Presenting Without Comment
In the Vatican Museums, alongside myriad sculptures of gods, emperors, and scholars, stands this old fisherman. His singular presence among these great figures places this sculpture’s significance firmly in its statement rather than its subject. Given that the portrait took months or even years to create, the artist clearly felt some ferocious drive to immortalize an ordinary man—perhaps to glorify the everyday or the earthly. Stranger, since these artists generally depended on patrons, someone wealthy supported that message.
A little earlier in my trip, I saw at Pompidou a truly enormous canvas, painted entirely a rather pleasant shade of blue. Next to it, of course, was mounted a lengthy plaque bloviating the painting’s profound interrogation of audience expectations, art criticism, and the true definition of beauty. Which bloviating, fundamentally, mirrors my natural reaction to the old fisherman sculpture.
That led me to wonder: is it possible to present anything unusual (but true and without pretense!) without these reactions in its audience?
I suspect we can chase these levels of meta to arbitrary depth, if we account for the artist’s own awareness of this phenomenon. Say you decide to take a photo of yourself every day. So you’re about to take one, but you can just feel an ill-placed lock of hair across your forehead. Do you brush it aside? Or leave it be for a “natural” photo?
You decide to just take the photo, but wait: if you always look disheveled, aren’t you maybe making some other statement? Might you convey some kind of, like, hipster-disaffection-I-don’t-care-how-I-look-but-I-care-about-looking-that-way countenance? So maybe you’d better fix your hair… but only a little? Make sure not too many photos in a row are perfect? But wait—will people figure out that pattern?
Or, as Mills asked when discussing this with me: can I cover a wall with a massive monochromatic canvas just because I really like that color? And have anyone believe me when they ask?
I’m not sure I’d believe him. But maybe this is just some kind of social paranoia? “That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do?”1
Consider, though, as one closing point in this non-argument: on a Facebook wall, a self-portrait with an empty expression seems more affected than one with an enormous, impossibly celebratory grin.
- c.f. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. I know I’m years late to the party on this book; I beg your weary tolerance.
Leading photo of the Old Fisherman by Dennis Jarvis, licensed BY-SA.
