‘In Conversation’: Exploring the Spatio-Temporal Nature of Interview as Linguistic Portrait

Our understanding of images and texts are both perceptual, yet historically the case has been made that time and space interact with how we grasp their respective meanings differently. For instance, it is often believed that text is understood linearly, i.e. the meaning of a text is gained over a matter of time: a moral or epistemic conclusion is attained once one has read a text from start to finish. On the contrary, one might observe more details of an image the longer one looks, and perhaps gain a deeper understanding of what it represents, but one cannot sit and stare at one page of a novel and gain an understanding of the entire narrative. It may elude the reader until the very final world.
Henry James’ The Art of Fiction was an early theoretical discussion about the relationship between image and text, and attempted to do away with social misconceptions, like those outlined above, that the two function oppositionally from one another. In this essay, I will suggest make the case for another artistic medium that provides more food for thought around the spatio-temporal function of images and texts conveying a character or portraying a person’s identity: interview. Using James’ reasons for text and image being considered analogous as a starting point, this essay will aim to legitimize the conceptualization of interview as linguistic portraiture, and interviewing as a form of artistry. Through both art historical methods of analysis and producing ekphrastic commentary about two case studies, one an interview and one a painted portrait, I aim to reveal ways in which their meanings are conveyed analogously.
The two case studies I shall examine are Gluck’s self-portrait Gluck (1942) and Hugo Huerta Marin’s interview with Cate Blanchett in his collection Portrait of an Artist: Conversations with Trailblazing Creative Women (2021). Both Gluck and Marin on Blanchett are highly complex, dense and nuanced instances suggestive of their subjects’ interior worlds and subvert the ways in which one might assume they function distinctly from one another.