"The face is not an envelope exterior to the person who speaks, thinks, or feels."
Deleuze and Guattari, 'A Thousand Plateaus'
"I'll keep going until my face falls off"
Barbara Cartland
In the episode 'Seasonal Beatings' of the British television comedy, 'Peep Show', one the show's protagonists, Mark, has his family over to his flat for Christmas Day. After an awkward lunch, games are suggested, at which point Mark’s father leans over the table: "We're not playing bleeding Pictionary. It's a made-up game." It is, of course, an absurd line. The games that we play as children (and perhaps as adults at Christmas) are all "made up". Yet despite that, whole systems are evolved that players have to understand to take part in. These systems include winning and losing, as well as the nuances of how participants operate throughout the game in relation to each other and how they communicate within the system they have chosen to participate in and the rules of the game.
Emma Cousin's new series of works 'Game Face' includes paintings titled after such games: 'Hide and Seek', 'Pictionary' and 'Snap' (all works 2021). Each painting shows figures or faces engaged in a discrete system where meaning arises from their actions or the other figures' reactions. Whilst the titles of the works are recognisable as childhood games, these are not paintings of people playing them. Instead, Cousin's array of figures and faces, painted life-size, seem to be busy in games of their own making where the rules are esoteric and baffling to the viewer. The figures in 'Putt Putt', for example, appear to be passing, inserting and catching marbles in and out of their orifices. The marbles are moving in a circuit, as if, together, they have become a machine that collectively articulates a system. The figures seem to be working something out: a thought, a question or working through the game of language itself. The functions they produce collectively, might be the answer.
The title of the show, 'Game Face' suggests that in order to produce this system, the figures in the paintings need to ready themselves and in particular set their face to convey meaning before action is taken. To put on a ‘game face’ is to prepare to communicate something non-verbally in a particular situation. This could be a sports person, flexing the muscles in their face to produce an intimidating scowl, or somebody getting ready to go out on a Friday night. It might even be an artist making works for exhibition. We make our faces. From the children's activity of face painting, through the use of make-up, to pulling faces. We paint our faces to explore possibilities, alternative selves. And the artist makes faces, through the push and pull of paint on canvas. The act of painting itself seems bound up here with the idea of putting on a face, in order to create an apparatus that generates meaning. It offers a space for amusement, play and pleasure too – after all, games are fun. Cousin's figures are painted in colours that allude to theatrical make-up used to help the audience recognise characters on stage, but also to disguise the actor beneath. The triangular shape of the figures' noses suggests masks, or augmentation. The figures' eyes are often hidden from the viewer or shielded by the movements of other figures. However, these elements also suggest communication between the figures; the colours are relayed from figure to figure, their noses are configured to nestle around and into each other in cartoonish symmetry. The triangular shapes act to bring together geometry within the painting, to form a central territory on the canvas. “Putting your face on” seems a precondition to entering the game, the noisy, silent circles of communication that these figures are busy with. The game face acts to communicate before a word is spoken.
Welchman traces the long history of artistic treatment of ‘the face’ as “probably the primary site of visual representation, [which] has shaped the very conditions of visuality … the head/face was either evacuated from the scene of representation, or hyperrationalized (Oskar Schlemmer), or etherealized (Odilon Redon), or radically distorted (Ernst Ludwig Kirchner)." Prior to modernism, art history is filled with texts on how the face should be painted to show inner emotions. More recently, critical theory has tried to think beyond the face, for example, in Gilles Deleuze's and Félix Guattari's theories around 'faciality'. For Welchman, the face becomes less to do with depicted reality and more of a territory, written over with traces of history and where the present and past collide. At some point during modernism, he writes, "The face becomes a grid; a particular geometry among geometries, and an exemplary architecture among structures." Cousin, in ‘Game Face’, invites us to play with the positions we adopt and the faces we paint on. The paintings offer us a space to inhabit which feels post-human: alteration, augmentation, vivid colours and stylised geometric forms are the visual order. Through our positioning – assigned as viewer but agentic through our meaning-making, we enter into these private games.
Deleuze and Guattari ask: "Is this also to dismantle the face...no longer to look at or into the eyes but to swim through them, to close your own eyes and make your body a beam of light moving at ever-increasing speed?" The fluidity and energy of these paintings, offer the possibility of change, morphing by contact during the game. The figures are entertaining themselves, acting out these “games” to farcical limits, offering new possibilities of making ourselves up. When we have our game face on, we can begin. There is no time limit to these games. We keep going until our faces fall off.
