persona as art

Banksy’s 2010 documentary film Exit Through the Gift Shop revolves around Thierry Guetta, a jobless French man in Los Angeles, who goes from aimlessly video recording street artists - Banksy included - to becoming an unlikely overnight success. Banksy eventually realizes that Guetta doesn’t have a legitimate project for the footage, but recognizes that the recordings immortalize street art and are, therefore, worth salvaging in some way. So Banksy, peppering in the street art recordings, begins to fashion a documentary about Guetta himself. To deflect attention from his secret project, Banksy suggests Guetta create a small art show of his own. Guetta calls himself Mr. Brainwash and begins infusing popular images/icons/artworks with slightly new elements, although his work is noticeably derivative of other artists, especially Andy Warhol. But Guetta takes his artistic presence to an unforeseen level, becoming increasingly consumed with cultivating his personality as Mr. Brainwash. He becomes entrenched in publicizing it, plastering the images of his silhouette and name throughout Los Angeles on billboards and building exteriors. 

 What’s immediately apparent about Guetta is that the more he fixates on his public persona any focus he initially had towards his art falls to the wayside. The most obvious example: hours before his first show, he’s outside the gallery conveying vague ideas about his work and identity as Mr. Brainwash to a seemingly mediocre reporter. Guetta’s dressed in paint-splotched pants and a ragged t-shirt with a hole by his belly button; his broken leg is propped up on a knee walker scooter. He postures like he’s a messy artistic genius, citing his “filmmaking past”, and saying little of substance to match his exaggerated hand movements. Inside, the art is disorderly strewn about on the floor; people stand by awaiting his artistic direction (Exit Through the Gift Shop 01:13:28-01:15:10). Thus, it seems the quality of his work suffers because he’s preoccupied with personal reputation. Nonetheless, his first show is high-profile, “selling nearly a million dollars worth of art” within its opening weekend (01:17:00-01:18:00), despite Guetta’s lack of training. By the end of the film, he candidly reflects on shifting from an observer to participant in the art world, explicitly admitting: “I feel good as an artist to have a reputation now.” He then shrugs off doubts relating to his premature success, concluding that time will tell if he’s “a real artist or not” (Exit 01:20:10-1:20:46). Thierry represents someone who, maybe subconsciously, elevates their persona above their art. 

Gift Shop suggests that the acclaim and wealth Guetta receives from his first show is largely a function of people’s curiosity in his image - the apparent novelty of it - than a reflection of his artistic abilities. Conversely, Banksy seems to be someone who ultimately prioritizes the work above self-image, or at least whose investment in their persona doesn’t come at the expense of artistic substance. (It’s important to note that Banksy’s anonymity is arguably a highly-orchestrated form of persona in itself, since completely abstaining from the spotlight can be as consuming of a pursuit as participating in it. For example, reclusive writers who hide from celebrity culture still have a persona following them around - e.g. J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon.) Regardless, Banksy’s obsession with anonymity doesn’t derail him from focusing on his art to the extent that Guetta’s hunger for publicity does. But Gift Shop left me wondering: to what extent can someone’s persona in itself be their art?

For writers and visual artists, like Guetta and Banksy, it’s easy for us to separate their persona from their art and try to figure out how much one informs the other. Persona is seen as something separate from their work and therefore something that can be analyzed outside of their creative process. But for performing artists, it’s not that their persona is tangled up in their work and affecting it for better or for worse; persona is inseparable from the product. The performer’s art literally comes from projecting themselves into the world. Performers must, then, grapple with the public’s response to their art and identity as one - and decide the extent to which they want to integrate or reject that merging reception into their work. 

If persona is the performer’s art, then so is their self-exploration that comes with it. Contorting persona prompts a seismic personal reckoning that opens the floodgates for artistic freedom. For actors, the idea of a character is a conduit of sorts to freely express and/or hide from oneself. Take the documentary film Jim and Andy: The Great Beyond: it examines Jim Carrey’s meta-process of staying in character as Andy Kaufman throughout the entire production of Milos Forman’s 1999 film Man on the Moon. This immersive form of “disappearing” gave him such relief because he no longer felt obligated “to grasp onto” abstract labels of his own identity pertaining to politics, religion, and country to give him purpose (Jim and Andy 1:17:34-1:20:10). Being away from his normal Carrey behavior for so long and then reassuming that role after production ended made him realize how performative his social identity was to begin with. It allowed him to see that whoever he was as “Jim Carrey” was just a cobbled up “personality charm bracelet, or an ID bracelet that we wear in life” (The Upcoming 00:01:10-00:01:18). The experience illuminated the absurdity upon which Carrey’s own persona rested, the “avatar [and] cadence” he created to please people (1:12:30-1:14:00). Persona prompted the spiritual discovery for him to give the idea of self up, realizing he didn’t need it “to be held together” (01:25:45-01:28:25). In this respect, crafting a persona isn’t self-indulgent and predicated on seeking attention and validation, as might’ve been the case for Guetta, it becomes almost a primal tool to explore uncharted territory within ourselves. And that experience, for the performer, is the art itself. 

Construction of persona is like being your own puppeteer. Under normal circumstances, when we contort our persona it’s usually because we’re trying to please people. And there’s a slightly insidious effect that happens to us on a soul-level when we’re controlling our behavior to elicit validation. When we want approval, we give ourselves such a narrow landscape of possible ways to present ourselves. As a result, our self-display becomes wiped of all the murky, nuanced parts of ourselves for fear of ridicule and/or embarrassment; we become sterile versions of ourselves. We often put up this bland canvas when we’re meeting new people - whether it be in a job interview, first day of classes, and so on. But the lens through which we see ourselves, and through which others can see us, becomes infinitely wider once we stop this pandering. 

What makes the performer’s self-puppeteering artful is that it’s not rooted in pandering; they’re working in a medium where they can - for the most part - play around without consequence. Carrey, as Kaufman, capitalized on persona to behave without fear of judgement. He started out with disruptive eccentricities and then - by the end of filming - completely subdued his behavior to play a sick Kaufman, needing the cast and crew to push him around on a wheelchair and help him out of the transportation vehicles. (01:17:34-01:18:00). Most would be self-conscious teetering on the creative ledge in such a visible way for fear of appearing foolish, but that doesn’t stop us from recognizing someone else’s courage to go for it. Whether or not we’re in agreement with Carrey’s behavior, when someone unapologetically establishes their persona - wild as it may be - as their art, we begin to confront our own rigid conception of self. If we choose to honor someone's persona as their art instead of being critical or fearful of it, we can start to recognize that a malleable self-expression is something we can harness as well.

But how do non-performers maneuver this self-puppeteering when it’s not alongside traditional performative artforms? For Guetta, his persona as Mr. Brainwash inflated his ego, while Carrey’s persona as Kaufman was a mission to dismantle it, a “yearning for [his] own absence.” Persona as a path for spiritual discovery, as was the case for Carrey, seems so distant from persona as a largely profit-driven endeavor, as seen with Theirry. So far removed from what Guetta - and even Banksy in his own way - is after, Carrey’s experimentation with persona shifted his idea of success into “not want[ing] anything… it’s the weirdest thing to say in a place like America, [but] I have no ambition [anymore].” His younger urge to have a successful career drove him to constantly monitor his social identity to gauge how close he was to “making it” (1:17:59-1:20:07). This altering of persona to please people seems to be even more of a risk for non-performers because they’re not explicitly serving a larger creative project in the way that an actor’s persona is a direct act of helping to tell the larger narrative in a film. 

Perhaps, then, in a capitalist culture encouraging us to people-please and make money, persona only remains an artform if we give ourselves permission to turn the rules of capitalist American culture on its head. Amelia Jones, in “The Contemporary Artist as Commodity Fetish”, references Cindy Sherman, known for self-imaging photography, as an example of someone who “embrac[es] the confluence of fetishisms [resulting from] late capitalist cultural production” instead of fixing them (139). Extending from Jones’ idea that “self-display inevitably slides into self-commodification” (146), it seems that Sherman’s ability to begin from a place of self-manipulation - knowing whatever she presents will be fetishized and misconstrued - is a reclamation of her power. This idea of holding power by contorting self-image, and making that an artform in itself, is likely why social media’s become indelibly interwoven in people’s lives. Users get to create their own narrative online, offering everyone - not just performers - the opportunity to consider their persona as art, to make the reconfiguration of their persona a creative pursuit in itself. Under this lens, Thierry’s ability to manufacture and circulate the idea of Mr. Brainwash throughout Los Angeles in the weeks leading up to his first art show could be seen as a testament to his creativity, even if it was absent from his physical artwork.

If we agree upon self-commodification as a creative pursuit, then how do we allow room for that without being complicit in and falling prey to the circulation of false information in our culture? Because the more consumed we are with manipulating our identity, and the more we justify that as a form of creative expression, then the more susceptible we are to systems intending to capitalize on that. The 2020 docudrama The Social Dilemma establishes the danger of social platforms: fake news circulates faster than the truth and our decisions are subliminally influenced by this false information. In the film, Tristan Harris, president of Center for Humane Technology, warns “society is incapable of healing itself” in a landscape of skewed truths (The Social Dilemma 1:14:56-1:20:08). In joining social media, under the guise of reclaiming power by performing our personal narratives online, we also become swindled by other people’s personas and the (mis)information that sprout alongside it. 

So what’s the way out? Jones references a somewhat subversive consideration for dealing with this commodification balancing act: feeding into persona is a way to acknowledge the impossibility of representing a true self (138-139). Under this assumption, the artist (I say artist because we all become artists through our personas) agrees that personality in itself is a warped construction, even for those who earnestly seek to present authenticity. And the artist also suggests that we cannot fully know each other’s intentions. If being misunderstood is the assumption from the get-go, instead of tirelessly trying to get others to understand our true nature, why not play around with that unattainability? If it’s futile to force others to see us in our most authentic form, to insist on authenticity, and we give up that burden, why not swing the pendulum and try out wildly different iterations of personality? An artist can mess around with grandiose, seemingly far-fetched ideas of self once they’ve disavowed external approval to fuel their work/being. In Gift Shop, we can speculate all we want about Guetta’s persona compared to Banksy’s, but once we admit to the unknowability of other people’s intentions, it’s kind of ridiculous to elevate or undermine work based on ideals of authenticity and artistic ability. Persona isn’t a barometer of someone’s dedication to their art; it’s another form of their art whether we agree with their presentation of self or not. In the landscape of daily performance, the onus is no longer on the audience (us) to discern truth from fraud in artists (also us) because persona makes us all simultaneous spectators and performers. If we’re all performers and our art’s our persona, then our entire life becomes a creative exploration experimenting with more expansive ideas of self. That journey of self-discovery is the crux of all artforms and is what makes our experiences fruitful and worthwhile, for ourselves and others. 

Works Cited

Exit Through the Gift Shop. Directed by Banksy, with Banksy & Mr. Brainwash. Paranoid 

Pictures, 2010. YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqVXThss1z4 

Jim and Andy: The Great Beyond. Directed by Chris Smith, with Jim Carrey, Danny DeVito,

Milos Forman. VICE Films, 2017. Netflix. 

Jones, Amelia. “The Contemporary Artist as Commodity Fetish.” ​Art Becomes You!: Parody,

Pastiche and the Politics of Art. Materiality in a Post-Material Paradigm, ​First Edition. 2004 ​Central Books. Published by Article Press, Department of Art, UCE Birmingham. pp. 132-149.

The Social Dilemma. Directed by Jeff Orlowski, with Skyler Gisondo, Kara Hayward, Vincent

Kartheiser. Exposure Labs, Argent Pictures 2020. Netflix. 

The Upcoming. “Jim Carrey: ‘We Don’t Exist, We’re Nothing But Ideas’ at Jim and Andy: The

Great Beyond Press Conference” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 6 Feb 2018. Web. 24 Oct 2020.

Azure Brandi graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she studied Drama and Creative Writing. Brandi’s poem "Style" was published in New Croton Review's Spring 2023 Volume and her poem “You Can Deny” was published in October Hill Magazine’s Winter 2024 Issue. Brandi’s poem “The Currents” will be published in The Underground Volume 30 and her essay “On Beauty” will be published in Afterimages by Thirty West Publishing House.