The Accident in the Mirror Adam Budak I’m struck by your It’s another flat view of the world, Kingdom in the nineteenth century That dark future is one that drives extensive consideration of a mir- limited yet seductively infinite. Like (fig. 1). Painting no longer exists as a much of my work. There’s a reason Ellen Harvey in conversation with ror as a “vehicle” of an image. In a painting, it’s an object hung on a bearer of narrative by itself. It requires that the first painting I ever fell in love Adam Budak his essay “Special Being,” Giorgio wall—an utterly conventional piece a context; it literally needs its frame. with was Rogier Van der Weyden’s Agamben touches on medieval of interior decoration—but it exerts a Painting’s representative function Last Judgment (c. 1445–50). That philosophers’ fascination with kind of fascination that most paint- is similarly obsolete: no one now red-hot sword is coming for us all. mirrors and, in particular, with the ings would give their metaphorical looks to painting for an accurate rep- nature of images that appear in eyeteeth to have. You can walk past a resentation of reality. The old tech- AB The mirror implicates a kind of them: “The image is not a substance painting without looking; it’s almost nical skills are now entirely optional, self-ethic, too. It confronts you with but an accident that is found in the impossible to do that with a mirror. I just one aesthetic choice among a Face; it constitutes the Other; it mirror, not as in a place but as in want to steal that for my own work— many. We don’t carry around minia- is an altar of confession. You remind a subject (quod est in speculo ut in I want to seduce people into stopping ture paintings of our loved ones. No me of a main character in Clarice subiecto),” he explains, and adds, and thinking. I suppose that as an trompe l’oeil painting can fool an eye Lispector’s 1973 novel The Stream of “the image is a being whose essence artist I’m also jealous of the mirror educated by photography and video. Life, a painter obsessed by the task is to be a species, a visibility or an because it does so much with so lit- Any authority that painting once of painting a mirror. Hers is an inner appearance. A being is special if its tle. It’s the ultimate low-tech special had is long gone. My use of the mirror monologue, a journey toward the essence coincides with its being effect. It’s such an old technology, is also the logical extension of my self: “In painting it, I needed all my given to be seen, with its aspect.” but, unlike painting, it’s a technology fascination with the Polaroid, another fig. 2: Thomas Gainsborough (British, own delicacy not to cross it with my He emphasizes the mirror as the of representation that still retains its technology of representation that has 1727–1788). Artist with a Claude Glass image, since in the mirror in which (Self-Portrait?). C. 1750. place where we simultaneously original representational function. become obsolete in our own time and I see myself I already am, only an discover that we have an image and By contrast, painting, my first has, interestingly enough, become empty mirror is a living mirror. . . . that this image can be separate from great love, has lost almost all of its more “artistic” in its senescence. as a result, I’m particularly inter- You have to understand a mirror’s us. Agamben concludes, “Between original uses, not just that of repre- Most of my early paintings were of ested in the idea of the mirror that violent absence of color to be able the perception of the image and the sentation. If you unpack painting’s Polaroids, using the Polaroid to make lies—in the dark untruthful mirror to re-create it, just as if one were to recognition of oneself in it, there traditional genres, as I did in many of painting’s properties visible by con- that converts life into art. I’ve long re-create water’s violent absence is a gap, which the medieval poets my early projects, it becomes readily trast: immediate gratification versus been obsessed with the Claude glass, of taste. No, I haven’t described a called love. In this sense, Narcissus’s apparent that painting’s great con- lengthy production, indexical versus the small, black, convex handheld mirror—I’ve been one.” mirror is the source of love, the temporary function is to be an art unreliable, machine-made versus mirrors used for eighteenth-century fierce and shocking realization that signifier and often, by extension, a handmade, ephemeral versus archival, landscape appreciation, so named EH I always edit myself out when the image is and is not our image.” status symbol. Painting used to do so cheap versus expensive, etcetera. A because it was thought to produce I walk past mirrors. You mentioned Michel Foucault, the philosopher of much more. Take what used be the painting that claims to be of a Polaroid images reminiscent of the paintings earlier that the space between the representation, situates the mirror most important genre of painting: the taken in a mirror serves to doubly of Claude Lorrain (fig. 2). Like some viewer and reflection can be called between utopia (a placeless place) now much maligned history painting. highlight the unreliability/impossibil- camera lenses, the Claude glass’s love—I think hatred or self-loathing and a heterotopia (the “other” space, No one looks at a painting to see ity of painted “documentation.” optical qualities both compress and has a place there, too. Our fascina- suspended between the real and a narrative of the past or the future Unlike painting, the mirror expand the image, creating a theat- tion with the mirror is the function the unreal). Your obsessive use anymore. We just go to the movies. promises a kind of reality. There’s rical distance between the planes of our own self-obsession. Who has of mirrors goes beyond the mirror’s It’s impossible for us to imagine a a reason that the allegorical figure and allowing for a much wider field not wished to glimpse some lovelier obvious qualities as a device of world where people line up to pay to of Truth carries a mirror. Like the of vision than the eye itself. It also version of themselves in the mirror repetition and reflection; for you see the enormous apocalyptic scenes predigital camera, it offers a suppos- produces a startlingly sharper and and been repulsed by the reality? In the mirror is also an ambiguous of John Martin that toured the United edly objective optical view of what more contrast-rich view because it is most of my mirrored works, viewers producer of images, an agent of is there, an apparently unbiased a direct and not a silvered mirror: the have to fight against their desire for memory, a possible image archive, alternative to your own lying eyes. I image is produced on the surface of or revulsion at their own image and a Foucaultian reservoir of the virtual think the old chestnut that art holds the black glass itself. In a world where shift their focus in order to actually space where the spectator’s sense up a mirror to nature is actually so much of our reality is produced experience the work. We literally of the temporal and spatial “now” fascinating when you think about in the screens of our various devices, cannot see the world for our selves. is questioned. Can you define the it. What kind of mirror should art the Claude glass now seems oddly We are the inevitable final context relationship between an image and be? And what sort of nature should prescient—an early presentation of of any artwork. Including a mirror in the mirror in your work? it be showing? And what about the reality that is both theatrically height- an artwork makes visible both the fact that any mirror shows first and ened and portable. Of course it’s also degree to which the experience of the Ellen Harvey I think the idea of the foremost the viewer? If art is a mirror, important to remember that the black work is produced by the viewer and

mirror haunts representation and rep- fig. 1: John Martin (British, 1789–1854). The it’s obviously a failed mirror. It cannot mirror is traditionally used for magic, the way in which the viewer’s desires resentational painting in particular. Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. 1852. escape its own subjectivity. Perhaps in particular for seeing the future. inform that experience. The viewer’s

298 299 embarrassment mimics my own as Museum of Failure, but it’s actually My authorial relationship aside, as repository of many voices, a the producer of the mirror-containing an old nightgown. I dislike the way I try to make work that incorporates cacophony made all the more poi- artwork. It’s always the moment at this persona excludes people who multiple points of view. We live in a gnant by the inevitable inadequacy which I find a work appalling that I want to be artists but who for some world that prizes narrative coherence, of attempts at ordering and of course know that it is done. I suppose I want reason haven’t made it inside the but I think that an artwork should by the fact that so many of those the viewer to feel similarly vulnerable charmed circle of the art world’s actively resist or mock any single voices have already been forgotten. I and compromised as the producer approval. Perhaps as a result of this interpretation. In The Unloved, the think it’s important to remember for of the work in his or her turn. discomfort, I often inhabit different viewer walks through competing rep- whom and by whom museums were Mirrors aside, I think this interest artistic personae. Since I can’t be resentations of Bruges’s connection originally made; there’s a great deal of in the subjective viewpoint and the fig. 3: Robert Mitchell (British, 1782-1835). myself, trying to be J. M. W. Turner to the sea: the technological sublime narrative violence that coexists with centrality of the viewer has also been Section of the Rotunda, Leicester Square, for Arcade/Arcadia or William Gilpin (my painting of the satellite view of the idealism that we associate with in which is Exhibited the Panorama. 1801. a driving force in the creation of many for Observations Concerning the the ancient city’s new connection to the museum. If you look at Johann fig. 5: Johann Zoffany (German, 1733-1810). The Tribuna of the Uffizi. 1772–78. of my panoramic pieces. I like works Picturesque doesn’t feel like much its modern port) and the picturesque Zoffany’s Uffizi, all those master- that force you to situate yourself. EH Who is speaking, indeed? of a stretch. It’s probably also why I (the seldom-shown paintings of the pieces, all that glamour, exist primar- I’m obsessed with the circular walk-in Authorship has always been problem- make so many copies of things. I feel same locations, from the museum’s ily to provide a fancy background always inadequate. Like all desires, painted panoramas of the nineteenth atic for me. There is a reason why I more comfortable seeing myself as storage depot). In a similar fashion for wealthy Englishmen on holiday the desire for narrative coherence century—precinematic spectacles am generally invisible in my self- a perpetual art student. There’s also The Alien’s Guide to the Ruins of (fig. 5). For me, the museum exists as is doomed to remain unfulfilled. The that attempted to re-create three- portraits. I’m profoundly uncomfort- something very comforting about Washington D.C. superimposes an aspirational space, continually more you want the story to work, the dimensional experience in a two- able claiming my own voice. I think the self-negation implied by a copy. an absurd conceit—postapocalyptic collapsing under the weight of its less it does. I try to make my work dimensional medium (fig. 3). I really this discomfort has to do not so much Somehow the self that inadvertently alien aficionados of classical ruins— hopes and dreams, much like my own reflect that. I also feel that art is one like the fact that the viewer has to with a fear of authorship as with an inevitably creeps into a copy feels on the contemporary tourist expe- projects. In some ways, I see all of my of the few spaces left to incoherence move. Unlike in the cinema, where acute awareness of the degree to more honest to me than intentional rience of Washington, D.C. In both work as forming a kind of personal and narrative collapse. So much of the viewer is passive, the panorama which even my own personal author- self-expression. I particularly like the cases, competing narratives disrupt expanded museum of failure. our social space is dominated by lies requires action; unlike a movie, ship is a fictional construct. I am way that making doubles or copies and undermine more conventional that pretend to make sense of what which is out of the financial reach perfectly capable of sincerely holding of my own work (excruciating though dominant narratives, forcing viewers AB You depict a collapsed, some- is senseless. Incoherence is nec- of almost any one individual, a several utterly contradictory opinions it is) repositions the much-fetishized to either situate themselves within times mystical landscape in a state essary for the creation of new and panorama is a spectacle that any- at once. I change my mind all the marks of the artist’s hand as failure. a spiraling mess of alternatives or of physical and psychological unrest better narratives. It makes space for one can make. It just requires some time. I’m not the same person today Much as the uncanny doppelgänger accept the mess for what it is. They’re (a memory disorder, a world of new ideas, new orderings. It’s also skill and a lot of patience. The work that I was yesterday. The idea of of legend presages its victim’s death, also just fun. My love of conflicting contradictions, a ruin or a possible honest. There is no one narrative that makes a claim for the importance inhabiting a single coherent persona doubled images undermine and ques- viewpoints is also probably one of disaster, the universe’s afterlife), can make sense of our lives, of the of the maker’s viewpoint but in a seems neither realistic nor desirable. tion the value of the original. So it’s the reasons why I’ve made so many which brings to mind the cinematic way we live. Utopias are particularly generous way—it essentially says, I Organizing the images in this book not surprising that coming up with a museums and been drawn to artists imagery of Andrei Tarkovsky’s poignant examples of this. At best, saw this and found it so interesting is a good example of what I mean: personal graffiti tag for the New York who make museums, most especially films, especially Solaris, Stalker, one person’s utopia is another’s dys- that I spent an age re-creating it for the images are divided into sections Beautification Project was excruciat- to Marcel Broodthaers’s deliciously and Mirror. The world’s gestalt has topia; more often, attempts at imple- you, the viewer, to experience in your in order to provide the viewer with ing. I ended up choosing small oval mad Department of Eagles (1968). I’ve been dispersed into fragments, and menting utopia lead to unintended turn. Of course, it’s also a doomed five concurrent narratives that unfold landscapes, much like Gilpin’s illus- always loved the idea of the museum the artist’s impossible utopian task catastrophe. There is no public Sisyphean attempt—which just over time, but in reality many of trations of the picturesque, precisely is to strive for completeness and narrative that can solve our private makes me love it more. the works belong in more than one because they seemed like the aes- meaning. As a visual anthropologist narrative disasters. narrative, and it would be child’s play thetic opposite of the regular graffiti and an ethnographer of the every- This doesn’t mean that I don’t AB Many of your works—subtle to imagine an entirely different and tag: an utterly inoffensive art signifier day, you often speak of the idea of value and even prize attempts to cre- interventions in public space, equally valid set of organizing prin- that would also resonate with the incoherence as a foundational driver ate a collective narrative. Universality conventional portraiture, architec- ciples. Like any narrative structure, idea of urban beautification (fig. 4). and a method for your work. Can you is a beautiful and important dream. tural installations—function as it is also highly dependent on when Since I wanted the piece to create unfold that, please? We would be the poorer if we didn’t if situated in a passage between it was constructed; hindsight lends a conversation about who is allowed aspire to it. But the truth is that sheets of a reflective surface, experience a spurious coherence. The to make public art in our society and EH I like the idea of unfolding much that is presented as universal acting as echoes of reality, avatars reality of making work is always the roles that demographics and incoherence—I suppose it would look is often painfully specific to a society, of their immediate surroundings, far messier. aesthetics play in how the law like a very large, very messy napkin. class, race, gender, or ideology. Just creating a composition of a “con- The popular persona of the against graffiti is enforced, it was The truth is that I love narrative. I as history is written by the winner, versation piece.” They challenge artist in particular is one that I find important for me to find something especially love inventing alternative “universal” values are all too often just authorship. Who is the author? challenging. It’s not an easy fit for that could function as the aesthetic narratives or making nondominant the values of whoever’s on top. I think

Who is speaking? me. It may look like I’m wearing equivalent of my less-than-cool fig. 4: William Gilpin (British, 1724–1804). narratives visible. But narrative is this is why I’m so interested in clas- a traditional painter’s smock in The white female self. Picturesque Views with Ruins. 1770. a cruel lover, always slipping away, sical and Neoclassical architecture.

300 301 This is the one architectural form for of awe or terror. This is not a response each other. I would like to tear down seductive to me. I find myself trapped I don’t see why public spaces It’s important to remember that which a host of wildly different and that is available to someone actually and reforest much of what we have in a liminal space between repulsion should not be beautiful and useful. I a gift is a double-edged thing. It can even ideologically opposed societies dealing with something genuinely done to our planet. Since I can’t do and desire, between nostalgia and try very hard to think of what might be unwanted. Or maybe the giver is have claimed universality, and it’s threatening. For a supposedly uni- that in real life (except very occasion- hatred, and my work reflects that be a supportive as well as provocative unwelcome. A gift implies a relation- been going strong for more than two versal category, it requires a removal ally), I do it in art, where it has little tension. I want art to be useful in addition to the situation in question. ship, a possible obligation. And many thousand years. At the same time, from reality that is available only or no effect. Any artistic action can some way, but I am forced to accept Often the simplicity of the resulting people are hesitant to engage with it’s really the physical expression of to a small and privileged subsection at best be only a symbolic action. that its function is often decorative solutions is a reflection of the reality a stranger, for obvious reasons. Often, power: its distribution follows the of humanity. So in some sense, measured by my at best. I’ve always felt for William that these works will be experienced I think the generosity of interactive amplifying effects of the Roman and desires, all I do is a failure. I think the Morris, wanting to change the world fleetingly, in the middle of compet- pieces is actually not on my side European colonial empires—there’s AB On the other hand, failure— two parts of The Museum of Failure and ending up designing wallpaper ing stimuli. Public art is a humbling at all—it’s on the side of people who a reason John Ruskin referred to the master narrative of your work express this the most directly: the for the rich. On the bright side, there’s field in which to work. There are are willing to risk entering into a it as the architecture of slaves. Its (perhaps along with nostalgia and front consists of an “exhibition” in a refreshing honesty to just admit- inevitable compromises because you relationship with me, to risk a new form echoes the nature of its pro- the desire to belong)—is perceived which all subject matter is obliterated ting that a thing’s only reason for don’t always have total control. It’s experience. When I made Ex/Change duction—it’s a very top-down form of as a constructive force, marshaled by context; the back consists of an existence is to make the world more also hard to perfectly anticipate how Your Luck at the Cosmopolitan architecture. It’s not surprising that toward creating hope rather than utterly untruthful self-portrait. All beautiful. The world can use more a piece will be used or received, no casino in Las Vegas, it was remark- it was beloved of Joseph Stalin and pessimism or fear. As such, it consti- my attempts to deal truthfully with beauty, and more things that don’t matter how much research or out- able how many people refused to the Fascist movements. But it’s also tutes a powerful heroic force char- either my private self or my public take themselves too seriously. reach you do. I was deeply touched believe that they could actually get been seen by many as the ultimate acterized by the tensions between concerns collapse into aestheticized when the village of Bossuit in a bronze charm for free. Everyone aesthetic expression of democ- distinct quixotic (real/fictive), triviality. It’s the bleakest possible AB Last but not least: generosity. Belgium enthusiastically embraced thought that there had to be a catch racy and the humanist ideals of the Sisyphean (possible/impossible), vision of my role as an artist. That It defines your relationship with Repeat, the repurposed ruin of their somewhere. Perhaps surprisingly, it’s Enlightenment. Just as it’s impossible and Bartelbian (authentic/false) doesn’t mean that I see this or any the viewer and shapes the politics village church, and started putting not that easy to just give art away. to look at a classical building without features. Your embrace of frictions failure as necessarily bad. In fact, I’m of affect of a large number of it to all sorts of very imaginative and Unfulfilled desires are always the seeing the ruin implicit within, it’s and incongruities (high and low, not sure I believe in the existence of your participatory, viewer- and interesting uses. It could so easily most seductive. impossible not to see the contradic- skilled and presumably amateur, success. There is a worm at the heart community-oriented performa- have gone horribly wrong. They made tion of the Jeffersonian slave-holding marginal and mainstream) feels of every rose. Failure is the common tive and site-specific works. It also it happen; I just provided a platform. pillared plantation (fig. 6). urgent. To what extent is your experience of humanity and the glue promises a belief in the transfor- Working with the public is also My interest in the dream of the fixation on perceiving your artistic that binds humanity to art. We all mative power of art and a role for a great way to solve the eternal universal is also one of the reasons endeavor through the prism of a dream, and we all fall short. I think the artist in civic society. As such, dilemma of what to do as an artist. I find myself drawn to the relation- doomed attempt influenced by my obsession with ruins is related to it counterbalances or complements I actually hate making decisions, ship between art and nature, in your understanding of the world this positive view of failure. It’s not your discourse on failure. How so I find it very relaxing to be told particular to the landscape. Much of today? just that I sometimes think it’s good would you describe this energy? what to do. I’m also truly interested of our troubled relationship to our to destroy things, but in a perverse in understanding people’s expecta- habitat seems rooted in the prob- EH I often feel a sort of rage at way I do find things more beautiful EH Although I would like to think tions and desires for what art and, lematic assumptions that underlie the visual and moral poverty of our when they are somehow ruined or of myself as generous, I fear that the by extension, an artist should be. the apparently anodyne categories lives—a poverty in which I share and wounded. I find myself moved by the truth is that I am a lamentably selfish It’s something that I find sufficiently of the picturesque and the sublime. am deeply implicated. In the cheap- beauty of broken things. They seem person. I am also deeply fortunate difficult to define that I welcome all In the instance of the picturesque, ness, the shoddiness of so much of more sympathetic, more accessible. to be able to more or less choose the suggestions. I enjoy the feeling of where our surroundings are appre- what we build and inhabit, I see the I am also fascinated by the way a work that I do and to have a public making things that people actually ciated based on the degree to which physical expression of our larger lack thing becomes more “artistic” as it platform, no matter how limited. want. When I gave away paintings to they approach a particular Western of care for our environment and for becomes less useful. I suspect this That is far more than most people people who had lost what they con- pictorial ideal, the aesthetic trumps is due not only to the traditional hier- have. Perhaps as a result, when I sidered to be irreplaceable things to the practical. It presupposes a viewer archy of the fine versus the applied work in the public sphere I am inter- Hurricane Katrina, it was obvious, as who has no actual need or use for the arts, but also because it’s easier to ested in making my work accessible. the title of the piece implied, that The landscape, who exists independently appreciate something on a purely I would hate for someone to just Irreplaceable Cannot Be Replaced. of nature. This is taken a degree aesthetic level once its functionality walk away from something I’ve made. However, that symbolic restitution further in the case of the sublime, is no longer at issue. Sometimes it I want people to feel enticed and was not meaningless, either. There’s which values a particular emotional seems to me that art is most defined safe enough to risk a new experience. something hopeful in that for me. The response to an aesthetic experience. by the fact that it has no real function I am deeply grateful to anyone who is caveat to all this is that in the end, I’m As such, it presupposes a very par- other than to be art, its pretensions willing to engage with my work. For not so selfless. I only do what I want ticular kind of viewer—one with the to social engagement notwithstand- me, art functions as a conversation. to do. I set the rules of the game. If fig. 6: Joseph Michael Gandy (British, 1771– leisure and education necessary to 1843). A Bird’s Eye View of the Bank of England ing. This celebration of uselessness It’s not something I can or want to do I am a mirror of my audience, I am a examine and appreciate the feeling (Soane’s Bank of England as a Ruin). 1830. is both deeply troubling and utterly just by or for myself. highly selective one.

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