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“The Arts Council of Great Britain asked Richard Hamilton to organise a Duchamp retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1966. The almost complete works of Marcel Duchamp opened on 18 June 1966. Realizing the futility of trying to do justice to Duchamp without the ‘Large Glass’ and other glass studies (the 1915-23 original, in Philadelphia, was too delicate to travel), Hamilton spent a year making a reconstruction of Duchamp’s masterpiece, working from the notes and dimensions given in the ‘Green Box’.
In the course of the work he followed Duchamp’s path faithfully by making reconstructions of the studies Duchamp had found it necessary to make to check his innovative methods. Hamilton also made two separate small studies of procedures Duchamp was not able to test, the Oculist witnesses and Sieves. Both of these elements of the ‘Glass’ required more time than Hamilton had at his disposal with an exhibition deadline to meet. He had to invent a less labour-intensive method to draw the sieves with mirror silver than scraping the silver with a razor blade, and three months breeding dust for an indeterminate result was not practicable.
When the publisher Paul Cornwall-Jones asked if it would be possible to
make multiple editions from parts of the ‘Large Glass’, Duchamp suggested that he did not regard these two studies as entirely his and that since they had emerged from Hamilton’s involvement with his ‘Glass’ he regarded them, to some extent, as new works. Duchamp insisted that the studies and multiples should be jointly signed. Both the Sieves and the Oculist witnesses are part of the lower half of the ‘Large Glass’, the domain of the Bachelors. The Oculist witnesses, are ‘silvered like a mirror’ as we are informed in the notes made by Duchamp on many scraps of paper over the period he was working on the ‘Glass’. They have an important function: the viewer is reflected in them and thus appears in the work itself. 1 In his 1957 essay, The Creative Act, Duchamp describes the viewer as participating in the creative process.
A faster method was necessary for the reconstruction: first a full-size drawing
had to be made, a silkscreen was exposed from the drawing, and varnish was then screenprinted onto the silvered glass. Surplus silver was removed with a wash of acid to finish the work. 3 Hamilton conceived the piece as a freestanding glass slab. Laminating the mirrored side to another piece of glass had two advantages, it protected the sensitive mirror silver and it made the glass stronger and safer. It employed the technology of Triplex safety glass that provided most cars with a windscreen in the sixties.” –Lullin
Oculist witnesses (with Marcel Duchamp) 1968
Screenprint, silver mirror in laminated glass, aluminum plinth
25.59 × 20 × 8 in / 65 × 50.8 × 20.4 cm
Printing: the artist with Ernie Donagh at Petersburg Press, London
Edition: 50 + 10 artist’s proofs
signed by both Hamilton and Duchamp in silver ink on the inside, annotated ‘d’après’ and numbered 19/50
Publisher: Petersburg Press London
Condition: Some scuffs and wear commensurate with age.
Catalogue reference: Lullin M2
