In the Political Body Blog, I intend to write an entry about each work or group of works of art in the exhibition The Political Body. In each post I will describe my reasons for including the subject in the exhibition, and while doing so, I will offer some observations and facts about the art and the artist. I will also try to say something from a more general critical perspective about the excellence of the work—why I am proud to show it at Trident Gallery in the first place. Ideas themselves, such as the ideas behind The Political Body, are well and good and important, but I feel one must always be careful, in the zeal of pursuing a topic in art, not to lose track of the prerequisite of the intrinsic excellence of the work of art, which motivates and justifies exploration of its topical relevance to a theme by placing it within the suggestive context of an exhibition and the discourse it inspires.

I am writing this blog toward the end of this exhibition because, as with all genuine political discourse in my view, I have developed the ideas I express in dialogue with others, through recent conversations, reading, and looking, beginning with the extraordinary performances with which we opened the exhibition and including conversations with gallery visitors and the artists, and reading inspired by these experiences. Political thought, like making art, is a continual process, the nature of which, I feel, is organically suited to a blog format: thoughts captured for the future, but dated on a continuum, thoughts soon superseded and receding into quaint naivete. Please join me in this vigorous activity of movement: the faster these thoughts become obsolete, the more we have meaningfully experienced and done together.

For more than 35 years, Winston Boyer has photographed a pair of painted screen-mesh masks to create a series of whimsical and profound still lifes called the Mask Series. Like Boyer’s work generally, images in the Mask Series are diverse, unpretentious, and painterly in composition, color, and texture. While curating The Political Body, I spent a lot of time with the Mask Series and gained a new appreciation for it. Two Mask Series images emerged for me as a powerful contribution to the exhibition.

The first was Black and White Bag Mask, an image strikingly exceptional within the series, because the familiar screen mask is barely visible. The boldly graphic rectangle and stripes contrast with the subtly variegated textures of the paper bag and the cowhide background, and the round, organic eyes of the mask are visible only through the crude geometry of the diamond cutouts of the bag.

The paper bag immediately suggests a familiar trope, a caricature of the impulse to hide one’s identity out of shame, and quickly becomes more serious as it recalls the act of hiding of one’s identity to avoid persecution or prosecution. As with most other uses of masks, these uses have a strong element of ritual, and even of overt symbolism: the executioner, the intruder, the terrorist, the Klansman. We are off to a promising start: the image conjures powerful emotions and meaningful circumstances involving bodily appearances and identity.

The bold black and white stripes deepen and complicate the idea of the concealment of identity. Are they a crude label imposed by the viewer on a more nuanced person within who is neither black nor white, the whole bag becoming an allegory of over-simplification? Or do they represent an attempt, like a zebra’s stripes, to confuse a predator’s vision and judgment? With reference to United States history, the stripes invoke black and white skin and the stripes of our flag. The doubling of masks—a mask on or for another mask—amplifies these questions and invites reflection on the variety of meanings and functions for masks.

The anxieties of Black and White Bag Mask are tempered by the fun and play of Melon Mask, which recalls the grotesques of the Old Masters and earlier medieval traditions. As I studied the Mask Series, I kept coming back to Melon Mask simply because I liked it, and before long, the patience and pretense for sustained attention that this enjoyment conferred on me began to pay a dividend. It is always a thrilling moment when a veil lifts and a work of art reveals itself, and at the same time promises further revelation.

Though there is much to say another time about the aesthetic beauty of this image, my genuine enjoyment of the Melon Mask is founded in the powerful sense of character it creates for me, which I perceive in the face. The appeal of caricature and grotesque depends upon this kind of emotional response, which their exaggerations then amplify and channel. Such strong feelings! I feel sure that you and I could have a long conversation about this pudgy man with blue, almond eyes and pursed lips! I feel we could tell his story, that he has a fabulous story to be told. Such knowledge and convictions I have—about a melon. A piece of fruit, decorated with simply painted eyes, nose, and a mouth. So powerful is our compulsion to “read” faces and body “language,” and so unshakeable is our belief in this ability, that we are ready to become the soulmate of a melon.  We have the proverbial blindness of rutting beasts. (If such a proverb doesn’t exist, it should.)  Enjoy this power, I told myself, in art, and beware the insidious insistence of this fantasy elsewhere in the world.

Afterthought

Melon Mask could not have its same effect as anything but a photograph. As a painting or drawing, the same image could not confound, reveal, and deconstruct the theory-laden prejudice of everyday visual cognition; it would rightly be understood as a metaphor or satire, essentially fanciful however serious the intent or trenchant the message: a peasant’s perspective, for instance, which “sees” nobility as fat, corrupt, and profligate. Photography’s special authenticity gives it special access to a critique of objectivity in visual perception, and a corresponding mode of aesthetic play. I often say, after being out and about looking at art in studios, galleries, or museums, that some of the best art I saw was photography, as well as most of the worst.

From 2009 to 2014, artist Gabrielle Barzaghi drew a series of large heads, about 50 x 40 inches and having tightly cropped compositions and neutral backgrounds. (Two were shown in Harbortown 2014.) Though large heads continue to appear in Barzaghi’s work, it seems fair to say that Cephalic Frieze was the last drawing in a particular series, and it is the only one showing more than one figure.

In this series of drawings, the surface of the human body, objectified like landscape, becomes a fascinating territory to explore. The large faces are rendered almost exclusively with hashed marks, a technique which leads to dramatic differences in the apparent texture and color of the faces within the range of normal viewing distances. This characteristic itself mimics our experience of landscape, which maintains meaning and aesthetic interest across a broad range of physical scale. Step away from Cephalic Frieze, and the intricate and charismatic gestures of the artist’s hashing resolves into uniform skin tones. Likewise, the vividly pure green and blue eyes of the two figures on the left, so compelling from afar, dissolve on closer inspection into a complex combination of marks and flashes of unexpected colors. Marvel as well, when you see the drawing, at the vividness of the dark blue streaks in the face of the figure on the right.

Barzaghi’s series of “portrait landscapes” posits topographical parallels for the life experiences of psyches and of bodies, invoking literary and religious narratives of life as a journey, and following traditions in the visual arts of rendering the journey of life etched in the surface of the body. The title of “frieze” and its corresponding composition sets Cephalic Frieze apart, within the artist’s series of heads, by invoking traditions of architecture and through them the ancient societies of Greece and Rome in which the architectural traditions are grounded. The temporal and cultural distances of centuries, and the aesthetic distance of architectural elements are positioned in parallel to the differences of perception with changing visual distance as ways in which the work of art develops meaning.

Cephalic Frieze was one of my core choices for The Political Body around which ideas for the exhibition coalesced. I had always been intrigued by the ambiguity of racial or ethnic identities of the two male figures. From this starting point and a general understanding of the artist’s interests and concerns, I discovered much more. The figures have monumental scale and in most cases impassive expressions that give us little to read in the way of character. In lieu of understanding character and emotion, we ask, as we do of monuments, Who and what do these persons represent? and The historical references of the drawing reinforce the racial and ethnic ambiguity (to my eyes) of the figures, and prompt me to resist and question my own inevitably narrow list of categories of race, ethnicity, and identity. I’m further prompted to ask, What were the terms of reference and thought which persons from the ancient societies of Rome, Greece, Egypt, and Persia used to describe races, ethnicities, and identity? And what do I learn by putting my labels and categories (African American, Asian, Mexican, Native American, European, etc.) into a wider context of history?

In summary, for me, Cephalic Frieze shows vividly how distance simplifies, which is a profound moral idea about personal identity. Greater distance, as with the perspective across centuries and societies, often confers more universal sympathies. And yet this gain comes with a cost and a moral peril. The distance which allows wider perspective is inseparable from the distance that allows—indeed requires—categorization, which eclipses and devalues sense experience and close attention to individual persons or objects. Direct, experiential knowledge is discarded in favor of a prior concept of the category, a concept influenced by experience but often strongly culturally determined and transmitted. Wider perspective can be gained only at the cost of losing track, in a process of abstraction, of individual complexity and variation, just as complex elements of the drawing resolve with spatial distance into simpler forms. The physical, sensory experience of this drawing reveals and contextualizes that slide of recognition and assimilation into pre-conceived types, which is morally required as a foundation of thought and understanding, and is at the same time so morally dangerous.