Spirit Faces

Across cultures and history, the face has been bestowed with incredible importance and power. Faces have been used to express cultural and spiritual beliefs, create identities and transform personalities.

How did a mask become become a global symbol of public protest?

Collections Officer Yvonne Carrillo-Huffman explains...

From the financial cradle of the world markets in Wall Street, to Madrid, London and other European cities, many ‘Occupy’ protestors are wearing masks inspired by Alan Moore’s 1982 graphic novel V for Vendetta. The film adaptation, made in 2006 by Joel Silver, presents the version of the mask used by the demonstrators today.

V for Vendetta tells the story of a theorised future of Britain as a fascist state, where one person takes it upon himself to organise a passive revolt against the State. He does so wearing a Guy Fawkes mask.

Who is Guy Fawkes? He was a British catholic who plotted to blow up the Houses of Parliament in London in 1605 as a protest against the treatment of British Catholics by the government and the Anglican Church. Fawkes and his co-conspirators were captured and executed. Since then, it has become a British tradition to celebrate Guy Fawkes Night every November 5th, when an effigy ‘of the Guy’ is burnt, accompanied by fireworks.

The Guy Fawkes mask featured in Moore’s graphic novel and its later film version has gradually become a global symbol of public protest; first as the online symbol of the Anonymous Movement, and now as one of the major symbols of the worldwide ‘Occupy’ movement against the greed and inequalities of the global financial and banking systems. From Madrid, New York, and London, to Athens, Rome, Rio, and beyond to the recent G20 and G8 meetings, hundreds of the masks have been worn. Even Wikileaks’ Julian Assange made an appearance briefly wearing one of these masks during a massive ‘Occupy’ public debate recently in London.

One might say that the mask’s bleached skin, pink cheeks, pencil beard and half-shut eyes above a mysterious smile has become a symbol of the hope for freedom from the financial oppressions of current times. The theatrical role of masks recognised for their symbolism and entertainment values applies in this case of the V for Vendetta global phenomenon.

The actors, in this case, are the people – global citizens who have identified with and transformed the identity of a specific character, adopting and transforming it into a symbol of hope and liberation from the world’s current financial system.

The growing global phenomenon of wearing the V for Vendetta mask is part of a collective empowerment to assist in social change by bringing people together in a global theatrical act. As the actor Hugo Weaving (wearing the mask) says in the 2006 film, ‘Beneath this mask there is more than flesh…and ideas are bullet-proof’. The mask serves more than disguising personal identity. As Alan Moore says in a November 2011 interview, the mask’s growing popularity ‘…turns protests into performances. The mask is very operatic; it creates a sense of romance and drama’.

Wearing the mask can help empower individuals to join in a people’s rebellion that is shared with every citizen, to be part of a collective action, to protest behind anonymity, and to also have fun and enjoy the pleasure of not being recognised. This can send a powerful message for change. It also brings the topic of the relevance of masks and their use today to the forefront of the public stage – in this case as a world stage symbol for hoped-for change and transformation and as a powerful communication tool and a prominent emblem of modern activism. It can represent, in Moore’s words, Vox populi, ‘the Voice of the People’.

Primitivism or art?

The term ‘primitivism’ was first used in France in the late nineteenth century to describe a series of non-Western arts, and was formally defined as an art-historical term in the encyclopaedic Nouveau Larousse Illustré, published in Paris between 1897 and 1904. Ethnographic museums in the later nineteenth century collected and preserved all manner of curios, masks, figures and other indigenous material but made no distinction between art and artefact. They categorised as ‘primitive’ any indigenous cultures and art from Africa, Oceania and the Americas outside the parameters of the Beaux-Arts (the ‘beautiful arts’, meaning European classic art).

Primitivism also mirrored the prevailing Social Darwinian theories that placed non-Westerners at the base of the cultural evolutionary tree. By contrast, modern European artists of the early twentieth century responded to primitive art primarily as an expression of imagination and invention. Matisse, Picasso and Derain admired the abstract qualities found in indigenous artefacts and formed a deep fascination, and respect, for non-Western artistic pictorial forms that would influence their own artworks.

Picasso’s first encounter with an ethnographic display of African and Oceanic artefacts, at the Ethnographic Museum of the Trocadero in Paris in 1907 deeply impressed him. He later wrote: ‘If we give form to the spirits, we become independent of them. The spirit, the unconscious, emotion – it’s the same thing. I understood why I was a painter. All alone in that awful museum, the masks, the Red Indian dolls … Les Demoiselles d’Avignon [1907] must have come to me that day, but not at all because of the forms [but] because it was my first canvas of exorcism …’.

Picasso was moved by the abstract expressive representations of the artefacts in that collection and the ritualistic possibilities of their use, rather than as mere objects to be looked at or even admired. He recognised in those masks a sense of psychological ‘otherness’ and a symbolic connection to a larger view of humanity. Picasso and other early modern artists through their responses helped encourage a broader appreciation of the rich variety of humanity and culture outside the art circles of the West. But it was not until the 1920s that these non-Western styles ceased to be ‘primitive’ and became known as ‘tribal art’.

Behind the masks

Masks possess a rich symbolism and psychology that resonates throughout history and cultures, with their near-universal links to identity, the subconscious and the supernatural. On one level, masks symbolise our ability to change or transform, to go to other worlds or communicate with and appease the supernatural. In many cultures, masks act to fulfil the desires and challenges to which societies must respond in order to prosper, to maintain balance or strengthen identity.

Across Melanesia, in Papua New Guinea, New Caledonia and Vanuatu, masks are instruments of revelation, used in celebrating important periods of the ceremonial life cycle. They promote the community’s prosperity and fertility, with the masked figure often a key participant in these rituals. For example, the huge Mandaska masks of the Uramot Baining people of New Britain represent the spirits of particular leaves and trees. The masks are traditionally used in celebrations held for the newborn and initiated, and for more contemporary events such as the openings of schools and churches.

Other forms of masks are found in complex and elaborate funerary rituals, such as those in Southern Malakula, Vanuatu. Masks such as the large overmodelled headdresses found here represent the spiritual aspects of a particular nalawan (sacred knowledge society). During funerary rituals, the mask becomes the abode of the portrayed spirit and becomes one with the wearer.

Spirit masks are also found in the northern central area of La Grande Terre in New Caledonia. Certain types of Kanak masks represent a series of spirits linked with chiefly lineages, while others are associated with creation or the underwater world of the dead, the latter decorated with masses of coiled human hair worn on top of the mask.
Whatever the origin of their identity, or the myths, shapes and materials used in their making, masks have come to be associated with the supernatural. In some Melanesian cultures, the mask holder is believed to be the conduit of life into the object.

We in the West may consider such masks to be tribal art, and a masked figure as a person disguised, but in most Melanesian societies such masked figures become the spirits – the wearer of a mask becomes whatever his disguise represents, and their movements during performances emulate the characteristics of the associated spirit form. Add to this the theatricality of many rituals and you can perhaps begin to appreciate the powerful illusions created for the mesmerised Melanesian audiences gathered for ceremonies and rituals. Such effects are at the core of the mystification behind masks.

Secrecy and mystery

In some Melanesian societies, masks retain their power in part because of the heavy veil of secrecy and mystery surrounding their nature and use. The materials used – shells, feathers, wood, barkcloth, seeds, human hair and animal teeth – help to hide the transformation of the initiated man into a masked figure whose identity remains hidden from the public.

These views are worth reflecting upon. It is perhaps our unqualified Western sense of realism and logical thinking that prevents us from adequately responding to the deep significance of some Melanesian masks. In attempting to understand them, we may first need to develop the attitudes of Picasso and other European artists and share in the sense of mystery, respect and admiration that gives these masks such extraordinary appeal.

Yvonne Carrillo-Huffman, Collections Officer, Pacific, Cultural Collections and Community Engagement

First published in Explore 33(4) pp 8-11

Masks from Melanesia

These particular masks are all from Melanesia. They were chosen for a past exhibition called Spirit Faces for their diversity in form, design and function.

As objects, some link to past practices and living cultures, and their timeless ‘primitive’ nature influenced the 20th century modernist movement and artists such as Matisse and Picasso. As faces, they continue to ‘speak’, inspire, scare and enthral the audience.

Masks from other cultures

Across cultures and history, the face has been bestowed with incredible importance and power. As the point of contact and medium of communication with others, faces and their artistic representations, whether human, animal or spirit, have been used to express cultural and spiritual beliefs, create identities and transform personalities.

Masks in particular have the potential to generate new levels of identity. In some cultures, spirits and ancestral beings can inhabit a mask, which then takes on the spirit’s essence. In others, the wearer themselves is transformed as the mask endows them with new powers.