Mona Lisa Images for a Modern World - 8

Mona Lisa as Personal Symbol
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As a personal symbol, the Mona Lisa bestows benefits from a variety of manifestations. She can appear as a protector, as a symbol of elite identity, and as an ideal to which man should aspire. At the same time these qualities can be made the subject of ridicule and Mona can be used, ironically, even facetiously, to represent opposite values.

The image of the Mona Lisa commonly can be found on articles of clothing, on tee-shirts, sweat shirts, embroidered into socks, and on human dress accessories such as neckties and umbrellas. On the Mona Lisa Socks shown here, while Mona has been put to the service of adorning the human body, her appearance is not entirely frivolous; hiding from the public eye, she serves a surreptitious symbolic function. The multiple appearances of her figure are matched emblems, the weaving alternately reversing Leonardo's image to create in effect two symmetrical pairs of front-facing Monas, two images per sock -- Mona-monsters, erstwhile gryphons safe-guarding the twin fortresses of the feet. They are especially appropriate in this age of Nike and "Air Jordans" when commercial clothing emblemata habitually proclaim the wearer's claim to power and notoriety and establish imagined, yet symbolic proximity to greatness and celebrity. Ironically, while the socks invest their wearer with the inherited cachet of the Mona Lisa, at the same time they shrink the image to pedestrian proportions and unaesthetic resolutions. The bright red nailpolish and the matching lipstick painted shapelessly on shapeless faces turn these Mona Lisas into worn streetwalkers, testimony, perhaps, to the hollow promises and illusions of greatness that is the core meaning behind using these symbols.

If images on clothing can be used to identify the wearer with symbols of success and class, they can also be used to ridicule those very qualities. A T-Shirt found in Howard Besser's T-Shirt Database (being his private collection) varies a well known image by Gary Larson. The T-Shirt, entitled "Moona Lisa" in this case serves a counter-cultural objective. See: http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/T-Shirts/.

It may be safe to say that there are few (if any) articles of contemporary clothing or adornment that do not serve some symbolic function. Yet, among these, there are several that by tradition seem to have received more attention and have been given more significance than others. These items, in particular because of their symbolic potential, understandably, have been the subject of great commercial interest. Today, the basketball shoe and the wristwatch may most ubiquitously mark their wearers with the conventionalized significances of personal identity -- for the shoe, by association with a highly regarded sports figure, and the watch, by identification with sexual and other clearly demarcated roles and personality components. The name-branded wristwatches, the Rolexes, Cartiers among others, serve as badges that identify their wearers as members of amorphous, yet self-defined, select and elite groups. Such adornments are typically intended to distinguish their wearers as wealthy or wishing to give the impression that they are. While the watch is a badge, it is also a shield and escutcheon -- a coat of arms --; for, it protects its wearer (in his own mind) from being identified as one of the indistinguishable masses -- a talisman for modern times. In this way some wristwatches are only nominally functional, and serve their purpose primarily as a platform on which to mount jewelry. Like jewelry, the propriety linked to its being worn, is closely allied to the type of occasion at which it is used.

Sometimes the expression of function, itself, serves to create signs or codes of identity. Such codes of identity are susceptible to great variation, of course. In this post Dick Tracy world, the watch may take its shape and style from a conventional list of functional types and can manifest, for instance, as a calculator watch; a memo watch; a timer, stop and alarm watch; a g-force watch; a diver's watch; and all the combinations and permutations thereof. Sometimes these wristwatch functions are used by their wearers; but when they are not, they offer their wearers comfortable illusions that their chosen specialty timepieces are requirements of, or attributes of their lifestyles. How many diver watches are sold to people who don't, never did and never will need to know how much oxygen is left in their scuba tank? Some timepieces claim to be known for their advanced or avant-garde design, as, for instance, the manufacturer of Movado ("The Museum Watch") wishes everyone to know. The cachet of having been acquisitioned into a museum's design collection offers an aura of select elitism to its wearers.

The timepiece serves as the door into a fictitious world of fancy and would-be identity, the persistent metaphor of the secret life of self-definition that responds to the forced anonymity imposed on man and woman by the molecularization of the human spirit in modern society. Through the selection of timepiece the wearer stands out and individualizes himself among the lost and diminishing moments of civilization in its rush to the future.

Ever since the nineteenth century, when Walter Pater projected his romanticized image of the Mona Lisa into the literature, envisioning her as a repository of the ages, as the sum of all human experience, and as a vampire of everlasting life, in the modern mind Leonardo's image has been enveloped in a patina of timelessness and permanence. [Note: Turner.] But, in the popular mind the Mona Lisa, by virtue of her enigmatic smile, stands both for the fleeting passing moment and the permanent benevolence of the state of motherhood -- in other words, the Mona Lisa is a figure that is rooted in time while yet permanently outside of time. When we find the Mona Lisa on a clock face (fig. 28a.), the machine that compartmentalizes our days and nights, that forces us through the inexorable flux of daily obligations, we must consider the juxtaposition meaningful. Perhaps Mona is being used to signal our antipathy to the uncompromising rule of the big and the little hands; perhaps her presence is intended as a sign of a secret or subliminal revolt against the time that pirates our lives and the obligations that absorb our freedom -- as a way of unwinding the clock that cuffs our wrists. That certainly appears to be the meaning of the Salvador Dali send-up shown in figure 28d. In this parody of Dali's famous 1931 painting entitled The Persistence of Memory, Mona, herself somewhat elongated, presides over a surreal landscape of limp forms imaged in Dali's signature style. We are shown a clock face enveloping Mona's shoulder and a portrait of Dali melting over the table on the left. In Dali's world it is the artist who is the ultimate master of reality. In the world built around the Mona Lisa, it is the ever-present image of Leonardo's woman, metaphorically ourselves, to whom reality must bend. This is a modern message: our humanity defeats time; but it is also a self-deceptive message.

[Note: On the attribution of the Dali send-up see: here.

During the Renaissance, when mechanical clocks were first being introduced, the symbols with which they were decorated frequently alluded to time's quick passage, to our short stay on earth, and reminded us of our frailty and the unavoidable ending to which we are all subscribed. Such Renaissance mementi mori might show us Father Time as Saturn with his terrible scythe, or, perhaps, deaths heads among other symbols of decay, in order to indicate that man's life is temporary and that he is unable to escape the ultimate triumph of time. But, today, we are of a different mind and are using our clocks to proclaim -- even if by self delusion -- that human triumphs over time are possible -- that in this relativistic age, we are the masters of time, for time, itself, no longer immutable, now bends and has become, in this Einsteinian age, just a function of speed. In a curious convolution, then, Mona Lisa, mother, everlasting matriarch, her face a clockface, cancels time's swift decay -- cancels speed, cancels the clock.

Petrarch (in I Trionfi), long ago, told us that Fame triumphs over Death. How ironic that one of the mantras of the moment teaches us that the allotted time of personal celebrity for the common man is fifteen minutes -- that in that fifteen minutes each person may enjoy, by way of democratic necessity -- an entitlement it seems -- his or her destined glory; and for fifteen minutes he is a member of the elite, set up for the world to watch. At other times his badge must suffice -- the wristwatch escutcheon -- which, on his arm proclaims his membership in his clan of personal selection. Mona on a watch stands for the death of time; it deconstructs the age-old function of watches and redefines the watch into a message that looks out as much as it is looked upon. Once a symbol of transience, the wristwatch has become a symbol of transcendence, orchestrating an apotheosis into an everlasting state of triumph -- ignoring Petrarch's next admonition: Fame is undone by Time.

[Note: Turner, Inventing Leonardo. p. 125.]

To be an elite in contemporary society, to distinguish oneself from the masses, ironically, it is not always necessary to own expensive works; there is an elitism to be found in the popular and the cheap -- a reverse snobbery, a rejection of the fine and precious. In this class may be placed the inexpensively manufactured Swatch watches, and (related to these) the watch shown above (fig. 28a.) bearing the image of the Mona Lisa produced by LAKS-Watch (http://www.laks.com/english/332big.html). Here, a reproduction of the image of the Mona Lisa serves to identify the wearer as someone who knows that a timepiece must perform a higher purpose than raw function -- that it must lead the wearer and observer to a realization that possession of the object bestows style, elegance and class, not to mention the comfort of belonging to a class of individuals who prize individuality over the gaudy ostentation of gold and diamonds. Cleverly, in this case the designer has turned the entire watch -- face and band -- into a composition based on Mona Lisa motifs. While the face of the watch naturally reproduces the familiar visage of Leonardo's sitter, the wristband expands the conceit by providing fields onto which the composition can continue, here, with Mona Lisa's hands (below) and part of the famous landscape (above). The watch, which is de facto a bracelet, turns ornament into a continuous pictorial field, breaking with the tradition of using abstract design and repeating motifs for this kind of object.

We have been concentrating on the use of the Mona Lisa as a personal symbol, but the issues to which these objects address themselves, while personal, are for our age in our place and time, universal. It should not be unexpected, therefore, to see the private Mona Lisa symbology migrating to more public domains. Through the mass production of articles expressing private meaning, this migration can be held to be simply the natural consequence of replication. In some ways the rise of the multiple must be linked to the use of private symbols in public contexts. At least that is how I interpret the use of Mona's visage on a wall-clock as depicted in a recent edition of Smithsonian magazine. Of course, because the original Mona is a public Mona, no stretch of the imagination is necessary to amalgamate the private timepiece with the idea of placing Mona on a wall. But we remember that the Mona Lisa herself, the echte Mona, began its life as a private object, carried by the artist in his migration from Italy to France, and this "singular" Mona made its own journey from Leonardo's precious, private property to the "private" collection of Francis I, where it was on display for the private enjoyment of the aristocracy at Fontainebleau, and only assumed its place as a public monument in the Louvre during modern times.

The clock, however, delivers a significantly different message than the wrist-watches. In the watches, for whatever the use of Mona's face implies, no statement is made about individual moments of time -- one hour or one second on these is much the same as the next. The wall-clock is different. Here part of Mona's face has been cut out and made into a clock-hand, presumably the hour-hand, while the minute-hand is made from a matching, but narrower rectangle that is entirely black. Only twice in the twenty-four-hour cycle we call the day is Mona's face made complete and full -- at 12:00 A.M. and P.M. At all other times the hour-hand displaces Mona's eye, leaving in its proper place an empty blank -- a shadow in reverse, while the minute hand obscures the face -- eclipsing the entire face in its hourly circumnavigation. Who knows whether the designer thought of anything else except of using the famous face (as asserted in the Smithsonian article from which this image has been taken) as anything but a "marketing" device. But when viewed in the context of the gestalt of Mona Lisa interpretations, perhaps we are justified in thinking that the designer is commenting upon the fluidity of Mona's presence, on the transient display of fleeting emotion, where time -- like the picture -- manifests its moment of fullness in an evanescent instant. At other times the face is seen only as the interplay of white and shadow -- the chiaroscuro built on the extremes of pure white and pure black that envelop human emotion and leaves in its wake only a mystery of dislocation.

[Note: Joseph A. Harriss. "Seeking Mona Lisa," Smithsonian, Vol. 30, No. 2 (May 1999), p. 54 ff.]

In a Mona Lisa lady's pin by metalworker and jeweler J. Fred Woell (fig 28b), the artist has turned functionality on its head. Borrowing its form from a wristwatch, in this work the artist has reproduced the familiar form without the expected machinery. In doing so he forces the wearer or observer to reconcile the inherited, traditional need to make functional personal objects serve symbolic purpose with the sudden realization that this work offers a symbolism and content of comment for its own sake. To rephrase: while we have come to expect functional objects like watches to carry a symbolism of social significance, and while we expect jewelry, by way of its preciousness and fine design to do the same, we do not expect jewelry on one hand to be inexpensive and crude, and on the other we do not expect it to provide fields for iconographical excursions. Indeed, the artist has gone to extra lengths to make this Mona Lisa iconographically active. Unlike other jewelry bearing the Mona image, Mr. Woell's pin manipulates its subject by drawing dashed sight-lines that emanate from Mona's eyes and converge outside of the copper roundel that circumscribes the image. (Compare to wall-clock's use of eyes.) In this way the jewelry directs the observer away from itself, breaking the unwritten jeweler's law that insists that the designs of rings, pins and other pieces of decorative body ornament only refer to themselves and never lead the onlooker away. In this way the artist is also breaking the boundary that distinguishes the crafts from the major fine-arts. I suspect that Mr. Woell uses Mona here to allude, self-consciously, to the tradition of using Mona's image symbolically. Mona's face is used ironically -- a faux face on a faux watch as a faux pin.

If the iconography of this pin investigates the circumlocutions of the meaning of "faux," we may look at its design -- where the eyes project sightlines that converge near the periphery of the encompassing orbit of the faux bezel, as a minute dissertation on the theory of sight in its relationship to reality. For here, this diagram shows us that sight recreates the perceived world with convincing similitude as a binocular projection of the individual. The lines of binocular vision simultaneously serve as the sweeping minute hand of this watch maquette. That is to say that it is through Mona by which time is perceived and apprehended.

On some articles of personal adornment, the image of Mona serves as the means by which the wearer receives the benefits bestowed by the power of her persona. Mona's symbolic presence, as presented in the repeating panels of an ordinary umbrella (to infer from the accompanying photo), has the power to excite its bearers to flights of fancy. Here, carried away by a simple request to pose with their gift to this author, Minnie Singh and Matthew Reichek enact a scene from an unscripted spontaneous drama loosely based on the story of Mary Poppins. Here the umbrella, presumably under the energy of its own spirit, is about to carry away its passenger. Its coercive force comes from an unknown mysterious source, and is just barely counterbalanced by Mr. Reichek's firm earthbound grasp. This is all play-acting, of course, but we are permitted -- even invited -- to watch the actors enjoying their game, but it could hardly have occurred at all, or at this precise moment, except by virtue of the protection, influence and inspiration of the Mona Lisa image, an image whose power to allow its beneficiaries to transcend staid normalcy, here, seems self-evident.

This drama asks to be understood with moral, ritual and mytho-poetic dimensions. The protagonist, drawn by the umbrella toward apotheoses, yet anchored to the earthly by the fawnlike fun-loving male, is automatically enacting a version of Hercules at the Crossroads, indeed, a feminist version of the famous story. Under the shadow of the dome of a pantocratic Mona -- the erstwhile deity of art, of accomplishment and of the universal woman -- the female protagonist is being forced to choose between the forces of inspired elevation and undeniable pleasure. The other mythic drama that this playact implies is best understood by comparing the photo to Bouguereau's Nymphs and Satyr (Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA) in which, incidentally, the sex roles are reversed.

This playlet exists at the borders of high and low art. As an attribute on a mere umbrella, Mona at first appears to serve as an ordinary symbol of something considered fine that has been put to common use -- to be "humanized" -- turned into something ordinary and pedestrian. But, as employed by the actors, Mona is transformed into a metaphor that stands for a fundamentally human conflict and dilemma.

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