Strange Encounters

When Jim Carrey donned a green mask, his unrepentant behaviour was the result of being granted anonymity. But masks conceal less than we might think, reveals Strange Encounters, a new exhibition at the Dean Gallery in the room adjoining Paolozzi's studio.

Wearing rough estimations of Venetian masks, reminiscent of the Plague Doctor's beak (intended to keep a distance from contagions), four male mannequins in suits and oxfords are splayed across the room in poses authoritarian, carnal, contemplative and vacant. The domination at play lacks any traditional signifiers; beyond posture, the figures appear nearly identical, but one holds a mirror. The room is otherwise sparse; containing one painting and two other hung works.

From masked uniformity as a feature of the horrors perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan to the sadistic conspiracies of the ultrawealthy in Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, the mask often proves better-suited to hiding one from oneself than from others. The 1963 Milgram Experiment, under the guise of a memory experiment, tested the willingness of an individual to forgo moral concerns when reassured by an authoritative figure, as volunteers administered lethal voltages to their 'test subjects' (actors trained to simulate effects). The 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, in which volunteers played the roles of guard and prisoners, found the 'guards' gleefully at ease with their assigned task of proving their 'arbitrary control' and the experiment was shut down in infamy. Foucault argued that discipline as a social function mutated from corrective preservation to one of positivist engineering. Arendt called it the banality of evil: horror is not revealed outwardly or inwardly, as long as one is aligned with authority and its goals.

Douglass Gordon's mirror behind a sheet of glass, with the ashes of a photograph, calls itself a portrait of the artist and viewer, a clever play on the artist hidden within the work, and a mocking celebration of the self in space and time. The viewer cannot accept both simultaneously: cognitive dissonance theory explains that the mind cannot hold two opposing views and will rationalize whichever is dominant. This is the process that held accountable the individual bankers, not the system that let them run wild; and the individual guards who engaged in torture at Abu Ghraib, not those who made and approved the order. As such, one might assume Adolf Eichmann had talons. Take a look in Gordon's mirror: we all wear masks.