“The gaze refers not to looking, but to being looked at. Hegel says: “Self- consciousness exists in and for itself because and by way of its existing in and for itself for another; i.e., it exists only as a recognized being.” (Phen. §178). One of the most important writers to develop Hegel’s ideas on the gaze was Jacques Lacan. Lacan refers to the Taoist Choang-tsu’s story of dreaming he was a butterfly, and questions whether or not it was a butterfly dreaming it was Choang-tsu: “in the dream, he is a butterfly for nobody. It is when he is awake that he is Choang-tsu for others, and is caught in their butterfly net” (Seminars XI 76). He therefore characterises our being captured by the gaze of others as being caught in a net, yet reliant on the other to define our existence. “From the moment that this gaze appears, the subject tries to adapt himself to it, he becomes that punctiform object, that point of vanishing being with which the subject confuses his own failure [to live up to what the desirous gaze wants to see]” (83). The gaze is essential to the reciprocity of recognised being, and is why the handkerchiefs and scarves of Copeau’s early experiments would not suffice. Both the spectator and the performer exist in, and are constituted by, the gaze of the other—the gaze of a specific mask has its own power, which is mutually constitutive of both performer and spectator, whereas the ‘gaze’ of a handkerchief does not function in such a way. Moreover, to recall Laughlin and Laughlin’s hypothesis, the mask radically alters the body image, the handkerchief does not. Viewed in this context, it becomes clear why the gaze of an ‘other’ is so essential to transformation and activating the Mask. The gaze is mutually constitutive, without the gaze, the mask dies, or rather, never lives.” The Mask and The Self: A historical exploration into the ways in which the phenomena of selfhood and the theatrical mask can illuminate each other By Matthew J. Cawson #mask #artwork #papiermâché #atre #contemporaryart #phylosophy #history #culturalhistory #masks