Halldór Björn Runólfsson
These pictures have no real history or meaning, no beginning and no end.
They are absolutely irrelevant fictions, like most of the visuals in newspapers nowadays. Nameless faces peer into a computer scanner and flatten their noses against the glass while the sensors move slowly across and reflect the face onto the hard disk and the screen. The light that illuminates these faces and the wait for the sensors to complete their pass underneath the glass gives the faces a somewhat gaping and puzzled look, like fish in a bowl. The face does not know how to appear, as it is drawn out and its relationship to the body is blurred. The distance between the eyes narrows and the lower part of the face is enlarged as the rest of the skull is diminished. It floats like a foetus or a space alien in the dark void with a white nose and shiny eyes.
People tend to stare still into the scanner and hold their breath while the process is completed. That accounts for the inflated, curvy look that seems out of breath and surrounded by water. The faces are life-size, which is disconcerting to the viewer since they are distorted and therefore appear to be smaller than a normal face. They are, in fact, a brutal reminder to the viewer that he has no idea of the size of his own face, it being that part of the body that one sees least often and always only in a mirror. That is another reason why these images shock: They stare back at the viewer like that face in the mirror; his own disfigured face in the hall of mirrors.
Though the images are scanned in black and white, they are printed to paper in four colours. The grey grains take on colour, though it is not sufficient to enliven the pale face. The effect is all the more ghostly, like the image of a made-up corpse. Perhaps Hamlets father appeared to his son as a grey fog in four colours. The faces appear to form like wraiths by the concentration of specs of light in the darkness. That is how Dracula’s voluptuous helpers appeared in the snow-filled air of the Carpathians – how the apparitions looked at turn-of-the-century séances. There is something about the process of scanning these nameless faces that seems likely to become the subject of folklore. Who is to say if it doesn’t somehow affect the soul behind the face? Can we be sure that it does not become disfigured like the face?
What has now become of the renaissance frame that ensured the viewer’s invisibility? Instead of him observing safely from his window a scene where nobody can see him, other viewers now flock to the window to stare back at him and trap him in their distorting mirror. He is caught behind his window and cannot escape. It is best, anyway, to relax and keep still. Any movement in the scanned face only leads to more fogging, so that the features of the face are blurred and indistinct. Thus the audience becomes the audience of an audience that looks back, staring like a floating apparition.
Some faces are disfigured through merging. Two or more images form new variants of the species, like when Bergman merged Liv Ullman and Bibi Anderson into one persona. This visual fertilisation leads to total chaos.
The faces become like over-ripe mushrooms. Their features are threatened by clones. The face of our time is an impersonal mass-mask that is only a face by name. The unlimited possibilities of modern genetics are mirrored in this visual cross-fertilisation where the opportunities for combination are inexhaustible, yet are exhausted at once since they have no limit and no discernible goal. In the endless sea of faces we resemble each other like peas in a pod. When a pea is formed with the combined characteristics of two others nobody notices the difference.
These floating visages are from another dimension; they condense and appear without shape. They have no ears, for instance, and so must be deaf. The glass prevents them from making a sound, which is apt since apparitions are generally silent. Their shape is anamorphic or oval, which tells the viewer that he must change his perspective to see their true form. The reason is that anamorphisms have different perspective points and sections than those things that the audience sees in normal perspective on an even plane. It is often enough to lean up against an anamorphism to see its shape, providing you can get close enough.
It is said that the sixteenth-century master Holbein the younger wanted to jest with his subjects, the French ambassadors to the English court, Jean de Dinteville and the bishop George de Selve whom he painted in 1533. He showed them in all their glory standing on a tiled floor that can still be seen in Westminster Abbey with a curious table between them, laden with globes, navigational instruments, a watch and a lute with a broken string. Between the ambassadors, lower down in the foreground, Holbein painted an anamorphism of a skull, floating like an orb above the floor. The skull can be seen by looking at it from the side. It is said that the artist wanted to show that despite their riches, knowledge and influence, these gentlemen were are fleeting as their wealth.
Others say that Holbein had merely been amusing himself by painting his signature symbolically into the picture – the skull that is nothing but hollow bone: Hohl-bein – without any motive other than to add his tag to show that he had been there, just like his predecessor Jan van Eyck signed above the curved mirror between the Arnolfinis. The mirror reflects a face as an anamorphism. Anamorphisms of this type are rarely horizontal like Holbein’s skull, but rather perpendicular like the scanned faces. But however these phenomena lie, they belong to a different visual dimension than the one we perceive every day. Anamorphisms are the fourth dimension in art, the sensed dimension that lies beyond the second and third dimensions.
The dimension on which these images rest is always skewed to the viewer so that he can never quite look into the distant and self-absorbed gaze of the face, no matter how he may try to approach it.
