contrapposto: a flash-card vocab term, the only real thing i remember from my freshman classical civilizations seminar in college. when a lean, perfect marble statue is contrapposto, it means there’s a measured fluidity, a tilt to the hips, that makes the cold, chiseled rock feel alive and human. in that class the professor prompted us to stand in pairs and demonstrate that oxymoron of posed ease, mimicking michelangelo's david shining on the smart board. we all felt a little funny, or at least i hoped this was a collective feeling — wrists askew, shifting our weight back and forth on unsure feet, nervous giggles bubbling up in our throats.
it takes a lot of effort to make something this relaxed out of solid marble. that’s the wonder of it: the illusion of something relaxed.
i often think of myself as an extension of this contrapposto exercise. i want to be fluid, and in many ways i am, but peer closer and i am also straining. i am holding myself just so. i am worrying about how my fingers are curled around a wine glass and also uncaring if it sloshes. don’t look at me, but please notice the sparkly eye makeup i applied just for you.
i think about this john early tweet a lot:
at my most prickly and self-conscious, i’m glaring at myself through the eyes of the other. i’m overanalyzing my every move. i do it in benign ways, too: i know i’m not the only one who loves to rewatch my own instagram stories over and over like my own game of adult peekaboo.
but when i stare too hard at myself, both literally and metaphorically, i lose my greatest weapon as an artist and as a person-- the art of noticing.
when you choose to become an artist, there are a million other little invisible titles that come with it. storyteller. self-marketer. boundary-maker. time-management captain. noticer is my favorite of these titles. i catalog a million details a day with delight: the pigtails of the little girls being pulled along in a wagon amongst the houston rodeo crowd. the way my name is written in sharpie on a to-go box with a looping L. a cat nested in a hammock in an apartment window.
details are an artist’s bread and butter. if i lose myself in the contrapposto of it all, i lose that. my creative well runs dry. there’s a line in writers and lovers (my personal fiction bible) where a man deep in his own douchey contrapposto admits he’s only written eleven and a half pages of the novel he’s been boasting about. “i cant go out with a guy who’s written eleven and a half pages in three years,” says our narrator in response. “that kind of thing is contagious.”
the truth is i may never be one thousand percent free from the contagious cooties of contrapposto and that is okay. maybe to be human is to apply the teal metallic eyeshadow in hopes that you might catch a compliment or two.
if i may be so real with you right now, i’m self-conscious that everything i’ve written lately seems to end with some kind of lesson, some kind of danny-tanner-sitting-on-the-edge-of-the-bed-in-full-house neat, nice bow.
but i’ll push through that.
for now, an affirmation for the time being, echoed across centuries from michelangelo to us: may i never be so deep in my own stupid-ass performative-ass contrapposto that i forget to look. may i embrace the embarrassment of putting out art that is slouchy and vulnerable and earnest and overromanticizing everything. may i let myself be seen as My Self, uncool and overly caring, not always holding all the answers. may i chip away, no matter how tedious it is, at the thing that pumps my blood and tethers me to the world around me.
I beg of you, keep gazing that navel if it reads like this!!!
I’m in love with this. ❤️