Iconography (or, Radical Self-Portraiture)
During the year in college in which I was fortunate enough to live abroad — a stroke of extraordinary luck and naive privilege which I have only recently, in this age of most forms of travel being either unsafe or unethical, begun to comprehend — I met a girl, a fellow American, on a walking tour of Lisbon. I didn’t fall in love with her, but I came pretty damn close.
I was in a phase of my travels in which I’d found myself phenomenally, and unexpectedly, alone: I’d been meant to meet up with a friend in Portugal, but he’d cancelled his trip to spend time with his boyfriend. On the one hand, I understood this decision, as the boyfriend was undeniably cuter than me. On the other hand, it was the worst thing that anyone had ever done to another person in the history of human betrayals, and I’d rarely felt angrier or more wounded about anything in my life. [name redacted], if you’re reading this, I still count this as one of the biggest transgressions anyone has ever made against me, but I have since come to recognize how singularly well-treated this fact makes me, and I therefore forgive you (I don’t forgive you).
Anyway, when you find yourself alone in an unknown place — especially if you are not a man — you naturally start casting about for de facto companions to eat and converse and ward off potential harassers with, and I found a great one in the aforementioned young traveler woman. Friendships formed while traveling are easy come, easy go; I attached myself to this person based on nothing but the fact that she was an American studying in Scotland. Nevertheless, I found her one of the most beautiful and radiant people I’d ever met, and I rearranged my whole Lisbon timetable to better align with her plans.
On day two of tagging along with this girl, I learned that she was really into iconography. She said it just like that, too: “I’m really into iconography.” (A cynic would say that this wasn’t a real passion, but rather the sort of characterizing detail one intentionally cultivates in order to appear quirkier and more interesting. But I am not a cynic.) Over the seventy-two hours or so that I followed her around Portugal like a puppy dog, she single handedly changed my entire position on religious art, by which I mean my position on it went from entirely indifferent to only partially indifferent. At a street market on our last morning together, just before it started to rain, my new friend spent a long time perusing a merchant’s collection of Virgin Mary figurines, each one crafted in miniature and installed inside what appear in my memory as shoeboxes. She didn’t end up buying one, but the image of a contemporary lady, beautiful as God makes them, perusing a collection of artist depictions of the original Beautiful Lady (I’m being insufferably Western-centric here, I realize, and I sincerely apologize for that) stuck with me, and sticks with me still.
I cannot say my partiality towards religious art has evolved much beyond that, but I have come to see images of women, and especially ones that were fashioned by women artists, as pretty sacred in their own right. I suspect this might come from my own accumulating exposure to the ideology of radical self-love. In short: I believe in it. A thesis statement on my belief in it could perhaps be found in the caption of an Instagram post I once shared that read, “Selfies are feminist.” Second-wave feminist, at least.
But I have a confession to make: I posted that selfie/feminist treatise several years ago, and in the time since then I’ve started to have doubts. Recently I was able to identify that, when I read about or consume media on the transformative, liberating, and ultimately anti-capitalist nature of radical self-love, I exclude myself from its intended audience. I think: This message is not meant for me. And in some ways, it isn’t — I am a skinny white girl from the Midwest, flat-chested and not especially head-turning but certainly well within the accepted boundaries of Toxic Eurocentric Beauty Standards. I ask myself: What rebellion could I possibly be engaging in by loving this face, this body? From which question, of course, a very short line can be drawn (by me at least) to an internal defense of self-rejection and self-abnegation. In the past couple years, I’ve picked up a bad habit of cancelling myself in my own mind, denying myself self-love as penance (I think) for my own shortcomings as a person with racial and economic privilege, not to mention the violence wrought by my ancestors, and by other people who looked, and look, like me.
Everyone deserves to love the body they have, I tell myself. (Of course, I think.) Except you, though. (Except me, though.)
Now we’re caught up to the present moment, in which, without exactly intending to do so, I’ve begun accumulating images of myself as a personal project of iconography. But rather than representing myself in photographs, I am fashioning the likenesses myself, in (thus far) the forms of sketchings and paintings. “This art is beautiful,” I can say, pointing to the project of brush pen-upon-cardboard that inspired this essay (the cardboard, as it happens, was salvaged from the packaging in which my brother’s Christmas-present cookware was shipped to him, pre-formed in too compelling a shape for me to ignore). At first I do not notice the visual similarities between my project and Joan of Arc (or perhaps a stylized representation of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, collar splayed beneath her face like sunbeams); I simply need some way to fill the blank squares that radiate out from the center canvas like spokes of a wheel. But when I do notice the similarities, I’m pleased. I like it far better than any selfie I’ve ever taken, and I think this is because its beauty comes NOT from any inherent characteristic of my face (hair texture, nose width) but from the attention I paid in rendering it. I look back in the mirror and register the face there as also beautiful, NOT because of any inherent characteristic of it (green-brown eyes, pink-white skin) but from the conscience I cultivate while inhabiting it.
I am attempting to deconstruct the standards of self-worth which my flawed and ungraceful awakenings (political, racial, social, etc.) have led me to hold myself to — standards based on immutable things, such as the dollar amount of unearned wealth my family has access to, and the oppressor/oppressed status of my lineage. I am trying to replace these with standards of self-worth based on value systems and ways of moving through the world. I am also trying, concurrently, to release myself of the (mis)conceptions that one must be supremely good in order to be worth one’s salt; that one must earn, over and over again, the privilege of being happy; that one must constantly be paying back tithes to the universe for the right to go on existing. I am realizing that I did not ask to exist in this body, and thus this specific debt is one I do not have to keep making payments on (it might be better to think about paying my privilege forward, not off; I’m not convinced something like white privilege could ever be paid off, anyway). Maybe we don’t have to justify our bodies or the space they take up, so long as we actively use those bodies (sharp elbows, stamping toes) to defend as much room as possible for others. And maybe we, especially if we’re women or femmes, don’t have to justify our right to represent ourselves; certainly, men have never let such philosophical questions stop them from representing us.
I really hope I’m onto something here, because I am spending a significant amount of my 2021 energy reserves creating a new self-portrait every day. Today I made my 50th self-portrait to mark the 50th day of the year, and I decided it was time I started writing about these artworks, too.
(Also, [name redacted], I do actually forgive you, and I hope you forgive me for using our friendship as a device in this essay.)
