Masks & Maskmaking

John Flugel in his book Psychology of Clothes states, "When we wear a mask, we cease, to some extent, to be ourselves; we conceal from others both our identity and the natural expression of our emotions, and, in consequence, we do not feel the same responsibility as when our faces are uncovered; for it appears to us that, owing to our unrecognizability and the alteration in our personality (persona = mask), what we may do in our masked state cannot be brought up as evidence against us hen we resume our normal unmasked lives. The masked person is, therefore, apt to be freer and less inhibited, both in feeling and in action, and can do things from which he might otherwise be impeded by fear or shame. Hence the highwayman, the burglar, and the executioner have frequently worn masks, and a masked ball permits of less restrained expression of certain tendencies, notably the erotic ones than is otherwise possible." (6)

Claude Levi-Strauss, author of The Way Of The Masks tells us. "It would be misleading to imagine, therefore, as so many ethnologists and art historians still do today, that a mask and, more generally, a sculpture or a painting may be interpreted each for itself, according to what it represents or to the aesthetic or ritual use for which it is destined. We have seen that, on the contrary, a mask does not exist in isolation, it supposes other real or potential masks always by its side, masks that might have been chosen in its stead and substituted for it. In discussing a particular problem, I hope to have shown that a mask is not primarily what it represents but what it transforms, that is to say, what it chooses not to represent. Like a myth, a mask denies as much as it affirms. It is not made solely of what it says or things it is saying, but of what it excludes." (7)

The use of the mask reveals the limitations of Rimbaud's control as well as the extent of his alienation from his own body. Indeed, Rimbaud would retain the same expression during orgasm as he would riding the subway, but this is more than just a matter of a prop's artificiality. The mask also alludes to the experience of having to camouflage one's desires from everyone, including one's self; in effect to submit to invisibility. Wojnarowicz's wish to contest society's abjectification and silencing of sexual outlaws is hinted at by Rimbaud's performative self-determination on the piers. (8)

Hillel Schwartz in the Culture of the Copy says that the Haida themselves equated the camera with the wooden mask; both were for "copying people." On the glass backs of cameras, they saw "copies" of people appearing like masked dancers. (9)

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Samuel Mazza in his book Spectacles says that glasses draw all their power from being a mask. It is the power of seduction, playing with mystery and with the deception inherent in disguise, in eyes that see without being seen. They are not mere lenses, but screens and mirrors whose frames function as picture frames, elevating them from lowly instruments to works of art. (10)

Awareness of metaphor in the use of mask, even the most literal, is almost irrepressible in the case of the photograph as opposed to painting. The reason for the difference in our regard lies in the notion of the photograph as a transcription of the real, the photograph thus becoming itself the mask concealing what is behind it and thwarting confrontation with the real. What in the work of the eighteenth-century Venetian painter Pietro Longhi we can accept as a conceit inherent in the situation, the ball with its beautiful women enhancing their mystery and appeal by the Venetian convention of the domino, in photographs may be resented as a contrivance to cheat. Conversely, in some of Diane Arbus's photographs the viewer may be grateful for masks covering certain helplessly vacuous faces. Both resentment and gratitude originate in the frustrated expectations of the real. In these cases the mask is literal, even with its metaphoric overtones. (11)

J. Michael Walton in his book Greek Theatre Practice tells us that the tradition of the masked performer goes back far earlier than anything recognizable as 'tragedy' or even as drama. The dancer in many African and American Indian tribes assumes a mask to induce the onlookers to accept him as the representative of higher powers or as a god. Over and above the compliance of the onlooker, the dancer may acquire some of the power of the mask itself, including protection from adverse gods or spirits.

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Hence the use of the death mask to cover the features of a corpse. The mask was not originally used as a means of personification, but for the exaltation of the individual and to reveal the power of the god captured in its very essence. An analogous sense of mystery is the prime emotion of the animal mask, where individual or group wearing the mask assumes certain qualities of the beast itself, qualities also inherent in man, but suppressed under normal social conditions. In dance and in ritual these submerged qualities are allowed to surface, as everyday life is forgotten and the marvelous takes over. (12)

A contemporary photographer, Yousuf Karsh, says about his own portraits, "All I know is that within every man and woman a secret is hidden . . . The revelation, if it comes at all, will come in a small fraction of a second with an unconscious gesture, a gleam of the eye, a brief lifting of the masks that all humans wear to conceal their innermost selves from the world" (emphasis added). Karsh's photographs should ideally, according to this profession, reveal that secret, make that revelation, surprise that lifting of the mask. What he demonstrates in fact, however, is a cultural reverence for power, purpose, and achievement, expressed in the very choice (or assignment) of subjects, enhanced by solemnity of treatment. The subjects may be caught briefly without their own masks, but they are then covered with the photographer's inadvertent mask of sheer admiration not for the subjects' uncovered disclosed selves, though he has recognized them, but for his subjects' importance in the world. Looking at his photographs of famous people, one sees that he has not allowed the private moment of revelation to remain private but has turned it into a public moment. Contrasting his photographs of famous people with photographs of famous people taken by Man Ray, Andre Kertesz, or Richard Avedon illustrates how deeply Karsh's mask of admiration obscures the revelation of a private person. (13)

One of the defining attributes of the voyeuristic relation is that the one giving the look should be concealed from the one receiving it. In deciding to 'become visible' on that occasion, I suppose, I was trying to deal wit the problem of how to 'speak' of voyeurism, in my work, without behaving as a voyeur. There's certainly no simple answer to this problem -- one can be 'hidden' behind a battery of studio lights, or in the simple act of raising the camera and looking through its keyhole of a viewfinder. Perhaps it's a mistake to focus on the act of looking itself, an empty moralism simply to code voyeurism as 'bad.' Perhaps we should focus rather on the relational aspect of voyeurism -- a relation which, according to individual cases, may, or may not, be oppressive. (14)

The photographer was thought to be an acute but not interfering observer -- a scribe, not a poet. But as people quickly discovered that nobody takes the same picture of the same thing, the supposition that cameras furnish an impersonal, objective image yielded to the fact that photographs are evidence not only of what's there but of what an individual sees, not just a record but an evaluation of the world. It became clear that there was not just a simple, unitary activity called seeing (recorded by, aided by cameras) but "photographic seeing," which was both a new way for people to see and a new activity for them to perform. (15)

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John Berger in Ways of Seeing says that to be naked is to be oneself.

To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude. (The sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an object.) Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display.

To be naked is to be without disguise.

To be on display is to have the surface of one's own skin, the hairs of one's own body, turned into a disguise which, in that situation, can never be discarded. The nude is condemned never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.

In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man. Everything is addressed to him. Everything must appear to be the result of his being there. It is for him that the figures have assumed their nudity. But he, by definition, is a stranger with his clothes still on. (16)