In his performance, Through the Looking Glass II, Gerhard Lang passed through Greenwich Village and the Bowery viewing the city solely through a Claude Lorrain mirror –  a darkened and slightly convex glass plate as was used by landscape painters in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries for their studies of picturesque rural motifs.  The mirror allowed the painters to not depict what appeared directly before their eyes but the mediated image of the setting behind their backs.  Lang based his performance on these inverted conditions and walked Manhattan backwards solely by observing the city’s mirror image.

Gerhard Lang

Through the Looking Glass II

2012

4 minutes 47 seconds