Mask
and Mirror by
Anatxu Zabalbeascoa
Christine Webster makes the spectator a participant
in the game of masks and mirrors. This is the common
denominator in the series of the last few years –
Can Can (1994) and Black Carnival (1993-97).
In Can Can we witness details and fragments of the human
body in living flesh tones, in many cases with theatrical
props, gestures and masks, a set-up shared by her other
series, new Myths: new myths elaborated precisely on
the basis of what is not mythic, endowed with attributes
such as those that prompt the recognition of the saints
in art history.
Her work Black Carnival envelopes the visitor in a
black cyclorama of grotesquely ambiguous figures. The
spectators find their active role as subject overturned
as they are converted into the objects of a spectacle.
With its roots in the frescos of the Villa dei Misterii
in Pompeii, in the chiaroscuri of Carravaggio and in
the macabre dances of Dionysian initiation, the carnival
with which Webster surrounds the spectator mixes irony
and torture to make the visitors feel they are interlopers,
discoverers, and offer them an intruder’s view
that surprises, enchants and frightens.
Black Carnival is an immobile dance that sets out to
unmask the spectator. Actors masked with the history
of art, in familiar or decontextualized relations with
the world of cabaret, present a joint actuation, an
ironic and burlesque act in which the faces cross over:
the women dress as men and the men are adorned with
feminine attributes. Nothing is what it appears and
everything ceases to appear in the excess that envelops
the spectator. In complete concordance with the tradition
of renewal celebrated by carnivals, Black carnival offers
the possibility of choice, it questions the assumption
of roles and revels in confusion. This is the triumph
of the flesh, of the senses and the sensual, of instinct
over reason, of the visceral and Dionysian over the
Apollonian and conventionally beautiful. The work of
the New Zealand artist portrays the spectator by giving
back her or his attitude in front of the mirror. The
sequence of panels surrounds the visitors, enveloping
them and making them the centre of the observation:
the observer observed. The roles are confused.
Webster’s proposal is a baroque game of appearances
with a double edge: at the same time as it presents
the spectacle it places the spectators in the uncomfortable
position of being the only ones at the party disguised
as themselves. The staging allows no escape: the set
of life-size figures seems to be on the point of commencing
a circle dance around the person who believes, with
a sense of relief and security, that this is merely
an inoffensive work of art. Perhaps this explains the
irritation and annoyance that comes with the spectator’s
discovery of his or her defencelessness, the sheer size
of certain pieces (274 x 120cm) that overflow any kind
of frame to threaten the barrier between art and life
in a gesture that is entirely untamed. Whatever might
be argued to the contrary, the poses and the nudes add
nothing to what the everyday invasion of images has
already revealed. What is annoying is that they resemble
us so closely, lighting up the thorny ground of our
taboos and our desires.
In this gesture we know ourselves to be discovered,
the victims of a black carnival that introduces us to
the grotesquerie of that side of ourselves we had believed
was subterranean, subcutaneous, hidden. Coming into
contact with Black Carnival is like entering inside
the hall of distorting mirrors in Valle Inclan’s
Callejon el Gato and being shown the grotesque reflection
of our being, formless and refracted, yet cruelly and
inescapably ours, faithful.
© Anatxu Zabalbeascoa,
independent curator and art writer in Barcelona, text
written for catalogue of Mask and Mirror, MACBA, Barcelona,
1997. |