THE ART DEALERS’ OPTICAL TESTS  1987

“In 1987, while researching the mechanics of the eye I came upon a book, published in the early 1960s, that depicted a group of children in the process of taking a variety of simple optical tests, each of which was designed to demonstrate some rudimentary fact about how vision worked: focus, shape identification, pupilary adjustments to changes in illumination, and so on. The test “results” were already known in advance, of course; the exercises were intended not to discover anything new but to teach children about the eye. Inspired as much by the scientistic look of the photographs as by the distinctive activities they depicted, I remade a selection of this optical theater’s simple prop-objects: cards with holes in them, cards with letters or numbers on them, cards of contrasting size, and so on. I then approached a number of respected art dealers who were active in New York City at the time, and subjected each of them to a different test. In intent and results the tests taken by the art dealers — professionals who make their livings “with their eye” — exactly reproduced the experiments pictured in the source photographs. Replicating the style of the photos in the book, I photographed the new subjects in black and white, and framed the prints in understated, “museum-of-natural-history” frames. Art’s intoxifications were drained away, replaced by an objective joke about subjectivity. Excerpted from Concrete Comedy: An Alternative History of Twentieth-Century Comedy.