For the longest time, the dominant conception of the past was as more or less continuous with the present, and the most you could hope for was to repeat it at its best, sifting through its models in ruins. Into the nineteenth century, the past becomes more and more allegorical, its research and development an imperfect but necessary trial, a flawed dry run for our more perfect today. It is deeply ideological – the shaping and interpretation of the past to promote the mythical idea that capitalism as embryo was always already coiled tightly inside the very earliest of human social structures. The past here becomes a validation for the present, confirmation of the virtue of the path taken. The British government's demand this year that monuments to rebarbative historical characters remain upright and rigid helps define the past as a sacred precursor of contemporary capitaclass="underline" the past is a protected ‘heritage’, even if this heritage is one of dubious or now rejected truths. Each year we discover new connections to the past, new histories, new origins stories, as older truths are overturned. We learn about gene flow events (sex between different species of primates) that indicate we are more than 2 per cent Neanderthal. We are also a not-insignificant amount of a ghost species, extinct except for a few footprints discovered in the sand. Everything is always only provisionally and conditionally correct, yet capitalist stagecraft has been persuasive: history has been written so that ancient cultures appear as pre-forms, sympathetically predisposed for their capitalist futures. From theories of evolution to stories about transitioning from nomadic life, many long-held truths are revealed as motivated magical thinking, working hard to hypostatise our contemporary political economy. We are potentially full of complexity and contradiction, but forced to be a small percentage of ourselves.
A mask-wearing monkey could be a metaphor for the theatrical commentary that has always accompanied this manipulation, giving form to alternative narratives while revealing the fragility and nonsense of others. This is a history of optimistic and critical reflections on difference, how things could be otherwise. From Ancient Greek theatre through Noh theatre, commedia dell‘arte, African Dance theatre, South American Indigenous theatre and all the way to Untitled (Human Mask), masks engender dialogical thought and reveal the robustness of fantasy, how it can enable resistance as well as play.
I read the other day that monkeys and other wild animals have come back in large numbers to parts of Fukushima. It's similar to Chernobyl, apparently – the wild animals living mainly in the radiation-contaminated, off-limits wooded areas, but from time to time wandering into abandoned villages and small towns as if they own them. Did the monkey grab her mask and hair on the way into the restaurant? Was this the first time, or does she always transform in this place? The longer the film goes on, the more its restaurant world feels like an old-fashioned cabinet of curiosities. In the sixteenth century, when the novelty of the Wunderkammer was at its height in Europe, visitors to homes and museums were invited to touch and feel the objects, take in their strangeness with tactile curiosity. Untitled (Human Mask) depicts the monkey is if she were inside of such a cabinet: everything, including his own body, seems like a strangeness without obvious signification.
My friend Mick thinks the digital diaspora is abducting gesture, perhaps a perfect description for a very difficult and complex condition. Gesture is what protects us, allows for pauses, circumspection, another way of reading each other. The monkey in Untitled (Human Mask) exhibits a lot of gesture. The monkey tries to write her own story through complex articulations of her body, attached to an intense curiosity. But gesture can also diminish, if an attached meaning reduces the subject to stereotype, undermining the subject's self-worth. This record of how gesture works is captured by the other star of Huyghe's production: the contemporary camera. The camera seems as curious about the monkey's gestures as the monkey is about all the things that distract him.
The gesture-less mask makes it seem as if the monkey is perpetually in deep thought. The mask flattens out and removes hesitation, distraction, boredom. I'm wondering all the time as I watch: What can she be thinking? Perhaps, given the presumed end of humanity going on outside, he's thinking that the human species never really gave birth to anything; that they only took lives, and eventually took their own. Descartes thought that monkeys and humans had almost identical brains, except for the penal gland, pea-sized or less, living secretly in the centre of the human brain. The penal gland, according to Descartes, is the soul, what gives us our difference, all of our human intelligence, our ability to cry, love, argue and, importantly, to feel shame. Jacques Derrida says shame is a human-beast differential test.
In The Animal That Therefore I Am (2002), Derrida describes the shame he feels when an animal sees him naked:
I often ask myself, just to see who I am – and who I am (following) at the moment when, caught naked, in silence, by the gaze of an animal, for example the eyes of the cat, I have trouble, yes, a bad time overcoming my embarrassment. […] It is as if I were ashamed, therefore naked in front of this cat, but also ashamed for being ashamed.48
Clothing is proper to humans; no other animal would bother. They feel none of the shame that we do at our nakedness, they don't overinvest in the sight of genitals. They are naked without even knowing it. What is Derrida ashamed of? ‘Ashamed of being as naked as a beast.’ 49 But a beast cannot be naked, if it has no idea of what ‘not naked’ is; perhaps being naked for it is much like being clothed for us. Would a monkey ever arrive for dinner without first making sure she was naked? Ham, son of Noah, sees his father naked and as a consequence is cursed. Ham is forced into exile and his descendants continue to carry that curse. With typical malevolence, European Christianity, through the middle ages and into the Enlightenment, considered Africans to be the descendants of Ham; subjection, hatred and fear of African people was considered justified on the back of this original curse.
Why is the mask white? Monkeys are almost never ‘white’, the exception being the rare white spider monkeys of Central America. In traditional Noh theatre, a white onna-men (mask) is typically worn by men to signify that they are playing a woman of refined character.50 But a white mask can also be whiteface. This never occurred to me when I first encountered Untitled (Human Mask) and watched it over and over again in preparation for writing this book; yet it certainly does now.