Thoughts post reading Rosalind Krauss’s ‘Video: the Aesthetics of Narcissium’ in which she looks at the inherent narcissistic nature of the video-medium.
we could consider the notion of a medium
- as apparatus, the simultaneous reception and projection of an image.
or - as communication, the mediumistic experience of the human receiver (and sender) of communications arising from an invisible source. ‘The human psyche as a conduit.’
Most video art has used the human body as its central instrument, either the body of the artist-practitioner or in the case of video installations the responding viewer. As video has the capability to record and transmit at the same time, to produce instant feedback, the subject (in my case myself) can be centered between the two apparatuses; the camera and the monitor, re-projecting the image with the immediacy of a mirror.
This closed circuit feedback creates a situation of spatial closure, prompting a condition of self reflection, as I respond to a continually renewed image of myself. This ‘live-ness’ supplants anything prior to it, that is the original action I was doing rather ‘the performer becomes committed to the perpetuation of their own self reflection. There becomes an echo-effect of self-reflection, in a sense a collapsed present’.
‘Reflection in the case of mirroring is a move towards an external symmetry whileReflexiveness, a strategy to achieve a radical asymmetry from within’
In a mirror reflection, although the subject is literally separate from their reflected image, it could be considered a movement towards fusion. The agency of reflection is a mode of appropriation, illusionistically erasing the difference between subject and object.
‘facing mirrors on opposite walls squeeze out the real space between them.’
screen recording of studio footage
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