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research-article2017
VCU0010.1177/1470412917720441journal of visual cultureBooks
journal of visual culture
Books Hans Belting, Face and Mask: A Double History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017. 270 pp. ISBN 978 0691162355 How often have you read an article and then Googled the author to see him or her? How often have you swiped right or left just looking at the faces without reading the profile on Tinder? Seeking faces and trying to put faces to names happens every day but Hans Belting has brought together Face and Mask to tell us: what you see is not a face but rather a presence ‘rigid as a mask’ (p. 6). The book speaks of faces and their representational qualities to ask what a face actually is and how can we write a cultural history of faces? He portrays ‘face’ to challenge representations and to provoke curiosities for investigating subject, self and reality by way of faces. The book, in its luxurious print, is placed at the intersection of historical anthropology and art history to insist that ‘the face is the cynosure of all images … with the impossibility of representing it accurately’ (p. 7). Face and Mask is divided into three major thematic parts that are argued through images, depictions and examples from curated artefacts to photographs that the author has explored during 10 years of writing the book. Regardless of the thematic division, 21 subsections compare, analyse and deconstruct faces and masks alongside each other. Hence, the book could easily be read in segments without attending to the larger ideas argued in each part. The first part encourages readers to look at faces and masks in equal measure through histories that reveal how masks of the self, and cultural and social roles of the face correspond similarly in visual encounters. Belting discusses the notion of role in sociocultural life in order to state that this role and other presences enable faces to become ‘an infinite repository of masks’ (p. 23). Then he steps from life to death to align the mask in the cultural history of the face to the cult origin of the mask. He refers to various examples that range from a skull from Jericho (7000 BC) to a drawing from Antonin Artaud (1948) to argue that ‘the mask was understood as a copy of the face … as a substitute for that face’ (p. 36). In a brief but succinct section, Belting addresses how the separation and duality that today is imagined between face and mask could be traced to journal of visual culture [journals.sagepub.com/home/vcu] SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC and Melbourne) Copyright © The Author(s), 2017. Reprints and permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalspermissions.nav Vol 16(2): 274–284 DOI 10.1177/1470412917720441 https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412917720441
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the colonial past when masks became exotic objects for ‘Western curiosity’ (p. 43). Belting does not leave the first part with just the exploration of faces and masks in histories but also shows how the changing role of faces in relation to masks became dramatic and performative. Hence, he moves on to portraits and masks in search of the drama of the subject to draw ‘the face as representation’ (p. 91). This part conveys how portraits and their capability to imply expressions and meanings devalued masks because they were understood as a ‘falsification of the face’ (p. 92). The social role of the mask was re-claimed by the face and its representational ability to act and to express; however, portraits became proxies and symbolic surfaces for the face in Europe. Thus, the mask that was separated from faces by colonial assumptions made its way back into European cultures via portraits. In his passionate prose, Belting shares the example of ‘an old Flemish portrait’ (p. 93) which gave the portrayed person a symbolic presence ‘as if still alive’ (p. 95). However, he does not ignore how the history of each individual portrait is influenced by the intention of the portrait to document. He suggests portraits that emerge from ‘shadows of courtly representations’ (p. 104) turn to the life mask that rivalled the death mask. The life masks that were painted were neither cast from faces like death masks nor legitimized by contact with the bodies. Belting proposes that this gap between the painted portraits and death masks brings our attention to how a portrait was ‘an interpretation determined by social interests’ (p. 105). It is from this reference that Belting continues to explain the pictures of Jan van Eyck, the 14th-century Flemish painter. His painted portraits resembled the face and the authenticity he bestowed on them crafted an intersection between the painted and the real world by giving the painting a signature, name, time and age. Therefore, the portrait separates the time of memory from the time of the viewer. The second part ends by moving toward portrait photography to examine how faces highlight the elusive self that cannot be framed and, by association, cannot even be defined. Belting refers to the series of photographs by Jorge Molder who photographed his own face, its reflections on various surfaces and also next to his own face mask. In exploring these photographs, Belting states that, despite the attempts at depiction, frame and photograph, ‘the face resists the resemblance to itself’ (p. 167). The last part that examines media and masks explores with sarcastic tone the production of faces provided by new media, the selfie-taking era and ‘a generation with a short memory’ (p. 175). Belting mentions at the beginning of the third part that ‘the concept of cyberface marks the rejection of true resemblance and likeness’ (p. 175, original emphasis). This unsettling part with the interrogative tone of an anthropologist with a nostalgia for clarity questions whether the notion of the face is the same as the earlier era when the story of the face could be considered as the history of images. It begins with the face ‘boom’ with reference to the faces in the American photo magazine Life since 1937 and ends with the portrait of Mao. Belting highlights the production of faces in an intriguing story of Mao’s portrait
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by comparing the official portrait of Mao commissioned by the Communist Party with the portrait of Mao by Andy Warhol. He ‘reconstruct[s] their mutual history’ (p. 228) by examining how the content and timing of the two faces correspond to each other and lend meaning to each other. Belting’s comparison is a well-crafted introduction to understanding the role of media in the production of faces and transition in the epilogue of the book. The epilogue includes internet culture and ‘radical changes in media culture’ (p. 239) to address how faces ‘can be reproduced that belong to no one but exist only in images’ (p. 240) in the current era. Belting ends the book by reminding us that digital masks that immerse faces in a virtual aura offer a similar experience to that of the iconic painters and the masks of the cult of death. They differ merely in their production process. Hans Belting has made a remarkable contribution to European visual anthropology and his latest book falls more towards art history and philosophy of image. Face and Mask resembles a cabinet of curiosities that any student of anthropology has to enter to learn what it means to speak of visual cultures and images. However, the book is not for those unfamiliar with the author; it must be read with reference to his larger oeuvre to comprehend his methods of analysis and the bases for his interpretation of images. In order to explain faces, the book privileges history over culture and sociality so that sometimes the analysis resembles historicism. This historicization is especially tangible when the internet and digital media are explored in a most general manner without attending to the details of the production of the digital masks. Younes Saramifar Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands Email:
[email protected]
Kris Paulsen, Here/There: Telepresence, Touch, and Art at the Interface. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017. 250 pp. ISBN 978 0 262 03572 9 I Wish I Was Shot/I Wish You Cared: Defining Ethics For an Eternal Telepresent In May 1983, British folk-punk icon and left-wing activist Billy Bragg released his debut album Life’s a Riot with Spy vs Spy, a remarkably compact yet influential one-sided cassette containing 16 minutes of political critique and love songs. Over the album’s 7-item tracklist, the young musician’s lyrics ricocheted across themes as diverse as the commodification of aesthetics, the limited opportunities available to working-class Britons, and the emotional pangs of romance, reconciliation, and betrayal that characterize youth. In what I presume holds true for countless other angst-ridden adolescents, I believed once that Bragg’s nasal intonations
