Excerpts from The Believer: The Joy of Persona
ON THE MEDIUM OF ARTISTIC PRESENCE
THE ACCEPTANCE OF PERSONA
Every artist expresses persona. For performers, the public face is inside the art. The work of Charlie Chaplin, Billie Holiday, Ana Mendieta, or Jimi Hendrix cannot be separated from the undeniable power of persona.
For artists who send their work into the world, persona may be less apparent. Writers, painters, and composers will have little relationship to an exterior self unless they actively choose to engage it. Such private-minded artists may find the very subject of persona to be taboo, distasteful, and cringeworthy. They might bristle and scoff at the possibility that they, too, have constructed and worn masks for many years.
In such cases, persona becomes a hideous relative, ignored, avoided, or acknowledged only when absolutely necessary, in a huff of obligation. Negligence may lead someone to believe that persona has been extinguished, but it has not.
If an artist releases art into the world, they have already created immortal persona. When we expose ourselves and ask for the world’s attention, we give birth to strange new forms of self, shadowy doppelgängers who will live on even after our death.
Punk, hip-hop, Fluxus, surrealism, goth, transcendentalism, the Beats—many of the most potent artistic movements are defined as much by the artists as by the work itself. Any exhibition of art is also an exhibition of its creator. Denial is futile.
I was once a persona hater—which, at times, could be a form of persona in itself. To me, dealing in public facades was, in the best cases, an irritating distraction. In the worst cases, it was an inauthentic scheme, at direct odds with the mission of artists: to seek and present truth.
To define some terms: persona is constructed, while personality tends to be a more passive phenomenon, shaped by genetics and the vicissitudes of life. Persona is an invented, enhanced, and performed version of personality, which, I came to understand, makes it a natural material for artists, for whom invention, enhancement, and performance are the primary means of working. Why would a creative person not be a creative person?
“Untitled #654.” 2023 by Cindy Sherman. Gelatin, silver print, and chromogenic color print. 40 28 in. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
The term persona was coined by Carl Jung as “a complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society.” Jung says the mask is essential to human interaction, and without it, we suffer. But we can also find trouble if we overly identify with it. For Jung, integration is the only path forward.
In the century since Jung invented the concept, the word has developed a stench of pettiness, as if persona were only for the swindlers and fakes. It is often associated with the kind of superficial traits that rarely support meaningful human exchange: seductive charisma, affected coolness, self-absorbed confidence. These qualities look best from afar, on camera, or through the rose-colored lens of history. Up close, they refuse intimacy.
I am bored by the contemporary persona archetypes: the narcissist, the scenester, the “on brand” celebrity, the campaigning politician—all of whom are trying to transform themselves into perfect icons. Encounters with such forms of persona are often repulsive. Like a wax figure, they stand still, uncanny, dead.
Artistic persona, the subject of this text, encourages the contradictions of our changing selves. Instead of a fixed image, consider persona as a field of infinite expression, as unresolved and irreducible as human perception—“a complicated system,” as Jung says. For this reason, I avoid the traditional grammatical usage of a persona, and consider it as a fluid substance, forming and re-forming to the manipulations of the artist.
Artistic persona does not require self-obsession, only an acceptance of the true nature of artistic exchange, in which evidence of the self is always present, even if hidden or ignored. The line between self-expression and selfishness is razor thin, but persona, when worked thoughtfully, is a tool for profound connection. Bob Marley’s physical energy amplified his music. Gertrude Stein was an extraordinary writer but is still best known for the effects of her magnetic social presence in 1920s Paris. Like a sonata or a painting, the presentation of self can be a window into consciousness and a generous display of vulnerability.
For me, communication is the fundamental pleasure of art. While I enjoy fetishizing a sculpture for its sensual thingness, I ultimately want to feel a relationship to the vitality that produced the object. This is true even in my relationship to the natural world: a mountain stirs up awe not just because of its material presence, but because of the universal forces that lifted it into being.