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September 24, 2009
This is a photo taken late last summer towards the end of a long heat wave in Adelaide. A hot north wind was blowing, the temperature was in the mid-40s, and the pavement radiated heat.
It is a part of a set entitled Mise-en-abyme but I have completely lost the plot on what this project about. I looked at the images today and I can see that the concept has eluded me. The images make no sense at all as a project.
According to Wikipedia Mise en abyme occurs
within a text when there is a reduplication of images or concepts referring to the textual whole. Mise-en-abîme is a play of signifiers within a text, of sub-texts mirroring each other. This mirroring can get to the point where meaning can be rendered unstable and in this respect can be seen as part of the process of deconstruction. The film-within-a-film is an example of mise-en-abîme. The film being made within the film refers through its mise-en-scène to the ‘real’ film being made. The spectator sees film equipment, stars getting ready for the take, crew sorting out the various directorial needs. The narrative of the film within the film may directly reflect the one in the ‘real’ film.In Western art "mise en abyme" is a formal technique in which an image contains a smaller copy of itself, the sequence appearing to recur infinitely.
Well, nope that " stories within a story" is not what I had in mind at all. I had rejected narrative as story. What was I thinking? If I recall I was thinking in terms of a “hall or world of mirrors."
But what did that mean? The Wikipedia entry goes on to say that:
In literary criticism, "mise en abyme" is a type of frame story, in which the main narrative can be used to encapsulate some aspect of the framing story. The term is used in deconstruction and deconstructive literary criticism as a paradigm of the intertextual nature of language—that is, of the way language never quite reaches the foundation of reality because it refers in a frame-within-a-frame way to other language, which refers to other language, et cetera.
aah that is what I had in mind--- the intertextual nature of visual language. Yet the images in the set seem to refer to a narrative situation that leads into a vortex or abyss and to a hall of mirrors that is more like an endless reflexivity.
Thinking about it now I recall that the idea had little to do with an abyss, and everything to do with an internal mirroring that is endlessly repeating.
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