sitting pretty at the bottom of the ocean

the need to be seen, reflections in concrete, and eye dissections

1. curator

Something about being young and being seen makes you feel incredibly fragile. And something about not being seen makes you feel as though you don’t exist. If you’re not concentrating enough, you can confuse the fragility for feeling alive, and then you’ll start to crave it. Suddenly a gaze transfixed on me is oxygen. That paragon of patrilineality. I wonder how long I’d need to be shut away to stop caring about the ghost eyes that watch me even when I’m alone.

In the art gallery, I learn how to be something to look at- the key is to never make eye contact with the painter. It’s about deft hands and soft joints, sideways glances and lips pursed in thought. I try to look at my reflection in a painting, but it’s a dull sheen of oil paint with no glass and I can’t gain purchase. The windows are covered with mesh to stop the sun from fading the art. I settle for my rippling shadow under the glare of the overheads.

The only time I forget I can be looked at is when I’m doing the looking myself, that eyesdarting handstwitching jawclenching thing. At a woman who has something I want, something I can feed off. I know how easy it is to forget that she could look back at me as I circle her like carrion, eyes dripping down her back. She has the thing that eyes search for in me and so often don’t find. She’s something else. I’m fine, if you don’t look too close. I am what cow parsley is to baby’s breath. I’m methadone, I’m a reassuring smile when what you really need is a hand in your own. I Will Do.

Without warning I’m trapped in amber. I’m seen. A man stands next to me in front of oil on canvas, 1833. I recognise him from the tube here; I was annoyed at him for sitting in my eyeline, because it meant I couldn’t check my lipstick in the window opposite. He lets out a deep breath that I’m not sure would have been so loud if I wasn’t there to hear it. Trees, forests, it’s all a matter of roots that can’t relinquish.

‘Beautiful, isn’t she?’

I’m unsure whether “she” is the painting itself, as one would refer to a boat, or its main subject- lamb to the slaughter, fated executionee.

‘Really evokes something,’ he continues.

I should hope so, she’s about to have her head lopped off.

I want to tell him that kneeling means something different when you paint a woman on her knees than when you describe a man on his, but I know he’d misunderstand me. There’s a fascinating secularity in this city if you can ignore the high-rises, and I’m trying to talk about sanctity. I’m trying to talk about worship and desperation. Instead, I think the thought to myself, and allow him a small nod and tight lipped smile, before moving on, his Kantian grace still shimmering around me.

I can breathe again around an abstract canvas, expanse of blue shards and red blotches, purpling together like a bruise. I like to walk really close to the art and tip my head back, so it feels like it’s about to topple over onto me. Faithless in the face of all that colour.

Back of a Woman- Besnard, 1889

Later, on the bus to the party, I realise I’m almost twitching because I can’t catch my own reflection. No window, no mirror, no metal. I can feel the sensation of looking good seeping out of my body like losing a high I’m trying and failing to grab with my hands, water between my fingertips. Like a wave of nausea passing or pain seeping out of the body.

It’s a temporary discomfort, being found unattractive. Or simply not being noticed. But being noticed is a temporary comfort in itself- both can deepen the need to be wanted if you have them in high enough quantities. I look up to see eyes on me and I’m comforted. I regrasp the feeling again. I’m not sure it’s quite enough to quiet the yawning jaws, though. There’s being seen and then there’s exaltation. I want to be lionised, I want to be worshipped in the street.

2. bodycrazy

We’ve always been drawn in by the woman-visual. The archetypal woman in most art is sat, slumped, hunched. She’s weaving or reading, pulling up stockings, standing by a window and staring into the middle distance. Do we look at her with genuine appreciation for the beauty in mundanity? Is she painted out of pure love for the brush stroke? Or is it just the natural order of things that women are fated to become still lives? The imbalance in subject and creator is canyonous. It’s not just that things are instantly more appealing if a woman is doing them, holding them, in close proximity to them- as true now as it ever was. It’s items themselves that are shaped in the image of Woman.

We’re magpies- something’s more sellable when it has a woman’s image on it, and not only to men. It’s not just the pornification of ads, films, and clothes. It's what we’re pulled to, our eyes and our money. Whether it’s in the name of self-love, body positivity, or art, we’ve added to the commodification of women’s bodies for men, with the commodification of women’s bodies for women. We just can’t help but look.

This isn’t to say that finding the feminine body beautiful can’t be a wonderful thing. The feminine form, in all of its infinite ways of being, is beautiful, inherently. You’re not an agent of the patriarchy for being more appealed to by paintings of women with royal fabric cascading down their torsos and a faraway look on their faces than a landscape or a bowl of fruit. You’re not a bad person for owning a line drawing print that traces a woman’s legs to her hips to her breasts without any kind of face. There’s no evil in one of those headless candles built like anime characters, that would probably thank you if you actually took the time to light the wick and watch the curves melt into their own divinity.

It’s just sales 101. But as an aggregate picture, it’s a little bleak. We can’t pretend that a huge part of us wanting to see women’s bodies isn’t because we’ve been told that’s where the art itself lies.

The sensation of knowing that you’re one of those bodies is jarring. It leaves us unable to escape our own imageness; we’re too entangled with the visual to keep existing. Or, at least, I am.

When I sit with rollers teasing my hair, when I run my hands over my body in the shower, when I set my vertebrae to stack on top of on another instead of hunching at my desk, I embody this off-guard nonchalance. I’m the most desirable form of woman- one who isn’t looking back at you. I’m nearly real. I’m entirely constructed. I set my face, poised to be scrutinised even when I seem occupied or lost in thought. It’s the result of years of exposure to the pinnacle of dissociative gazes, women who look like they both know and could never understand just how look-at-able they are. If you can perfect that dead stare from beneath heavy eyelids, you’re golden. Can’t let my arms press against my sides, can’t let my face look disgruntled with concentration. I’m exactly the sum of my parts, no more, and definitely no less. Limbs, curves, veins- inescapable.

3. butchered

The sensation crystallises on the walk home, where I no longer feel like a static watercolour of a woman in a gilded frame. I’m a verse enjambed. My lips feel full and the blue lights are reflecting off the side of the building and the rain starts but only over the trees and not over me and I can taste the pollution. Under my coat I’m a dress, and under the dress I’m goosebumps, and under the goosebumps I’m afraid, but I tell myself that it’s anticipation and that the two are made of the same stuff, really. I make myself as lifeless as possible so that the stares can’t get to me. Now dark windows that might show me to myself are my enemy. If I can’t see myself, they can’t see me either.

Man shouts from his car. Man breathes something unrepeatable into my ear as he walks past. Man nudges his friends and smiles with fifteen rows of teeth so they can circle me together. Man pulls up to the pavement and tells me to get in. I want to claw at him, leave him like me. Half eaten away.

I’m aware of the exact dimension I occupy for them, and that’s where I’ve been able to feel any level of control. But it’s not really control, is it? It’s not really power. I don’t know what to do with that. Maybe you can do something with it. A man taking a smoke break outside his shift at the pub looks me up and down as I walk in his direction, then spits on the floor as I get closer. I don’t think the two are connected.

Écorché of a Woman’s Back- D’Agoty, 1746

Cut offs of photo film reels litter the street outside the studio a few doors down. Across the road, the only light still on at pavement level is the butcher’s. Men in white boiler suits stained and freshly smeared with blood drag meat structures from the rear of a truck. I know what it’s like to be in rooms where being looked at feels like being skinned alive. They take a limb each, the strongest of them taking two. The spoils look heavy. I feel molten at my edges at the sight.

Those dead things will be devotedly sawn and sliced, lain down on their sides in pieces with their eyes to the street. They’ll choke on the cold mist that’s pumped out into the cases, waiting to be yanked from their glass tomb, to join me in sitting inside the depths of someone else’s stomach. My teeth taste like someone else’s. I want to be scary enough that eye contact would be unthinkable, I want to be a biblically accurate daughter with snarling animal heads growing from her shoulders and three-thousand eyes splitting open her wings. Instead I am prey, and I trudge home with deer-like eyes, headlights or not.

4. anatomy of an eye

There’s a belief that some people were born to be subjects of art. The quiet part, the part we don’t say out loud is that they weren’t meant to be anything more. This is an unfortunate axiom.

If you were to pluck out one of your own eyes and create for yourself a cross section of the thing, slicing top to bottom, you would understand this. The two halves would split away from one another like meat from the bone, and you would be left with a perfect microcosm of what it is to have been created to see. The pupil, a hole bored through the iris’s slick muscle, gathering and slackening itself at your command. Your cornea, glazing over the empty space so you aren’t too concerned by your own hollowness. Your lens, your retina, your nerves burning themselves into existence. You would see the purpose in the seeing of it all, the delicacy in its edges and grooves.

Consider, moreover, the light that is supposed to be burned through the eye. Come from above to illuminate everything around you, leaving you able to revel in it, despise it, ache to see more of it. And you care how the light falls on you?

How are you? Un-look-at-able. It’s not insecurity- that sinking pit of the stomach feeling, skin crawling with gaze, jaw electrified. There isn’t a mirror in the room but I can gauge my slip pot outline in the glass of a framed graduation photo. It’s ugliness, permeating my skin. I suddenly fear I’ve become sonorous and will ring out to the touch.

Every day I feel like I’m new to this. I can’t take in the lessons about being uncaring, because the only way I can be that way is for the sake of my appearance. The beauty of an expansive moment, of being off guard, synaptic, isn’t enough. I’m just fine at seeming unbotherable when it’s an image I’m reaching to project in motion. I can’t pretend to be someone who doesn’t care, no matter how hard I try. I’m too busy suffocating in the feeling of insufficiency.

I hate reminders that I’m mortal, uncomposed. It’s a thing of beauty in others, odious in me. I swear I looked good this morning when I set out, but no one saw. It doesn’t count. I feel like I want to start again. Each day I push chalk onto the blank slate and realise it’s already scratched, etched into the surface. I collect scars, scrapes, clay pounding decisions. I can’t help but think of myself as misshapen. To do otherwise would be presumptuous, I suppose.

Mannequin woman and three mannequin children in living room- National Nuclear Security Administration, 1953

What do I think about if not how I look? If I’m so commodifiable- to know it never makes it easier- I need to speak the language of my own currency. Cosmetic additions and adornments are painted as offhand, freeing, but when I do them they reek of desperation. I see the delicate hands with which the woman around me and the ones trapped in my screen make finishing touches. Spreading niacinamide and retinol, unending, across the seriousness of skin. All for a sweep of lipstick, smearing mascara into eyeliner, messy hair. I can achieve it all, but only if everything’s in its predetermined place. Fix my fringe before every interaction. It feels mortifying to be aware of your own appearance.

I don’t know how to step out of the frame, but I know what makes me uncomfortable and lean in. I try to do things without them being seeable. I let sweat stick hair to my brow instead of punishing it, let myself walk with heavy steps and a curved spine instead of pushing my shoulders back. Pick at the scab on my arm until it tears further and blood buds at the surface. I’ll let it dry in its own stack, landmarking its own existence. Typing out words before they slip away, a plum I’ve just bitten into hanging out of my mouth, its acid smoothing down my teeth. Red juice drips down my chin and onto the notebook in my hand, turning purple when it lands on the page. I beg for this too not to be encased in lacquer.

4. digital membrane

What thing ever worth having or knowing confined itself to the wall of its physical self? It’s about the heat that buzzes in orbit of the thing, the weight of it in your hand, the story told around its edges.

It’s no longer subversive to play into the imagification of the self, no longer an act of resistance to let yourself drown in the visual with the top of your head submerged in the marsh. We have a collective obsession with being seen as something antithetical to the image that’s forced upon us, or with playing into it so deeply that we own the label, rather than being subjected to it. This can be useful to allow you to get you by, but it’s not always the living that it’s painted as.

To resist our own crystallisation and avoid being calcified in pixels or minds’ eyes, we have to feel, to be sensate, to listen and be heard. We have to be moved, hurt, joyful, and to try with everything we have not to put energy into the visual of it. You can be conscious of what it looks like- if you punish yourself for caring about your looks, you’ll spend a lifetime swimming in shame- but you have to choose where your intention is. Devote too much time to the external and a sell is all you’ll be.

The visual can be fun, stimulating, connective, experimental and exploratory. It can also be intoxicating. If left unchecked, we risk not only being cursed into the life of an image but damning ourselves. We’re doing their work for them. To live in the visual is not to live. We have to be bigger than the portraits that are painted of us. And we have to be more than our images.