Mirror Self. Heinz Mack’s Zwei Licht-Prismen in Vaduz

Zwei Licht-Prismen by Heinz Mack, 2002. Vaduz, Lichtenstein. Photo: Augustina Zeya

“They are the dreams that one dreams when light sleeps with matter.”

Heinz Mack

I remember the moment clearly: a hot August afternoon in Vaduz, the Alpine air shimmering, when I first came upon Heinz Mack’s Zwei Licht-Prismen... two tall, triangular stelae that caught the sun and seemed to split it into coloured atmospheres. Standing before them I felt a peculiar mixture of astonishment and intimacy: the sculptures did not simply sit in the square as objects to be observed from a polite distance; they summoned the city, the sky, and my own face into their play. In the bright, oblique light of summer the glass glowed like something between stained glass and a living mirror.

A curator in me would first try to describe Two Light Prisms in terms of material and effect. Mack made the stelae from dichroic, specially vapour-coated glass — a technology that layers ultra-thin films onto glass so that it reflects and transmits different wavelengths depending on the angle of incidence. The two prisms are monumental: approximately 8 and 10 metres tall, enough to register against Vaduz’s historic and modern architecture yet slender enough to enact delicate refractive shifts. The coating means their appearance changes continuously with daylight, weather and the viewer’s position; what you see is always a negotiation between outer world and reflected image.

 Zwei Licht-Prismen by Heinz Mack, 2002. Vaduz, Lichtenstein. Photo: Augustina Zeya

That negotiation is precisely why the work brought to mind classical philosophical accounts of the self as a reflective phenomenon. Charles Horton Cooley¹, with his concept of “looking-glass self” proposed that the sense of who we are is shaped by imagining how others see us, thus the self was understood as an effect of social reflection. Jacques Lacan’s mirror-stage², by contrast, emphasized a more radical, psychodynamic misrecognition. This meant that the subject recognizes (and misrecognizes) itself in an image, fashioning an “Ideal-I” that both comforts and alienates. Mack’s prisms act like both mirrors: they externalize the city and the social (Cooley), while generating an image of the self that is at once affirming and uncanny (Lacan). The viewer, reflected and refracted, becomes an inseparable part of the artwork’s meaning. A meaning that only exists in his own perception.

Being this sophisticated inversion of the spectator/object relation is what makes this artwork so interesting. The prisms do not offer a single, privileged viewpoint; from each angle the cityscape fragments and reforms, colours shift and architectural motifs split into planes. You cannot “appreciate” the work by excluding yourself: every movement, every head-tilt changes the sculpture’s answer to you. In that sense Mack’s project is democratic and performative. The public is not merely its audience but a required collaborator in the production of effect.

 Zwei Licht-Prismen by Heinz Mack, 2002. Vaduz, Lichtenstein. Photo: Augustina Zeya

The prisms were installed as a public art commission in 2002, sited prominently near the Centrum Bank area of Vaduz, and remain accessible year-round, though their theatrical potential is richest on clear summer days when sunlight is abundant and angles are sharp. The dichroic coating was applied via vacuum vapor deposition, a process that requires industrial precision and explains the exceptional chromatic effects Mack achieves. The artist has long explored light and perception since his work with the ZERO group in the 1950s, so these prisms sit squarely within his lifelong inquiry into light as medium.

In my experience the work’s power is domestic as much as monumental: while it reads well in photographs, Zwei Licht-Prismen rewards the slow, bodily attention of being there and moving around the sculptures, catching one’s reflection at a sudden angle, feeling the city reconstitute itself in coloured fragments. It is a public artwork that insists, gently and insistently, that you are part of what it is.

Text by Olena Iegorova

Address: 

Vaduz, Liechtenstein

Near the Centrum Bank

Commissioned by: 

Liechtenstein National Bank / Vaduz City Council (public art commission)

Notes:

1. Cooley, Charles Horton. Human Nature and the Social Order. Revised Edition. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922, pp. 168–210 (“The Social Self — 1. The Meaning of ‘I’,” Chapter 5).

2. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by Bruce Fink, in collaboration with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg, W. W. Norton & Company, 2006.