“No one cared who I was until I put on the mask.” The line from Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises (delivered by Tom Hardy as Bane), highlights a paradox. “Through the act of hiding you’re making yourself much more noticeable,” says the artist James Merry, who began making facial ornaments for Björk to wear on stage a decade ago. “That’s the tension that makes them powerful, the weird conflict at the heart of masks.”
Artists have long played with this duality, from the 20th-century painter Leonor Fini, with her feathery or feline adornments, to the paper bags made by the New Yorker cartoonist Saul Steinberg from 1959 to 1962, to the 21st-century hip-hop artist MF Doom (aka Daniel Dumile). There are masks of augmentation and adornment, such as Merry’s intricate and otherworldly creations, or of secrecy and concealment, like the renegade balaclavas worn by Russian punk group Pussy Riot, or country star Orville Peck’s fringed bandit-style face covering.
“The minute you put the mask on, you become someone else,” says Käthe Kollwitz, a founding member of the feminist-activist art collective Guerrilla Girls (their work is at Hannah Traore Gallery in New York until 29 March). Talking over Zoom in a gorilla mask, Kollwitz – who takes her pseudonym from the early 20th-century German painter – explains how the furry store-bought disguises have shielded the members’ identities since they first started calling out art-world discrimination in 1985.
“We put our first posters up; all hell broke loose; and suddenly people wanted to see us,” she recalls. When one member misspelled “guerrilla” as “gorilla”, they settled on the primate get-up. “It became our trademark,” she says. “Without necessarily meaning to, we created a Guerrilla Girls persona.”
Some content could not load. Check your internet connection or browser settings.
In the past 40 years, more than 60 women artists have been part of the collective. “We were afraid that our careers would be hurt by our activism,” says Kollwitz. “We wanted to protect ourselves.” A number of members have since gone on to reveal their true identities, “but what’s great is it just doesn’t matter”, says Kollwitz. “The masks are stronger than going unmasked. It empowers you.”
A mask has often been a ploy for creating intrigue. Peck, who has steadfastly worn face coverings as a singer since 2017, has said that his mask-wearing is “bringing back that trope of the outlaw and mystery”; Irish rapper DJ Próvaí, of Belfast hip-hop group Kneecap, is also distinctive for his tricolour balaclava in the colours of the Irish flag. Originally a teacher, he first wore it on stage so as not to be recognised by students at his “very Catholic” secondary school, but has acknowledged its potency as a symbol.
Fiontán Moran, curator of the upcoming Tate Modern retrospective of the Australian artist Leigh Bowery, pinpoints the tradition of Venetian carnival costume, which dates back to medieval times. “It creates a moment when society can do things they’re not normally allowed to do,” he says. “Leigh embodies that spirit. Masks are a way of existing in another realm.”
After studying music then fashion in Melbourne, Bowery moved to London in 1980 and became a fixture of the city’s underground nightclub scene. He began making and wearing his own flamboyant outfits, treading the line between performance art, club culture and fashion design. He modelled for Lucian Freud, collaborated with choreographer Michael Clark and couturier Mr Pearl, and was referred to by his friend Boy George as “modern art on legs”. The Tate show (running from 27 February to 31 August) features many of his infamous looks such as Plastic Surgery – created with pairs of tights padded with foam and painted with make-up – or outré A-line dresses that covered the face and head. “People often refer to them as Mexican wrestling masks,” says Moran, “but I think they are more likely connected to sexual gimp masks.”
Manipulating one’s appearance is often part of the thrill. In the 1920s, French surrealist Claude Cahun (born Lucy Schwob) photographed herself in guises that challenged gender stereotypes. Eighty-five years later, Cahun’s androgynous take on a bodybuilder was recast in a self-portrait by British artist Gillian Wearing, in which she also holds up a mask of her own face. Since the 1970s, Cindy Sherman has created and photographed more than 600 personas, first through make-up and costume, later with elaborate prosthetics. The exhibition Masquerades at the M+ museum in Hong Kong (until 5 May) pairs Sherman’s early work with images by another shapeshifting artist: Yasumasa Morimura, who adopts the likeness of both historical figures and celebrities in his self-portraits.
“You could say that Leigh was always wearing a mask, because he was always performing on some level,” says Moran. “Almost every person I’ve spoken to who knew him well said that their favourite look of his was the everyday one. He would wear a bad wig or tape up one eyebrow so they looked wonky. We’ve christened it hardcore normcore, but it speaks to his constant hiding of his real self.”
Where masks begin and end is ever more complicated in the age of social-media selfies and photo filters. Wearing first began exploring the theme in the 1990s, making her first masked portrait in 2000. It’s a stark and uncanny portrayal: the Turner Prize-winning artist’s face is layered with a semi-realistic silicone mask cast in her own image, her eyes beneath staring directly at the viewer.
“I remember seeing a scene in a children’s TV programme in the ’70s where a girl was wearing a smiling mask at a party,” she recalls of an early inspiration. “All her friends read from this that she was enjoying herself, until someone lifted the mask and she was crying. It made me realise that is what people do in real life, just without a physical mask.”
Some content could not load. Check your internet connection or browser settings.
Wearing has continued to photograph herself in ever more lifelike disguises: as younger versions of herself, as members of her family, and as artists such as Georgia O’Keeffe and Andy Warhol. At her current show at Thomas Dane Gallery in Naples (Art Lovers, in which she is showing alongside her husband, Michael Landy, until 12 April), a series of new self-portraits see her morph into Italian actresses Monica Vitti and Anna Magnani – “who are used to being other people and wearing their faces as masks” – and also directors Federico Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini. “When I put on their masks there is a shift in how I hold myself,” says Wearing. “It is a form of acting in itself.”
Merry began creating adornments for Björk in 2015, when she had just created the Vulnicura album in the wake of her break-up with artist Matthew Barney; his stage pieces acted like a veil to her vulnerability. His designs, often inspired by natural forms, can summon surreal sea creatures or supernatural plantlife, and have evolved through fabric and silversmithing into “alien-looking resins” and digital masks, released as filters to wear on Instagram.
He continues to dream up creations for Björk, but he also makes masks for himself. “It’s bizarre because I don’t really have any interest in being a performer,” he says. His latest art project, designed to be exhibited, references archaeological Iron Age masks worn by priests. “I’m kind of making myself, very loosely, into my imagined versions of the priests at different sacred sites in England.”
On stage a mask can be a device for overcoming inhibitions. It’s a way “to become your true self”, says Goatman, the stage name of the drummer of Swedish psych band Goat. “A mask makes you feel connected with the energy that you truly are,” he says. “Your inner vision of you. Or maybe your best self.”
For others, it’s just part of the joy of dressing up. Fini, who moved in the same circles as Jean Cocteau, Man Ray, Leonora Carrington and Salvador Dalí, once said: “I have always loved to dress up in costume. There’s this aspect of glorifying oneself, of becoming larger than life. I liked to go [to masked balls] solely to make an entrance, to be intoxicated with myself for a few moments.”
Whether a mask reveals or conceals, it’s rarely the end of the story. Moran is sceptical, for instance, of the idea often expressed by people that Freud’s portraits of Bowery, showing the latter nude and unmasked, show us the “real Leigh”. “It’s maybe a little naive,” he says. “The idea of the ‘real person’ is maybe always a mystery.” Cahun, nearly a century ago, seemed to agree. “Beneath this mask, another mask,” she wrote. “I will never be finished removing all these faces.”
