L'optique moderne: Daniel Spoerri's 'Optical Readymades'
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Jill Carrick [1]
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[1] Carleton University
Carleton University
Canadá
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- Localización: Art history: journal of the Association of Art Historians, ISSN 0141-6790, Vol. 39, Nº. 4, 2016 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Material imagination: Art in Europe, 1946-72), págs. 744-771
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
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Resumen
Daniel Spoerri’s interactive assemblage L’Optique Moderne (‘Modern Optics’) of 1961–62 consists of a collection of eyeglasses and optical devices positioned below a death mask of the French philosopher Voltaire, the latter’s eyes pieced by scissors. This essay examines how L’Optique Moderne dialectically engaged with both ocularphobic trends in twentieth-century French thought and modernist dreams of a technological extension of vision. Simultaneously playground and minefield, the work stands as a key example of 1960s experimental re-workings of the visual and conceptual heritage of Marcel Duchamp. L’Optique Moderne ingeniously fused two of Duchamp’s artistic strategies – the ‘readymade’ and optical play – by deploying found objects and optical effects. The result, as the work’s title implies, is an invitation to refl ect critically on vision in the age of modernity.
