Mystic Visage

Mystic Visage

Throughout human history, masks have been used to conceal, protect, or disguise the wearer. Providing anonymity, grandeur, or both, the mask can afford the wearer courage to speak freely or to transcend physical limitations. Whether simple or wildly elaborate, facial coverings can create powerful auras of mystery and strength or lend substance and secrecy to important rituals. At their most basic, masks can amplify or hide our emotions and allow the wearer to adopt a new persona. The mask can have a profound effect on both the wearer and viewer, simultaneously obscuring and revealing.

Early humans made sense of the universe and sought to manage nature's sometimes cruel power by personifying, on a grand scale, man's efforts to direct its forces. The most accessible, recognizable and elemental source of this personification is the use of symbolic animal or human faces to gain mastery. Masks have long been central to religious rituals, serving as tools of transformation and bridges to the spirit world. Masks lend a supremacy over the temporal world and the divine. Masks can be intended for many purposes: to ensure fertility, raise the dead, make crops grow, kill enemies, ward off evil, or cure sickness. The covering of the face provides a very real, if temporary, psychic and physical shelter in times of worship, war, celebration and grief.

The earliest examples of masks are stone masks from the Neolithic period. In these ancient tribal societies, it is believed that masks served to cement group identity or designate roles within a hierarchy. In later communal cultures, masks became part of rituals that affirmed jointly-held customs, morals and beliefs. In the individualistic west, masks take on more personal, even private meanings. In art and literature, the mask is used symbolically to express private fears and fantasies, as well as concerns about the integrity of individual identity.

The tradition and symbolism of masks and mask masking offer the artist a scope for limitless exploration. Several contemporary artists such as Matthew Barney, Folkert de Jong, Gilbert and George, Cindy Sherman and Leigh Bowery have turned to the mask form in investigating issues of identity, power and provocation. These artists, in part, take their inspiration from theater, where role playing and the creation of characters allows exploration of extended narratives or comment on the dramatic nature of ordinary life.

In the work of Cindy Sherman, the bounds between real and assumed identities become more indistinct as she presents theatrical, over-the-top female personae in the form of sun-worshippers, clowns and clawed grotesques. Her very human figures are nonetheless so unreal that they become "drag" in nature. The artist succeeds at disappearing behind the masks and disguises of her subjects. The viewer is forced to confront these unsettling characters head-on, rather than through the artist as scrim.

Similarly, the theatrical "drag" theme is mirrored in the work of Leigh Bowery, as captured by Fergus Greer in the 1980's. The iconic work of Leigh Bowery is reflected in many forms of today's popular culture; for instance, Bowery is credited for launching the universally recognized "look" of pop idol, Boy George. This look, essentially a combination of masks—sometimes sadomasochistic, sometimes sad, sometimes glamorous, are at once humanizing and de-humanizing. In Greer's capture of Bowery's world, there is a sensitive, sad revelation that goes beyond the superficially comical make-up and drag.

In contrast, William O'Brien's purple happy face mask from 2008 bears an eerie similarity to a mask from 7000 BC, although his is a work on paper and the other of stone. The masks' origins are separated by thousands of years, yet the forms are still united by the human obsession with facial camouflage.

A wonderfully crafted and captured example of the modern death mask is Gabriel Orozco's bki from 2004. In one way we are lifted from the natural fate of death via the beauty, complexity and dimensionality of the skull and, on the other hand, we are brutally confronted with the ghastly reality of inescapable death.

Today, more than ever, we are reminded of the political uses of masquerades and impersonations. As the theorist Yaron Ezrahi has said, "Just as this new war doesn't have a front (terrorism), it doesn't have a face. It doesn't have boundaries." This non-face or ski mask effect used by terrorists is relatable in no uncertain terms in Adam Helms' Man and Buffalo #2, 2005.

Perhaps the most well-known Western function of the mask is role-playing. This descends from Ancient Greek and Roman Theater through to various forms of art such as the operas Un Ballo in Maschera by Verdi and Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux. In Pepe Mar's Face-Off role-playing is attributed to the consumer culture, as a whole. At first glance, the work resembles a tribal mask- sharp, defined, almost human. Upon closer inspection, it is constructed out of cut paper from beer boxes, shoe boxes and fashion magazines: the detritus of modern human culture. Mars' cut-up critique is of a culture driven by things, the assumption of images and the false notion of possession. Face-Off is a good example, both in title and spirit, of the work of a culture that is socially and morally dysfunctional. We are theatrical at all times, removing our own faces and donning new ones, never revealing truly which one is the real persona.

Most directly and revealingly, masks often underscore a real identity rather than keep it hidden. In tragedy and in comedy, we are all artist-manipulators of our identity and our public demonstration of it. Oscar Wilde perhaps put such manipulation into the clearest words "Give a man a mask and he'll tell you the truth".