Like in a Mirror

Daniel Buren, COMME DANS UN MIROIR, multiplication - division - addition - subtraction, 2003, Exhibition FORM-SPECIFIC, 31. 5. - 31. 7. 2003, Moderna galerija - Metelkova 22, Photo: Dejan Habicht & Matija Pavlovec

10 January - 27 January 2008
Kresija Gallery, Stritarjeva 6, Ljubljana

Like in a Mirror. "Form-Specific Reloaded"
The event is part of the action entitled »Hosting Moderna galerija!«.

To the casual eye, the job of a museum photographer seems clear-cut: to accurately represent the artifact photographed. But our eyes serve us differently. And so do our minds. When a museum photographer sets about reproducing a work of art, knowing the films, lighting, and the optics of photography is not enough. Every reproduction, even the most straightforward one, displays - albeit incidentally - the photographer's attitude to verism. Photography is interpretation, turn it whichever way you will. And when a work of art is in a specific site that gives it additional contents by its specificity, the photographer cannot settle for the standard of "everything showing." Not by a long shot. The clarity of the image must give way to the recognizability of its contents.

The exhibition Form Specific, curated by Zdenka Badovinac in 2003, was mounted in the disused former army barracks building at 22, Metelkova Street, Ljubljana. The premise of the exhibition was, simply put, that form, no matter how abstract, can never be innocuous. It does not hover in non-space and non-time, dissociated from social reality and life. The abandoned army barracks building with decrepit mains and peeling wall paint provided a post-apocalyptic backdrop for the formally precise works. It was a counterpoint which should have made the works stand out in their distinctness, but what happened was the exact opposite, and much better: most of the works looked made expressly for that site, expressly for that show.

Human perception is selective. Watching a James Bond movie we see the film, not the TV set on which it plays. A similar thing happens when viewing works of art. As I walked through Daniel Buren's installation COMME DANS UN MIROIR, multiplication-division-addition-subtraction at the exhibition opening, all I noticed were the wonderful patterns the sunlight made as it shone through the colored glass panes of this two-part installation occupying two adjoining rooms. The similarity of the two parts is immediately discernible; the fact - indicated by the title - that they are each other's mirror images, however, becomes apparent only when we put the photographs of the two rooms side by side. We could even say that Buren conceived his work in such a way that we can enjoy it when we walk through it, and see it only when it is mediated by photography.

Looking through a photo archive is similar to looking in a mirror. Everything is real, except the right- and left-hand sides are reversed.

Dejan Habicht

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