Surrealism, objects, and spectacles

The same can be found in other canonical surrealist objects, like Man Ray’s Gift, an iron whose very ability to glide is obfuscated by the spiky tacks that are attached to its surface, or Meret Oppenheim’s Object, a teacup, saucer and spoon set bristling with animal fur.

This stems from the 1930s, when André Breton’s surrealist group became particularly obsessed with subverting everyday objects. Breton himself called for a ‘total revolution of the object’, a changing of the way we look at the things around us, a destabilisation of our privileged position of superiority over the inanimate. The surrealists proceeded to challenge the human-object relationship.

Inspired by the Design Museum’s exhibition, Objects of Desire, we set about creating a series of spectacle experiments as a modern response to surrealism’s object obsession.

Surrealism so often confronts our desire for perfect wholeness with images of destruction and fragmentation. Dalí’s paintings, with their melting objects or exploded views, have become some of the most popular examples of surrealist iconography. These destructive images are part and parcel of the surrealism’s ambition to rupture the bounds of rational thought.

Our first frame extrapolates from this destructive urge, in conjunction with kaleidoscopic colours that nod to the surrealist fascination with the dream. Shattered and jagged combinations of acetate melded together, with a lens that seems to be melting out of place. At once broken and whole.

Surrealism at its very core consists of turning the inside out. Depictions of the human body gives us much of the movement's most shocking and disruptive imagery, often problematising the delineation between inanimate object and body, or exposing the insides.

During the 1930s, Meret Oppenheim produced a variety of such objects, including designs for a pair of gloves that externalise the inner vein system of the hand, problematising the inner/outer relationship between glove and hand. The gloves, realised in collaboration with Elsa Schiaparelli in the 1980s, are a contradiction in form. A wearable embodiment of the hands’ inner workings.

We applied the same reasoning to our second pair of surrealist spectacles, with finely detailed blood red temples that bring the curving progress of the optic nerve to the outside of the head. The lens is replaced with a laminated acetate eyeball discs. The pupil hole in the centre is just big enough to see through, but restricts vision, refuting the function of the pair of spectacles.