My Emergency Googly Eyes
Gouache and watercolor on board, 2025. JD
Some gifts seem completely useless when they arrive, pointless and wasteful in a way that makes you wonder how human beings can find so many ways to squander the resources of the earth through the complex processes of extraction industries, manufacturing, specialized machinery and production satisfying some idea of creating a commercial product for which no apparent need exists. Really. Who needs an emergency supply of googly eyes?
Oddly, it turns out they are quite useful after all and that nothing quite substitutes for their presence on otherwise blank-faced ceramic statuettes of animals, those cat salt-and-pepper shakers in pastel hue that were another questionable addition to the domestic menagerie. The dull kitsch objects transformed into self-consciously playful versions of themselves, able to seem coy and funny and engaging instead of inert once the eyes were affixed. The objects shifted, transformed from mundane to engaging, as if imbued with redemptive awareness of their own absurdity.
Next, the light disks worked to call attention to the edge of the kitchen screen door that disappeared against the light to such a degree that everyone was always walking into it. Once attached, the eyes called out, “See, I am here, look at me and note my presence,” thus preventing the collisions. So it turns out they have their purposes, these adhesive-backed flat plastic bubbles, their transparent domes arcing over the round white base against which the dark, black circular pupil forms move erratically.
According to Wiki, the origin of these novelties might be tracked to Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, cartoon characters, and a song from 1923 titled “Barney Google (with the Goo-Goo-Googly Eyes”).[1] The reference and the cartoon characters are familiar from my childhood, no doubt lying latent in whatever repository of memory stores such bits of information so that they trigger affective responses. Other surprising details on the page describe a bored toy maker who stuck some of the eyes on a wool pompom and invented a novelty item that sold in the hundreds of millions. And then the Wiki goes on to describe “eyebombing”–attaching googly eyes–as a guerilla urban art practice. In December 2024, the Smithsonian magazine ran a piece on the sudden appearance of googly eyes on public sculptures in Bend, Oregon.[2] As the headline ran, “City Officials Are Not Amused,” which is too bad because the effect of the oversized orbs was quite remarkable, causing a rare frisson of surprise and disorientation that is frankly hard to achieve. The eyes are at once familiar and out of place, and yet, manage to seem completely right stuck to the faces of bronze deer and a large cast bronze sphere of weathered metal in the public space of the city. The eyes animate the work, give it a quality of engagement, response. They quickly become the source of an actual gaze, providing a sense of being looked at. An abstract sculptural globe turns into a living thing, cartoonish though it be, as an effect of the giant eyes.
High art and humor are not always connected. As any introductory art history course makes clear. Modern art defined itself by distance from religious imagery, aristocratic portraiture, and mythological subject matter that had been central to western art for centuries. Abstract artists pursued what they termed a “universal language of form” through formal innovation. Later, these claims for universalism came under critical attack in the late 20th century, seen as the expression of an ideology that sought to mask its own “first-world masculinist identity.” By the 1980s, the claim that modern formalism was universal was subjet o thorough and scathing critique from feminist, queer, and post-structuralist and post-modern theorists. At the time, I was learning everything I could to teach modern and contemporary art in the academic environment. That self-education built on the scanty art history background I had acquired in art school a decade and a half earlier when contemporary art ended with minimalist and conceptual practice taken on their own terms. In the 1980s the language of art history had become infused with input from critical theory with roots in German Frankfurt School texts, French post-structuralist writing, and the British Birmingham group among others. Initiation into that world took hefty effort, but provided a foundation for critical insight into the ideological machinations of art world as well as academic language. That point could expand here into a whole digression into the politics of academic art history, each trend and fashion marked by a shift in vocabulary that now can be modelled with digital tools with the same precision as LiDAR reveals the topography of a landscape.
But among the critical terms with which I had to grapple, the word “sublation” posed a particular difficulty. The notion that modern art had attempted to “sublate” art into life was a nearly incomprehensible concept, made more difficult by the work itself. In what, exactly, did “sublation” consist? And how was modern art, with its firm connection to “autonomy,” meant to perform this critical alchemy of both maintaining and losing its identity in relation to common experience. Well, maybe not so “common” as I doubt much of anyone outside of esoteric seminar rooms was much concerned. Images of seeping groundwater, of boundaries dissolving, of works of art becoming undefined while continuing to introduce something other, performatively disruptive, into the fabric of the everyday conflicted in my mind with the existence of pedestals, frames, set-off spaces and restricted access. The strains of minimalist work that struggled to define the “least thing” that made a work art distinct from an ordinary object provided some vivid examples. But sublation? The term and concept continued to pose questions I could not answer for myself and my students.
That other strain of modernism, which was not committed to formal innovation but to subversive activity, the avant-garde, provided a more vital tradition of work on which to understand this curious concept. In my generation we were deeply steeped in the belief that de-familiarization and subversion were the key tasks of aesthetic projects. Even if we had left behind the more adolescent “épater le bourgeoisie” and “slap in the face of public taste” that had been the defining program from Alfred Jarry through Dada, Surrealism, into Happenings, Fluxus, and much Performance art, we were still convinced that the capacity to reveal the dulling impact of convention through intervention in the normative systems of language, imagery, music, dance, theater, film were the way to use aesthetics to political ends. Like anyone who has lapsed from a once unquestioned orthodoxy, I have both ceased and continued to believe, wary of the exaggerated claims and equally wary of giving up on the efficacy of aesthetics to play a role nothing else does in the culture. Art may not save us from current dangers, but without it we lose the capacity to “imagine otherwise.”
I come back to the googly eyes, to their capacity to work subversively and with deep irreverence and humor. I still puzzle over the term “sublation,” even as the automated Google “assist” AI-Bot offers me a description of “a philosophical concept in Hegelian dialectics,” rarely a good entry point to a casual conversation even with an automated system. The Bot goes on to posit that in this interaction of thesis and antithesis something happens in which both are simultaneously preserved and transformed, “It embodies the idea of negating something while simultaneously preserving it in a new form.” Or does it just provide a way of thinking differently about what things are?
The googly eyes don’t negate the objects to which they become attached, instead, they activate them, give them life and character. The googly eyes add a reciprocity to the relation between you and them, a subtle call to accountability through negation by holding you in their gaze. Humor remains be one of the only routes to enlightenment. Irreverence is essential to the subversion of authority. No matter what power these adhesive-backed orbs may possess, this seems an apt time to have an emergency supply of anything capable of doing that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googly_eyes
[2] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/someone-is-sticking-googly-eyes-to-public-sculptures-in-oregon-and-city-officials-are-not-amused-180985679/
Very funny. I remember the event quite well and am only sorry I long ago misplaced the googly-eyed glasses! Thanks for the comment.
In the late 1990s, I attended a talk by JD on concrete and visual poetry. A quarter century later, you can hardly expect me to remember the talk; Yet, I remember JD's talk about how to read a concrete poem (and read that modernist poetry visually and not sounding out the words as one would for a traditional poem) because half-way through she dawned these googly eyes. I always remember the googly eyes!