Mirror Affect: Seeing Self, Observing Others in Contemporary Art by Cristina Albu

Author:Cristina Albu [Albu, Cristina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ART015100 Art / History / Modern (late 19th Century To 1945), ART009000 Art / Criticism & Theory
ISBN: 9781452952598
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2016-12-06T22:00:00+00:00

Reflective Spatiotemporal Passageways

Kapoor, Eliasson, and Lum often situate viewers at spatial and temporal crossroads by denying them access to a set of precisely delineated aesthetic choices or participatory roles. They ask viewers to embrace the indeterminate interval between one state of being and another, thus offering them a glimpse into the plasticity of the world and selfhood. Their reflective works constitute liminal spaces and temporalities in which differences between flatness and depth, as well as between mutability and presentness, become questionable.

Even though these three artists have followed somewhat different artistic trajectories, they share more than an interest in the use of materials with reflective qualities. Since the early stages of his artistic career, Kapoor has taken an interest in the ritualistic aspects of art, the coexistence of opposite principles, and the ambiguous nature of matter and concepts. Variously classified as a late modernist who perpetuates the minimalist tendency and as a contemporary artist who deftly appropriates “the new visual language of our digital era,”[2] Kapoor embodies in his work the contingency of multiple temporalities so characteristic of the contemporary condition.[3] His sculptures bring forth a perplexing realization of the conflicting times of lived experience. They situate viewers on the boundary between transitoriness and immanence by confronting them with perceptually ambiguous visual and material referents.

Both Kapoor’s sculptures based on the motif of the void from the latter half of the 1980s and the ones based on reflective materials from the mid-1990s betray his interest in the perpetual deferral of representation. These works challenge the distinctions between blunt flatness and immersive depth and open up the space of the object to intersubjective relations. I (1987), one of Kapoor’s first sculptures dealing with the void, presents the viewer with a boulder whose upper part is pierced to reveal its abysmal inner core, which can be easily intuited yet remains unseen. A conceptual twin of I, Void Field (1989) destabilizes the binary relation between the beholder and the object even further by multiplying the number of perceptual referents. Composed of several stone blocks staring back at the viewer through their dark oculi, the work renders the notion of an infinite emptiness perplexing by abolishing the singularity of the void and unveiling its presence at the core of all things. Moreover, it does away with the uniqueness of the individual viewer’s perspective. The plurality of the similar-looking objects parallels the plurality of perceiving subjects.

Even before he started to use reflective surfaces, Kapoor envisioned the aesthetic experience prompted by his works in terms of a mirroring process:

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