Masking the White Gaze: Towards a Postcolonial Art History of Masks

Abstract

On 23 February 1991, the auction house Lempertz published a catalogue featuring a dossier showcasing Africa. Its title-page shows tiie photographic presentation of a face mask, which, through the use of strong lighting, close-up, and frontal positioning, and due to the lack of any visible mounting, appears to float (Figure l).1 Based on the principle of object isolation developed around 1900 during the rise of art history as an academic discipline, the positivistic visual strategies used for this image seek a method of objectification in the service of object analysis.2 With the absence of shadow and the stark illumination the endeavour is not to obtain (alleged) neutrality, but instead to carve out the idealized facial features of the object. The mask comes alive due to the reflection of light onto the surface of theartefact's dead materiality. The mask is looking at us. Its 'strange and exotic' aesthetic achieves the height of spectacle through the lighting effects and fulfils its anthropomorphic faciality (being the face, the abstract machine producing faciality), which is articulated through the familiar language of form. A haptic excitement, which appeals to the viewer's perception, is simultaneously produced by these reflections. This visual performance divorces the African Dan mask from its cultural and historical context and re-inscribes it through the visual power system of the face, described as 'strong organization' by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.3In the 1980s, Deleuze and Guattari juxtaposed the facelessness of so-called 'primitive' cultures against the principle of the faciality of the 'civilized' Western world. Their concept of the 'power system of faciality', which was developed for visual communication, was explicitly established in contrast to tiie mask-like character that was perceived as African and primitive.4 Not only does this distinction illustrate how this character is dismissed as 'primitive', but it also points to the dependent relationship between both principles: for setting the African mask as a counter concept to 'Western' faciality ultimately means that the face cannot exist without the mask, and not vice versa.In the following, I argue that such a mask was not selected randomly for the cover of a catalogue featuring so-called 'traditional' African art. On the contrary, masks play a key role in the economy of Western misappropriation, homogenization, and the determination of African art up to the present as masks became one of the strongest signifiers for the African continent in the twentieth century.In this catalogue image, the mask is rendered anonymous through the erasure of its origin, lacking information about the artist or workshop where it was made as well as the date. The object - consequently severed from authorship and historicity - is thus displaced into a timeless, mystical setting, which creates the precondition for the judgement of the art dealer, who, as a connoisseur, determines the artistic value of the auction goods.5 This de-individualization ensures that masks can henceforth stand for an entire West African region (Liberia and the Ivory Coast in this case) or, as suggested by the title page, even the entire African continent conceived of as a homogeneous unity. The cultural context in which such a Dan runner's mask was designed and used is completely edited out of the catalogue. It is not evident to observers or potential buyers whether the mask was specifically produced for tiie art market, or even if it reached Europe as looted art. It is only this banishing of content and culture that makes the mask usable for Western projections and commercial interests. Through this type of visual presentation or mise-enscene, the object is transformed into a work devoid of biography. This process of stripping the object of its own past or origin makes the transfer into the new, Western context possible - a context which is determined by the rules of tiie international art market. …