MANUFACTURING SHARON: INTERVIEW WITH SUPERSTAR NANCIE NAIVE
– By Nancie Naive (Emilė Skolevičiūtė)
(First published on 1 June 2020, artnews.lt)
Nancie Naive presents this interview as her latest work on everyday life, looking at it through the aesthetic filter of Sharon Tate, creating an easy life for herself and Tate, which she imagines in a sentimental photo shoot.
Nancie's work is enriched with various images of famous women. Is Nancie an artist or an actress? What is Nancie's creative strategy and how does Sharon Tate play a role in it?
Nancie Naive: I create images of famous women, images of famous women create me. My works, through this femme fatale mimicry, come together in a kind of cycle. "Friendship" by Marilyn Monroe, "Ilona" by Ilona Staller-Cicciolina, "Love Me Tender" by The Little Mermaid, "Light of My Life" by Nabokov's "Lolita", Nancie Naive's "Ambitious" by myself and "I Am Nancie" by Nancie Naive. It is not so much a collection of appropriations as a collection of visual novels, a list of acting roles. My work is a self-creation, a transference of the self through the perception of the other. I could never understand the advice "be yourself" because I never knew who I was. I perceive the self, like being, as an image, and I use that as a vehicle through which I return to something that reminds me of myself - in this case, I use the image of Sharon Tate, who carries her own contexts, stories and beauty. I speak of Sharon through myself, I create Sharon as myself, but not myself as Sharon. It becomes unclear and even irrelevant which is which, because it is a play of images, a surface loaded with all the contexts dictated by images.
A lifestyle in the face of Armageddon
The world is in crisis, but life does not stop. How do the issues of recent times resonate in Nancie's work and how does Sharon's image work in this situation?
Nancie Naive: It is difficult for human beings to comprehend life because life is infinite. The human being is entangled in a ball of thoughts, which he transmits outwards by his actions - the external situation of life is considered as a way of life, and the way of life is identified with life itself, even though they are inverses of each other. It seems to me very interesting how life is perceived as a mixture of habits, a structure of tendencies and manners. There seems to be a parallel and opposite perception that life is complete chaos and that the human resistance and desire to hang on to such abstractions is absurd, but one is influenced by an inexorable desire to understand something, to grasp something, and so we strike that perception in action and try to create this and that, to create what looks like "something beautiful". The figures of today's forum live in a lifestyle picture, under the guise of actions and places, make-up and spectacular stories that have become our new folklore. Such global emergencies reveal personal boredom; pandemics and quarantines prevent us from falsifying world history with our own Instagram stories. The staged life is an old trick that we are all trying to re-apply, because life without form hasn't existed for some time - if it's not documented, it doesn't exist - like a work of art, like a fairy tale, so you could say that by continuously documenting our actions, we are beginning to live in a fairy tale world.
Instagram and Facebook feeds bombard us with all sorts of tales, stories and information that is not really necessary or important, but what matters is the personal moment of realisation, when the information we publish acts as a proof, a document that we exist. Documentality and data are the most precious currency - we trade our lives and our tales, our time and our meaninglessness. Like the stock market, we watch small numbers on our screens, numbers that signify another's success or failure. In the siege of a pandemic, someone's death affects us like a personal victory over an unmanageable situation, because the media acts as a compass of personal security. We are not so much intimidated by the pandemic as we are moved by it, because all post-apocalyptic scenarios come true in a slightly easier form than we imagined. We perform the duty of the observer with the absolute satisfaction of being an observer - as in cinema, as in art. In this way, we contribute to the indifferent dance of death - so slow, boring, unnecessary. We are isolated from our own death and from ourselves as a social function, we look for ways to survive, to become the other, a different tool of society, and we try to change our own stories because it has become harder to lie about being. It is much easier to turn domestic actions into being, or rather into a counterfeit of being. In the imagination, we begin to live our lives as free and independent, even though it is obvious that we are inseparable neither from each other nor from the actualities around us. In the treacherous everyday life, the cosiness of home becomes a prison. We become chained in a counterfeit of life, in which I imitate my life as Sharon's everyday life. Sharon Tate's life is imprisoned in the terrifying shadows of memory, which I try to illuminate with her own ideas. She takes over my body and walks around my house, bending time, and death. The question is: how to understand death or life at the end of the world, when the concepts of good and evil are fighting in our subconscious and in our consciousness? How can we remain faithful to beauty when everything is so confusing and chaotic? We can only fall into faith, experiencing it all through an aesthetic frame - a keyhole, rose-tinted glass, fog or a fairy tale.
The look of Sharon Tate
The tale told by Nancie Naive is controversial. It is about Sharon Tate, an actress, model and fashion icon from the 1970s, whose name today sounds like a restored echo of Tarantino's in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Sharon Tate is famous for her death under the shadow of the Manson murders, for her marriage to the director Polanski and, lastly, for her ravishing beauty.
Nancie's fairy tale - Sharon Tate's tragedy. How did such a story and such a personality fit into Nancie's persona?
Nancie Naive: I use Sharon Tate as an image through which I talk about life and look at life. She is an idea of beauty, a filter through which everything becomes clear - both the horror and the beauty of life. It is a work about beauty and life, the aesthetics of life and the tragedy of the world.
Sharon Tate glows with immense tenderness and beauty, sexuality and intelligence - she shines brightly and easily. Sharon is an icon of the 1960s, painfully embodying an era drowning in the bloody search for freedom. She was a free American woman, living beautifully and walking barefooted, her ideals were love, freedom and peace. Sharon Tate was and is the light that spills through the film easily onto the screen of desire.
Who is Sharon and who is Nancie Naive?
Nancie Naive: Sometimes other, smarter, people say the words you are looking for, so I will quote:
"It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible..."
- Oscar Wilde.
Sharon is beautiful. Her beauty is the very concept of beauty. I was fascinated by her appearance and what it reflected - a life that was wonderfully unbearable. In my perception, just like life, beauty is very sad, perhaps because sadness is so unbearably pleasurable, it is as shimmeringly precise as the surface of water.
Sharon is full of angelic sincerity and courage, and bathed between utter naivety and acute awareness. In the midst of these qualities, Sharon becomes very self-critical. Her acute self-consciousness and attentiveness, her exaggerated awareness of her actions, her person or her appearance lead to anxiety disorders. Sharon Tate confirms this to Look magazine when talking about how people look at her: "All they see is a sexy thing. People are very critical of me. It makes me tense. Even when I lay down, I'm tense. I've got an enormous imagination. I imagine all kinds of things. Like that I'm all washed up, I'm finished. I think sometimes that people don't want me around. I don't like being alone, though. When I'm alone, my imagination gets all creepy."
Sharon's anxiety is interesting because we feel it. We imagine knowing what she was afraid of - as if we know the ending when we watch a film, but we enjoy watching it and move on. This saves us from the terrible burden of freedom, which is an existential horror. Of course, there is much to worry about, but the fear of anxiety has a negative impact on our daily lives, sending our consciousness into a downward moral spiral. Anxiety wanders in our eyes and in the streets, it enters our homes: when we watch evening news, we know that we are not going to be treated to comforting information, but to tales of crime, tragedy and the aftermath of pandemics. We are active observers, committing crimes of the gaze for our own satisfaction. We take incomprehensible measures to avoid anxiety, and by gawping we transgress all moral laws, lose empathy and become sadists of sight.
Talking about Sharon is difficult because of the same anxiety-laden gaze created by the belief that the subject is ethically sensitive. It threatens the perception that the aesthetics of life are untenable by the ethical choices we make and raises the fear of intellectual impotence. I am trying to subvert this ethical question by resolving it with a primal aesthetic charge - to speak of Sharon Tate as a beautiful creature, a Barbie, based on Sharon's character in Don't Make The Waves.
Sue Cameron, a former gossip columnist, recalls Sharon Tate in the Hollywood Reporter: „It was the middle of summer and Sharon wore a full length mink coat. I’ll never forget that. She was into the celebrity stuff. She was beautiful. It was real. When you looked into her face she had these luminous eyes that looked right at you.“
Her sexuality is not only outward, but also in the harmony between a woman who is at the same time very fragile and belligerently strong. In her images, the portrait plot expands as a fighter for freedom and love, a warrior princess. Her tenderness makes her the strongest figure in the frame. Her personality itself is described as extremely sensitive and kind-hearted, and although her interviews are few in number, Sharon's lightness and kindness gently undulates with sophisticated insights and childlike innocence.
To manufacture Sharon
How does Sharon work in this article or the photographs? Is her image a decorative element or an indicator of being? In what way does Nancie Naive exploit Sharon Tate and how does she try to achieve this?
Nancie Naive: „Oh, that’s silly! I’m not an anything… I’m just me. If I am sexy, it’s just something I do naturally, like picking up a knife and fork to eat. I think people who try to be sexy are the most unsexy people in the world.“ This is Sharon Tate's answer to being dubbed Hollywood's New Sex Goddess. Modern Screen magazine, May 1968.
I am not imitating Sharon, I am imitating her image as a way of seeing life.
It is not possible to pose for Sharon's image because Sharon has never done so. So it turns out that by recreating only her image, not even herself, I have to find myself, I become myself through Sharon, by putting on her mask. The hardest and most interesting part of making photographs is to become "yourself". I say 'becoming' because for me, being myself is such a strange, unfamiliar feeling that I only experience when I read, and perhaps because of the same thing, I can now understand why some people think I am 'fake' - because I am - I am an imitation of myself, and this is very much related to the anxiety and the social excitement that construct our expressions - both domestic and aesthetic. Anxiety was also present in Sharon: she lacked confidence to no end, but the naturalness that she creates has the exact opposite effect. In my work, I try to create the same anxious sincerity, but in a more artificial, simulated version of it. These qualities make Sharon's work a challenge, which starts to act as an orchestrated therapy, an unmasking ritual. I start to sacrifice my reflections and images, I start to lose them.
The Sixties
As far as rituals are concerned, the images created by Nancie Naive begin to function as ritual masks. Ritual beliefs, paganism and various sects emerged in the 1960s in America, along with the booming advertising business and the counter movement brought about by the Vietnam War. How does image intertwine with advertising and neo-pagan rituals? How do politics, faith and fashion intertwine? Are these questions relevant to Nancie?
Nancie Naive: For me, it's all about the personal. And politics, in my perception, is very personal. I don't know it as a science, but I try to reflect on my lack of understanding and to approach it with caution, and sometimes to laugh at it. My image politics is visual politics, relationship politics and the politics of feelings, because these are my fields of interest. This is probably where the belief in beauty begins to intertwine as my personal aesthetic church, where fashion functions as a social and political phenomenon. I think it is the main connecting link, but it should be stressed that I look at fashion in a detached way, as a phenomenon, because I don't know how to dictate fashion and I don't follow it - I'm more interested in observing the waves and cycles and cyclones of fashion, and in talking about it with a little bit of a backward look. I am a weather girl, predicting the weather of the previous week.
The 1960s are remembered as a time of great fashion and style, as the classic and class of today, as the perfect picture of propaganda. Politically, though, it was a very unstable and volatile time, both in the world and in America. As far as America was concerned, it was shaken by the counter movement - an opposition movement consisting of hippie culture, student protests and the fight for civil rights. It was a time of young people, born out of the generation gap. Their parents had worked to keep from starving after the Great Depression, and their children saw it as an empty pursuit of material goods. Young people were embarking on a new quest for spirituality - Eastern religions, neo-pagan beliefs and sects of all kinds. All in all, the 1960s changed America and much of the world. Sharon Tate is the personification of that time - young, fresh, striving for freedom and a more beautiful future with more love and less fear. Her tragic death symbolically ended this time of aspiration, taking away young dreams and hopes for the future and bringing with it more uncertainty and anxiety. Sharon's story has become a political tool to talk about the turmoil of that time by manipulating people's feelings. A story that acts as a script in a political play.
Maybe that's why I'm so interested in Sharon Tate - as an example of a politicised life. To be honest, I feel very sad about that, because looking at the images of her in films and photographs fascinates me far more than the desire to be horrified or to be political and to speculate imaginatively on the end of her life.
She is the standard of human beauty, but to deprive her of that beauty by overwhelming her with a plethora of unbearable contexts is a sad duty of human history. She has become an instrument to speak of the horror and terror in the world, and only because her gentle, innocent style forces us to perceive it through contrast. It is the sacrifice of a lamb. God sacrifices his daughter and we sacrifice her to God. It is a pointless struggle with notions of consciousness - we must have heroes and heroes must sacrifice. This is our common religious ideology - this is how moral safeguards are created in society as another way of controlling the system and the masses.
How does Nancie view religion and how does Sharon figure in this topic?
Nancie Naive: "She's today's kind of girl, bursting with youth, vitality and hope for the future." This is how Sharon Tate is described in a short promotional film about her and her first film, Eye of the Devil (1967). It is a film based on the occult and the Wicca faith (one of the most popular neo-pagan beliefs of the time). For the film, director J. Lee Thompson consulted Alex and Maxine Sanders, the high priests of Alexandrian Wicca. In her autobiography Fire Child, Maxine Sanders claimed that Tate was fascinated by the neo-pagan rituals of Wicca and became an adherent of the faith. Although Tate does not appear to have promoted Wicca, her image was imbued with occult imagery, simply because it was the first film that shaped her portrait.
Sharon's face embodied the whole spirit of the 1960s, and the sudden end of her life symbolically reflected one sunset and a new sunrise. She is the difference between the old Hollywood and the new Hollywood, and Hollywood, as pop culture, is also the religion of our times, the new myth that unfolds between the images of paganism and Christianity, in which fame acts as salvation. We all need an idol, a reflection or an icon through which we can believe in both religion and ourselves. Mirrors, photographs, celebrities, and finally art or films serve this purpose. My choice is to treat art and fashion as a religion, as an aesthetic faith.
Life as aesthetic form
How does the belief in beauty work in Sharon Nancie's contexts, in her understanding of the world and life today?
Nancie Naive: In Sharon's deadly symbolism, her interrupted life and dreams are intimately linked to a decade-long spontaneous movement, and its end is a record of human history that destroys hope, revealing how the desire for love becomes the world's grief. Such a macabre fulfilment confirms all the fears and leads to the conviction that, in order to avoid catastrophe, ideas cannot be realised and must remain in the world of ideas. This is where Nancie comes in. Our images (Nancie and Sharon) are intertwined with lightness and mourning. Nancie is a kind of suicide, a prettier version of Emilė Skolevičiūtė, created for a prettier world in which I cannot exist as Emilė, because I belong to a painful and dirty world, in which the consciousness that perceives it is incapable of replacing the moral laws that exist. Nancie acts as a projection, a dream or an imagination, and can therefore live the same ideals of Sharon. Sharon is an image of a different world, she lives only in a dream world where people don't lock their doors, make love and go barefoot. The tragedy of her death is the tragedy of the world we live in, and I want to revisit that Garden of Eden and metaphorically undress. I want to give Sharon back to herself, I want to give myself back to myself in the imaginary.
„I’d like to be a fairy princess – a little golden doll with gossamer wings, in a voile dress, adorned with bright, shiny things. I see that as something totally pure and beautiful. Everything that’s realistic has some sort of ugliness in it. Even a flower is ugly when it wilts, a bird when it seeks its prey, the ocean when it becomes violent. I’m very sensitive to ugly situations. I’m quick to read people, and I pick up if someone’s reacting to me as just a sexy blonde. At times like that, I freeze. I can be very alone at a party, on the set, or in general, if I’m not in harmony with things around me.“
Sharon Tate's answer to a question in the "What I would like to be in my next life" section of celebrity answers. Eye magazine, January 1969.
Life is terribly boring and the only way to make it work is to incorporate art into it. I don't mean to admire it or to generate it, I mean to turn life into art, to copy art, to bring art into life - to be heroes in films, to talk like they're from a book, to wear one-of-a-kind clothes, to dance at parties where amazing music is playing, and so on. You want to create yourself and your life as a spectacle, as a work of art, as an aesthetic experience.
This artwork is about itself and the experience of the oeuvre. In form, I reflect on the very experience of the production of the artwork, its content and form in the ecosystem of the art field - how does the piece of art try to control or resist the internal and surrounding situations, and how is it experienced and received by the viewer once it has begun to live? How to maintain a balance in relation to a tragic, emotionally manipulative and political story that tries to outweigh Sharon Tate herself? What can counterbalance the weight of such contexts - beauty, aesthetics, or perhaps naivety, which in such contexts is only horrifying? The horror, which is entirely aesthetic, comes in creeps. The horror comes from the admiration of violence and horror, the admiration of beauty, and the horror happens in catharsis. It is the thrill of the effect, by which I falsify the sense of being and experience.
The beauty of life in a tragic world
Less than a month after man first left his footprint on the moon, in the year when the Beatles played their last show and love was on the rise in Woodstock, in a time of coloured shirts, flower children and sexual revolution, three members of the Manson Family crossed the threshold of the 10050 Cielo Drive house. When Los Angeles woke up, the dream was over and the world was never the same. How to talk about horror as an aesthetic in the context of that time, and how does the mood of such an event affect Nancie and Sharon in this piece?
Nancie Naive: Sharon adored The Beatles. Charlie Manson used the phrase "Helter Skelter" as a reference to his apocalyptic vision of Scripture and ordered the LaBianca-Tate murders to ignite a race war. "Helter Skelter" is the title of a Beatles song from their White Album.
She was killed by her ideology - the hippie dream of freedom. The intertwining of freedom and belief, even in freedom itself, in reality brings a terrible end to this dream - the dream of the whole world dies with her. Her death, like that of Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, John and Bobby Kennedy, was tragically American - a dream taken away. It became inseparable from the crime that took it.
Sharon was extremely beautiful and the tragedy of her beauty is not how exactly her life ended, but that her image, so bright, is doomed to drown in the shadow of tragedy. I am talking about how beautiful she was in every way, but the horror of her death still looms in your mind, and that is the most important moment in this work, which I develop through the tactic of surrender - I fight knowing that I will lose.
"Death in art is not a single (albeit privileged) theme, but a way of testing and challenging art itself."
– Nerijus Milerius
Violence hurts and satisfies us, and politics acts as an excuse to perpetrate it, to indulge in it, and to be horrified by it. The most important thing is to experience, because we are insensitive, we need flavour enhancers to arouse our feelings and to deceive ourselves that we are living, because living is what we fear most. It is scary to look at a woman and admire her because we are suspicious, because we are convinced that she is a trap. And Sharon's beauty, her image and her history only confirm this. Nancie's naivety makes it possible to look, admire and enjoy - herself, Sharon and the work, which is so indeterminate in the reflection of the weave of reals and realities. I dance with Sharon in her memory, not in denial of what has happened, but in full knowledge and reconciliation.
