Through my initial research on Michael Jackson and his face, I came across an article in the Guardian written by Scottish novelist Gilbert Adair. Adair describes Jackson’s face as “Klimt drawn by a plastic surgeon,” and though it seems strange to appreciate someone’s face as a piece of piece – particularly one that many consider to be disfigured by plastic surgery, I can only find myself agreeing with Adair. Adair’s phrase “it was a face within quotation marks, a face that was both itself and the prodigiously stylized representation of itself” hints to a greater level of introspective meaning regarding the mind-body problem, residual self-image and the psychology of self.
Adair continues, “Jackson’s face fascinates me. A made-to-measure face, it was its own caricature”. In my view, Jackson’s face isn’t just a physical caricature, but represents a caricature of how we all relate to identity. Neuroscience and philosopher Sam Harris explains how we feel the “self” is synonymous with our mind but we feel we are inhabiting the body we have, and though we may feel protective of it or even identify with it, it doesn’t feel like “us”. Adair seems to echo this idea and sees it as amplified with Jackson’s appearance, “Its power, moreover, as an object of contemplation was intensified by its apparent disconnection from its owner’s body”.
“Was it, though, what anyone would call a beautiful face? I’d like to propose a paradoxical axiom: beauty has no need of beauty. When Picasso, to take the obvious example, painted a beautiful woman, he rendered her unbecoming, even downright ugly, so that the painting itself would be beautiful”.
Here Adair touches on the idea of Jackson as an uber-celebrity, as an object as far divorced from how we view other people and faces in our lives. Jackson has had huge input in the way he looks, he directed the structure of his face and this must in some sense make him an artist, and his face an artwork. This creates a larger disconnect between his body and mind but because of that, it gives the viewer greater insight into the mind of Jackson. “He didn’t need a canvas – his own face was the canvas. That he became his own self-portrait (literally) isn’t in itself exceptional; it is, after all, the entire point and purpose of plastic surgery. The difference in his case was that the result bore absolutely no resemblance to one of those fawning society portraits that are themselves the artistic equivalents of plastic surgery. If his face could be compared to anything in art, it would be to the warped and wonderful stylisations of Klimt, Schiele, Van Dongen, Beckmann, even Grosz”.
Adair considers Jackson’s skin colour in a way I was surprised I hadn’t really noticed beforehand. Though it’s pedantic to point out, nobody’s skin is either literally black or white. White people are tones or pink, and black people tones of brown. Yet Jackson was literally white as if he interpreted his design through technical words and Pantone colours rather than any connection to naturalness or colloquialism.
This extremism in Jackson’s choices and outlook was hyper-everything; he was hyper-white with hyper black hair, hyper-red lips, a hyper-small nose, and a hyper-square jaw. It seems seems as though nothing less would satisfy hum than to be incontrovertibly and diametrically opposite to what he was, what he perceived himself to be, and how he thought others saw him. It’s this extremism, and pardon the pun, black-and-white outlook that I feel makes Jackson a perfect basis for addressing wider issues of identity and self that are present in all of us, if not necessarily, like Jackson, always immediately visible.
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