Cyber Self-Portraits

It was fortuitous that fire left me holed up in my little abode for a couple days last week, because the imprisonment gave me the opportunity to paint a nice self-portrait on the social networking site Facebook. The inspiration was Agnieszka Tennant’s latest column in CT, “A Fishy Facebook Friend.” 

For a brief moment, Facebook was a lot more fun than blogging. Arranging the user-friendly icons that represent some of my favorite things allowed me a kind of instant gratification creativity that writing and uploading photos does not afford. Collecting “friends” was fun too, except for the anxiety produced when a few of them took a little longer to accept me than my fragile ego favored. Some acquaintances rejected me outright. Cyber-brutality and its twin, exploitation, are two of the critiques of online social networking outlined in pieces in  The New Atlantis and The New York Times.

In the New Atlantis article, Christine Rosen introduces cyber self-portraits thusly: “Self-portraits can be especially instructive. By showing the artist both as he sees his true self and as he wishes to be seen, self-portraits can at once expose and obscure, clarify and distort. They offer opportunities for both self-expression and self-seeking. They can display egotism and modesty, self-aggrandizement and self-mockery.

Today, our self-portraits are democratic and digital; they are crafted from pixels rather than paints. On social networking websites like MySpace and Facebook, our modern self-portraits feature background music, carefully manipulated photographs, stream-of-consciousness musings, and lists of our hobbies and friends. They are interactive, inviting viewers not merely to look at, but also to respond to, the life portrayed online. We create them to find friendship, love, and that ambiguous modern thing called connection. Like painters constantly retouching their work, we alter, update, and tweak our online self-portraits; but as digital objects they are far more ephemeral than oil on canvas. Vital statistics, glimpses of bare flesh, lists of favorite bands and favorite poems all clamor for our attention—and it is the timeless human desire for attention that emerges as the dominant theme of these vast virtual galleries.“

Having created self portraits in oil paint, pastel, plaster, wood, photograph, words and pixels, I can say I don’t recognize either the motivation behind them, or the finished products in her description. For example, I didn’t create self-portraits to reveal how I see myself or how I wish to be seen. I did them because I was an easily accessible subject and/or because I was trying to figure out who I was.

The wood sculpture was created to process the freshman 20 I had gained in college. She was an abstract objet d’ art made of scrap two-by-fours and paint. I named her “Adipose.” She was a reflection of my distorted self-image and met a timely end when my mother tossed her from the family attic. The plaster head was an accurate likeness, for portraiture is one of my only gifts as an artist. This decapitated incarnation lived in my attic for years, only coming out as a Halloween prop that I arranged over stuffed clothing in the driver’s seat of our Mercury Grand Marquis. As youngsters approached, I’d simultaneously open the door and remotely set off the car’s panic button. The little goblins got a trick along with their treat. A brilliant use of self-portrait, IMHO.

Point is, Rosen is too dour and serious about the whole phenomenon. According to Sabine Melchoir-Bonnet, self-reflection has been the norm since the Enlightenment, when man usurped God as the center of human existence in the West.  In The Mirror: A History, she writes,

“To medieval theologians, any representation of man that would ignore his divine aspects is reprehensible and potentially idolatrous. The moral status of imitation and of looking upon oneself is ambiguous due to the sacred character of the likeness. Imitation, when it is not interacting with or related to the divine, reduces itself to tromp l’oeil. Lucifer is the great usurper of likeness, sin being the foremost of false appearances.“

I think the tromp l’oeil sins on Facebook are what bother Rosen, but she talks about the entire endeavor as if it were inherently dishonest, as if everyone fudges the books they read, the music they like, etc.—as if everyone is powerless over the need to be SEEN through a flattering lense. If this were so, methinks my friend the managing editor of a respected magazine wouldn’t so readily confess his love of country music! Nor would another friend have begun a group called “____ Bible Institute Heretics!” I love that she did, by the way. I myself might not have chosen these words from John Donne as one of my quickly assembled favorite quotes: “Love’s mysteries in souls do grow, and yet the body is his book.” While I read a multiplicity of loves into this verse, others might think it’s about only one kind.

However, I’m quite sure I don’t have a full picture of Facebook. Ninety-nine percent of my “friends” self-portraits are painted with thickly applied “divine aspects.” They’re cyber-beautiful. (Surrounded they may be by advertisers, but isn’t that the case everywhere—even at the gas pump and the grocery store line? The more advertisers encroach, the more I tune them out.)

I didn’t create my facebook portrait to find love, friendship or “connection,” but to aquiesce to professional realities. I’m not really sure what this online presence is supposed to do for me. Google and Microsoft get what it can do for them, and, to us. My friend with an MBA gets it too. She frequently updates her page with notes that keep her in my mind through the news feed: she’s got a radio interview, she’s scaring someone, her agent notified her that her publisher has signed on for her next book. I don’t see myself doing these kind of updates frequently. I made one such announcement and was embarrassed by it, so now I look at my Facebook adventure as a hobby begun on a rainy firey day.

What I like, other than seeing the smiling portraits of far-away friends and keeping abreast of what they’re up to, is my art gallery. Every time I go to my profile page, a new painting that I’ve bookmarked loads. This process actually helped me identify my first loves because I would smile inside whenever works by Franz Kline and Alberto Giacometti showed up, while others caused an inward frown (these were either banished to my private gallery or deleted altogether). Now only my favorites greet me.

Which brings me back to the one point Rosen makes that is truly noteworthy. She wonders about the impact of online social networking on the development of children.

There is actaully an application for rating one’s friends. Ouch! I deleted that one. I’m 43 years old and one of my “friends,” whom I have never actually met, took a while to accept me. When he did, I posted a note on his “wall”—the public space for such comments. I looked back a while later and saw that my note had been singled out for deletion. Nobody else’s, just mine. My feelings were hurt. Was my new “friend” so embarrassed to have accepted me that he didn’t want anyone to know, or was he embarrassed by my praise of his work?

Uniquely, this “friend” doesn’t utilize the avatar feature, so his self-portrait is painted without the colors of virtual friendship. Hmmm. Interesting. Could this thoughtful guy be employing a fix for the badging of oneself with notables and/or for hiding warts? I thought about adopting this strategy, but realized I’d miss seeing those symbols, and maybe just a little, being seen with them. I was briefly tempted to delete this friend, but since I don’t actually know him, I thought better of it. Imagine this game being played by 8-12 year olds.

Scot McNight accepted me as a friend. Last I checked he had 353+ of them. He wrote a note on my wall thanking me for making him my “friend” and I wrote one on his telling him I loved his open heart, for surely he doesn’t like or even know all 353+ of those who claim him as “friend.”  

I’m moderately adopting Scot’s fearless approach. If you’re an actual friend of this blog and you want to be my Facebook “friend,” I’ll gladly claim you! But, if I discern that, like Agnieszka’s opportunist, your motives are impure, you can just forget it!

Update 2/8/08: Scot’s funny tuxedoed portrait has long since disappeared from facebook. Can’t say I blame him. He was getting an awful lot of friend requests.

Update 7/4/08: I quit facebook in March 2008.

[© cas 2007, all rights reserved.]