A few months ago I had the first in an ongoing series of synchs involving the Mona Lisa. It started when I was researching pix of stencil graffiti online. The objective was to find and save pix of anonymous hotness, blow them up and print them out so I could recreate the stencil with a piece of mylar and an exacto knife for my FTW T-Shirts project—thrift store t-shirts customized with graffiti style stencil sprays. FTW (Follow The World) T-shirts was an experiment with online telepathy—the goal was to “magically” select the perfect shirt from the ranks of second-hand goodness and to intuit the right stencil design to add to it. As I searched through various Euro picture galleries of stencil-based street art, I felt my mind drift with the beats emanating from my red Tivoli desktop speaker, dressed in the distinctive clitter clatter it gave them—like the hard wood Italian soles racing across cobblestones. I dreamily clicked on this and that before coming across a Romanian stencil spray of the Mona Lisa—complete with the perfect accident of a tear-drop shaped paint drip in the corner of her eye. This caught my interest—I sat up—ready and awake. When I hit the forward button at the bottom of the pic, the next stencil was the exact same image except that this Mona Lisa had its head half-transformed into Woody Woodpecker. Perfect, I thought to myself, as I right-clicked triumphantly. This must be the feeling a fisherman has when making a prize catch after hours of waiting knee deep in icy water. I started typing “Mona Woody” into the Save File box at the exact same moment Slick Rick’s “Mona Lisa” came on the magic shuffle—a song that I had thought, until that moment, had been accidentally purged from my iPod:
Well, it was one of those days — not much to do
I was chillin downtown, with my old school crew
I went into a store — to buy a slice of pizza
And bumped into a girl, her name was Mona — what?
Mona Lisa (what?) *singing* Mona Lisa, so men made you..
I felt the buzz of the synch course through me—mixing with my happiness at hearing the track again. I felt awake down deep, like I’d downed a cup of coffee for the spirit—setting me off to investigate further, casting the hungry hunting bird gaze of my third eye across the internets. The synch told me this image meant something—it let me know I was on the right path. My google research quickly revealed that Woody Woodpecker was one of the few American cartoons shown on Communist run Romanian TV—which meant that the stencil undoubtedly invoked childhood memories for many Romanians of a certain age. Pop culture meets the masterwork, revealing the nostalgia and trauma contained within both of them. Suddenly I wanted nothing more than to see the “real” Mona Lisa again—which is to say I wanted to see a picture file reproduction—the closest I’ve ever been to DaVinci’s work. As familiar as the image was, that post-synch google was the first time I could ever remember taking the time to really look at it. Other times I merely sucked in the familiar face vacuum cleaner style but this time I stopped and observed the sparkle in the eyes and the upward curl of the mouth—while all along I saw the reflection of my own face on the monitor screen, adding my own layer to the cultural assemblage that was the painting. I used what I had learned from my ongoing, virtual apprenticeship under Andy Warhol to recognize opportunities for art riffs in the exchange between the image and the culture within which it’s created. I’ve learned that the importance of a piece has to do with the expansiveness of its reach across the centuries. In the case of the Mona Lisa a core chunk of western culture’s expressive genius as well as its crippling repression is revealed in DaVinci’s masterpiece. He paints a deep humanity (light! Heat! Lust! Love!) glowing through a mask of culture and class.
I decided to make both stencils. They didn’t really fit with the ones I already had— the hip-hop head silhouettes and 60’s style psychedelic chicks with stenciled stars in their eyes, but the synch and the charge that being re-introduced to the painting had given me made it feel like a necessary part of my FTW line-up. The only way to really test the power of online telepathy was have lots of stencils to choose from so that I could intuitively choose one that was “right” for that particular shirt and person. I could put the two faces on the front and back of a single shirt—or just use one at a time or mix them up with other stencils. I chuckled as I imagined the possibilities of pairing ML with Eazy-E—or maybe Steven Colbert. I felt certain that no matter how I ended up using them it would be the right way— there was significance to them—something special, something with meaning.
As if in confirmation of this it seemed that as soon as I cut out the stencil I started seeing the Mona Lisa everywhere—on TV commercials and in print ads that appeared across the pages of magazines opened randomly. I saw her on display in the window of a poster store underneath the Port Authority. It seemed there was an especially large number of ML’s within a several block radius of Collective Hardware. A series of wheat pasted ML’s seemed an hommage to Andy on Elizabeth Street. It was a short stroll from the pizza slice bearing ML on the side of Lombardi’s Pizzeria to the Keith Haring mural of tripped-out orange and black faces on Bleeker and Houston—the eyes of which I’d considered making into a stencil for the purpose of giving the Twitter bird crazy staring eyes. I’d forgotten that this corner was it’s home. I wondered if seeing it again was a sign that I should cut out those crazy eye stencils—perhaps they were meant to go with the ML pix.
As I contemplated the green atomic symbol, dancing men and funhouse characters on the giant slab of concrete, a man stopped in front of me and took out his iPhone. I noticed that his screen background was a picture of the Mona Lisa.
