Justin’s Work

week 6:

Turn and Face the Strange: Darcey Steinke on Our New Life with Masks

A couple stand outs from Steinke’s essay:

“My face, while a body part, is much more than a hand or a foot -it stands for my whole body, my whole self”.

The face is a logo, a symbol that advocates for the Other. It leaves an impression that is warm and welcoming, but also the power to dispell. For Steinke, the face is much more than the sum of her parts, it is beyond them; It is both her identity, and also, gift of recognition. An exchange that has been challenged by the pandemic. At it’s extreme, this period has kept people and places at a distance, in walls and fabrics. In other words, Steinke’s gift was denied because the signifiers are skewed.

“A mask that is permanent pose”

Adad Hannah’s practice of still poses in a video, in which mimics a photograph. But also there is the notion that paintings are a leftovers of a process and there is a tradition of portraiture. In the article, I am wondering if Steinke is mourning this idea of a portrait.

She also inserts an interesting quote by Efrat Tseelon, “unsettle and disrupts. The fantasy of coherence replaces clarity with ambiguity and undermines the phantasmic construction of containment.” This kind of goes back to where what I was saying that siginfers are skewed; the idea of the face is not covered entirely, the elements that betray expression that isn’t complete.

Another thing that is interesting, and thought worth sharing, is that the article is reminiscence of Saul Steinberg’s Social masks. Steinberg describes certain parts of the face to be liars, among other things. He sets up the mask to be a performance of society too, a concept that is constructed and held up.

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I see a lot of parallels with Steinke’s article with my own experience. The whole process has been strange. I like to think that I have become more sensitive to the body language. In the beginning, My partner would say how she needed to learn to “smile with your eyes”. It was as if we were all kids again, trying figure out how to talk. It shocked me to see how frustrated her she was through them, but also revealing of our shortcomings -as a population I mean.

To me, the face is the poster boy of the body, it’s logo in front of the brand. The more I think about it, the more I see it in others. It is because the face is the first thing that is addressed to when I engage with someone. Other body parts are treated differently. And what I find with my face covered is that information is expresses becomes ambiguous it becomes. Brand recognition is gone. At least, in the real world.

On social media it’s different. The notion of self is already masked through other means. In a later section of Skeinke’s article, they describe a veil and how it expands outward from the edges of the mask. In a way, this is an adequate description which can be given to our presence on the internet. To be on the internet is to chose make accounts whose forming is constitutional which reach out to other users.

Who am I without my mask? It is difficult to answer that because the mask I have been yapping about is not physical. To me, my mask is a portrait left behind by my attacks. It is socially constructed, I don’t know if there would be anything underneath. It is an aspect of my person that so dependent on society and people. Having a physical mask can change that, as long as the mask hasn’t be identified as being me.

That could be what is seemingly wrong with the masks we are told to wear during this time. At the start, it disrupted something about who you were. perhaps, it revealed more than it covered up. If my attacks are me then what does the performance of wearing mask signfy to someone else?

EXCERCISE:

Change your face three ways. Make up a new face, or a new way to hide your face. Make an alternative pandemic mask. Use your face as the base of a sculpture. Make your face into something that is not a face. Or that is someone else’s face.

Notes:

Some attempts:

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A couple more:

Best Three: