Albrecht Dürer and history's first selfie

“I, Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg portrayed myself in appropriate colours aged twenty-eight years”. In painting himself like Christ the Saviour, Dürer is saying that he has created this painting on behalf of God. The direct gaze, the fur coat. This is a bold personal statement about his own God-given creative ability. An iconic self-portrait that needs no introduction, this arresting picture was painted by Dürer when he was only 28. Maybe he did paint himself like Jesus, but so what. Dürer was a supremely confident artist who knew his worth and created a monogram of his initials using it to sign his work. In doing so, he established a crucial and definitive separation between craftsmen and artists. The divino artista was born - not just a maker, a creator.

Self-depiction may be a mass phenomenon and a daily occurrence today, but in the 1500s it was a revolutionary act. And while a selfie on our smartphone takes mere seconds to produce and costs no money at all, Dürer invested time and money (pigments were expensive) to create his own image and make a statement about his importance as both an artist and a human being. So, what is it that we do when we decide to pose in front of our phone? Is it to capture a moment in time, create a memory, or rather to affirm our existence and hope that a mindless, repetitive gesture will somehow allow us to emerge for our uniqueness?

It's my mum's birthday today, she would have turned 87. She loved this painting (and hated selfies), and kept a postcard of it on the desk in her study, where she would sit for hours penning letters in her illegible (for most) handwriting and reading the news. If I close my eyes, I can still see her cutting out articles from the papers with this really long and shiny pair of scissors. She'd then put the cuttings aside for me so I could read them on my next visit. They were mostly of exhibition reviews. "Go and send me photos, then write about it" she'd say.

#Dürer #AlbrechtDürer #selfportrait #selfie #selfdepiction #renaissance #painting #artblog #beyondthecanvasblog

Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528)

Self-Portrait with Fur-Trimmed Robe, 1500

Alte Pinakothek, Munich

The issue of (female) ageing

You know when you're having a conversation with a friend and the following day you read something that exactly echoes your thoughts articulating them better than you ever could? This morning I randomly found this interview on Libération, in which French writer and journalist Laure Adler states: Je suis vieille et je vous emmerde, meaning I am old and you can go to hell/I don't give a sh*t what you think (translations are seldom straightforward). Adler goes on to say exactly what I was trying to tell my friend yesterday. Why is there such a taboo around this inevitable and universal phenomenon? And, as I sometimes like to half-jokingly remind my moaning friends, would you prefer the alternative?

The truth is that there is a cruel dichotomy between the overall 'improvement' of maturing as a human being and the unstoppable/natural decadence of our body. As we get older and we become more in tune with who we are (that is a hell of a long and difficult journey), the mirror of society returns an image of decline and sadness. It's a vision of the future that brings us all back to the insecurities of our youth without any of its benefits. It is true that aging means losing things: memory, sight, bearings, loved ones, health, but what would happen if we focused on everything we gain instead? Per Adler, "to grow old is not to give up, it is to be wild, angry, passionate. And above all resist the attempt to relegate and make the rest of society invisible." I want to hug her for saying this, and tell her that I, too, am getting old and don't give a flying f*ck about what everyone else thinks. Ideally, I would also really mean it.

Enough of the cliched ramblings, I will let one of Cindy Sherman's most troubling self-portraits do the talking. Here the artist uses her uncompromising female gaze to morph into a woman who wants to be seen as glamorous and powerful. She wants to be seen as young and attractive, hanging on to her former beauty and clearly refusing to 'age gracefully' (do they ever say that to men?) by slapping on tons of makeup that does nothing to fix the issue and everything to make it look worse. The issue of ageing, the issue of living.

#laureadler #cindysherman #photography #age #ageism #women #blog #artblog #blogger #beyondthecanvasblog

Cindy Sherman

Untitled #474, 2008

© Cindy Sherman / MoMA, NYC

Remembering David Wojnarowicz, artist and activist (1954–1992)

"One of the strongest feelings I have about death is that it's a time when the energy we carry is dispersed and becomes a part of everything." - David Wojnarowicz

It's been 30 years since David Wojnarowicz died of AIDS-related illness at the age of 37. I remember seeing his survey exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2018 and being struck by the poignancy and brutal honesty of his work, a genuine punch in the gut.

Wojnarowicz was, for all intents and purposes, an outsider. Born into an abusive family, he dropped out of college at 16 and ended up living in the streets of New York, where he had to hustle in seedy Time Square to get by. He worked in the East Village until his death, producing a vast body of work that reveals extraordinary talent and heterogenous creative sensibility. Wojnarowicz painted, took photographs, made collages and street art, but he also wrote poetry and, importantly, became very vocal during the AIDS crisis, openly addressing it in his work. As he was losing friends, colleagues and lovers to the 'gay disease', his anger towards the chilling denial and inadequate response of the Reagan administration kept growing.

As someone who lived his life on the margins of society, Wojnarowicz merged art and activism, weaponising his work to articulate his experience of living with AIDS as a gay man and to denounce the indifference of the establishment. The legacy of his work is powerful, necessary and more relevant than ever.

#davidwojnarowicz #artactivism #aidsawareness #contemporaryart #artblog #artblogger #beyondthecanvasblog

David Wojnarowicz

Self-Portrait, 1983–84