Marcus Herse

Cloak and Dagger gathers a selection of masks, costumes, paintings, and videos by six American and German artists. Through vastly divergent uses of masking and cloaking strategies, they manifest new agencies at the vanguard of ideological inquiry and self-presentation.

Undercover agents gain access to secrets, disguised assailants attack unnoticed, a masked shaman communes with the supernatural, while many colonized subjects bear the internal “white masks” of servile psychology and shame. Both deceiving and not, masks present many appearances, meant to tell friend from foe, provide anonymity, or invoke spirits, gods, and others. Whether concealing or revealing identity, posing a decoy, masquerade, or symbolic ritual face, masking and unmasking enacts a powerful double vision—a ritual process that brings everyday reality into complex relation with the hidden, illicit, abstract, and sublime.

The ancient Roman sense of persona—which literally translates to mask, while also describing someone with full citizenship—shows the paradoxical root of a word that for us describes individuality in a complete sense: personality is understood to be the highest order of self-expression. And yet the origins of the word betray a more nuanced provisionality at work—where a "person" may ultimately be thought to function as a kind of signal relay within a networked order of references, switching personae to suit. This Janus-headed quality underlies both self fashioning and presentation; personality is built up through masking, which conceals individuality while proliferating options for reconfiguring one's identity in the collective imagination.

The abstraction and formalization of selfhood reaches back into early childhood, beyond the constraints of social reality. The fertile playground of the child's mind persists into adulthood and at a deeper level, it shows our second face. This face is the one we put on to communicate to the other side: the other within us. Our animate self exists not here but there—in some exceptional realm, separate from ordinary experience and invoked perhaps through ritual—which crucially binds our sense of the world.