Column | The posing artist not only portrays himself

Because I suddenly became interested in posing, self-fashioning, the construction of a self, I read what others wrote about it. I read about the sociopolitical implications underlying the dismantling of the autofictional subject. On the Mediterranean politics of the representation of the social self vis-à-vis Antonio Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony.

Wouldn’t it be great, I thought ambitiously, plowing through the lyrics for inspiration, if I could one day become someone who also managed to turn his thoughts into such ludicrous formulations?

The fact that I had decided to restyle myself and construct a new persona for myself was in fact due to Piet Mondrian. Recently I visited the exhibition Striking a Pose in the Fotomuseum Den Haag, where you can see how Mondrian used photography to “put himself down”, as the museum puts it. The camera as an instrument for staging the self.

We were all already familiar with the professional portraits, the photos in which Mondrian can be seen as a detached pioneer of abstraction. As a “serious loner,” as the museum puts it. This serious posing with a stern look and an upright posture was of course an attempt to position himself as an artist, a great artist. And at the same time you can see an attempt to transform the person into a work of art: into a Mondrian.

At the exhibition and in the book Mondrian and photography Wietse Coppes and Leo Jansen also show photos of a completely different Piet Mondrian. A looser Piet who smokes, drinks wine and lives loose to a limited extent. He attends parties, travels and plays records in his studio. The photos that Coppes and Jansen have collected of this loose Piet were not taken professionally, they are snapshots, insights into private life. Taken by friends. Or by photographers after the official photo shoot ended.

There is something extremely reassuring, a sort of Garbo Smile effect, about this collection of hitherto unknown photographs. Greta Garbo, whose image was also rather serious for reasons that are unclear, burst into the movie Ninotchka suddenly burst out laughing. To do this, an admirer had to fall backwards from his restaurant chair, because Garbo was a cold Russian envoy in the film, but once the admirer was lying on the floor, crockery and all, she was unstoppable. ‘Garbo Laughs‘ shouted the movie poster enthusiastically.

In short, on the one hand you have the official posed world, with a cold look, dark glasses, pretended seriousness and learned texts about autofictional subjects. And on the other side the world of relaxation, Piet Mondrian with his hair down, Greta Garbo in a dent. Pete and Greta and slippersas the French say.

Well, of course it would be great if you could choose which of the two faces you could show, so that you could decide to freeze or thaw on every single occasion. But if there’s anything I’ve understood from the scholarly texts about self-fashioning, positioning yourself, it’s that you don’t have complete control over your pose, if only because your image depends on the people in your body. environment.

The photos were not made by Piet Mondrian. He may have been able to determine which glasses he was wearing and in which direction he was looking, but the famous photographers who captured him must have had input. And the parties at which he appeared dancing were not only given by him. In short, there was no basic Piet who, completely isolated, sometimes posed as an art Piet and then let himself go as a loose Piet. There was a Piet in context.

And there was something else. In art, as in the rest of life, there is a role for the viewer. Piet Mondrian could now decide to become a work of art by posing as squarely as possible in the photo, but how that work of art was perceived was up to those who viewed it. And these in turn contributed to the freezing or thawing.

Finally, the posing artist not only portrays himself, he also portrays the other. You must, as the saying goes, in art pacify the troubled and disturb the calm: art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. And the same goes for the rest of life. You must freeze the hot and thaw the chilled. And with this conclusion about the effect of the pose, I concluded my search. I didn’t know what you thought, but I went to find my slippers and open a bottle of wine.