In cultural forms, a small monkey, despite its age, will generally be anthropomorphised as a young child without sexual desire. Even if the figure were to enact such desire, expose her genitals provocatively, this would likely appear as a more or less childlike cabaret to us. To read such a gesture too literally would be close to recognising the monkey's sexual activity as the human's degree zero. It is us full of desperate lust, our secret fear of dignity lost. But here, with a feminine mask, long humanlike hair together with childlike costume, the monkey is a bundle of contradictions. Watching him like this, I want to know what she is thinking, to somehow feel the intensity hidden behind the mask. As if beneath the mask is not a childlike monkey, but a girl who knows what she wants, and who, like Brás Cubas, relishes the salt of mystery and the pepper of danger.25
Fredric Jameson describes things like props as apodeictic – as pointing to specific properties or truths, since we immediately assume recognition and denotation on their basis. They are also, however, troubled by Derridean undecidabilities, as he puts it, they are always capable of reversing and undermining intention. This uncertainty, argues Jameson, is productive – ‘it makes for the tension between temporality and space which, when maintained to the breaking point, allows us to glimpse the absent centre of this work, the famous Still-stand in which history and the Now are momentarily indistinguishable’.26 In other words, sometimes a prop is not a prop, when it exceeds its own propness. The maneki-neko is one such prop, prodding, scratching at (for this viewer at least) long-held marginal curiosities like: What keeps the maneki-neko arm bobbing? Is there a battery? Does it belong to our age or an older one? Is it mechanical or electric or even solar? Do you wind it up, and if so, when was the last time? It also feels slightly authorial, as if whoever or whatever is behind the camera and its editing protocol is distracted by the maneki-neko and its bobbing arm, or wants to make a serious philosophical point about likeness via cats and swinging limbs. As the scholar Paul North writes, ‘Between a banality of sameness and a delirium of difference is where likeness hides.’ 27
Real cats never wave their paws in greeting. In English, ‘the cat's paw’ is an idiom for the dupe, someone taken advantage of or used by another for pleasure and need. How perfect that this idiom is derived from Jean de la Fontaine's seventeenth-century fable ‘The Monkey and the Cat’, sometimes included in anthologies of Aesop's Fables (fig.3). The difference between Fontaine's depiction and the Aesop version is that in the former the cat is tricked through persuasion while in the latter it is by force. In French the idiom with identical meaning to ‘the cat's paw’ is tirer les marrons du feu, picking up directly from the fable's morality tale, wherein a monkey persuades a cat to pull chestnuts from the fire with the empty promise of sharing the edible treasure. The cat leaves empty-handed, of course, with its paws badly scorched.
The real cat in Untitled (Human Mask) is not interested – won't be pulling any chestnuts out of the fire on behalf of this or any other monkey. Perhaps the anthropomorphic costume-wearing fills her with contempt. What she does do (in the brief moments when the camera fixates on her) is that instantly recognisable, excruciatingly enigmatic eye work: slow wincing, dipping and raising his brows, opening and closing his eyes, shoring up her sense of himself, almost as if, speaking, sotto voce: Are we cats just bored, instinctively?
The swinging back and forth of the monkey's leg, her head dropped and hidden behind her long wig, is this the sign of introspection? All the time I'm thinking, what a strange orbit all of this rotates within; what a strange desire I have to want to parse it all, have it make sense; and what a strange confusion all of this is rendering. Is, for instance, the monkey missing something, reminiscing, in the middle of a reverie over a pleasure once had, or regretting the ruin of plans just made? Is she composing a thought to share with another monkey? Surely there must be others – friends, family – somewhere? The longer this list of speculative interior states based on the value of her pose (tempered by or perhaps assumed through the featureless mask), the more we become aware of the arbitrariness of these conventional poses everywhere. A tapping foot, a swinging leg, playful kneading, stroking one's hair – what to make of these clues for interior states? Every time the monkey strokes or pulls at his hair, I'm reminded of the absence of my own. The monkey seems evolutionary close to me (99 per cent shared DNA). Zoographia. Not every animal could wear that costume, that mask, and suggest to us some of the things I have been listing. She sits at one of the tables and fidgets, plays with her hair. Her attire suggest that she should be able to talk but can't; her silence reminds me of my father. He was not a man for words, he spoke little to me unless he was angry. The tender moments were sparse, but I do remember playing chess with him. Chess was something he liked, and he played it with me. Until I was able to beat him, and then we stopped playing. And I would sit, alone at the table where we once played, fidgeting, playing with my hair probably.
The philosopher Henri Bergson thought the essence of comedy was ‘the image of something mechanical encrusted upon the living’.28 A monkey with a wig, a child's long hair, a sailor suit and a white mask. Is that funny? There are circumstances where you could imagine small children in delight at such a spectacle, at least in the days when the circus was more dominant in public life. There seems to be very little that's funny in Untitled (Human Mask). After five or six minutes, I could feel a rising grievance on behalf of the animal. This is something that can happen when you look too long, remain with a thought for a while. The monkey's humiliation reminds us of who we are, in a way that we wish we weren't. It humiliates all of us to allow humiliation to proceed. I think the feeling of humiliation is powerful and productive here, its incitement of awkwardness as we watch is almost too much, pushing each observation back onto us.
At one point, the monkey leans back against the corner of what seems to be a dividing wall. The pose is a graceful recline, as if deep in thought, the light catching the end of her porcelain nose and the cavity of one of his eyes. A piece of hair, beautifully highlighted, falls across the side of her face, most of which remains in shadow. The chiaroscuro here is exquisite; it overcomes the subject of the image and feels like it belongs to the long history of composition, a means of making an image pulse with light and shadow. She plays with his hair, each time with the same apparent curiosity as the time before. What is this stuff that hangs from the top of my head? Then a wide shot as she sits at a table, looking towards the camera. Is she looking at the camera? What would that even mean? Then, a cut to what seems to be the real object of her vision – a screen imprinted with a mountain view. Is she looking at the view, or the picture?
The monkey is touching the screen and the walls. His mask imposes structure on these (familiar) movements, it supplies an idea of purpose. At one moment she touches the wall and then turns away to touch her hair, as if these were coequal objects of curiosity. (Does she do this every day, with everything, everywhere?) Then he touches the plastic that wraps a forgotten bouquet of flowers. Then he is on to her hands, holding them up, touching, feeling as if he had no idea he had them. What are these for, I wonder? And so he goes on: hair, hands, walls, kitchen surfaces, bottles, hot towels, screens. But the one thing she never seems to notice is the strangest of all – the mask she's wearing. This lack of touching is stranger than all the serial touching put together.