Myths and Masks: The Art of Paul Watson
Paul Watson has recently published Myth and Masks, a book of his artwork from 2013–2015 featuring a range of dark, folkloric characters. The artwork in the book is primarily photography, but also includes drawing and printmaking, accompanied by a series of short essays on myth, masks, the “English Eerie”, and other related subjects that he explored while making this work.
His artwork draws heavily on the concept of myth, calling up primal myth images from the dark hinterlands of his mind. He has just started work on a new series of large-scale charcoal drawings called England’s Dark Dreaming.
James Curcio: How did you become interested in myth? And how do you define it?
Paul Watson: Like many people I’ve been interested in mythology — that is, mythological stories — since I was a child, but my interest in myth as a concept-in-itself is something that has developed over the past few years. My differentiation between myth (as a concept) and mythology (as a series of myth-imbued tales from a particular time and place) is purely a personal device that helps me think about two related but different subjects.
I started working on an art project around 2008 called The Book of the Erinyes which combined letterpress, lino printing, photography, and bookbinding. The project itself remains half-finished and one day I hope to find the time to complete it. The concept was based around a re-working of the Ancient Greek mythological tale of Aeschylus’ Oresteia in which the Erinyes — later, more commonly known in Roman mythology as the Furies — pursue Agamemnon’s son Orestes to avenge his patricide. The Erinyes were chthonic deities in Greek mythology, and probably survived from a much earlier, pre-Olympian, layer of myth, pre-dating the classical era. They certainly seem darker and more primal.
Anyway, I was doing a lot of research for this project and I became increasingly interested in the wider concept of myth: what it is, what it does, and how it shapes us, and I think that starts to approach how I’d define myth. It’s what we tell ourselves about ourselves to explain ourselves. Myth is a tricky concept, not least because the meaning of the word has evolved in modern English to become a synonym for a lie or falsehood — a point that is made well in the book The Immanence of Myth which I believe you edited.
JC: Yes. We were trying to wrestle with that question from as many angles as possible. We all seem to know what we’re talking about when we say “myth”, but the closer you look at it, the less clear it becomes. At the time I was more interested in teasing that out than providing any clear answers. In retrospect, I think that’s the right approach but it probably could’ve been done in less than 250,000 words.
PW: Right. Myth isn’t just old mythological tales, and it’s still very prevalent in Western society. For instance, the myth of constant human progress and the opposing myth of the inevitable decline of human civilisation; the myth of the “invisible hand of the market” always maintaining equilibrium in a capitalist economy; the myth of the honourable way to live. Some of these you may passionately believe in, some you may dismiss as ludicrous nonsense, but these myths are deeply ingrained in modern people’s psyches as truths that explain how the world around us works, and direct how people live their lives.
JC: What is your process, when picking a subject, and then making it?
PW: The subjects generally come from what I see around me: the season of the year, the landscape I’m in, what’s happening in the world. I’m currently working on a series of drawings called England’s Dark Dreaming which are probably the most political pieces I’ve made for a long time. The title of the series references the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen (“There is no future in England’s dreaming”) — and while England was immensely creative in the late 70s and 80s, there was a lot of misery and poverty, exacerbated by far-right nationalist violence on the streets. And it feels like my country is heading back into those murky depths, with the Brexit vote triggering a rise in racist violence and homophobia as well as being, by definition, inward-looking and nationalist.
The actual act of creating a work is not planned out much beforehand, in that I often have no idea what a piece will look like when I’ve finished. This is both frustrating and exciting. For the England’s Dark Dreaming series my starting point is old-fashioned life drawing — observational drawing from a live model. This brings in a lot of uncontrolled elements, and acts in some way like a set of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards: introducing exciting and unexpected changes to any original plan there might have been. For example a model might not be able to hold a particular pose that I’ve imagined so we have to find another one that’s actually viable to hold for forty minutes-or-so, or their interpretation of my vague prompt for a pose (even as simple as “standing, looking to your left”) subverts what I thought it would look like because of the way they have chosen to realise it or how they hold themselves.
JC: The relationship between dream and myth has long been a ripe subject both for psychoanalysis — Jung was big on this, of course, maybe to the point of being somewhat prescriptive in how he interpreted dreams — and art. And techniques like Eno’s oblique strategies, or the Burroughs / Gysin cut-up technique, or the approaches of Surrealism attempt to bypass the conscious censor in one way or another to get at something that lies underneath.
What do you think about this? Is there a “collective unconscious” that is informed by this, as Jung seemed to think, or are the symbolic overlaps more circumstantial?
PW: Just to be perverse, I think that the conscious censor can sometimes be a good thing. Listening to a description of someone else’s dream, as we’ve all had to do at some point, can be pretty dull. The conscious censor is the thing that shapes a writer’s dream into an enticing narrative, and it’s the same for visual artists.
So, having rehabilitated the conscious censor into a useful tool rather than the bête noire of the surrealists, then I think it’s safe to say that tools that bypass it — such as Oblique Strategies, automated writing/drawing, cut-ups, etc — are also useful tools. If I’m drawing with pencil then I use both a pencil and an eraser. I add graphite with the pencil, then take some away with the eraser, then add a bit more pencil work, then take more away, and so on, until I produce the image I want. And it’s the same with the conscious censor and tools to bypass it — by using both then I can create something that is the best of both worlds.
JC: Part of our process of training as an artist is learning to get this kind of control, in one way or another. Of course, there are many different approaches and intentions, and it’s all going to yield different results. But in terms of what we’re accessing in our work, it’s certainly informed by more than our conscious mind, too. That’s part of what’s tricky about the idea of dealing with a collective by going inward. It’s very mysterious.
PW: Well, as I said earlier, there are huge numbers of people who deeply believe in the same myths, such as the “invisible hand of the market” or “the inevitable demise of civilisation due to humanity’s greed or stupidity”. That shared belief in a myth is, in effect, a collective consciousness. And if a new myth starts spreading virally — I could use the term meme, although its meaning has changed considerably in the past few years — then the collective consciousness will be disrupted accordingly.
JC: If it spreads, it also means that it’s already been primed for it. There’s kind of a self fulfilling prophecy in fame. Retrospectively, it always seems like the ‘public mind’ was ripe for it, but…
PW: It’s not a very romantic or magical view of the collective consciousness — no exciting trickster figures or other Jungian archetypes, although it doesn’t exclude them — but I think it models what happens on a collective level with reasonable accuracy.
Coincidentally, since you mention the cut-up technique, the first ever project I did in order to teach myself how to code PHP circa 1994 was a cut-up machine: the first version of the Lazarus Corporation Text Mixing Desk. The code was pretty dire, and it’s finally been replaced by version two a couple of years ago, which has no additional features, but looks better and is coded to a much higher standard. Jeff Noon has used both versions 1 and 2 for his writing, so it can’t be too bad.
JC: Masks are obviously a ripe metaphor for exploration of the division between art and artist. What are your thoughts on this, and how did it play out within your book Myth and Masks?
PW: Masks act as a metaphor on so many levels. They really are fascinating. One of the most interesting things for me is the interplay between two slightly different beliefs: that wearing a mask disguises who you are, and that you take on the attributes and personality of a mask that you wear. And so when I depict masked figures am I depicting the mask as a person, or a person wearing the mask?
One model I worked with for some of the photographs in Myth and Masks who was a little nervous (she hadn’t done any modelling before, and being unclothed in front of someone who isn’t a sexual partner is obviously a very unsettling proposition for most people) said she’d be far more relaxed as soon as she had the mask on. The wearing of a mask certainly does something to the mind of the person wearing it. It’s a defence, an abstraction or distancing from immediate reality, effectively a way to change reality into something different.
So, the first layer of complexity arises before the artwork is even started — is the model in front of me (as an artist) wearing a mask, or is the mask being modelled, being animated — in the meaning of “brought to life” — by being worn and so altering the model wearing it. Either way it seems to change reality, or bring about an abstraction of reality that makes everything one step removed from “the real world”.
JC: I think that’s precisely it, and it’s a question I’m trying to raise in the upcoming Masks: Bowie and Artists of Artifice anthology: is the persona of an artist, or their body of work, essentially a mask?
PW: Yes, the artwork itself acts as a mask for the artist in that it is the art(-ificial) face of the artist that is shown to the public, behind which the artist’s “true self” can be perceived, or so the traditional wisdom says. But what if the artwork is the mask that subsumes the person who wears it rather than the mask-as-disguise? In other words the artwork being made actually changes the artist in its own image?
When I was putting together Myth and Masks I tried to adopt an objective role (a role being another mask I put on) to document, in a fairly traditional way, three years of my artwork, research, and writing on myth and masks. As such, it’s another mask between my artwork (a mask for the artist) and the reader or viewer, and that artwork either depicts people wearing masks or masks being animated by people. It’s masks, all the way down.
JC: “And if it’s masks all the way down, what motivates the behavior of that mask? The “masks all the way down” idea is interesting because it opens the door for all sorts of occult ideas such as possession, which again was lingering at the edges of both the Surrealist and Burroughs-esque approach of “randomization.”
We tend to think in the context of art of a mask being something that is put on, and in the context of shamanic or tribal rituals as an embodiment, but of course it can be both. This has long been a sort of lay speculation of method acting, that by involving your own psychology in the role you’re playing, you run the risk of becoming what you play. I experimented with this in a kind of goofy way in Gonzomentary. I’m wondering if you have struggled with this duality personally, or have any speculation on the subject?
PW: I have no problem with holding both concepts simultaneously. I don’t see any particular paradox from a semiotic perspective in a mask being both signifier and signified. In fact, that’s what makes it so interesting as an artistic device.
I’ve always had an attraction to writing and art that manages to convey multiple meanings within a single phrase or image — probably one of the reasons I really like Andrew Eldritch’s lyrics so much. They revel in the multiplicity of meaning. And if you can create a really interesting set of layers of meaning then it resonates so much more strongly and vibrantly — in the same way that a chord, with its multiple harmonics, is richer and more interesting than a single note.
If you view duality as a harmonic enhancing the main note, then it’s never a struggle.
JC: A little bit of bibliomancy to close this out. Earlier this evening, I was reading Kissing The Mask, a really interesting book on Noh, Kabuki, gender roles and the like. This passage struck me, and seems to get at the ‘duality that isn’t a duality,’ here:
“Where does consciousness go when you perform?”
“It depends. The state where you think absolutely nothing, I think it’s hard to grasp. But the intention is to show. …”
I told him about the feeling in my hands and fingers when I am caught up in my writing; it is an exhilarating feeling during which my fingers do not belong to me, but to something else which is writing. What is it? I do not know. At its best, it is not an assertion of myself.
“I feel exactly the same,” said Mr. Mikata.
“How else do you feel when you perform?”
“Depending on the role, sometimes excited. First, one thing: When you put on your mask, your view is restricted. It’s like you are standing in the dark.”
“What effect does that have?”
“Like a binding. Because of the restriction, your mind comes back to you.”
He became “half-eyed” when he played Yoroboshi. “That’s how I can see. That means, I cannot see anything in particular. But somehow, you see the air.”
