"Ways of Seeing" - Revealing self and subject

I am fascinated with the notion of looking behind a curtain, considering it a barrier between worlds. We peek into a living room through an exposed sliver of window. We watch a performance in rows as the curtain lifts to the tune of mounting strings. Are voyeur and viewer so different?

Before a show, when the curtains are closed, anticipation mounts in the face of mystery, half excitement, half existential unease, knowing the barrier between us and another world will be momentarily eased. John Berger’s words on undressing in front of another come to mind: “Their nakedness acts as a confirmation and provokes a very strong sense of relief. She is a woman like any other: or he is a man like any other: we are overwhelmed by the marvellous simplicity of the familiar sexual mechanism . . . We did not expect them to be otherwise, but the urgency and complexity of our feelings bred a sense of uniqueness which the sight of the other, as she is or as he is, now dispels. They are more like the rest of their sex than they are different.” (Ways of Seeing, chapter 4) The difficulty with the nude, Berger points out, is that it is uneven; one-sided display rather than the equality and reciprocity of sex, to which the nude only alludes. If someone is made into subject it is challenging to show them as they are, rather than as they appear, for to do so requires complete surrender and vulnerability from both sides. (This is like having sex, at least in its most realized manifestation. At its common worst, sex is a look into a mirror without reflection.)

I think of the time I went to Wyoming to ride horses and found I couldn’t even get Brownie, the stallion with which I was paired, to hold eye contact with me. Horses won’t pay you any mind unless you reveal your soul to them. And so I’d sit, and try to feed him an apple, or brush him, or draw him—making him into an object—and he would ignore me. I’d say to myself, “open your soul. Open up.” But nothing would happen. It was just through sitting and breathing that it happened. It’s not that you’re trying to do something, to get somewhere, to get something, it’s that you’re allowing the curtain to fall away. You aren’t reaching; you stop gripping (which I had been, desperately). And we sat and I stroked him. I was enveloped, but in a fragile sense, the kind of connection that would collapse if I disengaged for a second. There’s a reason they use horses for therapy. Horses are empathetic. If you hand them bullshit, they’ll spit it right back at you. If you hand them your soul, they’ll hand theirs back, and you’ll see yourself in their gentle gaze. This is the kind of connection that can’t be orchestrated.

The same thing applies to portraiture. Is the face an object, a landscape, a mirror—or a soul sharing in experience with the artist? Berger cites Ruben’s painting of his second wife, wherein “Her body confronts us, not as an immediate sight, but as experience - the painter's experience.” I remember showing my artist aunt the drawing of “my friend Elise,” oblivious, unassuming, and cracking inside with a kind of desperate flutter, equally proud and embarrassed, horrified, as my aunt, visibly taken aback, almost shaken, paused before venturing, “It’s—so full of tenderness. It’s so intimate.” I got there drawing my ex-girlfriend last summer, sitting on her bed while she played Red Dead Redemption III. I was full of love for her and I gave myself over. I look at myself and swell with anxiety, pride, judgement. (Why is my face so fat? I have pretty eyes. Not when I draw them like that. Are my lips weird?) I want to find that, in having drawn something beautiful, I, too, am beautiful; then I exaggerate everything ugly about myself to try to be “honest.” It’s a total concern with the look of something rather than a surrender into being. A quote that comes up for me is from Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human: "What superficiality—and what stupidity—there is in trying to depict in a pretty manner things which one has thought pretty. The masters through their subjective perceptions created beauty out of trivialities . . . seemed not to rely in the least in the misconceptions of others . . . I began to do a few self portraits, taking care that they not be seen by my female visitors.” What is my art practice but an overarching search for a truthful self-portrait? A portrait of my interaction with the world instead of a drawing of the way I look as a being apart?

The result can often be so disarming as to be, in Berger’s words, “chilling.” Comfort comes in the form of “banality,” the intimacy to be found in the erosion of the mysterious. Part of this banality is a recognition of the universal through the individual—being a man or a woman “like any other.” In my proposal, I asked: “Is there room for intimacy under a spotlight? Can naked and nude converge?” Nudity and nakedness is one dichotomy. Nudity is a display, the guarded self, according to Berger, its own form of dress. The curtain opens, cruelly, to reveal a set of blinds underneath. What, then, is the relationship between being clothed and being naked? Berger writes: “Etiquettes of modesty are not merely puritan or sentimental: it is reasonable to recognize a loss of mystery. And the explanation of this loss of mystery may be largely visual. The focus of perception shifts from eyes, mouth, shoulders, hands - all of which are capable of such subtleties of expression that the personality expressed by them is manifold - it shifts from these to the sexual parts, whose formation suggests an utterly compelling but single process. The other is reduced or elevated - whichever you prefer - to their primary sexual category: male or female. Our relief is the relief of finding an unquestionable reality to whose direct demands our earlier highly complex awareness must now yield.” This is the thrill that spreads across the audience as the curtains begin to part. The curtain shifts from a literal barrier to figurative one separating the reality of the stage-world from that of the audience witnessing it. Realities do not converge but are allowed to meet: those of the displayed and hidden, the watched and seen, the ephemeral and repeated. Where a locked box is a hidden intimacy, a closed curtain is an invitation, grandiose, playful, to enter a new realm complete with show-tunes, sequins, and sword-fight suicides.

Sources:

"Ways of Seeing" by John Berger

"No Longer Human" by Osamu Dazai

"Portrait of Helena Fourment" by Peter Paul Rubens

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