of peepholes and windows

"So: we can argue that a peephole is a kind of window, right? If one makes a genealogy of windows, one will surely encounter peepholes."  Florence Lenaers

Unlike a window, a peephole is not intended for contemplating the view which it frames, nor the light gently falling within the interior of the space it opens.



Even when closed a window opens, whereas even when open a peephole maintains the integrity of a closed space.



A peephole provides security of the interior, a window comfort of the exterior.



A window reveals. A peephole conceals.



A window allows for various perspectives and varying viewing distances. A peephole only one, and that distorted.



A peephole is a puncture, a window an embrace.



The nature of a peephole (to be peered through from up close with a single eye) renders one half-blind. A window, on the other hand, encourages one to look with both eyes open wide.



One looks through a peephole with eyes of fear. One looks through a window with eyes of wonder.

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in praise of dialectics

René Magritte, 1937

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the curtain of obscurity

A vast bitterness seemed to inspire these images, images I understood very well as referring to what had begun to play out before my eyes, the curtain of obscurity now lifted--the spectacle that for many nights now he could not observe without sorrow. The studio windows that opened onto the wall perpendicular to his and the rear windows of the building that faced onto the street all lit up almost simultaneously once the sun had passed, although the shred of sky visible from the well was still light. Many of the windows had no curtains, at least, no one bothered to close any. The astonishing variety of life was displayed there. 'An unacceptable waste of gestures, of words, an incoherent mix of differences and similarities, endless complication, a boiler bursting with screams . . .' I don't know which I found more painful: seeing these vague silhouettes behind windows, some furtive, others immobile for long stretches of time (the studios were so small that empty windows were rare), each making its own gestures, imperfect, fragmentary, discordant, mysterious; or hearing that voice, barely audible and once in a while suddenly hard and almost shrill, commenting on the spectacle which, in truth, was no spectacle since these shadows were in all likelihood alive.

Philippe Jaccottet, Obscurity, pg. 25
tr. Tess Lewis

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Après le pas

in every place
we will cut out
windows
to release
the light
from the walls

Silvia Baron Supervielle

from Après le pas (1997)

translated by Jason Weiss

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reflections

Not all windows
are windows.

Even a window
is not always
a window.

And sometimes
something that isn't
a window
is the best window.


image: Robert Motherwell, Open Study No. 3, 1968 Charcoal on paper

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open

The Open series is also crucial for a complete understanding of Motherwell's work. He began the Opens in 1967, responding to the impulse in European and American visual arts to regard painting as a window. The notion of the window had figured into his work from the beginning of his career, as early as 1941, when he painted the Museum's Spanish Picture with Window. The Open series represents Motherwell's joining of his longstanding interest in the window with his new notion of how to a make a painting. Each of the Open works, which are characterized by sparse visual components and serene, uncomplicated color, contain a charcoal-delineated rectangle (or three-sided rectangle), which the artist acknowledged partially derived from whitewashed adobe facades. He said, "I've always loved Spanish houses with those big, plain, stark facades, with a dark doorway cut out of the expanse, or say, two windows beautifully cut out of a magnificent whitewashed wall." (from Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth)

Robert Motherwell
top: Open No.24 in Variations of Orange
bottom: Untitled (Open in Yellow, Black and Blue), 1971

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light time silence

Keisuke Yamamoto (山本桂右), lithograph

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red light (amsterdam)

James Zzz

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high windows

When I see a couple of kids

And guess he’s fucking her and she’s   

Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,   

I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—   

Bonds and gestures pushed to one side

Like an outdated combine harvester,

And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if   

Anyone looked at me, forty years back,   

And thought, That’ll be the life;

No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide   

What you think of the priest. He

And his lot will all go down the long slide   

Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:   

The sun-comprehending glass,

And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows

Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

Philip Larkin

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The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, by T.S. Eliot
image: Julian Peters (more)

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the balcony room

Vilhelm Hammershoi, 1911

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Tenth Street at Night, 1960

John Cohen

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viennese window (ii)

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viennese window

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nu

there are rooms that have no windows
so in the world of the heart there are windows with no rooms 

among the buzz of honey bees
torn things and the skin of a heart
sparkling rain on a summer’s day
and dead things

you stand still, in silence
even if your heart, lost
before things took shape, 
cries out from the window

my ears do not hear her voice
my eyes listen to her voice


Ryuichi Tamura, tr. Takako Lento
original

deadly windows

Rebel sniper's nest in the Karmel Jabl neighborhood of Aleppo 

Javier Manzano

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radioactive windows

A Soviet stained-glass mural at the Pripyat riverside cafe
Guy Corbishley

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paris windows

Avigdor Arikha

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life near windows

Youngna Park
more in this series

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...

Sarah Hermans

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