Inscribed on a strip of metal glued across the approximate center of this work are the words of its title, suggesting that viewers look through the lens that Duchamp mounted between two panes of glass and haloed in concentric circles. The title of this work, which Duchamp said he “intended to sound like an oculist’s prescription,” tells the viewer exactly how to look at it. But peering through the convex lens embedded in the work’s glass “for almost an hour” would have a hallucinatory effect, the view being dwarfed, flipped, and otherwise distorted. Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Marcel Duchamp’s To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour→
No matter how confident I ever am that I know most of the street level galleries in Chelsea, today I stopped it to the Heller Gallery on Tenth Avenue and asked how long they’d been open, since this was the first time I’d noticed them. The answer, which was quite unexpected, is that they’ve been at that location almost two years! How have I missed that? I have a few ideas. Continue reading Katherine Gray’s A Rainbow Like You→
While there is no shortage of very cool artworks to see at the Dia: Beacon Museum in Beacon, NY, one of my favorite things that I saw on my recent trip there with Geoffrey is Robert Smithson’s Map of Broken Glass (Alantis) which is mind blowing on so many levels. First of all, it’s huge pile of dangerous glass shards sticking up into the air, which if you fell onto them, they would surely injure you gravely. Take a closer look: Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Robert Smithson, Map of Broken Glass (Atlantis)→
While on an Art Safari at The Met this past weekend, we discovered the rare Glass Bambi, which is actually called PixCell-Deer #24, created in 2011 by Japanese artist Kohei Nawa as part of his Heisei period works. Glass Bambi was realized by covering a full sized Taxidermied Deer with variably sized artificial crystal glass beads, called PixCells, a term coined by the artist. PixCell combines the idea of a Pixel — the smallest unit of a digital image — with that of a Cell. Clever. Continue reading Glass Bambi→
This Sculpture / Installation, Untitled (Night Train) (1989) by African-American artist David Hammons had just been re-rotated into display from the permanent collection at MOMA when I visited earlier this month, and I think it’s really terrific.
