THE FATALITY OF THE MIRROR



Alan Cholodenko



Coen Young’s lustrous, delightful paintings of mirrors hold a dark secret…or two.

Speculating on the specular, like Young and this writer, these ‘mirrors’ not only ‘hold the mirror up to nature’, as Hamlet described the goal of play, of theatre, but to the mirror itself.

In so doing, Young turns the mirror on itself, reversing the general understanding of it as passive, inanimate object at the service of the subject into active, animate object, indeed an animator in its own right, one ‘with a life of its own’, in the process confounding the mirror as the very model of reflection, of representation, of doubling as simple return, deconstructing the entire notion, tradition and assumption of representation with that of the pernicious double—the simulacrum—which evil demon, at once enabling and disenabling representation, reflection, instituted the so-called ‘crisis of representation’ at its very origin.

Which is to say that Young not only makes the mirror as object animate but makes it the model animate object and the model of the object as animate, of all objects as animate, that is, animated, animating and reanimating, including always already, never not, not only of the subject but of themselves in a mode of challenge, play, game—in a word, seduction—one in which the object is superior to the subject and its desires, where, as Jean Baudrillard posed it, ‘it is a sort of invention of the subject by the invented object’.


But Young does more.

His ‘mirror’ issues a challenge to all the mirror mirrors.

And what does the mirror not animate?!

As arguably first technology and abiding ontological and epistemological figure/trope/ technology/model animator of identity and self-identity, of knowledge and self-knowledge, of consciousness and self-consciousness, the mirror—this singular object of all objects—animates self, painting, art, society, culture, identity, self-identity, the self, reality and all its pertinences—in a word, world.

What Young does is to hold his ‘mirror’ up to all that the mirror animates, doubling, outbidding and seducing it, denegating and annihilating it, fatal to it.

Which is to say that, pushing hyperreality further, seducing hyperrealist, contemporary media technologies and their hypersimulative, virtual reality mirroring, including the morphing of the self into the narcissistic what I call selfie in the electronic, silver, digital bubble of the mirror-screen, Young’s ‘quicksilver’ ‘mirror’, mercurial, protean plasmatic, animatic riss, spectral, cryptic non-essence, constitutes a return toward something primordial, ‘originary’, cruel even, an animatic virtuality, a nothing, an artifice before and out of which art (and the artificial)—indeed all, including the mirror and all it enables—emerge, in the process posing the irresolvable question whether hyperreality is avatar of the Radical Illusion of Seduction rather than the Perfect Crime of Virtuality.

At the same time, his seductive, singular ‘mirror’, prior and superior to, more and other than, the mirror, what at once enables and disenables the mirror, issues a challenge to the mirror itself, doubling and seducing it, fatal to it.

And, as fatal, his ‘mirror’ must be fatal to itself and all speculating upon it.

A multiple seduction performed with wit, irony and humour, a dark humour fit for purpose, fit for a dark secret…or two.

Or more.


Catalogue Essay for Primavera 2019: Young Australian  Artists, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2019.