Mark Wallinger’s Self Reflection show, in which he has installed a mirror across the entire ceiling of Sigmund Freud’s study at the Freud Museum in London’s Hampstead, is one of the most successful of the many artistic interventions that have taken place in this iconic room. As well as its richly chiming references to Freudian notions surrounding the doubled self and self-reflection, it also presents a weirdly disorientating and decidedly unheimlich perspective for anyone entering the room, especially when you notice through the window the looming—and also doubly reflected—presence of the artist’s sculpture Self (2016) outside in the garden. Thanks to the Art Fund, this Wallinger-height bronze columnar letter “I” is to be a permanent al-fresco fixture at the museum.
All these subjects and much more were given an illuminating airing at the beginning of the week in a sparky conversation between Wallinger and Fiona Bradley, the director of the Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery. The packed audience included Elisabeth Murdoch, whose Freelands Foundation has just awarded the Fruitmarket its inaugural £100,000 Freelands Award to mount a major show of Jacqueline Donachie. But—as Dr Freud would certainly agree—it is the nature of live talks that surprises can spontaneously emerge, and this certainly happened when one audience member quizzed Wallinger about the erotic, bordello connotations of the mirrored ceiling, stating that he was speaking as an architect who had become familiar with mirrored ceilings “while working on a suburban brothel”. There were a few ripples of nervous laughter before the interlocutor added that it was his job to convert the building into a new function and remove, rather than install, its reflective surfaces. Ego and id, indeed.
