Urban Sculpture > God’s eye

We are always in search of our ideal “I.” We constantly attempt to find a way to return into its arms and unify with it once again. In this desperate search, issues around looking and being watched involves our mind engaging with itself from different contexts of our lives. “Who is really looking?” is a fundamental question formed through the systematic tracing of the gaze. This gaze results in the object’s desire to be seen and the subject’s willingness to see. It is what forms our identities.

The subject looks into our eyes, from a position that we cannot see. It may be hidden in some shroud of darkness, while the object is obvious and visible, or it may reveal itself as an object for being seen. As Lacan illustrates in Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (1964), the eye that looks is the eye of the subject, but seeing is from the side of the object. I only can see from one point but I am seen from all directions. Looking comes from inside my realm but being the watched object represents the workings of unconsciousness, the realm of “the other” to which I am dependent.

Being a subject is an attractive, ego building, exercise that may take on any shape or form. The subject may be massive in weight and scale, something so huge that it may be seen from far distances – its eyes, so strong that it can examine and evaluate various layers of the object. For the object, the subject can be too different and unattainable. However, the subject can see and appreciate the endeavour of its creation: a form of worshiping and being worshipped where the subject is formed through continued representation. In an ideal situation, when the distance between the subject and object becomes close, they would experience a moment of simultaneity: the subjects and objects can then understand, experience and feel themselves from within.