ART « In Which It's Like Looking In A Mirror »
Monday, June 8, 2009 at 12:41PM 
Self-Portrait In A Convex Painting
by ALEX CARNEVALE
A brave caution appears off the tendrils of the wind. I have spent these days gripped by that wariness, letting it go to the fingertips, never answering the call.
We meant to part, to separate for a time, fleeing until overcome by drought, or rising tide.
monet God stands somewhere outsides these things, pushing on himself like a button, or twisted wrench. You know that you are doing something, but you're not exactly aware that you are doing it. As Monet put it:
Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment. To such an extent indeed that one day, finding myself at the deathbed of a woman who had been and still was very dear to me, I caught myself in the act of focusing on her temples and automatically analyzing the succession of appropriately graded colors which death was imposing on her motionless face.
turnerWould you not let those tendrils of caution into your home to beg at your table, see what it means to be with grief?
picassoWalt Whitman made real sense of these things. He wrote that we were tied to something we could not hold fully, leaking out to the maelstrom, and sounding off.
courbetThis is the leverage of the events, a place to go when lights go out in the storm. Read them fully, and live on like the glossy thunder. We were meant to be in these places, say these things to ourselves.
goyaThe self-portrait as a question, asking whatever you are most sensitive to, whatever you are most in need of. It makes plain everything that normally isn't.
rembrandt
As David Markson once put it, "The world is everything that is the case."
lautrec
It is a helpful measure to see yourself in this fashion; to determine whether it is you that is caught up in something, or whether something is caught up in you. Once Poe was said to have looked in a mirror and seen a demon watching him. He went about his business, a daily walk, visit to friends. When he sat down to write he felt a growing power.
manet
There is something more analytical than artistic about such an effort. This is the real art for art's sake: not for anyone else's sake, but for your own. To find out what human intuition and logic cannot achieve, to solve for x on the largest possible scale.
chuck close
I once saw Chuck Close at a museum. He was just looking at the paintings. Afterwards, I quickly went to wash my hands.
chagall
Viewing a self-portrait is like getting a diagnosis from your doctor. You really weren't sure of what ailed you, but now you know.
bacon
There is something admirable in the act of painting itself, something Jed Perl could never understand.
duchamp
Whatever the act, it takes courage.
katz
elaine de kooning
villers
dali
gauguin
heckelAlex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls right here.
jessen
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Reader Comments (4)
I enjoyed compilation of words and images here, but I call bullshit on your Chuck Close story. That guy hasn't been seen in public since 1981. Seriously though, I'd wash my hands, too.
I was at the Met today and there was a tiny special exhibit on the collection's favorite self portraits. There were quite a few gems, including Yves Klein's Leap into the Void. It was hidden between the two modern and contemporary levels.
superb work!
Nice!
"The world is everything that is the case" is actually a (translation of a) famous quote by Ludwig Wittgenstein from his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, though. Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress was heavily influenced by that book.