Day 19

A Tiny Red Dot

We stopped on a walk through Hyde Park because two geese were clearly disoriented by the huge mirror beside the pond. They were honking madly and pacing back and forth.

We were actually reflected in the mirror too. I am the little red dot at the top of the world and Donna is the little black dot next to the red dot.

The mirror is an art piece by Anish Kapoor, who has four mirror installations in Hyde Park and adjoining Kensington Gardens. I have seen all four. One is exactly like the one pictured above except that it reflects sky not ground. One is a small circular mirror that reflects with a red tint. And the most well known piece is a "C" shaped installation called Turning the World Upside Down.

The day I went to see it, the exhibit was fenced off while workers tried to repair a bit of vandalism. The mirrors are intended to raise questions about perspective. Apparently it worked better for the geese than it did for the guys with spray paint. I find that I identify more with the geese here than with the vandals, who apparently just saw it as a shiny space to scribble on.

Like many other visitors I had hoped to photograph myself upside down in the C mirror, but the fence made the effort pointless. Some weeks later I found another, smaller mirror in the Tate Britain that allowed me the upsidedown experience.




I am not sure what I learned from being stood on my head, unless it is that I hope you won't see me with my world turned upside down just yet.

Interesting and compelling, the idea of a reflected world. It is a common device for novelists, poets, painters, song writers, sermon writers, and others, for talking about how we see ourselves or for finding out how the world sees us. It presents a distance, a doubleness, that is in itself an opportunity for expression, however obscured, as in the image below.






I am just not sure, yet, what being stood on my head means. It is a dizzying change of perspective for sure.

Still, I like being in the big pie picture with the geese. I know their pain. I relate. I too, at times, have paced around honking madly, knowing something in my world is badly misplaced.

For now, however,I am where I want to be, at the top of the world. Weird, I suppose, to find myself there, but the mirror gives me a realistic view. My place at the top of the world that I see is balanced by this tiny fact: the figure reflected there is clearly and visually insignificant.

We might call this "art reflecting life." Even the geese get into it.