Compare the stare of Chardin's monkey with the final shot of the monkey in Untitled (Human Mask), an extreme close-up on the monkey's mask, from just below the nose to just above the eyes. In each eye a single bead of reflected light. She is looking at you filming; we see the reflected light of the apparatus, the camera eye that is making all of this appear. Both works, the Huyghe and the Chardin, ask us to consider the difficult and arbitrary way we assign meaning and value to the other – to their gestures, grimaces, physical tics. Because here the monkey is the other, she comes to stand in for other kinds of cruel, inhumane otherness. Take another example from the mid-eighteenth century: Jean-Baptiste Deshays's Le Singe peintre (c.1745) (fig.6). Sharing his title with Chardin, Deshays meticulously references the senior artist's version of the same subject. But Deshays's painting misses the radical quality of Chardin's. The monkey looks not at the viewer but towards the voluptuous naked body of his model. The animal gaze here exceeds the performance of the male gaze, becoming a virtual male animal haze of prejudice and fear, and the provocative whiteness of the model's buttocks codes the monkey racially. The fear and prejudice projected here is the kind that gives birth to resentment and intolerance, what W.E.B. Du Bois calls the ‘psychological and public wage of whiteness’.38 The history of that representation, of a white (sometimes naked) woman desired by the projection of an almost-man beast, sublimates the deepest fear that many white men have, produced by and reproducing a desperate, dangerous racism.
One of the most poignant and riveting recent examples of singerie is Gary Winogrand's photograph Central Park Zoo, New York City, 1967 (fig.7). Here is Hilton Als: ‘[We] see a white woman and a black man, apparently a couple, holding the product of their most unholy of unions: monkeys. In projecting what we will into this image – about miscegenation, our horror of difference, the forbidden nature of black men with white women – we see the beast that lies in us all.’ 39 I read an article recently that revealed that the Black man carrying the monkey and the white woman in the picture did not know each other; their union is simply the effect of photographic composition. Donna Haraway, thinking about all the apes who are not humans, asks what it means to be close to ‘almost human’. For Haraway, the Western capitalist interest in primates is steeped in orientalist thinking and it is here that culture, race and gender are constructed, to reinforce and champion the order of things. Here is Haraway:
Simian orientalism means that western primatology has been about the construction of the self from the raw material of the other, the appropriation of nature in the production of culture, the ripening of the human from the soil of the animal, the clarity of white from the obscurity of colour, the issue of man from the body of woman, the elevation of gender from the resource of sex, the emergence of mind by the activation of body.40
When a monkey is included in a work of art, it's often in the service of a strong affirmation-through-negation of what it means to be human. Untitled (Human Mask) plays with this idea of difference, between humans and monkeys, but also between living and not. Apart from humans, all the species of Hominoidea are edging towards extinction, including the tailless monkey in Untitled (Human Mask). If, in the film, humans are now extinct, would monkeys be rescued from imminent extinction – would other species start to ‘come back’? Would human-built structures, like the restaurant, become the equivalent of archaeological curiosities for these resurgent species?
Back to the Restaurant
To us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risks. This world of the imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense. We favour the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.
– Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb41
Question: What animal would you be if you could be an animal?’
Answer: ‘You already are an animal’.
– Douglas Coupland42
Huyghe's ruined restaurant is shorthand for human life suddenly disappeared. It's a special kind of abandonment, without specific reason. We recognise this visual signature – emptied towns, destroyed buildings, piles of garbage – from contemporary depictions of Armageddon. Superpowers staving off imminent ends, courtesy of Marvel et al., have fittingly been the cinema's swansong, keeping screens packed worldwide right up until their closure due to Covid-19. The world in Huyghe's enigmatic scenario exhibits what Eugene Thacker refers to as ‘hiddenness’. It's not that the world is hiding from us, as this would suggest that all we have to do for it to be revealed is un-hide it. Rather, Untitled (Human Mask) reveals to us the remainder that cannot be revealed, that is beyond our ability to imagine – what Thacker names as ‘the-world-in-itself’. This is the paradoxical condition of Huyghe's film: Untitled (Human Mask) depicts a world without us rather than a world for us, but such a world is impossible to depict. We would of course have to have been there, making it once again the world for us. We can only, I think, hope to resolve this problem by conceiving of the camera and its entire apparatus – including editing and sound – as autonomous. As though for years the camera had been drawn ineluctably into the city's orbit of natural animation processes and innovation, contemplating a future where it would be both master and subject. Now it is all agency and possibility, and for the monkey, the cat, the cockroach and the maggots, their world has become a wholly autonomous moving-image spectacle.
Thacker points out that the horror genre is not simply about fear, but also ‘the enigmatic thought of the unknown’.43 In this enigmatic regard, Untitled (Human Mask) is, more than anything else perhaps, a horror film. We are afraid of the world without us, says Thacker, because it escapes our ability to conceive. Nuclear war and global warming hint at what that world might be like, but the entirely post-human is an unmanageable, impossible phantom. Untitled (Human Mask) chases that spectre's tale and fills this viewer, at least, with dread. It is a dread that destroys thought and reduces human to animal. Yet as the possibility grips us with terror, it increasingly defines us.
When we began the Afterall One Work book series fifteen years ago, we agreed that an artwork needed to be at least ten years old in order for writers to reasonably judge its importance, effect and influence. These latter things can change quickly and resonate differently across time, and a work that carries obvious promise on day one might shrink into relative insignificance some years later. A One Work ages into its importance, gaining strength ex post facto. As I write, on the tenth anniversary of the 11 March 2011 earthquake in Japan, I am reminded that we made an exception for 2014 work Untitled (Human Mask). This reinforces reflections I've had about my delay in starting this text, and my surprise at discovering how much my thoughts and feelings about the work have changed since I first saw it.