To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass)

‘Dadaism’ was an attempt to make sense of post war irrationality; born out of a disgust for the world and the view that conventional thinking had led  Europe  to war and carnage. As a 20 th  century movement it channelled its   anti-war   politics through a rejection of the prevailing standards in art, proposing an attitudinal shift that meant that a prerequisite ‘process’ was no longer required for a piece of art to be simply deemed a piece of art. It achieved such through giving the unimportant and everyday deep philosophical importance. And for this I return to the previously, if not briefly explored Marcel Duchamp who himself made the concept of art malleable. This is not to say that Duchamp’s re-evaluation of the artistic concept was a product of a stern political revolutionist, but a self amusement or retaliatory mock at the stuffy art world of post war  France . Key to this mock were the ‘Readymades’, a series of seemingly banal, industrially pr...

I have decided to name this blog ‘To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass)’ taken from Marcel Duchamp’s reactionary piece to Leonardo Da Vinci’s “pyramid of vision” in his ‘ A Treatise on Painting’. Its full title is ‘To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour’. Duchamp inscribed this directive on the work (in French:  A regarder d’un oeil, de près, pendant presqu'une heure ), written in the infinitive in order to achieve viewer interactivity. He said the title is "intended to sound like an oculist’s prescription," instructing the viewer precisely how to look at it. But the crux of the piece lies in not how only the viewer engages with it visually, but the viewer and work’s interdependence. It is a violation of artistic traditionalism; art becomes no longer an isolated, purely aesthetic ‘subject’ to be regarded and appreciated at distance. Looking through the convex lens centred in the work’s glass “for al...