the play of panic and grace

‘I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But show the rags, the refuse – these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them’ … Walter Benjamin

 

Since the summer of 2017, the performance maker and visual artist John Rowley has produced a substantial and compelling series of mask photographs on Instagram (@john.rowley.17). To date there are over 500 of these images, each of them a ‘self-portrait’ wearing a particular mask of his own devising, a new and different ‘face’ layered over his own face. The photographs are almost always taken in the same location, by the back door of John’s house in Cardiff. The framing reveals John’s body from the middle of his chest to the top of his head; his torso is naked, throwing our attention up towards the facial sculpture of the mask. The collection of images in this book represents a selection from this brilliantly eccentric catalogue of playfully performed, possible selves.

 

With great economy and humour, all sorts of practices and categories are teased at and critically questioned in this body of work. The self and its proliferative performance in the time of the ‘selfy’. Photographic portraiture and its enduring claim to register the real.  Social media as a site for creative practice. Negotiating and recycling a culture of acquisition and disposal, consumption and waste. And the status of a mask today. This series was underway long before the pandemic and its rolling lockdowns; but in the contested light of the enforced restrictions of Covid and its protective masks, these images assume a further critical charge, as an emancipatory realigning of our relationship to the mask, and of imaginative ways to people our isolation.

 

Cumulatively as a series, the images reference a wide range of art and cultural practices, consciously or otherwise. For example, there are comic resonances with Renaissance portrait paintings and the composite fruit’n’veg heads of Archimboldo, with Hieronymus Bosch, modernist visual art practices (particularly Surrealism and Dada collage, Constructivism, Picasso, Francis Bacon) and body art, as well as the work of certain photographers, including Cindy Sherman and Francesca Woodman. There are also buried echoes of British folk art practices, of Oceanic and African mask art, and tongue-in-cheek renderings of traditions of masked theatre: ancient Greek drama, commedia dell’arte. More explicitly and insistently, the images draw joyfully on the tropes, stereotypes and material traces of popular culture: B-movies, TV, sci-fi - clunky representations of early hominids, ancient warriors, assorted monsters and animals; cartoons, children’s drawings, doodles; amateur dramatics and school plays; perhaps even the construction of scarecrows and bodgy backyard snowmen.

 

Some of you will be familiar with John’s work over many years as a live performer, with Brith Gof, Mike Pearson and National Theatre of Wales, good cop bad cop, Forced Entertainment, Heiner Goebbels and others. And to my mind he brings some of his characteristic attributes in those experimental theatre contexts to these stagings of masks – the very sign of theatre. Above all, a profound tonal ambiguity that straddles the apparent opposition between laugh-out-loud-funny and not-funny-at-all. His performances consistently affirm a willingness to embrace and inhabit the desultory bare life of the browbeaten, wounded, pathetic, limping, lonely and broken; he knows how to adopt the shape of the ache of loss, dereliction and abjection. At the same time, these dented wasteling figures possess an enduring resilience, and present us with a resistant self who’s still standing, looking back, doggedly life-ful. A wilful spark glimmers in the eyes of these Beckettian clowns, their ‘pilot lights’ still ablaze, triumphant and still playing in the face of despondency and failure; although it’s a precarious balancing act, somehow they avoid being consumed by the mess of it all. In this way, John becomes a kind of suburban trash shaman, or a redemptive bouffon, buoyed as much, it seems, by a greasy bacon bap as by Francis Bacon. At times there’s also a whiff of that naughty attention–seeking kid at school pratting around with pencils up his nose, elastic bands scrunched around his ears, fingers distending his mouth – making faces for silly laughs, for the shock of it, pushing things just a little too far. Funny-haha/funny-peculiar.

 

When I have seen John perform, I have often been struck by his animation of these ambiguities, his recurrent ability to conjoin a poignant, hunched, lurching fragility with a stroppily upright ongoingness. It feels as though we are witnessing a layered and complex creature happening right here and now in all of its uncertainty, its fucked-up-and-yet-ness. I have come to think of John the performer as a defiant, playfully purposeful celebrant picking over the brokenness and waste of a culture, mirroring it back at us. A shapeshifting survivor finding a way through the chaos, all too aware of it, with his eyes locked on ours. And I am reminded of the American director and writer Herbert Blau’s description of how, through performance, he was always trying to work out ‘some liveable unison between panic and grace'. I see something of that brave juggle-dance in both John’s performances and in these photographs.

 

As with the creative ‘messing around’ that devising performances entails, John’s approach to these masks involves bricolage and montage. His aesthetic is rough, artisanal, home-made, his decision-making swift and intuitive. Found materials, the abandoned and forgotten by-products of domestic everyday life - the use-less remainder, a kind of living dead - are reclaimed and repurposed in new combinations that leak a mysterious potency and affect. Excavate, retrieve, accumulate, select, experiment, improvise, reinvent. Sometimes these combinations are minimal (three pieces of string - #barelyamask - tied tight around the face to rearrange it, one eye stretched wide, the nose flattened, the mouth stretched uncomfortably to somewhere between wince and growl); sometimes they are cumulative, stratified and elaborate. Specific materials are selected from whatever’s at hand in the home: food, packaging, clothing, soft furnishings and toys, decorations, objects and products from the kitchen, bathroom, garden and shed, junk mail, celeb magazine covers - including an astonishing series of ‘shredded’ politicians - and other found images. These elements are combined, attached to the face or draped over it, then recorded on a phone camera and uploaded with a slew of comedy hashtags, in this way transforming both raw materials and face into a new temporary ‘persona’ (the Latin term for a mask, and for the self presented to others, one’s social ‘role’). Compositionally, these constructed faces are knowingly arranged around the eyes, or occasionally John’s glasses, a comically effective stand-in for the eyes as well as a practical means to hold the mask in place.

 

John’s images make me think of the subversive power of children’s play, an experiential ‘becoming-worldly’, as conceived by Walter Benjamin: repetition with infinite variants as the organizing principle presiding over the rules and rhythms of the world of play, which in its world-making can propose a disorderly threat to the prevailing order: and Benjamin’s affirmation in his Arcades project of history’s ‘ragpickers’, scouring the debris of the residual dream-worlds of obsolete commodity fetishism, making use of the rags and the refuse, enabling them to take (a) place and to do their work. And I think of Roland Barthes’s reflections on the body, and how to write it: “Neither the skin, nor the muscles, not the bones, not the nerves, but the rest: an awkward, fibrous, shaggy, ravelled thing, a clown’s coat”.

 

Traditionally, masks have been conceived of as instruments of concealment, a deceptive covering deployed to withhold the self. Paradoxically, however, the best masks seem to reveal and expose something that’s hidden; they enable an archetypal shape, a ‘soul portrait’, to seem to flare into appearance. However, in John’s non-illusionist images the seams of seeming never quite disappear. Although we recognise a typology of different kinds of being-in-the-world in these masks, we never lose sight of their made-ness, the edges and joins, the string and tape, John’s skin and body. And in this ambiguous aggregation of John/not-John, invariably John is partially present AND temporarily elsewhere. His masks are presentational, to-be-looked-at, but more often than not he also looks back through the architecture of the fiction, through the cracks in the made thing. Of course his capacity to see is what’s needed in order to be able to take a photograph, but it also has the effect of making the mask both proximate and held at a slight distance, like a role in the theatre of Brecht, never all-consuming as a seamless illusion. And within this gap there is a critical friction, a give, a space for play.

 

Given that these images are named as self-portraits, where’s John in all of this? He presents us with a series of arrested, temporary identities, ludic signs of a plural, mutable and unstable self-in-process made up of fragments of our culture. The others who are us. In the ruins of the notion of an essential self and of a single, fixed, ‘true’ mask, perhaps that’s what a contemporary self is: an ongoing and unfinishable series of ephemeral identities, a parade of the borrowed and constructed, the hilarious and the tragic. Fleeting shapes that emerge and are encountered, before they melt away again, like the tips of passing icebergs. For we know that there is always more to this than meets the eye. And that there will be others still to come, hopefully …

 

Introduction to John Rowley's  'Ludic', a book of mask/self-portrait photographs, designed & published by Terraffoto, 2022. There's a large format, limited edition, hand-crafted risograph edition, and a digitally printed version. Big thanks to John for inviting me to write something to accompany his brilliant images ...

something out of nothing

'You gather things up like a person who leaves a burning house, which means very randomly ... I am not seeking an answer. I just want to say, "This is very odd, indeed"' (WG Sebald)

I have been re-reading texts by and interviews with WG Sebald. Alongside the uncanny repetitions and correspondences, the looping narrative structures, the mysterious photographs that act like 'barriers or weirs which stem the flow' and 'slow down the speed of reading' (Sebald), the displacements, double binds, silent catastrophes, spectral (re-)apparitions, somnambulist circlings and vertigo, the constellations of melancholic stones and dust and fog of this 'ghost hunter', I have been struck by his accounts of the 'questionable business' of writing and its compulsive, draining 'preoccupation with making something out of nothing'.

In an interview with Eleanor Wachtel (1997): 'Once you get hold of a thread you want to pull it out and you want to see, you know, what the colours of the pattern are. And the more difficult it gets ... the more intrigued you become, the more you know that there is something buried there. And the less you want to give up on it".

Later in the same interview: 'It is a characteristic of our species, in evolutionary terms, that we are a species in despair, for a number of reasons. Because we have created an environment for us which isn't what it should be. And we're out of our depth all the time. We're living exactly on the borderline between the natural world from which we are being driven out, or we're driving ourselves out of it, and that other world which is generated by our brain cells. And so clearly that fault line runs right through our emotional and physical makeup. And probably where these tectonic plates rub up against each other is where the sources of pain are. Memory is one of those phenomena. It's what qualifies us as emotional creatures, psychozootica or however one might describe them. And I think there is no way in which we can escape it. The only thing that you can do, and that most people seem to be able to do very successfully, is to subdue it. . And if you can do that by, I don't know, playing baseball or watching football on television, then that's possibly a good thing, I don't know".

Eleanor Wachsel: "What do you do?"

Sebald: "I walk with the dog. But that doesn't really get me off the hook. And I have, in fact, not a great desire to be let off the hook. I think we have to try to stay upright through all that, if it's at all possible".

From a public discussion with Joseph Cuomo (2001): "I never liked doing things systematically. Not even my PhD research was done systematically. It was always done in a random, haphazard fashion. And the more I got on, the more I feel that, really, one can only find something in that way, i.e., in the same way in which, say, a dog runs through the field. If you look at a dog following the advice of his nose, he traverses a patch of land in a completely unplottable manner. And he invariably finds what he's looking for. I think that, as I've always had dogs, I've learnt from them how to do this ...

"And so you then have a small amount of material, and you accumulate things, and it grows; one thing takes you to another, and you make something out of these haphazardly assembled materials. And, as they have been assembled in this random fashion, you have to strain your imagination in order to create a connection between the two things ... You have to take heterogeneous materials in order to get your mind to do something that it hasn't done before. That's how I thought about it. Then, of course, curiosity gets the better of you...".

From The Rings of Saturn, in a section related to Michael Hamburger:"For days and weeks one racks one's brains to no avail, and, if asked, one could not say whether one goes on writing purely out of habit, or a craving for admiration, or because one knows not how to do anything other, or out of sheer wonderment, despair or outrage, any more than one could say whether writing renders one more perceptive or more insane. Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life".

And finally, in the same book, Sebald returns to the recurrent trope of writing and/as weaving: "That weavers in particular, together with scholars and writers with whom they had much in common, tended to suffer from melancholy and all the evils associated with it, it is understandable given the nature of their work, which forced them to sit bent over, day after day, straining to keep their eye on the complex patterns they created. It is difficult to imagine the depths of despair into which those can be driven who, even after the end of the working day, are engrossed in their intricate designs and who are pursued, into their dreams, by the feeling that they have got hold of the wrong thread".

 

(text from 2018)

two shillings

'A tea time drunk weaving his way down Old Compton Street in the blinding sun stops me, and with a smile says, "Son, I want to give you two shillings".

I was quite taken aback as my hand was already in my pocket fumbling for change.

He gave me the two shillings. I thanked him and he said, "Good day".

"It is", I said. "All sunlight".

From Derek Jarman's Modern Nature, entry for 29 April 1990

care (push-pull)

When I last saw G, my neighbour in Western Australia, he was in his early eighties. A delightful, sensitive man who had once been an engineer. We used to chat at length over the fence or out walking with our two dogs. For over forty years, G had been caring for his bed-bound partner A; she had a rare brittle-bone condition so extreme it meant that even a sneeze could result in a broken rib. Sometimes we had tea with A around her bed; she was both fragile and extraordinarily radiant. Out with the dogs, over time G revealed his frustration and exhaustion. After so many years the imperative to care for A, the push-pull of having to meet her every need and demand, had ground him down. He loved A but wanted her to let go now, to slip away; it was time, he said, while there was still time. Sometimes, despite himself, the weight of his tiredness manifested as irritation or even anger towards A, and he felt crippling guilt for not always being up to giving away his life for another.

 

G had an escape, and perhaps, he said, it was now ‘the love of his life’. Once a week for a few hours he would go gliding by himself, and whenever he talked about it, he was utterly transformed, lit up. The sheer joy of riding invisible thermals, the miracle of soaring and hovering, the wedge-tailed eagles. The silence, adrift in skyspace with the world laid out far below like ‘a beautiful old faded carpet’ (his words). Freed, for a moment, from gravity and care, while A lay immobilised by her illness on her bed, as light as a bird. When he came home afterwards, he said, he was troubled about whether it was okay to feel such pleasure. I told him I felt sure it was, more than okay. He invited me to come gliding with him. But then A died, and for months G was bereft. Grounded.

 

Extract from ‘Diffractions: record of a passage’, an afterword for the collection edited by Karen Christopher & Mary Paterson, Entanglement: duet as form and practice, Intellect Books, published in August 2021. Image from www.aerospaceweb.org, 'Birds, thermals & soaring flight'