The Droste Effect

One night while watching Modern Family it dawned on me that the opening credits are a sort of example of the Droste Effect - in fact it might be where they got the idea from. One family hell is another family hell (the infinite recursion is implied), etc. Or I've got it all wrong and this is an example of what the Droste effect isn't.

Read this to a friend, played the above video, and he thought it was an example of the Droste effect too, except it isn't.

The Dutch Cocoa tin, from which the effect gets its name and its picture of the nurse holding a tray with a tin of Droste, etc., ad infinium, isn't new either. One of the earliest uses of "The Droste Effect" was by Giotto di Bondone in 1320 for his Stefaneschi Triptych .

We cannot speak about the Droste Effect without mentioning another Dutch staple, artist M.C. Escher. There is an entire project devoted to Escher's work and the Droste Effect, and what could possibly be in the inky blotches that Escher left on his work. The project is being done through the university in Leiden not far from the museum that houses Escher's works in Den Haag, which I might make a trip out to see via the Dutch railroad as it's only 1 hour from A'dam.

Another person we can not forget to mention is French writer André Gide who originally termed mise en abyme (which means placing into infinity). The French meaning is different from what mise en abyme has come to mean in Western art history - in French the phrase describes the visual experience of standing between two mirrors, seeing an infinite reproduction of one's image and in Western art "mise en abyme" is a formal technique in which an image contains a smaller copy of itself, the sequence appearing to recur infinitely.

The definition from Hollman and Harmon's Handbook to Literature is much better.  It says:

Mise en Abyme In heraldry, the representation of a small shield on a big shield (escutcheon) is called en abyme. More generally, placement en abyme has to do with any occasion when a small text is imprinted on or contained in a bigger text that it replicates. Fairly often, a film will contain another film, which serves as a commentary of sorts on the outer story. Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948), for example, contains a performance of the ballet The Red Shoes. Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust includes The Burning of Los Angeles, a surrealist painting by the character Tod Hackett. At the end, the novel and painting seem to merge.

As one critic has observed, not only does Hamlet contain a play-within-the-play, it contains a Hamlet-within-Hamlet. An inner text placed en abyme has a way of making the surrounding outer text seem relatively lifelike, especially if the artificiality of the inner text is emphasized (as is the case with the inner television news program en abyme on the outer Mary Tyler Moore television program, or the inner soap opera included in the outer text of Twin Peaks).

[Reference: Lucien Dällenbach, Le Récit Speculaire: Essai sur la Mise en Abyme]

Gide took this term originally used in heraldry (coats of arms, etc.) and used it to describe self-reflexive embeddings in various art-forms and to describe what he himself sought in his work. Gide often mentioned Hamlet (see above) as a literary example of a "play within a play" and the art of Diego Velazquez, specifically Las Meninas.

Las Meninas uses an effect found in a much earlier painting in 1434 called the Arnolfini Portrait painted by Dutch painter Jan van Eyck. Notice the mirror's reflection.

But where does the interest in all this Droste effect come from? Why did I spend such a vast part of my day searching for this Amsterdamn tin box? Borges of course.

Borges mentions this tin of Dutch cocoa specifically. Mise en abyme is what the Borges story The Aleph is all about. The labrinyths, the mirrors, the library - add staircases and you might start to get to wondering about the connection of Borges writings and Escher's works.

In Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas Hofstadter wove a network of connections linking the mathematics of Gödel, the art of Escher, and the music of Bach. According to Hofstadter, the common denominator shared by these three masters of contradictorily similar yet dissimilar arts can be identified in their application of the phenomenon known as the "Strange Loop." As Hofstadter defines it, a strange loop "occurs whenever, by movement upwards (or downwards) through the levels of some hierarchical system, we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started".

Although many of Escher's prints illustrate this concept, a particularly striking and familiar example is "Drawing Hands," in which two hands appear to be drawing each other. We can solve this puzzle in different ways. One way to approach the paradox of "Drawing Hands" is to recognize that it is Escher, the artist, who is drawing both hands and who stands outside of this particular puzzle. Alternatively, we may adopt a Zen-inspired solution and let mystery be mystery by choosing to embrace a unity which contains oppositions. Jorge Luis Borges described a similar type of recognition in his poem, "Labyrinth," which begins with these words:

There'll never be a door. You're inside
and the keep encompasses the world
and has neither obverse nor reverse
nor circling nor secret center.

Apparently I'm not the only one who wondered. There's even books on the subject for sale on Amazon, though mostly in Spanish.

Here's an interesting article that caught my attention: "Borges and Escher are both favourites of stoners" I found while searching to see if Borges and Escher ever met. It would have been possibly as Escher died in 1972 and Borges in 1989. I wonder how Escher would have described to the blind Borges what he drew. This is a question I will have to find an answer to...an excuse to go to the Escher museum perhaps?