While Transformation evokes associations of all types, in relation to art the topic conjures up a long list of associations, including how we refashion identity, how we reinvent ourselves and how art adapts and changes over time. questions How does our ability to transform who we are, or how we look, impact the way we see ourselves? Is our ability to transform or reinvent ourselves what makes us truly modern? Has our culture’s relationship to art changed and if so, how?

Giuseppe Arcimboldo (also spelled Arcimboldi) (1527 – July 11, 1593)

Was an Italian painter best known for creating imaginative portrait heads made entirely of such objects as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish, and books. Part of Mannerism

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/05/arts/05iht-melik6.1.7766101.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1 http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2008/04/gottorp-kunstkammer.html

Peter Joel Witkin

Masks and eyes-covering are recurring in Witkin’s work. They are as much symbols of fetishism as a way to let his models stay anonymous and give to his tableaus and allegories a universal message. The mask allows him to replace the model’s actual mask (his

http://lepetitmoutonaimelart.blogspot.com/2008/12/joel-peter-witkin-en-anglais.html

own personnality or how he acts to present himself) and to creates another one for him; Witkin replaces the metaphorical mask by a reel one. Very often that new pesonnality is the photographer’s own soul.

Rebecca Horn
«Pencil Mask»

http://www.culturevulture.net/ArtandArch/Horn.htm

She dresses the body in peculiar ways. “Pencil Mask” (1972) covers the head with leather strips in which are set 21 sharpened pencils; drawings of a sort can be made by turning the head in proximity to paper. The mask, looking weirdly medieval, is on view and a clip from the film runs near by. In a piece that may reference Frido Kahlo, an earlier artist who also found her theme in her body, the subject wears a costume of bandages with her young breasts exposed, exactly like Kahlo in her painting Broken Column.

Unicorn by Rebecca Horn and Broken Column by Frida Khalo.

Zeng Fanzhi

questions the gap between public and private truth and the honesty of expression in With his Mask series, Zeng

modern Chinese society. He exposes the psychological torment felt by those compelled into new social roles.

http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=4978818

Zeng depicts the existential crisis facing his generation. His works capture not only the painful gap between internal emotions and external appearances, but also the loss that occurs when a society is increasingly seduced by surface realities. In other works, the serene, cool repose of the mask hides the figures’ faces. In this example, it would seem that the masks in fact reveal an inner psychological state. However, the theatricality of the figures’ poses simultaneously implies that their anguish is itself a kind of posturing, as if the figures themselves are no longer in touch with their inner selves, and their pain is just another fashionable affectation.

Ron Mueck

http://24flinching.com/word/gold-seal/inspiring-artists/the-size-of-ron-mueck/ http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag03/jul_aug03/mueck/mueck.shtml

Mueck’s works command an uncanny ability to amaze with obsessive surface detail and intense psychic discharge. Engaging and wildly popular, they expose our need to validate our humanity, even as they thwart our attempts at full disclosure. Mask, as disguise, thus challenges the viewer to re-examine the concept of self-representation.

The Uncanny (Ger. Das Unheimliche -- literally, “un-home-ly”) is a Freudian concept of an instance where something can be familiar, yet foreign at the same time, resulting in a feeling of it being uncomfortably strange. Because the uncanny is familiar, yet strange, it often creates cognitive dissonance within the experiencing subject due to the paradoxical nature of being attracted to, yet repulsed by an object at the same time. This cognitive dissonance often leads to an outright rejection of the object, as one would rather reject than rationalize.

Pedro Lasch

http://www.body-pixel.com/2009/03/18/identity-masks-by-pedro-lasch/

Masks are designed for switching social identities and situations triggering serious questions on political situation and social harm. Lasch says about the project: ‘The initial perception created by these masks is one of spatial and psychological confusion. Subjects are reversed if only one person is wearing the mask.

Orlan (carnal art)

::video:: http://www.orlan.net/works/photo/

self-hybridations

Carnal Art is a self-portrait in the classical sense, yet realized through the technology of its time. Lying between disfiguration and figuration, it is an inscription in flesh, as our age now makes possible. No longer seen as the ideal it once represented, the body has become an ‘modified ready-made’. Carnal Art loves the baroque and parody; the grotesque, and other such styles that have been left behind, because Carnal Art opposes the social pressures that are exerted upon both the human body and the corpus of art. Carnal Art is anti-formalist and anti-conformist.

Ingrid Mwangi / Cutting The Mask

Cutting The Mask Zwei-Kanal Video-Installation /Two-channel video installation 2003

http://www.imow.org/wpp/stories/viewStory?storyid=1107 http://www.acrawsa.org.au/ejournalFiles/Volume%206,%20Number%201,%202010/acrawsa611.pdf

Body Performance and Video Many of Mwangi’s video and performance pieces include hair: cutting hair, using hair as a mask, dreadlocked hair. In performance, Mwangi’s voice is powerful and unsettling. She chirps, shouts and screeches in primal tones. Mwangi writes: My body is the only thing that I own... I react, interpret and question the clichés and stereotypes with which I am faced... I use art to awaken consciences.

Judith Butler (1993: 115) maintains that identity is constructed through a process of opposition and rejection. According to Theodor Adorno (1973: 23), turning a group into an “other” is a predatory instinct in which the predator must find an instinctive rage to direct against his prey. He states, “A mind that discards rationalization- its own spell- ceases by its self-reflection to be the radical evil that irks it in another.”

In Mwangi’s 2000 performance piece, Neger—Don’t Call Me she engages the audience in a constant dialogue about authenticity, other-ness and individuality (Mwangi 2003: 9). In this piece, Mwangi uses her own body as a source of knowledge where knowledge is defined as a unification of mental and physical selves.

Guerrilla Girls

http://www.guerrillagirls.com/videos/videos.shtml

Guerrilla Girls is an anonymous group of radical feminist artists established in New York City in 1985. Known for their posters, books, billboards, appearances and other creative forms of culture jamming, the group aims to expose discrimination and corruption.

Levi Van Veluw

http://beautifuldecay.com/2008/12/02/levi-van-veluw/

Van Veluw dismisses the heavy conceptual framework of the mask, citing it as merely functioning for “religious” purposes or as “decoration/tradition.” In a way, his refusal to acknowledge his relationship to other similar artists is interesting; they become instead private, more ego-driven explorations of himself, like a young child painting his face for the first time and marveling at his own transformation. SL: How do you think your works are related to, or different from traditional masks? LV: I think the relation is just superficial. Masks are for religious purposes or used as decoration/tradition. But a mask can be about giving someone another identity. And that is in a sort of way what I am doing with materials, giving them another identity.

Levi Van Veluw / Suri and Mursi

For the Suri and Mursi tribes that live in the Omo Valley region in southern Ethiopia, decorating their bodies is their main mode of expression. They use pigments from powdered volcanic rock, flowers, animal horns, grass, feathers and other available materials to create designs that represent a way of life.

Thorsten Brinkmann

El Santo

http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Lucha-libre#Masks

ETC....

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Useful links http://we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2009/11/royal-museum-for-central-afric.php http://www.africamuseum.be/persona/index_en.html http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/8g52pe/www.masksoftheworld.com/ http://www.kinkeadcontemporary.com/exhibitions/2007/painted-faces/ http://vernissage.tv/blog/ http://www.stumbleupon.com/stumbler/Coprophil/tag/arts-masks/ http://vi.sualize.us/invertebra/mask/ http://365masks.blogspot.com/2008_03_01_archive.html

VIDEOS: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCiYNE_hmNg&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOMxnUHIP_g&feature=related http://www.5min.com/Video/How-to-Make-a-Mask-100507353