Mirrored
The Photography of Maslen & Mehra

written by Eugen Blume, Chief Curator Hamburger Bahnhof Museum Berlin

The pair of artists Tim Maslen and Jennifer Mehra attained international recognition through their large-format color photography, which most often presents landscapes. For these photographs, they have developed special light-boxes which, in contrast to the backlit photographs of Jeff Wall, for instance, mostly stand upon the ground and extend the perspective of the picture, as if in an extension of the pictorial space, right into these landscapes. Through their metal framing and rounded corners, they clearly recall the framed pictures of fine art, the discipline of painting which was the first to free itself from the wall and to lay claim to a frame for the demarcation which was henceforth deemed to be necessary. These details, however, constitute only incidental aspects in the works of Maslen and Mehra. It is in the silhouetted figures placed directly into the landscape that these artists, each still less than forty years old, have found their distinctive language. These figures, whose outlines render human shapes exactly, possess no interior structure but are cut in two dimensions out of mirrored aluminium. With their approximately halfway life-sized proportions, they are positioned within the landscape in such a manner as to convey the impression that it is a matter of full-sized figures which, by means of their clothing, pay homage to a special camouflage technique. Of course the aluminium mirror takes on those aspects of the landscape which are reflected upon it but which, because of the degree of inclination assumed by the two-dimensional figures, do not necessarily correspond to that which surrounds them in the landscape. From time to time, the blue sky is mirrored within an expanse of green grass, so that the figures emerge crisply out of their surroundings, in their coloration as well. They issue a reminder of the flat shapes of traditional silhouettes which, however, by means of a black hue that is complementary to the mirroring aluminium, induce the viewer to reconstruct mentally the interior reality of the delineated figures. Strangely enough, this black hue functions in a manner similar to that of the mirrored aluminium. Even though nothing was represented upon its dull surface, still the viewer's memory associated all the pertinent details, so that a poor king limned in silhouette was nevertheless richly attired. One could even surmise his robe lined with ermine. In the animated films developed during the 1920s, there was mirrored - if one were inclined to range far afield - albeit with narrative intention, but closely related on an essential level, the spiritual dimension of an icon of Modernism, the black square of Malevich. This black color functioned as well as a blank space, in a spiritual sense as the Divine Void, which has been described by both European and Asian mystics.

The mirroring figures of Maslen and Mehra play a role similar to that of these shadowy figures, even if the reflected segments of nature impart an interior delineation to them and the viewer comes to fantasize real clothing for them, for example the weapons and uniforms of the figures which are often thereby made recognizable as soldiers. There is a simple explanation for the reason why human vision reacts in this way. The landscape reflected upon the shape is not considered to be real by the normative criteria stored in our consciousness. It is automatically replaced by an interior structure, which is more appropriate to the exterior figuration. This retrieval of the emergent human figure, repeated again and again, numbers among the mental processes, which the two artists apparently desire to provoke. The human being flows out of his natural limitation, as it were, into these diverse, occasionally magnificent landscapes. He is completely assimilated by the reflecting surface, absorbed into something out of which he was originally driven. The metaphor of a mirror-man awakens nothing other than the primal longing to be connected once again in an integral manner to nature. Human beings in the landscape are a quite common topos, which extends throughout art history. They refer to the primal scene, to the banishment from the paradisiacal garden through the knowledge of good and evil. Ever since this original exile, humanity has striven to reduce the intervening distance, to attain once again the homeland from which it became alienated through the mind, through cognition. A critical observation of the present era does not, however, lead to the uplifting conclusion that humanity is currently embarked upon the path of coming to understand itself as both nature and spirit in equal measure. The human violations of nature are too severe. It is as if humanity were attempting to establish an objective overview in the very act of retaliating for its banishment by means of a total annihilation of nature. The fundamental process, which has been unleashed, especially by the global industrializing endeavors of the twentieth century, is an all-encompassing destruction of the environment. In spite of various oppositional movements, this process cannot be stopped, but on the contrary it is speeding up more and more. Humanity has begun, instead of recalling in a productive manner its origin within nature, to transform itself into a nature-less mirror-mankind. It is not by chance that armed soldiers arise in the magically photographed landscapes of Maslen and Mehra, without it ever becoming clear what goals they are pursuing. They as well are occupied by the landscape in an utter lack of distinction. They lose their subjectivity in a reflection, which is projected onto the figures. By means of the fixed delineation of their surface they are at the mercy of nature, even while they cling to the mistaken belief that it is they who project their image onto nature. All military goals remain secondary in the face of the omnipotence of natural processes. The figures summon up reminiscences of the conquerors, the conquistadores, the foreign legionnaires and soldiers whose role it was to shore up the colonial ambitions of the European and American powers. This penetration of strangers into a strange land for the purpose of violence, such as was described so forcefully for the Belgian Congo by Joseph Conrad in his book The Heart of Darkness, is doomed to failure, as is announced metaphorically by the mirrored images. Nature is much more vast and mighty. It marks the human beings living within its realm, and not the other way around.

Of course the works of Maslen & Mehra may be read, beyond these somber considerations, as un-constricted, aesthetic play, even as a photographic paraphrase of Surrealism. Salvador Dali and René Magritte once painted similar reflecting figures, which could not be distinguished from the nature to which they belong. Especially with Magritte, there are pictures in which the silhouette of a figure merges with the surrounding landscape. The mirror is an especially important metaphor for Magritte. He was the first artist to cut out figures and to project the surrounding landscape into their interior surface. In his case, however, it is a matter of a fantasized image of painting, a surreal action. Maslen and Mehra, on the other hand, are much more concerned with investigating the ways in which such shapes could function in reality itself. The effects are astounding there where, within the reflecting figures in a manner quite similar to that of René Magritte, that which surrounds them is mirrored halfway, for example a field of debris on the bank of a river. We could extend the sequence of associations even further to Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, where Alice passes through a mirror to enter into an enchanted world in which all relationships and proportions seem to have been inverted. But here the figures placed within the landscape do not pass through a mirror into another space but are instead themselves a mirror, through which or upon which the landscape is reflected. The human being dissolves at the most intense instant of reflection and becomes indistinguishable from that which surrounds him.

The camouflage is a perfect success. The figures, whose visible weapons suggest soldiers, are of course particularly suitable for allowing the idea of camouflage to emerge into prominence. Soldiers camouflage themselves in order no longer to be seen by the enemy. The mirror seems to provide an ideal camouflage, inasmuch as it reflects nothing other than that which surrounds it. And yet the figures remain strangely visible, mirroring something incalculable and only in the most rare cases reflecting that which, with camouflage in a military sense, would be necessary for a successful attack. It is especially this military aspect which calls to mind the films of Terrence Malick, especially The Thin Red Line, a war film which takes place mostly out in the landscape of nature, in high verdant grass through which soldiers move as if they were mere vacant mirrorings.

Maslen & Mehra

Essay written by Edward Lucie-Smith

Tim Maslen and Jennifer Mehra belong to a new generation of experimental artists who are both extending the boundaries of contemporary art and at the same time questioning the assumptions that prevailed in the 1990s. In Britain, where much of Maslen and Mehra's work has been done, the experimental art of the 1990s was largely ego-driven. By this I mean two things. First that much of it was directly autobiographical, and centred on the adventures and traumas of the artist's own life. Cases in point are Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas. Second, that it often refused to look beyond the boundaries of the artist's own physical being. A celebrated example is Mona Hatoum's 'Corps Etranger', where the artist recorded the results of introducing an endoscope into her body.

Artists now establishing important reputations appear to be looking in a very different direction. They are more idealistic, but also more interested in scientific ideas, which can be looked at in an objective rather than a purely personal way. At the same time they recognise that contemporary art now plays an important role in what can be described as the 'culture of entertainment', and that it is no longer the property of an elite, but accessible to a large audience.

In a series of brilliantly imaginative installation works, made from the year 2000 until the present, Maslen and Mehra have been pioneers of this new approach. Their output has been marked by scrupulous craftsmanship, but also by poetic sensibility. Their installation projects include 'Gorge' [Void Gallery, London, July 2000], 'Woodland' [Sydney Law Courts, September 2000], 'Interior Landscape' [European Forum for Emerging Creation, Lyon, France, January 2001], 'Drift' [Dilston Grove, London, August 2001], 'Terra Incognita' [Artspace, Sydney, April 2002], and 'Glimmer' [Chaos Exhibition, London, July 2002].

These installations show a steady progression in terms of complexity, but also an equivalent progression in fusing ideas with the possibility of poetic experience. In a certain sense, what they do can be regarded as paradoxically retrogressive as well as being progressive. Let me try to explain what I mean.

In the late 20th century the great Modernist experiment finally seemed to come to an end with the Minimalist Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. Minimalist theoreticians held that art could have no subject: art objects existed by and for themselves. The real situation, however, was that Minimalist works did indeed have a subject, which was the nature of art itself, which they attempted to confine within a purely formalist set of rules. The attempt failed, and the result was the apparent chaos of late 20th century Post Modernism. Post Modernism was at first celebrated for its apparent disjointedness, its refusal of consistency of any kind. Gradually, however, certain things became clear. An important part of the Post Modernist rejection of Minimalism was a return to identifiable subject matter. Works of art once again started to address issues outside of themselves.

This, in effect, meant a return to most of the things that the Modern Movement had categorically rejected. Works of art were once again a vehicle for the discussion of moral and social issues. They even started to re-acquire a quotient of narrative.

All of these tendencies are contained in Maslen and Mehra's installations, but they are not the most prominent elements. What one finds in these works are other things which would also have been familiar to the pre-Modern audience for art, and in particular to the audience of the 19th century. There is a strong element, as I have suggested, of scientific curiosity - the narrative is the narrative of how nature works - in other words an analysis of natural processes, of a kind made familiar by Darwin and his heirs. At the same time there is something that stems from the earlier part of the century - a rapt communion with nature.

Though the idiom is apparently so different, there at things here which are inherited from the tradition of Romantic landscape - from the work of artists such as Samuel Palmer and Caspar David Friedrich. In fact, what the artists do is to construct a magical realm that the spectator/participant is invited, not merely to look at, but actually to enter.

There are, of course, significant differences from the work made by the artists whom I have just named. These are not small, portable objects on a domestic scale. They are not possessions; the are, instead, temporary events. What they offer is not the satisfaction of ownership, but simply an experience that must be, by its very nature, transient.

People are sometimes tempted to think that this is a new phenomenon in art. In fact, the opposite is true. The part of the art of the past that we now possess represents only a very small part of what artists actually made. When we look through Leonardo da Vinci's drawings, for example, we note a number of designs for elaborate masquerade costumes. 16th and 17th engravings record court and municipal festivities designed by leading artists that must have had a great impact on the spectators of the time. There are even a number of oil sketches by Rubens that are preliminary visualisations of parade floats made to celebrate the victories of his Hapsburg patrons in the Low Countries.

In the 18th century, painting and the stage were closely allied. Hogarth's 'The Rake's Progress' and 'The Village Marriage Contract' by Jean-Baptiste Greuze are scenes from unwritten dramas, and the art critics of the time, Denis Diderot chief among them, often discussed paintings purely in terms of their dramatic content. The installations now being made by Maslen and Mehra offer yet another twist on this long-established alliance between the world of the drama and that of fine art.

There are, nevertheless, also significant differences. The installations make skilful use of modern lighting and of materials that are characteristic products of contemporary technology. Artists of the generation to which Maslen and Mehra belong differ from their immediate predecessors in their concern for solid craftsmanship. Deliberate crudity in handling materials is no longer a distinguishing mark of avant-garde activity. The free handling of space in a number of these works suggests the influence of the cinema even more than that of the stage.

The most significant difference, however, is psychological. The pageants and other quasi-theatrical events I have just referred to were concerned to limit meanings as much as they were to open them up. They were allegories, often with elaborate programmes devised, not by the artists themselves, but by scholars employed for the occasion. The whole point of an allegory is that it proposes precise equivalents. This symbol is the counterpart of that abstract idea.

The installations made by Maslen and Mehra and their peers are not like that. They certainly propose ideas, and interest themselves in what is intellectual as well as in what is emotional. Yet they also exist to trigger a process of free association that will take the willing spectator into another sphere. In this sense they are directly descended from the installations made by members of the Surrealist Movement, and still more so, perhaps from the intellectual and emotional world of the Symbolists. This is logical enough. Going in the opposite direction, descending the ladder rather than climbing it, one finds that Palmer and Friedrich, whom I have already mentioned, anticipated many Symbolist attitudes.

The more closely one examines these supposedly radical works, the more one tends to find that they are also embedded in pre-Modern traditions. Yet this in no way compromises their originality. The preoccupations they express are increasingly things that are being recognised as fundamental to the whole question of human survival on a threatened planet. The poetry they embody is entirely individual, and makes any encounter with them a memorable experience.

EDWARD LUCIE-SMITH is an art critic, curator, poet and photographer who has written books on contemporary art published in many languages. Among his best-known titles are 'Movements in Art since 1945', 'The Visual Arts of the 20th Century' and 'Art Today'. He recently curated the survey exhibitions ‘Western Biennale Of Art’ in California and ‘Gods Becoming Men’ in Athens during the Olympics. Among his recent books are monograph on the American feminist artist Judy Chicago [published in May 2000], and 'Art Tomorrow' [published in October 2002], a survey of the most recent developments in contemporary art, which includes work by Maslen & Mehra.