We imagine the human head to be the site of identity, consciousness and imagination itself, and technically our own human heads are the places from which we view photographs. Four of the artists in the "Against Type" section of the "Only Skin Deep" exhibit's national survey take advantage of this relationship by creatively photographing the human head. These artists configure the heads that they feature in the photographs and our heads looking on as voids, and both enact and demand a new act of inscription. Jin Lee in "Untitled Head", Kori Newkirk in "Channel 11", Cynthia Wiggins in "Perceptions #5" and Alix Lambert in "Basketball Head #31" present the racialized human head in ways that highlight the function of inscription or typing in a raced, classed and gendered society and revise the significance and direction of such inscriptions. By simultaneously revealing the infinite inscribability of the heads and enacting alternative inscriptions upon them these artists blank the heads out and write them over.   The artists reveal the stereotyping that the viewer has been trained to do and reclaim the means of inscription. Therefore these four artists are each engaged in an act of crossing out . In other words these artists reveal a sacrifice and invoke a miracle through revision.

"UNTITLED HEAD" BY JIN LEE (AGAINST TYPE 13/39)

An ambiguous but racialized (visibly big lips, and nose) woman shows up white and blank against a black background. We are left to guess the identity of the woman and Lee reveals our most familiar set of tools in racial calculation: the contrast between black and white as inept. The image, appropriately, is the documentation of a projection. The artist's choice to use a process of projection points to the psychological process of projection in the creation of/use of stereotypes in the pursuit of simplicity. As Sander Gilman explains in Difference and Pathology , "We project...anxiety onto the Other, externalizing our loss of control. The other is thus stereotyped or labeled with a set of signs paralleling   (or mirroring) our loss of control." (Gilman, 20) Stereotypes insist on a dichotomy and reveal limits but leave out any interior complexity; thus they reveal the influence of a "white" gaze and the danger of a "black" void.    In Lee's image, a backwards shadow takes the place of the mirror. Instead of concealing the complexity and unidentifiablility of the image, she leaves the viewer in the unfinished tension of trying and failing to pinpoint the image. Lee therefore subverts the viewers own self-containment. Lee confronts the viewer with the fact that infinite possibilities remain even in this context of black background and white gaze.   Lee therefore denies the viewer control, reveals the inadequacy of black and white simplicity, and leaves the reader to create something else.

Lee's image not only intervenes in the psychological process of identifying the Other and stabilizing the self, but she also points to a set of functions which stereotyping serves in the capitalist state.   The positioning of the profile invokes the images of the profiles of presidents on coins and prison mug shot poses. In this way the image brings up the usefulness of race in enabling both the economic status quo and the prison industrial complex. The image, in fact, may remind the viewer of the connection between these two phenomena. The criminalization of race and the enforcement of class enable each other to persist. Lee's projection (one of a series of profiles) recreates and revises the criminal justice practice of the "line-up" and mimics and subverts the protocol of "racial profiling."   Lee's version of racial profiling leads to ambiguous results and denies the participant any dependable truth, as does the version of   racial profiling practiced by the   police force. Lee implicates the viewer in an impossible-to-win game of judgment, indicts the processes of stereotyping and imposes an indefinite sentence.

"CHANNEL 11" BY KORI NEWKIRK (NO TEXT)

The artist, an African-American man, has completely covered this self-portrait with tile squares, referencing the uniform spaces into which the act of stereotyping attempts to fit the black subject, through the work of the mainstream media and other cultural means of expression. This also refers to the technique of pixelization used to protect the "innocent" and obscure the faces of those involved in legal proceedings while anonymously representing them for the viewer. Newkirk's mimic of the process reveals that the effect of pixelization by the mass media is not to protect anyone but rather to criminalize black men in general. The viewer may also be reminded that they see vague   and similar police sketches of black men on the news even more often than obscured photos of black men. The series of boxes which cover the artist's face could represent not only pixels, but also repeated television screens. Additionally his use of these large boxes reveals a move towards symmetry, simplification and predictability in the presentation of this self-portrait. Coupled with the strategy of racial profiling this use of prediction and the obscured human face within the police force and the news media serves neither to protect nor to specify, but rather to justify action based on stereotyping.   Newkirk's presentation therefore reveals both the mechanisms of racial criminalization (namely anonymity and repetition) and the ability of the media to transform photography in order to obscure individuality and present an infinitely inscribable type.

By revising his self -portrait Newkirk reclaims the means of inscription and presentation and challenges the division of self from the Other as facilitated by the process of stereotyping. Newkirk's self is ambiguous, dangerous and representative, a set of characteristics which Gilman would assign to the construction of the Other. Since the self is merged with a set of criminalized Others the function of the Other is subverted and control breaks down.   Therefore Newkirk challenges the viewer's self-specificity and self control, simultaneously representing and blanking out the status quo as enforced by stereotype and clearing space for a new, unformed and multiply possible means of relationship and self-identification.

"PERCEPTIONS #5" CYNTHIA WIGGINS ("AFRICAN, NATIVE, ENGLISH, IRISH AMERICAN")

In yet another self-portrait, Cynthia Wiggins literally overtypes her face and shoulders with the words "African", "Native", "English", "Irish", and "American." The letters are white and while they show up against the image of the artist's face they are invisible against the white background. Thus, the face of the artist/model is the only thing that makes the white letters visible. She becomes the only viable background for the significantly white words; she becomes the only possibility for legibility. However, she is not big enough and the words slip off the edge and are lost in the void of the second background, the white background on which she becomes the text. It remains unclear whether she or the words are inadequate. Due to the problem of background (literally and figuratively here) the words "African" and "English" are incomplete in the perception of the viewer. The words obscure her facial features, but at the same time define these these elements of her heritage.   On another level, the darkness of her hair and her shirt reveal the model as relatively light-skinned, both disrupting a simple black white binary and positing her hair and clothing as an alternate frame.

Similarly to Newkirk then, Wiggins obscures her own face, but instead of revealing a blank space she covers her face with words, illustrating the competition at work between the stereotypical signification of a phenotypically black human face and actual description through language. Both the artist's face and the white letters are challenged by Wiggins's use of a layered background. This very use of a layered background emphasizes the complexity of the idea of background and the identified heritage of the artist. The image problematizes both specificity and generalization. The artist obscures her facial features and highlights the set of white letters while challenging their visibility, mocking simplicity, specificity and the functionality of both language and type. If the viewer would simply read her as a black woman, she forces the viewer to read literal type that calls his or her own psychological overprinting into question. In fact, Wiggins takes over the process of racial typing. The viewer cannot read her face because the moment one goes to "type" her, she interrupts the action with the placement of her own typed text between her face and the viewer's. Therefore the right to inscribe belongs not to the viewer, but to the artist.

"BASKETBALL HEAD #31" BY ALIX LAMBERT (BASKETBALL DESIGN WRITTEN ON HEAD)

In this self-portrait Alix Lambert does not simply obscure her face, she diverts it from the camera. The picture focuses on the bald top of the artist's head on which markings of a rubber basketball are drawn. These lines not only create both a basketball and a basketball court on the head, but they also reveal a series of intersections or crosses.   These lines emphasize the intersections of action and identity, especially as represented by stereotypes of black athleticism and the commodification of the bodies of black athletes by white spectators and team owners/managers. These lines could represent athleticism as an inscribed identity and a circumscribed space based on and contained by the athlete's skin.

This image also reveals baldness as an infinitely inscribable blankness. The notes on the website suggest that Lambert's work addresses the means by which aging males combat the blankness of male-pattern balding through their projections onto mostly black basketball players.   I would assert that Lambert opens up and reveals as a site of blankness even in the act of inscribing the type of the bald basketball player onto her own form, being that she is not the stereotypical bald basketball player.   By shaving her head she presents an open space. By crossing herself out and displacing the lines within which a game is played, she prompts the viewer to transform familiar limits.

All four of these artists present and invade the human head, demanding that the viewer clear out the space printed over by stereotypes and cross it out taking on an alternative narrative which revises the relationship between human heads and each Other, denying us the comfort of type and thus saving us from ourselves. They breakdown imposed limits, or "the function of society" as Baldwin terms it, and reintroduce us to the infinite possibilities of our "unknown selves" demanding that we create new ways of relating to each other.