Curator, Anne Umland: Marcel Duchamp's To Be Looked At (From the Other Side of the Glass) With One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour is basically a Duchamp instruction piece, one of many works that suggests a new form of audience engagement.
It parodies the age-old idea of art as a window, as a picture onto another world. Chance enters into this work not only in terms of its transparency, which subjects its 'composition' to constant change, but also in the way that damage to the glass, that occurred during transit, was welcomed by Duchamp.
The images, the objects, the lines and forms that are imbedded within To Be Looked At, the spheres, the magnifying lens, the 3-D rendering of a pyramid that floats up ahead, are as baffling as the work as a whole. They suggest an interest in optics, in peepholes, in looking. But that at the same time cancels any sort of seamless illusion.