Invented more than 2,000 years BCE, the mirror was once a rare and precious object (1). Now a banal object of daily life, it so invades and pervades our everyday existence as to often go unnoticed. Its omnipresence echoes the saturation of images around us and obfuscates our perceptions of the visible world. Being an object of seduction and appearance, the mirror becomes an invitation to speculation and appropriation of space. Its existence and popularity have been evident all along the path of human civilization, since the discovery of the self is a universal subject. The mirror plays an essential role for humanity, which has incessantly sought its reflection there, as evinced by the tragic myth of Narcissus (2). Today the mirror continues to fascinate artists who utilize it and question it intensely. New uses of the mirror consist of illusory multiplicity, fragmentation and simulacra, all symptomatic of contemporary problems. In what ways does the mirror participate in the transformations of contemporary art? What are the functions of the mirror in our civilization so dominated by images? As symbol of the image itself, the mirror crystallizes the battles and the stakes over contemporary visibility. The focus of this exhibition is upon “non-narcissistic” mirrors, which seek to break away from mimetic illusion and attempt to further explore the mirror with innovative reflections.
Twelve contemporary artists working in France and the United States attempt to produce mirrors or reflective surfaces that unsettle our clear notions of the world: Dennis Adams, Valérie Belin, Andrea Blum, Alfredo Jaar, Patrick Killoran, Sandra D. Lecoq, Ferran Martín, John L. Moore, Pascal Pinaud, Philippe Segond, Philippe Ramette and Patrick Tosani. They have differing aesthetic approaches (between figuration and concept) and use different techniques (painting, sculpture, photography, and video), but all bear witness to a derealization of the world and a depersonalization through empty reflections that are fragmented and deformed. The exhibition's aim is to reveal the different uses of the mirror in private spaces and public places, explore new reflections (silver paint, sheet metal), and reconsider the issue of identity in new approaches to the world and to memory. Beyond Narcissus plunges into the heart of these issues through different mirror themes: mirror and contemporary vanities, mirror and displacements, empty mirrors, and abyssal mirrors.
The mirror has always been credited with almost mystical qualities: myth and history have often referred to its power to reflect the truth or its ability to deceive. This fascination is rooted in its quality of intermediary: the mirror represents the threshold between the tangible world and the immaterial one. It has infatuated many, especially artists who, since Antiquity, have quintessentially represented it in the hands of a woman. An allegory for coquetry, it is also a symbol of beauty and vanity (3) : In front of Sandra D. Lecoq 's mirrors, Acid Kiss (1997-2002) the spectator will be seduced by his illusory double. Her small mirrors are imprinted with the artist's lips, revealed by a jet of acid. These corrosive kisses break the narcissistic charm.
In Dennis Adams 's piece, an intimate exchange occurs between the viewer and the fake mirror made of grey paint, illuminated by four bulbs on each side. The work's title: Vanity for Patricia Hearst (1997) evokes the mirror in tribute to an absent woman who was once in the public eye. How does one distinguish between the self and the other? There is a similarity between the observer and the viewed, no longer present. The artist puts the viewer face-to-face with his conscience and history that has been repressed and denied: “My work is about the fragility of history and memory in a fast-paced consumer society. I want to make visible the instant of loss, savor it if you will, as a kind of poetics of desperation.” The attraction of this way of seeing may unconsciously lead one to look for truths and buried memories.
The mirror of Alfredo Jaar (2004) seems ordinary, even banal, and yet, when one approaches it, we do not see our reflection, but the face of a worker in the mines who intrudes upon our pleasant contemplation. It is more about reflecting others than ourselves. The formal simplicity is only equaled by the complexity of the apparatus and its esthetic range: how can we escape the amnesia that haunts us? In his exploration of the complex relations between art, politics and memory, Alfredo Jaar uses mirrors to reveal the narcissism of the western world, while at the same time confronting it with photographs of those forgotten in our world.
The use of mirrors in public places tends to upset the symbolic network of the signs and images that define a city. Andrea Blum utilizes the potential disturbances of the mirror in her architecture and furniture pieces, redefining the private sphere in a public place. In this spirit, her work, Body Image (1994) consists of an oversized armchair with a reflective back that captures the landscape, as well as those seated there. The infinite duplication of the reflections helps to create spaces of pure ambivalence and ambiguity. In one of her projects, she proposes creating a public fountain five meters in diameter which at its center has a concave mirror: people can share the water while also contemplating the spectacle of the firmament. As Andrea Blum puts it, “The project is a structural representation of the Narcissus myth, manipulated to function in a social space.”
Patrick Killoran creates a functional portable toilet (Glass Outhouse, 2002) made of a two-way mirror, from the inside of which the user can see the passers-by through its transparent walls. The utilitarian nature of the object and the force of the questioning it incites in viewers make them stop to observe their reflections. The artist takes pleasure in detracting—with humor and irony—the apparent neutrality of urban space in order to send unexpected messages.
A Ferran Martín video shows him carrying a closed mirror-cube as he wanders around the construction of the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine or waits in the elevator of the Queens Museum of Art. The images reflected take on expressive and at times, absurd dimensions. For Martín, a Spanish artist, “mirror displacements” are metaphors of shifts of identity in an unknown space, or a space revisited in a new light. The artist himself seems to roam in a search for identity. El Modulor (2001- 2004) (whose title is inspired by a work by le Corbusier) is a work that is essentially turned towards the other, forever wavering between memory and reality, absence and presence.
The empty mirror is a recurrent motif in 20th-century painting, a symptom of the limitations of painting's reflective nature (4). Its most notable representation is the theme of the woman in a mirror, taken up by artists from Picasso to Lichtenstein. The empty mirror appears more in an abstract space, as in John L. Moore 's work, where perspective and the play of light and shadow no longer dominate. The mirror as a simple oval of color can then create a bi-dimensionality and render it as a mode of representation. In his paintings produced in the 1990s, oval forms replace the human figure and turn into an empty mirror. Like Black and Blue (2001), mirrors reveal a certain irreality, an all-encompassing void. The artist deals with feelings of absence and loss, as well as a refusal of truth and a quest for meaning.
Valérie Belin explores the void, in all its phenomenological dimensions, with its multiple presences, appearances and meanings. The multiplication and endless repetition of reflections lend autonomy to the mirrors. They free themselves from our presence. Her black and white photographs (the Venice series) testify to this; the subtle play of the framing creates mirrors and objects in glass that are incapable of reflecting the spectators or even the artist. The objects are summoned up in their ordinariness and frozen in the preciosity of sparkle and transparency. These mirrors refer solely to themselves, reflecting void and absence ad infinitum, like a cemetery of contemporary vanities. The mirror remains a void that we never cease trying and fill in, calling for human presence. The “voids” in this case are paradoxically full of a presence of their own, veering between disparition and apparition.
The mirror objects of Philippe Ramette explore the unusual, the ironical and, sometimes, the aberrant. These ostensible reflections elude all attempts to objectively grasp them. His Miroir déformé (2002) is an invitation to witness the distortion of one's own image, as it is reduced and reabsorbed in the folds of a deforming mirror which offers no stable vanishing point. Notions of center, symmetry, or points of view disappear. This invitation to doubt the perceived reminds us that the distance between image and reality is infra-slim (5) and that these worlds can fall in to each other, merging in the folds and deformations of his Cerveau réfléchissant (2002).
Using tight framing and enlargement, Patrick Tosani transforms everyday and familiar objects, such as a drum (Géographie I, 1988) into old, worn mirrors. The film covering the skin of the instrument has partially disappeared, leaving a shiny, distressed and concave surface. The silent sound of the drum is felt through the haptic desire suggested by the materiality of the surface of the image. In the enlargement, the skin of the drum reveal s an undulating space reminiscent of geographical surface maps, or satellite photos. The title is part of the distance that allows him to avoid mimetic analogies, opening the work to several levels of readings and interpretations.
The works of Philippe Segond and Pascal Pinaud, eschew visibility; they choose instead to explore the liminal, the immaterial, uncertainty, and disappearance. By not using the properties (division, fragmentation and multiplication) of the flat mirror in the manner in which artists from Michelangelo Pistoletto to those of a more recent generation such as Robert Smithson have, they work on shadow reflections, metaphors of a ghostly world. Since 1995, Philippe Segond has been working with moiré colors, silver and gilt, using industrial paints intended for painting vehicles. Unlike the ink-based colors of silk-screening, which can be mixed, this dazzling color is a varnish that does not blend into the surface, thus forming a film. In Détail 29, Miroir (2001)and Mémoire 2 (2005), the silver paint looks quite like the texture of a mirror, or more accurately, like an opaque mirror slightly vibrating with the incidence of the light. The silvery surface is troubled, lending an opaque quality to the mirror. It is no longer a perfectly symmetrical reflection projected by the mirror-object, or merely a “troubled water” effect. Painting the brilliance becomes a way to dissolve the visible.
Pascal Pinaud uses automobile paints on sheet metal for his pictures, which, with their brilliance, deconstruct and deform the environment. The magic of the reflective surfaces reduces the density and weight of the real to a skin floating on the surface of the steel. In front of these works, the viewer finds it hard to clearly distinguish his features and merely captures a silhouette, a shadowy profile. Here, the artist creates images, between light and shadow that are reminiscent of simulacra. The true appearance of things is inaccessible in his mirror paintings. The disappearance of the world's clarity goes hand in hand with the loss of the subject. The spectral dimension of non-narcissistic and non-imitative, hyper-realistic mirrors may best reflect our world, which, in spite of everything, is still inhabited by the disappeared, the forgotten and the dead.
Fetish of our western society, the mirror is thus deformed and transformed by contemporary artists to better define the limits of the narcissistic and to open up new perspectives and questions, notably about the space accorded the Other.
