MASKS

Description

This interdisciplinary anthology explores the complex relationships in an artist’s life between fact and fiction, presentation and existence, and critique and creation, and examines the work that ultimately results from these tensions.

 

Using a combination of critical and personal essays and interviews, MASKS presents Bowie as the key exemplifier of the concept of the 'mask', then further applies the same framework to other liminal artists and thinkers who challenged the established boundaries of the art/pop academic worlds, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, Søren Kierkegaard, Yukio Mishima and Hunter S. Thompson. Featuring contributions from John Gray and Slavoj Žižek and interviews with Gary Lachman and Davide De Angelis, this book will appeal to scholars and students of cultural criticism, aesthetics and the philosophy of art; practising artists; and fans of Bowie and other artists whose work enacts experiments in identity.

Acknowledgements 

Foreword: The Shifting Shaman of the Modern Age – John Gray

Introduction: Somebody Else Took His Place, and Bravely Cried… – James Curcio

Chapter 1: Masks All the Way Down – James Curcio

Chapter 2: Mishima, Bowie and the Anti-Metaphysics of the Mask – Roy Starrs

Chapter 3: Not All That Glitters Is Gold: Ziggy Stardust and the Fractured Mask of a Generation – Lúcio Reis-Filho

Chapter 4: Watch That Man: Splicing Tape with Burroughs and Bowie – Casey Rae

Chapter 5: From Vigilius Haufniensis to Ziggy Stardust: Pseudonyms, Irony and Truth in Kierkegaard and Bowie – Tara Isabella Burton

Chapter 6: Mascara and Marriage: The Twin Masks of David Bowie and Robert Smith – Tom Powers

Chapter 7: The Great Contrarians – Yahia Lababidi

Chapter 8: Seeing Things Like Hunter: Ralph Steadman’s Cartoon Visions as Revelatory Masks in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Kevin J. Hunt

Chapter 9: The Beautiful Madness: The Primacy of Wonder in the Work of Thomas Ligotti – J. F. Martel

Chapter 10: The Skin and the Double: Firbank’s Aesthetics of Surface – Michael Hunter

Chapter 11: God’s Twisted Identity – Slavoj Žižek

Chapter 12: Wishful Beginnings and Creative Ends: Conversation with Davide De Angelis – Davide De Angelis and James Curcio

Chapter 13: On Existentialism and the Occult: Conversation with Gary Lachman – Gary Lachman and James Curcio

Chapter 14: The Many Masks of Manifestation – John Harrigan

Epilogue: Art for Art’s Sake – James Curcio

Notes on Contributors 

Index

Sujets

• Arts visuels
• Arts visuels
• Musique
• Musique
• Performing Arts
• MUSIC
• Popular music
• Multiple signal classification
• Performance art
• General officer
• Cultural studies
• Fashion
• Aesthetics
• Art
• General
• Identity
• Mode (habillement)
• Yukio Mishima
• David Bowie
• Søren Kierkegaard
• Oscar Wilde

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 15 janvier 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781789381092
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2020 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2020 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2020 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover designer: James Curcio
Copy editor: MPS
Production manager: Laura Christopher
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 9781789381085
ePDF ISBN: 9781789381108
ePub ISBN: 9781789381092
Printed and bound by 4edge, UK
To find out about all our publications, please visit www.intellectbooks.com .
There, you can subscribe to our e-newsletter, browse or download our current catalogue, and buy any titles that are in print.
This is a peer-reviewed publication.
Note: The foreword has been previously released by the New Statesman website; ‘God’s Twisted Identity’ was first published in Absolute Recoil , Verso, 2014. Both have been modified slightly for this edition.
‘Watch that Man’, ‘On the Truth of the Aphorism’, and Parts 3 and 4 of ‘Masks All the Way Down’ are expanded and edited editions of previously published material, all rights granted.
At this point it is probably useless to decorate the altars of my next life with masks.
No matter how many faces I have, there is no changing the fact I am me.
— Kobo Abe
Contents
Acknowledgements
Foreword: The Shifting Shaman of the Modern Age
John Gray
Introduction: Somebody Else Took His Place, and Bravely Cried …
James Curcio
1. Masks All the Way Down
James Curcio
2. Mishima, Bowie and the Anti-Metaphysics of the Mask
Roy Starrs
3. Not All That Glitters Is Gold: Ziggy Stardust and the Fractured Mask of a Generation
Lúcio Reis-Filho
4. Watch That Man: Splicing Tape with Burroughs and Bowie
Casey Rae
5. From Vigilius Haufniensis to Ziggy Stardust: Pseudonyms, Irony and Truth in Kierkegaard and Bowie
Tara Isabella Burton
6. Mascara and Marriage: The Twin Masks of David Bowie and Robert Smith
Tom Powers
7. The Great Contrarians
Yahia Lababidi
8. Seeing Things Like Hunter: Ralph Steadman’s Cartoon Visions as Revelatory Masks in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Kevin J. Hunt
9. The Beautiful Madness: The Primacy of Wonder in the Work of Thomas Ligotti
J. F. Martel
10. The Skin and the Double: Firbank’s Aesthetics of Surface
Michael Hunter
11. God’s Twisted Identity
Slavoj Žižek
12. Wishful Beginnings and Creative Ends: Conversation with Davide De Angelis
Davide De Angelis and James Curcio
13. On Existentialism and the Occult: Conversation with Gary Lachman
Gary Lachman and James Curcio
14. The Many Masks of Manifestation
John Harrigan
Epilogue: Art for Art’s Sake
James Curcio
Notes on Contributors
Index
Acknowledgements
Thanks to my family, Jack Marsh, Ph.D., Brian Sheppard, Brian George, Will Parke and all the others who have helped to make this book what it is today.
Foreword: The Shifting Shaman of the Modern Age
John Gray
If your aim is to be original, you will most likely end up looking and sounding derivative. Striving for self-expression, you turn yourself into a mouthpiece for the ruling clichés. David Bowie did the opposite. Knowing himself to be – as a matter of fact or fate – utterly singular, he chose to become a clairvoyant who served as a channel for the shifting spirit of the age. Along the way a succession of selves emerged, each of them novel and original. A commonplace view has it that Bowie was a chameleon who kept reinventing himself in order to exploit the turns of fashion. But his changes served a deeper end. By becoming Nobody, he became many people, and at the same time, inarguably himself.
The circumstances of Bowie’s life predestined him to the role of a medium. His early years exposed him to splintered minds. His brother’s mental illness taught him the fragility of sanity, and at some points – when inflamed by too much cocaine – Bowie does seem to have come to the edge of madness. Yet the experience did not leave him less experimental in his art or his life. He used his time on the edge to take more risks and become more fearlessly creative.
He grew up and thrived at a time of upheaval. The 1970s and 1980s were decades when class, sex and gender roles were dissolving and mutating, and for many of us who lived through them these were years that Bowie not only embodied, but also anticipated and enacted. Some may have been seized by panic as social conventions melted down, but not Bowie. He revelled in the metamorphoses that were underway. Many have noted the eclectic craftsmanship with which he mixed art forms from different sources – kabuki and music hall, for example. These transformations did not come quickly; there surely must have been a lot of labour in them. But his changes were not mere exercises in pastiche, however brilliantly executed. Using a method of cross-matching, he created a space in which new forms could appear. When they did, it was as if they came from nowhere. Talk of Bowie being a magician is not all hyperbole.
That there was a streak of streetwise shrewdness in the man cannot be denied. In 1997, foreseeing the financialized economy that was coming into being, he sold $55 million worth of Bowie Bonds – securities that were backed by current and future revenues from the albums he had produced before 1990. The deal was possible because, unlike many musicians, he owned the rights to his songs. New technologies eroded this copyright and the value of the bonds, which were wound up in 2007. By then Bowie had been active in new media for almost a decade. In 1998, years before YouTube and Twitter were founded, he launched BowieNet, creating what he described as ‘the first community-driven internet site that focuses on music, film, literature, painting and more’. But here as elsewhere there was more going on than meets the eye.
In the course of his career – if that dated concept can be used in connection with him – Bowie became a digital presence in the lives of many millions. From very early on in its development, he seems to have understood how the new virtual world would become a vehicle for ancient dreams. So he turned the cultural mediumship he practised during much of his life into an Internet-enabled practice of channelling images and stories that linked him with his fans.
Whether he was always fully aware of what he was doing cannot be known. From one point of view, the album released just before his death was artfully scripted by him as a cryptic valediction. Yet the premonitory lyrics of Blackstar have a trance-like rhythm, suggesting they came from somewhere beyond his conscious personality. Finally eluding our and possibly his own understanding, Bowie died as he lived, a modern shaman.
Introduction: Somebody Else Took His Place, and Bravely Cried …
James Curcio
All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event – in the living act, the undoubted deed – there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. 1
— Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Blackstar was released on Bowie’s sixty-ninth birthday. On that day, it was an enigma: slick and nebulous, an amalgam of profound nonsense and profane sense. A box filled with puzzle pieces, every one painted black. Not that this was uncharacteristic of its author. Like many of his more experimental excursions – Station to Station , Lodger , 1. Outside , and so on – the listener played a role, weaving chaos into their own semblance of order, and like a tarot reading, it can only be as profound or shallow as its interpreter. Bowie always remained cryptic about proper interpretation, more fond of questions than answers.
Two days later, he was dead. The pieces fit differently, now that we knew it was his last. The same songs sounded like prophecy:
Something happened on the day he died
Spirit rose a metre then stepped aside
Somebody else took his place, and bravely cried:
I’m a blackstar 2
The myth grew that his imminent death was the focus for this final album, that the “he” who had died was Bowie himself. Many news sites and newspapers ran with that premise, and whether or not it is wholly accurate – he had plans for projects to follow Blackstar , including at least the intimation of re-exploring some of the “Outside” territory with Eno, 3 the musical Lazarus was based around a fictional narrative, and so on – hardly seemed to matter. The art was changed, because the frame had changed. Most of us have no real difficulty imagining Bowie possessing some preternatural certainty of when his end would come.
‘Everybody knows me now’, he sang. 4 It is true, almost everyone has at least heard of Bowie. But who do they know? Following his death, this question nagged me. It felt intensely personal, even though I know it is a magic trick: like a ventriloquist, artists speak to strangers through a mouth that is not their own.
In the following weeks, our social media feeds were awash with reflections about what a profound effect he had on millions of lives, personal and public. It was a reminder of how expansive the Bowie phenomenon was, how personal that relationship is. Many felt they knew him, and that made his death an uncomfortable reveal, because our friend was not only dead, but also a fictional construct.
Something Faulkner said in an interview with Jean Stein comes to mind whenever I wonder about this question, which is real