About Ourselves, We Have Mixed Feelings

Ever put yourself out there and then wish desperately that you hadn’t? I have, probably about a million times; such is the story of the life of an unrepentant extrovert. As my kids will attest, it’s not easy for me to head into a convenience store and refrain from initiating conversation with someone who happens to be there getting milk at the same time. Friendliness or just too much assertion of self? I’m never sure. During the past decade, though, the possibilities for a slightly different brand of over-exposure– the kind made possible through technology– have taken off exponentially. The way I think of it, the convenience store has gotten a whole lot larger.

Let’s be honest: most of us have a kind of love/hate relationship with images of ourselves. Selfies are all over the place, sure, but the whole business is still full of contradictions, hopes, fears, and pangs of guilt. And there are plenty of people—sensible people, I might add, many in my own family—who have nothing to do with it. Whatsoever.

Last weekend, in New York City, I had a rare chance to dip into the art world. It turns out that questions like “How do I want others to see me?” or “Is this really how I am?” as well as “How can I capture someone else’s essence?” remain compelling. And, even though there must still be museums everywhere with rooms of staid personages in their finery, gazing out, the whole idea of what a portrait gallery can be is surely changing.

My husband is a painter who’s drawn to Abstract Impressionism, so a sojourn at the Whitney Museum was definitely mostly for him, I thought generously. Besides producing nice, big colorful works himself, the guy really knows a Frankenthaler from a Pollock from a Rothko. And besides, we’d been to the MOMA not that long ago and had never seen the Whitney in its new location. Here’s the funny thing, though: he had the idea to go in the first place, but it turned out that the exhibit on portraits spoke exactly to my own internal condition at the time.

Just the night before, when I saw that my fiddling around with the pictures on my new Facebook site had resulted in an inadvertent re-posting of my profile shot, I felt completely ridiculous. The last, really—the last, thing I wanted to do was put an image of myself in front of everybody. It was bad enough that I did it the first time, when setting up the page, but a second time was inexcusable. I would profusely apologize, except that the whole silly thing isn’t even worth that much attention.

An episode like this sure does bring up the convoluted relationship many of us have with Facebook, and other means of self-portrayal. In a certain way, we like presenting ourselves in order to connect with others. Sometimes, though, and often quite suddenly, we can also loathe the situations we get ourselves in and shudder with embarrassment. Those of us who dare to write about our own experiences or conjure up new ones in fiction can go through this same thing with words, too.

I’m somebody who keeps at this blog based on the slightly weird premise that my own personal point of view as a “coming from the outside” clergy spouse might yield some reflections worth hearing. It’s preposterous, in a way. And yet, I get a certain fulfillment from at least trying to capture exactly what’s going on as I see and feel it—my own particular truth, or at least a representation of that truth. In a way, then, I suppose it’s kind of the verbal equivalent of drawing a portrait.

Going back to the museum, here’s a paragraph from the introductory panels we saw in the first room of the exhibit:

Once a rarefied luxury good, portraits are now ubiquitous. Readily reproducible and every-more accessible, photography has played a particularly vital role in the democratization of portraiture. Most recently, the proliferation of smartphones and the rise of social media have unleashed an unprecedented stream of portraits in the form of snapshots and selfies. Many contemporary artists confront this situation, stressing the fluidity of identity in a world where technology and the mass media are omnipresent. Through their varied takes on the portrait, the artists represented in Human Interest raise provocative questions about who we are and how we perceive and commemorate others.

They’re “provocative questions” all right, and the “unprecedented stream of portraits” we are faced with on a daily basis may in fact leave us not only feeling fluid but pretty limp, too.

We lingered for a while in this exhibit, in front of a mix of paintings and photographs that really defied characterization except that they depicted individual humans every which way. Sometimes the images were disturbing enough to make me want to turn away; the nudity wasn’t exactly depicted in a Greek god-like fashion. Others were transfixing, as I tried to figure out exactly what was the most salient feature, and how the artist tried to show that.

This one, a photograph by Cindy Sherman (called Untitled, from 2008) really held my gaze for a while.

Having lived under a rock or at least most recently surrounded by the granite of New Hampshire,  I had never heard of Sherman before; but isn’t this fabulous? She made herself into a certain kind of woman who is world-weary: she remembers better days, can still turn towards the camera in a certain privileged fashion, but her life is clearly a shell of what it once was, or maybe never quite fully was.

Looking at this must have been just the tonic I needed, because by the time we left the museum and headed to the High Line, I had shed my worry about the silly picture that may have gotten in the newsfeed. A mere blip on the screen it was. What suddenly seemed much more important was the fact that I was in New York City with my husband of 25 years, we were still alive, our children were fine, and we had a free afternoon. The only identity I wanted to create at that moment was to be a person who knew how to embrace the day.