The Sound of a Face: Re-Encountering Portraiture in Mario Moore’s The Work of Several Lifetimes
BY STAFF WRITER REBECCA NGU ’20
By the time I walked into the Mario Moore exhibition, The Work of Several Lifetimes, located in the Hurley Gallery at the Lewis Arts Center, I had already been hearing an unusual amount of buzz around campus about it. Moore is a Hodder fellow and spent this past year making portraits of Black men and women who work blue-collar jobs at the University. His process was collaborative and entailed conducting many interviews, sketches, and conversations with his subjects about how they would like to be portrayed. His exhibition, on view from September 19th to November 17th, felt personal, as this was art about people who belonged, in some ways, to my community.
When I walked into the gallery with my friends, the air was bright and hummed with the chatter between folks who knew each other. We walked silently through the crowd, appreciative but at a distance, absorbing the portraits and the celebratory atmosphere.
I had only been inside for a few minutes when I heard his voice ring across the room. It was rough like sandpaper, but capacious and deep like a preacher’s. I briefly flashed back to being in a New York subway, sitting on the F train and being interrupted, inevitably, by an up-and-coming dancer or singer showing their moves. But this was not the Queens-bound F train — it was a white box studio in Princeton University. The magisterial baritone belonged to a stout man standing in a corner, suited in black with a red tie. He had a salt-and-pepper beard and was wearing black thick-framed glasses with his hair pulled back. Just a moment before, I had mistaken him for another security guard, silent and unobtrusive, until he opened his mouth and sang. Within seconds, he had hushed the crowd into silence.
Another voice broke through, picking up the melodic thread, and I turned around to see a man clad in a fedora and purple floral button-down (whom I later learned was the artist himself), step forward from the opposite diagonal corner. A low baritone rumbled outwards, and a tall gentleman with a black-and-orange striped tie stepped forth from the crowd. A fourth voice, high and shiny like silver, sprung up, belonging to a sprightly youngish man with braided hair. Four men, acappella-style, walked to the center of the room and sang, their voices merging, separating, subsuming, together. Sometimes the voices would fade and a single voice would hold forth, intimidating in its nakedness, and other times they would all join forces. The singers had turned this white box into a church, a lyric, a vibrating and spellbound space of pure attention.
I wondered about the intent of holding this spontaneous vocal performance — without any introduction or explanation — in the space of an art gallery. The formal parallels between the irreducible individuality of a face and a voice were clear. But unlike the portraits, their voices did not consolidate into discrete objects hung on a wall to be observed individually. Observation implies a distance that did not exist; their collective voices not only overwhelmed and filled the room, but reconfigured it so that this loose morass of people were organized around the focal point that was their collective voice. There, four Black men sang a room into silence, leaving us with a memory of standing together bound by sound and space. Portraits are usually defined by an attempt to capture the essence of an individual in a static and timeless image, but this felt different. What would it mean to think of this performance as a choral portrait, revealing the self not as a static image, but an ephemeral note of a chord, at once unique and harmonious.
After the last note hung and dissipated in the air, the crowd erupted in applause. We dissolved back into our usual formations. I remember being struck by the sheer number and presence of people who had gathered for the occasion. Many folks, some of whom were the subjects of Moore’s paintings, had brought their families, kids, loved ones, and posed next to the portraits, taking giddy selfies. There was a distinctly family feeling in the room, unusual for a space typically reserved for strangers staring at objects while cooly passing each other by.
Source: Hope VanCleaf
Moore readily reveals the power of art as a form of attention, a power that can render people visible or invisible. Many of the portaits depicted people at their places of work, such as the grill at Rocky-Mathey dining hall or the art museum, but instead of being naturalized into the background in the way service workers often are, they are fully animated and commanding of the space, their bodies relaxed and comfortable, their faces boldly looking forth and holding your attention. Perhaps my favorite portrait in the exhibition, The Center of Creation (Michael), depicts an older gentleman with a firm but bemused gaze, his lips slightly upturned, as he opens the door to the art museum while staring at you, who is ostensibly standing at the threshold. Caught in the act of opening the door, he is literallyinviting you into the space. This portrait of Michael necessarily implies a “you”; he could not have existed, in this way, without a “you.” But you, too, could not have occupied this threshold without his invitation. The meaning of the portrait therefore did not lie neatly within the bounds of its physical frame, but in the implied relationality that existed between you and the portrait.
Moore wrote in his introduction that he tried to redefine the colonial gaze by allowing his subjects to look directly and unflinchingly at the observer. The directness of their gazes imbued their subjects with a sense of power. But the singing and communal feeling of the opening and made clear that the portraits were not celebrating self-sufficient and self-made individuals, but the multitude of voices, generations, relations, and spaces that have become the grounds for an individual life. As an old professor used to say, each face bears the trace of every face that came before it.
As I was leaving, I reread the title of the exhibition, The Work of Several Lifetimes, and was reminded of conversations that I’ve had with campus workers who would proudly declare the years, sometimes decades, that they have been working for Princeton. Due to the stability of employment at Princeton, many of them are second or third-generation employees. I met a mother who served food at the Wilson dining hall whose son vacuumed the carpets at Butler College. Roots go deep here, indeed, and do encompass several lifetimes. I walked out of the gallery feeling curiously overwhelmed, but grateful for the feeling, for shouldn’t the presence of another person always be overwhelming?