Jaguar Helmet Masks — from Aztec and Maya to Diego Rivera, from Hercules to Knights in Shining Armor…and Hockey Masks

A mural by Diego Rivera: Indian Warrior, 1931

Jaguar Helmet Mask design

by Christopher Agostino

Performing in a school on Wednesday I used the facepainted version of an Aztec Jaguar Warrior helmet mask to illustrate a folktale from the Kayapo people of the Amazon, so imagine my delight and surprise on Thursday to see that same image depicted in this mural by Diego Rivera in the current exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. The helmet mask idea has been a favorite vehicle of mine for dramatic face designs for a long time, especially when I want to get a “wow” reaction while painting an adult male at a party. It is a pretty universal mask concept: a mask depicting a powerful animal that fits over the full head so that the wearer’s face is visible through the open mouth of the animal, framed by the animal’s teeth—and you can just see the mouth of the Indian Warrior peaking through behind the teeth of the jaguar in Rivera’s mural. Aztec, Mayan and Toltec sculptures and paintings portray warriors wearing such masks, sometimes depicting eagles, serpents or coyotes rather than the jaguar. The text accompanying this mural states: “Jaguar knights, members of an elite Aztec military order, were known for their fighting prowess; according to legend, their terrifying costumes enabled them to possess the power of the animal in battle”, which is probably only a partial explanation for the use of jaguar helmet masks.

Eagle Warrior

The symbolic use of animal imagery in traditional cultures often carries multiple layers of significance. The exhibition of Aztec art at the Guggenheim Museum a few years ago included many examples of this helmet mask concept, including the breathtaking, life-sized terra cotta sculpture of an eagle warrior from the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan (found under the streets of Mexico City).

Deified Eagle Warrior

In addition to the idea of accruing power by association with powerful totem animals, the exhibit described how the ascension to the rank of eagle or jaguar warrior meant the individual was imbued with the spirit of the animal—not just the physical animal, but, more importantly, the animal in its spirit-world state, or god-state. So, we see in the “Deified Eagle Warrior” sculpture how the human in the spirit-world is completely enveloped by the eagle. I am reminded of the concept in Northwest Coast American Indian cultures and masks of the celestial eagle coming to earth in human form, kind of like an eagle/man superhero.

Contemporary Jaguar Dance

Which is not to negate the functionality of wearing something scary to scare your enemy in battle. The warrior’s interest in that is probably universal. Imagine what a warrior might have felt seeing this human/animal jaguar man rushing at him across a battlefield. In modern day Mayan festivals, dancers will wear jaguar masks made from the heads or skulls of real jaguars—which may have been the same way the Jaguar Warriors made their masks in ancient times—so as I explain to school kids in demonstrations, wearing that mask is like saying “don’t mess with me, I’m the one who killed him”. Other modern Mexican mask traditions include papermache or wooden masks recreating the Aztec helmet mask appearance or worn like helmets with the dancer’s face showing through the mouth as it opens and closes. Holidays and festivals in Mexico can include a blend of ancient and modern, including the Indios, dancers in traditional Indian costume, such as these two spooky looking guys wearing animal skulls, horns and bones in a 2007 procession through the streets of Gunajuato (where “la vida no vale nada” according to the old song).

Guanajuato, Mexico 2007

In the Diego Rivera mural, I’ve got to think that he put the Indian Warrior in that jaguar outfit in part to create an equivalency with the scary armor of the conquistador he has killed (“you may have armor, but we have jaguar-power”), and he is using a stone knife while the Spaniard’s steel blase lies broken underneath him. Now, if that conquistador had only been wearing the right armor, he might have done better.

Knight's helmet, 1460

New York kids love to visit the collection of knights in shining armor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and there you can find a golden helmet in the shape of a roaring lion that might have stood up to that jaguar.It was made for an Italian knight in 1460 and, again, its symbolic significance is not limited to the idea of him wanting to be as powerful as a lion.

Hercules

Alexander the Great

This helmet mask is part of a European warrior tradition that goes back to Alexander the Great and the ancient Greeks, for it is meant to invoke the spirit of the greatest of all classical warriors: the mythical hero Herakles (Hercules). Herakles slew the Nemean Lion and from then on wore its head and skin in a classic example of that general use of animal totem imagery in many cultures: “don’t mess with me, I’m the one who killed him.” On coins from ancient Greece, Alexander the Great is also depicted wearing a lion-headed helmet, to proclaim his personal mythic connection to the ancient hero. Lion-headed helmets have been showing up ever since.

Punia and the King of the Sharks

In our facepainting, we use this helmet mask concept for dragons, crocodiles, snakes and all the big cats. Anything with teeth. Years ago I used the concept to adapt a Northwest Coast American Indian storytelling mask depicting a man’s face inside a shark’s mouth to create the face I have used ever since in performance of the tale Punia and the King of the Sharks, and it always gets a response when I reveal the painted face. This past Halloween season I had the min-brainstorm at an event to try adapting it to a vampire and got one of my favorite new faces of this past year, the “Vampire’s Bite“.

As I said earlier, the concept is a crowd pleaser.People like big, ferocious looking teeth. And, when you have a kid with close-cropped hair or a bald man, you can make a real show of it and paint their whole head. I think it is important that you have some faces you can show off with.

Painting at tiger helmet

Faces to use when the event is slow and you still want to make an impact, or something to paint when the host sits down after you’ve painted all the little kids at the party. There’s a photo here of me painting a man in a tiger helmet design at the start of a special event for government officials and their families. We were doing their kids, but I didn’t think we’d be getting a lot of the adults to sit down. So I wanted to make this one count. At the end of the evening he returned to thank me, telling me that so many people had stopped to look at him and take photographs that he had felt like the life of the party.

The 1st time I tried the Vampire Bite

: Full head Tiger Helmet

recent Serpent Helmet

Jaguar Helmet from my book

Hans Silvester foto - animal helmet mask as aesthetic design

Cujo

Panther helmet mask

Shark helmet mask

I was looking for examples of modern day hockey masks, which I knew sometimes use this concept, and I was surprised to learn that hockey goalies get the chance to design and create their own masks. Some of them, like Curtis Joseph’s “Cujo” mask, are so distinctive they bring the design with them as they change from team to team. Wow. What a cool example of the power of the mask. (hockey mask images from the website: http://bleacherreport.com/articles/545279-the-50-best-goalie-mask-designs-in-nhl-history/ )

A Mayan painting from a temple wall that shows aristocracy in elaborate jaguar masks -- rising up higher on the head than the mask may have been, for there is a thin line painted in front of the face, seeming to indicate that there was a mask in front of the face, as if this is a depiction of the individual inside the mask as well as the mask he was actually wearing over his face

From a Mask to a Painted Face – Face Painting from Cultural Sources (thestorybehindthefaces.com)
New Faces – October 8 + 9: Zombies, Halloween, Vampires, Save the Turtles and Art on Faces (thestorybehindthefaces.com)
Art Review: ‘Diego Rivera’ Murals at Museum of Modern Art – Review (nytimes.com)
Is Art History Better Unsaid Than Red? (bigthink.com)

Men Getting Women Naked and Yves Klein — Female Nudity in Art

Dec15

Yves Klein's Anthropometry performance art, 1960

The resultant print of an Yves Klein Anthropometry

by Christopher Agostino

The post I wrote about possible origins of bodypainting in prehistoric times drew a comment that “man started bodypainting to get women naked” — I might have trashed it as flippant sexism until I saw it was from an accomplished painter with the right to say whatever he wants, Brian Wolfe. Another friend chimed in with the observation that way, way back then nakedness was probably the norm. Not today. The nakedness of the people we paint remains an issue for bodypainters, especially here in the U.S.—but I am not writing about that today (see the post: is a painted body naked? https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/2011/04/15/is-a-painted-body-naked/ )

"Yves Klein Blue" (or "International Klein Blue" as he called it)

I did think of Brian’s comment in a different context: Yves Klein and his “Anthropometries”. Yves Klein is one of my heroes, one of the radical conceptual artists that could make art with their minds as well as their hands. There was the brilliance of Marcel Duchamp who reimagined the answer to “what is art?”, and then there was the playfulness of Ives Klein who invented his own color—what a concept that is, to invent your own color. I’ve had Yves Klein on the brain as I have been writing and thinking about the question “why body painting?”, because his Anthropometries are the first thing I think of when I think of “bodypainting as art”.

Anthropometry performance 1960

The linkage to Brian’s comment came from a review I’d read about a recent Klein retrospective at the Hirshhorn Musuem (http://calitreview.com/9415) that opined that we (the viewer) have to confront the question of sexism in the Anthropometry performances. That there is something troubling about a formally dressed male creating art in public with completely naked women. I will add that they are being observed by a fashionably dressed audience of men and women and accompanied by a group of classical musicians, also formal in appearance. The only people naked in the room are the women serving as the objects of art. This is not a “happening” with everyone getting naked and painted. This is a lot of people with clothes on looking at naked women in an art gallery.

He took the naked women off the wall, out of the frame, right into the middle of the gallery. It is disturbing, and disturbing your audience is a vehicle for getting them to pay attention and engage with the art. Confronted by naked women being used as paint brushes, the spectators have to deal with the central role of the human body in art—especially the naked female form in fine art. And, from my perspective, that makes this the primary example of bodypainting as fine art because it so completely centers on the body in the creative process—there is no art here without the body as it is the naked body itself that makes this a process of art as the models cover themselves in his YKB paint and press themselves against the canvas, and it is the naked body that forms the resultant object of art in the prints that remain as the final product. The video from the Hirshhorn Museum (below) relays how Klein felt his hands were no longer enough to create art. He needed “living brushes”, the models themselves, to create an art form “designed to prevent that aesthetic objectivation which would give prevalence to the two-dimensional composition and make us overlook its bodily origins”—as analyzed by Michel Thévoz in The Painted Body. The text by Pierre Restany for the invitation card to Klein’s Anthropometry performance of 1960 makes the direct linkage between this act and those ancient origins of bodyart I write about: “The blue gesture released by Yves Klein runs back through forty thousand years of modern art to link up with the anonymous markings, the both sufficient and necessary markings in that dawn of our world, which at Lascaux and Altamira signified man’s awakening to self-consciousness and the world.” (See? I don’t just make all this stuff up.)

An "Anthropometry/Shroud"

To achieve that end, Klein not only needed to use the model as the brush, he needed the model to be naked. Nudity continues to have a radical role in art. Years ago I saw a modern dance performance in which the dancer was on stage alone completely naked. I believe the piece was called “Primate”, and she moved in an animal manner, comfortable in her nakedness, allowing the audience to consider what was so shameful about being naked? A recent exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art included live naked people and directly addressed the taboo of nakedness in public. One part of the exhibit had two naked people standing in a doorway so that the museum visitor had to brush past them in order to get through the door, confronting their own feeling of discomfort being so close to a naked stranger. (I didn’t see this exhibit so this description is based on a critics’ radio interview about it. The exhibit: Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present March 14–May 31, 2010 http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/965 )

At the origins of bodyart, the nakedness of the person being painted was probably not an issue. We have a different relationship with our bodies now and bodypainting functions in a very different context. In his analysis of the bodyart of the Southeast Nuba, James Farris states that the most significant element of the bodyart is the medium it is produced on, the human body—but that’s in reference to a culture in which nudity and very minimal clothing is commonplace. To risk misappropriating Marshall McLuhan‘s work (which, according to Woody Allen, is easy to do) by linking him to this idea of Farris, if the “medium is the message” than what is the contextual message embedded in the medium of a naked body in public in our current, body-conscious, sexually excitable but morally prudish, American society?

Brian and Nick Wolfe painting their championship winning design at the World Body Painting Festival 2009

Regarding the question of sexism in Yves Kein’s Anthropometries, we are back to Brian’s comment about male artists getting women to take their clothes off. Looking at the male dominated history of fine art it is hard to argue with. As I thought about this, though, it occurred to me that if you took a survey of all the naked bodies in paintings and sculptures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (most of which would have been created by male artists) the percentage of naked men vs. women depicted would be considerably higher than the relative proportion of male to female models at your average bodypainting competition or convention, and that’s an environment that will have as many female artists as males, so in the modern bodypainting world perhaps Brian’s comment needs to be expanded to say that everyone likes to get women to take their clothes off.

about Anthropometry, from the Hirschhorn Museum show:

a video of the live performance, in color, but with cheesy music rather than his original Yves Klein Monotone Symphony:

An excerpt from: Art Review: Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers at the Hirshhorn, Washington, DC By Alix Mckenna, June 3rd, 2010 at 10:00 am

In one of Klein’s, racier projects, the Anthropometry series, the artist dressed to the nines and directed naked ladies while they painted themselves in IKB paint and impressed their bodies onto the canvas. Musicians played in the background and an audience of art lovers watched the spectacle. The impression of these bodies represented the energy and temporal nature of the human form. While Klein spoke about his Anthropometry pieces in cosmic and asexual terms, the edginess of the project cannot be denied and is one of its greatest strengths. The mysterious, headless impressions reduce women to their most elemental signifying components. Against a white canvas, we see cosmic blue breasts and thighs and stomachs. They are as primitive and as powerful as the Venus of Willendorf. http://calitreview.com/9415

All the Yves Klein photos are from: Yves Klein Archives

An Yves Klein Anthropometry, 1960

An Yves Klein Anthropometry/Shroud

An Yves Klein "Firepainting" which used models as stamps and stencils in combination with fire

Yves Klein using the model as stencil for a firepainting

Yves Klein firepainting process

At the bottom is a a remarkable video with a great deal of Yves Klein footage in combination with works of his art:

Learn more at my Body Painting Page https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/body-painting/

Why Body Painting? – 4: Radical Act – The essential celebration of our humanity / the ultimate modern art (thestorybehindthefaces.com)
Why Body Paint? – 1: Collaboration – Painting the Mangbetu Queen (thestorybehindthefaces.com)
Why Body Painting? – 2: Ultimate Collaboration – MODELS, Pt.1 What I have learned from models. (thestorybehindthefaces.com)
Why Body Painting? – 2: Ultimate Collaboration – MODELS, Pt.2: Just how much a model can help, Amber and Kuniyoshi at FABAIC 2011 (thestorybehindthefaces.com)
Why Body Painting? – 3: Origins – Touching Ancient Sources (thestorybehindthefaces.com)
Why Body Painting? – 3A: Origins – Why did we start painting ourselves? Ancient bodypainting kit discovered at Blombos Cave (thestorybehindthefaces.com)
is a painted body naked? https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/2011/04/15/is-a-painted-body-naked/is a painted body naked ? – Pt.2: Painting Clothing On vs. Painting on Clothing https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/2011/04/18/is-a-painted-body-naked-pt-2-painting-clothing-on-vs-painting-on-clothing/

Face Painting — Kids for Kids Event — Inspirations from Africa and India, including Rangoli

Dec12

the Indian folk art of Rangoli

In November, at the Kids-for-Kids Family Carnival to benefit the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric Aids Foundation http://www.pedaids.org/, we had another opportunity to develop new face designs in support of an event theme. This year the event had a travel theme (“Journey to End Pediatric Aids”), so we offered to paint in our “World Mask” theme of styles from world cultures. The client asked us to go further and feature specifically the countries in which the foundation has its programs: the U.S.; several nations of Africa; and India. For U.S. faces we would include some iconic scenic designs like the Statue of Liberty and for Africa I have an extensive resource of mask and bodyart images which I could mine to find images from the specific countries involved. So I took this thematic opportunity to do some new research into inspirations from India. In addition to collecting some additional imagery from the elaborate theatrical makeups of the Kerala region, I did some image research into the art of Rangoli. Rangoli is a folk art that relates directly to facepainting, featuring floral and nature designs that are bright, colorful and very ephemeral, painted on the floor with colored rice, flours, sands or flower petals as an auspicious act, creating sacred welcoming areas for Hindu deities.

Click here for a pdf of the sheet of India reference images I put together for my artists: Face_Painting_IndiaImages_agostinoarts

The first third of my book, Transformations! The Story Behind the Painted Faces, chronicles my investigation of cultural sources of face and body art, and how I have incorporated those discoveries into my work.

To learn more go to: https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/books/

the images of the Holi festival are from this article: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/03/02/holi.DTL

From African Masks to Abercrombie & Fitch https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/2011/09/26/from-african-masks-to-abercrombie-fitch/

From a Mask to a Painted Face — Face Painting from Cultural Sources https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/2011/09/12/812/

Rangoli

I painted the rangoli style peacock on the left, Naoko (I think) did the one in the middle, and on the right, Lorraine abstracted the peacock and mixed it with the images of the girl's shirt