The Body as Medium and Metaphor

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The Body as Medium and Metaphor  there’d be a normal mirror inset among the distorting ones. People would look so beautiful when they passed in front of it (Russell, 1971; 90).

It is this quality of distorted mirroring that has often been perceived in the twisted and contorted features of his portrait subjects. However, it is not only the superficial, decorative effects of these trick mirrors that led to their fascination for Bacon but the way in which they offered him the scope to undermine and subvert the traditional conventions of  mimetic portraiture. Here, I shall pursue the observations I made in my first chapter on the mirror not only as a metaphor for painting but also for knowledge. Van Alphen devotes a section of his book to “The Mirror Image: Deceptive and Deceived.” This deals with how Bacon often employs the image of the mirror in his paintings and the extent to which it plays the role of a mise en abyme. However, the literal representation of the mirror in Bacon’s paintings is not necessarily relevant to the way in which it relates to his self-portraiture. It is helpful to look at René Major’s concept of negative hallucination, employed by van Alphen. Major introduces this idea in an interview about Bacon: Il arrive qu’une personne se regardant dans un miroir ne parvienne pas à se voir. C’est ce qu’on appelle l’hallucination négative. Je pense à un cas précis de quelqu’un qui a retrouvé son image dans le miroir après avoir brisé la surface en jetant un verre. L’image apparut d’abord morcellée avant que les fragments ne retrouvent leur unité habituelle. Le morcellement s’avère ici lié à l’impossibilité temporaire de faire apparaître une définition fixe et répétitive de son image (Major,1978; 28-31).

Van Alphen applies this idea to Portrait of George Dyer in a Mirror, 1968. This painting raises the question of sight by pitting the internal gaze of the portrayed subject against the gaze of the viewer, external to the picture. Van Alphen observes how the focalization in the painting is ambiguous with regard to both its object and its subject: It is impossible to detect where the defect in looking originates, or whose defect it is. Is it the external focalizer (the inscribed viewer), the internal focalizer (the figure), or the mirror that defeats the representation of the visual experience? Is the sense of  sight deceived, or does sense of sight deceive us? Do we see what