The gas mask is a telling prop in 20th warfare’s theatre of cruelty. Although its invention and use predates the 20th century, its most significant period of evolution has closely paralleled the advances in chemical warfare (beginning appropriately with the First World War) as well as subsequently developed further as protection against biological and nuclear weapons. Yet the fact that the gas mask continues to resist being an object of cloying nostalgia-much the way automobiles or aircraft have become popular collector’s items-points to sinister meanings that far transcended their original contexts or purposes. Rather, much like actors donning masks, it is a highly symbolic gesture imbued with psychopathological resonances not unlike that of theatre. Appearing more ominous than reassuring, it may very well herald what Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Bruce Mazlish calls the coming of the “fourth discontinuity”-the latest rebuke to our anthropocentric view of our selves. After being displaced by Copernicus from the centre of the universe, by Darwin from the centre of biology, by Freud from the core of our own minds, the adoption of a mask so soulless in its visage is giving up the ghost so to speak. With its links to the history of warfare, the gas mask-whose many permutations assemble like a rogue’s gallery of terror-represents to become inhuman or like a machine. (To cite a crude example of the connection, in the mid-1920’s, horse-breeder Ilya Ivanov was tasked by Stalin to crossbreed humans and apes to make a better breed of soldier. Unsurprisingly, he failed.) Rather than to keep us breathing harmful air, its ultimate purpose may to project our desire to not need to breathe at all, to asphyxiate our remaining humanity.
In Bembol dela Cruz’s “Asphyxia”, this sense of being human is still recognizable but also reevaluated to accept our own latent dismissal of it. As opposed to most photographs, the wearer of the masks or the owner of the apparatus is still sensed. The eyes are still visible, a residue of a soul. However how long is up the viewer to ascertain-indeed these portraits are mirrors. Thus, the sentiment of poet John Ashberry, who writes: “The pity of it smarts/ Makes hot tears spurt: that the soul is not a soul,/Has no secret, is small, and it fits/Its hollow perfectly…”
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