Thesis – Multiple Identities of a Face

“Masks were an expression of humanity and nature as well as a statement of time and belief. They were a commitment to the future in that they spoke of the past in terms of the present. They were a symbol of continuation and an extrapolation of time linked to cultural survival.” – Gary Edson, The Parallel Nature of Science and Visual Expression, 4. Ingenious Expression, Masks and Masking, Pg 73

A person’s identity is the totality of self, constructed from how a person portrays his self in the present which links to the past and how one aspires to be in the future. In a lifetime, it is possible for a person to take on multiple identities according to the phases of life and perceptions of society. The quote by Gary Edson is apt in explaining the definition and purpose of masks which reflects the fundamental of this thesis. 

The act of ‘masking’ becomes a ritual in everyday life where we layer our identities to hide flaws and what is undesirable. We take on different personas in efforts to mask the self but in turn exposing our desires and ultimately, exposing the self as all these identities come from the same source, inside of us. This thus, creates a cycle that evolves in its own shell.

Masks Transcending Time – Finding Parallels 
Investigating through cultural contexts, parallels are drawn between early and contemporary culture. An analogy that is an appropriate representation of this would transcend time – like how Jung’s archetypes are a primal part of humans, ever present through various cycles of life.
Action: Investigative publication

The Progression of Masks – Mapping Comparisons 
Masks have evolved from being tangible in early cultures to something intangible in contemporary culture. Social uses differ in present context as compared to earlier context of time. A representation of this could be drawn from the structure of the tree of life, which laid is roots in Dogon culture and African cosmology.
Action: Mobil installation

An Alternate Meaning – The Displacement of the Face
In Gombrich’s essay, The Mask and the Face: The Perception of Physiognomic Likeness in Life and in Art, masks are seen as “…crude distinctions, the deviations from the norm which mark a person off  from others.” Gombrich has revealed another way of seeing a mask. It might not necessarily take on conventional interpretations.
Action: Sculptural series

Lernert & Sander: Natural Beauty

Cheeky directors Lernert & Sander embrace the urge for cosmetic overkill in their surreal short Natural Beauty. Makeup artist Ferry van der Nat and his assistant Vanessa Chan helped to execute the vision, slathering a host of Ellis Faas products on  Belgian beauty Hannelore Knuts, who was recently named the new face of Swiss fashion house Akris. Lernert & Sander began collaborating in 2006; since then they’ve done everything from melt a chocolate bunny with a hairdryer to repurpose household appliances as sex toys in the name of video art. We asked the co-conspirators to break down the shoot in detail.

–Nowness

Picasso’s Ceramics

Takeaway: Picasso’s ceramics are very peculiar and stylised. Almost all are depictions of faces but necessarily in a naturalistic way. Picasso was known for using multiple perspective during his cubist phase. He was had interests in African masks, which were popular amongst European painters during the impressionist movement. It certainly shows through his work, the use of multiple perspective and the interest in masks and the face. This could be a medium I could explore.

Dali’s Mustache by Salvador Dalí, Philippe Halsman

With 101 Life magazine covers to his credit, Philippe Halsman (1906-1979) was one of the leading portrait photographers of his time. In addition to his distinguished career in photojournalism, Halsman was one of the great pioneers of experimental photography, motivated by a profound desire to push this youngest of art forms toward new frontiers by using innovative and unorthodox photographic techniques. One of Halsman’s favorite subjects was Salvador Dali, the glittering and controversial painter and theorist with whom the photographer shared a unique friendship and extraordinary professional collaboration that spanned over thirty years. Whenever Dali imagined a photograph so strange that its production seemed impossible, Halsman tried to find the solution, and invariably succeeded. As Halsman explains in his postface, Dali’s Mustache is the fruit of this marriage of the minds. The jointly conceived and seemingly nonsensical questions and answers reveal the gleeful humor and assumed cynicism for which Dali is famous, while the marvelous and inspired images of Dali’s mustache brilliantly display Halsman’s consumate skill and extraordinary inventiveness as a photographer. This combination of wit, absurdity, and the off-handedly profound is irresistible and has contributed to the enduring fascination inspired by this unique photographic interview, which has become a cult classic and valuable collector’s item since its original publication in 1954. The present volume faithfully reproduces the first edition and will introduce a new generation to the irreverent humor and imaginative genius of two great artists. – Goodreads Takeaway: These photographs by Philippe Halsman of Dali captures the very essence of the artist. Dali is almost distinguishable via his famous mustache, it is as if his mustache is a manifestation of himself. Like what I have read in E.H Gombrich’s essay, masks could stand for “crude distinctions, the deviations from the norm which mark a person off  from others.” which is exactly what Dali’s mustache is. It epitomises him. The last work which is of a mobile does not need Dali’s face but just representations of his face. It also supports what I read in Gombrich’s essay about the displacement of facial features, no matter how we rearrange them, they still are distinguishable.

Oliver Jeffers – Dipped Paintings

HERE OR THERE is predominately a portraiture exhibition, a space where Oliver Jeffers takes an anthropological approach in rendering subjects of various religious and ethnographic backgrounds. Diverging from his well-known illustration work for children’s picture books, Jeffers explores the chasm between logic thought and emotional impulse.

In a departure from his previous work that ropes in mathematical equations as a method to unravel the traditional portraiture conventions, in HERE OR THERE social satire and elements of the fantastic combine to create subjective renderings of the modern day condition. In a nice curatorial flourish, the artist himself handwrites the artwork titles and various quotes around the exhibition in chalk on the blackboard painted walls at Gestalten Space.

One of Jeffers’ approaches to portraiture that I would have enjoyed seeing more examples of were his paint-dipped works. In Without A Doubt Part I, a bust portrait of an Asian lady is obscured from the chin down by black paint that the artist has dipped the work in, gilt gold frame and all.

– Berlin Art Link

Takeaway: Jeffers used dipped paint to cover a portrait of a woman partially. This somehow arouses more interest as we wonder what the woman actually look like, what is behind the dipped paint. Does covering up conceals who she really is or do our interpretation of her makes her who she is?

For Light and Memory – Painting and Collage by Sergei Sviatchenko

This is an interesting technique where the face is being cut out and you can literally see right through them. Perhaps the face is only a veneer that when removed, it could possible reveal so much more.

Drawing on and harnessing all of the cultural tides he has experienced in 40 years of image-making, Sviatchenko’s oeuvre spans the known and the unimaginable. It cuts through the boundaries of traditional and contemporary visuals to merge pop culture with politics, personal memory with collective histories, and architecture and science with the logic of dreams.

For several years now, Sergei Sviatchenko has produced photo-collages that look like his own and no one else’s. A Sviatchenko piece may consist of only two or three interlinked elements floating on a vividly colored background of blue, yellow, green or pink. One of his periodic series is titled Less and reduction is his unfailing aim. The fewer the images, the more the pressure on each component increases, and the more crucial the acts of selection, excision and montage become, since everything depends on the associations and implications forced from this relationship. The flatness of the backgrounds is jarring and unusual; many collagists prefer to set their images into delicate beds of paper that can be savored for their colors and texture. Sviatchenko’s harshly bright and depthless backdrops deny his images any sense of location and push his constructions forward graphically as sculptural objects. The sharp cuts that he makes around, and into, his often monochrome source pictures give them a blunt, aggressive, anti-realist outline that helps to counteract the otherwise overpowering color. The final outcome is a limited edition C-print, which further flattens the image.

–Design Observer

Despite the disquieting intimations of violence, exploitation and control as the image grapples with itself, this “elephant man” exists first of all to fulfill the collagist’s desire to make another world from the chaotic visual debris of a planet in a state of permanent flux. All Sviatchenko will add is that reconfigurations of this kind create a new “story” in which viewers must discover their own associations: “Then everyone can look for their own reality.”

Takeaway: These collages by Sviatchenko are not overwhelming in terms of the use of elements, instead he uses a few pieces, more often two to three and creating a tight composition that is well balanced. The use of bright solid colours as the background elevates the collage pieces. I am especially interested in the portraits that he did via collage. Displacing the face, it is as if, the more you cover it, the more you are revealing. Not in a literal sense but more of a symbolic sense.

Janus

In ancient Roman religion and myth, Janus (Latin: Ianus, pronounced [ˈjaː.nus]) is the god of beginnings and transitions, and thereby of gates, doors, doorways, passages and endings. He is usually depicted as having two faces, since he looks to the future and to the past. The Romans named the month of January (Ianuarius) in his honor.

Janus presided over the beginning and ending of conflict, and hence war and peace. The doors of his temple were open in time of war, and closed to mark the peace. As a god of transitions, he had functions pertaining to birth and to journeys and exchange, and in his association with Portunus, a similar harbor and gateway god, he was concerned with travelling, trading and shipping.

Janus had no flamen or specialized priest (sacerdos) assigned to him, but the King of the Sacred Rites (rex sacrorum) himself carried out his ceremonies. Janus had a ubiquitous presence in religious ceremonies throughout the year, and was ritually invoked at the beginning of each one, regardless of the main deity honored on any particular occasion.

The ancient Greeks had no equivalent to Janus, whom the Romans claimed as distinctively their own. Modern scholars, however, have identified analogous figures in the pantheons of the Near East. His name in Greek is ‘Ιανός (Ianós).

Attributes:
Associated with doorways and gates, Janus is the god of beginnings. Since he looks both ways, the term Janus-faced is used to describe someone who is duplicitous. He was also considered the guardian of peace, a time at which when the door to his shrine was closed.

Honors:
The most famous temple to Janus in Rome, on the Argiletum, is called theIanus Geminus ‘Twin Janus’. When its doors were open, neighboring cities knew that Rome was at war. When the doors were closed, Rome was at peace. In his account of his accomplishments, Augustus says the gateway doors were closed only twice before him, by Numa (235 B.C.) and Manlius (30 B.C.). Augustus closed them 3 times, in 29 after Actium, in 25, and a debated third time.

There were other temples for Janus, one on his hill, the Janiculum, and another built, in 260 at the Forum Holitorium, by C. Duilius for a Punic War naval victory.

God of change and time:
Janus frequently symbolized change and transitions such as the progress of future to past, from one condition to another, from one vision to another, and young people’s growth to adulthood. He represented time, because he could see into the past with one face and into the future with the other. Hence, Janus was worshipped at the beginnings of the harvest and planting times, as well as at marriages, deaths and other beginnings. He represented the middle ground between barbarism and civilization, rural and urban space, youth and adulthood. Having jurisdiction over beginnings Janus had an intrinsic association with omens and auspices

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Takeaway: The roman god janus has two faces, symbolising the past and the future, war and peace, beginnings and endings – the start and the ending, basically complimentary elements representing a transition of time. It is interesting to see the connection between his two faces, with transition. In the context of masks, one face has to be the dominant one in order for it to work. I’ve never thought of having two faces not layered, not covering the other but placed from one end of the spectrum to another. Whatever in between symbolising change/transition/movement.

Consultation Today

For today’s consultation, it seems that I have so much information to work with but I have to always link them back to my three outcomes/purposes which are:

1. Create a physical metaphor of the cycles, layers and dimensions of identities
– The Universe/Cosmos, Layers, Narratives

2. Comparing early cultures vs. present culture – how masks evloved from being tangible to something intangible
– Cycle, Time , Past Present & Future

3. Come up with an analogies that somehow make sense in early culture as well as present culture
– Time , Past Present & Future, Dimensions, Layers

And also back back to the quote that ties everything together:

“Masks were an expression of humanity and nature as well as a statement of time and belief. They were a commitment to the future in that they spoke of the past in terms of the present. They were a symbol of continuation and an extrapolation of time linked to cultural survival.”

– Gary Edson, The Parallel Nature of Science and Visual Expression, 4. Ingenious Expression, Masks and Masking, Pg 73

I would have to conclude my findings on the kamatic tree if life and also on Jung’s persona and archetypes. It would also be good if I think about the physical outcomes of my main message.

Archetype

How Archetypes Function

Jung’s first answers to the question ‘How does the archetype function?’ was ‘through dreams.’ He made public his discovery that dreams contain impersonal mythological themes as well as martial of a more personal nature. A series of dreams and fantasies were amplified with parallel symbols draw from mythological and religious sources. He called these symbolic ideas archetypal symbols to indicate that these images were the symbolic form of the archetypes (instincts) that gave them form.

Archetypal symbols form a framework of images representing universal human characteristics. He held that they constellate energy (that is to say, they are experienced as drawing energy towards themselves) and that they express libidinally charged psychic structures common to all humans.

‘It is a psychological fact that an archetype can seize hold of the ego and even compel it to act  as it -the archetype- wills’. Jung warned that, in letting oneself be possessed by an archetype, one forfeits one’s humanity. The archetype acts as an amplifier, for example, of the power and effects of the real parent whose image combined with the archetypal representation becomes a divine or daemonic imago.

Archetype as idea

In considering the origins of the idea, Jung stated that it had a precursor, the primordial image. Earlier, he had spoken of both ideas and images as products of archetypes. He clarified this further by calling on his theory or personality differences and proposed that the idea has a dual meaning as both a primary determinant (as in primordial ideas) and as a product. 

Archetype as image

The image functioned as a condensed expression or the psychic situation as a whole. Jung speaks of the image as part conscious, part unconscious – a momentary constellation or elements or the activity of both. The image, then, is a kind of bridge that transcends the conscious and the unconscious. An interpretation of its meaning can only come from understanding the reciprocal relationship between the two.
Archetype as symbol

Jung claimed that mandala symbols were comparable with their ethnographic parallels in both form and meaning. He emphasised that knowledge of the common origin of these and other symbols has now been lost to us, and so it is necessary to read texts from old cultures to understand and elucidate their functions for psychic development. He spoke of historical layers below the surface of the psyche that are alive and continuously active in everyone: perhaps to a degree we cannot imagine in our present state of knowledge.

– Clare Crellin, The Theory Itself, Jung’s Theory of Personality: A Modern Reappraisal, Pg75-81

Jung’s Model of the Psyche

Imagine that two cartographers design maps of a particular territory. One cartographer describes what is on the surface of that territory; the other, however, makes a map, a geological survey. In Jung’s description of the geology of the psyche (in a collection of his talks published in 1925 as Analytical Psychology) there’s a sketch of the psyche (p. 133) made by Jung himself and reproduced below.

A = individuals; B = families; C = clans; D = nations; E= larger groups, such as
Europeans; F = primate ancestors; G = animal ancestors, in general; and H = the central fire

C indicate complexes and those with the letter A indicate archetypes.

The ego is shown orbiting in a band of consciousness around a central nucleus, the Self. The inner and middle concentric bands represent the collective and the personal unconscious, respectively. The functional units making up the personal unconscious are the complexes, and those of which the collective unconscious is composed are the archetypes. A close functional relationship exists between complexes and archetypes that complexes are “personifications” of archetypes;
complexes are the means through which archetypes manifest themselves in the personal psyche.

The Ego and the Self, as well as the Persona and the Shadow assembled in a schema.

Jung describes the persona as that which one is not, but which oneself and others think one is. It is a functional complex that comes into existence for reasons of adaptation or personal convenience but is by no means identical with the personality. The persona is exclusively concerned with the relation to objects.

The shadow is everything an individual refuses to acknowledge about himself. Qualities perceived as undesirable, unacceptable, or reprehensible are repressed or hidden from view in the shadow, the polar opposite of the persona.

The ego is a complex of ideas that constitutes the center of [one’s] field of consciousness and appears
to possess a high degree of continuity and identity.

The Self the unknown essence that transcends our powers of comprehension.  It is the ordering, structure ipving principle within the psyche.

As an empirical concept, the Self designates the whole range of psychic phenomena in humans. It expresses the unity of the personality as a whole. … It encompasses both the experienceable and the inexperienceable (or the not-yet experienced). . . . Insofar as psychic totality, consisting of both conscious and unconscious contents, is a postulate, it is a transcendental concept, for it presupposes the existence of unconscious factors on empirical grounds, and thus characterizes an entity that can be described only in part, but for the other part, remains at present unknowable and illimitable.

Jung’s psychology is essentially based on a biological model: the existence of archetypes embedded in the collective unconscious. The archetype is a primordial image that is determined as to its content only when it has become conscious and therefore informed by the material of conscious experience. The archetype in itself is empty and purely formal, nothing but a capacity in potential. It is the archetypal image that will make the archetype appear in consciousness. 

What better image, then, to see the archetype in the Invisible Man and the archetypal image in the Invisible Man dressed up, since our psyche “dresses up” the archetype with our personal experience.

A validation of Jung’s proposition that there is layer in our psyche, the collective unconscious, which provides the archetypal “geological” structure and that myths, fairy tales, legends, fantasies, and dreams give content to the events in our psyches, at the same time placing them in historical continuity and in a timeless, transcendent dimension comes from comparing two myths in two cultures separated by centuries and by geography. One is found among the Platonic Myths wherein, it is said, the soul of each (if us is given a unique daimon before we are born, and it has selected an image or a pattern that we will live on earth. The daimon is the soul companion that guides us, but at birth we forget. The daimon remembers, however, what belongs to us, and therefore, it is our daimon that is the carrier if our destiny. We must go back to childhood, because there we still had some idea, some grasp of what the intention of our daimon was. We need to get back to that if we don’t want to be sick.

The other one comes from West Africa. It says that before we enter this world, we draw up a contract with our double as to what we will do in the course of our life. Then, just before birth, we are led to the Tree of forgetfulness. We embrace it, and from that moment on, we have no conscious recollection of the contract. We must, however, live up to out agreements, for if we do
not we will become ill, and we will need the help of a diviner to contact our heavenly double to discover which articles of the agreement we are failing to fulfill.