history of the mask in sacred ceremonies, as we shall be doing in this study, one reaches different conclusions. The ceremonial mask clearly dominated the body of the wearer because one needed more face than the body was able to provide. Deleuze expanded the argument from A Thousand Plateaus in his book on the painter Francis Bacon, when he claimed that Bacon was "a painter of heads, not of faces."4'1 Some critical caution is appropriate here, because Bacon did not oppose the face per se, but rather portraiture, in order to liberate it from its conventions. In doing so, his goal was to make it expressive in the scream, which finally and ultimately destroys the mask and strips it of representational conventions.
For Deleuze and Guattari the concept of an absolute distinction between head and face is definitive. They designate the head as part of the body, whereas they separate the face from the body, because the face serves as a carrier of expression and thereby dominates the body. This thesis is far from astonishing. In cultural history we also find many examples to show that the face was often disputed and, one might say, abused. The problem arises when one begins to search history for those guilty of imposing power with the face. In this case both authors make the face of Christ responsible for the authority of the face over the body. In Christianity, however, there was never any "Zero Hour" for this image. Christianity distanced itself radically from the Orient and its imageless origins in later centuries once it had elevated the icon of Christ to a cult image."''
In 1992, approximately ten years after the first appearance of the book by Deleuze and Guattari, the Fondation Cartier in Paris dedicated an exhibition to the face (A Visage Decouvert), which represented a position contrary to that of the two authors. The exhibition presented a broad panorama of global cultures in which the face was revealed not as a stiff template, but as an open form, which constantly crossed the boundaries between presence and representation (or absence), between near and far."6 In this panorama the face is either veiled or surrounded by images that open up a multiplicity of associations and reveal the face as a focal point of mythical, religious, official, and intimate imagination. The face is thus an image that is transformed through other images and also transforms images in and of itself. The cultural history of the face is image history that has its origins in religious ceremony.
THE CULT ORIGIN OF THE MASK
The history of the human face begins in the Neolithic period with masks that represented or replicated faces. Masks are evidence of the oldest human concept of the face.1 The beliefs of early, preliterate cultures about the face were expressed in ceremo-
nial masks that gave faces to spirits and ancestors so that they might appear in religious rituals. Such masks also contain statements about the living face, which was understood as a vehicle for social codes controlled by society. Masks that transformed the face could be painted on or placed over it as artifacts. The production of masks was intended to make them correspond with one expression, over which society could claim the right of disposition. They served as official proxy faces for spirits of the dead, who had lost their bodies. There thus developed a universe of masks that encompasses almost all known cultures. The variety of forms and interpretations is virtually inexhaustible. And yet it is always the face—whether as foil or model—to which it corresponds. Even when a mask concealed the face or was presented by an anonymous wearer, it nonetheless brought a new face into view. The meaning of this face was agreed upon by social norms or comprehensible only to initiates.
In Europe the mask suffered the loss of such significance very early; today it often survives only in folklore or during carnival season. Yet it remained a memory in the theater, which in antiquity had secularized the cult of masks and introduced them to the stage in order to identify various dramatic parts. This was the role mask. The object of the following remarks is not only to view the mask as a subject for ethnology but also to restore its privileged place in the cultural genealogy of the face. This means that one must understand the face along with the masks that represent or dramatize a face. When one contemplates the cult of masks in general, one becomes aware of two structures that invite interpretation. First, there is the complicated and often dramatic relationship between mask and wearer, a relationship that was often surrounded with taboos if the wearer had to remain anonymous to avoid endangering the presence in the mask. Second, the dramatic presentation of the mask is often represented by the oversimplified shorthand notion of "the dance." In this context dance is really a collective term for the performative presence of the mask when it appears along with the ritually prescribed movements of a dancer who functions primarily as an actor onstage. In doing so, the man-made mask imbues itself with a life that it lacked when it was a mere object. In contrast to the face with its mimic expressions, the man-made mask possesses a stiff, blank surface unlil it is used in performance by a living wearer who gives it his gaze and his voice. At that point the rigid surface seems to erupt into movement, which is augmented by physical gesture during the performance. The mask ritual transfers the expressive drama of the face to the gestural drama of a wearer, who "embodies" the mask in the truest sense of the word by lending it the body with which it appears to awaken to life. When observers ask who is appearing in the mask, they are certainly not wondering who is acting behind the mask, but who the figure is that is being performed via the mask. The presence of the mask demands the
32
FACE AND MASK: CHANGING VIEWS
33
absence of its interchangeable wearer. Masks take command of the body more decisively than the face can, and they dominate the body that wears them. By transforming the body, they imbue it with a symbolic power that allows the expression to take on a life of its own. Roger Caillois called the mask "a medium of metamorphosis" and an "instrument of political power."2
The mask is simultaneously surface and image, which may also be said of the face, which offers itself as an image when revealed as the bearer of expression, and which can also be painted. The word surface contains the concept efface. Etymologi-cally, a surface is a plane that lies over or upon a face. Similarly, the mask of a face is also placed upon 1 he face. It consists of an outside, which we see, and an inside, which is not revealed to our gaze. And yet the openings that connect inside and outside make the mask permeable to the face it conceals. The masktvas invented for a face, which it fits like a second face.
There is much evidence that the cult of the dead predates all other cults and religions. Masks affixed to corpses can be found as early as prehistoric cultures. In such cases the ancestors were not presented as part of a mask ritual, but rather represented by a likeness. It goes withou I saying that masks were appropriate for the dead after their faces had been lost. If one wanted to restore a face to them it could only be in the form of a mask, which took the place of a living face. In this we can see the roots of the human habit of producing images m general. From the ritual practice that employed masks, we may conclude that faces were also understood as images in life—namely, ones that could be reconstituted upon the dead without sacrificing visibility. The origin of ancestor cults and cults of the gods may also be reflected in the history of the mask. Yet there is a fundamental difference between a mask that covered the faceless corpse with a replica of the dead person's face and one that was presented dramatically in ritual.
Through the vehicle of the mask, the ancestors returned to the living in whose social framework their death had left a void. In doing so, masks reproduced the social characteristics of the living face, and possibly represented the local norms that a society practiced with ihe face. We find the epoch-making invention of the mask around 7000 BC in the Neolithic culture of the Near East.3 These masks already show openings for the eyes and mouth, and one example in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem even has teeth formed in the opening of the mouth, as if the mask were beginning to speak (fig. 5).* The surviving examples show a smoothly polished surface and betray traces of lifelike coloration, which means that these masks were meant to portray authentic faces.5 For whom and for what purpose were these masks intended? The heavy stone material eliminates the possibility of use by living wearers or dancers. The masks, for the most part, have holes around
Stone Mask from [he area around I lebron. ca. 7000 BC (Jerusalem, ttie Israel Museum)
their edges, which served to affix them to something. It is possible that they were tied upon corpses du ring the process of decomposition. A further del ail points to [his explanation—namely, that there is evidence of a cult of the skull at the same archaeological site, which represents a different stage in this process. If one follows this argument, then the openings in the masks have no practical function but were rather symbolic in nature, for they could only have been intended for the dead. Millennia later masks returned to the Egyptian mummy where the only thing that was represented pi< tonally was the face, whereas the rest of the body disappeared under layers of linen strips.
The same Neolithic site complex also contains evidence of a second practice in the cult of the dead. This consists of real skulls covered with a thin layer of fired lime and clay fused together; the empty eye sockets are filled with seashells (fig. 6). In this
34
FACE AND MASK: CHANGING V13WS
35
FIGURE 6 Skull from Jericho, ca. 7000 BC (Damascus, Archaeological Museum)
36
case the mask does not lie upon the face, but rather it is the face, for it is modeled dirccdy onto the skull, to which it has restored the face that it once wore. In other words, in place of its living face, the skull has received a new, permanent one, which may then be underst ood as an image. In some cases, the skulls were mounted on small structures such as pedestals. This produced a composite entity consisting of skull (corpse) and image. The skull alone retained its complete form in order to carry a likeness. In addition to these skull statues, this archaeological site has also yielded face masks, which were separated from the corpse and buried face down.6 A third group of artifacts consists of statues or dolls, which were probably only used briefly during the burial. An example from Ain Ghazal conveys an impression of how the skulls with the implanted eyes looked, (fig. 7)7 The excavators concluded that the ritual practices regarding the skulls attested to an ancestor cult of an agrarian society. Nowadays, however, many details suggest a privileged treatment of the dead who enjoyed a particular social function and whose skulls were then used as cult objects.8
To interpret these finds, one must view the masks and their sculpted overlay together. The everyday experience of people with their dead was probably the most decisive factor here. They began with the impure corpse and ended with its purification in the faceless skull, which permitted cul lure to intrude upon nature.9 Since that moment the question of the face in the mask has never been posed so profoundly, nor the answer framed so radically. This earliest practice introduces the dualism between visibility and invisibility, between displaying and concealing the image on one and the same wearer—on the body itself. The face has been exchanged for a mask once death has destroyed it. From the Stone Age masks we can discern how early the connection between face and mask entered the consciousness of human cultures. They suggest that the mask was understood as a copy of the (ace that one wanted to reproduce as a substitute for that face.
The practice of making death masks has continued into the modern era in ever-newer forms and has not only produced modern portraits but also stimulated spec
FACE AND MASK: CHANGING VIF.WS
FIGURE 7 S;atuette from Am Ghazal, 7000 BC (Paris, Musee du Louvre)
ulation on the part of intellectuals. It thus makes sense to recall that these are the origin and root of representation of the human face. The history of the face has always been one of the human image. The best known and most significant con tinuation of the prehistoric death mask was the death cult in the first high culture that developed in Egypt. The rich repertoire of image-making techniques appears in finished form as early as the third century BC. All forms, from the portrait to the complete statues in the round, have their origins in the mummy, which had withdrawn from human sight when inside the tomb, but was represented outside by images of the dead. During the mummification with wrappings that concealed rather than depicted the body, the practice was to emphasize the face through the use of a mask, which was fitted to the skull and seemed to gaze with tire eyes of the dead. An especially early example from the third millennium BC (now in the Kunst-hist6risch.es Museum [Museum of Art History] in Vienna) si ill bears traces of skull bandages on the inside of the mask (fig. 8). In this case the plaster mask sits directly upon the skull and thus reconstructs the face on the corpse as in prehistoric finds.'" In such a second face, which could also be gilded in order to suggest eternal existence, the embodiment of the dead found its visual center." An image substitutes for the face. The mask is the new face.
In the late period of Egyptian culture, when the country was under Roman occupation, the three-dimensional mask was replaced by a hybrid form, which
FIGURE 8 Skull of a mummy, overlaid with p1 aster, ca. 2300 BC (Vtenria, Kunsthistorisches Museum) FIGURE 9 Mummy portrait fiomFayum, detail (Paris, Musee du louvre)
brought panel painting out of dwelling spaces and into the tomb. The so-called mummy portrait (fig. 9) does not represent a mummy, but is act ually a life study that was atl.ar.hed directly to the mummy in place of a mask. The young woman from Fayum, who looks at us from such a panel painting in the Louvre, presents a time-bound likeness from life, especially with her personal jewelry. This portrait presents a stark contrast to the timeless mask whose place it tookThis contradiction can be explained by very different attitudes toward death. With their funeral rites, the Romans introduced a procession of ancestors into public life. The wax portraits, of which a rare example from the necropolis at Cumae remains, were molds of the head, the realism of which emphasized elements of character or of family resemblance (fig. 10).!J These paved the way for the portrait busts of marble and bronze that were objects of public veneration.
The ritual performed by t he living has been of greater significance in the death cults of many cultures than either the grave cult itself or the preparation of the corpse. In this connection, the ceremonial mask was less an object than a prop for the role of an actor who embodied and summoned the ancestors. This brings up the question of image per se, which we encountered with the corpse in quite a different way.'4 Here it is not a question of how the mask looks; when and how it appears are the deciding factors. In such rituals the mask is the performance itself. We remain prisoners of a modern concept of the image when we think of dance and mask as
FACE AND MASK: CHANGING VIEWS
separate entities. The specialized disciplines that focus on either the performing or the visual arts are responsible for this dichotomy. Such a differentiation, however, falls short of accounting for image praxis in most cultures. A mask cannot be explained by its form alone, but rather through the cult ceremony in which it gains its significance before an audience of initiates. The cult ceremony endows the mask with life—life that the carved surface lacks   and imbues it with voice, gaze, and movement. The cult ritual transforms the mask into a face among faces—a foreign and often secretive one, but nonetheless a face to which the physical gestures of the dancer can give the impression of expressivity. For this reason, most research does not treat types of masks but rather customs surrounding masks, which express themselves in the various types formed by the mask carver.
In his book The Way of the. Masks, Claude Levi Strauss describes transregional distribution and influence of masks among the Indians of the American Northwest. For them masks play a cent ral role in creation myths because they illustrate narratives. "A
FIGURE 10 Wax death mask from the Necropolis of Cumae (Naples, National Museum of Archaeology)
mask never exists for itself alone, but rather refers to other masks, real and potential, which could have been chosen to replace any one of them. It is not merely that which it portrays, but rather participates with all that it simultaneously excludes. Like myth, a mask thus denies the existence of other masks by reacting to them, transforming competition or opposing it. For this reason the native peopl es used masks as a means of communication in the service of diplomatic relations with distant relatives by expressing family relationship through symbolic and collective faces."11
In an interview given in i960 to promote the exhibition Masques in the Musée Guimet in Paris, Lévi-Strauss emphasized the incredible variety of masks that this exhibition documented.'" He noted that it was useless to seek "morphological similarities" among masks because their meaning only becomes apparent in the context of the local cult. He notes that communication took place via a different means than the everyday face. Masks that concealed and those thai revealed could not be distinguished from each other: "each mask is both one and the other... the function of the mask is almost opposite to that of the word," which serves the purpose of direct communication between two people. "The mask interrupts this communication to create one of a completely different nature. It creates participation or correspondence, not exchange." What then do masks mean in different cultures? He further maintains that they fulfilled "a social function," and their assignment to "religion, secular society, or festival" expressed its elf m different choices of style. Ultimately every ritual function produces its own mask. The mask is like "a woman wearing makeup, or a public person monitoring his own expression." Commenting on the modern culture of the commodirication of the face, the ethnologist added thoughtfully, "in the moment of its defeat the mask celebrates its actual triumph."
We owe art historian Robert F. Thompson a debt for his contribution to the understanding of masks in particular African societies. He discovered a puzzling sim-ilarity between the fixed expressions of people in the throes of possession and the faces of various masks. Here the face of the person who was possessed resembled a mask when it was in the grip of an unnatural frozen expression.17 The individuality of the one who is transformed is extinguished in the trance and through the wearing of the mask. The concept of trance is related to transitus, in the sense of transition, change, or transformation. Possession, as a condition in the mask, refers to the "possessed" body as being "occupied" by another being, which uses the host body as a mask. Strong taboos protect the anonymity of the xvearer m the mask ritual. The protocols of the cult regulate the secret relationship between wearer and mask, but they also avoid the danger that spirits and ancestors within the mask would be surprised by the presence of spectators. Such taboos are basically an admission that the mask is a cultural construct whose security is strictly guarded by a community.
The mask as a "medium" gave indigenous cults a face in the literal sense. Fritz Kramer described a narrowly defined geographical region in Africa that has the most differentiated and contradictory mask forms and customs regarding the mask.18 When creating thier ancestor masks, the Pende tribe chose an abstract type. Characters from the actual community, on the other hand, were represented by a realistic mask type. In the Katundu tribe "each mask received its own personal face," which makes i t possible to identify por-
r. . , FIGURE 11 Anthropomorphic portrait mask from
trait masks. The Afixpo people used a .
r   r    r Vancouver Island, eighteenth century (Herrrmu.,
mask in which men could play the role of
Ivlusec.m ELono.oK>'j
women and also people from other tribes. A mask called beke—meaning
"whiteness"—had the explicit function of representing foreigners.1' In this way the wide variety of masks was able to depict both social reality and religious experience in one local cosmology.
Without even knowing much about the particular cult of the Nootka Indians on Vancouver Island, we can label as portrait masks some curious finds brought home by English sailors in 1778.10 These are life-size masks wi th human hair that show individual facial features, sometimes including the entire head. Even the teeth are represented, but the eyes are closed to mere slits (fig. 11). These masks would be very difficult for living wearers to use in any ritual, and their massive wooden bulk suggests that they were probably meant for the tribe's dead, who were being prepared for cult purposes. Masks thus record the face as document and memento, like the European portrait. In contrast to the European portrait, however, most masks were not objects of contemplation, but rather vehicles of transformation and objects required for cult ceremonies. For that reason, they either were, or had to be, continually refashioned, whereas outworn or damaged masks that had served their purpose were withdrawn! from use in order to protect them from curious gazes, a practice that is the complete opposite of exhibition.
Michel Leiris has provided a vivid description of mask customs from the Dogon people of the central Malian plateau in Africa. He wrote his report upon returning from the famous expedition from Dakar to Djibouti when Marcel Griaule
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PACE AND MASK: CHANGING VIEWS
41
led a colorful group of surrealists and ethnologists through Africa m 1931-32.21 He had been able to observe the "procession of the masks" (sortie des masques), which took place on the occasion of an important burial. The masks had been stored in particular caves, on the walls of which the elders had renewed the symbols of the masks in order to make sure that their forms could be copied correctly. During the dance of the masks the "wearers became the object of a great number of taboos. For example, one is not allowed to utter their names, for a mask wearer may not be recognized." If he were caught removing a mask, it would have to be destroyed immediately, for it was now contaminated and threatened its wearer. At the same time the wearer had to "speak only in a secret language." The Dogon also used their caves as places where termites could destroy their discarded masks.
3
MASKS IN COLONIAL MUSEUMS
The report by Michel Leiris was published in a special edition of the surrealist j ournal Minotaure. The connection with surrealism aligns this report with modern reception history in which the masks of colonized peoples figured. The foreignness of the mask, which holds fascination as an exotic object, was the motive for its colonial appropriation in the modern era. The mask was the absolute embodiment of the other in our Western understanding of the face, which otherwise simply viewed masks as deceptions. As a non-face it became a fetish easily subject to all kinds of misinterpretation. Anthropological interest became so crucial that every analogy to a real face was ignored. The collection and exhibition of masks in museums especially designed for them was a logical consequence. In such museums masks that had fallen into disuse or been removed from use became objects of study to satisfy ethnological curiosity.
Countless masks collected by colonial civil servants on their expeditions found their way into the archives of colonial museums where it was almost impossible to determine the provenance of the object. "Mask" quickly became a collective concept for all artifacts that came from the colonies. Yet for indigenous peoples, masks in African colonial museums were no longer masks, for they had been deprived of all meaning. Without the body language of a living wearer, they had fallen silent and mutated into objects with dead surfaces. The double separation of the mask—from the person who had worn it and the one it represented—turned it into an object for exhibition, which was not its original purpose. African languages do not have a specific lexeme for mask—for the mask was nothing more or less than the face it
4--j        t-Un wn^iirorc of tYipmasks
This incongruity in dealing with the mask is vividly demonstrated in the making of life masks of racial types of so-called primitive peoples to exhibit in anthropological collections. Examples of these may be found in the collection of the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology, and Ancient History. These colorful molds date from around 1890 from the sculpture studio Castan's Panopticum, a Berlin waxworks museum (fig. 12). They were taken from plaster casts made by the Königsberg doctor Otto Schellong of natives of Papua New Guinea, which was a German colony at that time.1 Once one had celebrated the unity of the whole human race, the new idea of evolution was used to draw new boundaries. The practice of making plaster casts—which was soon to be supplanted by photography and film—created a lifelike documentation of the variations among ethnic types.
Indigenous peoples were thus subject to a procedure that transformed their faces into objects for scholarship. Europeans turned the mask forms into display objects, whereas the masks the indigenous peoples had created themselves were sent to a different department in the museum. It is surprising that the same concept of "mask" appears in both cases. But the analogy lay in the fact that the living faces, like the cult masks, were exotic objects that satisfied Western curiosity and could be curated and exhibited.
Interpretations of African and Oceanic masks in the West went through several stages in which collectors, ethnologists, and artists have all played their parts. In this process a single mask, as an object for the Western gaze, could change dramatically without its appearance being altered. Rarely was any attempt made to give masks their place in a cultural history of the face. There remained a blind spot in the theoretical literature about the face that consistently compared it to the physiognomy of Caucasians. In addition, the face was always seen in the context of Western media history, from painting to film. New concepts of the face, as mirrored in masks, were relegated to the ethnologists and therefore marginalized. Ethnology, however, has seldom been able to provide a survey of the social praxis of faces and masks in one and the same place.2
The concept of fetishism enjoyed such currency in the nineteenth century that it became an obstacle to viewing the mask as a representation of the face. The colonial use of the word fetish originally meant nothing more than an alien, incomprehensible man-made object. It could not be encompassed by any European concept, not even the concept of the image. Fetishes were often understood as witnesses to a primitive worldview in which inanimate objects could acquire magical significance.3 As trophies for collectors, masks lost their original function purely through their tangible characteristics. When he developed the thesis of commodity fetishism, •  <      .1-----T.rriHnCTs of Charles de Brasses/