Left: Novgorod Devil Mask Shirt (Pagan Products 1983)
Right: three medieval leather masks found in Novgorod
I.
If, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, the white face is crucial to Christianity [a], then equally true is the fact that pagans have a thing for masks; be they anthropomorphic or zoomorphic in design, and worn for ritual or ceremonial reasons.
By disguising and losing the face, they are able to (momentarily and magically) recover the head as it originally belonged to the body; i.e., the head that isn't facially codified, but subject rather to a "multidimensional polyvocal corporeal code" [170].
A mask not only "ensures the head's belonging to the body" [176], it also enables the wearer to become-imperceptible; to set out on the road to the "asignifying and asubjective" [171] by inviting an animal-spirit or demon to take possession of "the body's interior" [176].
In sum: pagan mask-wearers have "the most beautiful and most spiritual" [176] of heads and the importance of masks cannot be overstated.
II.
Clearly, back in the summer of 1983 when I hand-painted the first of the Pagan T-shirts, featuring a design based on leather masks from Novgorod (Russia) believed to date to the 12th or 13th century, I hadn't read Deleuze and Guattari and very much doubt I would have understood wtf they were talking about when they discussed faciality and the liberating of probe-heads, etc.
Nevertheless, I like to think that I had already intuited something of the fact that primitive peoples and pagan cultures operate on a prefacial level which has "all the polyvocality of a semiotic in which the head is a part of the body, a body that is already deterritorialized [...] and plugged into becomings-spiritual/animal" [190].
Mostly, however, my decision to paint several shirts with mask images was based on my reading of the (metamorphic) role that masks played in ancient and medieval times and the fact that they continue to strike terror into the hearts of many people (which is why Leatherface has become such a powerful figure within the cultural imagination [b] and why McLaren and Westwood chose to use a mask similar to one worn by the Cambridge Rapist on an early line of shirts sold at Sex) [c].
Finally, here's a picture of a young punk-pagan wearing the Novgorod Devil Mask Shirt back in the day ...
Notes
[a] See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (The Athlone Press, 1988), pp. 167-191. All page references given in this post are to this text.
[b] As far as I remember, just as I hadn't read Deleuze and Guattari in 1983, nor had I seen The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (dir. Tobe Hooper, 1974), which was banned from general cinematic release in the UK until 1999 (although available on uncertified video in 1981). It's unlikely, therefore, that the figure of Leatherface played any part in my thinking at this time.
[c] The masked figure of the British serial rapist Peter Cook, known as the Cambridge Rapist, long fascinated McLaren. He and Westwood not only exploited Cook's notoriety on shirt designs sold at 430 Kings Road, but his image also appears on one of the posters in the 'God Save ...' series designed by Jamie Reid for The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (Julien Temple, 1980). However, whilst certainly aware of this when working on my own mask T-shirt, I wasn't consciously trying to imitate their design.
Readers interested in an earlier post on the truth of masks (3 Feb 2018) can click here ...
Readers interested in an even earlier post on the politics of the face (13 Sept 2013) can click here ...
And for those interested in a more recent post on the Cambridge Rapist motif (13 July 2022), click here.
