*Alternative Title: I’ve Become Bored of my Face, and I Must Scream
“It’s the sound of failure: so much of modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and falling apart…when the medium fails conspicuously, and especially if it fails in new ways, the listener believes something is happening beyond its limits” — Brian Eno, 1995
An unexpected outcome of this whole lockdown period is that I’ve become increasingly bored of seeing my own face. I’ve grown too accustomed to watching my own face speak and move on Zoom chats (which at first felt very unnatural and unnerving), and I’ve spent a lot of time in my basement flat which has a total of 4 mirrors. But the other reason — and this is my primary concern — is that I’m a drag artist, who works in the medium of makeup and selfies, and I’ve spent far too long looking at my face in mirrors, editing pictures, and seeing my face thrown back at me every time I reply to a comment. At first I thought maybe I was just bored of social media in general — which I am — but it’s gradually dawned on me that I’ve spent too much time in the last few months looking at the specific fold in my right eyelid that makes it droop slightly more than the left, the exact position of my eyebrows in relation to the bridge of my nose, and the shape of my cupids bow.
Let me head off any assumptions at the pass and say that what I’m experiencing is not some sort of body dysmorphia. It’s not that I dislike looking at my face. In fact I see myself as rather attractive, though certainly not so ridiculously attractive that I feel a pressure to maintain some sort of consistency in the way I look. No, what I’m experiencing is mere overexposure, and I suppose a sort of disconnection. I’ve spent so much time looking at my face that I now no longer find it interesting or unique, and I’m less and less entitled to see it as a canvas that I can work on. This presents an obvious problem, given that as a creative my face is my canvas. I am at least somewhat blessed, in this regard, that I’ve never pursued drag professionally in any serious capacity, though I have done a couple of digital drag shows. As this feeling of malaise begins to grow and grow, I find myself less and less inclined to do drag at all. This was exacerbated in part by being in the two drag shows (and I am of course extremely thankful for the opportunity), one of which was prerecorded and required me to sit and edit footage of my face for a few (ever less) excruciating hours. At first I was sort of horrified — ‘I never knew my face did that?!’ — but I increasingly became bored with it. I’ve always known I have an overtly expressive face, based off people’s impressions of me. I even toyed with the idea at one point of studying mime. But when your face is your primary canvas, it presents an issue when you’re bored of seeing it. Drag is an inherently transformative artform, so you’d think putting on a new face would alleviate some of my malaise. But alas, no. The message is the medium, and therefore the makeup is the message. As a queer artist, drag has served as an invaluable endeavour to express my ever shifting feelings of identity and uncertainty by using my face as a basis — my face is the marble block, the makeup brush the hammer and the foundation the chisel. But even that’s started to wear thin, and I want to brach out before I become totally bored by the thing I have to see everyday.
I also still grapple with the level of discomfort that arises from using my face as my primary artistic framing device. Any artist should learn that there is a difference between intent and impact, and once your work has been sent out into the world the ways in which other people perceive it may well be vastly different from your own interpretations. I have spoken about this disconnect in my article Sexy, Sexy Drag Queen: Drag as Liberation, Drag as Fetish, Drag as Shame, where I grappled with the discomfort I feel when I am perceived as sexy when I’m in drag — a feeling that arises, in part, from the complex ways my drag explores and emanates from my own sense of self and identity, which has rarely crossed borders with the sexual. I rounded out that article by declaring that I had moved beyond the sexual shame that drove my earlier drag endeavours, and that I was no longer worried about people sexualising my work. I was being truthful, in the sense that the shame has gone, but I do continue to be perplexed by the fact that my work is read as sexual. I’m aware, or at least assume, that it is only read as such because people are seeing what’s underneath the makeup, rather than the makeup itself. What a blatant misunderstanding of what I’m trying to accomplish. In addition to this, I objectively don’t see how a lot of my work is meant to be titillating — is it because I have a full face of makeup and a hairy chest? First of all, I go shirtless in my work because I find it wasteful to buy clothes for a single photo uploaded to Instagram. Secondly, I’m amazed that chest hair alone has that much influence over people. At first, I did enjoy the conflict between ‘hyper-feminine’ face and what I rather embarrassingly perceived as ‘hyper-masculine’ body. My attitudes towards gender have progressed along with my attitudes to drag, and I no longer perceive my own body as particularly masculine, because I no longer believe such a thing really exists for me. Therefore, the hairy chest/drag face dynamic also fails to excite me anymore. In fact, issues pertaining to my physical form bore me to death at the moment. And drag is all about the corporeal.
The tone of these ramblings may seem incredibly shallow, but what has arisen from these discoveries is actually something rather exciting. I’m beginning to toy with the idea of exploring other creative mediums, ones that still centre a queer voice and experience but have less need for my body to be the focus. I have enjoyed writing more often (only you can tell me if I’m right to be so confident), and working on the digital drag shows at least gave me some experience in video and audio editing, that didn’t quite terrify my technologically illiterate self as much as I was expecting. I have also been incredibly inspired recently by the work of Brian Eno, whose book A Year With Swollen Appendices I am currently reading. I have been a fan of Eno for many, many years, discovering his work with Roxy Music, as well as his early 70’s solo art-rock albums, when I was about 15. I was also a huge fan of the music he produced, particularly his work with David Bowie, Ultravox and Talking Heads. Early 70’s Eno — all shower curtain hair, bright blue eyeshadow and ostrich feather accoutrements — was an obvious visual inspiration for my teenage self, who was obsessed with glam rock and New Romantics, hugely visual artists with signature aesthetics. It helped that his early albums, particularly his solo debut Here Come the Warm Jets, were suitably weird and whacky. I was also fascinated by his creative process, particularly his Oblique Strategies cards — cards with little directions on them, such as ‘get the band to swap instruments’, that would uncover new strategies for working and deliver unexpected results.
Something I absolutely could not understand at that time was his ambient output. Much like how I couldn’t quite grasp why he spent so much time producing music, when he created such magic all by himself. The photos of Eno post-glam rock, all dour in jumpers and bald headed, and the inherently low-key nature of his ambient and production credits, seemed alien to me. But recently, over the past year or so, I’ve started to come round to what I imagine to be his way of thinking. I have gathered from reading the book that Eno is a frighteningly intellectual man, who gets results by working in a way that is far removed from the intellectual. He is a man of ideas and suggestions, and he has found new mediums to flesh them out. He quotes Bono in the book as saying ‘A lot of English bands went to art school. We went to Brian’…what a compliment! Reading his musings and getting an insight into his artistic practice has galvanised me to think of what I do as a ‘practice’ of my own — some may say haughty ambitions for an Instagram drag artist, who I assure you is not anywhere near an intellectual, much less an Eno. But if the message of the work has changed — discussions of my gender and body image do not excite me in the way they did even 6 months ago — then it stands to reason that the medium must change as well. Taking some inspiration from Eno has given me a blueprint in which to do that — throw things off balance, accept failure, work with unfamiliar tools. And take your bloody face out of it.
So that’s where I stand at the moment. In an almost complete contradiction to what I’ve written here, I’m not suggesting I’m going to move away from drag entirely. I still have some ideas floating around that I think are worthy of being fleshed out, and I often find that ideas lead to new ideas once completed. This suggests I’m not totally bored with the medium, which does in fairness allow space for a level of irreverence and silliness that is severely lacking in other art forms. But I am excited to start creating work in new ways. Perhaps I will expand on the drag idea, but turn it on its head — I am interested in the idea of making masks, something which completely obscures the face. Or perhaps I’ll move into new mediums entirely. On zero budget, in limited space, in the middle of a pandemic. Seems insurmountable, but I think Eno would suggest that that’s no reason not to try.
If you’d like to see where my endeavours take me, you can find me on Instagram as Mandy Sweats.
