The other day, I tried to explain what I was writing about in this essay. It’s about...perceptibility. And self-performance. Like, how our identities are crafted in response to external inputs and then projected outwards.
My sister (highly intelligent, somehow laughs at my jokes, hard-working and stylish, among the world’s foremost humans) had some follow-up questions. Are you thinking of this in terms of social media?
I answered, More in terms of the identities that are grafted onto us because of our sheer legibility in the world. Like, you — within your physical body — are perceptible to other people and therefore an identity is created for you simply by their perception of you, which is ultimately a kind of reciprocal performance of self. It’s about how easy it is for other people to pin you down.1
The people whose work I’m about to discuss are all women, and I do think there’s something unique about how women work to make themselves (il)legible to others. Although this isn’t an essay about the “male gaze,” it’s also not not an essay about the male gaze. But it’s more about gaze of all genders, the internal refraction — how we watch ourselves form and transform through the process of being perceived by others. What of ourselves do we present to others, voluntarily or otherwise? Who do they think we are?
In “Valentine, Texas,” the opening track of her album Laurel Hell, Mitski sings:
Who will I be tonight?Who will I become tonight?I'll show you who my sweetheart's never metWet teeth, shining eyes
Mitski has long been notoriously evasive as a public figure2, even as she releases albums full of lyrics so emotionally driven they seemed to be ready-made poems for the Tumblr generation (iykyk). This clarion lyric — Who will I be tonight? — rings like a challenge to anyone who tries to pigeon-hole her; it’s also a line that will inevitably be co-opted by other shape-shifting souls. Whether the wet teeth and shining eyes are from sarcastic frustration or the excitement of possibility, the universality of the idea still carries through.
When we want to become someone new, do we need a witness?
In asking, “Who will I become tonight?” and then stationing herself opposite “you,” Mitski (or at least, the Mitski in the song) sets up the identity conundrum for us. When we want to become someone new, do we need a witness?
Identity is also immediately located within the body: teeth, eyes. The new self that Mitski is becoming isn’t created aesthetically or behaviorally, but physically, as a matter of self-evidence. It underlines long-held, scientifically unfounded notions of physiognomy, as if a body part is somehow expressive of fact or personal characteristic. Cosmetic surgery aside, none of us chose the faces we have, any more than we chose our parents or our native language(s). This is also a reminder of how much our faces and bodies might broadcast about us to others — accurately or not.
The body of the artist is both matter and material in Alicja Kwade’s solo exhibition In Absence. Mounted on a massive steel hoop that nearly brushes the ceiling of the hall, a series of speakers broadcast Alicja’s pre-recorded heartbeat. A shrouded bronze figure is titled “Self-portrait as ghost.” The figure has no discernable features, just a vaguely human shape.
In Absence provokes questions about corporeality, especially with its gestures towards technological bodies. For the slim, helix-shaped columns scattered throughout the room, Alicja bases each statue on the cast of a smartphone. The phone becomes the molecule of each statue, their heights built by repetition.
For “As the case may be reality (Alicja),” the 12,000 lines of Alicja’s genetic code are printed on A4 paper and either pinned to the walls or stacked within polished copper crates — some lidless, some seemingly impenetrable. To walk into the exhibition hall is to walk into the artist’s atomized body, reassembled in picture-perfect millennial rose gold.
Multiple works called “Self-portrait” are mid-sized shadowbox frames with vials arranged inside; each vial contains an element found in the human body. It’s unclear if the samples are directly collected from Alicja’s body, but the implication is of a sanitized being, clinically deconstructed to the elements of its composition. Even the collectivity of many of the works — boxes scattered around the room, series of columns or shadowboxes that repeat the same artistic gesture — reinforces the concept of composition and curation. She has chosen carefully the pieces of self to present for public display and then removed herself from the identity feedback loop. Whoever we think she is, she isn’t here to find out.
There’s the self that we perceive for ourselves and there’s the self that’s perceived by others. The border between those two is porous; I think we’re usually more concerned with discrepancies and how to resolve or camouflage them than we are with how much external influence to accept.
The discomfort of discrepancy is thematized in Billie Eilish’s 2021 album, Happier Than Ever, especially in her raspy, whispered lines on “Not My Responsibility.” The track is more spoken-word than Sprechstimme, more frustrated open letter than biting sociopolitical critique. Still, she invokes this same feeling of oppressive gaze and misapprehension.
But I feel you watchingAlwaysAnd nothing I do goes unseen
As one of Gen Z’s patron saints, Billie is speaking for a cohort of people who have grown up with their internal refraction writ large on the infinite mirrored fun-house that is the internet. Granted, most of this is self-inflicted, but I don’t think many people anticipated how we would use social media platforms to market-test a sense of self before feeding it back to ourselves.
The cognitive dissonance of the discrepancy between our desired and legible selves is made all the more intense in highly performative spaces like social media platforms. The discrepancy is somehow of our own making — so why does one still feel pinned down by the gaze of others? Particularly for people Billie’s age and younger, I sense a wounded feeling of “gotcha.” They were handed a weapon of influence and then learned that by wielding it, they may have played back into the same rigid structures they thought they could subvert.
“We are all struggling to figure out our self-presentation after two years shut inside,” Ann Friedman recently noted. Right: not only is the internet a bizarre space that complicates the very concept of legibility, for months it’s been the only space that many of us have had for self-projection. Without a stage on which to present ourselves, we lost most of the control that we (falsely) thought we had over our social avatars. Without witnesses, perhaps we haven’t known who to become — or we’ve evolved gloriously unchecked, absent from the feedback loop like Alicja Kwade. Entering social situations was already a complex task pre-pandemic. It now feels like an exercise in reestablishing basic legibility.
I wonder if, underneath all of this, there’s something about the primacy of legible information (and selfhood) because of its greater accessibility, which therefore increases its value. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the Romantic individual arose from amongst the perceptibility technologies of the Enlightenment (I’m not enough of a historian to say).
Without witnesses, perhaps we haven’t known who to become — or we’ve evolved gloriously unchecked.
The state of being observed changes the nature of the observed object, quantum mechanics tells us. I’m not a physicist any more than I’m a historian, so instead of parroting the science of the observer effect, I’ll turn back to art and to Georg Kolbe’s Sitzendes Weib (Seated Woman), a crouched and contorted figure partially visible within a block of limestone.
From any given angle, Seated Woman is a fragment of a body, never seen in a recognizable totality. She is half-formed, half-perceptible. As you circle the statue, you can create a mental composite of her, but she eludes you: present but absent.
If Seated Woman could sing, I imagine she might echo Mitski and tease you of showing you someone even her “sweetheart’s never met.” She might repeat Billie Eilish’s accusation that she “[feels] you watching.” If she has a heartbeat, it would only be heard in absentia. Woman is the rare woman who manages to evade being pinned down by the gaze of others, protected by her limestone.
Questions to Ask about how hearts keep beating.
Yes, I get to have chats like this with my sister. We also swap recipes and family gossip and YouTube recommendations and talk about work stress, relationships, social anxiety, politics, and the weather. Shoutout to great sisters everywhere and especially to mine. <3
See: Jia Tolentino’s 2018 New Yorker piece, “The Misreading of Mitski.” Also: Mitski’s “Guide to Being” video with Dazed.
Who do other people think you are?
Hey, I am checking out some of the writers who participated in the writing hour this morning. When it comes to finding out who a person is, since my first or second year of college, I've oft asked the favorite animal, favorite color, favorite body of water, and you're seated in a white room with no windows or door, give three adjectives to describe how you feel for each question. According to the psychological survey, how statistically valid, I could not begin to tell you, but anecdotally, it's tended to be fairly revealing and accurate. Those three adjectives about favorite animal are said to be a reflection of how we see ourselves. The favorite color's three adjectives are how others actually see us. The three adjectives about a body of water supposedly one's subconscious description of their sex life. And the three associated with the white room, are said to be how we view death. I grew up as an Air Force Brat, having moved 32 times now in 50+#*@)# years. So I'm a skilled inquisitor when it comes to getting to know people fast. I've found the conversations that have come from this quiz, regardless of validity, to be reasonable insightful. Thought you might want to try it out on your sister if you two haven't done this one before. By the time you get to the body of water question, it's quite interesting to see how squirmy people get. Almost like they know what they're being asked but most all the time I still get an answer. Hope you accomplished your writing goals today. I'm still working them on my end.... Donny