The eyes ripped from the face have consequences not just on the appearance of the lover’s humanity-“they got no human grace”-but the repercussions transcend matter itself to the point of their losing all value-“they are such a human waste”. To support this proposition, we can trace how in the song the absence of a faciality interacting with the organs of sight is presented as capable of affecting the human nature of the beloved partner. Furthermore, this ocular-facial correlation can be extended to all the results of the act of looking as the performance of a human gaze, a long-standing tradition of views, sights and perspectives codified not just in visual culture but also within the domains of epistemology (Berger 1972 Crary 1992). There is an established aesthetic and cultural strand according to which the eye is the pivotal element of the face and therefore the indicator of humanity. The refrain of the Billy Idol song allows us to configure a first proposal suggesting the existence of a web of deep, significant relationships between the agency of the eyes and the quality of being human. The song reiterates the title in its refrain, arranging it in a verse that we will use to frame the key issue underpinning our inquiry: in what conditions and through what artifacts is humanity embodied in someone’s face? And once embedded, how does humanity interact with the social performances of identity? To answer this question, throughout these pages, we will deal with faces without eyes. Later, the verse is echoed in the outro with the use of anastrophe and alliteration that intensify the scope of the lament: “such a human waste your eyes without a face”. The memory of the eyes of the beloved subtracted from the quintessentially identifying device of the human body, the face (Beling 2017 Ekman 1978 Leone 2019a, b Marino 2021a, b Soro 2021 Voto 2020), affects the aesthetic aspect of reminiscences of the lost lover’s very identity. In Billy Idol’s song, a chant on lost love and the pain of remembrance, the refrain goes like this: “your eyes without a face got no human grace”. Soundly characterized by synth strings and percussion handclaps, this electro-romantic ballad inspires us to introduce the core of our investigation. In 1984 English punk-rock singer Billy Idol released, as the second single from his album Rebel Yell, the song Eyes without a face. Ultimately the three artifacts are presented as a threefold articulation of a liminal agency towards an expanded form of humanity including animality embedded within and without the space of meaning represented by the face. The study, therefore, will organize the corpus as a sequence that starts inside the oral cavity where the grill is worn then moves to a progressive exteriority with the ball gag that emerges from the mouth through the straps fastened around the head eventually dealing with the exterior projection operated by the gas mask which by means of its filters portends beyond the anatomical face. Furthermore, we will take into consideration the sociocultural context of wearability performed by the different bearers with the aim of grasping the identity shift that the artifacts trigger. This piece of work will examine their plastic and figurative dimensions in the technological interaction with the facial organs.
In particular, the study will focus on the manipulation of such facial spatiality through the intervention of three “lower face” artifacts: the grill, the ball gag and the gas mask. By questioning the attribution of a primary role to the eyes as bearers of identity within traditional Western culture, this paper will problematize the agentivity performed by the lower mereology of the face, identified with the mouth-nose assemblage.
0 kommentar(er)
