Exhibition
Oculist Witnesses: According to Duchamp
2 May 2015 – 4 Jul 2015
Address
- Market Square, Preston, PR1 2PP
- Preston
- PR1 2PP
- United Kingdom
Oculist Witnesses: According to Duchamp is a four-person exhibition including new and existing works by Sovay Berriman, Lindsey Bull, Ruth Claxton and Richard Hamilton.
About
Working in sculpture, painting and manipulated found postcards, the artists explore the notion of the gaze, movement and perspective using Hamilton’s work, Oculist Witnesses (1966) as a starting point.
In 1966, Richard Hamilton reconstructed one of Marcel Duchamp’s most ambitious, celebrated and enigmatic works, Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23) for the Tate.
The work consists of an upper and lower panel of glass, resembling a large window. The top section represents the bride as an insect-like machine and the bottom section the nine bachelors as marionettes, as well as a chocolate grinder and oculist witnesses made from pieces of mirror.
Not intending the work to be viewed purely on aesthetic terms, Duchamp produced a body of notes interpreting the artwork, intended to be as important as the work itself, thereby marking a critical shift in the development of art history from ‘retinal art’ to conceptual art.
Fascinated by notions of perspective and desire, Duchamp enables the viewer to see the objects floating in the frame, whilst being able to look through the glass at the world beyond. The work which resists interpretation was left ‘definitively unfinished’ by Duchamp in 1923.
