by Irina Vladi & Steve Finbow
The mirror as a prop in portraiture is a common one – Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait (1434), Diego Velázquez’s The Toilet of Venus (1647-51), Mary Cassatt’s The Oval Mirror (1898), Paul Delvaux’s Woman in the Mirror (1936), Helen Chadwick’s Vanitas II (1986), Tokyo Rumando’s Orphee series (2014) and many of Cindy Sherman’s photographs including Untitled (Vanity Mirror) (2020). Irina Vladi’s use of the mirror, the camera and her eyes in her photography, make dynamic Judith Butler’s theory that, “the ‘eyes’ that watch are thus ‘mirrored’ in the eyes that are delineated, but this ‘mirroring’ is less an autobiographical confession than a reiteration of its deferral.” The deferral of object/subject, self/other, imaginary/symbolic, art/biography, pleasure/desire and the deferral of image and memory.
The landscape of a dream is one of possibilities – the unfollowed tides, the shifting sands, an inventory of traces, of unused portals, labyrinths with fluxual boundaries and contracting and expanding apertures. And the creatures that haunt these protean worlds are enantiomorphs, mirror images of the dreamer that are and aren’t her, that are recognisable and yet spectres of the unknown, they are doppelgängers, chimeras, unrealisable oneiric fantasies, so close, just out of reach, beautiful and untouchable, familiar and exotic, human and alien. Giorgio Agamben describes this process of reflexivity as a movement of “re-flexion, a departure from the self and a return to the self, like a ray of light reflected in a mirror.”
The dream dissipates into consciousness and memory, lost forever, the optic unconscious closes its eye to always blind us to the possibilities with which it presented us; however, in Vladi’s self-portraits with mirrors, that dream frame, that unconscious glimpse, becomes a photographic image, the eyes – even though not looking directly at the viewer – lock us Medusa-like into her gaze, what she is perceiving and, even when she is perceiving herself – where we cannot either see her eyes or the reflection of them in the mirror – overrides that of the viewer because she frames the self-portraits in such a way that we are and always will be the voyeur, the dreamer grasping for substance. The gaze is both reflecting and locked, her eyes are two-way mirrors looking inward and outward, her eyes are thinking organs within the photograph and as photographer – she is actor, producer and director of her own fantastic creations.
In Bergsonian terms, “Our actual existence, then, whilst it is unrolled in time, duplicates itself along with a virtual existence, a mirror-image. Every moment of our life presents the two aspects, it is actual and virtual, perception on the one side and recollection on the other . . . Whoever becomes conscious of the continual duplicating of his present into perception and recollection . . . will compare (her)self to an actor playing her part automatically, listening to (her)self and beholding (her)self playing.” Or, as Jacques Derrida has it, “Here, the signatory, who is also the model, the object or the subject of the self-portrait, thus has us observe that (s)he is looking at (her)self seeing the model that (s)he (her)self is in a mirror whose image she is letting us see.” The surface of the mirror is the wall of hallucination.
Looking at the first two photographs, images of Vladi’s face staring into a mirror but seeing something “other” than herself, the camera looking at the face looking at something other, we see what Maurice Blanchot explains as a “milieu of fascination, where what one sees seizes sight and renders it interminable, where the gaze coagulates into light, where light is the absolute gleam of an eye one doesn’t see but which one doesn’t cease to see since it is the mirror image of one’s own look – this milieu is utterly attractive. Fascinating. It is light, which is also the abyss, a light one sinks into, both terrifying and tantalizing.” Vladi describes herself as a “time traveller” and “alien in disguise” and it is not too farfetched to imagine her landing here on this beach, taking shade under the pier and examining this terrifying and tantalizing new world through the protective glass and lens of the mirror and camera, the fascinating gleam of her grey eyes absorbing the landscape and her new-found place within it. This observed/observing other is what Jean-Paul Sartre terms “a continual game of mirror and reflection, a perpetual passage from the being which is what it is, to the being which is not what it is and inversely from the being which is not what it is to the being which is what it is.”
In Velázquez’s The Toilet of Venus (1647-51), the reflection of the reclining and naked personification of female beauty is blurred, we cannot focus on her, it is as though a full vision of her is somehow proscriptive, we cannot see the gleam in her eye, that scintilla of self-reflection, she remains unidentifiable, elusive, imaginary; she is only real because of the tactuality of the sheets which mirror the curve of her body and the folds of the crimson curtain which highlight her pale skin. This blurring and the palpability of the flesh – as in Diane Arbus’s photograph of the poet and Warhol acolyte Gerard Malanga – combine the specificity of carnality with the haze of desire.
In image 3, Vladi’s body lies prone on a beach as if she has just fallen from the sky. Dressed in a garment, which could be the one Velázquez’s Venus has removed, her head rests on the sand and her face is obscured by a hand mirror, her dark hair resembles the seaweed scattered on the shore, her bare shoulders and legs slightly paler than the sand around her. Like Venus, her body shape is echoed by the fabric of the dark clouds above and she could be a wave frozen there on the beach. Rosalind Krauss points to the visual effect of the ocean, made limitless and not bounded because of the horizon, “The sea is a special kind of medium for modernism, because of its perfect isolation, its detachment from the social, its sense of self-enclosure, and, above all, its opening onto a visual plenitude that is somehow heightened and pure, both a limitless expanse and a sameness, flattening it into nothing, into the no-space of sensory deprivation.” This plenitude and sameness are heightened when we realize that Vladi is looking at herself and the water behind her, that the alien other is in the perfect space of detachment and that the mirror and the sea offer her not only self-enclosure but a limitless expanse of unconscious (sensory deprivation) possibilities of dream and escape because, as Deleuze emphasizes, “everything is mirror-images, distributed in depth. But depth of field always arranges a background in the circuit through which something can flee: the crack.” This photograph of a woman looking into a mirror in which only she and the no-space behind her reflects, is an image of the optical and its limits, of the present frozen like the still sea, the fixed gaze of the artist and the model.
The sky and sea have visibly darkened in image 4 and this heralds Vladi’s move into consciousness and awareness. The horizon frames her body on the beach and the whole scene becomes a stage set in which she is the lone actress, director and audience. Except, she is not alone. On the right of the image, just above her head, floats a seagull as if, at once, emphasizing her alienness and her solitude. And we could be trite here and use the symbolism of Anton Chekhov’s play The Seagull to explain the bird’s appearance, yet the quotes are apposite, “In all the universe nothing remains permanent and unchanged but the spirit” and “We should show life neither as it is, nor as it should be, but as we see it in our dreams.” Vladi gazes into the mirror as she stares into her spirit and her dreams, the endless waves of the ocean, the whitecaps of her unconsciousness. This is more apparent if we use the lines of Stéphane Mallarmé to explicate this image:
Her American lake where the Niagara winds,
The winds have been frothing the sea-grass, which pines:
“Shall we any more mirror her as in times past?”
For just as the seagull, o’er waves it has passed,
Enjoins joyous echoes or drops a wing feather,
She left her sweet mem’ry behind her forever!
Of all, what remains here? What can one show?
A name! . . .
I took this quote from Derrida’s Dissemination where, in the notes, the translator explains Derrida’s interest in the pun and homonym in his analysis of Mallarmé. “Wing feather [plume d’aile] . . . her memory [souvenir d’elle]’ [‘aile’] (wing) rhymes with ‘elle’ (she, her). The unfolding of this aviary and of this fan is perhaps infinite. Just to give an idea of this défi d’ailes [‘challenge of the wings’; ailes also sounds like l’s. There is always a supplementary l. One l too few (produces a fall) or one I too many forms the fold.” So we see now that the white sheet could be her broken wings and that the elements that now surround her are alien to her, the reflection in the mirror now shows a visual pun on the memory souvenir d’elle of the creature she once was défi d’ailes, which produced the fall and that is evident in the fold of the sheet, her broken wings, Deleuze’s crack.
In image 5, the body is reversed and the broken furled wings have become either swaddling or a shroud. The top of Vladi’s face is visible, her eyes open staring at where she may have fallen from, where she may desire to return. The swaddling signifies her birth from the womb of the universe/unconscious, its shroud-like mirror-image representing the death of her past, the pupal stage before her new life, as indicated by the more active position of her long and graceful legs. The ocean just above her acts as another layer of swaddling/shroud and the tumbling waves appear as a line of frozen crystal arabesques, emphasizing the tension between her current state and the onsetting imago stage. There are similar waves in the bottom left corner of Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus and the mirror-image of the swaddling/shroud is as if Andrea Mantegna’s paintings of the infant Christ The Presentation in the Temple (c.1455) and the dead one Lamentation of Christ (c. 1480) had somehow been at once concertinaed and concatenated through the image of the white materials. And then, we notice that the mirror is no longer reflecting Vladi but shows the grey of the clouds, as if she is now in revelation, confessing to us where she is from, trying to make us understand. Or maybe it is at once a signal for help and a farewell to that world and the self in which she has so far been reflected, been reflecting.
Another painting by Botticelli, Primavera (c. 1480) is evoked in image 6, in which Vladi is now sitting up, her bare left leg feeling the haeccity of the pebbles, the earth and the sea, while her bare right leg is lancet-arched, her knee the keystone ready to bear her weight (what there is of it) when she stands. The white material draped off of her shoulders and bunched around her thighs resembles the robes of the Three Graces in Primavera and looks ready to be discarded, a chrysalis sloughed off for this new being. The background of this image is elemental in that it is a Rothko-like triptych of browns, blues and greys and enacts Rothko’s concepts of his “shapes” and “performers” in that the scene is “an unknown adventure in an unknown space” and these shapes, although having “no direct association with any particular visible experience,” enable the viewer to “recognize the principle and passion of organisms.” For Rothko and for Vladi (both Russian-born Americans), art “is an anecdote of the spirit, and the only means of making concrete the purpose of its varied quickness and stillness.” Jean-Francois Lyotard writing about abstract paintings, asserts that “the apparent immobility, the eye that doesn’t enjoy it, of the assemblages of points, lines, planes and colours is precisely what motivates desire. Here we are closest to what we are looking for, the instantiation of intensity in the theoretical text, immobile mobility. Klee, Delaunay, Newman, Rothko, Guiffrey, deceitful immobilizers, create movement by very small disparities of colour, lines, etc. Disparities, not oppositions. Learning to be set in motion by this, by a blue adjoining a blue, by two brilliances of the same white being dissimulated according to the angle of vision, beyond all loquacity and all didactic chromatics.”
This image also reminds me of Francis Bacon’s Reclining Figure, No. 1 (c.1959-61) in which Bacon uses a colour-field background (also a nod to the St. Ives school of abstract artists such as Patrick Heron) to enhance the angularity of the body in the foreground, expressing the complex relationships between anatomy, nature and pure abstraction. Whereas Bacon felt awe when beholding the human body and Rothko experienced awe when faced with nature, Vladi’s character appears to be in awe of the body in the midst of nature. Her head obscured by the hand mirror faces towards the sea while the viewer looks at the back of the mirror, the pitted moon-like surface a map of the lunar dynamics of gender and its relational tropes of mystery, darkness, sickness, the passage of time and even immortality and eternity – Vladi the alien time-traveller.
Like a figure in a Delvaux painting, Vladi is standing facing the ocean. The white garment now like a bridal gown, the bottom of it pooling on the pebbles creating a kind of mermaid’s tail as she regards the sea and sky. Her left shoulder is bare and she holds the mirror in her left hand, its surface reflecting back at the viewer yet reflecting nothing. There is something vaguely uncanny about this image because it reminds one of the figure of death in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) – the black-cloaked and white-faced character from the ars moriendi tradition; however, Vladi’s white vestment signifies more an ars vivendi, an art of living, of spring, of rebirth. The figure regards the sea and sky, the vestment is of those elements – wave and cloud, the mirror reflects an empty space, a vacuum waiting to be filled with experiences. Rather than death, the form resembles the female in Edvard Munch’s, Two Human Beings (the Lonely Ones) (1895) standing in a white dress on a rocky shore facing the grey-blue sea.
It is only in image 8 that Vladi reveals her full body and face. The profiled figure is now upright, about to take a dancer’s step into her new realm, her new life. The white sheet now like a Roman stola worn by an empress or high priestess. She holds the mirror in her outstretched left hand and stares into it as if confirming her new identity, her new powers. Or is she? Although the gaze is fixed, the mirror could be pointing to the sky, reflecting nothing again, the emptiness of mirrors. Or is she signalling her past self in order to reunite, for as Luce Irigaray explains, “How can I say it differently? We exist only as two? We live by twos beyond all mirages, images, and mirrors. Between us, one is not the ‘real’ and the other her imitation; one is not the original and the other her copy … we relate to one another without simulacrum. Our resemblance does without semblances: for in our bodies, we are already the same. Touch yourself, touch me, you’ll ‘see.’”
Vladi’s self-portraits with mirrors are in themselves a form of scrying in which she summons a divination of a form of anti-narcissism in which the human, the world and the cosmos are almost transcendental dimensions in which she moves and acts in innocent puzzlement and desirous ecstasy. Her vision is at once inward and outward, infiltrative and penetrative, she does not see her own face reflected in the mirror but sees that it is an integral part of the nature it also reflects; rather than being empty, it contains multitudes. If, as in the work of Jacques Lacan, narcissism is linked to the suicidal tendencies of the death-drive and that the mirror of narcissism is a concave one, then Vladi’s plane mirror reflects all of life. In her self-portraiture, to return to Irigaray, there is “no need to fashion a mirror image to be ‘doubled,’ to repeat (herself) a second time. Prior to any representation, we are two. Let those two – made for you by your blood, evoked for you by my body – come together alive. You will always have the touching beauty of a first time, if you aren’t congealed in reproductions. You will always be moved for the first time, if you aren’t immobilized in any form of repetition.”
About the authors:
Steve Finbow’s most recent works are The Life of the Artist Niccolò di Mescolano (Alberegno Press, 2022) and – with Jukka Siikala – Polaroid Haiku (Infinity Land Press, 2022).
Irina Vladi is an artist and model inspired by nature, mythology, music, robot dogs, religious iconography and the absurd. Of Ukrainian-Belarussian descent, she now lives in New England.
