1
DISMANTLING THE FACE OF AFRICA:
MASKS, RITUAL, AND THE MUSEUM
Literary Studies: English Literature & Culture
2 CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 3
CHAPTER 1: Dismantling the Face of Africa 8
The predicament of the African Mask
The face of Africa 11
An artist attempts to dismantle the face 16
Binaries and burning masks 19
CHAPTER 2: A Collection of Masks 25
Museum as system of faciality
Death in the Museum 26
Ethnographic Surrealism 31
Tourist art as stowaways 38
CHAPTER 3: The Appropriation of Ritual 44
To wear a mask
Seeking Artaud’s “obscure reality” 49
Not not an animal 53
Political masks 56
Entangling cultures 60
CONCLUSION 64
3 INTRODUCTION
“How do you dismantle the face?” (186) ask Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their 1980 work A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The question relates to the notion of faciality explored in their chapter Year Zero: Faciality, a mechanism which draws alterity into the landscape of the face to form a “single substance of expression” (181). In a particularly evocative passage, Deleuze and Guattari describe the process of faciality:
Bodies are disciplined, corporeality dismantled, becomings-animal hounded out, deterritorialization pushed to a new threshold - a jump is made from the organic strata to the strata of signifiance and subjectification. A single substance of expression is produced. The white wall/black hole system is constructed, or rather the abstract machine is triggered that must allow and ensure the almightiness of the signifier… You will be pinned to the white wall and stuffed in the black hole. This machine is called the faciality machine because it is the social production of face, because it performs the facialization of the entire body and all its surroundings and objects, and the landscapification of all worlds and milieus (181).
In his short story, Curiouser, Ivan Vladislavić describes the African Mask: “The face of Africa, he thought, the one made familiar by ethnographic museums and galleries of modern art, B-grade movies and souvenir shops” (102). Once the object of diverse ritual practices across the continent, the African Mask, through this process of faciality instigated by Western colonial infrastructures such as the museum - as my study will go on to demonstrate - has been reduced to a continental synecdoche; a fetishized symbol of the exotic which satiates the Western orientalist gaze and affords struggling post-independence African economies a means
4 to reel in curious Western tourists. This is particularly evident in the case of Côte d'Ivoire, which I will address in Chapter 1. As Vladislavić’s narrator muses, the African Mask finds itself constricted by a system of signs manufactured by Western modernity.
Deleuze and Guattari suggest that in order to dismantle the face, we have to “become imperceptible, to become clandestine,” to create “strange true becomings that get past the wall and get out of the black holes” (171). In other words, the mask requires recontextualization in order to escape faciality’s face. In the following chapters, through the use of literature, films and art, I will explore the methods with which we might achieve something of Deleuze and Guattari’s disruption of the facializing regime.
Let me begin with a scene from Jean Rhys’s 1939 novel Good Morning, Midnight. Sasha, the novel’s protagonist, arriving at an artist’s studio in Paris, is greeted by a selection of Congolese masks hung on the walls. Serge, the artist, shows Sasha one of the masks before holding it over his face and dancing. The contents of this particular scene form the tripartite structure of my thesis; focusing first on the idea of the African Mask as a face, before moving to the collection of masks and finally, their function within ritual. Within these three subjects, I will illustrate how the mask is facialized and how we might free it from the signifying regime. Rhys’s text affords not only the structure of my thesis, but an excellent example of a text which, as I will go on to argue, succeeds in dismantling the face.
In my opening chapter however, I will use Ivan Vladislavić’s Curiouser – a story concerning the use of African masks in a South African artist’s latest exhibition – as my primary case study in illustrating how the mask is facialized and the difficulty both Vladislavić and his protagonist have in their attempts to dismantle the face. I will supplement Vladislavić’s text with references to films and artwork likewise concerned with dismantling the common significations that comprise the facialized African mask.
5 Taking inspiration from Serge’s collection in Rhys’s novel, my second chapter will scrutinize what I perceive to be the fundamental infrastructure of the West’s facializing regime: the museum. Ishmael Reed’s 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo and its dangerous curator at the New York Center of Art, Biff Musclewhite, provides my study with an ideal lens to explore the tyranny of the museum institution. I will look to the surrealist movement for alternative methods of curation and ethnography.
And in my final chapter, I will take what seems to be the logical, but severely underappreciated step of looking at what happens when we wear the mask; focusing largely on Serge and Sasha’s appropriated ritual in Good Morning, Midnight. Indeed, it may seem obvious, but a major characteristic of the facializing regime, as exemplified by the museum, is the absence of a face behind the mask.
My thesis arrives at a crucial point of transition. French president Emmanuel Macron has this year committed to a programme of repatriation for African artefacts held in French museums (Quinn), and museums across Europe are beginning to follow suit. We need only look to one of Marvel Studio’s latest box-office successes, Black Panther, as evidence for how the topic of repatriation is entering mainstream discourse; the film featuring a scene in which a white curator at a British museum is lectured about the colonial looting of artefacts.
And yet, whilst I view repatriation as a potentially efficacious development in the dismantling of the face, it may also be a mirage in faciality’s landscape. This myth of return will not immediately solve faciality’s ingrained semiotics, as I will go on to address in Chapter 2. Too much of the discourse engulfing the African mask takes too little consideration of our existence in an inevitably postcolonial world (J. Jones), where so called ‘tourist arts’ permeate the art market and previously colonized nations attempt to rebuild and think anew their heritages from the detritus of colonization. There is no hope of return. Indeed, this rethinking lies at the heart of my thesis. In 1992, one ‘king’ of a Yoruba town (the Oba of Ila) argued that:
6 The way to preserve many of these cultural practices is to present them as ‘àṣà’ [tradition] and not as ‘èsin’ [worship]. The supernatural elements will have to be deemphasised to attract fellowship. If we present and sustain these customs as a mark of our identity with the past, with our ancestors, and as part of our history and heritage, not as religious obligation, then they will survive (qtd. in Wiles 187).
It is with this unfortunate dichotomy in mind that I suggest a rerouting of the African mask in the West. In order to do this, I will call upon the likes of Jean Baudrillard, Mikhail Bakhtin and Édouard Glissant to help reconcile the traditions of African masked ritual and the inevitabilities of the postcolonial world.
Whilst many of the points I make in this thesis can be extended to the masks of cultures the world over, the African mask is of particular importance in illustrating the exchange of cultures that my study concerns. From the early years of colonisation, and significantly the “discovery” of African art in the early twentieth century by the likes of artists such as Picasso or Matisse, l’art nègre (as it was then known), more so than the artefacts of any other culture, represents a moment of cultural transfusion – encapsulating, to use Dennis Duerden’s important distinction, both expropriation and appropriation of African artefacts (36). Likewise, whilst it is understandable that we might associate an African mask with Africa in the same way that we might view a Noh mask as an evocation of Japan, no mask or other artefact to my mind has suffered such homogenization and cultural erosion; from its legacy as a muse of Western modern art to its crude usage in films and even tourism, as I will go on to address in the proceeding chapters.
To dismantle the face of Africa then is to let the mask speak on its own terms; to free it from the gridded system of faciality that silences it. Over the course of the following chapters,
7 I will propose ways in which we might facilitate the African mask’s voice and the difficulties we may face along the way.
8 Chapter 1: DISMANTLING THE FACE OF AFRICA
“He takes it down and shows it to me. The close-set eye-holes stare into mine. I know that face very well…”
The predicament of the African Mask
The origins of the mask as continental synecdoche lie in what Dennis Duerden terms the “expropriation” of African art, beginning as early as the fifteenth century and reaching its peak in the nineteenth century as colonizers returned with items destined for museums; “the material which had been plundered from so-called ‘primitive’ societies” (32-3). This predicament of the African mask has been long cemented in the years proceeding colonisation. That masks and other indigenous artefacts are viewed by the West as aesthetically pleasing, fetishized “primitive” accoutrements of our modern lives can be summed up no better than by eminent businessman David Rockefeller: “I look at African art as objects I find would be appealing to use in a home or an office… I think it goes well with contemporary architecture” (qtd. in Appiah 338).
At the behest of a globalized world anchored in Western economic policy (and illustrative of the task at hand) even African nations themselves have been guilty of perpetuating this crude signification of the African mask. In his book African Art in Transit, Christopher Steiner discusses the role played by the mask in the domestic policy of Côte d'Ivoire in the 1980s “through its planning and organization of large-scale masked festivals…intended to fulfil the government’s dual projects of (1) promoting international tourism… and (2) fostering national unity in the face of growing ethnic factionalism and tension” (94). Steiner proceeds to cite the Ivorian Minister of Tourism:
9 We now declare that the trademark [of Côte d'Ivoire] will be the mask, for it is representative of this country, rather pleasing to the eye, and enshrouded with an air of mystery. The mask could arouse the curiosity of foreign tourists and lead them to visit our country. We have [therefore] chosen the mask for we believe that it integrates several aspects of our culture and civilization. The mask encapsulates the traditional arts of the Côte d'Ivoire, and represents the strength and history of our nation (95).
Steiner draws a direct link between the country’s economic collapse and the attempted peddling of the nation’s cultural heritage (95-6). The minister’s words echo those of the Yoruba king; what was once worship is becoming tradition. The fact that he views the mask as ‘mysterious’ reflects this self-immolation; conceding to Western orientalist notions of the African mask as an exotic “curiosity,” and thus, signalling an attempt to profit from these bonds of signification.
There have, however, been clear attempts made by African nations to reverse this trend. As Melanie Ulz points out, in the 1960s the Senegalese president Léopold Sédar Senghor trumpeted “an arts policy that linked a refocusing on ‘traditional’ African art and culture to ‘modern’ nationhood, systematically aiming at promoting contemporary art… a self-confident counter-positioning of African modernity” (54). And yet, whilst African nations can attempt to reframe and reinvigorate their respective cultural heritages, it is in the West where a recontextualization of the African Mask is of greatest necessity. After all, Western imperialism is the progenitor of this current predicament; and as the Mask continues to festoon Western hotel lobbies and market stalls, this inexorable bond of signification will remain stagnant. That Côte d'Ivoire sought to commodify heritage in order to participate in the world economy exemplifies the idea that to function in the modern world, one must speak the West’s language of signs.
10 Struggling post-independence economies prohibit nations such as Côte d'Ivoire from functioning in what Jean Baudrillard describes in his essay For a Critique of the Political
Economy of the Sign as “the total cycle of a political economy in which economic exploitation
based on the monopoly of capital and ‘cultural’ domination based on the monopoly of the code engender one another ceaselessly” (59).1 Indeed, the strictures on the African Mask, as my
study will go on to address, are at once cultural and economic.
The face of Africa’s legacy lingers in the West. Only metres away from my home in Amsterdam, a bathroom supply shop exhibits sparkling showers and sinks. One of the window displays features what appears to be a vaguely oriental-styled washroom, decorated with beads and an African mask (Fig 1). The diversity of African cultures and masked ritual is here reduced
1 To illustrate this point further, I referred to Baudrillard’s cycle in my essay What the Louvre Abu Dhabi means for modernity (written for the course The Muslim World, Europe and Modernity), my
argument being that the economic might of the Gulf States enables them to purchase the codes of cultural capital, and thus, reconfigure their image. Struggling post-independence economies such as Côte d'Ivoire do not have this privilege, and so are forced to cede to the signifying regime of the dominant order.
11 to a stereotypical image which, ignoring the abstractions of many mask designs, provides us with a rather representational face.2 That the mask is used as an accoutrement of a Western
bathroom only serves to further integrate the face of Africa into the facialized system.
The face of Africa
This idea of the Mask as a signifier of the African continent is considered explicitly in a passage taken from Ivan Vladislavić’s short story Curiouser:
The face of Africa, he thought, the one made familiar by ethnographic museums and galleries of modern art, B-grade movies and souvenir shops. Everywhere you went in Johannesburg, wooden faces looked up at you from the pavements at the hawker’s stalls, a running catalogue of expressions that ranged between hollowed-out hunger and plump self-satisfaction, each flipping over into its opposite as soon as the weather changed” (102-3).
In this chapter, I will use Vladislavić’s story of a South African artist named Simeon Majara - whose latest exhibit utilizes the African mask - as a fertile example of a work that attempts to grapple with our interactions with these artefacts. I will use the text as both a case study (that is, the artist’s attempt to recontextualize the African mask), and as a challenge to faciality in its own right; both approaches illuminating the difficulties in dismantling the face of Africa.
2 As I will go on to address, this is not to say that some genuine African mask designs do not depict
fairly realistic interpretations of the human face – they unequivocally do - but rather, I am alluding to the significance of the bathroom designer’s choice of a face that slots comfortably into Western perceptions of what a face is.
12 As is already clear in our initial passage, Vladislavić portrays a desire to view the mask as a face; as a signifier of meaning; the nose of which might crumple or lips might purse. In this instance, Simeon recalls faces that return the consumer gaze and express emotions such as hunger and satisfaction. For the sake of clarity, Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of faciality is not necessarily concerned with the physical face. In their illusory theorizing, “the face” – that part of our bodies most strongly associated with conveying meaning - provides a metaphor for the wider system of power that ‘overcodes’ the body and therefore, like a face, dictates meaning (170); in the specific case of my thesis, that the African mask signifies a “primitive” Africa and everything this connotes. The face, with its white wall that signifies and its black holes of subjectivity that subsume alterity (redistributing it as part of the facial landscape) becomes the face from which everything other is compared. The “abstract machine of faciality” (175) attempts to find the African mask a place in the facialized system, and has found one on the walls of museums and the tables of market-stalls where the mask is wrenched from its original context and thus, function.
In the case of our passage then, the imposition of facial expressions and their corresponding emotions is an attempt to render a dialogue with the mask. As Hans Belting points out, the face defines our correspondence: “This is evident in the expression ‘face to face,’ which designates the immediate, perhaps inescapable, interaction of a reciprocal glance in a moment of truth between two human beings” (1). If, as we have already noted, to free the mask from faciality is to somehow let it speak, then this impulse to anthropomorphise the mask is entirely understandable. Indeed, we find it throughout Curiouser: Simeon can “hardly work with them watching” him (141); a friend, Amy, faces “the wall layered with masks as if she had stage fright” (140).
I am not arguing that Vladislavić’s constant attributing of expressions to the mask represents faciality in itself, but rather that it serves as an ideal metaphor – in line with Deleuze
13 and Guattari’s – for the ways in which we attempt to make the mask comprehensible to us; the way we draw the mask into a Western, facialized system of signification. Vladislavić illustrates how the mask is treated as no more than a palimpsest for the emotional vicissitudes of the looker. In fact, I would argue that he is parodying this palimpsestic act of projection. The idea of the mask’s expression “flipping over into its opposite as soon as the weather changed” (103) evokes the fickle concerns of the modern West. Here, the futility of interpretation is highlighted. The mask, in its inanimate, facialized form, cannot respond.
We find a similar moment in Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight. When Sasha is first shown one of Serge’s mask, she sees a face, the expression of which she duly interprets:
That’s the way they look when they are saying: ‘Why didn’t you drown yourself in the Seine?’ That’s the way they look when they are saying: ‘Qu’est-ce qu’elle fout ici, la vieille?’ That’s the way they look when they are saying: ‘What’s this story?’ Peering at you. Who are you, anyway? Who’s your father and have you got any money, and if not, why not? Are you one of us? Will you think what you’re told to think and say what you’re ought to say? Are you red, white or blue – jelly, suet pudding or ersatz caviar? (76-7).
Sasha incessantly ‘overcodes’ the mask with meaning, the futility of this action evident in the mask’s radical segue from inciting suicide to asking what Sasha would prefer to eat. Quite clearly, her own anxieties inform her interpreting of the mask’s gaze; after all, her first thought after seeing the mask is: “I know that face very well; I’ve seen lots like it complete with legs and body” (76); referring to the metaphorical “masks;” those personas worn by the Parisians outside. But more on that in Chapter 3. For now, my interest lies not in the mask’s cultural translation, but simply in how these texts attempt to speak for the mask.
14 Seeing as Vladislavić’s story concerns an artist’s recontextualization of the African mask – which we will address in more detail shortly – it is fitting that we might call upon an artists to actualize this issue of imposing signification. In her essay Masking the White Gaze:
Towards a Postcolonial Art History of Masks, Melanie Ulz considers the artist Romuald
Hazoumé, whose mask creations are made from objects familiar to the West such as jugs and canisters. Ulz describes Hazoumé’s “quest to playfully create a facial schema that propels the Western search for the face ad absurdum – searching for a face of its own within that of the
Other” (56-7). These masks assembled from the paraphernalia of modernity provide a helpful
example of the way in which we desire the face-to-face encounter. As Ulz reinforces: “The objects…play with the expectations of the Western audience, which superficially expects an African mask upon first glance” (57). Chris Marker captures this impulse nicely in his 1953 film Statues Also Die. As a woman looks at an African mask, the voiceover narration suggests: “It is its Smile of Reims that she gazes upon” (431).
Indeed, our desire to view the masks as faces is symptomatic of the ways in which the mask has become detached from its original context. For example, Duerden points out that what we in the Western world perceive as the mask is often only one component of a Niger-Congo masquerade costume: “In fact, what we mean by what we refer to as Niger-Niger-Congo mask is very often a complete head-dress and not just that part that conceals the face (29). I am not suggesting that masks in African cultures do not depict faces. As Belting points out: “Masks are evidence of the oldest human concept of the face” (32). The two are intrinsically linked. However, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest of “primitive” societies: “…masks ensure the head’s belonging to the body, rather than making it a face.” The body is therefore connected “not to faciality but to becomings-animal” (176). We will look specifically at the mask’s ‘becoming-animal’ in Chapter 3, but what is important here is the distinction between the mask as a detached face lingering on market-stalls and mounted on museum walls, and the mask which
15 establishes a link between the head and the body. They go on to write: “‘Primitives’ have the most human of heads, the most beautiful and most spiritual, but they have no face and need none” (176).
Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking here is linked to their distinction between the tyrannous signification of the facializing regime and their own romanticized vision of “the presignifying and presubjective semiotics of primitive peoples” (180). Firstly, let me concede that I see no anthropological or scientific evidence for the claim. In fact, I join with Andrew Lattas whose essay Primitivism in Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ lambasts the book’s reliance on a vague, homogenised idea of “primitivism” (103). However, I do think the features that Deleuze and Guattari attribute to “primitive” societies can be used constructively, as my thesis will proceed to show. It is ironic that the facializing regime, which embraces stereotypes of primitivism, should be defeated by Deleuze and Guattari’s own primitive stereotypes.
What I am interested in here is the fact that when we see masks in the facializing regime, they are detached; thus isolating the head and subsequently the face. We get a sense of this through the shift that occurs when Serge places the mask on his face. Sasha, having just interpreted the mask’s gaze, observes: “His thin, nervous body looks strange, surmounted by the hideous mask” (77). The mask surmounts; it overcomes the body and Sasha’s attention switches to the body as a whole and the facialized realm of signification seemingly disappears. An obvious point it may be, but whilst a face is subject to change, the expression of the mask is usually set. This is reinforced when the mask is worn because we are aware of there being a face beneath the mask that does have the ability to change expression. Likewise, the moving body enunciates the mask’s stillness. I would therefore argue that to view the mask as a face, or even as another being as we have seen in Curiouser, is entwined with the fetishization of the African mask employed by the facializing regime to maintain the mask’s evocation of a vague, exotic Africa. We could call this the fetishization of the face.
16 This is intrinsically linked to the Western preconception of the mask as a means to transform, because of course a face entails an identity of sorts. I will address this misconception in far greater detail in Chapter 3, but approaching this topic through the lens of the face, that we should view the mask as a face and therefore in some way an identity, directly contradicts the original function of some African masks. For example, in his study What’s in Mask - an etymological exegesis of the mask and the role it plays both within West African communities and the wider world – John Picton seeks to defetishize the mask through his constructed dialogue between the Ebira people of Nigeria and the Western world. Whilst in some rituals, the mask does entail transformation (a Deleuzian ‘becoming-animal’ if you like), a festival such as the ekueci, in which the living entertain the spirits (eku) of the dead, contradicts this idea. Whilst the mask-wearer is viewed as eku, the mask plays no part in this transformation process, and is only worn in the presence of women (183). The mask here has nothing to do with a face, or identity; it is simply coverage. There is far more to the African mask than simply a face.
An artist attempts to dismantle the face
We have seen how Vladislavić’s text interacts with the mask, but as noted, Curiouser is multi-layered in its attempt at recontextualization; Simeon’s art attempts to dismantle the face as well. As one critic once wrote of Simeon’s work with curios: “Recharging the drained object with meaning” (107). The artist’s grappling with the mask is crucial to my study for it develops questions such as the importance of context that I will develop further in my next chapter on the museum. As I mentioned in my introduction. Deleuze and Guattari posit that in order to dismantle the face we must create new “becomings” and “combinations” (189). But what I
17 hope to illustrate here is that even Simeon’s attempts at recontextualization are dragged back into the facializing system.
Simeon’s exhibitions hold the key to Vladislavić’s wider agenda regarding the African mask. Preceding Curiouser (the exhibition which directly concerns the mask and other curios), Simeon’s Genocide III, focused on the Rwandan genocide (part of a wider series of exhibitions on the subject of genocide). Juxtaposing two narratives - Simeon’s closing down party for the
Curiouser exhibition and his research for Genocide III - Vladislavić manufactures an explicit
link between the masks and the victims of genocide. As Simeon himself muses: “the gap between corpses and curios was narrower than people thought” (106). As we have established, this metaphor pervades the entire narrative, embodied in Vladislavić’s constant anthropomorphizing of the mask. Take for example the story’s opening scene, in which Simeon makes lamps out of African masks. The ensuing violence is vividly described:
He put two masks together with their temples touching and aligned the holes he had drilled in their ears. Then he pushed the end of a length of wire through a pierced lobe, bent it sharply and pushed it back through the ear of its neighbours, and twisted the ends together with a pair of pliers… You could imagine that it was gritting its teeth – but that was just the effect of the drill. If you took the bit out of the picture, the grimace turned to a grin (102).
In the context of Vladislavić’s wider metaphor, the scene toys with our willingness to view the masks as in some way living, and therefore to sympathize with them. In this instance, we find that the masks were not really gritting their teeth, quickly returning to their default grins.
Likewise, this ethical hermeneutics of the mask is reinforced in a later conversation with a friend: “I’d buy one of those ‘Baloney’ things if I could afford to, I’ve got just the wall
18 for it. But I can’t help being aware of the balance of power, the imbalance, one should say. The way you live here, the way the people who made these masks must live (146).3 Whilst the
desire to own and display the mask persists, the mask’s relation to its maker continues to irritate a source of guilt in Vladislavić’s characters, representing what Slavoj Žižek would call fetishist
disavowal, whereby the collector willingly ignores the ethical dilemmas at the heart of the
artefact’s conception. Of course, this same fetishist disavowal is employed every time we use our IPhones manufactured by exploited Chinese workers, or in the example Žižek gives us, when we eat meat (45). In fact, as I will go on to explore, there are studies which celebrate the tourist art trade and the benefits it has on local communities (see. van Haute). So I would suggest that, in line with Vladislavić’s incessant anthropomorphising, the mask’s signification goes deeper here.
For example, Simeon recalls his first encounter with his African masks after designing the décor of Bra Zama’s African Eatery. By no coincidence, in Afritude Sauce - another of the four tenuously linked stories in Vladislavić’s book - the protagonist, a white South African named Egan, has dinner at the very same restaurant. He peers up at Simeon’s masks that line the walls: “There seemed to be more and more of them. Multipliers. He felt surrounded. It was uncannily like a white South African nightmare… As if they were in a glass house, feasting, while the hordes outside pressed their hungry faces to the walls” (91). This ethical signification is of course exacerbated in the context of South Africa’s tremulous racial politics, but indeed these anxieties and questions could well apply in the Western world.
3 It is important to note another factor that inflames the notion of the mask as continental synecdoche;
one that I will tackle in greater detail in Chapter 2. The masks Simeon acquires are not the authentic, precolonial masks desired by rich collectors and museums the world over, but tourist art produced and made to satiate the Western orientalist gaze. Huggan describes the dilemma of tourist art: “caught between the demands of a transnational consumer public and the need to decolonise cultural production in a post-independence age” (qtd. in van Haute 25). It is the face of Africa that sells. Whilst there may be a desire to dismantle the face, the exotic desires of the West and the global economy conspire to maintain the facialized system. The same pressures that led Côte d'Ivoire to use the mask as their national symbol, instruct the African Mask’s aesthetic. This is the stranglehold in which the African mask finds itself.
19 However, as Žižek’s notion illustrates, this ethical interpreting of the mask has little efficacy in dismantling the face for it is bound-up in the system of faciality; the mask is once again ‘overcoded’ by a modern system of morals and binaries; once again afforded an identity. We need only return to David Rockefeller to see how unashamedly we persist with our collections. What we have seen so far is two poles of the mask: (1) the mask as a fetishized object fit for the walls of Western homes, and (2) the mask as a symbol of subjugation, and thus an accusation of guilt. This comprises the gridded, facialized system. It is my contention that to dismantle the face, we must find a way of wriggling between these lines.
Simeon’s struggles persist. Epitomizing this difficulty in dismantling the face are his mask-lanterns scattered around the exhibition’s closing party: “People were talking quietly in little groups, hunched against the night, as if they were afraid of being eavesdropped upon by these glowing heads with candlelight spilling around in them like drunken thoughts” (124). Again anthromoporphized, we might argue that the transmutation of mask to lanterns represents another attempt at recontextualization, akin to Simeon’s Curiouser exhibition for which Simeon chopped-up a selection of curios (mostly animal carvings), making from them new bodies and connections. And yet, the lanterns serve to demonstrate how Simeon still cannot escape the face; the flames inside the heads only illuminating the facial features of the mask even further.
Binaries and burning masks
20 He had expected the effect to be merely amusing in a self-consciously kitsch way, a jokey African Halloween mask no scarier than a gutted pumpkin. But the mask-heads, streaming light from their eyes, mouths and noses, were chilling (120).
In light of Vladislavić’s constant anthropomorphising of the mask, the image conjured here is ominous in its suggestion of faces appearing to come alive, as if to reap revenge on their captors. But situating this fear of the African Mask in a wider context, Duerden informs us of the historic link between fear and the “primitive art” wrenched from “the heart of darkness” by colonizers. In fact, Duerden posits that: “This implication of ‘the primitive’ is still very much in fashion among the modern collectors of ‘African art.’ They put a work of ‘primitive’ art in the same order of emotive experience as the horror film” (39). This link between the horror film and “primitive” art is particularly evocative, for the fear induced in both cases is part of the attraction. Vladislavić’s allusion to Halloween, a Western commodification of horror, is particularly pertinent in this light.
This relationship between primitive art and horror in Western culture is well-established. Take Vladislavić’s “B-grade movies” that have made the mask familiar as an example. Though not a B-movie, we catch a glimpse of this anxiety in Agnès Varda’s 1962 French New Wave classic, Cléo from 5 to 7, in which the title character wanders the streets of Paris awaiting the results of her recent test for suspected cancer. With death firmly on her mind, Cléo’s taxi stops in front of a curiosity shop exhibiting three African masks in its window. Varda’s camera whip zooms dramatically into the faces of the masks; their chipped teeth and bulging brows viewed in close-up. Cléo’s own face creases with anxiousness, the masks serving to remind her of her plight through their association with death. Cutting back to the taxi, Cléo’s beautiful, unblemished white face in the foreground is juxtaposed with the dark masks haunting the background.
21 The film concerns itself with this dichotomy between life and death, which Cléo readily extends into beauty and ugliness. Looking at herself in the mirror earlier in the film, she thinks: “Hold on pretty butterfly. Ugliness is a kind of death. As long as I’m beautiful, I’m more alive than others” (Varda). And yet, after Cléo calls one of her musicians ugly, he responds: “Ugliness is beauty. Beauty is ugliness” (Varda). Indeed, we might suggest the mask be afforded such nuance.
Of the ‘de-facializing’ process we are attempting to ignite, Deleuze and Guattari suggest the need to destroy the “walls to which dichotomies, binarities, and bipolar values cling” (190). Nowhere is this use of binaries explored more explicitly than Man Ray’s notorious 1926 photograph, Noire et blanche (Black and white) (Fig. 2), in which an ivory-skinned white woman, Kiki of Montparnasse, poses alongside a dark African mask likely modelled on the Baule masks of Côte d'Ivoire (Grossman & Manford 134). Once again we can see the importance placed on the notion of the face. The photograph unearths one of faciality’s paradoxes: there is a sense of universality in the sharing of the face; the curvature of the woman’s jaw – enunciated by Man Ray’s use of shadow - explicitly resembles the oval shape of the mask. But within that same universality, we see clear binarization as the work’s title implies. As Deleuze and Guattari note, the abstract machine of faciality deals in “the computation of normalities” (178). Deleuze and Guattari discuss this most pertinently in relation to racism, however, I think the same very much applies here. The facializing regime manufactures the face to which all other faces are judged; but once the mask, in this instance, has ceded, binaries are imposed to form faciality’s gridded system. The photo captures the ‘abstract machine of faciality’ in action. The mask is beautiful when it in some way cedes to the facializing system; Kiki’s white face provides the face to which the mask must compare. But her hand rests on top, holding it in its place.
22 Furthermore, the photo perpetuates more of the facialized mask’s fetishized connotations. Kiki’s closed eyes and languorous pose, her fingers lolled over the mask, intimate a dream-state; as if through physical contact, the mask is transporting her to some vague exotic place. The photograph displays a clear hierarchy. We see none of Deleuze and Guattari’s new ‘becomings’ and ‘combinations.’ It is interesting that Man Ray’s photo has become associated with the Surrealist movement, because in Chapter 2 I will discuss elements of the movement which I feel successfully contribute to the face’s disruption. As I will soon address, the Surrealists sought to disrupt facialized binaries such as Cléo’s beauty and ugliness. We need only look to the famous last line of André Breton’s surrealist novel Nadja: “Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all” (160).
Duerden proceeds to rightly criticize exhibitions and collections which have employed manipulative techniques such as darkening exhibition rooms in order to foster fear and enunciate the “mystery” of the mask (39). Steiner writes of similar techniques used by African traders, who, in order to play on the tourist’s “unending search for the elusive beat in the heart of darkness,” present their masks accordingly, in darkened backrooms. Steiner quotes a
23 collector: “In the [trader’s] home…where the light of day scarcely shines, the masks and statues are aligned in front of me” (132). These techniques function as dichotomizing tools, distancing the consumer from the mask and its connotations. To combat this requires an attempt to dismantle the face and a rerouting of binaries in the creation of new ‘combinations’ and ‘becomings.’
Finally, the denouement of Vladislavić’s story proves particularly illuminating:
One of the lanterns had burst into flames and was blazing like a beacon in the shrubbery. It provoked a mood of awed hilarity that lasted for half an hour, as long as it took for the lantern to collapse in a smouldering heap (151).
Here, the issues Vladislavić raises culminate in one final image; the death of the masks. Like the dead bodies of the Rwandan genocide, the burning masks represent a logical, fated conclusion to Vladislavić’s extended metaphor. And yet, I would go further and argue that the burning masks are crucial to Curiouser’s wider dilemma; after all, a ‘beacon’ is supposed to show us the way. First and foremost, the death of the mask embodies the futility of Simeon’s attempts at recontextualization. Indeed, despite copious praise from friends and critics alike, we cannot help but detect a pervading sense of self-deprecation from Simeon; an awareness of the project’s futility. When Simeon speaks of “liberating the curio from its stifling form, cutting down to the core of its meaning, that sort of thing” (103), the latter clause serves to belittle the sentiment. And indeed, despite Simeon’s initial enthusiasm for his mask-lamp creations, their combustion provokes little more than laughter from the guests.
However, in order to introduce another aspect of the facializing regime, I will provide an alternative reading of the mask’s fate. Deleuze and Guattari posit that: “The face is Christ;” that to be facialized is to be “Christianized” (176-8). Whilst I will delve far deeper into
24 Christian monotheism’s oppression of the African mask in Chapter 3, I want to proffer Vladislavić’s burning masks as another example of the inability to escape the face. There is something of Moses at the burning bush in Simeon’s encounter with the burning masks. The charred masks provide Simeon with a new idea for a series of exhibitions: Crime Scene I, II and III (153-4); again anthropomorphized, the cycle seems set to continue. This link may seem laboured on my part, and of course there is little evidence to suggest that this is Vladislavić intention, but it demonstrates well the necessity to break from received systems of signification. For all of his efforts at recontextualization, Simeon’s masks end not with the creation of ‘new becomings,’ but remain firmly within a Christianized language of signs.
At every turn, Simeon finds himself beaten by the face. This make sense, for we might imagine the facializing regime as a series of tripwires; a gridded system through which ‘new becomings’ must attempt to pass through. Vladislavić captures the crux of the matter at hand:
This silence, the lull behind the noisy surface of objects, was difficult and dangerous. You never knew what it held, if anything. How were you to judge whether the voice you heard was a deeper meaning, whispering its secrets, or merely the distorted echo of your own babble? (123-4).
This very thesis will wield such a double-edged sword; how indeed can we know whether the mask speaks to us with its own voice, or whether it is the echo of our own? I hope throughout the course of the following chapters I can provide the answer. For now, as both Vladislavić and Rhys reveal to us, though it may give the impression of freeing the mask from its bonds of signification, to attempt to put words in the mask’s mouth is ultimately futile. Returning to the Ivorian Minister of Tourism, Duon Sadia: “The mask must become a spokesman” (qtd. in Steiner 98). But for whose cause?
25 Chapter 2: A COLLECTION OF MASKS
“We go up the stairs of a block of studios into a large, empty, cold room, with masks on the walls…”
The museum as a system of faciality
Picture the museum as a face. Let us reimagine Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the white
wall/black hole as the glacial white walls of a museum, upon which several dark Congolese masks are hung. The masks become our black holes of subjectivity in which any semblance of alterity is subsumed, disappearing into the facialized system. We must therefore claw out from these black holes, these masks, “the transformed, heated, captured particles [we] must relaunch” (Deleuze and Guattari 189). To return to our initial quote from David Rockefeller: “…[the mask] goes very well with…contemporary Western things. It would look very good in a modern apartment or house” (qtd. in Appiah 337). It is my contention that this impulse to draw the African mask into a Western-led facialized world is corroborated by the museum. If we are to recontextualize the African mask, then we must address the impulse which drives the collecting of masks in the first place, and subsequently, how we may revise our collections in order to further dismantle the facialized system outlined by Deleuze and Guattari.
When we speak of collecting African masks, we must scrutinize the institutions bearing the brunt of this responsibility. I proffer that the museum, through both its legacy and its curatorial practices, is often culpable of perpetuating the “biunivocalization” (179) - to use Deleuze and Guattari’s term - of the African mask in the West. As I will soon outline, many museums have attempted to decolonize their curatorial practices; however, I will ultimately argue that to dismantle the face through the very institutions that preserve and uphold the legacy
26 of the facializing system is a difficult task. Georges Bataille once observed: “According to the
Great Encyclopedia, the first museum in the modern sense of the word (meaning the first public
collection) was founded in France by the Convention of July 27, 1793. The origin of the modern museum is thus linked to the development of the guillotine (430). With faciality’s disruption of Deleuze and Guattari’s body/head relationship in mind (176), perhaps we can unearth a certain violence in the functioning of the museum’s machine of faciality. What was the phrase again? Masks will roll.
Death in the Museum
In Ishmael Reed’s 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo, there is a murder at the New York Center of Art. Berbelang, a member of the Mu’tafikah – an organization who repatriate looted masks and artefacts exhibited in Western museums – is shot by the museum’s curator, the tyrannical. Biff Musclewhite, “fearless curator of the Center of Art and consultant to the Yorktown Police” (123). Through Musclewhite, Reed provides us with an embodiment of the danger the curator poses to those who wish to dismantle the face. He is a pantomime villain who “laughs all weird and sick-like. Early Richard Widmark; Kiss of Death (1947)” (121). A police commissioner with no experience of the museum, Musclewhite is encouraged by “friends over at the Plutocrat Club” to go for the job (43), implicating the museum in the upper echelons of a corrupt political establishment. Whilst it is easy to view the museum as a harmless staple of Western modernity, Reed assures us that the museum is both a valuable purveyor and custodian of ideology.
The apprehension with which Reed portrays the Western museum is not reciprocated in Teju Cole’s 2007 novel Every Day is for the Thief, in which the nameless narrator, returning to his home in Nigeria, visits the National Museum in Lagos only to be left disappointed by a scant, unkempt collection of masks and other artefacts “caked in dust and under dirty plastic
27 screens” (73). It is in this context that Cole’s narrator heaps praise on “excellent” Western museums such as the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the British Museum: “A clean environment, careful lighting, and, above all, outstanding documentation that set the works in the proper cultural context” (74).4
This reliance on context is something I will come on to very shortly, but returning to Serge’s mask in Good Morning, Midnight, the question is subtly raised as to whether the mask should even be viewed as a piece of art. Interestingly, whilst Serge is aware that Sasha is interested in purchasing one of his artworks, not once does he suggest that the masks are for sale before exhibiting his paintings. Describing the debate between so called Formalists and Relativists in the field of museology, Anna Laura Jones stresses that, in contrast to the formalist stance of the art museum, the more anthropologically aligned Relativists argue that objects have “no meaning as ‘art’ in cultures without a word for art” (207); presenting a real challenge for modern museum curators in deciding which approach to take.
Take for example a moment in Every Day is For the Thief, when the narrator is informed of a previous director at the Lagos museum who “had been too superstitious to handle some of the items in his care… he feared the fetish power of the masks and statues” (75). Astonishingly, this comment is made in criticism of the museum being unable to care for its artefacts, ignoring the man’s right to believe in the mask’s function before it was labelled a piece of art. Likewise, in the art business, Steiner relays how most Ivorian traders are Muslim,
4 For a more nuanced analysis of Lagos’ National Museum, please see my essay “The museum as dream house” in Teju Cole's Every Day is For the Thief, written for the course Critical Approaches to
Literature and Culture. Whilst it is outside the bounds of this study – though very much related in its criticism of the museum institution - I wish to mention briefly the premise of the paper, which sought to argue that by being ruptured, propagandized and neglected, the Lagos museum more accurately represented Nigeria’s ‘ruptured’ history (to borrow Édouard Glissant’s phrase) than the Western museums full of Nigerian artefacts that Cole’s narrator applauds; museums which give the impression of a neat and ordered history. In making this argument, I used Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, specifically his labelling of the “museum as dream house” (407) in order to highlight the constructed fiction of the colonial museum. I subsequently inverted Benjamin’s theory, labelling the Lagos ‘museum as nightmare,’ thus providing the best chance of waking from such slumber.
28 and therefore “completely detached from the spiritual aspect of the objects they sell. As Alhadji Kabiru stated when discussing a Baule monkey figure (asri kofi), that was displayed in his stall: ‘To me this thing represents money. To the Baule it’s a God. A Baule could die if he touched this’” (88). There is a clear concomitance here between the museum and the art market (both consequences of Western colonial infrastructures), imposing the definition of both “art” and history on the artefact despite existing, though certainly waning, belief in the artefact’s original function. This tyranny of the museum and Western heritage practices lures the artefact out of functionality, even being used by traders as a means to prize objects from locals. Steiner quotes Sekou Yaka: “You have to explain to the elders that these objects are things which people want to learn about. ‘Your children,’ you must tell them, ‘won’t be able to appreciate or understand these things unless we take them and preserve them in museums and in books” (64).
This tension between the cult and cultural object was initiated by the museological infrastructures imposed by colonizers throughout and even prior to the twentieth century, manufactured in the image of Western institutions: “From their modern inception, and coloured by contemporaneous understandings of race, evolution, and culture, African museums were born as elitist and paternalistic institutions, and were alien to indigenous populations” (Fogelman 19). That these museological infrastructures are alien to other cultures is understandable given the modern museum’s intrinsic link to Western modernity, established earlier by Bataille. Arianna Fogelman outlines how organizations such as UNESCO and AFRICOM have since made frequent attempt to reconcile “African and Western notions of material heritage” – “incorporating…local ‘vernacular’ into museum operations” and “shifting focus from the pre-colony to contemporary culture” to name but two - in order to tackle the legacy of the colonial museum (19). However, try as these organizations might, I would join with Malcolm McLeod in reiterating simply that “some cultures have ways of preserving and displaying their past which need not involve the formation of museum collections” (455).
29 Indeed, despite attempts to decolonize museum practices, the legacy of the museum as a stalwart of Western modernity, and as a totalizing machine of faciality shows no sign of dissipation. We need only look to the high-profile “universal museum” projects in the Gulf States such as the recently opened Louvre Abu Dhabi; trumpeted by president Macron “as an example of how beauty can ‘fight against the discourses of hatred’” (Chrisafis). In doing so, Macron shamelessly uses the “language of modernity… totalistic, essentialistic, and absolutizing” (Eisenstadt 22). These “universal” institutions propagate a neo-colonial project where Western institutions once again vie to impose colonial infrastructures across the wider world.
It is this legacy which leads me to define the museum, to borrow Finbarr Barry Flood’s phrase, as “a locus of contemporary iconoclastry” (651). The facializing regime of the museum functions by cutting the artefact from its origins. Berbelang’s death in Mumbo Jumbo presents an ideal metaphor for this process. When he is shot between the eyes outside the Center of Art, his death is curiously soothing, even dreamlike: “Strange, he feels O.K., he doesn’t feel a thing. He’s just getting weaker, losing consciousness… Berbelang’s mind has rushed out to the pavement: Yellow, Red, Blue. Fire Opals” (120). Like the idols wrenched from functionality, Berbelang is not destroyed, but rather sapped of life; his essence (not his blood) trickles out onto the street, evoking the diverse, colourful cultures that are facialized on entering the museum, and whose spirits disappear. The process is one of petrification: “as a last shudder runs through it (the shudder of being acquired), it turns to stone” (Benjamin 205).
Flood goes on to describe the museum as “a type of secular temple…within which modernity is equated with the desacrilization and even ‘silencing’ of inanimate objects by their transmutation into museological artefacts” (652). This idea of the museum as an opposing religion, or rather a wing of Deleuze and Guattari’s Christianized facializing system, is aptly reinforced by Berbelang’s treatise on the Western exhibit:
30 We felt as if we were in church… Have you ever seen people line up outside a Van Gogh exhibit? When they get inside there are so many they can’t even see the paintings, they just pass by like sheep or like mourners passing the tomb of a fallen hero, a bier, with the same solemnity… Man, it’s religion they make it into (89).
The image Berbelang paints illustrates the sacrosanctity of the museum space in the Western world.
As a brief aside, the wider system of faciality that the museum helps comprise finds further embodiment in another of Reed’s villains. Returning to Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘face of Christ’: “The face is not a universal. It is not even that of the white man; it is White Man himself, with his broad white cheeks and the black hole of his eyes” (176). As if to expound this idea, Hinkle Von Hampton “staggers to his feet, the patch nearly slipping from the black hollow where his left eye used to be” (81). In order to stop the “Jes Grew” epidemic sweeping America – a plague that manifests itself in outbreaks of dancing and gyrating - Von Hampton actualizes the abstract machine of faciality in his search for a “Caucasian blackamoor” (103); denying alterity, subsuming it through the black holes on his white wall of a face: “The empty eye or black hole absorbs or rejects like a half doddering despot who can still give a signal of acquiescence or refusal” (Deleuze and Guattari 177).
But perhaps the facializing system is nowhere more overt than in Reed’s title, Mumbo
Jumbo, a phrase commonly used in the West to infer nonsense or bewilderment: ‘Have you
read this? It’s complete mumbo jumbo!’ Reed’s first chapter however, provides The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language’s definition: “magician who makes the troubled spirits of ancestors go away” (7). Indeed, in his study The Masked Figure and Social Control:
31 “I was visited by a Mumbo Jumbo, an Idol, which is among the Mundingoes a kind of cunning Mystery. It is dressed in a long Coat made of the bark of trees, with a tuft of fine straw…and when a person wears it, it is about eight or nine Foot high” (279-80). Weil’s article proceeds to address how masked figures such as Mumbo Jumbo function as mediators of societal hierarchies. The complexity of these masked traditions is hereby reduced to a maxim; the connotations of which imply lack of understanding. There are few better examples of the way faciality functions than this transmutation from societal arbiter, to superfluous colloquialism.
Ethnographic Surrealism
In the opening of Rhys’s novel, Sasha finds herself in the serpentine passages of a London tube station:
Everywhere there are placards printed in red letters: This Way to the Exhibition, This Way to the Exhibition. But I don’t want the way to the exhibition – I want the way out. There are passages to the right and passages to the left, but no exit sign. Everywhere the fingers point and the placards read: The Way to the Exhibition. … I touch the shoulder of the man walking in front of me. I say: ‘I want the way out.’ But he points to the placards and his hand is made of steel (12).
Sasha evokes a society in stupor, drawn to the Exhibition like ‘steel-handed’ robots, not unlike the “sheep” or “mourners” in Berbelang’s Van Gogh exhibit. It appears inescapable; like the omnipresent facializing system. Its presence haunts Sasha’s story, not resigned to any particular location. It is towards the end of the novel in Paris that Sasha announces: “I’m going to the Exhibition” (136). And yet its identity remains unclear.
32 I will return to Rhys’s exhibition shortly, but it is another Paris-based exhibition I wish to focus our attentions first: the 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale (ECI). Organized by the French government with support from other colonial powers, the exhibition was an attempt to instil national pride in the nation’s colonial exploits; creating an “idealized Empire in miniature” by the display of objects, people and even entire buildings, including “painstakingly reproduced monuments such as the Angkor Wat,” through which visitors could wander (Sweeney 132-3). The exhibition sought to render the history of the colonized world into an orderly, logical entity. Carole Sweeney describes the event:
As the visitors moved along the wide boulevards through the carefully signposted space – left to Senegal, right to Indochina, straight ahead to Polynesia – they saw a world tamed and brought to order; its history and ontology captured, arrested, flattened out and frozen into a moment of relaxation for the spectator… The exhibitionary space was testament to an unwavering faith in large-scale mimesis wherein no less than the entire world may be collected, labelled and named into being (137).
Likewise, a museum such as Reed’s Center of Art does not simply facialize through its facializing mechanism of “transmutation from cult image to cultural icon” (Flood 653), but also in its ability to evoke its own historical narrative, the neat and orderliness of which obscures the inevitable mediation of history. As Édouard Glissant argues: “One of the most disturbing consequences of colonization could well be this notion of a single History, and therefore of power, which has been imposed on others by the West” (“History-Histories-Stories” 93).
However, Sweeney approaches the exhibition from the perspective of the Surrealist movement and their own Counter-Exposition held alongside the ECI. Gathering colonial
33 objects from personal collections, the Surrealists posed a challenge to the Exposition’s curatorial practices by rejecting the ordered, gridded system in favour of a messy amalgam of artefacts: “…pulling them out of the pretence of an intact authenticity” (143) and usurping the ECI’s neatly periodized vision of “History” as posited by Glissant. Sweeney describes the intermingling of artefacts from Oceania and Africa, with Cuban rumba music playing in the background (144). We see in Good Morning, Midnight a striking similarity: “Serge puts some beguine music, Martinique music, on an old gramophone in the corner” (77). Indeed, the combination of the Congolese mask and music of Martinique disrupt the order of the facializing regime; the effect of this particular combination I will discuss further in Chapter 3.
Like the Surrealist’s challenge to the ECI, Rhys manufactures her own dialectic between “the Exhibition” that haunts Sasha’s narrative, and what we could call Serge’s ‘anti-exhibition.’ As Sweeney concludes: “The surrealists recognized the dense textuality of material culture and the compressed historical energies of the objet coloniale and released these into a more free play of signifiers where accumulation of material culture leads to not one, but to many meanings (144). In this sense, the surrealist paradigm is undoubtedly concomitant with Deleuze and Guattari’s dismantling of the face through the creation of “new becomings, new polyvocalities” (191).
That these ideas have influenced elements of modern curation is undoubted. Take for example the Rotterdam Wereldmuseum’s 2018 exhibition POWERMASK. Musing on the function of masks in different cultures, the exhibit rejects any semblance of periodization, placing traditional Dan masks next to contemporary fashion design and Renaissance plague doctors alongside Darth Vadar. The exhibition begins with the artwork of Coco Fronsac: colourful masks and artefacts painted onto old black and white photographs of Western people and families. Ingeniously, Fronsac’s palimpsests then become the formal premise of the entire exhibition. Masks are hung astride blown up photographs of important figures and artworks:
34 take Picasso’s famous Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) - his first work to have gleaned obvious inspiration from the discovery of the African mask – displayed as a large wall-sized photograph with a Congolese mask exhibited on top of one the women’s faces. The exhibit seeks to create new combinations and to disrupt received hierarchies.
The anthropologist James Clifford expounds these ideas further in his essay On
Ethnographic Surrealism: “[The surrealist’s] attitude, while comparable to that of the
fieldworker who strives to render the unfamiliar comprehensible, tended to act in the reverse sense, by making the familiar strange” (542). In keeping with this sentiment, my thesis is concerned less with an anthropological reading of the artefact, and more focused upon creating shifts in meaning; to turn the stagnant image of the face of Africa into something different. In this sense I share the surrealist’s enthusiasm for “cultural impurities and disturbing syncretisms” (549).
Clifford proceeds to summarize the surrealist’s philosophy of ethnography:
“Their view of culture did not feature conceptions of organic structure, functional integration, wholeness, or historical continuity. This conception of culture can be called, without undue anachronism, semiotic. Cultural reality was composed of artificial codes, ideological identities and objects susceptible to inventive recombination and juxtaposition(550).
This use of “juxtaposition for the purpose of perturbing commonplace symbols” (551) can be viewed as part of “the mechanism of collage,” which Clifford views as intrinsic to all practices of anthropology and ethnography, but made explicit by the Surrealist movement (563). It is at this juncture that surrealist art and ethnographic practices combine. For example, of her photomontage series Aus einem ethnographischen Museum, Hannah Höch posited her work as
35 a response to “the unscrupulous and simplistic use” of the vast quantities of African art arriving in Europe, “assimilated too simply into the working processes of certain groups” (Burmeister 187), for example, readily established museum institutions. Alternatively, in Höch’s collages, we can see something of Deleuze and Guattari’s “rhizomatic realm of possibility,” in which: “Each freed faciality trait forms a rhizome with a freed trait of landscapacity, picturality, or musicality. This is not a collection of part-objects but a living block, a connecting of stems by which the traits of a face enter a multiplicity” (190).
Take for example Höch’s Nur nicht mit beiden Beinen auf der Erde stehen (Fig. 3), which reterritorializes the head of a Pende sculpture onto the breast of a bird in flight. Interpretation is both futile and undoubtedly counterproductive; as Clifford suggests: “The procedures of (a) cutting out and (b) assemblage are, of course, basic to any semiotic message; here they are the message” (563). However, I cannot help but note that Höch’s photomontage evokes Deleuze and Guattari’s setting “faciality traits free like birds…to invent the combinations by which those traits connect with landscapity traits that have themselves been freed from the landscape” (189). Indeed, Höch’s landscape has legs which seem to peel away, disrupting faciality’s white-wall.
Of course, that removing the mask from its context might somehow allow it to speak is in some ways paradoxical. Melanie Ulz lambasts the Lempertz auction house for using an African mask as the cover-image for one of their catalogues without providing any contextual information such as artist or origin. Ulz argues that the object “is thus displaced into a timeless, mystical setting… This de-individualization ensures that masks can henceforth stand for…the entire African continent conceived as a homogenous unity” (53). For Ulz, it is the withholding of context which perpetuates the face of Africa. Undoubtedly this is an issue of contention, for whilst I want to free the mask of its current bonds of signification, it would be equally as problematic to lose important information.
36 This exact dilemma illustrates the difficulty in dismantling the facializing regime: how rooted (classified), or how isolated (free) can the mask be before it is captured by the face? Practically speaking, I think the POWERMASK exhibition unearthed an adequate compromise: contextual information was exhibited on small electronic screens at the foot of the gallery-wall so to not infringe on the aesthetic of display; leaving the decision to contextualize the object firmly with the visitor and therefore further implying that exhibition’s main priority was not to contextualize the mask, but rather to recontextualize. Part of the problem with the Lempertz image is the mask’s isolation; it is devoid of any context and therefore has nothing to speak to. Returning then to the dilemma posited in Vladislavić’s Curiouser regarding “whether the voice you heard was a deeper meaning…or merely the distorted echo of your own babble” (123-4), I view this debate as a misnomer. As Jacques Rancière posits, we must “try to think in terms of horizontal distributions, combinations between systems of possibilities, not in terms
37 of surface and substratum. Where one searches for the hidden beneath the apparent, a position of mastery is established” (49). We cannot put words in the mouths of the mask, but we can let the mask converse with other signs to form ‘new becomings’ in the Deleuzian vein. Whilst I am a great admirer of his work, I would argue that Coco Fronsac’s palimpsests – inherently concerned with surfaces - are perhaps flawed by their very politics. The colourful masks constitute a reclamation of space; evoking a very justified vengeance. But they, in a similar vein to Simeon’s ethical reading of the mask, therefore remain part of the facialized discourse and received notions of conflict and binarization. Höch’s photomontages on the other hand are largely democratic. We may labour over a political sentiment, but they attempt to elude our grasp. The dismantling of the face requires precisely this eluding of received notions.
Granted, Ulz’s reasoning behind contextualizing the mask has a clear ethics. And yet, the act of classification is enmeshed in the legacy of colonialism, as the ECI demonstrated by becoming the living, breathing embodiment of a colonialist’s rusty filing cabinet. Duerden provokes further debate concerning classification by considering the “destruction of…ephemeral documentation” that often characterized the looting of artefacts in the nineteenth century (34). Steiner even explains how Western books on African artefacts are used by African traders to authenticate items (102).
For a practical example of these problems, amongst the largely positive reception to Macron’s grand plans for the repatriation of African artefacts, Simon Njami posited: “How would one define what belongs to whom?” Njami alludes here to the Berlin Conference of 1884-85 when colonial powers imposed new borders on the African continent (Quinn). But furthering the mere practicality of Njami’s question, what is illuminated here is the problem of repatriating artefacts into a facialized system, still defined by colonial infrastructures such as the museum, and even geographic composition; as my introduction argued, repatriation is the
