Until now, I have responded to the vile intrBANG bang BANG bang bang BANGerrible rages My blood pressure soars My ventricular extrasystoles come back I hammer on the walls, scream, weep and curse. I lie under the duvet, ears plugged, helplessly preyed upon by terrible fantasies about smirking, black-toothed builders, farting and scratching as they go about hittiBANG bang bang bang BANG only to howl inarticulatelBANG! bang, bangovially whacking their vast empurpled rubbery tools on the rotting floorboards with cries of simian glee.But not this time What has happened is that my brain has .. gone. But though he mystifies his methods and obscures his motives, his work has fewer inhibitions. The more sullenly he guards his secrets, the more candidly his films blurt them out.! 'Secrets & Lies' (15) opens on Friday.. Modern artists often neglect portraiture.

But when the avant-garde depict people,the results can be surprisingExhibitions of portraits are not very common, apart from those mounted by professional societies, so it's good to see "Portrait of the Artist" at the Anthony d'Offay Gallery. This is a survey of portraiture within the contemporary avant-garde. The exhibition can't be representative, since all the artists are concerned with the gallery in one way or another. But d'Offay spreads his net wide (there are 40 works on display, from Britain, Europe and America) and the show is something more than an anthology of the artists in his stable.A catalogue essay might have been interesting.

Nobody these days writes about the subject, while artists tend to dramatise the problems of the genre. They don't like depictions of people's features to be straightforward Two further things are obvious from this exhibition. Within painting, the art of portraiture is not more radical or advanced than it was half a century ago. It has simply been given a contemporary look by technical effects from photography As for sculpture - alas! there's a gap. For most of the 20th century, three-dimensional portrait art has either been academic or neglected by non-academic artists.

Sculptors have lost due opportunity to make portraiture a true part of modern art.The most arresting sculpture at d'Offay is by the Greek-Italian Jannis Kounellis, a veteran of the arte povera movement of around 1970 But it's doubtfully a portrait. The implication is that we're looking at a 1996 version of a crucifixion. The sculpture is made from three pieces of wood suspended from the ceiling by a steel ring. Thick paper crudely marked with black paint is clamped to the upper part of the wood The piece nearly works, but is a little too pompous Kounellis has hinted at crucifixions before. He ought to stay away from the subject, for arte povera, in its origins or present-day forms, needs a lighter touch.But not the touch of the Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco, who is in London this year for a project with the Artangel Trust He has responded to the d'Offay invitation with Self-Pot On two house bricks stands a terracotta flower pot It's filled with earth, from which a wooden stick protrudes This is a poor work, without any sculptural ambition. I prefer badness to be done with humour, here provided by Jeff Koons's two pieces, a self- portrait and a double portrait with his loving porn-star wife (now ex- wife).

Made from perfect marble as if by Renaissance craftsmen (Koons himself does not produce his work), these pieces are a celebration of kitsch. The joke is by now familiar, though, and will shortly be over.Koons makes the point that self-portraiture can depend on little more than egotism and clever publicity. So it is with Gilbert & George, who last week received an honorary fellowship of the London Institute for "outstanding achievement" and an "honourable association" with the Institute. The latter means that they were students at St Martin's 30 years ago. Their present achievement is seen in a 15-panel photograph piece called Piss Hole.