‘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 ...
In the space between the narratives and
representational economies of these two images – enfolding mortality and
becoming, unrelenting threat and fragile possibility, explicit excess and
ineffable secret - representation itself seems to spasm and swoon. This (overtly Catholic) axis between panic and
grace informs the uncertain ground on which Palermo’s dreams and nightmares are
played out. 
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