Introduction: characters as forces.

 

John Hejduk’s Masques are populated by Widows, Musicians, Painters, Watchers, animals, angels, machines and victims. Their names initially suggest allegorical types rather than psychologically complete individuals. Yet they should not be understood as conventional symbols. The Widow does not simply represent mourning, nor does Security merely signify surveillance. Each character gives an otherwise invisible force a structure, a posture, an instrument and a duration. Mourning waits at a window; vigilance occupies a tower; memory follows a repeated route. A character is the temporary form taken by a force.

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This proposition leads Hejduk’s work back to the Stuart court masque and, more specifically, to the antimasque developed by Ben Jonson and given extraordinary visual and mechanical form by Inigo Jones. Hejduk acknowledged Jones as a crucial precedent. He admired not only the illusion presented onstage but everything “behind the masque”: the devices producing sunbursts, waterfalls and fire; the coordination of sound, light, architecture and participation; the architect’s capacity to construct what Hejduk called systems of thought. The historical relation is therefore explicit. What remains less explored is the role of the antimasque within that inheritance.

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In the Stuart form, the antimasque introduced grotesque bodies, unruly movements, social outsiders and scenes of confusion before these forces were dispersed by the harmonious principal masque. Disorder was temporarily given the stage so that sovereign order could triumph over it. Hejduk inherits the antimasque’s condensed characters, strange apparatuses and discontinuous actions, but he removes their final defeat. The marginal figures remain. Their structures occupy the city and their rituals continue without reconciliation.

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The argument of this essay is interpretive rather than a claim that Hejduk directly illustrated particular seventeenth-century antimasques. Hejduk transforms a theatrical and political logic. His architectural Masques may be understood as antimasques without end: cities in which disruptive, wounded and singular forces are no longer expelled from the scene, yet are not gathered into a new collective order either. This transformation gives his work its ethical intensity—and establishes its unresolved political limit.

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The Stuart machine: Inigo Jones and the production of order.

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The Stuart court masque was a compound art. Poetry, music, dance, costume, architecture, lighting and machinery converged in a singular event, often performed only once. Ben Jonson gave the form literary and allegorical density; Inigo Jones organized its visible and spatial world. Jones brought Italianate perspective scenery and increasingly integrated stage mechanisms into the English court. The proscenium framed the action, the perspectival scene established an ideal point of view, and machines allowed landscapes, clouds and divine figures to appear and transform.

The apparatus was not politically neutral. Court masques were presented before a privileged audience and frequently centred upon the monarch’s gaze. Perspective gathered the heterogeneous scene into a coherent image oriented toward an ideal observer. At the level of narrative, disorder could be exposed, named and overcome; at the level of scenography, changing scenery converted instability into radiance and visual unity. The monarch did not merely watch the restoration of order. The theatrical structure implied that order issued from, and returned to, the sovereign position.

Jones’s importance to Hejduk lies precisely in the unity of visible form and concealed production. He was concerned with the scene and with the mechanisms that made the scene possible. Architecture became an event-producing apparatus rather than a passive container for drama. Walls, frames, machines, bodies, lights and sounds operated together. Hejduk’s later “structures” inherit this expanded competence: they are simultaneously buildings, instruments, costumes, characters and notations for performance.

But Hejduk also dismantles Jones’s unified theatrical machine. He exposes what Jones often concealed. Towers, wheels, tracks, funnels, bridges and frames appear as autonomous architectural figures rather than backstage technology subordinated to a seamless illusion. The machinery comes forward and joins the cast. What had produced the spectacle from behind the scene becomes one of the city’s visible inhabitants.

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The antimasque: disorder given a body.

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The antimasque intensified the masque by giving disorder a recognizable body. Jonson’s antimasquers included witches, fools, alchemists, monsters and “imperfect creatures.” Their costumes distorted ordinary anatomy; their dances broke courtly measure; their language and noise interrupted decorum. The antimasque admitted the low, comic, animal, mechanical and grotesque into a form devoted to ideal order.

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These figures were not individualized in the modern psychological sense. They were legible through a concentrated conjunction of name, costume, attribute, gesture and action. An alchemist could wear an alembic-like helmet; a hag carried the signs of inversion and unlawful force; Discord appeared through storm and turbulence. Character was constructed externally, through relations between body and apparatus. The mask did not conceal an already formed identity. It produced a role.

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This is the first decisive connection to Hejduk. His inhabitants are also formed through external attributes: a musical instrument, a viewing platform, a funnel, a mobile structure, a repeated task. They resemble diagrammatic personae because Hejduk reduces them to a limited but intense set of relations. Their simplification is not an absence of life. It enables an affect or force to become architecturally legible.

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Yet the traditional antimasque set a limit upon these forces. Disorder appeared in order to be dispelled. The grotesque body was permitted temporarily, then subordinated to the measured bodies of the principal masquers. Antimasque and masque formed a political rhythm: controlled deterritorialization followed by emphatic reterritorialization. Chaos was staged, but the stage already contained the mechanism of its defeat.

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From perspective to axonometric dispersion.

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The difference between Jones and Hejduk is carried not only by characters but by systems of representation. Jones’s perspectival theatre organizes depth around a privileged viewing position. The proscenium frames a scene whose disparate elements become coherent for the sovereign eye. The visual field possesses a centre even when its stage is crowded with disorder.

Hejduk’s axonometric drawings reject this optical hierarchy. Parallel lines do not converge at the eye; structures retain comparable presence across the field; the viewer can scan among them without occupying a single ideal point. Axonometric space is not politically innocent, but it weakens the visual analogy between centralized perception and centralized authority. No inhabitant possesses the whole city as a completed image.

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The Wall Houses form the hinge between these systems. Their elevation acts as a generator: a frontal plane organizes circulation on one side and projects curving rooms on the other. Like Jones’s proscenium, the wall generates a world from a vertical frame. Yet Hejduk compels the inhabitant to cross it. The privileged spectator becomes a divided participant; perspective becomes passage; the machinery of approach remains exposed in tower, stair and bridge.

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In the later Masques, the projected figures detach still further from the wall. They become autonomous structures scattered across urban ground. The proscenium is no longer one architectural boundary. It has fractured into many frames, each attached to a character and a ritual. Theatre is distributed throughout the city, while every inhabitant occupies only a partial scene.

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The grotesque, Bacon and the haptic figure.

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The antimasque also clarifies Hejduk’s affinity with Francis Bacon. Bacon’s figures often appear within cages, rings, platforms and shallow rooms. They are exposed to forces that twist posture, blur contour and compress depth. The result is grotesque, but not because it illustrates a monstrous essence. The body becomes the site at which invisible pressures acquire sensation.

Deleuze describes Bacon’s Figure as an intensive fact rather than a narrative character. This language can help us understand Hejduk, provided the differences remain clear. Hejduk’s Widow or Watcher is not a painted nervous system, and architectural duration differs from pictorial sensation. Nevertheless, both artists use a frame to make forces legible. Bacon’s cage concentrates pressure upon a body; Hejduk’s structure concentrates mourning, vigilance, labour or memory into a repeated architectural situation.

The antimasque binds these operations together. Its grotesque was produced through costume, apparatus, movement and framing. Its body was already an assemblage rather than an autonomous organism. Hejduk slows that performative assemblage into architecture. The costume becomes a building; the attribute becomes an instrument; the dance becomes a route or recurring task. The character persists beyond the brief spectacle.

This persistence produces a haptic city. Hejduk’s structures are visually legible as icons, yet they continually refer vision back to bodies: climbing, waiting, carrying, listening, watching and mourning. The axonometric drawing may appear cool and abstract, but its isolated apparatuses forecast touch, fatigue and exposure. Geometry becomes the frame through which a force reaches the inhabitant.

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Duration: from theatrical instant to repeated life.

 

A court masque resolved itself within the duration of a performance. Its disorder, transformation and harmony possessed a ceremonial ending. Hejduk extends theatrical time into habitation. Waiting, guarding, painting, playing and remembering do not culminate in a final scene. They return.

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In Bergsonian terms, repetition does not consist of identical instants. Each occurrence retains what preceded it and modifies what follows. The Widow’s next ascent is altered by every previous ascent; Security’s field of attention changes with weather, fatigue and historical knowledge. A static structure supports variable duration. The frame remains while the force passing through it accumulates difference.

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This is why Hejduk’s characters cannot be reduced to stereotypes. The name condenses a role, but duration singularizes its enactment. “Widow” appears typological; no two acts of waiting are identical. The architecture preserves enough formal identity for repetition to be recognized, while life prevents repetition from closing into sameness.

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The antimasque without end is therefore not endless chaos. It is a field of unresolved rhythms. Forces acquire provisional territories—a tower, house, chamber or route—but these territories remain open to weather, memory and other figures. Deterritorialization and reterritorialization no longer form a one-way political sequence. They become an ongoing negotiation between disturbance and care.

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The ethical achievement and the political remainder.

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Hejduk’s transformation of the antimasque has a profound ethical consequence. Architecture attends to figures that sovereign representation would exclude, caricature or overcome. It constructs places for grief, vigilance and historical injury without claiming to cure them. It permits difference to endure rather than requiring an image of social harmony.

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But the suspension of reconciliation also raises a political question. Hejduk’s characters are intensely named and ethically charged, yet they often remain isolated. Their structures establish singular relations between body, task and memory, but do not necessarily explain how collective power can be contested or redistributed. The city becomes an assembly of witnesses more readily than an organized public.

This is where Hejduk’s antimasque remains deliberately incomplete. He exposes the violence concealed by unified order, but he hesitates to replace that order with a shared political apparatus. His work reterritorializes modern abstraction around memory and care, yet the resulting territories can remain symbolic, episodic and difficult to scale. Duration is represented and ritually sustained, but not always socially redistributed.

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That limitation should not be treated as a failure to provide a conventional urban programme. It is the pressure point through which Hejduk’s work addresses us. If architecture refuses sovereign totality, how can its singular characters form solidarities without losing their differences? How might mourning, vigilance and care become collective forces rather than isolated roles? Hejduk keeps these questions open because the final harmonious scene would close them too quickly.

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Conclusion: the city after the sovereign spectacle.

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Hejduk’s relation to Inigo Jones is fundamental because Jones demonstrates that architecture can exceed the building and orchestrate an entire system of bodies, images, sounds, machines and events. The antimasque deepens that inheritance. It reveals how characters condense forces and how political order manages those forces by allowing their temporary appearance and predetermined defeat.

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Hejduk removes the defeat. His grotesque, marginal and wounded figures remain onstage after the sovereign spectacle should have ended. The Widow is not cured of mourning, the Watcher is not released from vigilance, and the victim is not absorbed into a completed monument. Structures give these conditions formal and temporal existence without reconciling them into a total image.

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The resulting city is neither masque nor antimasque in the historical sense. It is a reciprocal field in which every apparent order contains disturbance and every force provisionally constructs a frame. Characters are not occupants added to architecture; they are the events through which architecture becomes ethical, temporal and political.

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To call Hejduk’s work an antimasque without end is therefore to identify both its promise and its difficulty. Architecture can shelter the unreconciled figure and preserve the memory that power would prefer to resolve. Yet the dispersed figures must still discover how to become a community. Hejduk leaves us not with the monarch’s final tableau, but with a constellation: separate structures, incomplete stories and forces awaiting new relations.

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