'What's in a name?'


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 almost an hour” has a deliberate hallucinatory effect, distorting and obscuring the otherwise clarity of sight that would have been gained by peering through unaltered glass. At the same time the viewer themselves become a part of the artwork, positioned as fixed at “the other side of the glass” exposed and displayed to other onlookers walking by.

Choosing to title my blog with the same title as Duchamp’s optic play therefore seems fitting. By taking the time to muse on Philosophy, Art and Literature, the same fundamentals of an individual’s existence that Duchamp interrogates through his work of perception, the nature of reality and how we decipher our relationship with our surroundings will continuously surface.

Through simply distorting the viewer’s vision after “almost an hour” of looking through the lens, Duchamp arguably highlights a difficulty with the way that we have become so accustomed to seeing things as two dimensional, moving on before even considering the multifaceted. In this sense, it can be said that Duchamp is asking us to dissect visual matter and by consequence, catechise.

I hope this is what this blog will achieve; encouraging exploration, questioning, interdisciplinary debate and reinterpretation. It is a reflection of what excites me, shapes my perceptions everyday and now hopefully other’s too. After all, the act of ‘philosophising’ shouldn’t be considered as abstruse or esoteric but accessible, intrinsic and most importantly, unavoidable. That’s not to say that it is all familiar to us. The ‘alien’ and ‘out there’ is good and serves to show that we as humans don’t fall into the trap of intellectual monotony. Variety is enriching.

I will leave this on an excerpt from W.B. Yeats: “The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”

Twitter: @eleanorgustard




                                         Marcel Duchamp 
   

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