Abstract
ABSTRACT: This article explores certain links between medicine and art, with regard to their use of stereoscopy. I highlight a work by the artist Marcel Duchamp (the ready-made Stéréoscopie a la Main) and stereoscopic cards used in ophthalmic medicine. Both instances involve the drawing of graphic marks over previously existing stereoscopic cards. This similarity between Stéréoscopie a la Main and stereoscopic cards is echoed in the form of "stereoscopic exercises." Stereoscopic exercises were prescribed by doctors to be performed with the stereoscope as early as 1864. Stereoscopic cards were widely diffused in the 19th century, often promoted as "stay-at-home travel." It was over such kinds of materials that both Marcel Duchamp and doctors of ophthalmic medicine drew their graphic marks. I explore Duchamp's Stéréoscopie a la Main as a hypothetical basis for stereoscopic exercises of different types, proposing that this rectified ready-made is the locus for erotic stereoscopic exercises.
Highlights
This article explores certain links between medicine and art, with regard to their use of stereoscopy
The artist was interested in perspective, but was ambivalent about it: as noted by Tom O’Riley, “the notes in the White Box referring to perspective and the fourth dimension suggest that Duchamp saw perspective as one type of representational method amongst others”[42]
Ophthalmic elements linked to active ocular movement in the context of desire are to be found in other pieces by Duchamp, explicitly in the Large Glass and Etant Donnés, and implicitly in the Rotoreliefs; and the first of the works keeps an intimate link with Stéréoscopie a la Main
Summary
There is a very special association between binocular movements and the expansion of gaze toward touch in stereoscopic viewing. Rosalind Krauss described the experience of stereoscopic viewing, highlighting the entry into the “deep channel of space,” and pointing out how the movements of the eyes and those of the body are rendered synonymous: These micro-muscular efforts are the kinesthetic counterpart to the sheerly optical illusion of the stereograph. They are a kind of enactment, on a very reduced scale, of what happens when a deep channel of space is opened before one. This provides a connection between stereopsis and desire
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