(born in Baden near Vienna in 1929)
“Sei ...”, 1970–75, work group “Body Poses”, signed A Rainer as well as titled (illegible, partially overpainted), stamp “Vormittag” to the lower middle margin, oil, oil crayon on photograph, 60.5 x 50.5 cm, framed

Provenance:
Galerie Lelong, Paris (label on the covering board)
European Private Collection

Self-portrayals

When I reproduce myself, this also takes the form of an attempt at expansion: visual formulations of things that are possible, things that I have come up with. I pull myself up by the scruff of my own neck, I jump up without anythingunderneath me, I simulate things that I have invented, I draw the things I have imagined, I lie and lie until it might become true. I don’t reproduce things exactly, instead, I get there through the act of reproduction.
These self-imaginings, corrections, wishful reproductions are created in three phases of which the first is a scenic photo release. It has to be the most compressed, because it is concentrated on the single moment of the shutter release. There can be no correction - ‘only the moment counts’. Mostly I need a mirror, not for control but for stimulation, a kind of extroverted self-communication. I am not interested in defined, targeted portrayals, or the familiar typecasting of the actor. Only in the moment of realisation am I able to search for or find what wants to be activated in me.
My two-second doodles were a preliminary stage of the tenths-of-second effort of being photographed.
The second phase involves selecting from hundreds of moments. Identifying with this, rejecting that. Criteria include: intensity of facial transformation and nervous tension. I don’t dare destroy the big rejects, perhaps the criteria change in me instead. Categories such as calm, relaxed, mature, balanced do not attract my attention for the time being; an expressive, formalistic visagism undoubtedly dominates. The third phase, another selection and correction, often begins weeks later, when everything has become nothing more than a flat sheet of paper. I draw over it and try hard to invent new important, more significant lies. Only when I begin to believe them myself do I abandon the sheet. The stronger the physiognomic quality, the faster the graphic accentuation succeeds. I then finish quickly and do not slip into completly overpainting. ...
Arnulf Rainer, 1972
From: Arnulf Rainer, Schriften, Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2010