A Mask and a facelift
Some lectures at ASU by Christian Feest
I attended an excellent lecture this evening at ASU. Christian Feest an Austrian ethnologist and ethnohistorian with particular expertise in Native American anthropology and art, gave a talk entitled: ”Transformations of a Mask: Confidential Intelligence from the Lifeway of Things”. The talk on the “biography” of a particular object, a mask, acquired as a Kodiak mask in 1881 for 50 francs from a French dealer by the Royal Zoological and Anthropological-Ethnographic Museum in Dresden, which was sold in 1996 at Sotheby’s in New York as a Nootkan mask collected on James Cook’s Third Voyage in 1778 for $525,000—at that time the highest price ever paid for a work of Native American art. The talk documented the many wonderful stories and individuals who’ve surrounded its “life” as well as discussing the theoretical construct of an object having a “life” or “biography”. These individuals have included an IRS fugitive/smuggler exiled in Europe, a forger, a wealthy American collector, a massacre of a whole ships crew, a Chairman of the Board of an American art museum, the American pioneer Mexicanist Zelia Nuttal, a kidnapping, a French dealer, who is best known for selling fake Aztec crystal skulls to museums, and a famous anthropologist in the form of Franz Boas. Quite the cast of characters!
One of the things that really fascinated me, beyond the talk itself, was the logical extension of the concept of the biography of an object to say that “if objects have biographies” then conservation is about “giving a facelift”. Which although not stated quite so explicitly the idea was implied. I thought this was a wonderful metaphor – and the more I thought about it the more I felt it has potential resonance along with ideas such as “The Frankenstein Syndrome” that have been raised recently by the ever excellent and thought provoking Salvador Munoz-Vinas.
