the-drawing-center:
In
his performance, Through the Looking Glass II, Gerhard Lang passed through
Greenwich Village and the Bowery viewing the city through a Claude
Lorrain mirror - a darkened and slightly
convex glass plate as was used by landscape painters in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries for their studies of picturesque rural motifs. The mirror allowed the painters to not depict
what appeared directly before their eyes but the mediated image of the setting
behind their backs. Lang based his
performance on these inverted conditions and walked Manhattan backwards solely
by observing the city’s mirror image.
Video: Gerhard Lang, Through the Looking
Glass II, 2012. 4 minutes 47 seconds.