Headdress

“The Spirit of the Mask” and the façade of identity

By Jenna Russell

If you’ve ever been to Mardi Gras, you know about the power of the mask. What is it about the pre-Lent season in New Orleans that inspires such naked abandon? Alcohol is a factor, but there’s something else. The passing floats are manned by masked strangers, and when you stand in a crowd looking up at them, madly flirting to inspire a bead hailstorm, it’s the giddy anonymity that fuels the transaction.

Carnival masks make up only a fraction of “Spirit of the Mask,” the big winter show at the Portland Museum of Art. Culled from the private archive of Kansas City collector Carla Hanson, these 95 masks come from Africa and Asia, Brazil, Denmark, Illinois, and Alaska, among other places, and their traditional uses are as wide-ranging as their native lands. A deformed Korean mask mocks that country’s privileged classes, and a Romanian “old man” mask is used to frighten away the evil spirits of winter. There’s a papier-mâché mask representing the Japanese “troublemaker spirit,” who takes the blame when monks can’t meditate, and one from Papua, New Guinea, that’s worn by young men to hide their tears when their backs are cut with knives in an initiation rite. Many of the masks are carved wood, but others are fashioned from cloth, animal hides, plaster or corn husks, and adorned with all manner of shells, beads, feathers, fur, hair, twine, and grasses. People, it seems, will make masks, wherever they are and whatever they have to work with.

As art objects, masks fall into that no-man’s-land between decoration and function, kind of like jewelry or furniture. The big difference is their infusion with charged symbolic and psychological meaning, and their importance at crucial moments of passage and transition. Most of these masks were never everyday objects; their power is reserved for special occasions: births and deaths; courtship and marriage; holidays, healings, and hunts. The most affecting pieces in this exhibition derive some magnetism from their past use in real-world rituals, smoky rites we can’t clearly picture, but which grip our Western imagination as they have since before Queequeg captured Ishmael’s attention in “Moby Dick.” The few masks in the show that were made solely as art objects — those that never witnessed any secret tribal worship — have a less riveting presence.

Of course, all the masks suffer a little for their shipment to a setting as sterile as this one. As one of the wall labels says, “Movement, music and firelight all serve to transport the mask from the everyday world.” The red-orange color of the gallery walls is intense, but a poor substitute for firelight, and drumming ceremonies seem unlikely to break out. In short, the masks are here unplugged from their energy source. Without a living, breathing human pedestal, without hidden flesh and glinting eyes behind their frozen features, they are inevitably less alive. Nevertheless, some masks retain an electric aura. Most are anthropomorphous at their core, and we relate to them somewhat as we would to portraits.

Intimidation is the natural response to the heavy mask worn by Ivory Coast medicine men “so they appear to be superhuman”; in our own hospitals, the knife-sharp wooden cheekbones and thick rope braids would certainly help distract patients from medical mistakes. An Amazon death mask, with its round eye-holes peeking from a hooded, skull-like face, bears a startling and weirdly appropriate resemblance to Kenny, the death-prone, hood-wearing brother from the cartoon series South Park. Just plain scary is an African mask used in warfare, social control, and the suppression of women. It’s mounted on a high post, framed by grassy dreadlocks, and its bulging forehead, slit eyes and toothy mouth seem the essence of Beelzebub.

It’s worth noting that ambiguous, abstract masks representing death or the devil — interpretations of the unknown — are more frightening than the plaster death mask cast from the head of an actual corpse. Human features become threatening when simplified to the point of symbol, to the verge of blankness, where empathy vanishes. That’s what lends terror to the Kachina cult mask from Arizona’s Hopi Nation, despite a duck-bill mouth that seems to smile. The clay-red, sack face is almost comic, with its dangling feather earrings and blonde horsehair moustache, but the goggle eyes suggest an old-fashioned gas mask, an alien countenance with unknowable motivations.

In Bali, when mask wearers become possessed, it’s a sign divine powers have made an appearance. In the theater, masks once helped actors become or “possess” their characters. By disconnecting identity from actions, the mask grants its wearer the freedom to become someone else, or to act on his hidden desires, avoiding consequences. Think Jason in the Halloween movies, the orgy scene in Eyes Wide Shut, or the Ku Klux Klan. From behind the mask, looking out, it’s a kind of liberation. On the other side, facing the mask, the willful separation can be threatening. Friends don masks, becoming strangers, and all kinds of confusions are possible. The mask confirms our nagging fear that as much as we think we know other people, we’re really alone. After all, every one of us has masks, ways we choose to look and act in different situations.

Part of the mask’s uniqueness as an object is its universal potential, the way it can make anyone a god or devil. A painting is a specific, individual mark, a kind of fingerprint, and even when it’s sold to a collector, it still belongs in some essential way to the artist. A mask, cast off by its maker, belongs in a very real sense to the person who wears it. In some strange way, too, the wearer belongs to the mask, so completely does it dictate the way he relates to the world, and vice versa. If you’re an Odd Fellow in Quincy, Illinois, and you’re wearing a giant, bearded, papier-mâché Goliath head on your shoulders during an initiation program (Goliath being in this case a dead ringer for Abraham Lincoln) — well, let’s just say it’s a different kind of night. As “Spirit of the Mask” makes gloriously clear, you don’t have to live in a primitive culture, or on any particular continent, to crave the occasional Mardi Gras moment.

Jenna Russell can be reached at russelljenna@hotmail.com.