Rough Notes

Self-Portraits, Masks, and Mirrors

 Beginning to Find out whether A Piece of Art can Have a ‘Mind’

25 August 2011

‘Self Portrait’, by Paul Cézanne, Oil on Canvas, 1890

In this painting we see Cézanne depicts himself in what at first glance may seem to be a compositionally conventional self-portrait.
            What makes it special (apart from Cézanne’s painting generally) is that the back of the stretcher is in view, the painting on the other side, however, is out of view.
So what is on the other side? Has Cézanne painted himself in the act of painting us - the viewer? Or, as I like to think, is there a mirror that he is looking into beyond the picture plane where the viewer is standing reflecting himself back? If so, then he would be painting his reflection, as people traditionally do when painting a self-portrait. If this is the case, then the painting hidden from our view is an exact replica of the one we are looking at. This would also in turn have the back of the stretcher in it with another exact replica of the original on the other side, and so on forever; the painted side of the canvas that Cézanne in the painting is working on, becomes a ‘reflection’ of the image seen in the potential mirror beyond the plane of the actual painting. Another way to illustrate this could be to hold two mirrors so that they are facing each other, and look as each reflects itself into infinity. On the other hand, we could be standing behind one of his wobbly still-life set ups, and that’s what is really on the other side of the canvas.

Usually when I look at the work of Cézanne, I try to analyse the way he records the act of looking at the world through painting, and from there I sometimes go on to think about Picasso and Braque’s early analytical cubism, and then onto more recent works by other artists who have also followed the same thread in their own unique ways. But with ‘Self Portrait’ 1890 I get stuck into wondering where I should put myself as the viewer of the painting, and playing guessing games as to what is on the other side of his canvas, and what should be imagined to be beyond the picture plane (Us the viewers, a window, a still-life set up, or some other person). This portrait, more than anything, really gets me thinking about mirrors.

‘The Studio’, by Philip Guston, Oil on Canvas, 1969

Philip Guston: You mean, that might be me painting? I’m under the hood, you mean?

Audience: Yeah.

Philip Guston: Yeah, it’s occurred to me….Well, it could be all of us. We’re all hoods.

Guston speaking about ‘The Studio’, 1969, in 1973

In ‘The Studio’, by Philip Guston, we have another take on the self-portrait / artist painting a self-portrait theme. This time we can see the painting that is being painted by the painter within the painting; in doing this, Guston has painted himself from the side, as if he is watching himself paint while having some kind of out-of-body experience. An important thing about ‘The Studio’ is that the artist in the painting wears a mask. He is painting a self-portrait with a mask on, and the canvas he is working on is almost like a mirror that reflects this mask (but the wrong way for a ‘true’ reflection); in the context of the painting, the image he is working on could almost be photo-realistic. We know it is a ‘he’ behind the mask; later, in 1973, he said that he was underneath the mask. Also, in a way, depending on how you look at it, Guston exploits the picture within a picture trick to present us with two ‘different’ styles of painting that are really identical; on the one hand we have the ‘clunky, demotic style’ (Graham-Dixon 2003) that he became remembered for, and also a ‘photo-realist’ style, in that the image being worked on is an extremely close replica, visually, of the artist painting it (Do Simulacrums have anything to do with this?). Again, this is a self-portrait that contains a picture within a picture which draws us in, and also makes us guess at what is beyond its edges, similar to what Cézanne has done in making us guess at what is on the other side of his canvas and what is beyond the picture plane. If the “real-life” canvas of ‘The Studio’ was bigger, and included more of the studio, I like to think that to the left, behind the canvas the artist is working on would be a mirror, into which he is looking. I had a go at imagining how the reflection in this mirror would look from the artists’ point of view. Below is a sketch of how it might look (this was surprisingly hard!); you’ll see that it almost matches Cézanne’s composition to a ‘T’:

The reason I mention these works by Cézanne and Guston in particular, is because I wanted to show how masks and mirrors are important to some artists, especially to artists like me trying to find out whether a piece of art can have a ‘mind’. Also important, I think, is the confusion and wonder, which some works of art create within the viewer in order to draw them into the worlds contained within the works. A picture can be just a picture, but I find that the more I look at them, as in the two examples above, the more I begin to see and imagine possibilities. 

I find these paintings fascinating because I never get tired of the tricks and riddles contained within them, and I’m sure that the more I look at them, the more likely new and probably unintentional things of this sort will become apparent. As time goes by they play more and more on the imagination. Cézanne and Guston were not the only artists to play about with portraiture, and self-portraiture in these ways, others would include; Jan Van Eych (The Arnolfini Marriage, 1434), Diego Velasquez (Las Meninas, 1656-57), Pablo Picasso (in many works throughout his life), Francis Bacon (Self-Portrait 1973), David Hockney (Model with Unfinished Self-Portrait, 1977)…the list goes on and on.

Looking at these two paintings has brought me to a new development in my practical work that is beginning to draw my research together into something a little more solid and cohesive, like an almost definite path has opened up.

Masks

Persona – Latin for ‘Person’ and ‘Mask’

‘The Shaman of Trois Freres’

Masks have been an important part of human culture since the dawn of man. Discovered in the 1920’s, ‘the Shaman of Trois Freres’ gives us pictorial evidence (that dates as far back as 30,000 years) of how shamans used mask themselves to enter other worlds. These images could be the first self-portraits using masks ever made. It has been said “it seems likely that it was the shamans themselves who painted images coming through into the world of the living and visions of the transformations they experienced in the spirit world.” (Lewis-Williams (2002)), so the first masks may have been used to enter a ‘spirit world’. Hunters covered themselves in the skins of animals in order to camouflage themselves and get closer to their prey.  Masks are often used around the world within complex dance rituals, and they are used to come into closer contact with gods. Many societies around the world use masks within religious ceremonies, rites of passage, and legal processes. Some masks are believed to contain the spirits of ancestors and must be treated with care and respect. Some masks can be very dangerous, even lethal if looked at by certain people. A mask can cover the face, but can also become a whole dress or suit that covers the body. Other masks are not intended to be worn (such as Singa masks, which adorn the ends of Batak Toba Houses (Sibeth, 1991, p. 119)), and can be a part of the architecture of buildings, warding off evil spirits and intruders.

            People who believe that some kind of power resides in inanimate objects such as masks are known as ‘Animists’. This area has been covered by psychologists, anthropologists and ethnologists. An early account from nearly a century ago comes from Sigmund Freud. Two sentences from ‘Animism, Magic, and the Omnipotence of Thought’ (1913) can tell us what Animism is, in a nutshell, “Animism is, the doctrine of souls, in its narrower sense, and, in its wider sense, the doctrine of spiritual beings in general. The term ‘animatism’ has also been used to denote the theory of the living character of what appear to us to be inanimate objects.” (Freud, 1913, p. 75). This will be explored more fully later. For now, Animists are people who believe that inanimate objects such as plants, rocks, earth, etc, contain ‘souls’ or ‘spirits’, or some kind of power that is referred to as ‘Mana’ (Freud, Gell, Jung, Lewis-Williams, Mack, Pearce, Wastiau all speak about Mana in their books).

Masks that are used in today’s Western Society

The mask is used to great effect every day in Western societies too; Lady Gaga, for example, never looks the same twice whenever a photo of her is printed in the Metro (which is practically every day), this forms part of her image, and has also helped make her the most powerful woman in music. Many other musicians have used the mask in some way, shape or form to gain fame and, ironically, recognition; the list includes: David Bowie, M.F. Doom, Bobby Digital, Ghost Face Killah, Michael Jackson, Sun-Ra, SBTRKT. As we can see from this list, many of these musicians even use aliases to mask their identities still further, for instance, Madlib (real name Otis Jackson) has also released records under the name of ‘Quasimoto’, ‘Yesterdays New Quintet’ (which has five ‘members’, but all of which are the same Otis Jackson), ‘The Beat Konducta’, ‘MadVillain’, ‘JayLib’, D.J. Rels…. the list gets bigger as more music is released.

This month we saw the power that masks can have when ‘Hoody’s’, to use the popular term to describe the rioters when speaking on the radio (and, also forms a connection to Gustons’ ‘Hoods’), turned the streets upside down in cities across England. The rioters were from many different backgrounds and walks of life, and it was reported that many were from previously opposed gangs. Most of them wore hoods and scarves around their faces, garments that were presumably designed for warmth and comfort. During the riots the hoods and scarves formed a kind of masked ‘uniform’ which gave them the power of unity, without which I doubt rioters would have been so ‘successful’ in their destruction. These masks were used to cause anarchy. The helmets that riot police wore are practical masks that offer protection, and would also strike fear into most people; these masks are used to enforce the law. School uniforms are like masks that try to instil order, and a respect for learning. Football kits are masks that create a sense of camaraderie whether the team is winning or loosing. Masks can hide us away from others, but can also integrate us into something far larger than ourselves; they can make us stand out from the crowd, and in other cases can hide us within a crowd. 

Animists in the West

“….we can say that….we are all literally or metaphorically animists.”

(Paskow, 2004, P. 101)

I grew up, just like most children, playing with toys that I believed were real; I cared for them. If I was making a fight to the death happen between two Action Men, I would have them strangling and punching and running each other over in jeeps, setting traps for each other, and throwing each other off ‘cliffs’… all kinds of horrific things that boys think of and, thankfully, usually release through playing. Every day they would drink from streams if they were ‘thirsty’, and would even be chucked in the bath when they got covered in tomato sauce (blood). I remember being completely engaged in the ‘lives’, and subsequently ‘deaths’ of these plastic figures with rubbery heads. For this reason I believe most children are animists (a quote from Lord of the Flies by William Golding, or Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory could be good here). I also think that the belief that inanimate objects may have minds or lives of their own stays with us into adulthood in a deep, usually overlooked level, and is not just a phenomenon that exists within “primitive” cultures. Traces of animism can be found in works by the classical writers Charles Dickens and Edgar Allen Poe. In their stories inanimate objects take on human physiognomies to either humorous or horrific effect. More recently in the stories of Will Self, his (often schizophrenic) characters often develop relationships with objects (such as ‘The Fat Controller’ from a Thomas the Tank play-set in the book ‘My Idea of Fun’ (Self, 1993)), building up personalities and whole worlds around them. These are fictional examples (we will see later that ‘fictional-beings’ can be ‘real’), but it happens in real life as well. Many people are animists without even realizing it, and would possibly feel embarrassment if they did; often they swear at the T.V. if something is on that becomes annoying, many people also develop affection for their cars, ‘bathing’ them every weekend, buying accessories for them, even give them names. In a similar way, I believe that some of the masks I make may have ‘personalities’ of their own.      

Masks Without Eyes

“And the eyes started disappearing. They became more slits like that, see?”

(Guston speaking on Drawing at Yale Summer School of Music and Art, 1974)

Masks are used all over the world for different reasons. They come in all colours, shapes and sizes, and if we look in a certain way at the world, they pop up almost everywhere. Generally speaking though, most masks that are to be worn by people (in a literal sense), for whatever reason, do not have eyes. They have holes where the eyes would usually be. This is strange because all of the other facial features are usually present in some abstracted sense. Why not make a mask with ‘eyes’ built in, but without a mouth, surely seeing is just as important as eating?

If you have ever worn a mask on a night out to a fancy dress party, you will probably know how hard they are to see out of, as they severely cut off peripheral vision, which I find surprisingly disturbing. Masks are impractical for living normally, and are cumbersome to us physically (if we consider the Papua New Guinea in the British Museum), and visually, for seeing out of (as in cheap Halloween masks), so why has practically every culture on Earth throughout time made them?

The whole point of wearing a mask, I think, is to be able to see the world in a different way. A mask does have eyes as soon as someone wears it, and the person wearing it begins to see the world in a different way. Its not that the world magically changes as soon as a mask is put on, it’s the person inside the mask who changes. The last time I wore a mask it was in the form of a full monkey outfit in Fabric nightclub, and I danced for around seven hours. I never dance – I can’t dance, let alone for a seven hour stretch. But, with this mask on my inhibitions seemed to melt away as no one could see who I was, and that I was a bad dancer. The mask, as well as the music must have put me into some kind of trance as I remember at the end of the night wondering where did all the time go? (I was drinking water all that night because I was ‘working’ as the event manager). The mask helped me have a better time.

Masks affect people in different ways; they are not all therapy for rubbish dancers. I have yet to meet anyone who wears a mask, and acts in the same way as they do in ‘normal, everyday’ life.

            Artists in the past have used the mask to rediscover the world. Guston, mentioned earlier, is a good example. While discussing The Studio, 1969, he also said, ‘….I’m not interested in the Ku Klux Klan, but I was interested in the hooded figures. And I got very involved in it, deeply involved in it. They became real characters to me.’ (Guston talking at Yale Summer School of Music and Art, 1973). We know that during the time of painting The Studio, Guston was going through a stylistic change that was pivotal to his already secured career as one of America’s top abstract-expressionist artists. Despite this critical and financial success, he felt that “American Abstract art is a lie, a sham, a cover-up for a poverty of spirit….A mask to mask the fear of revealing oneself” (Guston, around 1970). Ironically, he had to put on a ‘mask’, and live practically as a hermit, shut off from the art world of New York in his Woodstock studio while on a kind of vision quest to rediscover himself, and the world around him. With his hood on, he ‘suddenly thought there was a whole world to explore…I’ve got a whole life’s work ahead of me”.

            I believe the discovery of the hood was critical for an artist like Guston. By portraying himself masked behind a hood, I believe that he overcame the inhibitions that were bearing down on his work as a painter belonging to the ‘New York School’, and was free to rediscover himself, and the ‘solid’ world around him at Woodstock.

Why I make Masks – Joseph Merrick

A major part of my practice involves making masks. This began when I watched David Lynch’s ‘The Elephant Man’ film while studying for my Masters degree a few years ago. In the film, and also in the diaries of Dr. Frederick Treves, the doctor who looked after ‘the Elephant Man’ in London Hospital during the 1880s, Joseph Merrick (incorrectly, and often known as ‘John’ from Lynch’s film) is shown to be a skilled modeller. Even though he only had one arm that was practical for anything he still managed to make an intricate model of a Cathedral from card (This model is still in existence, and can be seen on display at the Royal London Hospital Museum). I wondered, ‘What if Joseph Merrick made self portraits of himself from year to year?’. At the time I was also looking at the self-portraits that Rembrandt painted, and enjoyed how it’s possible to chart how he faired psychologically throughout his life just by looking at these paintings without having to know anything about his personal life from other sources. The same could have been true if the ‘Elephant Man’ had made portraits – we could see how he viewed the world, and himself, throughout his life-long disfiguring illness.

Asking myself this question got me making masks of Merrick, on a day-to-day basis. Theories suggest that Joseph suffered from both neurofibromatosis type I, and Proteus syndrome; basically conditions that made his body grow abnormally. I tried to imagine how it would be to deal with the daily ordeal of coping with these illnesses, and as a result, a body like Merrick’s, and also the mental strain that it must have created. Luckily, I am healthy, and so can never imagine how it must have been, and so really the whole concept was doomed to fail from the start. But, I did get a series of work done that has completely changed the way I view portraiture, and the world.

 

Masks as Portraiture

“…the mask explodes the limits of the body and explores the frontiers of identity.”

(Adamowicz, 1998, p. 158)

Thanks to Joseph Merrick, I realised that masks are an ideal art form because the visual potential are limitless. Also, since this time I have come to realise that practically everyone wears some kind of mask, especially artists.

When an artist makes an image of someone in the form of a portrait, he/she is really making a mask of that person which can stand in for that persons’ absence when they are not around. This is why we have so many images of famous historical people; they are important, and we don’t want to forget them or what they did. The images of these people give a sense of their important personalities instantly and efficiently as opposed to a written description of them. When artists paint self-portraits, really they are painting masks of themselves, and sometimes for the same reason; many artists see themselves as important, and want to be remembered in that way, which is fair enough in most cases.

Self-portraiture with masks has been done in many different ways in art, particularly within the field of painting. As far back as 1606, Caravaggio painted himself as a screaming decapitated head in “David with the Head of Goliath”. We have already seen Gustons’ use of the kkk hood to mask himself in ‘The Studio’ of 1969. Guston hated the klan, so why on Earth would he want to portray himself as a member? (He would later ‘unmask’ himself as a giant, bruised, cyclopic eye). The Schizophrenic artist Adolf Wӧlfli, depicts himself as the self styled ‘Knight Adolf’, ‘Emperor Adolf’, ‘Saint Adolf’…etc, whose adventures see him dying and being reborn again and again in differing forms and variations in an intense world of pattern and music which is narrated in Wӧlfli’s very own invented language. The British artist Francis Bacon often wore a mask of lipstick and boot polish in his hair while out and about in Soho, and painted himself (when “there wasn’t anyone else around to paint” (Sylvester, 1975)) in self-portraits that often looked like masks. Picasso used masks in one of modern arts most important paintings, 'Les demoiselles d'Avignon' (1907), and depicted himself as the Minotaur in later works throughout his life. Max Ernst masked himself as the alter ego ‘Lop-Lop’, the bird figure that appears in many of his works.

For different reasons, artists constantly transform themselves with masks within their portraits. Banksy would be one of the contemporary visual artists who not only keeps his identity to himself, disguising himself to carry out some of his work (as in the British Museum stunt) but also portrays him self in different guises to make psuedo-political statements.

 

Confusion, Enchantment and Trance – What Other People Have Written on Pieces of Art containing Minds

As I said earlier, some artists use visual and spatial tricks to capture the imagination of the viewer in a way that forces the viewer into a confusing state of questioning the possibilities and potentials of the work. We try to come to terms with the work but are always questioning it in some way as it plays on our minds. All the while, in my case, I am staring directly at the work, while my brain gets more confused. Some people might say that I have become ‘entranced’.

The following (very short) review will show that other people from different fields of knowledge, have touched on the things I have been talking about in various ways:

Alan Paskow, in his book The Paradoxes of Art: A Phenomenological Investigation (2004) begins with Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology, and then builds upon Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological way of perceiving the world. In a nutshell, Paskow states that it is possible to have a kind of tiered consciousness, or levels of consciousness – a form of consciousness that is completely naïve and open, that can look at a ‘fictional being’, and take it to be a real being that exists with us. In his view, there is also another form of consciousness that regulates what and who the first form of consciousness takes to be a ‘real other’, and judges whether this can be true or not:

 ….I am appealing to what I believe to be the intimations of consciousness1, for it not only takes so-called fictional beings to be real; it also, if I am right, regards inanimate beings, in its so-called disposition, as intendingly able to communicate something to us, although naturally not through direct speech or gestures.…it seems to me, things themselves stand opposed to us as intending, quasi-living beings, hence with personality like characteristics…..

(Paskow, 2004, pp 98 – 100).

The anthropologist Alfred Gell, in his book Art and Agency: An Anthropological theory (1998) builds on this idea that ‘things’ have ‘personality like characteristics’. As an anthropologist, he looks at artifacts within the context of the social relationships in which they are used, and so, not necessarily as gallery or museum pieces. In this social context, Gell says that art objects are able to mediate ‘social agency’, and so in some cases can be treated as ‘persons’ (Gell, 1998, pp 8-9). He goes on to say:

Very much part of the theory I am proposing is the idea that we approach art objects (and members of a larger class of indexes of agency) as if they had ‘physiognomies’ like people. When we see a picture of a smiling person, we attribute an attitude of friendliness to ‘the person in the picture’ and (if there is one) the sitter, or ‘subject’ of the picture. We respond to the picture in this way because the appearance of smiling triggers a (hedged) inference that (unless they are pretending) this person is friendly, just as a real persons smile would trigger the same inference. We have, in short, access to ‘another mind’ in this way, a real mind or a depicted mind, but in either case the mind of a well disposed person. (Gell, 1998, pp15).

As well as building up an interesting anthropological theory in which art objects can be regarded as persons with ‘minds akin to a human one’ (Gell, 1998, p.17), Gell also comes up with an interesting ‘Technology of Enchantment’, in which technical skill is used to ‘cast a spell over us so that we see the real world in an enchanted form’ (Gell, 1998, p. 44). To illustrate how this works, he uses his experience of looking at a Vermeer. While looking, he imagines himself to be Vermeer painting the picture, in that he can work out to a certain point how he would go about making the painting. However, when he reaches the point at which he cannot imagine being able to paint like Vermeer. Gell gets stuck at this point, where he imagines being Vermeer until his knowledge of Vermeer’s techniques run dry. It is in this state where (Gell argues) he becomes ‘Enchanted’.

This section on Gell’s interpretation of looking at Vermeer needs better quotes here

The decorative forms of Troibander (Spelling?) canoe prowls illustrate Gell’s interesting views on how pattern can become ‘animated’ to entrance the viewer, and may also help me later as I look more closely into how pattern can be used to entrance a viewer while looking at art works:

We are accustomed to speak of decorated surfaces as ‘animated’. This idiom reflects the fact that the motifs in decorative art seem to be engaged in a mazy dance in which our eyes become readily lost…the inherent agency in decorative forms, forms which do not simply refer to (represent) agency in the external world , but which produce agency in the physical body of the index itself, so that it becomes a ‘living thing’ without recourse to the imitation of any living thing. (Gell, 1998, p. 76).

David Lewis-Williams, in his book The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art (2002), has interesting things to say about how human consciousness can slide through spectrums, and how pattern can affect this slippage. In an interesting quote on states of consciousness, Lewis-Williams cites William James, and Colin Martindale:

As long ago as 1902, the influential American psychologist William James, who successively taught physiology, psychology and philosophy at Harvard, noted that what we think of as normal, waking consciousness is only one type of consciousness (though, as we shall see, it too has a unitary state), ‘whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness, entirely different’. He added: ‘No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. More recently, Colin Martindale, a cognitive (rather than evolutionary) psychologist, has re-emphasized the point that studies of the mind have concentrated too much on rational states. He argues:

We need to altered states of consciousness as well as normal, waking consciousness. We need to understand the ‘irrational’ thought of the poet as well as the rational thought of the [laboratory] subject solving a logical problem…we need to investigate the historical evolution of ideas in the real world as well as how concepts are formed in laboratory situations. Finally, since people are not computers, we must ask how emotional and motivational factors affect cognition.  

I therefore suggest that we follow Martindale and think of consciousness not as a state but as a continuum or a spectrum.  (Lewis-Williams, 2002, P.122)

Lewis-Williams then goes on to talk about three states of consciousness, going from normal, everyday waking consciousness, into ‘the first ‘lightest’ stage [of hallucination where] people may experience geometric visual percepts that include dots, grids, zigzags, nested canary curves, and meandering lines’. According to him, ‘these percepts are ‘wired’ into the human nervous system, of all people, no matter what their cultural background, have the potential to experience them’ (Lewis-Williams, 2002, p.127). From there, a person gradually reaches the third state of consciousness, where, ‘in this stage, subjects enter into and participate in their own imagery: they are part of a strange realm. They blend with both their geometric and their iconic imagery. It is in this final stage that people sometimes feel themselves to be turning into animals and undergoing other frightening or exulting transformations.’ (Lewis-Williams, 2002, p.130).

These states of consciousness, or a different way of looking at the world, can be induced through the ingestion of psychotropic drugs, repetitive dances and rhythm, by looking at visually intricate patterns, or (possibly) by wearing a mask. I believe that everyday we slip in and out of different modes or stages of consciousness every day without even realizing it, and may not need any of the things mentioned above. When I am painting, hours pass by that seem like minutes. The same is true of running; the rhythm of breathing matched with the pace can put me in a trance so that when I have finished running, I can’t quite remember any of it. Watching a good film puts us in a trance, also playing video-games, reading books.

Pattern again seems important, and Lewis-Williams believes that these patterns, or ‘percepts’ are wired into all human brains, and have been since the first humans – we have the same consciousness as we did back then. The same was observed by Steven Rose in 1973. He writes:

[A] striking observation is that among Homo sapiens there is no sign of further brain development – today’s humans have the same cranial capacity, and hence presumably the same brain weight, as the earliest Homo sapiens found in the fossil record.

(Rose, 1973, p.139-140)

(Jung’s theory on Inherited Consciousness in Archaic Man could also be worth looking at is support of this).

Another person I have been reading with interest is James Elkins, who has said some interesting things in his books Pictures & Tears: A History of People who have Cried in Front of Paintings (2001), and The Object Stares Back: On The Nature of Seeing (1996). In these books, Elkins has researched his own and other peoples’ reactions to images (usually paintings), with results that could help to contribute to some kind of ‘Trance Theory’ (Elkins’ name) that may help me to work out whether or not a ‘mind’ can be somehow displaced into a piece of art, through a mode of ‘trance’. Of Picasso’s ‘Les Demoiselles d'Avignon’ of 1907, he writes, [It] is one of the rare pictures that can be intimidating to look at simply because so many people in the picture are staring back at us as intensely as they can….the real problem is that wall of eyes. They impel me to stand rooted in place as if I were a painted figure myself: like zombies, they turn me into one of their own….I cannot move, I cannot turn away.” (Elkins, 1996, pp212-213). In this passage, Elkins, while he stands transfixed by the picture, becomes ‘a painted figure’ himself. This is echoed by Paskow when he writes from a phenomenological point of view, ‘My claim is that we all posit the other as another in his or her own independent being and that at the same time on another level the other embodies a story or narrative for us that is not only familiar, but also our own. It follows that one’s own essence is defined by “the other”.’(Paskow, 2004, p.133). Also, Elkins writes:

….people can find themselves staring at a painting and not know how long they have been there. Pictures have always been like that for me. They put me in a little trance, and make me forget where I am…In Bertrand [Rougé’s] way of thinking, people who cry in front of paintings are actually taken away: their motionless bodies remain in front of the paintings, but their thoughts are temporarily lost, even to themselves. They are “gone”, somewhere inside the world of the artwork. Crying, or shock, is what keeps them there, and when the tears dry up and they come back, shaky and unsteady, as if the trip back from the painting led across a narrow bridge suspended high over a gorge. I’ll call this theory the trance theory…

(Elkins, 2001, p. 72)

He then builds upon this ‘trance theory’ based on a changing lifelong relationship he has had with the Ecstasy of St. Francis (1475-1480) by Giovanni Bellini. It is interesting to me because it is the beginning of a theory of how people become so entranced with a piece of art as to become enraptured and to cry. Another reason for my interest is that in my view, instead of making us cry, some pieces of art can be humorous and even fill us with laughter, which may also ‘keep us inside the work’.

Finally, the work of neuroscientists Henrik Ehrsson and V.S. Ramachandran attempts to cure patients of phantom limb syndrome. They use simple experiments with fake bodies and mirror boxes that can help trick the patients brain into believing that their missing limb is still there, gradually this somehow helps the patient come to terms with not having that limb anymore. Ehrsson has gone as far as to induce full out of body experiences with his experiments, and has also got patients to believe that they are inhabiting the body of another person while they are shaking that persons hand (!). details of these experiments can be found at this site: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0003832

These experiments may have some practical worth for me later as I develop.

This very short review of what I have read so far has suggested three points to me :-

-         That other people argue for pieces of art being treated as having a mind, just like a ‘real’ person.

-         To experience a piece of art as having a ‘mind’, the viewer must engage with the work in a special way in most cases.

-         A way to experience a piece of art as having a ‘mind’, could be to somehow ‘enter into the work’ by being in some way entranced by it, and that the work needs the visual power to put the viewer into this trance state.

Can a Piece of Art have a Mind?

My reading so far has found evidence that there is a wide field of people from areas ranging in philosophy, neuroscience, anthropology, archaeology, and history.

Fortunately for me, I belong to none of these fields. If I did, I don’t think I would be very good at any of them. I consider myself as an artist. I have grown up making art, have been trained as an artist, and have in a round about way come to ask myself whether I really believe a piece of art can have a mind. I am trying to tackle this question in a practical way as an artist, and believe that it can offer a rich source of information that can feed into ideas for some really interesting and original pieces that will help towards an answer from a different perspective.

So, using parts of these theories to form a bedrock or springboard, I have been using my artwork as a form of investigation into whether or not a piece of art could have a mind. I also intend to find out what other practicing artists, past and present, have to say on the subject.

Recently, I have been exploring this question with masks, mirrors, and pattern as a result of research surrounding the area. I’m hoping that I can develop what I’m working on and through this build up my own theory as to how, if at all, a piece of art can have a mind. As we have seen with this very quick look at the work of other people in different fields (a more thorough analysis to come later), pieces of art quite possibly can have minds. In my investigation, I want to try to come to this conclusion in a more material way, with pieces of art that people can (hopefully) engage with, appreciate, and really feel to have some kind of mind ticking away inside. 

Time Well Wasted

Since beginning my investigation into whether a piece of art can have a mind, I have asked other people what they think. I have already been told by some that the question is a silly one in the first place, that the answer is simply ‘NO’, which is fair enough – I also sometimes wondered (and still do on occasion) whether I’m wasting my time, and also what I’m contributing to the world. Whatever the outcome is, at least I will have an answer either way. In the meantime, researching this question has seen me looking at theories,(sometimes very bizarre) experiments, documentaries, subjects and most importantly art works, that I never would have made time to explore hadn’t it been for this question. The past few months has seen me recording dreams, giving presentations, doing bits and pieces of tutoring, reading, writing (something I don’t do very often as you can probably tell), and making lots of art. So, at least after thinking about this, I feel that my time has not been wasted, and that doing this will, and is now, proving important to my artistic development, and will hopefully contribute a little something at least to the field of Painting specifically, and to the subject of Art generally.  

New Mirror Masks

I have recently begun work on a new set of three masks that use a combination of form, pattern, and mirrors in a way that tries to put the viewer ‘into’ the work. So far, I have finished one. Taking a cue from the illusory experiments of Erhrsson and Ramachandran, and also from the questions inspired by the self-portraits of Cézanne and Guston mentioned above, I built a mask that has a mirror in place of its ‘eyes’.

On a practical level, the colours, pattern and form (Carved, semi-three-dimensional board, not on a traditional canvas), were chosen to really make the piece have an impact and catch the attention of a passer-by, should it ever be exhibited amongst other peoples work. I still consider this piece a painting, albeit a painting that leans toward sculpture and mask making. Friends sometimes say my work is not ‘painting’, but then when I ask them what they think it is, they don’t know. This I like, and use it as a kind of test. That fact that some people question what exactly it is that I make keeps them standing in front of what I’ve made, makes them really look at what it is hanging on the wall. Even though I consider it to be a painting, for now to make things easier, Ill keep calling it a mask.

I do consider myself a painter; I really enjoy paintings’ rich history, and believe (controversially for anyone who is an artist that doesn’t paint) that all other art forms stem from painting, and that painting itself stems from drawing.

Anyway, this ‘mask’, ‘painting’, whatever you want to call it, uses a mirror in place of ‘eyes’. The point of this is that the work needs the participation of the viewer in order for it to be ‘complete’. I have noticed with the earlier masks that I made that people always look at the eyes. Also, from personal experience, when drawing a self-portrait, or a portrait of someone else, that if I get the eyes even slightly wrong, then the drawing is botched; a lot depends on the ‘eyes’ of a figurative image. It is for these reasons I know that once the mask has caught the attention of the viewer, they instinctively will look for its eyes. Maybe they will look to see if there is ‘anyone’ behind the mask looking out at them.

Instead of someone else looking out at them from behind or ‘in’ the mask, they are confronted with their own eyes looking ‘out’ at them from ‘within’ the mask. The mask is a unique image for everyone who looks at it; it is never the same twice for two people. I took the photo above of myself looking into, or back out of the mask, and the result is odd. While looking into it at myself looking out I began (I think) to have strange feelings.

My peripheral vision, while looking into the eyes of the mask, was taken up with the rest of the mask, particularly its gnarled teeth. While standing there looking and trying to figure out what was going on I remember running my tongue (unconsciously at first, I think) over my teeth in my mouth. I realized I was doing this in the act. I think I was becoming confused as to what was really me, or where I was; was I still the viewer looking at a mask on a wall, or was I the mask looking at the viewer, with grubby horrible teeth and bones shooting out of my ears? In a literal way, I had ‘entered into’ the mask (as Paskow might put it), and was looking back out at myself through its eyes, perhaps making me see the world in a different way (or in a way that re-affirms my sense of self in relation to “others”, the “other” being me the viewer, while what become me (the mask) looks at this person (Paskow, p.67)).

Looking at other people (I have only so far done this with three others) looking into the mask is also a strange experience, especially when the reflection of their eyes in the mask turns to me standing behind them. This produces an uncanny feeling that the person is no longer standing in front, looking at the mask, but has become the mask, and is staring at me through the mask. They also remark that looking into the mask is ‘strange’ and ‘odd’ (my Mother recoiled when she saw the above photo of me staring out…then started laughing). After this initial and slight unease, people so far have laughed, and then gone on to look in different ways, from different angles, and have tried to take photos as the one above. I like to think that they are being entranced, if only for a minute, by the mask.

The way people look at, and respond to the mask may be a starting point into making a piece of art with a ‘mind’. It seems, that at some level for a brief period of time that while looking into the mask, the viewers mind maybe is displaced, and they begin to wonder (as in my case) where they are in relation to the mask; whether they are ‘inside’ looking out (and so part of the work in some real way), or outside looking in.

More needs to be done. I need to finish the other masks for a start. Hopefully, with a series of three masks with different facial expressions, different effects to different intensities could be recorded. I need to get more people to look at the work and to record their thoughts and build up some kind of record that may help show even if a piece of art cannot have a ‘mind’ in a real sense, at least it can, for a time, and in the form of a mask, reflect back the viewers thoughts to them, and make them stare in wonder as they consider where they are or what’s happening.   

Bibliography

Ashton, Dore, 1976, A Critical Study of Philip Guston, University of California Press Ltd, Berkeley and Los Angeles

Adamowicz, Elza, 1998, Surrealist Collage in Text and Image, University of Cambridge, Cambridge

Auping, Michael, 2003, Philip Guston Retrospective, Thames and Hudson, Modern Art Museum of Worth

Coolidge, Clark, 2011, Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations,

University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles

Elkins, James, 1996, The Object Stares Back: On The Nature of Seeing, A Harvest Book Harcourt, Inc.

New York

Elkins, James, 2001, Pictures & Tears, Routledge, New York

Freud, Sigmund, 1913, Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics,

Gell, Alfred, 1998, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory, Clarendon Press, Oxford

Graham-Dixon, Andrew, 2010, Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane, Penguin Books, London

Jung, Carl Gustav, 1918, The Role of the Unconscious, Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd, London

Paskow, Alan, 2004, The Paradoxes of Art: A Phenomenological Investigation, Cambridge University Press, New York

Peiry, Lucienne, 2001, Art Brut: The Origins of Outsider Art, Arts Council of Switzerland

Poe, Edgar Allen, 1908, Edgar Allen Poe: The Complete Stories, Everyman’s Library, New York

Ramachandran, V.S., 2011, The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human Book Launch:- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiIVtROrtbk

Rhodes, Colin, 2000, Outsider Art: Spontaneous Alternatives, Thames and Hudson, London

Rose, Steven, 1973, The Conscious Brain, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London

Self, Will, 1993, My Idea of Fun, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. London

William-Lewis, David, 2002, The Mind in The Cave, Thames and Hudson, London