Here Is My Space

Often when I see clothes with multiple pleats, ruffles, and ornaments that fit so smoothly a beautiful body, I think that they will not stay like this for a long time, but will get creases that cannot be ironed out, will collect so thick a dust in the ornament that it cannot be brushed away, and that no one will want to look so unhappy and ridiculous, to wear every day the same precious dress, and undress in the evening.

But I see girls, who certainly are pretty and often show such lovely muscles and delicate bones and smooth skin and masses of thin hair, and yet appear every day in this one natural fancy dress, always propping the same face in the same palms and let it be reflected in the mirror.

Only at times, in the evening when they come home late from a party, looking in the mirror, it appears to them as worn out, bloated, dusty, already seen by everyone, and no longer wearable again. (Kafka 1971: 3–4)

Clothes, disguises, masquerades – become second nature, as Kafka’s splendid story tells us. All are narcotics that alter perception and intensify the moment: enchantments followed by the desolate aftertaste of death, of what has been seen and lived already. Dust. As though life, in its very unfolding, foresaw its own retrospective gaze – an estranged gaze. Life fills with mirrors, doublings and duplications, after the image of Magritte’s celebrated La reproduction interdite (1937).

Are not images – from photography and fashion to virtual reality – the very sites of an extraordinary acceleration of time? A race that, from Shakespeare’s London to the screens of California, reaches ever-new phases and facets. Images – this matter that shapes us yet escapes us – appearing now to be faithful reflection, now elusive phantom. They form a current that seizes and sweeps us away, leaving spectators helpless, overcome and unaware. Is it still possible – and under what conditions – to recover meaning and control within the hold of images? For images exist only when they become the spectator’s memory. But when does the break occur – the leap from the flat stream of time to the vivid and piercing recollection? What gaze must one cast upon images for the observer truly to appropriate them, attaining a truth – his or her own singular truth – beyond the merely classificatory intent, so widespread and ineffectual, that, instead of clarifying, merely amplifies chaos and confusion?