Broken Mirror: A Reflection
Anne Qian Wang
Broken Mirror, by Song Dong, is a video artwork created in 1999 that was a part of Scenes for a New Heritage, an exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art. This exhibition was designed to present varying narratives in our constantly shifting modern world, offering currently relevant viewpoints on global cultural, historical and economical events and thought. Broken Mirror is an impressive evocation of this theme of contemporary perspective on the evolution of seemingly ordinary life in modern China.
The artwork is a four minute video installation that displays many continuous, repeated events spliced together. Each of these events is a short clip that begins with live footage of a street—focusing on the sidewalk, buildings, or roads—in China, with people passing on foot, bike, and in vehicles. However, it turns out that these images are in fact being reflected in a mirror that the artist is (without the audience knowing) holding in front of the camera lens. This fact only comes to light when a hammer enters the frame and proceeds to smash the mirror. As a result, the original image shatters and as the fragments of the mirror are dropped onto the street what has actually been occurring in the environment behind the mirror, all along, is revealed to the audience—another perspective of the street where the clip is taking place, with differing content.
Song Dong uses these two perspectives—one in the mirror that is smashed, and one that is actual and behind the mirror—to juxtapose the rapid development of contemporary city life in China, and the startling difference between old and new. The first image he presents is often of something traditional in modern Chinese life—an older street, travellers biking, a historic building—and the second is of something new and contemporary—a recent building, or many cars passing in a street. It is in this that Broken Mirror represents the literal sudden destruction—shattering—of the old, to bring in the new. It is an easy, almost careless destruction, presented simply and almost thoughtlessly—a few times, the mirror fails to shatter appropriately on the first try, and the hammer continues to brutally hack at the image until it falls away.
Song Dong plays with audience expectation and reaction in this stark and effective contrast, but additionally explores a human interaction with the audience. Often times, people are recorded and shown in the video to react to the smashing of the mirror, turning to look at or examine the shards and camera in the aftermath, almost interacting with the audience themselves, as if they are bemusedly responding to the destruction of the old. Finally, in the very last clip of the video, it is a reflection of the face of the artist himself that is shattered, suggesting that perhaps it is not just physical buildings and landmarks that are being stripped quickly away in modern China, but also culture and identity.
A central aspect of what Broken Mirror hinges on to be such an effective, provocative artwork is its use of extra-dimensional space. Initially the audience is not aware at all that there is another dimension to the image they are first presented with, but as each clip continues with the same theme, they begin to become aware that at all times there is an extra dimension in the artwork that extends beyond what they are literally seeing. When the mirror is placed, the audience knows that there is something behind the physical mirror that is being blocked, because they are seeing a reflection. When the mirror has been shattered and the background is revealed, the audience knows that there is still something occurring behind them, which is what the mirror once reflected that is now lost. This effect is exacerbated by the images of pedestrians examining and reflecting on the aftermath of the scene in some clips, as it causes the audience to become hyperaware of the actual set up of the artwork, what is in the foreground, the invisible background, and of the actual artist himself, kneeling in the street with camera, hammer, and broken fragments of mirror. This effect is very much like how Foucault describes—in The Order of Things (1966)—Las Meninas, a 1656 oil painting by Velázquez, an artwork that also plays with audience perception of what is visible and invisible in extra-dimensional space: albeit in a different, and of course, still manner. Foucault writes that “this mirror cuts straight through the whole field of the representation […] and restores visibility to that which resides outside all view […] it allows us to see, in the centre of the canvas, what in the painting is of necessity doubly invisible,” (The Order of Things, pg. 8), referring to the idea that a mirror, by its nature as a reflective object, presents to the audience something beyond what they are directly experiencing. “In Dutch painting […] one saw in them the same things as one saw in the first instance in the painting, but decomposed and recomposed according to a different law. Here, the mirror is saying nothing that has already been said before,” Foucault adds (The Order of Things, pg. 7). Foucault also makes references to another idea present in both Broken Mirror and Las Meninas, which is the effect of gaze within the artwork. People are depicted in both pieces to look “out” of their medium, essentially making eye contact with the viewer themselves. This creates an effect where the viewer seems to be looking at the subject and the subject back at them, but, because of the audience’s awareness of extra-dimensional space, simultaneously creates a sensation where the subject is in fact looking beyond the viewer at another object, or that perhaps the viewer and the other object are philosophically the same idea. “We, the spectators, are an additional factor. Though greeted by that gaze, we were also dismissed by it, replaced by that which was always there before we were: the model itself […] the observer and the observed take part in a ceaseless exchange,” Foucault writes (The Order of Things, pg. 4-5). It is as such that Song Dong uses dimensionality and the idea of gaze and perception within Broken Mirror—over and over again, in a kind of mise en abyme—to engage his audience and communicate his ideas.
Appreciating Broken Mirror as an artwork does require, in this sense, a certain level of intellectual and critical thinking to fully appreciate its meaning and purpose. It is easy to “lose oneself” in the video, as it is a captivating medium, and the repeated building of suspension in each clip—what is reflected, and what will be revealed—is extremely engaging. However, the artwork is less about the literal, direct aesthetic function of what is seen to the eye—the street scenes are fairly ordinary and framed in a non-descript fashion, the subjects do not present anything particularly noteworthy, the action of the hammer is mundane and brutal, and the shattering of the mirror is perhaps the most “beautiful” action that directly occurs—and more about the ideas they evoke due to the way they are presented, and the actual aesthetic appeal of the presentation itself. What is actually being presented in Broken Mirror is not particularly remarkable—streets, buildings, vehicles, people, mirror shards, a hammer—but how they are presented by Song Dong is especially remarkable, and hence its appreciation and recognition of its meaning and themes requires a level of critical thinking and engagement from the audience that goes beyond what seems to actually be there. This requirement is precisely the “demand” Paul Ziff describes in Why Describe Anything as Aesthetic? (1984) – “Anything viewed makes demands,” he writes (Why Describe Anything as Aesthetic?, pg. 28). All artwork makes demands for aesthetic appreciation, though it varies according to the content. Ziff writes that “Popular art is popular because it is so readily available to all within the culture,” (Why Describe Anything as Aesthetic?, pg. 27), and inversely that “Modern works of art often call for prolonged continuous close attention if one is to appreciate them,” (Why Describe Anything as Aesthetic?, pg. 28). The literal subject matter of Broken Mirror might as well be treated as “anything viewed,” but it is the way it is presented and hence the intellectual engagement it requires—its demand—that makes it an aesthetic piece of worthy attention as artwork.
This concept also plays strongly into the idea that form is more important than content, when viewing artwork, as described by Susan Sontag in Can We Ever Understand an Artwork? (1961). “What is needed, first, is more attention to form in art,” Sontag writes (Can We Ever Understand an Artwork?, pg. 254), “If excessive stress on content provokes arrogance of interpretation, more extended and more thorough descriptions of form would silence.” For Sontag, form is the medium through which content exists and is depicted. In Broken Mirror, as described above, it is the form—the video, the continuous clips, the repetitive act of reflection, broken mirror, and revelation—that gives the artwork the aesthetic impact it requires, rather than the literal content. Of course, this is not to say that the content is unimportant—for example, if the clips depicted similar streets over and over, there would be no sense of Song Dong’s commentary of the juxtaposition and destruction of old versus new. However, it is ultimately the form that gives the artwork this meaning, and ultimately the form that is more important to allowing the audience to critically engage with this piece to appreciate it, as a thoughtful and provoking perspective of the rapid development in modern China.
Citations
Dong, Song. Broken Mirror. “Scenes for a New Heritage.” Museum of Modern Art. New York, New York. 1999. Video.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Travistock, 1977. Print.
Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation: And Other Essays. New York: Picador, 2001.
Ziff, Paul. Antiaesthetics: An Appreciation of the Cow with the Subtile Nose. Springer, 1984.
Copyright © 2017 Anne Qian Wang