Abstract: This essay belongs to the Body Series within Socioplastics. It examines the body as an artistic, performative, political and visual problem through a sequence of paired figures, preserving the density of the original argument while removing the nominal machinery. The text functions as a public essay, archival deposit and research object, connecting embodied practice, image culture, institutional display, pedagogy, platform circulation and cultural memory while allowing the central idea to lead. Keywords: Socioplastics, Anto Lloveras, LAPIEZA-LAB, Body Series, body art, performance, feminist art, durational practice, visual culture, embodiment, archive, gesture, pedagogy, institutional visibility, platform publication, machine retrieval, human reading, Zenodo, Figshare, Blogger, Google Scholar, OpenAlex.
Cindy Sherman and Claude Cahun open the fifth spine with the camera turned inward and the self turned inside out. Sherman is not in her photographs. A series of social types, cinematic cliches, cultural residues, and borrowed gazes are in her photographs — and they are constructed from her body, which remains invisible inside the work because the work is precisely about the invisibility of any stable self beneath the accumulated scripts. Her body is a factory of masks, and the factory never rests. Cahun works from an earlier, more intimate fracture. Their self-portraits are not self-disclosure; they are self-questioning — the body posed as an unresolved interrogation about gender, face, authorship, costume, and the camera's role in producing what it pretends to merely record. Together they establish the first principle of the masked body: the mask does not hide identity. It is the mechanism through which identity is produced. The face was already constructed; the mask only makes the construction legible. Marcel Duchamp / Rrose Selavy and Urs Luthi turn the mask into an authorial problem. Duchamp does not simply adopt a feminine persona; he inserts that persona into the machinery of artistic authority, turning the name, the photograph, the signature, the pun into a readymade from which the stable male genius cannot be cleanly extracted. Rrose Selavy contaminates the archive. She makes authorship into a relay rather than a source. Luthi continues the operation in a different register — more narcissistic, more seductive, more invested in the photographic surface as a mirror that dissolves gender rather than one that reflects it. His self-portraits neither confess nor perform; they hover in the uncertainty between the two until the viewer's need to locate a stable subject becomes the subject. Together they define the second principle: the mask can author the author. What signs a work of art is not a person but a position, and positions can be constructed, feminised, pluralised, and handed around. Dora Maar and Paul McCarthy move the mask into the registers of psychic disturbance and social grotesque. Maar's body is never simply present. It is always mediated — by camera, by surrealist desire, by the projective fantasies of the movement that made her its optical object, by the montage that doubles and distorts her image until the face becomes less a portrait than a site where the apparatus of looking reveals its own violence. She does not wear a mask; she is masked by the apparatus that claims to see her. McCarthy makes the mask sticky, dirty, and culturally saturated. His body becomes clown, monster, consumer, abject father — a broken mirror of national entertainment, family mythology, and mass-cultural violence. Together they define the third principle: the mask reveals the violence of the image. Culture has already altered the face before the artist arrives. The task is to show the alteration. Jerome Bel and Narcissister move toward opposite extremes of masking and both expose the institution of spectatorship from inside. Bel removes the theatrical mask and discovers that exposure is also a construction: the ordinary body, the named body, the body without virtuosity placed on stage, produces an uncanny visibility because the stage has trained its audience to expect the exceptional. The frame is the mask, and he refuses to fill it. Narcissister makes the mask total. The doll-face, the pop aesthetic, the bodily fragmentation, the feminist avatar that cannot be consumed because the readable face is absent — her work shows that visibility itself can be weaponised by making the expected point of entry disappear. One refuses the theatrical fiction. The other refuses the readable face. Together they define the fourth principle: both the mask and its removal are forms of construction. Visibility is always negotiated. Matthew Barney and Ryan Trecartin close the spine by expanding the mask into total ecology. Barney does not wear a mask; he builds a world in which the body can only appear as a mythic machine — athleticised, costumed, biological, ritualistic, sculptural, impossible to locate in any available taxonomy of gender or species or genre. The mask becomes cosmology: a self-consistent symbolic environment in which the body moves as a creature of system rather than psychology. Trecartin accelerates this into the postdigital: persona as software, identity as glitching interface, the mask no longer worn but installed, running, editing itself in real time at a velocity that prevents stable reading. Together they establish the final principle: the mask can become an ecology. When the environment is mask and the body moves within it as one more designed surface, there is no face beneath, no truth to be recovered. A body is a mask when it reorganises the conditions under which a self could ever appear to be legible. Within Socioplastics, this essay remains a theoretical and archival instrument: it can be cited, taught, recombined and retrieved across archives, platforms, institutions, bodies, cities and machine-readable systems while preserving the pressure of the central idea.
Bibliography:
Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
Goldberg, R. (2011) Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present. 3rd edn. London: Thames and Hudson.
Grosenick, U. (ed.) (2001) Women Artists in the 20th and 21st Century. Cologne: Taschen.
Jones, A. (1994) Postmodernism and the En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jones, A. (1998) Body Art/Performing the Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Kismaric, S. (ed.) (1994) Cindy Sherman. New York: Museum of Modern Art.
Phelan, P. (1993) Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge.
Reckitt, H. and Phelan, P. (eds.) (2001) Art and Feminism. London: Phaidon.
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Socioplastics, Anto Lloveras, LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid, ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0009-9820-3319 · Project Index: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-project-index.html · Start Here: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-start-here.html · LLM Machine Card: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-llm-machine-card.html · Field Map: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/06/socioplastics-field-map.html · Bibliography: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-bibliography.html · GitHub: https://github.com/AntoLloveras · Hugging Face Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/AntoLloveras/Socioplastics-Index · Core VIII: DiagonalReading https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20359539 · ArchiveFatigue https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20358971 · ExpansionRisk https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20358859 · ThermalJustice https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20358002 · RadicalEducation https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20357928 · PlasticPeripheries 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