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This interdisciplinary anthology explores the complex relationships in an artist’s life between fact and fiction, presentation and existence, and critique and creation, and examines the work that ultimately results from these tensions.
Using a combination of critical and personal essays and interviews, MASKS presents Bowie as the key exemplifier of the concept of the 'mask', then further applies the same framework to other liminal artists and thinkers who challenged the established boundaries of the art/pop academic worlds, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, Søren Kierkegaard, Yukio Mishima and Hunter S. Thompson. Featuring contributions from John Gray and Slavoj Žižek and interviews with Gary Lachman and Davide De Angelis, this book will appeal to scholars and students of cultural criticism, aesthetics and the philosophy of art; practising artists; and fans of Bowie and other artists whose work enacts experiments in identity.
'Curcio’s book unravels artists and artifice, whether through masks of cosmetics, cultural dance, cartoon illustrations, poetry, politics or literature, the mask either conflicts with or enhances the artist themselves. The fascinating segments of the book offer ways in which Bowie’s artistic life and other artists led similar convictions and creative journeys to find meaning. Curcio brings beautiful narratives together for the reader to see the artist through their self-reflective lens.'
Acknowledgements
Foreword: The Shifting Shaman of the Modern Age – John Gray
Introduction: Somebody Else Took His Place, and Bravely Cried… – James Curcio
Chapter 1: Masks All the Way Down – James Curcio
Chapter 2: Mishima, Bowie and the Anti-Metaphysics of the Mask – Roy Starrs
Chapter 3: Not All That Glitters Is Gold: Ziggy Stardust and the Fractured Mask of a Generation – Lúcio Reis-Filho
Chapter 4: Watch That Man: Splicing Tape with Burroughs and Bowie – Casey Rae
Chapter 5: From Vigilius Haufniensis to Ziggy Stardust: Pseudonyms, Irony and Truth in Kierkegaard and Bowie – Tara Isabella Burton
Chapter 6: Mascara and Marriage: The Twin Masks of David Bowie and Robert Smith – Tom Powers
Chapter 7: The Great Contrarians – Yahia Lababidi
Chapter 8: Seeing Things Like Hunter: Ralph Steadman’s Cartoon Visions as Revelatory Masks in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Kevin J. Hunt
Chapter 9: The Beautiful Madness: The Primacy of Wonder in the Work of Thomas Ligotti – J. F. Martel
Chapter 10: The Skin and the Double: Firbank’s Aesthetics of Surface – Michael Hunter
Chapter 11: God’s Twisted Identity – Slavoj Žižek
Chapter 12: Wishful Beginnings and Creative Ends: Conversation with Davide De Angelis – Davide De Angelis and James Curcio
Chapter 13: On Existentialism and the Occult: Conversation with Gary Lachman – Gary Lachman and James Curcio
Chapter 14: The Many Masks of Manifestation – John Harrigan
Epilogue: Art for Art’s Sake – James Curcio
Notes on Contributors
Index