Harry's Place Arts

Episode One: The Scrying Mirror

A guest post by de Bentvueghels

Previous episode here

“I know,” Tarkington said. “But according to the stories I hear, a lot of memories of that brutality live on in that Woven Sorrow rug. They say that when the Navajo headmen signed that treaty with General Sherman in 1866 and the survivors started their long walk home, that young woman and her sister brought the beginnings of the rug with them and kept working on it, working in little reminders of their treatment. Little bit of root woven in here, and rat hair there, and so forth, as reminders of what they were eating to keep from starving. Anyway, so the story goes, the weaving went on when the families began getting their flocks reestablished for some good wool. And other people heard about it, and more weavers got a hand in it and added another bitter memory of misery and murder and dying children. And then, finally, one of the clan headmen, some say it was either Barboncito or Manuelito, told the weavers it violated the Navajo way to preserve evil. He wanted all the weavers to arrange an Enemy Way sing to cure themselves of all those hateful memories and restore themselves to harmony. [...] They said it had too many chindi associated with it. Too many ghosts of dead Navajos, starved and frozen and killed by the soldiers. The rug would make people sick, bring down evil on people involved with it.” Tony Hillerman, The Shape Shifter. Allison and Busby Ltd, London, 2007 [2006], pp. 39-40.

A chance encounter with a copy of the Guardian’s Saturday review containing a profile of a new exhibition at Tate St Ives, The Dark Monarch has prompted Gijsbrechts to return to this painting and its troublesome black hat – an object with some similarity to the black mirror described by Brian Dillon:

In 1966, the British Museum acquired a curious object of convoluted provenance and sinister reputation. It is a black disc of highly polished stone, 1.3cm thick and 18.9cm in diameter, with a small handle-like protrusion to one side, pierced with a tiny hole. The thing is plainly a mirror of sorts, small enough to be held in the hand, and carved – so the museum established, after centuries of confusion – from obsidian: the glassy stone from which the Aztecs fashioned their ritual implements. It is usually exhibited alongside a desiccated and much-repaired flat leather case to which are attached two labels. The first, dating from 1842, when the “wondrous speculum” was sold at auction, simply says “Lot 48″. The second inscription is from the late 18th century, and likely quickens the hearts of serious scholars and New Age occultists alike: “The Black Stone into which Dr Dee used to call his spirits.”

Your indefatigable Gijsbrechts is on the case – is Vermeer’s self-portrait drawn out of a mirror consubstantial with the picture?

Where what the viewer eventually sees is an affect of the artist’s phantasmal self behind the work – a prestidigitation of the mind perhaps?