"I'll be your mirror"

performative installation/print 2003

 

 

Jonas Vansteenkiste’s performative installation operates as a physical and psychological provocation, explicitly drawing from Stendhal’s The Red and the Black (1830). In this novel, Stendhal famously asserts that the novel functions as a mirror carried along a road, reflecting both the beauty and the ugliness of the world:

 

“A novel is a mirror carried along a high road. At one moment it reflects the azure of the skies, at another the mud of the puddles… And the man who carries the mirror on his back is accused of being immoral. His mirror shows the filth, and you blame the mirror!”

Vansteenkiste repurposes this metaphor to foreground the confrontational potential of art. The viewer is not merely invited to observe, but is compelled to encounter themselves—literally and metaphorically—within the work. Using mirrors within a sculptural installation, Vansteenkiste creates a performative and reflexive situation in which the audience is both subject and object, both spectator and performer.

This dialectical construction of viewer and reflection is reminiscent of Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage theory, wherein the subject first encounters its specular image and misrecognizes it as a coherent, unified self (Lacan, 1949). Vansteenkiste’s installation interrupts that illusory coherence by returning the viewer’s gaze with their own image, thereby producing a moment of alienation or rupture. The discomfort many spectators report—averting their gaze, stepping back, or expressing irritation—points to a destabilization of the ego, not unlike Lacan’s theorized moment of subjective division.

In addition to Lacan, Vansteenkiste’s approach also aligns with Michael Fried’s critique of theatricality in minimalist art. In Art and Objecthood (1967), Fried warns against artworks that depend on the presence of the viewer to be fully realized, accusing them of being too "theatrical." Yet, Vansteenkiste subverts this theatricality by not just engaging the viewer, but confronting them with their complicity in the act of viewing. The installation becomes a site of intersubjective tension, where boundaries between art, viewer, and environment dissolve—what Nicolas Bourriaud would call relational aesthetics (Bourriaud, 1998).

Moreover, the work operates as a critique of normative subjectivities and the cultural discomfort around self-exposure. It stages what Judith Butler refers to as the performativity of the self (Gender Trouble, 1990)—the ways in which identity is constituted through repeated acts and reflections, often under the gaze of others. By showing the viewer’s own image as part of the work, Vansteenkiste inserts them into a relational network that resists passive consumption and forces a moment of ethical self-confrontation.

Philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception also supports a reading of the piece as an embodied experience of space. For Merleau-Ponty, perception is always situated and bodily; the mirror in Vansteenkiste’s work functions not as a flat object but as a spatial threshold that makes the viewer aware of their own corporeality (Phenomenology of Perception, 1945). The mirrored reflection collapses distance, positioning the self within the artwork’s space and thus initiating a form of introspective spatial dislocation.

Ultimately, Vansteenkiste’s work leverages the simplicity of its materials—a mirror, a frame, a position in space—to construct a dense web of philosophical and psychological inquiry. The mirror is no longer a neutral device of representation but a charged surface that confronts viewers with their own presence, social role, and complicity in structures of meaning. It becomes a materialization of Stendhal’s metaphor—a device that reflects not only the visible, but also the hidden mechanisms of self-perception and social reflection.

Text Cin Windey

A Special thanks to Simon Vanheukelom & Karina Beumer, performer