Through the Looking Glass II

In this performance through Greenwich Village and the Bowery I saw the city only in a Claude Lorrain mirror – a black, slightly convex glass of the kind landscape painters used in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to study picturesque motifs. For them the mirror was an instrument of a different seeing: they depicted not what lay directly before their eyes, but what they saw in the mirror – the surroundings behind their backs.

I took up this reversal in my performance, and added something: movement, walking through the city – backwards. Walking backwards, I saw the city only in its mirror image and opened up a part of Manhattan in this way. At the same time the backward movement set itself clearly apart from the general forward motion. An otherness appeared within normality.

At Astor Place I stopped, laid a white linen cloth on the asphalt and placed the mirror on it. The rucksack was put down, the walking stick beside it. A tripod was set up and the mirror fixed to it. With a camera I captured the mirror image of the city – and in this image I myself can be seen, unlike the landscape painters, who did not depict themselves in their studies.