Play from (Behind) the Mirror: From Mimesis to the Author’s Re-Creation in Selected Works by Sylvia Plath, Vlado Gotovac, and Nam June Paik

Questioning the mimetic character of art, on the one hand, and the power and limits of creative imagination, i.e., the author’s creation using words and images, on the other, this paper aims to show how, in selected literary and video artworks, the authors use the motif and ‘the mechanism’ of the mirror to – regardless of the author’s oeuvre, origin, and the medium in which they create – send the same message: the viewer and the viewed (the sender and the recipient) do not stand in binary opposition, but mirror each other in a constant play between surveillance and introspection, spirituality and technology, the space of intimacy and the (counter)hegemony of (new) media. The paper analyzes and contextualizes Sylvia Plath’s poem “Mirror” from 1961, “Raport stražara iz Pompeja” [A Report of the Pompei Guard] by Vlado Gotovac, a poem published in his collection Osjećanje mjesta [A Sense of Place] in 1964, and the most famous video work, i.e., the still-exhibited installation of ‘the father of video art’ Nam June Paik, titled TV Buddha , first exhibited in 1974. Bearing in mind Jakobson’s language functions, the paper will try to show how in textual and audiovisual media artistic languages are foregrounded to send strong and constantly re -created messages to the recipient who becomes a co-author. The mirror serves as a motif and a tool/mechanism to examine the sender–message–recipient relationship. Both roles of the mirror refer to the self-referential potential of art. Applying the methodology of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Derrida’s poststructuralist idea of ‘the signifier’s transfer’ (through ‘skipping’ the direct signified–signifier relationship), the analysis will show the metamorphoses of the (lyrical) subject and the consequent jumps/skips in the re -creation of the identity of the reader/viewer, whereby art is reaffirmed as a space for play and pushes the boundaries of freedom.