Look at me
– By Stine Jensen
This essay was published in the Foam Cahier Showroom Girls, Foam Amsterdam, July 2011).
Look at me! Look at us! The two girls seem to be shouting. They left hundreds of photos of themselves on a showroom computer in a shop. Is this over-the-top digital showing off, or innocent digital mischief? Are they proving their mutual friendship in front of the camera – creating a wedding photo, as it were, of their girlish relationship over and over again – or is each of them continually angling, on her own behalf, for affirmation from other people?
At any rate, the girls are driven by the need to be noticed. And they succeed, because suddenly here they are, hanging in a Willem Popelier exhibition. Although not exactly in the way they might have envisaged, since their faces have been concealed by pink blobs. Anonymized like that, their behaviour suddenly raises all kinds of questions about life in a digital society. We’re interested not in exactly who they are but in why they’re acting this way. Can the anonymous face be filled in with any face we choose? Since the blobs are pink, they also raise questions about gender: is this a girl thing? Are girls more susceptible to digital narcissism than boys?
Girls or not, we’re all digital narcissists to some degree. Own up: how often do you google yourself? Do you have a terrific profile photo? Do you regularly check whether you have any new followers? The digital cry for attention is not wholly outside the experience of most of us. On Facebook we exhibit ourselves as commodities. Customers (‘friends’) are permitted to leer. In social media we are both prostitutes and our own pimps.
We make digital choices daily. Just how should I expose myself? Two extreme tendencies are discernable, I think: exhibitionism and isolation. On one side there’s the tendency to exhibit yourself to the full in all kinds of fun, smilingly challenging poses. But there’s also the tendency to avoid ‘going too far’, to keep guarding your privacy. Some people opt for anonymization, using an indistinct photograph or a picture of landscape. Which does not mean, incidentally, we’ll leave that person in peace. In fact we become all the more inquisitive. Surely anyone who wants to stay out of sight like that must be really exciting.
From this perspective, Popelier’s anonymized girls embody exactly that kind of excitement. They belong to us, and yet not entirely. In their anonymous form they personify in an extreme sense a dilemma we’re all struggling with: how to navigate between anonymous and transparent freedom. These girls have chosen to try to grasp hold of and keep every moment when mortal life slips by unnoticed. Trying to disappear is the greater challenge these days but, as these girls show, we’re by no means free yet of the pejorative meaning of invisibility; we don’t want to die anonymous. They put their fate in our hands. The philosopher Schopenhauer would look at them disapprovingly: ‘Other people’s heads are a wretched place to be the home of a man’s true happiness,’ he wrote.
Schopenhauer? I think the girls would laugh. Schopenhauer is dead, man, and he got his fifteen minutes of fame long ago. Now it’s our turn.