Death Mask of a Chimpanzee
Death Mask of a Chimpanzee presents the face of Jimmy, a chimpanzee who lived at Perth Zoo from 1962 to 1968, rebuilt from photographs of the death mask held by the Western Australian Museum. The mask is shown in more than one form, and each tests how far the viewer can trust what they see.
A death mask is a likeness kept after the life has gone. Jimmy’s was made after he died in 1968 and is now held in the research collection of the Western Australian Museum. This work was made by photogrammetry, photographing that mask from every side and rebuilding it as data. It is a copy of a copy, two steps removed from the face it records. Jimmy’s species is now listed as endangered, and the series treats his face as a portent of what many scientists call the sixth mass extinction.
The installation borrows from museum display, but it works more like a perceptual experiment. In Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes what psychologists call “the experience error”, in which “we immediately assume that what we know to exist among things is also in our consciousness of them.” Empirical observation, the method natural history museums were built on, takes seeing for granted. Each part of the installation is set up to make seeing fail a little.
The animation draws on Richard Gregory’s hollow mask experiment. Gregory turned a mask of Charlie Chaplin so that its hollow back faced the viewer, and the brain refused to see it as hollow. A lifetime of looking at faces that curve outward overrules the evidence. As the chimpanzee’s mask turns, the same error occurs. What feels like observation is partly expectation.
The 3D print is coated in Black 3.0, a paint that absorbs up to 99% of visible light, and it reads as a shadow of itself. It sits inside an acrylic case. The lack of detail draws the viewer closer, and the closer they come, the more clearly the case returns their own reflection, laid over the place where the chimpanzee’s face should be. The case stands for the line drawn between humans and nature. The reflection stands for the gaze that drew it.
The photographic print measures 150 × 100 cm and is printed so dark that at first there is only black. The face comes forward slowly as the eyes adjust, and it stays at the edge of visibility. It is an image of loss that has to be worked at before it can be seen. In No Direction Home at the Perth Centre for Photography in 2022, the works were placed so that a viewer looking into the case saw every part of the installation reflected there, along with their own face.
Graham Harman and the speculative realists argue that Western philosophy has privileged human perception over the things perceived. Timothy Morton carries the argument into ecology. If perception is as unreliable as Gregory’s mask suggests, the anthropocentric view behind the present crisis rests on weak ground. The series does not offer a way out of that view. It lets viewers catch themselves inside it.
Further reading: Rare footage shows rescue of Hollywood’s Jimmy the Chimp on NT’s Elcho Island, Laetitia Lemke, ABC News, 8 August 2021.