Until the eighteenth century, artworks almost never had titles. They generally didn't travel and were typically identified by what they depicted and where they lived most of the time. For instance, ‘Raphael's Madonna and Child at the National Gallery’ was all you needed to know. Fancy titles, metaphors, allegories, nonsense, negation, ‘untitled’ – that all came later. Ruth Yeazell argues that with the emergence of the modern market, auction houses and commercial travelling exhibitions, the title becomes an essential track-and-trace device.4 In other words the title becomes a stand-in for the work, trying to become identical with it. Marcel Duchamp referred to the title as an invisible colour, and John Welchman, whose book takes its title directly from Duchamp's formulation, describes three ways in which titles can work:
First, the continuation of broadly denotative titles, where the words are presumed to stand in direct and untroubled relation to that which is represented. Second, the set of titles that can be said to provoke connotative, allusive, or even, in Dada and Surrealism, absurd and non-consequential references to an image. And third, the conclusively modernist practice of advertising the absence of a title through the description ‘Untitled’ or through numbering or other systematic, non-referential designations.5
It's a curious thing, a title. As an artist, I'm often disappointed with my own, thinking they provide too much information or perhaps not enough. Untitled (Human Mask) (2014), by Pierre Huyghe, poises elegantly; it is finely balanced on a tightrope between the too much and the not enough, drawing attention to the divided and contradictory performance of titles. The menu is in two parts and the ingredients contradict. ‘Untitled’ is a ‘recognised’ title – currently very popular, though probably not as popular as in the 1950s and 60s in New York. ‘Untitled’ was born of artists’ resistance to the very idea of titling, and their demand that works be encountered and absorbed without textual entrée. Many such artists took their cue from Picasso, who usually refused to title his works, declaring that the works had to ‘speak’ for themselves. Yet, ‘Untitled’ does entitle a work of art, and its ubiquity, especially among the high modernist works of the second half of the twentieth century, has effectively defanged it. It feels mannered now, denuded of its power of aesthetic disruption. Untitled (Human Mask) draws our attention to ‘Untitled’ as a title by recalling its relatively short history of disruptive agency, deliberately antagonistic to the power of titles that specify something in particular. The ‘Untitled’ title, coming first, not tucked shyly between parentheses, wants to draw attention to the overbearing signifying weight of a title and put it sous rature. The parenthetical title ‘Human Mask’ clearly undoes that ambition (parentheses qualify, but they can't nullify). So ‘Untitled’, with the hard adjacency of the parenthetical title, strangely obtains some power as entitled; it cancels out the words that draw our attention to something specific. It openly embraces (and names) the confusion and contradiction that plagues all titles, turning the title here into a kind of provocative nonsense. Huyghe has form in this regard; the name of his extraordinary piece first exhibited in 2012 at dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel was provocatively titled Untilled.
Untitled (Human Mask) is not only provocative nonsense but also sluggishly schizophrenic. To be untitled, as in without title but parenthetically titled, is a parergonal envelope wrapped tightly around a critique of titling – of how titles struggle to mean and the ‘damage’ they can do. This combination, an untitled title with a titled title in parenthesis, is far from rare. Examples include Jean-Michel Basquiat's Untitled (Skull) (1981) and Felix Gonzales-Torres, Untitled (Girlfriend in a Coma) (1990). There are thousands of these. The contents in parentheses are sometimes added by galleries, auction houses or dealers, generally with a view to selling the works. But Untitled (Human Mask) is ‘deliberate’. It's there from the beginning, and for this viewer at least, measuring the truth value and confusion of the work's title while watching the film has been a consistent handshake. I've never read Kierkegaard, but there's a line I like that gets quoted a lot. With regard to faith, Kierkegaard apparently declared that the ambition is to ‘arrive at immediacy after reflection’.6 I think that's how the title of Untitled (Human Mask) works.
Of course, the parenthetical title ‘Human Mask’ draws our attention to the mask worn by the monkey in the film, suggesting that it is a simulacrum – a representation or image – of a human face. This question of something representing, of ‘being like’, something else is complex and weighs heavily on this film and its depiction of resemblances and differences. But we should immediately note that the mask in question is really nothing like a human face. This type of mask is typically worn by humans to look theatrically less like themselves, less specific. In Gaston Leroux's serial novel The Phantom of the Opera (1909–10), the phantom declares that in order to hide the particularity of his hideously deformed face he has ‘created a mask that makes [him] look like anyone else’.7 A mask can certainly indicate a ‘type’ or a parody; either way, what's interesting is how the wearer or bearer of the (human) mask could be said to be deliberately ‘untitled’ by it; as if, in Huyghe's film, the mask were a stand-in for ‘Untitled’ in the title. There is no human in the film Untitled (Human Mask), or at least not in frame, but there is a mask.
I began this discussion of the title with an epigraph taken from Baudelaire's critical writings on the 1846 salon. I confess I chose it simply because of the delicious coincidence of ‘monkey’ and ‘title’ appearing in consecutive sentences. ‘Les singes du sentiment’ are despised by Baudelaire as weak painters, foolishly relying on text, such as titles, to do the work their paintings should be doing. The title is not earned, so it does not belong. On sifting through Baudelaire, Derrida, Welchman, Yeazell and others, it seems the underlying consensus is that titles are necessary, but still should be avoided. As I write, titles are in the news: there have been demands to change the tendentious, sometimes overtly racist ones attached to older works. These are the nomenclature wars. Some have warned against judging the past by the standards of today. But they have obviously forgotten that the past is contingent, and commemoration is either sustained by consent or imposed. Contested titles are often imposed after the fact of the contested thing they name, by owners, art critics and even politicians. They seldom have existential claims on the works. David Lowenthal put it welclass="underline" ‘To know is to care, to care is to use, to use is to transform the past’;8 and Ann Patchett, perhaps better stilclass="underline" ‘Walking backward is an excellent means of remembering how little you know.’ 9
Damnatio memoriae – the erasure and transformation of memory when power and/or knowledge shifts – has, until very recently, been an essential part of commemoration and memorialisation, almost from the very beginning of such things; and the holding onto titles, like the holding onto offensive monuments, is paradoxically a relatively modern condition. ‘The Roman damnatio memoriae worked like Piranesi's: to dishonour memory, not to destroy it.’ 10 In the exhibition ‘Black Models: From Géricault to Matisse’ at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris in 2019, paintings such as Portrait of a Negress (1800) by Marie-Guillemine Benoist were renamed – in that case, as Portrait of Madeleine. Édouard Manet's Olympia (1863) was renamed Laure, after the model who posed as the maid in his painting. Both re-namings feel somehow right, as the works continue to connect with contemporary life. Some memories deserve and need to be dishonoured.