When I was young, I loved to play with my stack of "100 Greatest Men in History" cards. (*Note that being pc was not in fashion when I was young. 'Men' had more impact than 'People' is my conjecture. Nonetheless, women were not absent from the collection) The cards, a little larger than than the Samsung Galaxy phone, had an iconic portrait of the person on the front and a short biography on the back. I had two separate versions, one marked East and the other West.
The game I played with myself was simple. First, I would peer into the portrait and try to infer the profession/field of the person in question. The hints would come from the expression, hairstyle, outfit, often the most critical cues from an item the person was holding. Beethoven was a dead giveaway because he held a music composition notebook. And come one, who else but an impassioned composer would nurse such a tousled look. Religious figures such as Jesus, Buddha, and Mother Theresa were the easiest as they were either shown praying/meditating or had bursts of light emanating from their torsos. The trickier ones were male politicians, scientists, and writers; they all wore the standard suit and tie. Bo-ring.
Next, I would turn over the card and read the biography. When I had gone through the whole two stacks, I would shuffle them vigorously. The game now morphed into a memory task: the exercise of matching the face with the correct name and profession. The Greeks always duped me; Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle all looked the same in marble. I also cultivated favorites: I loved Einstein because he looked funny with his spazzy hair, respected Helen Keller because she was the prettiest, admired Yu Gwan-sun for her spunk, and had a fondness for honest Abe Lincoln because he looked like the type of man who would die doing good for the world. Hitler was a dubious one because I realized that being great did not necessarily equate to being good, Eureka.
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| - 48 portraits, by gerhard richter, macba |
In the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, I came across this installation work by the celebrated Gerhard Richter. The wall hosted a series of portraits of famous men (men, as in the male. No women here). I went through all 48 of them, racking my head and prodding my memory to recall faces I had seen in AP World History cram books, books in general, newspapers, satiric images I had witnessed on the internet, etc. To my absolute mortification, I could only put the name to face for only 5 of them: Albert Einstein, Oscar Wilde, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, and Tchaikovsky (what was his first name?). Most of their visages seemed painfully familiar but not quite. Sorry William James, Thomas Mann, Igor Stravinsky, Max Planck, Graham Greene-I should have remembered what you looked like - and profuse apologies to the other great men on the wall, I'm sure you're all very important. I'm most certain that I've encountered you before but didn't bother to retain the snapshot of your face in my brain. Really, my bad.
My point being (if I dared to have one): we live in an era of faces; it's all about remembering what someone looks like. And about being remembered. I see people on TV, in films and interviews in magazines, on ad campaigns and think, I know that face from somewhere; I may not know his/her name but I definitely recognize the face. Even people with non-camera related professions such as cooks, writers, designers, CEOs, professors, and what not, all sell their faces to a certain extent. To remember faces, or not to remember them, that is the question. If accumulating a directory of faces works on a zero-sum game, my childhood pastime of portrait-guessing has been a futile exercise, for there is no possible way that I would be able to retain the visual info of irrelevant-to-life people in my brain; there are more important faces to store, more catching visages to pay attention to.
Honestly, who gives a damn about dead faces, right?
