Masks by Marta Díez

By José Emilio Burucúa

Anthropological theories on the meaning and function of masks are as varied as is the very typology of those objects. The forebear; the totem; the other person, both psychic and collective; the metaphor of hidden desire in individuals; inversion or radical metamorphosis of social roles; the dead one - by no means a complete list - have been the referents used in explaining the singular fact that, in rituals and celebrations, we human beings tend to wear a mask. In truth, all of them might be summarized in the last one, i.e., the dead one - an assimilation requiring but little clarification in cases connected to ancestry, the totem animal or even the other person, since that alien being is also the synthesis of a great many of us who are not, and whom at a certain time in our life we have left aside, given up or perhaps killed in the meanders of our psyche in order to take on only the crossed identities that we have finally become. The expression of the repressed longing, cancelled, denied and temporarily dead within us, would belong in the same category as inner maiming and homicide of our other selves. And finally inversion is leading us to the carnival-like, laughing world of that which is low, underground, latent, scatological in both the senses of this word: the one concerning final digestive processes and the one referring to the end of life as seen in the light of religion. Both meanings refer us again to the lower world, ad infera, the old Hades where the dead are. Any mask we look at and which is looking at us would then involve a contact, be it subjugating or terrific, with the territory of the shadows of those who have lived and are questioning us from beyond. For this reason, setting off from the ideas that Aby Warburg worked on referring to emotional intenseness of symbols taken as immediate associations of heterogenous elements which the eye and the mind unite through analogical ways that are prima facie not evident, (1) it is from such notions that Carlo Severi coined expressions such as "chimerical object" or "chimeric representation" for defining masks (2). We should bear in mind that Chimera was, according to the ancients, a polymorphic beast made of sundry parts from various animals (the visible figure of the monster), even though they all placed on the superhybrid being the faculty of a strength greater than that of each of the beasts it came from (the invisible but divined and emotionally felt part of the monster). Thus in masks each trait of the other being, the forebear, the totem or the dead person, crystallizes in its simplest form, one that may be recognized separately by visual sensitivity, while at the same time it induces in those of us facing it, the experience of an invisible conglomeration of emotions. Masks reproduce the articulate construction of the classical Chimera, of its heterogenous parts and the opposites deriving from outer sensitivity and inner commotion in living men. Hence Severi´s lucidity in naming masks "chimerical representations". The objects produced by Marta Díez multiply and take on to the greatest degree the character of hybrids of that which is visible and invisible which the Warburgian anthropologist attributes to masks. Thus a golden feline (The beginning of everything) is observing us with its greenish eyes and making it scarcely possible for us to see through its face with our own eyes, so that we shall become blind if we put on the mask, although we will clearly remember the wax in his nostrils and on the wrinkles on his cheeks. This blue colour unites us, by means of an automatic exercising of our memory, to the lapis lazuli on Egyptian ornaments, and by this, other possible projections of history on the totemic animal are eclipsed: it is not an American jaguar but a lion from the great Nile oasis. Such is the invisible process, released by representation, whereby our psyche bestows meaning on the being of the mask while at the same time turning it into the heterogenous and contradictory object resembling the beast overcome by Bellerophon. Beyond, a human face crowned by a star-shaped headgear (The sun goes round) reminds us of Venice, perhaps not in a way so explicit as does the blue cat-mask with yellow feathers, but enough to make us think of XVIIIth century celebrations on the banks of the Grand Canal. Nevertheless, we are still besieged by a glimpse of Agamemnon`s mortuary mask, or the brightness of gold objects thrown into the water during chibcha rituals. By just getting a glimpse of a vampire´s wings amid the labourious, exquisite foldings of the headgear, the world of the dead will prevail over any celebration from those living. And again the artist has produced - by means of her dense network of hints, echoes and latent images - one of the chimeric objects that we are looking for. But probably the highest point of the entire corpus created by Marta Díez, viewed from this perspective, which is a combination of the heterogenous and has been obtained between the horizons of that which is visible and that which is invisible, is Strange music: in it Carnival-like irreverence blends with the sublimity of high metaphors. It does so not just because of the paradoxical contrast between the collage of everyday papers and the mysterious sentence on pure love, but - above all – because of the association of shrill colours from the flood at inversion times and the abyssal darkness of the mask´s empty eyes. Ambivalence and uneasiness prevail, because we do not know whether it is life - insistent and luminous - that prompts us to dance at the edge of the abyss, or it is death peeping from the merriest folds of our worldly existence. 1) Warburg, Aby, Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America. Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1995. Translation and interpretative essay by Michel P. Steinberg. 2) Severi, Carlo, Anthropologist Warburg or the deciphering of a utopia. From the biology of images to the anthropology of memory, in L´Homme, nº 165, 2003, pp. 77-128 (Severi, Carlo, Warburg anthropologue ou le déchiffrement d´une utopie. De la biologie des images à l'anthropologie de la mémoire", dans L'Homme, nº 165, 2003, pp. 77-128)
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Jose Emilio Burucua. Academician. He was awarded the Platinum Konex Prize as an essayist in Art, and was Juror to the Konex Prize in Communication, Journalism and Professional Formation.