The Groove Issue 122 - How to Be Memorable
HOW TO BE MEMORABLE
Whether you like it or not, you are always selling yourself or your ideas. A job interview is a sales meeting, so is asking for a promotion or convincing anyone to buy your products or services. These require an ability to capture people’s attention in a memorable way.
There’s nothing narcissistic about standing out and wanting to be seen. In fact, when American psychologist Abraham Maslow defined the highest level of self-esteem and called it “self-actualization” he defined it as "to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.”
That’s why being creative is so intertwined with being you, because no two people have the same ideas, experiences, or ways of expressing them. The more truthful you are in your articulation of how you view business, life or art, the more people will pay attention to you.
The boldest thing you can do is let it all hang. And bold is memorable.
There’s a way of being bold and memorable that can span several levels of intensity, and you decide where to fall on the spectrum and what’s right for you.
Natalia Goncharova was one of the first female artists to become a leading avant-garde figure who challenged the establishment and produced innovative work that continues to be relevant today. Here are some of her moves:
See Yourself As Limitless
Natalia Goncharova in her studio in Paris after she left Moscow in 1917.
The minute you put a limitation on your capacity of expression, or in what you want to achieve, be, do or have, you are doomed to stay exactly where you are right now.
“I set myself no limits in the sense of artistic achievements,” Goncharova wrote in her first manifesto. Born in 1881 in Tula, an area in the former Russian empire located in southern Moscow, this woman meant her words.
Goncharova started as a neo-primitivist painter, creating a style that looked as if made by a child with Russian motifs mixed in with the innovations of the post-impressionists in France. By the time she was 26, she was a celebrity in Russia.
Her work combined diverse techniques and styles including painting, print, theater design, fashion, cinema, interior design, book illustrations and performance art.
Wherever she went, she made a statement. She often adopted peasant clothing; her head covered with a scarf in the manner of the Russian working class. But she had no problem hanging out with aristocratic crowds in gaudy parties, to which she wore flamboyant outfits and entertained others by reading their palms in a humorous parody of folk superstition.
Be a Rebel with a Cause
Natalia Goncharova’s The Deity of Fertility 1909-1910, is the painting that got confiscated by the Moscow police for violating a law relating to the public display of ‘corrupting’ images.
Being a rebel for the sake of being a rebel is childish and amateur. A true rebel looks to defy rules to open up paths for yourself and for others; it has greater transcendence than just being performative, and people can tell when it’s the former or the latter. A true rebel is well versed in the system they are insurging against; they have reasons to do so, there’s purpose and cause.
In 1910, Goncharova showed The Deity of Fertility, a cubist painting representing a female nude that got her immediately canceled by the Russian authorities and was confiscated by the police. She was charged with violating a law relating to the public display of ‘corrupting’ images.
For her first retrospective at the age of 33 in 1913, Goncharova wowed Moscow with an exhibition of more than 800 works. A few weeks before the opening, Goncharova and fellow artists paraded through the streets of Moscow with hieroglyphic patterns painted on their faces. Journalists had been tipped off in advance, so the streets were lined with curious crowds and photographers keen to find out more.
Goncharova in Moscow with “Basic makeup for an actress of the Futurist theatre”, 1913.
This clever publicity stunt obviously worked. Over 12,000 people visited the exhibition, and 31 works were sold.
On top of that, she scandalized everyone by living with her boyfriend, fellow artist Mikhail Larionov, without getting married. And as preposterous as it may sound today, she wore trousers (unheard of for women at that time), causing further stir in society. Art historian John Bowlt wrote, "in private relations and behavior, Goncharova enjoyed a license that only actresses and gypsies were permitted, and perhaps because of this dubious social reputation … she was said to traverse the 'boundary of decency' and to 'hurt your eyes'."
Bend Nonsensical Rules
If you look back at the reasons why Goncharova was being censored, none of them make real sense. Perhaps at the time she was a bit outrageous, but being memorable is about bending nonsensical rules.
Goncharova was also criticized for painting religious figures in unorthodox ways, which made me think about the time Madonna recorded the video for “Like a Prayer” in 1989, dancing with an actor pretending to be a Black saint inside a flaming church.
The video was first released by Pepsi as a commercial during the Grammys that year. The whole thing was a scandal that went all the way up to the Vatican. The video and the commercial were banned everywhere except for MTV. I saw that video again last week after maybe 10 years and truth be told, it looks tame next to the lyrics and videos of hip-hop performers today.
Eventually, Goncharova and Larionov left Moscow after the start of the Russian revolution in 1917 and settled in Paris and London, where she continued to work in different styles and mediums for the rest of her life.
Sixty years after her death, she continues to be remembered and recognized with big museum shows like the retrospective at the Tate in 2019 and an active auction market. Her record was set when her painting Les fleurs (1912) sold for $10.8 million in 2008.
So, if you are holding yourself back from your own boldness, whether that’s in the boardroom or in the studio, thinking you will scandalize everyone, know that as long as you aren’t directly harassing people, celebrating hate or encouraging harm, you do have an inalienable right to freedom of expression that makes you, you. So go ahead and channel Goncharova by being memorable for all the right reasons.
UNLEASH YOUR CREATIVE GENIUS
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If you’d like to watch it, please register here (it’s on auto-repeat every 15 minutes once you have registered).
HOW CREATIVITY RULES THE WORLD
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TEDX TALK
Have you already watched my TEDx Talk: “NFTs, Graffiti and Sedition: How Artists Invent The Future”?
I share three lessons I have learned from artists that always work for anyone in their careers. Watch it here.