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| Larry Wolf, Mirror Stage (2024) |
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| Larry Wolf, Mirror Stage (2024) |
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| Larry Wolf, Mirror Stage (2024) |
from the transcript
The protagonist of The Mirror Stage is Simon Fujiwara, an 11-year-old boy. He’s going through puberty, the process of deep emotional and physical confusion. Simon lives in a small fishing village ... [he] feel[s] suffocated and repressed. For Simon is hiding a terrible secret: Simon is gay and nobody knows it, not even himself. ...
The Mirror Stage is a play about a young artist who walks into a museum one day and sees a painting that changes his life forever. When I was 11 years old, I saw this painting, which is on the wall in front of me here. It’s called the Horizontal Stripe Painting, and it’s by Patrick Heron, and it was painted in 1959. ...
This painting was extremely significant for me for two reasons, because firstly, it made me realize when I saw it, that I wanted to become an artist, and secondly, that I was gay. ...
in 1995, IKEA bought the rights to actually copy the color code of the painting and put it on their range of soft furnishings, everything from ironing boards to bed covers. And I was actually able to buy those bed covers that were based on the painting as a teenager and literally dream in my favorite artwork. ...
a French philosopher, Jacques Lacan ... , wrote this paper, and in it he explains how human beings go through this process of looking for mirror images of themselves in other people and in objects and in the world around them. And that, during puberty, this becomes extremely heightened, that pubescent children look for mirror images—but sexual mirror images—of themselves in other people, but also in other objects. So, Patrick Heron, who made this painting, was very influenced by this notion of the mirror stage. He would even describe his paintings sometimes as being mirrors to the inner soul. And what’s interesting, or what inspired me as a teenager, is to see for the first time an abstract expressionist painting, an image in which the body has disappeared, and its just pure form and color, a sort of internal experience sort of made flesh ...
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