A Brief History of the Mug Shot From Alphonse Bertillon to Andy Warhol

Top: Alphonse Bertillon's self-taken mugshot (1900)

Bottom: A canvas from Andy Warhol's Most Wanted Men series (1964)

 

I. 

 

Thanks to Donald Trump, everyone is talking about mug shots ... An informal term for a police photograph, typically taken soon after an individual's arrest in order to help with future identification [1].    

 

The act of photographing criminals began soon after the invention of photography in the 1840s, but it wasn't until 1888 that French police officer and biometrics expert Alphonse Bertillon standardised the process in terms of lighting and angles, etc. [2] 

 

His mug shot selfie, reproduced above, is typical; one side-view image and one face-on, against a plain background. Such photos are often compiled into a rogues gallery of images or a so-called mug book, although, in high-profile cases, the mug shot might also be circulated via the mass media and feature on wanted posters.

 

It is thanks to the latter phenomenon that mug shots gradually came to have a certain cachet and became fixed within the cultural imagination; the faces of gangsters such as Clyde Barrow, John Dillinger, and Al Capone, became as well-known as famous film stars and a whole host of Hollywood celebrities would eventually pride themselves on having had their own images captured by a police photographer.

 

Fascinated by both crime and celebrity, the American Pop artist Andy Warhol created a large mural of twenty-two mug shots in 1964 entitled Thirteen Most Wanted Men - a work which I would like to discuss below ...

 

 

II. 

 

Although Warhol had been commissioned to create a work for exhibition at the 1964 World's Fair in New York, Thirteen Most Wanted Men almost certainly wasn't what those who invited him to decorate the façade of the New York State pavilion had hoped for; in fact, the expectation was that he would produce a celebratory work that would represent the best - not the dark underbelly - of America. 

 

Partly inspired by a 1923 work by Marcel Duchamp, in which the French artist placed his own face on a wanted poster [3], Warhol decided to screen-print large-scale copies of images from a booklet published by the New York Police Department, entitled The Thirteen Most Wanted, and containing mug shots of dangerous criminals (including a child murderer) whom the authorities were anxious to arrest. 

 

As an anonymous critic writing for the Christie's website notes: "By elevating the criminal visage to a form of high art Warhol is aligning these nefarious figures with his own earlier celebrity portrayals." [4]   

 

Unfortunately, two weeks before the fair was due to open, Warhol was officially informed that he must remove or replace the work within 24-hours. Not wanting to do either, Warhol instead gave his permission for the 30-metre wide canvas to be painted over with silver house paint prior to the opening of the Fair [5].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Mug, of course, is an English slang term for (usually an ugly) face, dating from the 18th century. Often, when posing for a mugshot, a person will pull a face in an attempt to distort their features, thereby making future identification by a law enforcement agent a little more troublesome (thus we speak of mugging for the camera).  

 

[2] Bertillon was one of the founding fathers of forensic anthropometry; i.e., a system of identification based on the finding that that several measures of physical features - such as the size and shape of the skull - remain fairly constant throughout adult life. Bertillon concluded that when these measurements were made and recorded systematically, individual criminals could effectively be differentiated. 

 

[3] Created in 1923, Duchamp's Wanted: $2,000 Reward lithograph was the final work of art he completed before leaving New York that year to return to Paris. 

      Duchamp pasted two mug shots of himself on a joke poster he'd come across and had a printer add another alias to those already listed; that of his recently invented alter ego Rrose Sélavy. Duchamp re-created the (now lost original) work throughout his career and hoped it would played a significant role in the (de)construction of his artistic identity.

 

[4] See the essay on the Christie's website entitled 'Warhol's Most Wanted' (16 May 2018): click here.

      One can't help wondering why it is that the male homosexual gaze so often lingers on the faces and bodies of violent felons; is it the inevitable result of criminalising love? Or is it simply an inconvenient truth that evil attracts and has a more photogenic quality? Richard Meyer touches on these questions in his book Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century Art (Oxford University Press, 2002).

 

[5] The official reason given was that the Governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller, was concerned that the images of mostly Italian-Americans would be offensive to a significant section of his electorate. However, it is also believed that Warhol himself was dissatisfied with the work and so more-than happy to have been afforded the opportunity to paint it over in his favoured colour of negation. 

      Warhol would later use the original silkscreens to produce paintings in his Most Wanted Men series and many of these were exhibited in Paris, Cologne, and London, in 1967-68.

 

On the Aesthetico-Perverse Appropriation of Objects (With Reference to the Work of Christoph Niemann)

Two Sunday Sketches by the brilliant German illustrator

 and graphic designer Christoph Niemann

Members of the kinky community pride themselves on their ability to re-imagine the world around them and see things from a queer perspective. They take giggly pleasure, as Steven Connor says, in the idea of so-called pervertibles; common household items that can be put to a sexual use of some kind.

At first, this sounds philosophically intriguing; a creative attempt to appropriate objects and further the pornification of the everyday.

Sadly, however, necessity is more often than not the mother of invention and the rationale behind pervertibles is usually financial in character; an attempt to become a sadomasochist on a budget, or masturbate on the cheap as well as on the sly. Why purchase expensive lubes and sex toys when you can just use cooking oil, clothes pegs, and a toilet brush?

To the outrage of genuine objectophiles, the majority of those who enjoy playing with pervertibles possess no affection for (or concern with) things as actual entities existing outside of any erotico-utilitarian function. For most perverts, things interest only when they are on hand to stimulate a variety of sensations and help facilitate orgasm; they have little or no time for ontological reflection. 

And that's why - as I've said before and will doubtless have occasion to say again - even perverts disappoint.

They're so intent on finding everything sexy and turning the world into their own private toybox, that they miss entirely the wider allure and fascination of objects. It's a failure of sensitivity and it demonstrates the limits of a pornographic imagination which remains tied to what Foucault termed the austere monarchy of sex (that most ideal form of modern agency).   

And it's why being an artist is more than being a pervert. For when an artist looks at an object, he or she sees an infinite number of possibilities and not just something that might possibly substitute for a dildo, butt plug, or nipple clamp.

Thus it is that, for Duchamp, a urinal can become a fountain; for Dalí, a lobster can become a telephone; for Picasso a shovel, a tap, and a pair of forks bound together with wire can become a magnificent bird; and for the genius of Christoph Niemann, pretty much anything can become the inspiration for one of his Sunday Sketches ...     

See: Christoph Niemann, Sunday Sketching, (Abrams, 2016).

The Most Beautiful Streets of Paris (Notes on Surrealist Mannequin Fetish)

André Masson: Mannequin (1938)

Photo by Raoul Ubac (gelatin silver print)

The Cleveland Museum of Art

 

If you love Love, you'll love Surrealism ...

Unfortunately, however, I don't love Love - certainly not as some kind of moral absolute - and so have never really much cared for Surrealism as conceived by André Breton, whom, despite his admirable anti-theism ("Everything that is doddering, squint-eyed, vile, polluted and grotesque is summoned up for me in that one word: God!") remained an idealist and a dogmatist at heart.

However, there are some aspects - the darker, pervier aspects - of Surrealism that do excite my interest. And one of these aspects is the erotic fetishization of mannequins; agalmatophilia being a major component of the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, held in Paris at the beginning of 1938.

The exhibition, organised by Breton and the poet Paul Éluard, pretty much involved everyone who was anyone in the world of Surrealism at the time, including Duchamp, Dalí, Max Ernst, and Man Ray. It was staged in two main sections and a lobby area, displaying paintings and objects as well as unusually decorated rooms which had been redesigned so as to create what would today be called an immersive environment or experience.

It was the first section - Les plus belles rues de Paris - in which a parade of surrealist mannequins was located, including, most dramatically, the one by André Masson pictured above.

The mannequin, or lay figure, has a long if relatively humble history within the world of art; as a tool it's pretty much on a par with an easel, a brush, or a palette knife, even though it served several purposes; from helping fix perspective and understand the fall of light and shadow, to acting as a support for drapery and costume.

Perhaps, in their loneliest moments, some artists looked affectionately - even longingly - at their mannequins as silent companions. But it was only from the 19th century, however, that the latter became the subject of the painting and, ultimately, an objet d'art in its own right. For the Surrealists, however, the mannequin became something else too: a sex object.

Upon entering the most beautiful streets of Paris, visitors encountered sixteen artificial female figures provocatively designed, dressed and posed by Masson and friends. These kinky mannequins were deliberately intended to disturb and to arouse strange (often illicit) desires.

Duchamp, for example, dressed the upper-half of his model in male clothing, but left the lower-half naked, thereby playing with notions of androgyny and obscene exposure. Max Ernst, meanwhile, had intended to place a glowing red light bulb in the underwear of his 'Black Widow' mannequin (revealed by looking up her conveniently raised skirt), but - ever the prude and policeman - André Breton prevented this. 

It was, as indicated, Masson's mannequin that attracted the greatest attention, however,  with its pretty head squeezed into a bird cage covered with red celluloid fish. The mannequin was gagged with a velvet ribbon and had a pansy placed in its mouth.

What this all means, I'm not entirely certain. But it surely isn't just about female objectification and misogyny masquerading as art, or the pornographic violence inherent in male sexuality. Those critics and commentators who exclusively discuss these works in such reductive terms are mistaken and being intellectually lazy, I think. 

This isn't to say that these things aren't realities or worthy of serious discussion. But simply that there are other considerations here; for example, the way in which objects became central within consumer culture - the mannequin in particular being the very embodiment of urban modernity, as Hans Richter pointed out. Or the manner in which fetishization can elevate an object from base utility, transforming it into something magical and seductive, with its own strange allure.         

For me, as a perverse materialist, mannequins, statues and sex-dolls need to be considered as things in themselves and not as mere substitutes for real women. And the men who choose to erotically privilege such over biological entities are deserving neither of ridicule nor condemnation.

The adult imperative to grow-up, stop touching yourself and get a steady girlfriend (i.e. one who is actual, rather than imaginary; human, rather than synthetic; alive, rather than dead) is one that at least some of the Surrealists dared to challenge and for that I admire and respect them.  

Besides, maybe Proust is right to argue that we are all forever isolate at some level; that reciprocity is an illusion and the objects of our affection - whatever their ontological status - simply allow for the projection of our own ideas, fantasies and feelings ... 


Note: those interested in knowing more about the role and rise of the mannequin in Western art should see Jane Munro, Silent Partners: Artist and Mannequin from Function to Fetish, (Yale University Press, 2014). 

Infrathin Erotica (Fragment from an Illicit Lover's Discourse)

 

The blissful feeling that the Illicit Lover experiences when he sits in a seat on the Tube vacated by a young woman and her body heat is transferred unto him is heightened by his knowledge that this is not merely a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics, but an example also of Duchamp's ambiguous concept of the infrathin - a concept which refers to (amongst other things):

(i) those fleeting sensory experiences whose pleasure escapes any form of rational explanation  ...

(ii) that intangible fourth dimensional state that transcends mundane existence ... 

(iii) the almost imperceptible difference that exists between two seemingly identical objects ...  

Later, he notices how the perfume of the Prostitute marries with the scent of her flesh into an intoxicating cassolette. And he delights also in the way that her cigarette smoke smells of the mouth that exhales it (the same mouth that fellates him with such consummate ease).