1991. September had precisely ten years left to go without shadows.
I and my fellow Septemberites filed downstairs for the first time to the basement where our department held its classes. We formed a cloud outside the seminar door. When the professor came and unlocked it, it was exactly like she created a vacuum; the open door sucked the cloud inside and atomized it.
We dispersed around the table. Blinking. Nervous. New.
And we learned to mistrust autobiography.
That was the first lesson in our first seminar as art history graduate students. We were to pick an artist's autobiography (I chose Odilon Redon's "To Myself") and cast a long, cold eye on it. Our assignment was to go out and learn so much about our artist that we could come back and poke holes in their own story.
Find the self-flattery, people. Dig through the pretty portrait until you hit the manipulation rotting at its core. Oh, it's there, the professor assured us. You naive little creatures...it's there. Where you least expect it!
Autobiography was a borderline evil in that room.
I was a bit put off by the insistence that EVERYONE who wrote one of these damn things MUST be using it for self-serving ends. (A certain condescending allowance was made that, occasionally, the self-inflation might be unconscious.)
I thought this belief said more about the professor than the books. She was obsessed that people were going to try to make themselves look good. Well, maybe so. But does gelling your hair and putting on makeup and a pretty dress make you a liar? You're still you. An autobiography can stand some gel and pancake before it crosses over into genuinely self-serving territory. It's not naive to give someone the benefit of the doubt. It's actually sensible.
Besides, we're talking about a bunch of painters here. What are the stakes? Even if some of them do tell their story in a calculating or self-serving way, who does it hurt?
It's not like they're...you know...running for public office or anything.
Like a politician.
Which is why--his merits as a candidate wholly aside--it was a huge and nasty shock to me to visit Salon yesterday and see this article (sit through an ad) by Gary Kamiya swooning over Barack Obama's "Dreams from My Father."
"Obama's prose alone was almost enough to make me vote for him," says Kamiya. "But what tipped the scales was the portrait that emerged--of a man who has been tested and found true, who has proved he's ready to assume the most important job in the world. For the question he answered was the hardest one of all: Who am I?"
Mr. Kamiya, there's a minor detail here. The man who emerges so glowingly in that portrait...is the man who created it.
And in this case, that matters. In this case, gel and pancake are a big deal.
Because Obama's not looking back. He's looking forward. Any autobiography by someone at his stage of life isn't a summary. It's a pitch.
Most of the artists we studied in that long-ago seminar had written their autobiographies at the end of their careers. As a capstone. Obama published "Dreams From My Father" at age 32, at the beginning of his career. He might technically have been writing about his past, but such a book can only really be about his future. It's a stage-setter.
An old artist has nothing (worldly) to gain. A young politician? Everything.
What bothers me about the lengthy quotes Kamiya gives us from Obama's story is that Obama appears to have mastered the Disney trick: he writes from his weaknesses. Self-scolding--"You've lost your way, brother"--sets the stage for epiphanies of humility: "What was she asking of me, then? Determination, mostly."
This may well be genuine. I can't help but notice, though, that it's precisely what we want from our heroes: struggle, painful lessons, self-betterment.
Here's the thing. This book may be genuine AND cynical at the same damn time. The plain truth AND a manipulation.
It is not a basis for deciding whether to vote for someone.
With respect, I feel it's a staggering failure in judgment on Kamiya's part to have made his final decision in this manner.
Barack Obama is a remarkable man. And his self-portrait may well be ratified by history. He may really be "a man who has been tested and found true;" he may really be "ready to assume the most important job in the world" (although the idea that self-knowledge is his key credential seems a bit shaky to me).
But we need to find that out in other ways besides reading his own version of his life. Here, Mr. Kamiya, is how it's done; here's Richard Kim casting a long, cold eye (then voting anyway).
We should go into this with our eyes open. It ain't love.
