It was in a mirror, at some time, in some
place, that the first act of recognition occurred, the point when man stared
into the ocean, saw his face in its infinity, grew anxious, and began to ask,
‘Who is that?...’
(Sándor Márai: Casanova in Bolzano)
Who would
not be tempted, would not be thrown into a fever at times, trying to visualise
the world fettered to the three dimensions of existence, on the two-dimensional
plane, or even in the four-dimensional hyperspace? Beautiful as it may be, the
undertaking is futile: foredoomed to failure. For all intents and purposes, we
are unable to imagine our visible world other than in its three dimensions,
neither from here nor from beyond. Even when thinking of points, lines or
planes, we always do so as parts of space; moreover, let us admit, when we
envisage the notion of time, even then it is along endless networks oscillating
in space that nostalgias projected into the past and the future haunt us. There
is one single component of our created world, one physical and metaphysical
entity that is an exception, and that is the mirror. The mirror and the
mirror-image. Behind the luminous surface, the replica of reality without
dimension, existence faced with itself, visibly three-dimensional, yet its
planar image, the dividing line that can touch the whole universe. Not space –
only its husked vision, not depth – only its releasing mystery, not creation –
only its symbol divested of dimensions: the mirror. Albeit obscurely,
nevertheless through the mirror we can recognise the world. Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate…[1]
And perhaps it can be represented through the mirror.
When we seek the origins of artistic
representation, the mirror-image is generally the first to be mentioned (as the
counterpart to the cast shadow). Did Narcissus know – who fell in love in the
trace in that obscure, illusory replica, rippled by waves, who looked back at
him from the mirror of the river – that the mirror-image that had just been
born would also grow old with him? Perhaps he suspected so, but nevertheless
secretly hoped that the facsimile would with some sort of artifice remain
ageless and outlive him. It is this belief, the hope in immortality, that
sustains occupation in art.
Man encloses the plane of creation into an
angle of 180 degrees. To put it another way: our basic condition is the mirror
– our sentence, and our fate, is just that. Man originally entered into the
world in such a way that he would see himself in things. He is incapable of
seeing, feeling or comprehending anything as independent of himself. He can
only correlate every experience with himself. “My poems hope to sing of universes, but never reach beyond my lonely
cell” – wrote Mihály Babits, and this immodest attitude, whether
acknowledged or not, prevails in every author. “Thinking functions in such a way that one thinks one’s self, art in
such a way that it becomes conscious of itself, and the poet will be a poet by
beholding himself. To compose poetry, to reflect, to look in the mirror ... all these ultimately are one and the same.”
This narcissistic recognition formulated by Valery brought on perhaps the most
significant change in the arts: the open acceptance and declaration of
self-reflection, and it is conjecturable that societal alienation from the arts
was also a consequence of this proclaimed isolation. Nowadays if someone
depicts a mirror, or a reflection appears in the picture, either consciously or
instinctively, it speaks about art itself. Of course, I suspect that it has
always been this way.
The painter’s master is the mirror – wrote
Leonardo at one point, and we can choose as we like among the many
possibilities to comprehend the sentence left mysteriously open. In the
professional circles, they often recommend checking the finished work of art by
looking at it in the mirror. If the picture is good, its mirror-image should
also work. The mirror can come into play as a device to aid perspectival
drawing. There is a sketch of Leonardo, in which a draughtsman fixes the
picture of the object depicted on a mirror, and he draws around it. This
solution is quite similar to the presumed procedure by which Brunelleschi
invented the technique of perspectival depiction.[2]
And of course, the quotation can also be comprehended philosophically: it is
the task of the artist “to hold, as ’twere, the mirror
up to nature”.[3] We can also observe that concealed
in the slightly old-fashioned word “speculate” is the Latin speculum,
i.e., the mirror. The primary meaning of the verb was to watch, to scrutinise,
which, of course, is closely related to the mirror, but by now in the European
languages rather the secondary meaning referring to meditation, excogitation
entered. The French spéculer (=
argue, profiteer), the English speculate
(= ponder), and the German spekulieren
(= reason, profiteer) all stand close to the Hungarian spekulál referring
to cogitation. Among my works engaged with mirrors and reflections there are
those that evoke older well-known mirror representations. I have produced
graphic paraphrases of the famous convex mirror of Jan Van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Portrait, and that of
Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas.[4]
My compositions employing mirrors belong to the most curious, or if you like,
the most speculative portion of the anamorphoses.
For a good number of years, I have engaged in
the slightly naïve, slightly mystic offshoot
of the depiction of perspective that was so popular in the 16-17th
centuries, then became a forgotten genre. Art history uses the terminus
technicus for such amorphic illustrations, without meaning, that take on
significance from an uncommon viewpoint, or on the cloak of an object of
reflective surface they expose their secrets. The viewer of an
anamorphosis, and not only – in following the infamous saying of Duchamp – the
artist, completes it; he “does” it himself, identifying also his own
viewer’s nature. As he discovers the exact viewpoint, as he recognises the
image that is re-distorted to become intelligible, at the same time, he also
defines his own spatial coordinates. The viewer of an anamorphosis observes not
the sight appearing on the retina, but rather the correlations between the
artwork and her/himself. S/he should concentrate on where s/he finds her/his
place in the space created by the work of art, or more precisely that
designated by the visual rays diverging from the work, and on what sort of
mutations the movements of the meaning of the image lead to. While this occurs
in the physical space, s/he also involuntarily observes the reception in
her/himself, if you like, the mental mechanism of “artistic pleasure” in the
spiritual space generated by the anamorphosis. The viewer who makes contact
with anamorphoses might feel more independent, but also more vulnerable. For
s/he has awakened to the altered position: now it is not her/him standing at
the centre of the world. On the one hand, s/he senses the wonder of the
creation of the image, but also the fact that s/he is left alone with the
illusion that appears in her/his consciousness, but does not even exist in
reality.
Perhaps familiar with my mirror-plays and my
reflections with these games, I came to the mind of Bruno Ernst[5],
who decided to send me the drawing that he had originally intended for Escher.
He sent me a pencil sketch, depicting a mirror and a portal, moreover, in such
an artful arrangement that the area behind the opening of the gate can only be
seen through the mirror. He had originally destined the idea for Escher,
offering it to him to make a lithograph based on the design, but the sickly
artist could no longer do the work. In effect, the mirror-cylinder for
anamorphoses fills exactly the same function as the mirror in the Ernst-sketch,
since both render the hidden meaning of the image visible. In the first case,
the mirror is a part of the drawing, while in the other, it is a real object,
independent of the picture. This however, is not the definitive difference, but
rather the nature of the image appearing in the mirror – the “picture within a
picture”. As opposed to the two-dimensional “reality” of the drawing, the image
of the anamorphosis is merely a virtual phenomenon, which cannot be grasped
either in the horizontal figure, or on the surface of the placed over it
mirror. It coasts somewhere on the rollercoaster between the retina and the
cerebrum. We might say mysteriously that it is a “speculation” of
two-and-a-half dimensions, referring again to the correlations between speculum
and speculari.
[1]
Paul the Apostle: “For now, we see in a mirror, darkly; but then face to face.”
(I Corinthians, 13:12)
[2]
The punctured panel depicting the Battistero in Florence, which had to be
viewed through a mirror in order to produce the illusion of perspective, was
lost over time. We are familiar with it only through the descriptions of
Manetti and Vasari. My installation entitled In memoriam Brunelleschi was an attempt to reconstruct the process.
[3]
Shakespeare: Hamlet.
[4]
Johannes de Eyck fuit hic, etching, 1998; Velázquez spectaculum,
etching, 2002.
[5]
Dutch mathematician and art writer. He was born Hans de Rijk.
[6]
In 1998 La Sapienzia University in Rome organised the congress and exhibition
in connection with the centennial of Escher’s birth. The conference lectures
were published by Springer in 2002 under the title, M. C. Escher’s Legacy. The exhibition material was published by the
periodical Leonardo.
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