THE MIRROR WORKS OF KIM DEMUTH
“When you gaze long into the abyss the abyss also gazes into you.” Friedrich Nietzsche1
“When you gaze long into the abyss the abyss also gazes into you.”
Friedrich Nietzsche1
The Dismembered Body
In the catalogue for seeing you seeing me seeing you, Julie Walsh introduces Kim Demuth’s work with an anecdote from the opening night of another recent show that had featured one of the works also in this Institute of Modern Art exhibition.2 The story tells how a woman navigated her way through the crowd towards four small, black monochromes already being viewed by a male gallery visitor. Only one seemed to depict anything, and it was before this one that the man was thoughtfully engaged, leaning in to scrutinise the work closely. As the woman approached she assumed her place next to the other observer and, unconsciously mimicking his posture, peered intently at what appeared to be the reflection of the man’s head in the monochromatic panel. What the woman failed to notice was that her fellow spectator was, in fact, headless; having no corresponding referent in reality, this ‘reflection’ was purely a trick of perceptual expectation. But because of the familiarity of the whole scenario, the woman did not realise her cognitive faux pas until she was side by side with this (otherwise frightful) spectatorial aberration.
The work was The Punter (2003), and its sourceless reflection produced the effect of what Jacques Lacan has called the point de capiton: that moment when ‘a perfectly “natural” and “familiar” situation is denatured, becom[ing] “uncanny”, loaded with horror and threatening possibilities’.3 This effect requires the insertion (into the idyllic or expected scene) of a pure signifier without signified, that ‘thing’ that transforms everything: from something... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline