This is note of a catalogue published by the School of Image Arts on an exhibition of work by

Christian Châtel. I am presenting it here in the hope that some people might find the
commentary on the role of the mirror-image in art.

On The Role of the Mirror Image

The gallery is dark, filled with loud, and mostly mechanical noises; the overall effect is
primordially mysterious and, perhaps, a bit intimidating. On the walls, on the ceiling and on
screens in front of the walls are a number of images, projected so as to repeat, over and over.
Some of the images have a rectangular format, some trapezoidal, and others are irregular
quadrilaterals. The sources of the images are not immediately evident – not until one’s eyes
become accustomed to the dark. But one does notice two things about the images in Christian
Châtel’s Le Cinéma Blanc: Discards/Rebuts: first, they are all portraits – and not only that, but
the figures in the portraits are frozen and stare out at you with a fixed stare; and, second, the
portraits are interrupted by abstract forms that recurrently block access to it.
The question that I want to ask about the piece is a question of sort that artists usually
avoid asking – and that is probably for the best, for such questions must not be allowed to
intervene in the creative process. The question concerns what gives the work its power to affect
us, and it is a legitimate question for anyone who wishes to deliberate on the mysterious power
of images.
To begin to answer it, let us note this about our response to the work: the bodies of the
spectators, standing in the dark, amidst the roar and clamour of the mechanical sounds mixed
with what seems to the sound of surf, staring at the images, are as invisible in the dark as the
real people upon whose images they look. Nonetheless, the spectators may well feel as
strongly that they are caught in the gaze of the image as that they are looking at the image. That
feeling is a key to identifying the affective processes through which the piece works. For one
thing, it highlights a mode of being with the body in which the body is felt, but not seen. The
importance of mode of being with the body we shall pursue later. Our being displaced from our
usual observer condition – a displacement we feel strong as we first enter into the space of the
work and before our eyes have become accustomed to the darkness – and into a condition in
which proprioceptive experience of a body in space is paramount is a key to a transformation in
visuality that is just now being recognized as requiring a rewriting of the history of modernism
and modernity. That transformation is certainly an aspect of the thematic Châtel treats in Le
Cinéma Blanc: Discards/Rebuts. But it is not the historic implications of the work upon which I
wish to reflect.
For the feeling of belonging to the space of the work also indicates something
characteristic of installation art – a characteristic theatricality of the sort that Michael Fried has
painstaking analyzed and critiqued. In that critique he staked a claim that nearly two entire
generations of artists would subsequently challenge, viz., that “all of the arts degenerate as they
approach the conditions of theatre.” Whatever merit one may or may not find in Fried’s
condemnation of theatricality, one does have to acknowledge that Fried’s contrast between
pictoriality and theatricality draw attention to a crucial distinction of modes, between, on the one
hand, those works that strive to be independent of their surroundings and of the vicissitudes of
the conditions under which they are seen and, on the other hand, those works which make the
viewer aware of the space in which the work is situated and of his or her presence in that space.
Further, while artworks that strive to be autonomous, transcendental objects seek to engender a
heightened perception that opens one to an experience whose temporal character is that of an
expansive “Now,” theatrical works, on the contrary concern themselves with the importance of
duration. The mode of temporal experience that the autonomous modernist object generates,
then, is that of an eternal present, a temporality of detachment and transcendence. In contrast
with that, the mode of temporal experience that theatrical works generate is characterized by
immediacy, as theatrical experience (in Fried’s sense of the term “theatrical”) is occasioned by
an exchange between the viewer and the work that occurs in a particular here-and-now and so
acknowledges the circumstances in which the work is encountered. Viewing a theatrical work,
one is often induced to thematize the experience of time-as-duration, for it is duration that gives
shape to the experience. All in all, while the autonomous modernist object invited the viewers to
put aside the contingencies of their spatio-temporal location, theatrical works make viewers
aware of their being embedded in a particular space and time, and of being situated in relation
to particular objects.
Theatrical works that make viewers aware of the actual space in which they, and the
artworks, are situated and the actual time in which the exchange between the viewer and work
takes place. Such works of course need not be without internal relations, nor is Châtel’s Le
Cinéma Blanc: Discards/Rebuts: the young woman on one side of the room enters into a
dialogue with the young in the opposite corner, and the police officer and the older, heavy-set
man nearby, on the ceiling also converse with one another. But the elements of Le Cinéma
Blanc: Discards/Rebuts form few such relationships, and what relations they do form are not
very strongly marked – we could imagine even that the work would not be fundamentally
changed if these relationships were altered in some measure. The lack of stress on internal
relations is characteristic of that exhibit theatricality. Indeed, it is almost the condition of a work’s
taking on a theatrical character, inasmuch as the paucity of internal relations leads the viewers
to establish relations between the installation and themselves. In Châtel’s Le Cinéma Blanc:
Discards/Rebuts, viewers belong to the site of the work insofar as they are comprehended in the
“sight” of the image; they become actors in the work, their status is similar, in most respects, to
that of the figures we see in the images. Furthermore, the dearth of internal relations invites
viewers to experience the space to which the work belong as a stage set; accordingly viewers
walking through the word and exploring its space, are on-stage, just the actors in the films they
look at are.
The philosopher whose name is most often evoked by those who wish to deliberate on
theatricality is Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In works such as the Phenomenology of Perception
(1945) Merleau-Ponty demonstrated the ineluctably perspectival condition of perception – the
fact that vision (indeed all sensation) is necessarily sited, that nothing is knowable apart from
the contingencies of where it set and the conditions under which it is seen (including the
vagaries of the viewer’s history and condition). If works that strive to be autonomous,
transcendental objects assume a positionless, and therefore disembodied viewer, artworks
whose character is fundamentally theatrical assume a different viewer – an embodied viewer,
with a particular history and particular location in space and time.
Châtel’s Le Cinéma Blanc: Discards/Rebuts thematizes the process that makes the
viewer aware of the contingencies of his or her spatio-temporal location; that is, it puts under
scrutiny the processes that makes viewers aware of the space in which the work is situated and
the time in which they experience it and, what is more important, of their being in that space and
time. Le Cinéma Blanc: Discards/Rebuts does this through the gaze that the images on the
walls and ceiling direct towards us: they look at us, just as we look at them. The dynamic is that
of the mirror process that was so much discussed – perhaps overdiscussed – two decades and
more ago. The most frequently cited analysis of deep psychological role of mirror operations is
that which Jacques Lacan offered in his famous text, “Le stade de mirroir comme formateur du
function de ‘je’.” The particular formulation of the role of the mirror stage that Lacan offers
derives from hypotheses about what experience might be like before the infant had succumbed
to the fiction of the unifying ego.
Lacan had proposed that young child experiences himself or herself in as being in bits
and pieces; but when, somewhere between six months and two years of age, the baby catches
a glimpse of his or her image in the mirror, the baby experiences himself or herself as collected
into a unified form. A crucial point in the Lacanian commentary on the experience is the
insistence that there is a disparity between what the baby feels and what he or she sees in the
mirror; the disparity results from the lure of an illusory unity that the baby longs to assume, a
spurious image of completeness that remains forever a lure, and will forever elude the
individual.
The merits of Lacan’s analysis of mirror operations are many, but his is not the only
analysis; others, indeed, are more germane to issue with which we are dealing. The English
paediatrician/psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott traced mirroring operations to a stage earlier than
that which Lacan discussed – he treated the mother’s face as the precursor to the actual mirror
in individual development. For Winnicott, what the baby sees at Lacan’s stade de mirroir
described is determined by an even earlier mirroring phenomenon.

Now, at some point, the baby takes a look round. Perhaps a baby at the
breast does not look at the breast. Looking at the face is more likely. What does
the baby see there? To get to the answer we must draw on our experience with
psychoanalytic patients who reach back to very early phenomena and yet who
can verbalize (when they feel they can do so) without insulting the delicacy of
what is preverbal, unverbalized except perhaps in poetry.
What does the baby see when he or she looks at the mother’s face? I am
suggesting that, ordinarily, what the baby sees is himself or herself and what she
looks like is related to what she sees there. All this is too easily taken for granted.
I am asking that this which is naturally done well by mothers who are caring for
their babies shall not be taken for granted.

If the mother is sufficiently responsive, then what the baby sees in the mother’s face reflects the
state the baby is in: if the baby is content, then what the baby sees in the mother’s face is the
contentment the baby feels.
The baby’ opportunity to see what he or she feels reflected in the mother’s face depends
upon the mother’s capacity to respond to the condition in which the baby finds himself or
herself. But being seen is basis for creative seeing, Winnicott insisted. He pointed out, then, that
perception arises though apperception; he pointed out, that is, that the capacity to see things
depends upon the capacity to experience oneself, a capacity that comes through the other. The
mother’s capacity to mirror her baby’s mood (to be concerned at the baby’s troubles, to
experience delight when the baby does) is a crucial factor in the development of a sense of the
self. The images in Châtel’s Le Cinéma Blanc: Discards/Rebuts can be seen as objective
portraits, but they can also be seen as self-reflective images, like images in a mirror. The
difference between seeing the portraits in Châtel’s Le Cinéma Blanc: Discards/Rebuts as mirror-
images and seeing them as representations of others is exactly the distance that separates
apperception (the mode of experience characteristic of participating consciousness) and
perception (the mode of experience characteristic of ego that has crystallized out of an
undifferentiated matrix.
But the faces in Châtel’s screens are immobile – troublingly immobile. Winnicott helps us
to understand the affect results of this immobility:

Many babies . . . have a long experience of not getting back what they are
 giving. They look and do not see themselves. There are consequences . . ...
[T]he baby gets settled in to the idea that when the he or she looks, what is seen
is the mother’s face. The mother’s face is not then a mirror. So perception takes
the place of apperception, perception takes the place of that which might have
been the beginning of a significant exchange with the world, a two-way process
in which self-enrichment alternates with the discovery of meaning in the world of
seen things.

Châtel’s Le Cinéma Blanc reawakens our sense the potential associated with the with the face’s
mirror role; but the immobility of the projected faces also invites to see the people shown not as
mirrors of the self, but as distinct, isolated individuals separate from oneself, to see the faces as
simply objects in the world. The tension between the two ways of seeing the faces makes us
feel, acutely, the gap the separates self and other, a gap that, as we shall see, has just about
the measure as the gap that separates the self-observing self from the proprioceptive self.
Winnicott framed his theory about the mirror-role of mother and family to account, inter
alia, for the development of the integration of psyche and soma, for a psycho-somatic
collaboration. He explains this psycho-somatic collaboration through the fact that the
development of the sense that we have our selves, of our interiority, goes hand-in-hand with the
development of a body image. The development of a body image and the development of a
sense of interiority are really different modes of the same underlying process – “The ego is first
and foremost a body ego,” Freud asserted in The Ego and the Id. The experience of self-
recognition, and consequently of apperception, is a bodily experience and, accordingly, is
dependent upon the development of a secure body image.
But the development of the body image also demands separating ‘the Me’ out from ‘the
Not-me.’ Thus, the development of the body image transfroms the young child’s experience, as
cosmic anonymity, the “oceanic experience” that Freud commented on, cedes its dominance to
focussed awareness. Participating consciousness wanes, as the child begins more and more to
himself or herself as a separate, individuated person. The child’s experience becomes
elaborated in such a fashion as to be able to take a standpoint on the body, to “see” it as though
from the outside. Though experience is still tied to the body, a distance opens up that allows
experience to look in on the body. The individual develops a capacity for self-reflection, a
capacity that Châtel’s Le Cinéma Blanc: Discards/Rebuts thematizes as feel ourselves being
looked at by the faces onscreen and become, to a degree, self-conscious.
The process by which the child separates out from the environment involves a
transformation of experience, from a mode of experience that is primarily kinesthetic to mode of
experience that is primarily visual (from a mode of experience in which the body participates in
what experiences to one which involves looking in on what one observes). This change from
kinesthetic to visual experience is highlighted by the contrast between two types experiences
that Châtel’s installation engenders. On one hand, the variations that we hear and see as we
move above the space of the installation make us proprioceptively (kinesthetically) aware that
our bodies belong to the space of the installation; on the other, the self-consciousness
engendered by having the portraits look at us makes us feel acutely that “we” are “here” looking
at “that” which is “there.”
The process of separating out from the environment has another effect: what eventually
happens as a result of this process is that the fit between the self and the realm of the other
goes off a little, and the relations between our selves and the world becomes disturbed. These
effects can be grasped most readily by considering other ways of describing the shift from
kinesthetic to visual awareness: we could it a change from an inward to an exterior mode of
awareness; or as a transition from the experience of the true self to that of a false self. All these
descriptions point to a central fact: an abyss opens up and, as Lacan and the Surrealists never
failed to remind us, by virtue of this split, the ontological structure of human be-ing acquires a
potential for paranoia, a potential for the self to be invaded by the other. The shift from
kinesthetic to visual awareness produces an insuperable and irrevocable fragmentation of the
body, a gap which the ego is constructed to conceal. That gap is what is highlighted by the
contrast between the that Châtel’s Le Cinéma Blanc: Le Cinéma Blanc: Discards/Rebuts
provokes, between the proprioceptive experience of belonging to the space of the work (an
experience that is heightened by being caught in the gaze of the other), and the visual
experience of staring at images that belong to another place. These faces serve a dual role, to
be sure: first, a mirror-role, through which the observer becomes aware of his own being, and
secondly, as images of the alienated self, the fictitious self of the stade de mirroir ; or, to express
this duality in different terms, they serve on the one hand to make one aware that the other is
inmixed with the self and, on the other, to heighten the fiction of the self is a separate and
distinct entity. That paradoxical function is one principal sources of Discards/Rebut’s affectivity.
Caught in the tension between these two modes of experience, we become acutely aware of a
lack of being, as we realize that there is no self-present beholder to whom the world is
transparently obvious.
This opacity is reinforced by another feature of the projections. For the portraits are not
all that is projected one the walls and ceiling of the gallery: superimposed over each portrait is a
loop that repeats the same abstract forms, over and over again. These abstract forms often
obscure the face over which they are superimposed. Winnicott’s ideas help explain this aspect
of the installation as well. We have already seen that our sense be-ing comes to depend our
relation to the mirror image, or to the mirror-role of the face. The eclipsing of the faces by the
abstract form re-enacts the disappearance of the face of mother and, accordingly, repeatedly
reactivates the affects associated an event that resulted in a disturbance in the sense of the
self. The interruptions provoke a primal experience of rupture in the personal continuity of
experience, and so a threat of break-up that we can characterize as madness. The grating
sounds in Le Cinéma Blanc: Discards/Rebuts suggests something of that.
Once one’s eyes have become accustomed to the darkness that enfolds the spectators,
one can make out the source of the images and sounds. They come from eight moviolas – old-
fashioned film editing machines – that are placed here and there through the gallery space. The
moviolas themselves are conspicuously old-fashioned machines, and the overall appearance of
the installation is reminiscent of old industrial site – a garment factory, let’s say. On the back of
each moviola is bag, containing pieces of film. Ordinarily such bags are used simply as
receptacles for pieces of film that are excised as the editor assembles the finished film; and
here the bags are full of film, so we presume that the bit of film we see on the walls or ceiling
might even have been taken from the film in the bag. The suggestion is clear: the film is
assembled from discards – from what filmmakers call the “outtakes” of films, pieces of film that
are put aside, and don’t make it into the film that is exhibited. The implication that the film is
composed of rejects explains the subtitle of exhibition.
A question immediately imposes itself: what is the connection between this idea of
discards, of obsolescence (consider the moviolas), and the portraits on the wall? We have
already commented on how disturbing it is for the baby when he or she experiences a hiatus in
the flow of attention the mother directs towards the baby to assure the baby of his or her being.
The baby can experience a loss of self, a rupture in being. In “Fear of Breakdown,” Winnicott
compared the fear that analysands express, of experiencing a break-down in the course of their
analysis and the fear of death they sometimes convey. Winnicott proposed, first, that the fear of
break-down, the fear of a psychotic episode and the return to very early stages in development,
has its roots in the time of absolute dependence, when the mother supplies the baby with
auxiliary ego-function. The facilitating environment, if it existed, enabled the baby to undergo a
maturational process marked by integration (by developing a sense of coherent, continuous
self), psycho-somatic collusion that engenders a sense of indwelling (the sense of a self within
that meets an outside world), and the development of the capacity for object-relating. The
primitive agonies that are encapsulated in the fear of break-down is the fear of returning to an
unintegrated state, of falling forever, and of the loss of psycho-somatic collusion, and the failure
of indwelling.
Winnicott’s second proposal on the fear of breakdown, that emerged from the foregoing
ideas, was shockingly original:

I contend that clinical fear if breakdown is the fear of a breakdown that has
already been experiencd. It is a fear of the original agony which caused the
defence organisation which the patient displays as an illness syndrome.. . .
There are moments, according to my experience, when a patient needs to
be told that the breakdown, a fear of which destroys his or her life, has already
been. It is a fact that is carried round hidden in the unconscious.

Winnicott extends this keen observation to comprehend the fear of death sometimes
encountered analysis.

Little alteration is needed to transfer the general thesis of fear of breakdown to a

specific fear of death. This is perhaps a more common fear, and one that is
absorbed in the religious teachings about an after-life, as if to deny the fact of
death.
When fear of death is a significant symptom the promise of an after-life
fails to give relief, and the reason is that the patient has a compulsion to look for
death. Again, it is the death that happened but was not experienced that is
sought.. . .
Death, looked at in this way as something that happened to the patient
but which the patient was not mature enough to experience, has the meaning of
annihilation. It is like this, that a pattern developed in which the continuity of
being was interrupted by the patient’s infantile reactions to impingement, these
being environmental factors that were allowed to impinge by failures of the
facilitating environment.

Th obsolete equipment in Le Cinéma Blanc: Discards/Rebuts and the repeated projection of the
“discards” on the screens in association with the repetitive concealing of parts of the faces by
the abstract (and so unidentifiable) forms that, when they are visible, serve a mirror-role replays
the loss of being that primally signifies a death that has not been experienced. But, as Winnicott
pointed out, the death that has not been experienced provokes a longing to “remember” having
died, which requires experiencing death in the present. Small wonder, then, that installation
provokes feelings of mystery and terror.
The piece’s concern with death helps explain too the effect of the contrast between the
images on the walls and objects on the floor. The images that surround the viewer are nothing
more than phantasmagoric. Of course, the real film strips are there, in the moviolas, in the same
space as we are, so we acknowledge that the film images correspond to something real. But we
can hardly see the strips in the projector, and anyway that correspondence only serves highlight
the contrast the phantasmal images and the real objects (the moviolas) that project them. The
contrast makes evident that images possess only the reality of a revenant.
 Repetition is a key feature of work: the sound loops repeat, and so do the abstract forms
the recuurently block out the images. What is the affective meaning of this repetition? Freud
was so struck by the fact that the repetition compulsion is relatively uninfluenced by the
pleasure principle that he entitled his first major study of the compulsion the title “Beyond the
Pleasure Principle.” The repetition compulsion revealed mental operations that are more
primitive (in an evolutionary sense) than the pleasure principle. Freud considered that repetition
compulsion served to promote the dominating function of the mind and, thus, to bind, and
thereby reduce, tension. In striving to minimize excitation, it seeks to return the organism to
state of quiescence. Freud ventured to suggest (though only with the greatest hesitancy) that
the repetition compulsion manifested a drive directed towards a “nirvanic” state, an inorganic,
non-vital state of non-animation – that is, towards death. The compulsion to repeat unpleasant
experience is the product of an aggressive drive, Freud suggested.
That was not all that Freud had to say on the topic of repetition, however. In a paper on
technique from 1912, “Remembering, repeating and working-through,” Freud offered slightly
different views. He suggested that repetition in action is a form of remembering – that repetition
substitutes actual behavior for words in remembering. It is here Lacan’s ideas are relevant.
Lacan’s ideas on repetition derive from this view, though they revise it radically. The form of
repetition that Lacan terms remémoration, belongs to the moi (the illusory unity of the self), an
identity that one assumes as a way of triumphing over fragmentation – or rather, a form of
fragmentation that can just as easily be understood as death. The drive towards constancy that
arises at the mirror stage becomes the dynamic force that impels repetition. This drive towards
unity is made strong with the subject’s entry into the Symbolic realm, for by being inaugurated
into the Symbolic, the subject is split between, on the one hand, the “I” of cultural and linguistic
meaning, the “I” seeks itself in social discourse (the “I” of the images on the walls and ceiling in
Le Cinéma Blanc: Discards/Rebuts) and, on the other, the repressed “I” (the “I” that is non-
thetically disclosed to the viewer as the Other regards the viewer from the pictures. This division
is reflected in the split between the observing “I” and the “I” observed on the screens in Châtel’s
Le Cinéma Blanc: Discards/Rebuts (the latter “I stipulated through identification). Identity, Lacan
suggests, stands in constant need of reformulation, and thus repeats itself endlessly in the
tension between the inner ideal (disclosed through the Other’s regard) and outer realities. This
is the origin of desire, for desire arises from a gap in being – in response to this gap in being the
finite moi attempts to fix being through repetition. The moi continually reconstitutes itself in the
Real. Repetition expresses the constant effort to thwart whatever intimates the moi’s Imaginary
nature, to formulate something unified, something familiar that it might place against that void,
that gap in being that characterizes the Real. Repetition, thus, is the continuous insistence of
the unconscious in the quotidian present. Unconsciousness messages circulate, and recirculate
continually (as do the do the undecodable repetitions of abstract forms in Châtal’s Le Cinéma
Blanc: Discards/Rebuts). Indeed, the appropriate model for the dynamic of desire is the
repetitious turning of a machine, that relentless, repetitious turning that Le Cinéma Blanc:
Discards/Rebuts highlights. Repetition is not understood in Lacan’s system as it is in Freud’s, as
vital adaption; rather it is a dynamic driven by disturbing intimations of the primal lack in being.
That insight goes a long way towards explaining the disturbing quality of Le Cinéma Blanc:
Discards/Rebuts.
But of course, despite the exact repetition of the individual loops, there is variety in the
piece, especially auditory variety. The moviolas run at slightly different rates, so the loops
playing on the different machines do not move in lock-step with one another – one loop will run
slightly faster than another, and, accordingly, the relation between the sound events on the two
will constantly shift. Furthermore, by positioning oneself differently in space, one hears the
relation between the various sounds differently, and observes (creates?) different connections
between the sounds and the images. Deliberating on this variety, one notices a peculiar fact:
that this sort of variety is not a determinate construction the precise details of which are exactly
predictable. There is an aleatory dimension to relations between one sounds and another (and
between a sound and the various images, though these variations are hardly noticeable, if at
all). This aleatoriness is a sign of the work’s being beyond (point-to-point) shaping by the maker
– of the separation of the work from the maker, for the maker does not have control over the
precise relationships the sounds assume. Thus this aleatoriness is a sign that the process that
the work unleashes has disengaged from the maker; that it is other than the maker – and that
alienated quality affects the viewer. Given its contexts (and especially the grindingly mechanical
qualities of the sounds), the way that this alienation affects viewer relates to that psychic
process I referred to earlier, through which the fit between the self and other goes off a little and
the relations between our selves and the world becomes disturbed. The world no longer seems
a product of the creative self – there is no longer any sense of the inmixing of the self in the
world – to the contrary, the process of separating out has gone to the extreme.

It is creative apperception more than anything else that makes the

individual feel that life is worth living. Contrasted with this is a relationship to
external reality which is one of compliance, the world and its details being
recognized but only as something to be fitted in with or demanding adaption.
Compliance caries with it a sense of futility for the individual and is associated
with the idea that nothing matters and that life is not worth living.

This comment, I suggest, encapsulates the core dynamic that imbues Le Cinéma Blanc:
Discards/Rebuts with its antique, mysterious, and terribly troubled qualities.
On the other hand, the emphasis on how the viewer positions himself or herself in space
bring us back to somatic at-oneness with the world. This tension, between a world without any
inmixture of the self (a world felt to be obsolete and alien) and world perceived as continuous
with the self is basic to the affective means of Le Cinéma Blanc: Discards/Rebuts.