Ugo Rondinone: the mask and the masked Tennis Elbow 121

The right question is not “Who are you?”

It is “Who are you not?”

The mirror has not been with us for long. It was only five or six thousand years ago that some creative and industrious soul polished up a flat piece of bronze and voilà—you, only golden.

So it’s interesting that the mask has part of the human selfscape for at least 40,000 years—and, given that most would have been made out of degradable materials like leather, twine and feathers, probably 40,000 years longer.

Perhaps they knew what we do not—your face is a prison, a mask is a key.This basic truth lies at the rock bottom of Ugo Rondinone’s new show of seven/eight stone masks, weighing in between three and 14 kilograms. Elemental and prehistoric in design, they are all different, shaped vaguely like hexagons, ovals, hearts, shields or just a good old-fashion rocky blob, but they are all visual cousins to the legendary chipped-stone hand-ax, the first known human tool. Though mostly the size of a human face, Rondinone’s masks are stonily symbolic, with naught but a pair of blank round eyeholes (albeit with teeny crow’s feet) to suggest a face, and wildly unwearable unless you are very strong and very drunk.

Their blank expression is itself a key, opening the interpretation of the object to free-ranging speculation.This is a quality present in much of Rondinone’s work—not unfinished, yet still open to interpretation. Nowhere is this more true than in his monumental towers or boulders cairns, which balance precariously between contemporary spectacle and primeval totemism.

The masks balance on a knife-edge, too—between self and other, gravity and levity, profundity and play, the mercurial and the leaden, horror and honor, the ordinary and the sublime. “I always like to play with two extremes, to walk tightropes between two qualities,” says Rondinone, showing a visitor around his vast studio in an old Harlem church.

The masks’ qualities can also connect to the myriad roles that masks can play and have played over the millennia, from ritual use, dramatic feature, costume party requisite or, most recently, personal protective gear.

But seen lined up along the wall as a collection, the masks become a seductive multiplicity of faces across time and space. Stone ciphers. Stoic guards and goalies. Saturnian pachyderms. Ecstatic hierophants. Mutant lichens. Chary warriors. Quizzical aliens. Retired models.

They are everything and nothing. Expansively plastic in interpretation yet comfortingly concrete in hand. Why would pore over your face in a mirror for truth when it’s already so weighed down with everything that you and the world project on to it? Identity is immobility; the mask is manumission.

David Colman