F A N T A S Y S E T
E V E R Y L A S T O N E
Queen Nefertiti
˙BC1350˙ Egypt
[2016: 06: 01] I was maybe seventeen years~old when I first saw this image or something like it. Of course it was instantly familiar. Some time back, the idea occurred to me that the face of every girl I've ever fallen for is in some way a rendition of this old ghost.
My art history professor at ˙SVA˙ (Robert Mahoney) lectured at length on the thing in what must have been September or October of ˙2007˙. But, not a thought remains to me of what he had to say. I was transfixed [1].
When I showed the photo from the Story of Art to my brother around Christmastime, he told me, "It looks like Ma'." Maybe he's right.
Alex Katz said that Queen Nefertiti was what he was going for.
Is that the right idea?
Notice the tilt of the head, and the more extreme tilt of the mouth. If the head runs let's say ˙23°, the mouth is slightly more extreme at something like ˙45°.
Ada with Bathing Cap
Alex Katz ˙AD1965˙ America
My mom has a mouth that falls to one side, too, and so do I. That means, whenever we're half smiling, we're also half frowning.
Nefertiti's Eye is important. Who knows why the artist didn't finish it [2]. It makes her face fall to one side.
(Top) Detail of Queen Nefertiti's crooked face ˙BC1350˙ Egypt
(Bottom) Detail of my crooked mouth ˙AD2016˙ Mexico City
Conclusion
Beauty Mark with Cindy Crawford's Mouth
America ˙AD1990˙s
Notes
[1] And hungover.
[2] I prefer the theory that the artist was a genius.
[2] I prefer the theory that the artist was a genius.
The W H I T E S P O T
Surely there are a lot of things that convert Nefertiti's visage into a vacuum of desire ~ a long neck and sloping soldiers; the lifeless posture of her mouth and brow at once objectify her in the extreme and grant her confidence enough to rule the world; blue and gold and bronze cut by dark black slashes. But, the Eye does not ~ apparently ~ contribute to either her role as object of representation, icon of power, or assemblage of color. That white spot only throws off the symmetry of an otherwise absolute harmony between right and left parts.
Her pull on me is what I want to call "beauty" [1], but how did she get to be beautiful?
I've seen images made by I~don't~know~whom wherein the Eye was painted in.
The presence of Nefertiti's new wholeness marked the absence of her dumb seduction. And so she went from almost~symmetrical~but~not~quite to perfectly symmetrical. Likewise, she went from beautiful to not.
The presence of Nefertiti's new wholeness marked the absence of her dumb seduction. And so she went from almost~symmetrical~but~not~quite to perfectly symmetrical. Likewise, she went from beautiful to not.
"Then beauty is imperfectly symmetrical or has imperfect symmetry ~ "
~ Like when your favorite clothing item gets it's first tear, and you think, "Finally, it's perfect." But let me tell you another story: I once had a beautiful green ceramic, not quite the color of mint, with such fine proportions ~ it fit in my hand as my hand on my wrist, and to my lips as my lips to those of one of those girls I was talking about earlier. Everyday, I would fill it with coffee. Then one day came (that inevitable day) when I dropped it. I dropped it on the shit floor of my shit apartment in a shit city in a shit life. Instead of exploding into a million pieces, though, it just suffered one chip, so well made was it. At first, I was completely stoked! One of my favorite things narrowly evaded death. But, with each passing day I lost all my feeling. It was broken even though it still worked, and I stopped using it inside of the week. The symmetry was ruined.
So, the Queen's Eye ~ responsible for that just imperfect symmetry ~ is no more the cause for the Queen's beauty than it was for the ceramic's hatefulness.
Notes
[1] When I say the word "beauty", I imagine myself describing that thing that draws me into it. But, do we not also find in certain things beautiful that we are not attracted to?
Well, let's say "war": I hear a war story, and the experience terminates with the thought that I have just encountered something "beautiful". Does anyone really want to be in a war, though? There's a difference between being a spectator of soldiers dying and being a dying soldier, or watching your friends die ~ a spectator~participant distinction.
"Granted, but that only beats back a criteria of beauty as attractiveness. Because I call the war~story "beautiful" (which I would not like to participate in) and the girl on the street that looks like Nefertiti "beautiful" (which I would like to participate in), it must be that the purely attractive is no more a criteria than is just imperfect symmetry. Moreover, a spectator~participant distinction is also invalid: the spectator of a war and a participant in a sexual act with Nefertiti are both having the same experience of beauty, even though one is a spectator and other participant. That is, even though the participant of a war might be in horror, when you heard the war story it was made to be beautiful. What is the constant between them?"
[I] "The bust of Nefertiti and the ceramic are different. The former is a representation of a person, the latter not a representation of something, but actually is that thing. We're likely to have different criteria for each object. What is the constant between them, though?"
They're not as different as they at first appear. If we remember from the Story of Art, Strange Beginnings, our knowledge that an object is facsimile does not imply that we earnestly treat it as such. Gombrich said:
"Once more we should return to ourselves and the experiments we can all perform. Let us take a piece of paper and scrawl on it any doodle of a face. Just a circle for the head, a stroke for the nose, another for the mouth. The look at the eyeless doodle. Does it look unbearably sad? The poor creature cannot see. We feel we must 'give it eyes' ~ and what a relief it is when we make the two dots and at last it can look at us!"
If the reader is dissatisfied with the results,
They can try it for themselves.
They can try it for themselves.
You might notice that I used a felt pen for
Gombrich's Experiment. Pencils also work,
But ballpoints are in my opinion less helpful.
Gombrich's Experiment. Pencils also work,
But ballpoints are in my opinion less helpful.
So, I know that the image of Nefertiti is not strictly real, but if I meet her gaze long enough ~ think about her in the way I did when we had first met ~ I'm liable to forget. Similarly with the handsome stranger on the street ~ in passing, she's just an image. I have no context for the content of her soul, history or roots, but only what I can see. "Who else can know a man's thoughts except a man's own spirit that is within him?"* Saint Paul wrote, First Corinthians, almost two millennia ago. In this way, I perceive strangers much like works of representational art. It's not that I think that real people are art, but can confuse myself into believing that Nefertiti is real. But really, they're both fake, because I only have empirical information to go on.
Conversely, the ceramic is very human although it does not look it. We call it "inanimate", but I surely don't think of it that way when I'm holding it in my hand. No ~ my hand is fixed in position and the ceramic replaces it; it's but an extension of my body. To illustrate: had I no vessel to hold a liquid, I'd need only to cup my hands at the banks of the river. Because my hand's sole purpose when drinking something is to use the ceramic, I might even forget that my hand is there. If anything, the ceramic is more like a person than the statue, because it exists to enlarge what my body can do. Meanwhile, I perceive Nefertiti as a stranger in the street.
I relate to Nefertiti in that she is human as other ~ a stranger of whom I have no experience. But, I relate to the ceramic in that it is human as an extension of self. If Nefertiti and the Green Ceramic are different, then it's not because Nefertiti is like a human and the Green Ceramic is inanimate ~ they're both deeply human ~ it's because Nefertiti is other and the Green Ceramic is part myself.
Before even reading Strange Beginnings, maybe the first week of class, fall semester freshman year, Mahoney gave us some homework: we were to each get image of our mothers and, upon acquiring it, poke their eyes out with a needle. Mahoney in his brilliance had had us going for a minute or two before he made known that he would never ask us to do such a thing; he knew way too much about black magic to condemn us like that. "But, what would have happened if you had done it?"
"Nothing," I or the next smartest person in the class said, starting to feel the hangover come on.
"Precisely. Because it's just a picture ~ isn't it?"
* The full verse in Latin reads: "Q V I S E N I M H O M I N V M S C I T Q V Æ S V N T H O M I N I S N I S I S P I R I T V S H O M I N I S Q V I I N I P S O E S T I T A E T Q V Æ D E I S V N T N E M O C O G N O V I T N I S I S P I R I T V S D E I"
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