"You can't see yourself": su alcuni presupposti teorici della funzione dello specchio nella ricerca artistica tra performance e videoarte

The awareness of 'living inside the eyes of others' and the related desire of 'seeing themselves through their own eyes', have traversed the history of art, taking shape into the centuries-old tradition of the self-portraiture and, recurrently, in more recent artistic practices, such as happening and performance, which aim to interchangeably involve the artist, the spectator and the outer word using mirrors or technological substitutes of them, primarily the video camera. Taking into account the topic of narcissism and the concerns about the physical, psychological and relational space of the work of art that have become main issues in the artistic research from the Fifties to the present, the essay examines the function of mirrors in the work of some already historicized artists, such as Jackson Pollock, Allan Kaprow, Robert Morris, Joan Jonas, Marina Abramović, and in a selection of performances by the Italian artist Cesare Viel, who has lead in the last three decades a coherent and intense research on the Self-representation as a mise en abîme of his own identity.