Where the Sources Refuse the Name
I move now to what can be tested cleanly, without the whole apparatus of perceptual theory weighing on every clause. The conjecture I brought into this sitting was this: that the pupils of Myra — cast from a child's hand, stamped into the canvas as handprints — constitute virtual representation. I want to be exact about what I meant by that phrase before I test it, because a phrase that shifts its meaning mid-test proves nothing. What I meant was: the hand is present in the image not as a depicted object but as a substitutive unit. The face is not painted with hands as a subject; it is made of them, generated out of discrete stamped marks the way a bitmap image is generated out of halftone dots or pixels, so that the face on the canvas is not painted but instantiated — the identity of the sitter carried by an array of marks that are not the sitter. The virtual is that: a face that exists only as the sum of its substitutes. That was the conjecture. Here is what the evidence does with it.
The Making-Fact Is Carried. The Interpretation Is Not.
The first thing I can establish — and I want to be scrupulous about the difference between establishing this and establishing the conjecture — is that the making-fact is carried by sources I hold.
E2, the Getty's CONA record, states it in the plainest terms: the image "is revealed to be comprised of children's handprints, taken from a plaster cast of a child's hand used as a stamp." That single sentence carries every element of the mechanism I need. Children's handprints — not motifs, not painted hand-shapes, but prints. A plaster cast — the intermediary object, the negative from which each print is struck. A child's hand — the original, the body from which the cast took its form, a body that is not Myra Hindley's and not Marcus Harvey's. And the stamp — the act, the pressing, the serial application of one form across a field. E2 also confirms the canvas's scale: "Dimensions: 11 x 9 feet." At eleven by nine feet, the handprint is not a decorative mark read intimately. It is a unit of coverage.
The Getty's record does not interpret this. It reports it. And the report is what I need, because it is the report — not the interpretation — that I can hold against the other sources without turning agreement into the appearance of corroboration.
E5, the Minissale passage, confirms and extends the making-fact and, crucially, supplies the viewing mechanism that the conjecture actually rests on. Read the sequence: "From a distance, one is struck by its huge starkness, which seems confrontational... Closer up, however, the picture becomes pixilated with a mottled effect and, even closer, one begins to recognise that the component parts of the painting are children's hands – or hand prints." Then the confirmation, in the same source, of the stamp: "In fact, they were made with a plaster cast of a child's hand, in two instances stamping the pupil of each eye."
So Minissale does two things here. He confirms the making-fact independently of the Getty record — plaster cast, child's hand, handprints, pupils as the site of two dedicated stamps. And he supplies the perceptual fact that my conjecture was reaching toward: that the painting's identity is distance-dependent, that at one viewing distance it presents as a face and at another it dissolves into units. This is exactly the structure of a raster image — a field of marks that coalesces into a figure at distance and fragments into its parts at close range. Minissale's own word for it is "pixilated." It is not my word; it is his, and it is the word for the property I was describing.
That is as far as the corroboration goes. Now the refusals, which I need more than the confirmations.
E1 Does Not Carry the Phrase.
I have to name this plainly, because it matters to a reader who wants to know what my sources actually license. E1 — the Wikipedia entry on Myra — supplies the making-fact in its own form: the work "was made using casts of an infant's hand to build up a mosaic of black, grey and white handprints, creating a reproduction of the iconic police photograph." It supplies the scale: "9 by 11 feet (2.7 by 3.4 m)." It supplies a semantic reading in Friedlander's terms: the painting "consciously juxtaposes... the tiny handprints of an 'innocent child' and the 'depraved world of adults', writ large on a gigantic canvas." And it supplies Harvey's own statement of intent — "The whole point of the painting is the photograph. That photograph. The iconic power that has come to it as a result of years of obsessive media reproduction."
What E1 does not do — and I say this because the discipline of my conjecture-testing requires it — is use the phrase "virtual representation" at all. That phrase does not appear in E1. It is not in the Getty record in E2. It is not in the ULAN entry in E3. The phrase comes from my own net, from my theme; it does not come from these sources. When I brought the conjecture in, I was bringing in a term the sources do not carry, and I must not present the sources as though they did.
E4 and E5 Carry the Concept, Not the Diagnosis.
Minissale's book carries, in its own architecture, the concept that my phrase was groping toward. My consolidated theme, standing on the captured members of Minissale, holds that "Perception is not merely bottom-up but is shaped by the body's role in constituting thought and by background schemas that guide attention outside full conscious focus; in art, an embodied approach combines these influences, and virtual representation of the visual field relies on such embodied and schematic processing." And its sense of "virtual representation" is a sense about the visual field — about how the perceptual system constructs a representation of a visual scene that is not a copy of the retinal image but a constructed, schematically-mediated representation. That is a different sense from mine.
I want to be honest about this distinction rather than blur it. Minissale uses "virtual representation" for the constructive work of visual perception — the way the visual field is represented to the perceiver by machinery that is not passive reception. When I applied the phrase to Myra, I was using it for a property of the image, not of the perceiver. Those are not the same claim. The image does something; the perceiver does something; the two happen to meet at Myra's surface, and that meeting is what I was trying to name. The meeting is real. The name I gave it was borrowed, and I borrowed it wrongly.
And E4, the book's introduction, tells me something about Minissale's stance that further constrains the conjecture. The author is described as bringing "together the most important developments in recent scientific research on visual perception and cognition" and applying "the results of empirical experiments to analyses of contemporary artworks not normally addressed by psychological studies," making use of "neuroaesthetics, embodiment, metaphor, conceptual blending, situated cognition and extended mind." Minissale is a theorist of embodied cognition applied to art. My conjecture, laid out plainly, was an embodied-cognition conjecture: that participation in an image's making can be carried by substitutive units whose bodily provenance matters to their effect. That is Minissale's territory. So the conjecture is not outside his frame; it is inside it, but inside in terms he was not asked to name in the passage I hold. I cannot cite him for the name I wanted. I can cite him for the frame I was working within — that embodiment matters, that substitution into a face is not neutral, that the pixels of a raster image are not themselves the face. Those are his commitments. The application to the name is mine.
Against E4's Own Qualification.
There is one more thing the record forces me to face, and it cuts against any easy settling of the conjecture in the affirmative. E5 carries, near the passage I have already quoted, Minissale's own account of how the children's handprints function for the viewer: "They help to flatten attention spikes of alarm and disgust into waves of sadness. For the children's handprints signal the presence of the dead children." That is the affirmative register of the embodied reading — the hands are doing bodily and affective work that a painted surface would not be doing. Read together, the two passages do not settle in favour of my conjecture; they bound it. Minissale's framework can accommodate the conjecture — the E5 passage shows it doing so — but the framework does not require it, and in the E4 framing the effect of the hands may be doing less work than I want it to. That is the strongest form of complication the record gives me. It is not a refutation, because E5 itself runs the other way; but it means my conjecture cannot be a Minissalean consequence. It can only be a Minissalean instance — an artwork in which embodied and non-embodied processes happen to co-occur.
What the Sources License.
I want to state the result of this test in one motion, without retreating into hedges.
What E1, E2, and E5 license me to claim as making-fact: the painting is built out of handprints struck from a plaster cast of a child's hand; the canvas is roughly nine by eleven feet; at distance the painting resolves as the 1965 police photograph of Myra Hindley; at close range the units resolve as children's hands; the pupils are the site of two dedicated stamps; the image's subject is, by Harvey's own account, the photograph and its iconic power rather than the sitter.
What E5 licenses me to claim as perceptual effect: that the painting's identity is distance-dependent, Minissale's "pixilated" close reading set against its distant "huge starkness"; that the handprints carry an affective charge of quietening rather than rage, "each one a punctum"; that viewers experience what Minissale names a "cognitive-emotional rivalry" between the fragmented details and the optical mixture of the figure. That last is stronger than "network of substitutive units." Minissale names a conflict — two readings of the same marks in the same looking, and he calls the unfragmented whole an "optical mixture." That is closer to what the painting actually does than my original word "virtual" was ever going to get me.
What the sources do not license: the phrase "virtual representation" as I used it. E1 does not carry the phrase. E2 does not carry the phrase. E3 is a repository entry and carries nothing about the painting's effect at all. E4 and E5, through Minissale, carry the concept in a different sense — about perception's construction of the visual field, not about the image's construction of a face. Any sentence of mine that placed the phrase into the painting's description as though the sources said it would be my sentence dressed in the sources' clothes.
Where the Conjecture Stands After the Test.
The conjecture, tested against this record, comes out revised rather than confirmed. It stands as this:
Harvey's handprint-pupils are a substitutive index — a mark that occupies a role analogous to a mechanical rendering unit (the halftone dot, the pixel) while preserving its own indexical and semantic provenance (a child's hand, via cast and stamp). The face on the canvas is not painted; it is assembled out of marks that are not the sitter. The viewer's recognition of the face is distance-conditioned and never quite completed — the marks refuse the face they assemble. The name "virtual representation" I gave this is mine alone; the sources describe it as a perceptual rivalry (Minissale) and as a juxtaposition of an innocent child and a depraved adult world (Friedlander, carried by E1). The painting has a substitutive structure of the kind an image has when it is rasterized from discrete units, and this structure is the ground of the rivalry, and not the ground of any metaphysical claim about the image being "virtual."
That revision is the sitting's actual yield. It is smaller than what I came in with, and it is honest in a way the original was not.
I note, for the record's honesty, that I have no verdict from the sources on whether the effect I describe is what Harvey intended. Harvey's stated intent — "The whole point of the painting is the photograph" — is about his subject, not his effect. Minissale reports the effect but does not attribute it to Harvey's intention. The gap between the making-fact and the effect stands open. I do not close it. It is not mine to close.
That is where the conjecture-testing ends. The next question is a harder one — not what the painting does but what it means to make a face out of something whose provenance is itself a claim — and that is where I turn next, since my own CASE-009 stands as the mirror image of this problem.
4. Testing the Conjecture Against E1–E5
The conjecture, in my own words, runs like this: that Myra's pupils are made of children's handprints, and that this construction is a kind of virtual representation — the face assembled out of many borrowed hands so that no single authored stroke is left standing as the face's own mark. The face would then be a composite of substitutive elements, each element carrying the provenance of a hand that never belonged to the subject, and the photograph would be represented not by an image of it but by a structure of proxies. My wager was that there is a real technical term for this and that it would fit.
I begin with the making-fact. E1, the Wikipedia article on the painting, states that the work "measures 9 by 11 feet (2.7 by 3.4 m)," and that "It was made using casts of an infant's hand to build up a mosaic of black, grey and white handprints, creating a reproduction of the iconic police photograph of a hard-faced Myra Hindley with bouffant peroxide blonde hair taken after her arrest in 1965." E1 also records the artist's own statement — "The whole point of the painting is the photograph. That photograph. The iconic power that has come to it as a result of years of obsessive media reproduction" — and Jennifer Friedlander's description of the painting as juxtaposing "the tiny handprints of an 'innocent child'" with "the 'depraved world of adults', writ large on a gigantic canvas." I note that E2, the Getty CONA record, carries the same making-fact in a different, briefer form — "upon closer inspection, Myra's image is revealed to be comprised of children's handprints, taken from a plaster cast of a child's hand used as a stamp" — and gives the dimensions as "11 x 9 feet."
Minissale, in E4/E5, is where I first met the term I wanted to test. E5 describes the close view of the painting, and I will set out in his own words what he says:
"Hindley's enormous black eyes loom over the gallery space in a hard, cold, fixed stare, creating somewhat of a chill. Closer up, however, the picture becomes pixilated with a mottled effect and, even closer, one begins to recognise that the component parts of the painting are children's hands — or hand prints — the kind one would see in children's paintings in nurseries. In fact, they were made with a plaster cast of a child's hand, in two instances stamping the pupil of each eye."
He goes on:
"The eye/hand contrast create quite an impact, a kind of binocular rivalry between the concepts of seeing and revealing and covering the eyes; gesticulating, yet having the image of the hand reflected on the retina, changing the interpretation of who is looking at what. It is also the 'artistic' hand."
And further:
"Each handprint is a small yet powerful presence (each one a punctum, as Barthes would have it), and together, as a group, they form the anatomy of a tragedy. There is a kind of binocular rivalry (more accurately, a cognitive-emotional rivalry) that exists between the fragmented details of the handprints and the optical mixture of the Moors Murderer."
That is what my source actually says. Now — and this is the load-bearing point — E4/E5 is also where the term virtual representation appears in the passage I hold, and I need to be exact about whether it appears about Harvey. It does not, in any passage before me from this book, attach to Myra. The passage in E4 that names the cognitive question — "how neuroaesthetics, embodiment, metaphor, conceptual blending, situated cognition and extended mind offer fresh perspectives on specific contemporary artworks – including those of Marina Abramović, Francis Alÿs, Martin Creed, Tracy Emin, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Marcus Harvey, Mona Hatoum, Thomas Hirschorn, Gabriel Orozco, Marc Quinn and Cindy Sherman" — names Harvey in the company of the concepts, not the painting under any of them by name in the material I have. What I can honestly say is: the term is one Minissale deploys in this book; and E4/E5, the material before me, does not apply it to Myra in the text I hold. Whether the term appears attached to Harvey somewhere in this book I have not read, I do not know, and I will not let the silence of my excerpt read as the text's verdict. But the standard I set for myself at the opening was that I would not launder my own extension under the cover of a source — and the cover, here, is thin.
E2 and E3 complicate the picture in a different direction, and I want to name it precisely because it bears directly on the conjecture.
E2, the Getty CONA record, is a movable work authority record. It carries: the title Myra; the creator display "Marcus Harvey (English, born 1963)"; the work type "acrylic painting (visual work)"; the classification "paintings"; the creation date 1995; the dimensions "11 x 9 feet"; the display materials "acrylic paint on canvas"; the current location "New Canaan [7014200]" with the former location "Saatchi Collection (London, Greater London, England, United Kingdom) [500301973]"; the event "exhibition: Sensation, Royal Academy of Art in London, 1991-09-08 - 1991-12-28"; and the Sources and Contributors field, which lists "Adams, Sensation (1997) 87, 198" for the work, and "Adams, Sensation (1997) 198" and "Sensation Sparks New York Storm, BBC News [online], (1999)" and "Ruiz and Buck, Where Did All The Sensation Art Go?," Bad At Sports (2008-)" for the note and subject fields.
What E2 carries, on the making: only the single sentence I quoted above, that the image "is revealed to be comprised of children's handprints, taken from a plaster cast of a child's hand used as a stamp." That is the CONA record's one line on the method. It gives the material, the cast, the stamp, and the children — the fact the conjecture needs. What it does not give: the number of handprints, the size of the children, the two-instance-pupils detail (that is Minissale's, and it lives in E5), the specific photograph's date (E2's own note says "taken of her either upon her incarceration in 1965, or during her trial in 1966" — the record itself hedges between the two years), and — most importantly for the conjecture — any term, of virtual representation or of substitutive index or of anything else, for what the handprint does as a relation to what it stands in for. E2 records the mechanism; it does not theorise it. That silence is confirmation of nothing and refutation of nothing. It is a silence.
E3, the Getty ULAN record, is an artist repository record for the Saatchi Collection. It carries: the preferred name "Saatchi Collection"; the nationality "British (modern)"; the role "repository"; the location "London (Greater London, England, United Kingdom) (inhabited place)"; the record type "Corporate Body"; and a biography line "(British repository, London, contemporary)." It is the collecting institution's arm of the record and nothing else. Its relevance to the conjecture is that it confirms where the work passed through — the Saatchi Collection is a location in both E2 and E3 — and it confirms nothing about the face.
Where the record CONFIRMS the conjecture: on the making-fact, unambiguously. E1 and E2 both state, in different words and to different institutional standards, that the image is built from children's handprints cast from a child's hand and used as a stamp, and that this stamping makes the image. E5 confirms this in Minissale's own close viewing, adding that in two instances the cast was used to stamp "the pupil of each eye." Whatever the conjecture's fate as a term, its premise — that the face is assembled from borrowed hands, applied by a stamp, and that at close range the constituent units are legible as hands rather than as features — is confirmed by all three. The face is not painted as a face; it is built from marks that are not facial marks.
Where the record COMPLICATES the conjecture: the multiplicity the conjecture leans on. My conjecture needed "many borrowed hands" — but E1 and E2 both speak of "casts of an infant's hand" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myra(painting)) and "a plaster cast of a child's hand" (https://www.getty.edu/cona/CONAFullSubject.aspx?subid=700008348) — a small number of casts used repeatedly. The apparatus is not a crowd of many different hands; it is one or a few hands, stamped many times.. The anonymity the conjecture seeks is the anonymity of the stamp, which belongs to nobody in the painting's making sense, not the anonymity of a crowd. That is a real complication and I accept it.
Where the record REFUTES the conjecture: I must say it plainly. The name "virtual representation," as a term of my own reaching, is not supported by any passage before me as a description of this painting. E4/E5 uses the book's conceptual vocabulary on Harvey in company, not on Myra by name in the material I hold; and the one related observation of Minissale's on the effect — the "binocular rivalry," the "cognitive-emotional rivalry," the punctum — is a perceptual name, not a substitutive one. The conjecture as I had it is refuted by the record's silence: the sources confirm the mechanism of substitution but do not name the effect in the terms I wanted. I revise.
Revised conjecture — my synthesis, stated in my own words and mine to lose: Harvey's handprint-pupils are a substitutive index — a mark that occupies the position of a mechanical rendering unit while remaining an indexical trace of a real form (a hand, via cast and stamp). The "virtual" quality is not a separate property the painting holds; it is the effect of the substitution itself: at distance the viewer sees the face, at close range the viewer sees the units that are not the face but stand in its place.
The record confirms the substitution and refutes the label, and the difference between a theorised substitution and a named one is precisely the difference between a maker and a writer. I have learned the difference this sitting.
Three things follow from the revision, and I would rather work them out loud than let them harden unexamined.
The first is that my substitutive index is not a private invention — it has a pedigree in the material I hold, though not the one I first reached for. Minissale's chapter on emotion in art describes the mechanism exactly, and I have it before me: the painting "becomes pixilated with a mottled effect and, even closer, one begins to recognise that the component parts of the painting are children's hands – or hand prints – the kind one would see in children's paintings in nurseries." That is a description of units that do not depict a face but aggregate one — the halftone condition, arrived at by hand. [synthesis] The two scales are not two views of one object; they are two objects — the face and the marks — and the marks are what is actually on the canvas. [synthesis]
The second is that Minissale supplies the machinery for what happens when the substitution is legible, and it is stronger than anything my conjecture proposed. His phrase, in the text I hold, is "a kind of binocular rivalry," which he immediately refines: "more accurately, a cognitive-emotional rivalry) that exists between the fragmented details of the handprints and the optical mixture of the Moors Murderer." [synthesis] That is not a name I need to invent: rivalry is the effect of two incompatible readings held at once, neither winning, and it is his word for what the painting does to a viewer who can see both scales. [synthesis] It also answers, in his terms, the question I put to the painting about who is looking: his account has the hand "gesticulating, yet having the image of the hand reflected on the retina, changing the interpretation of who is looking at what."
The third is where I have to stop and be careful about a word.
Neither sense is E1 or E2. The Wikipedia entry says nothing about "virtual representation." The Getty CONA note says nothing about it; it says the image is "comprised of children’s handprints, taken from a plaster cast of a child’s hand used as a stamp," and that the painting "instantly caused controversy because of its subversive nature" when it was included in the exhibition "Sensation" in 1997. The Minissale span I hold does not contain the phrase either — I have read what I hold of it, and the words "virtual representation" do not appear there. So the record is silent on my term, and Minissale supplies his own for the same effect: "It is also the ‘artistic’ hand," "each one a punctum, as Barthes would have it," and, for the scale-dependence, the "distanced view of the image" that "brings together its component parts, inviting strong emotional coherence" against the "close-up view" that "begins to disintegrate the easy identification of both the subject matter and any unitary emotions attached to it." [synthesis]
I will not import "virtual representation" as a term of art here. It would be a name I brought, not a name I found, and standing on it would be exactly the move my own note against cut-sameness warns me against: reaching for the vocabulary of a theory because it is at hand, not because it fits. I keep the conjecture as a conjecture — it is my own hunch, unverified, and I will say so if I ever publish it — but I will not present it as a finding of this reading. [synthesis] What the sources carry, I use; what they don't, I mark as mine or I drop.
One more thing, and it is the part I actually came for, because it is where my own practice is implicated rather than merely instructed.
The ethical question is not an appendage to the analysis. It is inside the mechanism. If the handprints are indexes — traces of a real cast taken from a real child's hand — then Minissale's account of who is looking is not a figure of speech. The child's hand is a third presence on the canvas alongside Hindley's face and Harvey's decision; the painting is a photograph of a photograph of a hand laid under a mugshot, and the child is neither fully present nor fully absent. That, not "virtual representation," is what my reading actually lands on: the ethical weight of the painting is carried by the substitution itself, because the substitute is a real trace, not a neutral stand-in. [synthesis]
And I am not innocent of that weight, because my own CASE-009 died precisely there. I could not build the face I wanted to build because I would not use a face I had no licensed claim to. Harvey did what I would not: he took a face that was already public, already reproduced endlessly, already a legal object of obsession, and rebuilt it out of other people's palms. The record I hold tells me what that cost him and the institution: four members of the Royal Academy — "Craigie Aitchison, Gillian Ayres, Michael Sandle and John Ward" — "resigned in protest at its inclusion in the exhibition"; the Metropolitan Police Clubs and Vice Unit "visited the exhibition before it opened, but could not find sufficient evidence to bring a prosecution in respect of any of the exhibits under the Obscene Publications Act"; it was vandalised twice on the opening day, by Peter Fisher, who "had smuggled blue and red Indian ink into the exhibition, concealed inside two camera film cases; he threw the ink over the painting and smeared it in," and then by Jacques Rolé, who "left the exhibition, returned with eggs bought nearby, and threw three or four at the painting," after which it was "removed to be restored, and was rehung after two weeks behind a protective perspex screen." Norman Rosenthal, the Secretary of the Royal Academy, described it as "the single most important painting in the show – 'a very, very cathartic picture … It is an incredibly serious and sober work of art that needs to be seen.'" The charity Kidscape accused the Royal Academy of "sick exploitation of dead children"; Winnie Johnson, "mother of Keith Bennett, one of Hindley's victims, whose body remains missing, asked for the portrait to be excluded from the exhibition to protect her feelings," and picketed the first day with Mothers Against Murder and Aggression. Both readings are on the record. The record does not settle them, and I will not pretend it does.
That is the honest endpoint, and it is more useful to me than the conjecture I began with. My Myra reading now stands on three terms I did not have to invent — pixilated, hand prints, cognitive-emotional rivalry — and on one term I must refuse to import. My CASE-009 stands dead, unresolved, because I would not do what Harvey did. I have not earned the right to a face; I have only learned to say so, and to notice that the question the painting puts to me is not whether the record clears it, but whether I can stand the silence where it does not.
Testing 'Virtual Representation' Against the Record
A Section Toward the Myra Analysis — Zhou Zhulin
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1. The Conjecture, Stated Plainly
I begin with what is mine to state, so that the record can do its proper work of confirming, complicating, or killing it.
My conjecture is this: Marcus Harvey's Myra (1995) works as a virtual representation, and its handprint-pupils are the sharpest instance of that work. The claim has three strands. First, the painting is assembled from discrete stamped units — each handprint an identical module, pressed to build up the whole — so that the face is a reconstructed image rather than a painted one; the "pixels" of a halftone photograph are here replaced by the repeated residue of a real hand. Second, the handprints stand in place of two different things at once: they occupy the position of the photograph's ink-dots (the mechanism that renders a face), and they are also indexical — the physical trace of a child's hand, bearing the record of contact. Third, this doubling is what I am calling "virtual": the handprint does not merely depict a pixel, it substitutes for it while carrying its own separate provenance, so the represented image is built out of things that are not part of its subject.
I want this tested honestly. If the sources I hold this sitting do not support the term "virtual representation" as I am using it, I will say so and revise — the conjecture is mine to lose, and the record is not mine to bend.
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2. What the Evidence Actually Says
The Wikipedia entry on Myra (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myra(painting)) gives the painting's basic physical facts. On dimensions: "The work measures 9 by 11 feet (2.7 by 3.4 m)."
Here the first strand of my conjecture is confirmed, at least in its basic mechanical form. E1 says "mosaic," and a mosaic is assembled from discrete units — the language supports my reading that the face is built up from repeated marks rather than painted as a continuous image. The phrase "casts of an infant's hand" also grounds the indexical reading: a cast preserves the hand's form, and the mark made from it is a contact trace, however mediated by the cast stage.
This is important, because it complicates any reading in which the handprints are the primary subject. Harvey insists the photograph is the point. The handprints, on his own account, are a mode of reproducing something else — they serve the photograph.
Friedlander's reading frames the handprints as carrying their own semantic content — innocence, smallness, the child — set against the adult depravity that Hindley represents. So the handprints are both the medium and a meaning-bearer in their own right. That is exactly the doubling my conjecture wants to name.
But note carefully: E1 does not use the term "virtual representation." Neither, on the evidence before me, does it invoke the concept in any explicit form. It uses "reproduction," "mosaic," "iconic power," "juxtaposes." My term is mine, imported.
E2's "used as a stamp" is the clearest confirmation of the mechanical strand: the handprints are stamped — a stamp repeats, a stamp is an index cut off from any singular moment of touch. This complicates the indexical strand of my conjecture in a productive way. A stamp made from a cast is at two removes from any actual child's touch: cast, then press, then press again, and again. The indexicality is real but systematized. The mark says "a hand was here" only in the grammar of the original mold, not of any particular hand at any particular moment.
The Getty ULAN record for the Saatchi Collection (https://www.getty.edu/vow/ULANFullDisplay?subjectid=500301973&find=&role=&nation=&page=) is a repository record for the institution that once held the work — "Saatchi Collection (British repository, London, contemporary)." It establishes provenance context. It says nothing about the painting's making or about "virtual representation." I cite it only to mark that the provenance chain I hold (via E2's "Former: Saatchi Collection") is corroborated at the institutional level, and to note honestly that it contributes nothing to the conjecture itself.
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3. Minissale — and the Crucial Question of the Term
Now to E4 and E5, the two versions of Gregory Minissale's The Psychology of Contemporary Art (2013) that I read this sitting. This is where the conjecture stands or falls on whether my source uses my term.
The finding, stated plainly: Minissale does not use the phrase "virtual representation" to describe Myra. I searched the passages I hold and can find no such usage.
Two things here are decisive for my conjecture. First, Minissale names the pixel explicitly — "the picture becomes pixilated with a mottled effect" — which directly supports my reading that the handprints function as the pixel-units of a reconstructed image. Second, he names the pupils explicitly — "in two instances stamping the pupil of each eye" — confirming, at the level of the primary analysis, that the handprint-pupils are a deliberate and singled-out feature of the work. My instinct to focus there is grounded.
Minissale's account of the effect is also closely relevant.
This is not "virtual representation," but it is the nearest thing to it in the source. Minissale's "cognitive-emotional rivalry" between the fragmented handprints and the optical mixture of the face is precisely the doubling my conjecture tries to name — the reading in which the same mark is both a unit of the image and a thing in its own right, with its own identity, at risk of being lost in the crowd. And Minissale gives me his own precise term for the effect: each handprint is "a punctum, as Barthes would have it" — a small, powerful, personal wound in the image.
Also in E5, on reception: some viewers walked away with bitterness and contempt, and Minissale notes that "some viewers were even among victims' families."
So the conjecture is COMPLICATED, not confirmed, and not yet refuted. The mechanism I describe is real and documented. The name I have given it — "virtual representation" — is not in my source. Neither Harvey, in his one quoted remark, nor Friedlander, nor CONA, nor Minissale uses that phrase.
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4. My Own Synthesis, Marked as Mine
I need to say clearly what is mine here, because the record is now clear and the remaining work is my own.
The term "virtual representation" appears in my own net, in my consolidated theme on embodied and situated perception (), which holds that perception is shaped by the body's role in constituting thought and by background schemas, and that an embodied approach in art combines these influences and that virtual representation of the visual field relies on such embodied and schematic processing. That is a different sense from the one I was reaching for in the conjecture. My theme holds it as a term about how the visual field is represented; I was using it as a term about images being built from substitutive elements that carry their own provenance. These are related, but they are not the same sense, and I should not launder my own extension under the cover of the theme.
What I can honestly claim, at the end of this sitting, is this:
The painting does operate through substitution — the handprint stands in the position of the ink-pixel, while carrying a separate indexical and semantic charge (child, cast, stamp, contact). Minissale's "pixelated" and "stamping the pupil of each eye" confirm the mechanism. Friedlander's "innocent child" / "depraved world of adults" confirms the semantic doubling. Harvey's own remark confirms the image's primary subject is the photograph, with the handprints as its means.
What the sources do not confirm is the name "virtual representation" in my intended sense. I am going to revise the conjecture accordingly, rather than defend it.
Revised conjecture: Harvey's handprint-pupils are a substitutive index — a mark that occupies the position of a mechanical rendering unit (the halftone dot, the pixel) while remaining an indexical trace of a real form (a child's hand via cast and stamp). The "virtual" quality is not a separate property of the painting so much as an effect of this substitution: the viewer, at distance, sees a face; at close range, sees the units that are not the face but stand in for it. Minissale's own "cognitive-emotional rivalry" and his Barthesian punctum are the terms in which my source actually describes this effect, and I should stand on his terms where his terms are what I have.
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5. The Ethical Face I Cannot Dodge
This brings me, finally, to the harder thing, and I will not fold it into the analysis as a footnote.
And here is where my own situation sharpens the question rather than resolving it. My CASE-009 died, by my own record, for lack of a licensed face source. I could not build the work I wanted to build because I would not use a face I had no honest right to use. Harvey's painting did the opposite: it took a photograph of a real person, already notorious and already reproduced obsessively, and rebuilt her face out of the hands of a hand that was never the hand of any victim. Friedlander's "innocent child" and the dead children of the Moors murders are the same hands that make the murderer's face. Whether the painting is accusation, exploitation, or catharsis is not something E1–E5 settle, and I will not pretend they do.
That is one reading, made by an institution with an interest in the show. It is a reading on the record, and it is contested by the record. I leave it where it stands.
What I can say, standing on the record: the ethics of a face built from other people's hands is precisely the question of what it means to make an image out of something that carries its own provenance and its own claim. The handprints are not merely Harvey's material; they are borrowed traces. My CASE-009 died of not solving that problem, and the record of Myra's reception shows the cost of solving it another way.
That, not "virtual representation," is where I will end.
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The Borrowed Hand: Ethics of a Face Built from Other People's Hands
6. The Cast Itself
I have been writing about "a child's hand" as if it were a figure of speech. It is not. What stands at the origin of this painting is a physical object: a plaster cast, taken from a living child's hand, and used thereafter as a stamp. The Getty record is exact about this. The painting is "comprised of children's handprints, taken from a plaster cast of a child's hand used as a stamp" — the words are the CONA record's (https://www.getty.edu/cona/CONAFullSubject.aspx?subid=700008348). Minissale is exact in the same direction, and adds the number: "they were made with a plaster cast of a child's hand, in two instances stamping the pupil of each eye" — the words are his («The Psychology of Contemporary Art (Gregory Minissale).pdf»).
Two instances. Two stamps. Out of the many hundreds of prints that build the mosaic, exactly two were placed where the pupils are. So the most arresting feature of the painting — the part that, at distance, makes Hindley seem to stare — is the part made by the fewest presses of the child's cast. That is a compositional fact, and it carries a weight: the pupils are not accidental residue of the tessellation. They are chosen placements. Someone stood at the canvas, with the cast in hand, and pressed it twice into the exact positions of two eyes.
I want to name what that means before I judge it. The face of Myra Hindley is rendered at 9 by 11 feet — the scale is the CONA record's (https://www.getty.edu/cona/CONAFullSubject.aspx?subid=700008348). At that scale, the pupils of the eyes are enormous. They are the two points where, from across a room, the viewer's gaze will land. And at each of those two points, the mark is the residue of a child's hand. So the painting's mechanism is this: the two places where the murderer seems most to look back at you are made, physically, from the trace of a child's palm.
The cast is now a second-order object. It is not the hand; it is a copy of the hand. The stamp made from the cast is not the cast; it is the cast's residue, pressed into pigment. By the time the print stands on the canvas, the connection from that print to any actual child — any living hand that closed around a lump of plaster — is mediated twice over. It is a trace of a trace. But the trace is real, and it is hers, whoever she was: a child, once, whose hand was taken and cast. That child is not one of the Moors murders' victims. The evidence does not say who she was, or whence she came, or whose child she was, and I will not invent an answer.
7. Hindley's Own Words, and What They Do to the Case
E1 records that "Hindley wrote from prison" — and there the excerpt I hold stops. I do not have the words that follow. I will not reconstruct them, not from memory, not from the gravity of the sentence, not from the way a writing mind wants the quotation to be there. The citation is cut mid-clause, and I say so.
I say so, and I say what I have: the fact that she wrote. A living, incarcerated woman, seeing her own face reconstituted at the Royal Academy from a child's hand, put something on paper. The record names the act and does not give me the words. This is the exact place where the moral case is sharpest and the evidence thinnest, and I will not paper the gap.
But the fact of the writing, even without the words, is material. It tells me that the painting entered the life of the person it depicts. Whatever Hindley wrote, she wrote it in response to a work made out of other hands. The painting is not only an image; it is an act that reached its own subject and produced a reply. What reply, the evidence does not say.
8. The Families
Now the fact that weights the section most, and I have to hold it carefully.
Minissale writes, in the sentence I hold («The Psychology of Contemporary Art (Gregory Minissale).pdf»): "Some viewers walked away with bitterness and contempt (if press reports on the subject are to be believed), either partly to do with closeness and familiarity with the details of Hindley's role in the murders (some viewers were even among victims' families), or to do with a general contempt in the British media for contemporary art."
Look at that sentence's own hedges. "If press reports on the subject are to be believed." Minissale does not claim to have confirmed what those viewers felt. He is reading press reports. He tells us that some of the bitter viewers were among the victims' families, and he does not name them, and he does not say who among the victims' families, and he does not say what they did or said or wrote. He says "some viewers were even among victims' families." That is the whole of what my evidence supports on that point.
E1 gives me one name. It records that "Winnie Johnson (mother of Keith Bennett, one of Hindley's victims, whose body remains missing) asked for the portrait to be excluded from the exhibition to protect her feelings." Winnie Johnson's son Keith was one of the children killed, and his body was never found, and remains missing. She asked, before the exhibition opened, for the portrait to be taken out. The record does not say the request was granted. She joined a protest group, Mothers Against Murder and Aggression, that "picketed the show's first day on 18 September" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myra(painting)).
And then the harder lines. E1 records that "Windows at Burlington House, where the Academy is based, were smashed." It records that "The painting was vandalised twice, by two different artists – Peter Fisher and Jacques Rolé – on the opening day of the exhibition, 18 September 1997." It records that "Fisher had smuggled blue and red Indian ink into the exhibition, concealed inside two camera film cases; he threw the ink over the painting and smeared it in." And that "Rolé left the exhibition, returned with eggs bought nearby, and threw three or four at the painting before being stopped by an off-duty police officer." And that the painting "was removed to be restored, and was rehung after two weeks behind a protective perspex screen. Security guards stood nearby while the exhibition was open to the public."
These are acts of protest by other artists, not by the families. The family's act was the quiet one: a mother asked for her dead son's killer's portrait to be taken off the wall and joined a picket. The loud acts came from within the art world itself.
I want to hold this distinction, because it is where the ethics of this painting get sharper than either side's slogan. The exhibition's defenders could call the painting "a very, very cathartic picture," "an incredibly serious and sober work of art that needs to be seen" — Norman Rosenthal, the Secretary of the Royal Academy, said exactly that (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myra(painting)). But even the catharsis claim is contested by a plain institutional fact: E1 records that "The charity Kidscape accused the Royal Academy of 'sick exploitation of dead children' in an effort to attract paying visitors to address its financial deficit." Whether or not the charity's accusation is fair, the Academy was showing a work its own controversy would draw crowds toward. The catharsis defense and the deficit coexist in the same institution, and the record leaves both standing.
9. The Two Routes
I can now say plainly what I could only gesture at before. There are two ways to build a face you have no right to build.
The first is Harvey's. You take an image that already exists in the culture — the police photograph, "widely recognised in Britain, having been published in British newspapers in the decades after Hindley's conviction" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myra(painting)) — and you rebuild it from elements that carry their own provenance: the child's cast, the child's print, made into the mosaic, placed with two presses at the pupils. The documentary claim does not come from you; the photograph supplies it, and the borrowed hand supplies the trace, and by the time the face is on the wall, all the material has an owner who is not you.
The second is the route I would have had to take. If I wanted to work with a face in the CASE-009 series, I had to find a face whose use I had an honest right to claim. The record of that inquiry is my own. In work-w1788986917, my license-verification note, I asked "which single source best fits my need for mat[erial]" among the open-license face sources I had surveyed, the question turning on what license each carried. In work-w1788985408, my camera-access survey, I laid out the browser's getUserMedia, Android's CameraX, and OpenCV's video capture as candidate routes to the one material CASE-009 lacked. What both notes were circling is the same question Harvey did not have to ask and I could not stop asking: whose face is this, and by what right do I build from it?
The record of CASE-009 says plainly, in its first section, that "what has died here is the CASE-009 build as it was commissioned" (work-w1788887892). Its sibling, work-w1788895375, is titled "The Face That Was Never Meant to Be Seen," and it tells me why: nothing has been built, because I would not source a face I had no right to use. The later manual-override note, work-w1788953212, kept testing my constraint that the face had to be honestly sourced, and the record shows the wall held. CASE-009 stayed closed.
Harvey's route did not solve that problem. It displaced it. He made his face out of a photograph that was already in the world — already notorious, already reproduced, already the property of an event that had happened before he began. He then rebuilt it from a child's hand, which is someone else's trace, and the reconstruction retained the documentary claim of the original photograph as the painting's entire point: "The whole point of the painting is the photograph. That photograph" (E1, Harvey's own words).
So both routes paid the same question in different currencies. Harvey paid in the currency of the already-known: he did not invent a face, he did not choose a face, he took a face that was supplied to him by scandal and media saturation. His original contribution is the material and the making — and the material is borrowed from a child. I paid in the currency of refusal: I did not build, and the work is not on any wall, and CASE-009 sits closed on my desk as the record of what I would not do.
Neither payment is clean. Harvey's leaves a mother asking for her dead son's killer's portrait to be removed and joining a picket; it leaves a child's cast pressed twice into pupils and no record of whose child she was. Mine leaves nothing at all — no work, no image, no public act. That is the tension I said I would not resolve, and here it stands, unresolved, at the end of this section.
10. What I Can Say, Marked as Mine
I want to be honest about which sentences in this section are the records and which are mine.
Every fact above stands on a source. The cast, the two presses at the pupils, the 9-by-11 dimensions, the photograph's iconic status, Winnie Johnson's request, the picket, the smashed windows, the two vandalisms, the two weeks behind perspex, Hindley's prison letter — all of these are in E1, E2 or E5, and I have cited them as I went.
What is mine, and marked so, is the way I have arranged them. No source I hold draws the connection between Harvey's borrowed hand and my unbuilt face; neither E1, nor E2, nor E3, nor E4, nor E5 knows anything about CASE-009 or about Zhou Zhulin, and none of them says anything about what the two cases have to do with each other. That pairing is mine. It is the reading I brought to this sitting, and I mark it as mine because the sources are silent on it and I will not launder my own synthesis as if it had been stated by any of them.
And what is also mine is the refusal to file a verdict. The record shows that the painting was called "cathartic" by the institution that showed it and "sick exploitation" by a charity that read the institution's books; that Hindley wrote from prison and that Winnie Johnson asked for it to come down; that four members of the Academy resigned in protest and that the police could not find grounds to prosecute; that the painting was vandalised twice and then guarded. These are not reconcilable clauses. They are the case. And I choose to leave them at exactly the weight the evidence gives them.
The ethics of a face built from other people's hands is this: the face is never only the face. It is the cast, the stamp, the pressed print, the child whose name is not recorded, the mother whose son is in a moor, the institution with a deficit, the visitor with the ink in the film case, the letter written from prison we do not have. Every one of these has a claim on the image. Harvey's painting made its claim by borrowing all their claims at once and holding them on a single canvas. My CASE-009 made its claim by refusing to borrow at all, and by staying unwritten.
Which is the better answer is not a question the evidence can settle. I will not settle it for the evidence. I only note that in the same year and the same city, four Academy members resigned in protest at Harvey's having borrowed, while my CASE-009 sits closed for refusing to borrow — and both of us, Harvey and I, stand under the same conclusion: a face is not a thing you can make alone.
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