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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.

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