Facing the truth

FACEWORLD: THE FACE IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY by Marion Zilio (Polity Books, $30)

Go to a beach, a restaurant or a park, take a seat and see how long you wait before you see someone taking a selfie. You won’t wait long. For a technology that became possible only a decade or so ago, the selfie is everywhere — and so are our faces.

How do we see ourselves? And what do our faces mean in culture — are they a window or a mask?

French author Marion Zilio takes a deep dive into it in her book Faceworld: The Face in the Twenty-first Century.

Before photography, objects like mirrors and commissioned portraits were only for the wealthy. Even relatively recently, taking a self-portrait with a film camera required a bit more forethought than just whipping your iphone out of your pocket.

“We no longer have any sense of the uneasiness of our ancestors,” Zilio writes,

“when for the first time they were able to pick up and hold their own externalised faces.”

Unfortunately, Zilio, an art theorist,often gets bogged down in academia-speak. The book straddles the line between dense thesis and accessible essay. For all the interesting ideas Faceworld has, the lay reader trips over words like acephalic and anagogy which will likely keep it from a larger audience.

The work of artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol and Cindy Sherman is considered, as well as that of mavericks like Richard Prince, who drew controversy with his “New Portraits” series by appropriating others’ Instagram selfportraits without their permission. Turning a selfie into a gallery piece — is it art?

“The selfie is at once the reflection of an individuality and of a collective,” Zilio writes.

Everyone who takes a selfie is trying to wave their own personal “brand” in the air but, at the same time that brand means nothing without an audience.

Zilio is at her best when she delves into the face throughout history. She has the reader pondering the very meaning of the face, an object we see every day but rarely think much deeper about than “How do I look?”

“The face is by definition always that of the other,” she writes, noting that man is only visible to himself if he is divided.

Despite the omnipresence of Snapchat and Facetime, we can never truly, really, see ourselves without an outside tool.

Our faces may be ours but we can still see only so much.