In Huyghe's film, the parenthetical title, like the actual mask itself, draws keenly nuanced attention today. As I have walked to my studio to work on this text, over the spring of 2021, most everyone I've seen has been wearing a mask, often with distinctive designs. As I write, I have just seen an image online of a protest against vaccines and Covid-19 rules in San Marino (fig. 1). One of the most puzzling phenomena of the last year has been a certain variety of protest: the demonstrations against lockdown, vaccines, almost anything to do with pandemic-related rules and restrictions. The look of these protests – uniforms, signs, face coverings and slogans – has often been confusing. Ask yourself: How does the mask of a young woman protesting against mask-wearing make any sense? How does her mask, for instance – sort of Venetian carnival meets Anonymous – critique mask mandates? The San Marino woman's mask is strikingly similar to the one worn by the monkey in Huyghe's film. Five years ago, for me at least, these signifiers did not connect. Will they still connect five years from now? Even for most of the duration of the pandemic, until a friend pointed it out to me, I hadn't noticed the connection between Untitled (Human Mask) and the mask on my own face.
Throughout this text, I have resisted using shorthand for the title Untitled (Human Mask); by repeating it in full, its deliberate contradictions are emphasised, its provocative nonsense. And, as this is a housekeeping segue, I should say I have also resisted giving a specific gender to the monkey in the film. The monkey's costume suggests she is female, but the tradition of Noh masks, wherein men wear masks to play women, would suggest that underneath he is male. Nameless, she remains unknowable in this sense, and I have rotated his gender throughout, sometimes in a single sentence. Same with the cat who makes a brief entrance, comme il faut, while I simply punted on this gender question with the insects.
Disposing of Leftovers
In July of 2020, during the pandemic, the artists who own the building where my London studio had been located for eighteen years decided to evict me with just one month's notice. So while writing this text, I have also been clearing out my studio. I didn't think it would take long, but the process has been endless. I threw a lot of things away. Why, I wonder, did I keep six copies of a catalogue containing a single small reproduction of one of my works, so small it was almost impossible to find? But there they were, the six of them, proudly upright and adjoining, shouldering dust, yes, but otherwise in good condition. For whom was this imagined posterity? Most likely it would have become a problem for my children, one more thing to get rid of after my end. I threw five away. Multiple copies of other forgotten accomplishments were also summarily disposed of.
I found one catalogue that pulled me temporarily out of this burdened reverie. It was for a 1999 group exhibition, ‘Cinéma Cinéma: Contemporary Art and the Cinematic Experience’, at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. I had two films in this exhibition, as did Pierre Huyghe. In fact, it was the first time I had ever seen Pierre's work and the first time we met. Career-wise, Pierre and I came of age, so to speak, at the same time. It would be fair to say that he has been more successful than me, though perhaps it wasn't always clear that this would be the case. I think we spoke briefly at the opening dinner. I was curious about his work. It seemed low-tech but serious. Mine was high-tech, trying to be funny. What is funny is that twenty plus years later we seem to have swapped things around: I'm generally pretty low-tech, whereas works like Huyghe's Untitled (Human Mask) seem polished and ‘professional’. More so than, say, his Remake (1995), which, according to the catalogue I had just found, was exhibited in Eindhoven back then.
I tried to think if there were other group exhibitions we had participated in together. But I couldn't remember any, which is strange given the proliferation in the late 1990s and early 2000s of group shows on the theme of art and the moving image. That thematic may have been necessary back then, when museums and curators, and artists too, wanted to define moving-image art as different from artists’ films, making the former collectable as art rather than film. Maybe there were other such group exhibitions Pierre and I were both part of, documented in publications I'd already thrown away. Today that theme seems less useful, the moving image being an established art form. I remember, very vaguely, a conversation with Pierre back then where he expressed an indifference to the ‘moving image’ thematic and a desire not to be known as a moving-image artist. Perhaps he simply exited that particular circuit early.
Eventually, a huge amount of books, catalogues and other printed matter, once destined for a now cancelled posterity, filled more than a hundred extra-large garbage bags, which were then placed in large ‘recycling’ bins, the contents of which, more likely than not, were destined for equatorial Africa, where they would be burned outside by small children without masks or protection, earning just a few cents a day. Sometimes a long sentence is needed just to bring everything together. Morituri te salutant.
Disposing of leftovers; readying for final departure. It was inevitable, I suppose that, like all movers and packers before me, I would think about the things I had done and not done during my almost eighteen years at that studio. Not doing something can be significant – sometimes more significant than a great success. There are lots of things I have almost done but haven't, like writing a book, sailing around the Cape of Good Hope or getting a PhD. And then, there are all the films I thought I might make but didn't. Some of these films still exist in minimal form, barely legible lists of things to think about, scattered across studio walls and desks, some with instructions: Camera rises rapidly, vertiginously to the cupola, pauses for some moments, then descends vertiginously over the head of a suppliant. ‘Vertiginously’? Didn't I read somewhere that adverbs rob verbs of their authority? What I do know is that this fantasy film of mine, (not) made inside Francesco Borromini's Chapel of Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza in Rome, is perhaps the biggest, most important, of all my failed films. It's a project that has dragged other people in its wake, more than one of whom worked for a year on detailed preparations. And still it remains … well, vertiginous. The making of this film has travelled with me and I continue to find opportunities to talk and write about it. I often wonder, sometimes aloud in front of others, how it is that my desire to make that film has changed the way I think about all film. There is a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ not making it. Unfinished projects, planned but not executed, perpetually taunt. It's as if the past gets reimagined as a growing accumulation of créatifs de l’escalier.
One of my more recently unfinished projects, at least until now, has been this very book. At least five years ago I promised many people (colleagues, Pierre himself, the MIT Press) that I was just about to start working on it – that I was just days, minutes away from putting pen to paper. And each week, each month, for several years after, I didn't start. I'm wondering now if there is something significant to this failure? And I think I'm probably on to something here, because I do recall thinking about failure in genere when I first saw Untitled (Human Mask), on a cold, wet autumn morning in London, probably seven ago. Watching the film through several cycles, much as I knew that I really loved it, it also irritatingly reminded me of the difficulty of … well, doing difficult things, as if Untitled (Human Mask) were the realisation of an unmade film that could have been mine.