soldiers staring blindly out at the spectators. Naked Moment took this baleful stare one step further. The sculpture is divided into two halves: a mirror on the right obscured by a wire cast sheet of glass with the words Naked Moment etched onto it. The left side is a mirror-lined box covered with a sheet of metal mesh containing a camera connected to a hidden but complex triggering device. A heat sensor situated on top of an auto flash unit is triggered when the viewer stands at a particular distance and location in front of the camera but only if the internal clock with its three arms, all rotating at different speeds happen to coincide. At its first installation in 1994 at the Anderson O’Day Gallery in London the resulting photographs shocked Masi. These faces peering into the camera were not frozen into a mask that is created by the image-screen repertoire: our unconscious adherence to an already existing field of visual signifiers into which we insert ourselves as fixed subjects. This unconscious adherence is part of our habitual existence as social subjects but comes to the fore when we are faced with the prospect of being photographed.

In subsequent installations these initial photographs were displayed alongside the wall sculpture. They appeared to enact a strange inversion of the conventional power relation between subject and object of representation. As dream-like hallucinatory images of large-scale features peering into the lens of the camera, they gave the impression that their gaze is capturing us the spectators. Masi describes the sculpture as “looking back at and documenting its audience, it views the viewer and fixes the experience, constructing a portrait of its public” .7 The project led Masi to a more systematic exploration of portraiture and an interest in the human face that was at odds with his early performance based work in which the face was either hidden completely, masked as ‘painting’ or, in its extreme distortion, a metaphor for an abject alienation of the subject.8 In later installations the inclusion of these photographs diminished the element of surprise for some of its spectators.9 At their most successful, that is when the spectators are unaware of the process of being photographed, we find a glimmer of something that is often absent. They offer a sense of being that is not simply what is caught when we are off-guard but something more elusive which emerges when we relinquish these co-ordinates of identification with a pre-existing regulatory norm.10 The photograph can only capture a fragment of that elusive quality that might be described in terms of phenomenology as a ‘being-in-the-world’, that is not always available to us as a form of consciousness but might be indirectly conveyed through this kind of portraiture.

7 Statement in artist’s documentation.

8 Cf. Tableaux Odalisque (1971), a staged black and white photograph of the artist with his head covered seated next to a chaise longue on which a reclining nude model looks outwards, with her face framed and painted over to signify ‘painting’; and Nose Wipe/Lip Smear (1972), a 16 mm black and white, 10 min film documenting a performance in which the artist is seen pressed against a glass surface, his features distorted.

9 Naked Moment was also exhibited at Culturegest in Lisbon in 1996, with four of the ten portraits taken at the Anderson O’Day Gallery, and constitute the series Self-portraits 1. In 1997 it was installed in a local café/bar situated in the same building as a church in Drewen, Brandenburg, the resulting portraits Self-portraits 3 were exhibited in the same café/bar in Drewen and in a gallery at the same time in 1998. The building in which the café/bar is located is also a chapel. Buildings of this type called kapelle are common in small villages. Kapelle means simply chapel, but it also refers to a band or orchestra, typically of the folk variety. Its double meaning is suggestive of a worldly and a religious notion of groups as congregations of people that seems pertinent here.

10 Masi alludes to this in his definition of naked moment as “a point in time when one is caught off guard, when the unexpected happens”. Statement in artist’s documentation.