A mind's eye, Joanna Callaghan, 2009
In the middle of a field of hay, the viewer finds a frame within the screen where Stanley is searching for something in a room of mirrors. Closing his eyes, it is as if he wills the world into being.
The visual essay that makes up the first five minutes of A mind’s eye bathes the elements it presents in a light imbued with riches and value – fire, water, mineral, human life itself are each carefully introduced. As one becomes accustomed to a consonant pace of development based primarily on visual understanding, Callaghan creates a parallel movement, setting up the prospect of a confrontational, yet reflective, dialogue. Indeed, Stanley turns around to be confronted with an image of himself, then another, and another, within a room of mirrors – reminiscent of the setting for Bruce Lee’s spectacular fight scene in Enter the Dragon. Whereas in Lee’s film the mirror serves as a device that multiplies vulnerability and threatens with mortality, here it functions as a means by which to assertively question essences and identity. Beyond enabling Stanley to perceive his visual qualities and aiding in his self-identification, in the context of epistemological inquiry, the mirror also serves to reflect the duality between the world of appearances and the world of essences – the things that Stanley is able to imagine in his mind’s eye.
Dialogue then comes as a somewhat jolting disenchantment of a hitherto analytically perfect world. Stanley’s subsequent discourse with his double creates an interruption in the rhythm of the film, from which stems its uncanny aspect. The subtle echo that the viewer discerns establishes the notion of difference or otherness within oneself, in the manner of a ghostly return. The shift of attention from the visual to the linguistic is reaffirmed by a modulation in the film’s soundtrack – initially comprising of stylised fundamentals, it moves towards a more synthetic soundscape with concrete sounds.
A mind’s eye researches ideas including Plato’s Theory of Forms by conceiving of a dialogue with oneself, in contrast to the conventional notion of the Socratic dialogue involving a community of peers. The film’s somewhat self-reflexive standpoint is sympathetic with its employment of the Timaeus, a dialogue from Plato’s middle period, where both the primacy of the Theory of Forms and the concept of the Philosopher King are destabilised. Although both the film and the Timaeus still hold that there exists an ideal realm beyond mere physical appearances, we perceive an erosion of confidence in the pre-existing structures and relationships between physical reality and any sort of noumenal sphere. Hence, the exchange about where Stanley-ness is located allows an Aristotelian critique of the Theory of Forms (the Third Man Argument) to make an appearance in the film.
Often in works by Callaghan, there are extraordinary characters who adopt the qualities of the objects around them, and vice versa. In A mind’s eye, the protagonist’s ability to imagine his world into existence highlights a symbiotic relationship between physical reality and the mind of Everyman (aka Stanley). Examining the possibility of universal and eternal knowledge, the film’s historicity is only visually marked through details, such as the shape and texture of Stanley’s collar and the design of a picture frame.
This notion of frames bookends the narrative of A mind’s eye. As Stanley journeys from confident knowledge to introspection, towards searching and self-realisation, the set itself folds back on itself in order to at once disappear and also divulge and demystify its own artifice. Voiceover: “An image, a moving shadow of something else always needs to exist in something else to claim to be real”.
About the Author: Cecilia Wee is a London-based artist curator, writer and broadcaster who produces art projects that challenge existing models of audience engagement, particularly in the fields of experimental sound, performance and visual art practices, in the UK and internationally.
Watch a clip of A mind’s eye here on APEngine.