The Other Face: the mask in the arts , by Walter Sorell, Thames and Hudson, London, 1973

The Other Face: the mask in the arts , by Walter Sorell, Thames and Hudson, London, 1973

Chapter 1 – The Mystery of the Other Face

Early mans desire for transformation, for losing the identity of face and shape, emerged from his seemingly contradictory need for self-repulsion as total possession of his self. In order to make the charm work he felt he had to conceal his identity, to shake off his corporeal existence. Since the spirit was thought of as living in the face, it was a logical act to wipe out ones countenance. To make this self-effacing act more effective, primitive man put on an artificial face and admitted with it another spirit.

In the mind of early man the border line between the concrete and the symbolic was blurred; he could not conceive of a life clearly demarcated by any determining facts of reality. He could not separate the natural from the supernatural. For him the latter was a living force with which he needed to identify. The spiritual act of taking possession of, or rather assimilating, the spirit represented by the mask – to the point of becoming possessed by it or becoming it – was the goal of such a masked man.

The variety and expressiveness of the mask grew immensely with the growing skill and artistic awareness of man. All the unrealized images he carried around with him, those many frightening visions that may have tormented him and which he could not articulate in any other form, went into the creation of masks. Afraid of demons but existing with them as seemingly living realities, man transferred demonic powers to the mask. Demon and mask were an inseparable entity in his eyes, at times – as his fear of the unknown and death led to and mingled with his escape into ecstatic joy – indistinguishable.

We may accept that the masked person becoming the impersonated spirit of the mask truly believed himself to be in possession of the masks demonic powers. It is more difficult to assume that those who watched him – not an audience in our sense of the word, but participants in a ritualistic society – believed in his mask. It is an experience we know from children, who can be afraid of a mask although fully realizing that they know the person hiding behind the mask. The total acceptance of the mask and the peoples’ identification with it was an unwritten law among the members of the tribes (what tribes????). Sometimes, as with tribes in New Guinea, the enforcement of this law could put to death a person who, through contempt of denial, profaned the portrayal through the mask.

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The mask was undoubtedly preceded by the painting of the body, the first realization of mans sense of decoration which greatly inspired and finally led to the creation of masks. Curt Sachs has pointed out that ‘masked culture, one of who’s roots lies in the physical, conceives its spirits in perceptible, often in animal form’. (Sachs, Kurt. World History of the Dance, New York,  1937).

Some scholars speak of the Mesolithic age as the beginning of the animal mask; others refer to a ‘mask culture’ beginning in the early Neolithic period, significant for its matriarchal system. In the beginning man would put on the skin of a slain animal, especially the skinned head of a beast, and wear it as a living mask, a sign of triumph, a disguise for use on his hunting exploits or a working charm for his fertility dances.

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In contrast to dancing, the creation of masks was a conscious act, executed in full awareness of rudimentary aesthetic principles. It was mans first attempt to give shape and meaning to his innermost visualizations, to reach beyond the ordinary for something in which he was only vaguely aware. In a life in which mans thoughts and feelings, the surrealistic world of his dreams and the realities of his waking hours, become blurred into an often frightening oneness, the mystic and magic forces gain demonic sense. All this played into the mask makers hands, and the mask was the first instance in the spiritual growth of man in which the synthesis of idea and matter reached an artistic form. Mask-makers were as much appreciated in former days as artists are today, and it frequently happened that chieftains would invite famous shapers of masks from other tribes and reward them richly for their work.

There was no disguise without a mask, which always played the most important role as the counterpart to man’s face, mirroring mans soul. The lifelessness of any mask becomes strangely animated when the body moves, and in fact the dancing body instilled the mask with an over dimensional reality.

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The mask came into being owing to many basic instincts, such as fear or faith mainly expressed as superstition. It is most important, however, to realize that the mask emerged from a collective will which was of decisive influence on the will of the individual artist whose hands fashioned the mask. As a work of art it had to be recognizable and recognizable by each member of the community. The early creator of masks thus combined his inner consciousness with a high degree of social awareness. He mastered with his art ‘not only what the eye perceives but what it cannot see’, as Andre Malraux said (Malraux, The Voices of Silence, New York-1953, London-1954).

The mask is the earliest man-created phenomenon and mans most accomplished visual realization of out twofold existence: of day and night, wakefulness and sleep, life and death, the live and rigid face. The essentially immobile and unchangeable aspect of the mask – the face that lives without living – indicates that one its original connotations, which early man felt strongly, was with death. But all the art of primitive man was closely linked with death.

The application of the mask was twofold, like the causes of its birth. At opposite ends of the spectrum of mans nature lie his barbaric instincts and his desire to transcend his ordinariness. The mask was used in both instances. When in the early beginnings of homo sapiens an adversary was killed, his dried and then stuffed skin was turned into an artistic trophy. Primitive man often wore the mask of his slain foe and imitated his gestures with the intent of absorbing his spirit.

At the other end we have the priest of early and later religious cults, who would step in front of the god’s altar hiding his face behind a mask. The mask may have served to create more readily the mysterious tie between the priest and the divine spirit, but primarily it was supposed to help him shed his humanness, with all its corporeal attributes.  In those early days the mask played its part in what can be considered the spiritual act of becoming possessed in order to take possession. Also, the symbolic power of the mask gave the priest a super-personal dignity. Beyond the mere unreal expression of his second face, however, the metamorphosis was very real for him and his fellow men, as it created an imaginary power which turned into a mystic force.

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Primitive man put on a mask to pacify nature, the mysterious and frightening face of the unknown. His inner experience was a surrealistic nightmare; his subliminal experience belonged to his struggle with demons and evil spirits. Modern technological man puts on masks to challenge nature, to demystify the mysterious and to penetrate the frightening face of the unknown. His mask has demonic power of a different kind from that of early man, but he feels the same openness with his mask which helps him dispel his fear and conquer spirits. The spirits of primitive man were imaginary creations and yet real to him, the spirits of modern man are creations of his imagination, tested in high-powered laboratories.

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Mystery and magic are still with us, for all they have done is to change their connotations. We now put on the mask of the voyeur to look through the keyhole of creation. Mystery in bunkum, we claim, and clandestinely try to escape our technological traps by going back to the soil and everything that we can relate spiritually to primitivism.

The mysterious spirit of the mask can be suppressed and diverted but not silenced forever. Our century was destined to rediscover the inherently demonic quality of the mask. When Picasso turned to the Congo he felt the power in the darkness of an elemental world that did not mind defying the universe, and then he realized the instinctive force that went beyond all refined variations of realism into new forms of primitive, and yet sacred, simplicity.

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The mask is the beginning, trauma, and essence of all metamorphoses, it is the tragic bridge from life into death, it is the illusion of another reality, or the disguise with which man reaches reality on a higher plane, stronger in its awareness, clearer and more concrete in its expression that the elusive image of reality itself. The mask contains the magic of illusion without which man is unable to live.

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