Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques. I'm Ben Miller. When I look at a portrait, often the first thing that draws my attention is the eyes.
Speaker: Are they flat? Are they deep, monochrome, or complex? The eyes can tell you a lot about the quality of the picture and the skill of the painter.
Speaker: So if eyes in a portrait hold that much power, imagine the experience of someone with a prosthetic eye, how important it must be for that artificial eye to be convincing to look natural, to carry the same depth and complexity as a real eye.
Speaker: Well, it turns out that prosthetic eyes have been made for thousands of years, and there's rich and impressive craft tradition around the occupation known being an ocularist.
Speaker: This is really a fascinating collision of decorative arts and medicine connecting to the history of glassmaking and painting. My guest today is Dan Roche, professor and author of a new book called Eyes by Hand, Prosthetics of Art and Healing. Dan, welcome to Curious Objects.
Speaker: Thank you, Ben. It's wonderful to be here. really appreciate the invitation. So today's curious object, and and I hope listeners won't be squeamish about this, um is actually your own prosthetic eye.
Speaker: And this is a an object that I have to say is, well, it's incredibly convincing. I would never have guessed that it's anything other than a natural eye just to to look at it. But the the history of...
Speaker: how we got here, how the the art and science progressed to the point of being able to make a completely convincing prosthetic eye is totally fascinating. And I'm excited to to get into that with you. But first, I have some rapid fire questions for you. Are you ready? We should go right ahead into those. Yes.
Speaker: Okay. So Dan, what what is the oldest object that you personally own? Oh, gosh, I'm not a person who keeps a lot of old objects. I kind of live in the the current times, the space of my own life, probably. um I was building a patio in the backyard last summer and I dug up a a number of bottles that were probably from early 20th century, so some old milk bottles and medicine bottles.
Speaker: And those probably went to the top of oldest things that I actually own. And that part of the backyard used to be kind of a trash pit. And to dig in there is an archaeological expedition. So I found a few that were still intact and cleaned them up. So what do you do with them? Do you do you drink out of them? No. They are sitting on the kitchen counter as a decoration and a reminder of all the digging I did in the hot summer sun last summer.
Speaker: What's your favorite museum to visit? um I would have to say i have several. I like the smaller museums. I have several that I really like. One probably is the Eastman House Photography Museum in Rochester, New York.
Speaker: I love photography and photography. That's just ah it's a really comfortable, intimate, but super well curated museum that I fortunately am fairly close by too. So I go to a couple of times a year anyway.
Speaker: I had a whirlwind tour of Rochester a few months ago, and I was very disappointed not to have time to make it to that museum, which i've I've heard great things about. Yeah, make it back.
Speaker: ah What was the last object or or work of art you've seen that made your pulse race? I would say, to go back, I went to the Diane Arbus Museum.
Speaker: show at the New York, and I believe it was at the extension to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bauer Museum, I believe.
Speaker: It was a few years ago now, but being in that room with those large photographs was sort of overwhelming in and an emotional way for that too. so That would probably be one of the most recent ones.
Speaker: m um what To change gears a little bit, what is the most unconvincing prosthetic eye that you've come across? I don't think I could call to mind one that I've seen in person, but I remember the story of a a person I interviewed for the book who when she was a baby, had retinoblastoma and had her eye removed. And her family was not living close to ocularis because they're fairly few and far between.
Speaker: And so her dentist made her eyes for her. Really? during Yeah, during her early years from maybe you know two years old up until high school, actually.
Speaker: And he he told her, you know, i will do the best I can. I know how to work with acrylic to make dentures and crowns, but I'm not an artist and then i I don't claim this as my my specialty whatsoever, but I'll do it because there's nobody else around to do it.
Speaker: Wow. And so she, that's the kind of eye she had through her childhood, which she said was very unrealistic, didn't fit well, was not as nearly as sophisticated in its painting and its decoration as and as an actual ocularis could do, but it was the best that she could have. So when she did finally get to go to a real ocularis when she was 16, she said it was amazing.
Speaker: Of course, it was what she had been waiting for for many years and a complete complete change of quality too. What's the most unexpected or or unusual archival source that you turned to when you were reconstructing the the history as you have?
Speaker: I think probably the records of the 1855 Paris exhibition were really interesting and was surprised because artificial eyes were kind of a sensation there as I as ive read. And the competition for them for the best prosthetic eyes was one of the stories of that exhibition as far as I can tell.
Speaker: And a French ocularist named Auguste Boissonneau won the prize for best artificial eyes at that exhibition too. So I thought it was really interesting to see eyes included in the exhibition, all the other arts and crafts that were included in that show.
Speaker: and that show yeah Yeah, that that's quite interesting. I mean, there's a rich history around these world's fairs and international exhibitions. And you think of the the great famous decorative arts manufacturers, but for pro prosthetic eyes to be part of that, to well, it ties into some themes that we'll will develop as we talk today.
Speaker: What was the the most a surprising decorative arts discovery that you made while you were traveling through Germany, through their historic glassblowing regions?
Speaker: um So I went to the small town Lausche, which is this kind of where Glass Eyes started for Germany. And what was interesting, and I went to the glass museum there,
Speaker: What's interesting is how um glass eyes are a small part, really, of the glass the decorative glass industry there. And it was also the place where they first started making glass ornaments for Christmas trees, the baubles and things, too. So those kind of dominate the museum and the the glass makers who still are in town and sort of line the main street.
Speaker: And then there's one firm of Ocularis also in town that has been there since the eighteen twenty s eighteen thirty s as well. But to see the glass eye within that larger context of the Christmas tree ornament, and to be a part of that, and to be presented as a an important cultural heritage for the area, but also to be very different from a Christmas tree ornament.
Speaker: Who would you say is the most peculiar historical figure to have worn a prosthetic eye? So I would say Alexander the Great's father, Philip of Macedonia, apparently by now The story goes, lost an eye from an arrow in battle and had a prosthetic eye carved out of wood, which he wore from then on. Probably not very comfortably, but... Oh, God, I can't imagine. I mean, I think Washington's wooden teeth is bad enough, but wooden eye it sounds awful.
Speaker: Right, yeah. I wonder if that survives survives in a to you know in a long lost tomb somewhere. would be quite an interesting artifact to turn up. It would.
Speaker: All right, well, we'll be back in just a moment with Dan Roche. I always like to pause for a moment here and say thank you to everyone listening.
Speaker: You are the reason that I'm able to have these conversations that I enjoy so much. Of course, i hope you are getting a lot of enjoyment out of them. Also, and if you are, i always love to hear about that. You can reach me by email at CuriousObjectsPodcast at gmail.com. You can also find me on Instagram at my new handle at CuriousObjectsNYC.
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Speaker: So, Dan, ah the the first chapter title in your book, I think on the book is called Eyes by Hand. The first chapter title is Repulse, which is quite on the nose. I mean, I'm curious, is there is is there a kind of uncanny valley for artificial eyes where it becomes sort of more and more unsettling as it looks more and more lifelike right up until that point where it it's completely convincing all of a sudden?
Speaker: That's a really interesting thought. I think they were probably extremely unsettling when they were not lifelike, not necessarily because they didn't look like an eye, but because they didn't move. And early, 19th century, before eyes were really sort of custom fit, you could buy one out of a drawer and pop it in and it would be you know sort of looked at as ah what they call the fixed eye.
Speaker: And it became kind of a metaphor for some writers like Anthony Trollope and and others for for a character who is suspicious, perhaps evil, something bad going on. you know, you give them a ah fixed eye. and it kind of freaks people out and they don't know where they're looking, they don't know what to make of that unmoving object in the eye socket. So presumably it it would have been a common enough phenomenon that Trollope's readers could have understood and related to that description. Yeah, I believe so. I think the reviewer of the 1855 Paris exhibition contest on artificial eyes
Speaker: talked about how in previous decades, eyes were made, they were shaped, like he he said, like half of a bird's egg. um Both sides, you know the same shape for the right or the left eye, nothing custom made to fit the landscape of any particular eye socket or eye They weren't removing eyes at the time, so it just eyes that fit over i a shrunken real eyeball because eye surgery had not progressed to the point where it was actually safe to take out an eye. So so usually people who had prosthetics did so over a shrunken glove.
Speaker: But the when there was no movement to it, yeah, it was quite freaky and uncanny. And I think, you know, hadn't thought about that, but there is that valley, I suppose, between that extreme and the other, you know, extreme of it being completely undetectable.
Speaker: So there's some place in between there where, you know, Even two natural eyes are really never completely symmetrical, right?
Speaker: but But if there's a bit of discrepancy or asymmetricality in between a natural eye and a artificial eye, then that can cause some uncertainty, i guess, in the ah person who's looking into those eyes.
Speaker: which is where that sort of uncanniness comes from, of not quite being sure whether something is real or not. Yeah, well, so im so I mean, in broad strokes, is it fair to say that most of the history of of prosthetic eye making has been about trying to approach closer and closer to a lifelike appearance?
Speaker: Yes, definitely and i think that that 99.9% of the time is the, it's been the goal. It certainly was for me, I wanted, you know, complete symmetry. And when I got my eye, that's, and my ocularist was painting you know, she said, our goal is complete congruence, complete symmetry. And so, yeah, I think that,
Speaker: um the The goal has mostly been, I'm just leaving a little bit of space there because I want to explain an exception to that and it's more recent, to have that artificial eye disappear into an appearance of, yeah an illusion of reality.
Speaker: And so that ah that's the goal. It's a difficult goal and, you know, it comes down to um little things like how how reflective the material is, how much um moisture it can hold on its surface. you know Glass and plastic eyes have different qualities in that way whether or not the pupil dilates or seems to dilate or constrict or not, um and and movement, what ocularists call motility.
Speaker: um And I would say, you know, that's generally been the goal because there has been, up until fairly recently, real um prejudice against the ocular of somebody who is missing an eye or has a a badly deformed eye um to the point where some people, you know, there are stories that are plenty of stories that ran across, especially the 19th century and even through the early decades of the 20th century where people who were missing an eye or had a ah damaged eye were not employable.
Speaker: um say were There was a story of ah a soldier who'd come back from war in France in the mid 19th century and had lost an eye in battle but could not find a job because of that injury. Another story I really liked was of of the same time period, a a girl had lost her eye when she was about five and had an artificial eye but it was poorly fitted.
Speaker: fitted and she didn't, her parents didn't really take care of it very well. And so by the time she was in her late teens, the eye was, would fall out quite frequently whenever she looked, you know, off to the side or something, it was so badly fit and, and her eye socket had scarred over in various ways. it made it a really difficult thing. And she,
Speaker: wanted to be a piano teacher and she couldn't get any students. The story was told because of her, of her bad eye. It just, you know, was sort of socially disqualifying for her. So there, I mean, that would suggest there was actually a very strong economic incentive to produce more effective, more convincing eyes. And and i you know, I want to,
Speaker: take us back a little bit in history. And as I mentioned before, and as you say in the book, there is a millennia old history around around prosthetic eyes. But I think we're going to jump into the story really with Venetian glass and in the Renaissance. And this is maybe of the first ah real close examples touch points between the history of prosthetic eyes and the broader history of decorative arts. I'm guessing listeners are are likely familiar with Venetian glass or Murano glass, where in in the Renaissance, these glass workers more or less cornered the the European market on sophisticated luxury glassware.
Speaker: ah But at least speaking for myself, i had never considered how those glassmaking techniques might have been put to use on prosthetic eyes. so So tell me about that. I'll say I know a lot about the specifics of that.
Speaker: I know that... the Venetian glassblowers and Marano glassblowers did sort of dominate the prosthetic eye making world for for the sort of 18th century.
Speaker: and the the eyes that they made um were apparently very thin shells, very fragile.
Speaker: by all accounts, fairly uncomfortable as well. and And were these luxury items that were really reserved for for the wealthy few? I don't know, to be honest. Yeah. Later on, there was there was certainly economic considerations for the prescribing or the the fabricating of of artificial eyes. And especially in Britain, say in the in the second half of the 19th century, if somebody needed, had an eye problem that required eye
Speaker: you know an eye to be taken out, then sometimes the the that person's financial situation and economic status was a deciding factor in whether or not they would do that and give them an artificial eye or not. So it wasn't a necessarily an object that was made available consistently every
Speaker: capabilities or conditions. Sometimes the the choice was made to, um without the patient's input or consent, to say, well, this person won't be able to afford a new eye every year, so we're just going to not do that surgery.
Speaker: and And I don't know whether that kind of thing happened in um around venas and with venetian-made eyes at the time It wouldn't be surprising if it did. had to be somewhat rare maybe, but there probably wasn't a million of them around to to to satisfy whatever demand there might have been.
Speaker: Yeah, and I mean, as you mentioned before, these prosthetic eyes weren't necessarily made for a specific person, right? I mean, you suggested that they were, they didn't differentiate between left and right eyes. I mean, obviously you'd want an eye that matched the color of your other eye. But it sounds like, at least in in this period, probably you didn't have a whole lot of control over you know how well that eye would actually fit your face.
Speaker: No. They were generally what they called stock eyes. So they would be made in a variety of colors and sizes. And then those would generally be sold either by an optician or at a some kind of a medical supply store in Paris in the early eighteen hundred s early late 1700s, I guess, there was there was like, for instance, a shop named Hoobins Eye Shop. they You go in and there were drawers full of eyes and you could you know search through to find one that was close to what you're what you needed, but the stock was limited to what was in the store
Speaker: and It certainly wasn't custom fit. It could not be adjusted on the spot to fit particular person's needs. So, yeah, until probably ah at least the second half of the 19th century, eyes were not generally custom made.
Speaker: And even beyond that, well into you know the first through the first half and of the 20th century, stock eyes were very common, supplied in medical supply stores, opticians,
Speaker: um eye doctors could order them. And so you took what was available and helped it fit. And if it didn't, I suppose you could you know try another one.
Speaker: So the the center of prosthetic eye making shifts over time, right? I just talked about Venice, but then it it moves to to France and then eventually to Germany, right? How how did that come about?
Speaker: Yeah, um it did in the early eighteen hundreds sort of move to France, sort of centered in Paris. and The French ocularists started using enamel, actually, rather than ordinary glass.
Speaker: And that you know there's a lot of experimentations, I suppose, with different types of glass and different types of materials for eyes, too. But the um enamel glass was also extremely fragile, just like the the the glass by the Venetian eye makers.
Speaker: um And it corroded over time. It became uncomfortable to wear as well. But I think you know i think a lot of it, some of these things happen because of individual doctors or eye makers glass blowers who decide,
Speaker: who take on themselves a, you know, the project, I guess you can call it, to to sort of start a, not an industry so much, but a ah center for doing this. And it's probably the the individual stories are probably completely varied on the motivations for those individual people. But, you know, like a lot of things that that start up in one place or another, they they're the result of maybe one person who has a skill or interest in that and and takes on and it grows from there.
Speaker: So a prosthetic eyes being produced in Paris or at you know whatever city they're being produced in, then have to be shipped widely. Obviously, people will be in need of of those eyes all all around the world.
Speaker: um There's actually one quite funny anecdote you relate from in your book about a ah smuggling ring. which was bringing glass eyes from from Germany into the US. Can you tell me a little about that?
Speaker: yeah so I love this story of Baron von Schonwitz, who was a handsome, sophisticated man who was arrested 1911 for smuggling glass eyes into the United States from Germany.
Speaker: And according to the newspaper reports at the time, he wasn't actually a baron whatsoever. he was passing himself off that way in order to invest workers on these German steamships to help him hide the glass eyes. his His name was actually Bruno Schultz.
Speaker: and he was a resident of Hoboken, New Jersey. um And, you know, his he became known as the king of glass-eyed smugglers among the U.S. s customs officials.
Speaker: um But he he was able to, he was when he was arrested, he had 14,000 glass eyes in his position. The tariff was something like 60%, wasn't it?
Speaker: Yes, 60% duty on it. And so he avoided that. And it's a tariff that was assigned to decorated glass, and glass eyes fell under that category. So it wasn't specifically targeting glass eyes. They just got caught up. They got caught up in that broader category. Right. And so once avoided that and could...
Speaker: could get those eyes into the United States at obviously a much cheaper price, whatever he had to pay the the helpers on the on the ships to help him do that.
Speaker: He was able to distribute those across the country and undercut other suppliers of of glass eyes that were supplying opticians across the country in medical supply stores too. oh so the customs officials took those class size and sold them on the market for, I think, 24 cents a piece.
Speaker: But Schultz was not the only smuggler of Glass Eyes at the time. There was also um another person around the same time, in late 1911, who was arrested in Baltimore.
Speaker: for doing the same kind of thing and smuggling in thousands of glass eyes too. Wow, big business. It was big business. it was it was ah You wouldn't think about the sort of the underworld part of the glass eye making industry, but I suppose anything that has a cost to it, somebody's going to try to find a way to to get around that, right? Fair enough. Well, so I'm interested, we've been talking ah a lot about the the sort of decorative arts aspect and the production aspect of of glass eyes, but there's also a medical science aspect to it.
Speaker: um And you this is where these this conversation maybe diverges a bit from the more typical decorative arts conversations that I have on Curious Objects, because there really is a close dovetailing with medicine, medical science,
Speaker: and I'm curious how that how advancements in in medicine influenced the the design and and production of of prosthetic eyes. Yeah, well, there was definitely a a very close connection to it, especially in terms of advances in eye surgery.
Speaker: as I said before, the mid nineteenth century, eye surgery was frequently a death sentence because of infection and hemorrhaging probably. And so no bad no matter how bad an eye might be and it might have a tumor on it that was growing and might have other kinds of really horrible conditions to it.
Speaker: Surgeons were extremely reluctant to remove an eye because of the danger of mortality. So once anesthetics and some other safety advances, I guess, in terms of panacepsis became more available in the second half of the 19th century, eye surgery took off in ways, and it was then possible to remove an eye much more safely.
Speaker: They also discovered um more about the anatomy of the eye. There's this very almost invisible part of the anatomy the eye is called the tinon capsule, which is a sheath that surrounds the, think it's on the outside of the sclera.
Speaker: and But that had not really been observed before or If it had been observed, it had been sort of destroyed in sort of unsophisticated, brutal surgery. um So little things like that made a huge difference. And once um eyes were able to be removed much more safely, then you could fit a person with a prosthetic eye who had had eye totally removed. And before that,
Speaker: Like I said, they had to fit over shrunken globe of an eye. And I don't know the details on this, but I know there were surgeries in order to reduce the size of a a blind eye or a painful eye in order to fit a prosthetic over that.
Speaker: That sounds fairly horrible to me. yeah And otherwise, it would be, you know, a prosthetic eye would be most available to somebody whose eye just had shrunken on its own.
Speaker: But after they were able to enucleate, which is the removal of the entire globe of the eye, then you could sort of fit that person with an artificial eye. And so prosthetic eyes then became much more practical, I suppose.
Speaker: And so the other advancement was in the 1880s, sort of by accident, a an eye surgeon was trying to do a procedure and the eye collapsed and all the vitreous solution that's in the middle that gives your eye its volume kind of ran out and he was able still to save the eye and it was ah an accidental discovery of a way to empty out the eye without removing the rest of the eye, the the white part of the eye and the muscles.
Speaker: which is called evisceration. And that opened up a whole new avenue for prosthetic eyes as well, because if you empty out the vitreous from the inside of the the globe, then you can put something else in there to take up that space and give some volume again to it, but it's still smaller than the normal eye would have been.
Speaker: And then on top of that, you can put a prosthetic eye, which is not round. It's shaped like a like a thick contact lens, and it's concave on the on the interior of it, so it would fit. there to take up that space. And then the other advancement at the time was a German ophthalmologist sort of came up with the idea and had and worked with an ocularis, a night glass blower, a glass blower, I'm sorry, to develop what they called the Snellen eye. which was rather than a single layer of glass, it was kind of a pillow. So it had it had a sort of a vacuum of air, of of just a vacuum inside two layers that was sealed in there. So the the prosthetic was thicker and lighter and could take up more space in the socket and then hold up the eyelids better and also um result in greater motility or movement of the eye too. So that was a huge advancement, I think, in terms of just the design that came from advancements in eye surgery that itself. So let's talk about our ah titular curious object, which is your own eye. so it's not an antique, clearly, as as we often talk about on on curious objects, but it is part of this tradition going back centuries of of prosthetic eyes.
Speaker: You've had this one since 2009, I believe. Right. so what what was the process like of having it made? Well, my eye is made out of acrylic or PM MMA.
Speaker: And the process of making an acrylic eye is very, very different than making an eye out of glass. It is not unlike getting a crown made for your tooth, where they do a mold out of alginate solution. So with an eye, they kind of inject some alginate into the empty socket and let that harden up for 30 seconds or so and then take it out. And that is that gives you the
Speaker: sort of the landscape of the of the socket with all its bumps and crevices and, you know, it's not completely smooth off as you can, it's human tissue. And from that, that alginate is then used to create a wax model made from just hard dental wax.
Speaker: And so the ocularist will we'll make a wax model that is the back of it that goes you know fits in against the tissue of your eye socket has all of the geography of that of your own eye socket with the ridges and the bumps and the valleys and whatnot. And that will stay through every phase of the fabrication of the eye up through the acrylic version of it too.
Speaker: That is what kind of helps give movement to an artificial eye because it it kind of locks in to that texture of the of the of the tissue in your eye socket, which you wouldn't really think about because you would think it would be just pink, sort of smooth, but it's but it's actually got, you know, everybody's eye socket would be different texture, but but there is enough there to create a sort of a locking in action from the eye to the to the tissue.
Speaker: um So with the wax model, with the with the back of it, then the ocularis takes that wax model and can add or remove wax from the front of the eye in order to have it fit and have it lift the eyelids to the to the right height in accordance with your natural eye. And that's a lot of sort of whittling with a little knife and smoothing out with a little torch.
Speaker: um and also they put a little temporary iris and pupil on the front to to also make sure that the gaze of the eye is is correct and it's pointing in the right direction.
Speaker: So that takes probably you know two or three hours of shaping, putting it in, taking it out, reshaping, adding more wax, taking it some away, smoothing it out, over and over until it to it seems in the in the right place.
Speaker: And then they take that wax model and they use it to make an acrylic version of the eye. And then that one obviously has adopted all of the texture of the the original wax model and the original alginate model. So it's just transferred all along the various phases of that.
Speaker: and it also has the the shape of the front of the the prosthetic that was determined with the wax model. But then there's more fine tuning from there. With the acrylic version, they go to the painting because it's just you know white.
Speaker: and so From there becomes the painting phase and the painting is done with paints that are made from acrylic powder. So it's the same material kind of being painted onto the same material.
Speaker: And it's all done with like, you know, fine little paint brushes. I always thought of them, you know, as the kind of paint brushes that my kids had for their art projects on the shelf, you know, and ah just a ah lot of vials of different color paint and several hours of trying to paint it in a way that exactly matches the color, the variation, all the small details down to the freckles and the the shadings of your other eye.
Speaker: And then along the way still is some, you know maybe adding a little bit more material onto it or taking a little bit off again to try to to get it perfect in its gaze and its the way that the eyelids sort of fall on it so that there's no drooping or excessive height on on an island too, so that you have that complete symmetry.
Speaker: So it takes about 12, 14 hours to do the whole process for the ocularist. my I went for two different appointments. The first one was to do the alginate fitting and then make the wax model.
Speaker: And then I left and when I came back the next week, the ocularist had made the acrylic version and then that day was spent with the painting and the final shaping and polishing.
Speaker: Quite a process. Yeah. now and And I'm curious, you know, I mean, plenty of people have prosthetics, whether it's it's a limb or a replaced joint or even something like ah an artificial heart. But we tend to think of prosthetics as being, I think, purely in the domain of of engineering and and medical science.
Speaker: Whereas the process, if as you've described it, for eyes, that really falls somewhere closer to the world of of art and and craftsmanship.
Speaker: Is that something you were aware of all along, or or was there a moment that shifted your your thinking about that? It's a question I ask people a lot. I ask Ocularis, do you consider yourself you know an artist, a technician, and a craftsperson? where Where do you see yourself on the spectrum of fabricating and creating this piece of beautiful you know this beautiful object?
Speaker: And I got various answers. A lot of ocularists come from art backgrounds. Some of them come from a background in sculpture. Some of them, a lot of them come from background in like medical illustration and some from painting.
Speaker: um So I think those people tend tended to describe their work more towards the art end of the that spectrum.
Speaker: um When I interviewed some ocularists in Germany, actually, who were making, think they just did they just did eyes out of glass. those Those particular ocularists didn't work in plastic whatsoever. but and i And I had just come from the glass museum. and to see some of his work and seeing it as in in the context of all those Christmas decorations. And it was, you know, very much a part of that world of decorative glass.
Speaker: But i asked them that question and they said, no, we we're technicians. we We see ourselves as technicians because we're making kind of the same thing over and over. You know, if if if we thought of ourselves as artists, we would be creating something new each time. But they saw it more as a formulaic thing, even though each eye is custom made for its own particular wearer.
Speaker: They at least didn't consider that that an artistic process so much as a technical one or or even a craft too. But, you know, i i came to think of it as sort of a combination of all those things. I think it's definitely ah craft in the way that, you know, weaving or or something else like that is that you are you're following a particular procedure of fabrication and using particular materials.
Speaker: But each resultant object is its own thing. It's not factory made. It's not mass produced.
Speaker: so And I think, too, um that the painting of it, especially with the acrylic eyes, is as an artistic skill, undoubtedly. yeah you know it's just You have to be able to understand how colors work. You have to and understand how to create certain effects of depth and other kinds of sort of resonances in that object that
Speaker: you're not It's not just painting you know a layer of paint on a wall or something like that. It's yeah so much more sophisticated. And and i think that's why the the field is done best by people who do have that artistic training and that artistic background, even if they're not even if they don't think about it as art in the moment.
Speaker: the The person who painted my eye, um you know, how had studied painting in college and had exhibited her work around in galleries and museums and um and she told me that she still does that kind of artwork um but she also thinks of her painting of eyes as its own artistic endeavor, I guess. and But weirdly, her goal is not to have anybody know that she did it. oh
Speaker: know Completely different than what she wants to exhibit of a painting in a frame on a wall of ah of a gallery. She doesn't, you know, the goal is to have nobody know that that is a piece of art.
Speaker: Wow. Wow. So listeners know that I'm ah a big believer in integrating decorative arts into your daily life, building a relationship with these objects, keeping them top of mind.
Speaker: But having a work of art embedded in your body is another level. Yeah. Is that something that you're conscious of on a daily basis?
Speaker: Yeah, I think so. and Maybe not conscious of daily, but fairly frequently. i you know, I look in the mirror sometimes and I forget which eye is which. And i and sometimes I'll look at it very closely and I'll <unk>ll just be, you know, sort of impressed by its artistic quality. And I mean, you asked me early on in the,
Speaker: the initial questions of what was the last artwork that gave me, you know, sort of made my heart race or something. And I have to say that, you know, when I take those moments to to sort of look in the mirror at my eye, i feel a little bit of that too. And it's obviously, you much more complicated because it has to do with, you know, my own self image and self identity, history and all that other complex, psychological stuff too. But I also sort of get a little rush when I when I study it. And, you know, I'm just sort of completely um impressed by what it is too. So I feel
Speaker: excited by it still. I've had it for 15 or 16 years, but actually on the second eye, I got the first one replaced just because the shape of my socket had changed a little bit and the first one wasn't fitting as well anymore. Yeah, I have a great affection for it and I feel very sort of lucky to have that be something that I could that works as a part of my body. And I think of it still, I think of it both as something separate as as a part of you know something organic to me, it's become that at this point. But I also know that it's it's not.
Speaker: So it it kind of exists in both of those spaces for me. Well, I think that's a really lovely note to end on. Thank you thank you for for joining me, Dan, and and congratulations on the book.
Speaker: Thank you. um It was a fascinating book to write. When I got a an i I really didn't know anything about how they were made or where they came from or anything. by My understanding of them was probably what most people is, from movies or cartoons where an eye falls out and rolls across a saloon floor and you know there's tension suddenly in the room.
Speaker: And so it was really fascinating and revealing to dig into the subject. And it's also, for me, part of the healing of going through that process of sort of losing the body part and and having a replacement and understanding more about what it is, where it came from,
Speaker: how it has sort of a ah power of illusion that comes from the art of it, the decorative part of it, and that it doesn't have any sort of powers of vision, obviously. You can't see these days out of a prosthetic eye.
Speaker: So all of its power comes from its decorative realism and what it looks like to other people rather than what you see out of it because you can't see out of it.
Speaker: So I think that just, you know, it was just really part of the the process of coming to accept it and coming to accept more of what it meant to wear it for me to to to hear other people's stories, to to talk to ocularists who spend their lives making these things and to sort of understand more about what eyes, real and artificial, sort of mean in terms of being a human.
Speaker: Well, thank you again, Dan. um Once more, the book is Eyes by Hand, Prosthetics of Art and Healing from MIT Press, available now.
Speaker: Curious Objects is produced by Urbashi Lele. Today's episode was edited by Julian Minerva. Support from the Magazine Antiques editorial team includes senior editor Sarah Stafford-Turner and managing editor Christine Kultebrit.
