Mirror Dislocations
A widespread superstition, throughout history and across broad geographies, holds that certain persons have the ability to inflict misfortune merely by looking at others. Such individuals possess the ‘evil eye’. Within this belief, the eye stands as more than a passive receptacle, or sinkhole for impressions from without. It emanates. And what it radiates may seize upon the victim. Indeed, the evil eye fascinates in the literal sense of the term—fastening upon, drawing the poor soul into its malevolent vortex.
This fixing is the gorgon’s stare, turning persons into stone. We find a loose parallel in the fate of Lot’s Wife in the Old Testament, who was turned into a pillar of salt for being too interested in looking upon a destructive scene. The gaze, in general, is a font of mortification. In a modern vein, we recall Jean Paul-Sartre’s celebrated example of the peeping-tom, staring through a keyhole, unaware of themselves until realizing that they have been caught in the act by another observer. Exposed to sight and the subject is frozen—spirit fixed in place, and, like mineral, struck dumb. In fact, Eye of Silence borrows its title from a painting by Max Ernst which graced the cover of a J.G. Ballard novel: about an apocalyptic tide of crystallization, spreading throughout otherwise fecund jungle. The evil eye brings silence.
To counter the maleficent power of an unwanted look, the classic remedy entails deploying an apotropaic (good) eye. A talisman, worn on a necklace, painted on a door, or even decorating the prow of a ship. One whose regard diffuses whatever ill beam of attention may be directed at its bearer. Why? Because, of course, the singular form of the evil eye must be met with a double (making a pair of eyes) in order to effect a balanced outcome. Twins: one evil, another good; one darkness, the other, light. Together, in balance or harmony—symbolic homology with the Yin-Yang—they are opposites but equal. Each, a mirror image.
The visuals in Eye of Silence are frequently mirrored on either side of the screen’s central vertical axis. This device brings symmetrical order to scenic chaos—ragged craters, lava, and smoke. It is also highly amenable to pattern recognition. For viewers, the resulting ‘composed’ landscapes may function in the manner of the famous Rorschach test.1One might see a smile in the billowing gas; a demon, or winged moth, in the scree. Perhaps, even, an eye... Such things, and whatever else may be imagined, are the fruit of a proclivity that is hardwired into the human brain. This facility, or instinct, underpins the age-old phenomenon of pareidolia—seeing faces in clouds. Thus, Stankievech plays two tokens for compulsive imagination at the same time—a kind of mathematical squaring of suggestion: volcanic smoke, laid out like the psychologist’s inkblot. Who can look at Eye of Silence without reading-into it? Here, intimations of a chthonic demiurge—spewing rock, and vapor—and the viewer-as-author muddy. Recall how Leonardo da Vinci counselled attention to “walls splashed with a number of stains, or stones of various mixed colours.” “[Y]ou can see there”, he wrote “resemblances to […] strange figures, expressions on faces, costumes, and an infinite number of things.”2In associative terms, the eye is never silent. But whose eye is it? Before venturing an answer, one observes that the mirror effect in Eye of Silence is generative in another way. Applied to moving image—running in opposite directions, away from the reflective axis—it produces a constantly unfolding horizon. A world appears to emerge from its center; a deluge, gushing from some crux. Flowing; erupting. In such moments, as pictorial details rush forth, a strange counter-perception draws one’s gaze into the unknown dimension. One cannot help but focus on the abyss, eyes fixated by the wellspring of the video’s scene. Here, a corresponding psychological effect may register, oscillating between intense passivity—being devoured, ingested, on the one hand—and a more active sense of willful penetration into the core. Pull and push fluctuate, here, in what can only be described as a hallucinogenic optic—tickling the speculative (instinctive, imaginative) nerve, already stimulated by inkblot-paredoilia.
In Eye of Silence the vanishing point is, simultaneously, the site of emanation. As such, this fault-line at the center of the screen manifests a coincidentia oppositorum—key marker for the esoteric imagination’s focus on short-circuits between macrocosm and microcosm, and the reconciliation of heterogeneous phenomena on a higher metaphysical plane. The actual content of Stankievech’s artwork sustains this observation. Bubbling craters are easily re-dreamed as alchemical crucibles, or eyes; and vice-versa. Moreover, the spreading smoke approximates expression (in the physiognomic sense): a face, manifesting in the boil, then another; portraits of the mystic ‘unity of opposites’ effected through the simple but immense power of symmetry—which really does appear to give living forms to inorganic material.
But Eye of Silence is a ‘mirror-displacement’ of another kind, too—to borrow a term from a series by one of Stankievech’s art-historical touchstones, Robert Smithson. As both the Rorschach and the Gorgon’s stare intimate, Eye of Silence speaks to the displacement of self into the mirror of Narcissus. Was the lake into which this mythic persona fell not, in fact, an eye? Identity, playing across the surface of a crater filled with liquid—the quintessence of the image, and the creation of the subject—a matter of one-to-one relation. Per Nietzsche, Eye of Silence has viewers staring into the abyss as it stares back into them. And yet, it would be wrong to limit the symbolic resonance of Stankievech’s work to nihilism. Didn’t Gaston Bachelard write, after all, that lakes are the eyes of the earth, reflecting its own being and so manifesting ‘cosmic narcissism’?—“The lake takes all of light and makes a world out of it. Through it, the world is already contemplated, already represented. […] Near the lake, we understand the old physiological theory of active vision [which] implies that the eye projects light, that it illuminates its images by itself. It is understandable, then, that the eye may be desirous of seeing its visions, that contemplation may also be will. The cosmos, then, is in some way clearly touched by narcissism.” He continues—“The world wants to see itself.”3 In the mobius strip of a mirrored regard, and especially in a smoldering gaze, the lights of love first blink, then sparkle.
Projected onto the inner dome of the planetarium, along with many clouds and craters—stars. In such moments, where the whole room functions as a screen, the architectural vault recapitulates a celestial one, in a manner that recalls Ptolemaic cosmology. Forerunner to the heliocentric model, this system held the earth at the center of the universe. Encircling it: a series of concentric glass spheres, upon whose surfaces the stars were fixed. Aporia at the focal point of the planetarium. Central to it, as a visualization system promoting a scientific view of the heavens, lies a scotoma disturbing the ‘real’ picture. Indeed, the ‘immersive’ style of this multi-media facility amounts to less than exposure to the truth of galactic extension. It is, quite the opposite; enclosure. For, the Ptolemaic spatial imaginary is recapitulated in the concrete shell of the planetarium; a historical optic nerve puncturing building’s retina; interrupting the visualization. No wonder, then, that Stankievech chooses to intercut the video’s astronomical material with subterranean subject matter. At one point, a field of stars morphs into a point map of a lidar scan of a cave.
Like the balance between evil and apotropaic eye, and the Yin-Yang’s ‘dualistic-monism’—reconciling the cold earthiness of Yin with Yang’s heat, and light—the Western esoteric school reconciles the antinomy between closed and open at the ‘most hidden place’, the cave or sanctuary. At the center of the labyrinth, the heart of the chthonic complex, a powerful reversal occurs. What is sealed up, buried, but apt to be discovered there is a principle of total expansion. More generally—the secret unity of opposites. As already stated in so many words, this aesthetic concept echoes throughout Eye of Silence, which performs a series of antinomies: along with mirrored transposition, visual passages flow between creation and destruction; expansion and contraction, intrusion and extrusion, swallowing and eruption, within and without. At every polarity, inversion obtains, wherein a horizon unfolds to offer new vistas. A void, such as outer space, or some geological fissure, delivering a new world. In such moments, another antinomy is revealed—between subject and object. Thusly, the planetarium dome, like the closed eye, allows for cosmic dreams despite its concrete vault.
And yet, in the geocentric imaginary, the rotation of the spheres was regular—the glinting constellations, moving in perfect arcs, registering the movement of celestial orbs by proxy. Everything erratic in the sky was considered part of a lower dimension—weather. For this reason, Aristotle consigned comets to his Meteorology, rather than his study of the higher planes.4 As phenomena that appeared suddenly, moving from constellation to constellation, such wanderers were interpreted as atmospheric events. It would take Tycho de Brahe’s tracing the path of the Great Comet of 1577 to change this view. For, its recorded trajectory crashed through all the Ptolemaic spheres, perforating the intellectual system as a whole, while, he proved, orbiting the sun.
At the basement of the planetarium, with a work tilted The Desert Turned to Glass, Stankievech suspends a meteorite, just, above the floor—having also punctured the planetarium’s dome on a conceptual flight from who knows where. Such astronomical objects are termed transients. But what of those who have come to stay? Are they not settlers? And rather than calling them transients to begin with—a term that has something of the pejorative vagrant about it—what about explorers? The politics of migration, colonialism, and more lies within such linguistic nuance. With this in mind, we note Stankievech’s interest in the cultural history of meteor landings, as registered in his previous essay citation from Mircea Eliade’s Forge and the Crucible: “When Cortez enquired of the Aztec chiefs whence they obtained their knives they simply pointed to the sky.”5 The one from without, having fastened upon a place, has the potential to change everything.
But what about the seeker? Per initiatory descent into subterranea, The Desert Turned to Glass is a vector that runs from outer space to the architectural profundity of the planetarium. At the building’s lowest accessible point, in a cavern directly beneath its auditorium, the artist also installs a lake of crude oil: Dark Side of the Sun. Set in crepuscular light, this piece effects a partner eye to the inner dome of the building—and the many craters onscreen. Conceptually, the work echoes a descent first proposed in another of the artist’s works, The Glass Key—from the peak of the “mountain of the sun” to an interior “cosmic cave.” In the latter piece, Stankievech followed esotericist René Guénon (quoted, elsewhere, in that work) by deploying the ancient icon of an inverted triangle, set within a larger triangle, onscreen. Its symbolism is crucial: The inner triangle’s peak is inverted, facing downwards, indicating a second hidden (mountain) summit whose magnitude is of no less import for the spirit.6 It is clear, that this sigyll resonates beyond The Glass Key, throughout the suite of works installed throughout the planetarium: beckoning the initiate to move beyond the hallucinatory image, as projected in the Eye of Silence, into the mise en abyme offered by Dark Side of the Sun. In this light, the whole exhibition vibrates with a mystical riddle concerning our planet’s ‘inner illumination’.
It is a riddle transmuted through the alchemy of oil. Experienced in near darkness, black surface winking, Dark Side of the Sun might be taken to represent a view of and from the flow of hydrocarbons. This is an ancient liquor, on the one hand, predating the human species. It is also, simultaneously, the magma of modernity—and the sun’s terrestrial antagonist. The pool’s slight glimmer, its surface rippling in tune with a bass soundtrack of tectonic field recordings, offers a presentiment of ongoing planetary fire—devouring the earth’s lithic layer, and whole ecologies, as climate change continues apace. This eye is a mouth too. A world eater.
When not consumed with the business of ingestion, does it speak? In the darkest and most quiet spaces, sensory deprivation does not lead to the absence of cognitive events but, instead, hallucinations—optic and auditory. Again, psychological projection—speaking for the void. Silence never reigns where there is human thought. Georges Bataille, whose interest in Paleolithic cave art played out through various essays concerning the passage from animal to human, would have it thus: “the universe is silence. The world of words is laughable […] Sovereignty does not speak”. Elsewhere, in his writings on Inner Experience , a more crystalline aphorism: “the word silence is still a sound, to speak is in itself to imagine knowing; and to no longer know, it would be necessary to no longer speak.” Immediately thereafter, his words indulge conceptual slippage between voice and sight: “My eyes are open, it is true, but it would have been necessary not to say it, [in order] to remain frozen like an animal.”7 The eye speaks rather than hears—it erupts. All the while, the great silence of the earth rumbles at ear-splitting volume, constantly, deep in the throats of volcanos; and in the blinding brightness of fluid mineral, animated as if were light itself.