The broken window

Marcel Duchamp, Fresh Window, 1920 (MoMa, NY)

In Leon Batista Alberti 's treatise De Pictura (1435), where he discusses for the first time in western literature the concept of optical perspective, he mentions, in relation to art that, "it is impossible to take anything away from it or add anything to it, without impairing the beauty of the whole."

Illustration for Book 2, p.15

More recently, the American poet William Carlos Williams, talks about what he calls action “pruned to a perfect economy”, and goes on:

" To make two bald statements: there is nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words. When I say there’s nothing sentimental about a poem I mean that there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is redundant. Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matter like a ship. But poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy. As in all machines its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character. In a poem this movement is distinguished in each case by the character of the speech from which it arises."

I believe the same applies to the concept of design, which is, like Williams says, a well tuned machine, made of all the necessary elements but nothing more, since, by logic, anything not essential would be taking the place of what is. A place where form and function are interchangeable and indiscernible from each other.

Alberti said, in his famous visualization of painting as a window that the observer, from a fixed point of view looks 'outside'. The role of the artist/designer, is to establish the continuity between those two seemingly separate worlds, breaking so to speak, the metaphorical glass that stands between them.

Now, Alberti was not refering to the surface of the painting as a whole as the "window", but rather to the square, quadrangolo de retti angoli, that you draw as a boundary, limit or predetermination of the shape, size, proportion etc where the outside will be seen, like a hole punched in the very fabric of reality.

I only wanted to share these thoughts to make you think about that window, about the possibility to break it, once you know it is there. Is it possible to maintain the coherence or continuity without it? What happens in our media world where the view is fragmented or distributed around millions of tiny windows that together are more than the sum of their parts?



All images, except Duchamp's Window are from The Painting of Leone Battista Alberti facsimile that you can find at the Science, Engineering and Technology Linda Hall Library