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Three Self-Reflexive Masks
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2009
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Masks are age-old artefacts common to many cultures. In this paper I attempt to show, through the maskmakers' choice of materials, subject matter and innovations in the conventions basic to the traditional uses of mask, that the three which I have selected provoke useful speculations on the nature and function of masking itself.
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- Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1981
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Notes
1. This paper was in part the result of seeing the exhibit IMAGES: Stone: BC: Thirty Centuries of North West Coast Indian sculpture. The illustrations are from the catalogue of the same title, Oxford University Press, Toronto: 1975, p. 136 and p. 167 and from Masterpieces of Indian and Eskimo Art from Canada Société des amis du Musée de L'Homme, Paris: 1969, Plate 53. The ‘sightless’ mask is in the National Museum of Man, Ottawa, and the ‘sighted’ mask is in the Musée de Paris.
2. Additional details about this mask, which is in the Fort Ancient Museum, Ohio are to be found in Echoes vol. 7 no. 3, 03, 1968 (A publication of the Ohio Historical Society) in an article titled ‘Prehistoric Shamans’ by Martha Potter Otto and in Baby, R. S.'s ‘A unique Hopewellian mask-headress’, American Antiquity Vol. XXI, no. 3, 1956Google Scholar. The photograph was taken by Dr M. F. Richardson, Brock University.
3. This mask and its description are found in The Stenography of Josef Svoboda by Barian, Jarka, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, Connecticut: 1977, p. 106Google Scholar. All subsequent quotations are from that short description.
4. A very few cultures do use human skulls as ornaments of dress. See also the Aztec turquoise mask in the Museum of Mankind, London and the wicker and wood headress using the skull of a slave, plate 86, Negro Art, Paul Hamlyn, London: 1969. A private communication from Elizabeth Carmichael, Ethnography Department, Museum of Mankind, 25/7/80, confirms that it was probably worn as a back ornament. Martha Potter Otto, Department of Archaeology, the Ohio Historical Society, 17/9/80, and Dennis Alsford, National Museum of Man, Ottawa, 14/10/80 (by telephone) confirmed that no related discoveries or new information regarding the Hopewell skull mask and Tsimshian stone masks have come to light so far.
5. op. cit., pp. 12 and 13.
6. Prometheus, BASF 7521, 345–5–1–3. Recorded January 1971. Director: F. Leitner. Prometheus: Roland Hermann. Production Photographs on the dust jacket show a design concept for the opera very different from Svoboda's. To Svoboda, the music ‘conveyed an image of… resonant metal planes and angles’. According to Slonimsky, Nicolas (in Music Since 1900, 4th ed., Scribner's, New York: 1971)Google Scholar, the text is ‘set to the original ancient Greek text in one continuous act, constituting a series of homophonic monologues, dialogues, trialogues, tetralogues, and choruses in neo-grecian diatonic modalities’ using an ensemble of 70 percussion instruments and an assortment of flutes, oboes, trombones, banjos, harps, 2 organs and 9 double basses. It is certainly a remarkable piece of music, even to the conservative ear.
7. Gihalji-Merin, Oto, Masks of the World, Thames and Hudson, London: 1971, p. 9 and p. 11Google Scholar. See also Masks: Their Meaning and Function by Andreas Lummel, tr. Fowler, Nadia, Paul Elok Book: 1972, p. 215 ff.Google Scholar
8. Edward Malin in A World of Faces: Masks of the North West Coast. Timber Press, Portland, Oregon, p. 42. As one Tlingit woman put it, ‘Masks are our shrines’, p. 47.
9. op cit., p. 14.
10. See plate 33 in Eskimo Masks: Art and Ceremony, By Ray, Dorothy Jean, J. J. Douglas Ltd., Vancouver: 1975.Google Scholar
11. As in the Theatre Passe Muraille production of Rick Salutin's 1837 where several of the actors formed a gigantic talking head of Sir Francis Bond Head – A.K.A. ‘Bone Head’ to Wm. Lyon Mackenzie's fellow rebels.
12. Theatres and Auditoriums, second ed. with new supplement Burris-Meyer, Harold and Cole, Edward C., Robert F. Krieger Publishing Co. Inc., Huntington, New York: 1975, pp. 67 and 68Google Scholar. Cf. ‘From the front row [of the large Greek Amphitheatre the Actor] appeared only about 4″ high – from the back, hardly an inch.’ Arnott, P., An Introduction to the Greek Theatre, Indiana U.P., Bloomington, Indiana: 1959, p. 48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
13. Quoted in Claude Levi-Strauss: An Introduction, by Paz, Octavio, tr. Bernstein, J. S. and Bernstein, M., Cornell University Press: 1970, p. 36Google Scholar. Later Paz identifies a ‘Promethean theme’ in Levi-Strauss' paradigms in his emphasis on ‘the schism between the gods and men, the eternal life of the cosmos and the brieflife of human beings…. The mediation between life and death, dry and water, plants and animals’ p. 50.
14. Henry Moore on Sculpture, ed. James, Philip, MacDonald, London: 1966, p. 69.Google Scholar
15. Arts Canada, Vol. 30, 01 1974. In the Chapter ‘The Roots & Continuities of Shamanism’ in ‘Stone, Bone and Skin: Ritual & Shamanic Art’, p. 34. See also the extensive account of Kwakiutl Hamatsa rites of initiation. These rituals have never been disrupted despite repressive laws against them. See also Hawthorn, Audrey's Kwakiutl Art, Douglas F. McIntyre: Vancouver, 1967Google Scholar. Revised 1979; Woodcock, George's chapter ‘Shamanism: The Link with Asia’ in Peoples of the Coast: The Indians of the Pacific Northwest, Hurtig Publishers, Edmonton: 1977Google Scholar; and Ray, D.'s ‘The Shaman and the Mask’ in Eskimo Masks: Art and Ceremony, J. J. Douglas Ltd., Vancouver: 1975.Google Scholar
16. Aeschylus II in the series The Complete Greek Tragedies ed. by David Grene and Richard Lattimore. Prometheus Bound tr. by Grene, David, University of Chicago Press, Chicago: 1956. II. 236, 250, 252 and 254.Google Scholar
17. People of the Totem: The Indians of the Pacific North West, by Bancroft-Hunt, N. and Forman, W., Doubleday Canada Ltd., Toronto: 1979, p. 87Google Scholar. Also Claude Lévi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning: 5 talks for radio, University of Toronto Press, Toronto: 1978. [The 1977 Massey Lectures] ‘It is well known that on the coast of British Columbia, among the Indians, twins were endowed with special powers, to bring good weather, to dispel storms and the like’. He goes on to trace a pattern in what he calls ‘A Pan-American Myth’ which attributes to such twins the same mother but different fathers, thus explaining both their identical function i.e. mediation between powers above and humanity below, and their quintessential differences, e.g. one human one immortal or one is sun, one moon etc. Sometimes, Janus-like, the twins become one with two faces – as in video/human or inner skull/outer flesh?
18. op cit., pp. 164, 165. See also catalogue plate no. 135, 136 and pp. 166, 167.
19. As J. M. Miller asked when he saw the photograph, to the audience, which represents the ‘real’ Prometheus and which the mask – the actor or the enlarged image?
20. The Ascent of Man, Little Brown and Co., Toronto: 1973, p. 36.
21. Gihalji-Merin, , op. cit., p. 9.Google Scholar