“Mirrors do not primarily serve as the means of self-reflection and reproduction but provide another instance of the optically created dialectic of interior and exterior: ‘The way mirrors bring the open expanse, the streets, into the café, the living room—this too, belongs to the interweaving of spaces…’”
-Tom Gunning’s essay The Exterior as Interieur
Esoteric: understood or meant for only the select few who have special knowledge or interest
Cryptic: mysterious in meaning; secret; occult
I don’t know why but I just can’t get these two words straight. Maybe it’s because what is cryptic is necessarily esoteric and what is esoteric is necessarily cryptic. It’s as if one steps in front of the mirror and sees the other.
Unica Zurn
The Lovers by Remedios Varo
The image below is “Le Salle du Illusions”, an installation at the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris. Its arches are multiplied to infinity through the use of mirrors as spectators awed at this spectacular yet confounding glimpse of eternity:
“Let two mirrors reflect each other; then Satan plays his favorite trick and opens here in his way (as his partner does in lovers’ gazes) the perspective on infinity.”
-Walter Benjamin
“Sartre claimed that modern life had become ‘fantastic,’ as if it were made up of a ‘labyrinth of hallways, doors and stairways that lead nowhere, innumerable signposts that dot routes and signify nothing.’”
-James Naremore, “Film Noir: The History of an Idea”
“Primitive society had its masks, bourgeois society its mirrors. We have our images.”
-Jean Baudrillard
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