Anti-Art Gestures in Early Modernism: Duchamp and Dada

Anti-Art Gestures in Early Modernism

  • Duchamp and Dada Overview:
    • The lecture explores anti-art gestures in early modernism, focusing on Marcel Duchamp and Dada.
    • Referenced a popular song quoted in James Joyce's Ulysses (1922): "Moses, Moses, king of the Jews, Wiped his arse in the Daily News."
    • Referenced Sigmund Freud's essay, "The Uncanny" (1919), which defines 'unheimlich' as the opposite of 'heimlich' (homely, native), suggesting the uncanny is frightening because it's unknown and unfamiliar.

The Conceptual Status of Art

  • Defining Art:
    • Art is a concept, not a physical object like elephants or chairs.
    • Since becoming self-aware, art has played with its conceptual status.
  • Classical Precedents:
    • Pliny's account of Zeuxis and Parrhasios' competition: Zeuxis painted grapes so realistically that birds tried to eat them.
    • Parrhasios won by painting a curtain so realistic that Zeuxis tried to pull it back.
    • The anecdote illustrates the confusion between art and reality and highlights epistemology (how we know) and ontology (what is art).
  • Rembrandt's Self-Awareness:
    • Rembrandt's Holy Family with Curtain (1646) includes an illusion of the frame and cloth, drawing attention to the act of looking at a painting.
    • While self-aware, it is not self-critical or fully reflexive, as it doesn't critique the language of painting itself.
  • Modernism and Self-Criticism:
    • Modernism in the 19th century marks the shift from self-consciousness to self-criticism in art.

Modernism and Critique

  • Manet's Critique:
    • Édouard Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882) places the viewer in an uncertain position through perspective and gaze.
    • The painting's oddities, like the flat label on a bottle and blobby paint, challenge the compatibility of a picture and a painting.
  • Mallarmé's Visual Poetry:
    • Stéphane Mallarmé's poem A Throw of Dice (Un Coup de dés) uses the page as a field for text.
    • Lines are dispersed like elements in a picture, and different typefaces are employed.
    • Mallarmé aimed to embody 'subjects of pure and complex imagination or intellect'.
    • Paul Valéry described the poem as 'the form and pattern of a thought, placed for the first time in finite space'.
  • Conceptual Art's Goal:
    • 'Imaging' thought or consciousness became a primary aim of later Conceptual art.

Duchamp and the Readymades

  • Duchamp's Innovation:
    • Duchamp's readymades consistently questioned the definition of art itself.
  • Questions Raised:
    • Were readymades isolated examples of Conceptual art?
    • How were they received?
    • What did Duchamp intend with them?
    • What led to their emergence?

Cubism as a Precursor

  • Cubism's Role:
    • Cubism attempted to resolve the conflict between representation (illusion, depth) and presentation (pigments on fabric).
  • Picasso's Innovation:
    • In early 1912, Picasso created Still Life with Chair Caning, which incorporated a piece of printed oilcloth as chair caning.
    • This inclusion served to disrupt pictorial illusionism, simultaneously presenting both illusion and a 'real' thing.
    • The painting also features an eccentric rope frame and the letters 'JOU' (presumably part of 'journal'), linking to reality.
  • Cubism's Significance:
    • Introduction of everyday images and objects prefigures the use of the readymade.
    • Focus on epistemology, questioning representation and knowledge.
    • Disruption of viewer expectations.
    • Fusion of street life with studio art.
  • Literary Parallels:
    • Guillaume Apollinaire claimed his inkwell was a readymade.
    • He incorporated overheard conversations into his poems.

Duchamp's Rejection of Painting

  • Cubist Context:
    • By 1912, Duchamp was establishing himself as a Cubist painter.
  • Rejection at the Salon:
    • Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) was withdrawn from the Salon des Indépendents due to objections from Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger.
    • They felt it resembled Futurism and had 'too much of a literal title'.
    • The title was written on the canvas, which was deemed inappropriate for Cubism.
    • The committee stated, 'A nude never descends the stairs…a nude reclines.'
  • Duchamp's Reaction:
    • Duchamp realized the avant-garde could be as dogmatic as the academy.
    • He withdrew the painting and soon gave up painting.
  • Duchamp's Reasons:
    • He wanted to move away from the physical aspect of painting and focus on recreating ideas.
    • He emphasized the importance of the title to direct the mind.
    • He sought to put painting 'at the service of the mind'.
  • Critique of 'Stupid Painting':
    • Duchamp rejected not painting itself, but mindless painting.
    • He believed thinking (in words and images) was separate from making (in paint).
    • He opposed painting for painting's sake, considering it a tyranny.
    • He said, 'There was no thought…of anything beyond the physical side of painting. No notion of freedom was taught.'

The Genesis of the Readymade

  • New York Influence:
    • The idea of the readymade took shape after Duchamp moved to New York in 1915.
  • Early Prototypes:
    • As early as 1913, Duchamp fixed a bicycle wheel onto a stool.
    • In 1916, he had a replica made and decided it was a Readymade work of art'.
  • Duchamp's Description:
    • In 1915, he bought a snow shovel and wrote 'In advance of the broken arm'.
    • The word 'Readymade' came to mind to designate this form of manifestation.
  • Key Characteristics:
    • Choice was never dictated by aesthetic delectation.
    • Based on a reaction of visual indifference with a total absence of good or bad taste.
    • Complete anaesthesia.
    • Short sentences inscribed on the 'readymade' were meant to carry the mind of the spectator towards other regions more verbal.

Fountain: The Notorious Readymade

  • Background:
    • In 1916, New York artists formed the Society of Independent Artists to organize an annual exhibition.
    • They decided on a no-jury, no-censorship policy: any artist paying six dollars could exhibit.
    • The aim was to circumvent the conservatism of institutions like the National Academy of Design.
    • Directors included William Glackens, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and William Arensberg.
  • The Incident:
    • Just before the 1917 exhibition, Duchamp bought a urinal, placed it on its back, signed it 'R. Mutt', and submitted it.
    • 'R' stood for Richard (French slang for 'moneybags'), and 'Mutt' referred to Mutt and Jeff and J. L. Mott.
  • Controversy:
    • Glackens was horrified and deemed it indecent.
    • Arensberg argued that R. Mutt had paid the fee and that it should be shown, citing its aesthetic contribution and new approach by removing the object from its utility.
    • The directors voted not to exhibit the work.
  • Duchamp's Intention:
    • Duchamp wanted to test the organizers' principles.
    • The directors told the press it was 'by no definition a work of art'.
  • Duchamp's Reaction:
    • Duchamp resigned from the society.
    • He wrote to his sister that a 'female friend' under the pseudonym Richard Mutt submitted a porcelain urinal as a sculpture.
  • Louise Norton's Possible Authorship:
    • The possibility remains that Louise Norton was the true author of Fountain.
  • Stieglitz's Photograph:
    • Duchamp took the rejected object to Alfred Stieglitz, who photographed it in front of Marsden Hartley's painting The Warriors.
    • The flags in the background possibly referenced World War I.
    • The photograph was reproduced in The Blind Man magazine.
  • Defense of Fountain:
    • Beatrice Wood's editorial in The Blind Man questioned the grounds for refusal.
    • She argued it was not immoral, just as a bathtub isn't immoral.
    • She emphasized that Mutt CHOSE the object and created a new thought for it.
    • Louise Norton's article emphasized the object's beauty.
  • Duchamp's Expectation:
    • Duchamp expected and sought scandal.
    • His aim was to test standards and initiate debate.
    • The debate is more important than the object itself, which disappeared soon after.
  • The Shock Factor:
    • The intention was to shock.

The Context of World War I

  • Critique of Culture:
    • World War I was being fought to defend culture and higher values.
    • German propaganda vilified Germans as barbarians.
    • This propaganda discredited the very 'culture' it was meant to support.
    • Young men were slaughtered in the trenches, doubting any higher justification.
  • Ezra Pound's Critique:
    • Ezra Pound questioned the war's value:
    • "There died a myriad And of the best, among them, For an old bitch gone in the teeth, For a botched civilization For two gross of broken statues, For a few thousand battered books."
  • Duchamp's Questioning:
    • Duchamp questioned the nature of art and culture itself.
  • Crisis of Authority:
    • Authority was not just political but also religious, sexual, and cultural.
    • Art, even Modernist art, was believed to stand for culture, decency, and high aspiration.
  • Anti-Authoritarianism:
    • Fountain was an anti-authoritarian object, questioning the definition of art.
    • By what authority could the directors of the Society reject it?
    • If they couldn't define art, what was their authority?

Precedents and Interpretations

  • Religious Relics:
    • The Catholic Church's treatment of saints' relics is a precedent for readymades.
    • Relics are treated as special, even talismanic.
  • Transubstantiation:
    • The wafer in the Catholic Church transformed into the body of Christ is the ultimate claim of authority.
    • James Joyce parodies it in Ulysses.
    • Blasphemy became a common strategy of early Modernism.
  • Commodity and Collecting:
    • Fountain was put up for sale, raising questions about objects as commodities and collecting.
    • Collecting has absorbed some of religion's function.
    • Walter Benjamin: 'the collector always retains some traces of the fetishist, and, by owning the work of art, shares in its ritual power'.
    • Collecting is about giving special significance to certain objects.
  • Marx's Fetishism of Commodities:
    • Karl Marx in Das Kapital (1867-94) described how commodities appear trivial but are 'a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties'.
    • Labor invested in a commodity makes it a social thing with a transcendental nature.
    • This creates a false mystique: 'In the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life…So it is in the world of commodities…This I call the Fetishism'.
    • Objects are overloaded with meanings and significance.
    • This false perception contributes to alienation.
  • Freud's Fetishism:
    • Sigmund Freud: fetishism occurs when a body part represents the whole, or an object substitutes for the body.
    • Sexual desire is misdirected at it.
    • Fetishism may be based on misapprehension and suggests an incomplete world.
  • Objects and Meaning:
    • Analyses of fetishism in Freud, Marx, and others show how objects can be uncanny and reveal how we understand the world.

Duchamp's Readymades

  • Duchamp's Oeuvre:
    • By 1921, Duchamp had made fifteen readymades, including:
      • Bicycle Wheel
      • Bottle Rack
      • Why Not Sneeze Rose Sélavy? (an 'assisted readymade')
      • LHOOQ (which sounds like 'She has a hot ass' in French)
  • Sexual Ambiguity:
    • Sexual ambiguity became a leitmotif in his work.
  • Varied Approaches:
    • Each work presented a different approach.
    • Duchamp avoided repetition and creating a 'style'.
  • Reciprocal Readymade:
    • A 'reciprocal readymade' would be using a Rembrandt as an ironing board - art becoming an everyday object.

Man Ray's Readymades and Dada

  • Man Ray's Approach:
    • Man Ray's readymades easily became illustrative, literary, or fetishistic.
    • One example is a plaster cast of a child's hand painted green and planted in a flowerpot, called a dream object'.
    • Man Ray freely made duplicates, emphasizing the concept over the making.
  • Cadeau (Gift):
    • In 1921, Man Ray made Cadeau (Gift): an iron with glued tacks.
    • It rendered both objects useless and had violent, erotic implications.
  • Dada's Origins:
    • Dada was initiated in Zurich in 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire as a protest against World War I.
    • Richard Huelsenbeck: 'We had found…that Goethe and Schiller and Beauty added up to killing and bloodshed and murder. It was a terrific shock to us.'
  • Dada's End:
    • By 1921, Dada was over, with participants becoming career artists, religious converts, or psychoanalysts.
  • Dada's Influence:
    • Henri Lefebvre: 'to the degree that modernity has a meaning…it carries within itself, from the beginning, a radical negation - Dada'.
    • Dada can be seen as a first wave of Conceptual art.
    • Surrealism, which followed, had different interests.
  • Extended Critique:
    • The critique of art extended beyond the readymade.
    • Conceptual strategies were established in the monochrome painting and anti-painting of Francis Picabia.
    • Deployment of outrage.
    • Desire to fuse media.
    • Analysis of word/image relationships.
    • Exploration of the exhibition as a spectacle.

The Climax in Russia and Beyond

  • Malevich's Black Square:
    • In 1914 in Russia, Kasimir Malevich painted a black square as an absolute statement of pure painting.
  • Rodchenko's Monochromes:
    • In 1921, Alexander Rodchenko painted three monochromes in primary colors as demonstrations of pure paint.
    • They were seen as a full stop to painting's history.
    • Understanding the artist's intentions is crucial.
    • This demystification freed artists to explore new media and socially useful roles.

Picabia's Deconstructions

  • The Cacodylic Eye:
    • Francis Picabia's The Cacodylic Eye (L'Oeil cacodylate) is both a deconstruction of painting and a painting.
    • Visitors were asked to sign or add something to a large canvas.
    • It was covered with signatures, puns, and an eye.
    • The title refers to a foul-smelling ointment.
    • The work caused a scandal at the 1921 Salon d'Automne.
    • One critic described it as the 'wall of a public urinal'.
    • Picabia defended it on the grounds that art was about choice: 'Art is everywhere…except with the dealers of Art, in the temples of Art, like God is everywhere, except in the churches.'
    • Picabia disclaimed the work as an expression of a unique artistic vision, stating that it was a site where many people could meet: 'Whereas I…am nothing, just Francis Picabia'.

The Dadaist Outrage

  • Extreme Acts:
    • Dadaists deliberately initiated extreme outrages to shock.
    • Tristan Tzara appalled Zurich dowagers by asking for directions to brothels.
    • The Surrealist Benjamin Peret publicly insulted Catholic priests.
    • This echoed the 'propaganda of the deed' by violent anarchists.
  • Rejection of Norms:
    • Outrage was a dismissal of the norm.
    • Revolution was demanded in private and political life.
  • Hugo Ball's Transgressions:
    • Hugo Ball flirted with drugs and sexuality.
    • He wanted to have sex with a girl's skull.
    • This recalls the 1909 anarchist rising in Barcelona, when convents were burned and a skeleton was danced with.
  • Carnivalesque Inversion:
    • The Dadaists wanted to initiate a carnival where the world was stood on its head.
  • Polite Outrage:
    • Picabia's Portrait of a Young American Girl in the State of Nudity (a spark-plug) was a sort of illustrative readymade.
    • The metaphor of the spark-plug as a woman was scandalous.
    • Her purpose was to 'spark', a synonym for desire or orgasm.
    • Sexuality was pervasive, transgressive, and contagious.
  • Machine Metaphor:
    • The machine was a recurrent metaphor for the person.
    • This was an attack on the humanist view of art and culture.

Performance and Cabaret

  • Rebellion:
    • In rebellion against easel paintings and traditional poetry, the Dadaists turned to performance and cabaret.
  • Multisensory Experience:
    • They demanded simultaneity and ecstasy rather than refinement of one sense in isolation.
  • Cabaret Voltaire:
    • Hans Arp: 'On the stage…are several weird and peculiar figures…Total pandemonium. The people around us are shouting, laughing…Our replies are sighs of love, volleys of hiccups… Tzara is wriggling his bottom…Janco is playing an invisible violin…Madame Hennings…is doing the splits. Huelsenbeck is banging away nonstop at the great drum, with Ball accompanying him on the piano, pale as a chalky ghost.'

Dada Magazines and Language Critique

  • Fusing Media:
    • Dada magazines fused literary and visual elements.
    • Typography became dislocated and outlandish.
    • They were an attempt to make a visual/verbal equivalent of simultaneous performances.
    • They overturned the authority of traditional typography.
  • Critique of Language:
    • At the heart of Dada was a critique of language as supposedly transparent.
    • This continued in Surrealism, though less urgently.
  • René Magritte's Deconstructions:
    • René Magritte's Words and Images deconstructed the relationship between language and representation.

Dada's Attacks on the Exhibition

  • Subverted Displays:
    • The Dadaists attacked the nature of the exhibition itself.
  • Cologne Kunstverein Incident:
    • In 1919, Max Ernst and Johannes Baargeld were consigned to a separate room at the Cologne Kunstverein.
    • They included not only their work but also that of Sunday painters and children, as well as 'objets d'art' like an umbrella.
    • The staging of the exhibition became the artwork.
  • Brasserie Winter Exhibition:
    • In 1920, Ernst and Baargeld rented a courtyard at the Brasserie Winter in Cologne.
    • It could only be reached via the men's toilet.
    • Visitors were invited to destroy anything they didn't like.
    • This inverted the bourgeois exhibition and demanded active participation.
  • Rejection of the Artist Identity:
    • John Heartfield and George Grosz: 'The name of