Pan's Opticon Studies

Robin Rhode’s Pan’s Opticon Studies (2009), a suite of five photogravures, appears at first like a scientific study of optics. Rhode investigates different architectural and measuring calipers, heralded by Russian constructivists, and El Lissitzky in particular, as visual extensions to the human eye. They evoke associations to both the visual range and the idea of observation but at the same time to the mechanics of opening and closing the eye, allowing or precluding acts of visual perception to influence thought. The title of the series is a play on ‘panopticon’: a circular prison building conceived by the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century that allows constant surveillance of the prisoners from a central location without them knowing if they being watched or not. Panopticon derives from the Greek ‘panoptes’— all seeing. Hence, the question arises if the Pan in Rhode’s Pan’s Opticon Studies does, in fact, see everything after all.