Lecture #2: IN SEARCH OF FOUND OBJECTS INTRODUCTION Visual Art in the C20th could be divided into two main categories – figurative or non-figurative art – the former, representations of recognisable imagery, or the latter, abstraction. A comic strip parody of a modern artist in the studio often depicts the artwork as a dynamic array of lines, shapes and colours - Abstract Art - which has come to characterise the fundamental changes in C20th art. However, an equally radical, fundamental change was wrought in early C20th sculpture by the introduction of the readymade, also known as the found object, or ‘object trouvé’, as a means of representation The first readymade sculpture was made by Marcel Duchamp in 1914 in Paris, the ‘Bottlerack’. It was preceded by ‘Bicycle Wheel’ in 1913 when, he said, he attached a bicycle wheel to the seat of a stool so he could watch it turn. He did not intend this to be an art object but rather a soothing play thing to have around the studio. In 1914 he purchased a bottle rack, inscribed it and called it a sculpture. In an interview he said the readymade reduced ‘the idea of aesthetic consideration to the choice of the mind, not the ability … of the hand’. (1953, Harriet, Sydney and Carroll Janis, unpublished).. Rather than the artist fabricating sculpture, from scratch, using raw materials such as marble or wood as the medium to fashion a realistic depiction of their subject, representations of the subject in three dimensions were abandoned for the real thing. Traditional subjects for sculpture - the human form - sometimes dressed, sometimes nude, sometimes accessorised with objects, sometimes just the head, or bodies with bits broken off, the human form sitting on an animal, or sometimes animals by themselves, such as horses and dogs, elephants and tigers - were rejected. ‘Things’ as the subject of sculpture leapt out of paintings where they were happily called ‘Still Life’, out of the shop windows and off the shelves, out of the garbage bin, factory and workshop, out of the kitchen, into the gallery, to be called Art. Making sculpture became a search for the right object, which was then manipulated, re-contextualised and ‘branded’ as Art. Banal things from people’s ordinary lives became both the subject and medium of sculpture. Art movements, such as Dada, Surrealism, Pop Art, Arte Povera and Fluxus onto today’s culturally blended, figurative art rest on this radical move away from the manipulation of traditional, raw materials to the found object. In this lecture we will look at artists from each of these art movements to introduce the changing ideas and motivations underlying the selection of objects by artists and the expansion of subjects worthy of the label, Art. DADA: NAUGHTY BAD BOYS AND GIRLS 1. Marcel Duchamp, ‘Rrose Sélavy’: Duchamp’s female alter ego. The most notorious readymade sculpture is called ‘Fountain’. It is a urinal purchased from a plumbing shop, laid on its back on a plinth and crudely signed, ‘R. Mutt’ on its outer rim. Attribution could be disputed Jones, Amelia, ‘Irrational Modernism: a Neurasthenic History of New York Dada’, MIT Press, 2004, P. 42. The Dada movement’s love of puns may support this attribution to Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven, – in German, the signature R. Mutt is a pun for ‘poverty’, or ‘Armut’. . Marcel Duchamp wrote in a letter [April 11th, 1917] to French Dada artist, Suzanne Duchamp Camfield, W.A., ‘Suzanne Duchamp and Dada in Paris’, from ‘Women in Dada: Essays on Sex ,Gender and Identity’, ed. Sawelson-Gorse, 1998, MIT Press. P 82., [also his sister]: ‘One of my women friends, using a masculine pseudonym, Richard Mutt, submitted a porcelain urinal as a sculpture’. The woman friend was Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven, a member of the New York Dada movement The Dada movement was formed in Zurich by German refugees, Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings in 1916 as a revolt against Western civilisation which the Dada artists saw as the cause of the horrific war. Lemoine, S., ‘Dada’, 1987, Art Data. P 10., and the exhibition referred to was the Society of Independents in New York. This exhibition was meant to be an unselected show, all artworks shown on the payment of a fee, as a rebuke to the censorship of experimental work that occurred at that time. However, the hanging committee refused to exhibit the controversial piece. ‘Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that article’.’ D’Harnoncourt, A., McShine, K. [ed.], ‘Marcel Duchamp’, 1973, Museum of Modern Art, NY., Philidelphia Museum of Art. P 283. 2. Marcel Duchamp, ‘Fountain’, 1917. Photo, Alfred Steiglitz Was submitted to the jury free Independent’s exhibition but suppressed by the hanging committee… an anonymous article in the second issue of ‘The Blind Man’ (published in May 1917 by Duchamp, Beatrice Wood and H. P. Roché, [defended the piece]: ‘Now Mr. Mutt’s fountain is not immoral, that is absurd, no more than a bath tub is immoral. It is a fixture that you see every day in plumbers’ show windows’. The ‘new title’, ‘Fountain’, refers of course to a traditional context where sculpture is seen. It also refers, scatologically, to men’s ‘fountain’ of piss in the context of its modern, mechanised, sanitised removal. Its ‘placement’ was to put it in an art gallery, on a plinth or column, and ‘point of view’ was to turn it on its back to emphasise its function as a vessel, womb-like, therefore blurring its association with the masculine, AND to sign it in the traditional way. In these ways the urinal was manipulated to become a work of art. The work entitled ‘God’ by Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven of the same year, 1917, made from an up-side down wooden mitre box [rationality over turned?] with a cast iron plumbing trap mounted on it [twisted phallus? trap for garbage? drain for abject fluids?] is similarly irreverent. Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, [with possible collaboration of Morton Schamberg], ‘God’, 1917; wood mitre box, cast iron plumbing trap, 10 !/2 x 115/8 x 4 in. Dada was defined as a movement against the tragic back drop of the 1st World War trench warfare. Both these pieces, ‘Fountain’ and ‘God’, reflect disaffection with paradigms of European glory, asserted by war propaganda. Sculpture as a hand made, unique object, their parody of Art’s exclusive value and elite status, the urinal’s absurdity as a precious art object, the subversive ambiguity of the Fountain’s attribution, - the piece after all has a fictional signature irrespective of the true identity of its maker, the anarchist spirit and pacifism of the artists, characterised the Dada manifesto. The snubbing of convention, the breaking of bourgeoise taboos related to the body and its abject functions, the bending of gender, and the use of machines and ordinary mass produced, industrial products as mediums for art making In ‘Assembling Art: the Machine and the American Avant-Garde’, Barbara Zabel discusses the influence of Jazz and Afro-American culture on Dada artists, particularly Man Ray. See Chapter 7, ‘The ‘Jazzing’ of the American Avant-Garde’., come together in the ‘Fountain’, and ‘God’, to exemplify the objectives of Dada artists. 3. Marcel Duchamp, ‘L.H.O.O.Q’. 1919. Rectified readymade: pencil on a reproduction, 7 1/4 x 4 7/8 inches. The title is a French pun of dubious taste, ‘She has a great arse’. SURREALISM Similarly, the Surrealist artists defied convention, questioning the ability of the human mind to grasp reality, - the nature of fantasy, the imagination, sexuality and dreams, the reality of the irrational sub conscious mind were the subjects of their art. By implication, the new science, psychology Breton, André, ‘Manifestoes of Surrealism’, 1924, trans. Richard Seavert & Helen R. Lane, Uni. Of Mitchigan Press. P 10., the insanity of war (World War 1) and the strictures of the social conventions of the times - class division, formal etiquette, elitism and prudish morality were addressed by the Surrealists. After the appearance of the Surrealist poets (Lautrémont, Rimbaud, Mallarmé): ‘…the idea of what is forbidden and what is allowed adopted its present elasticity, to such a point that the words family, fatherland, society… seem to us now to be so many macabre jests’ Breton, André, ‘Surrealism and Painting’, 1928, (extracts) (Chipp, ‘Theories of Modern Art’.. The Surrealist artists’ strategy was to juxtapose unlikely yet ordinary images, objects and materials to make works that, like dreaming, confound rational analysis. Meret Oppenheim’s ‘Déjeuner en Fourrure’ (Breakfast in Fur) 1936, purchased on its first showing in Paris for the newly founded Museum of Modern Art in New York, became an emblem of Surrealism ‘Meret Oppenheim: Defiance in the Face of Freedom’, 1989, Parkett Publishers, catalogue, ICA, London. Pp 39 –40. Bice Curiger, essay, ‘Defiance in the Face of Freedom’, P 9-. . 4. Meret Oppenheim, ‘Déjeuner en Fourrure’ (Breakfast in Fur) 1936. Photo: Man Ray A large, plain cup, saucer and spoon were purchased from the Parisian department store, Uniprix, then covered with the fur of a Chinese gazelle. As Meret is not a common name in America the Swiss artist was commonly assumed to be a man. She went on producing work in relative obscurity until the 1970s when she was (re)discovered and honoured by feminist researchers. In her contributions to feminist discussions she insisted, ‘The mind is androgenous’ ‘Meret Oppenheim: Defiance in the Face of Freedom’.. Androgenous or not, the mind was used by the Surrealists as a means of relinquishing the masterly control of medium and content traditionally a prerequisite for the production of Fine Art. A technique known as ‘stream of consciousness’, where the mind is allowed to wander freely on an inconsequential train of thought was used to conjure artworks and poetry by creating a direct conduit to the ‘sub conscious mind’. Chance was also used to determine the composition, calibrations, and content of works. ‘This’, wrote Tristan Tzara, ‘is not all modern. It is more in the nature of a return to an almost Buddhist religion of indifference’. Doris, D. T., ‘Zen Vaudeville: a Medi(t)ation in the Margins of Fluxus’, quoting Tristan Tzara, from George Brecht’s discussion of chance from ‘Chance Imagery’, A Great Bear Pamphlet, New York, Something Else Press, 1964, p 3. From ‘The Fluxus Reader’, Friedman, K., [ed], Academy Editions, 1999. P 93. FLUXUS As in ‘flux’, - flowing; changing; fusion; inconstant; variable; excessive bodily discharge. Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary. Both Surrealism and Dada were the conceptual origins of the Fluxus Movement, which, throughout the 50s, 60s and into the 70s to now, carried forward ideas that critiqued definitions of sanity, the social, and reality, in Europe and America – against the backdrop of the Cold War and the testing of thermonuclear weapons, the rapid expansion of television and global communications, the lucrative commercialisation of modern art, the war in Vietnam, and unprecedented economic expansion in Europe and America, with the accompanying promotion of materialistic conformity related to increasing consumerism. The Fluxus movement could be seen as the first global avant garde movement with participants from Japan, Korea, France, Germany, Czechoslavakia, Denmark and the USA Doris, D. T., ‘Zen Vaudeville: a Medi(t)ation in the Margins of Fluxus’, from ‘The Fluxus Reader’, Friedman, K., [ed], Academy Editions, 1999.. Zen Buddhism, a philosophical practice from Japan and Korea was being taught in American universities by Japanese lecturers, and had a great influence on many Fluxus artists. The Fluxus poets, musicians and artists formed a loose affiliation across the Atlantic, mainly in New York and Germany, where artists met united by common philosophical ideas about the cathartic role of art Emmett Williams, American Fluxus poet, told me in 1981 he was conscripted into the USA army and sent to occupied Germany, met like-minded German artists there and ended up staying in Germany as a Fluxus artist/poet.. For example, Joseph Beuys, a German Fluxus artist, considered himself a sharman, symbolically healing his country’s psyche after the devastating lunacy of the Third Reich. They organised interdisciplinary events and ‘happenings’, often in public places to the astonishment of on-lookers confronted by heights of freedom from social constraint, acute body consciousness, and absurdity – such as musicians smashing their instruments rather than playing them; adults throwing eggs and butter at each other ( see below). Continuing from Dada and Surrealist precedents, artists relinquished control, using chance as a central determinant in the performance (action) of art Ibid, p 92, 93.. FOUND ACTIONS By the 1950s, authentic discourse, study and practice, rather than Eurocentric supposition and interpretation underpinned the influence of Buddhism Ibid, p 96. on Fluxus artists. For example, American composer, John Cage, attended lectures about Zen Buddhism by Daisetz Teiraro Suzuki at Columbia University from 1949 – 1951. His composition, ‘4’33’’’ exemplifies this influence. Here the pianist opens the lid of the piano but does not play for four minutes and thirty-three seconds then shuts the piano lid. Time, silence, incidental chance sounds are amplified, promoting a contemplation of the nature of music, nothingness, serendipity, and the ‘is-ness’ of the present moment. At this time artists absorbed Zen teachings about the impermanence of phenomena, the ‘substance’ of nothingness, and Zen Buddhism’s koans, or conundrums that are used to expand the thinking of novices towards the reality of the experiential rather than intellectualised ways of perceiving reality. Events were organised around instructions written on small pieces of paper [which are now collector’s items of course] such as Dick Higgins’s happening [1962] entitled ‘Danger Music Number Fifteen (For the Dance)’, where audience members were instructed to: ‘Work with butter and eggs for a time’ Ibid, p 100. Don’t try this at home. The author is still washing egg out of his hair. . Text could be seen as a ‘net’ used to catch meaning. The net [words, author, authority] is discarded and only the fish [meaning] is consumed Ibid. Metaphor from Chuang –Tzu, one of the founders of Taoism.. Playful humour was also an important aspect of Fluxus art, debunking the seriousness of traditional art. Performances you could try by yourself are: Takihisa Kosugi’s ‘Chironomy’. ‘Put out a hand from a window for a long time’. Ibid. P 103 for descriptions and discussion of the experience. Or, Alison Knowles, ‘Proposition’, [1962]: ‘Make a salad’. Ibid. p107, Or, Yoko Ono, ‘Wind piece, Make a way for the wind’. [Performed 1962]. Or Alan Watts, ‘f/h Trace, Fill French horn with rice bow to audience’ Or Nam June Paik’s, ‘Zen for Head’, in which he dipped his hair in ink and made calligraphic gestures across a piece of paper. INTERMEDIA Ibid Term first coined by Dick Higgens , Fluxus artist, to describe works that combine and allude to different media and therefore fall between media. Nan June Paik, a Korean artist, combined new technologies such as video and electronic sound with musical instruments and traditional animist performance from Korea, often collaborating with Charlotte Moorman, an American cellist and performance artist. Here she is seen ‘playing’ his naked body like a cello. 5. Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman 6. Charlotte Moorman playing June Nam Paik’s cello made of video monitors. 7. Nam June Paik’s cello made of video monitors. Perhaps Paik’s most famous installation is a life size statue of Buddha contemplating his own image on closed circuit television – amusingly irreverent yet drawing the ancient verities of Buddhism about illusion, delusion, into a contemporary context. Their performances exemplify the spirit of Fluxus – always a challenge to convention, the readymade, everyday object always at hand [as in these works, the ubiquitous TV], always absurd, often challenging perceptions of reality, often overtly sexual, often referencing Buddhist teachings, often collaborative, performative, corporeal, spontaneous, open to new media and innovative methods of presentation. POP ART http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hamilton_%28artist%29 We are talking the 50s & 60s here with the invention of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Mary Quant, Bridget Riley, Haight Ashbury, San Fransisco and Carnaby Row, London. Sexually explicit material, youth culture and the hedonistic life style of the affluent consumer were examined and presented as the stuff of art. Pop Art in America and Britain narrowed the division of art from life and broadened fine art’s domain Ibid. P 65.. Mass production, global marketing, the promotion of consumerism and capitalism’s bed partner, advertising, were perceived to be the new ‘landscape‘. Pop Art took the heavily encoded found object and depleted it of meaning to become a sign for the cultural dominance of commerce. Food becomes brands names and instant, infantalised pap; furniture becomes fantasy; cars become sex; women are desire; celebrities are marketing ploys; belongings are status, designer packaging – all is commodified. 8. Claes Oldenberg ‘Soft Fur Good Humors’, 1963. Fake fur filled with kapok, painted wood. Each 48.3 x 24 x 5.1. Pop artists used found objects, but also represented them as the ironically glorified subjects of their work, thereby completing the elevation of the mundane into the subject of art. Claus Oldenberg’s giant lipstick, his glass cabinets, vitrines, full of inedible food, and his soft sculpture, all parody the monumental, solidly respectable form of conventional sculpture to intensify consciousness of the dominance of hyped up ‘products’. 9. Claes Oldenberg, ‘Floor Burger (Giant Hamburger)’ 1962. Painted sailcloth stuffed with foam. 132 H x 213.4 diam. Pop artists also drew upon the strategies of the Surrealists, a ‘confounding of expectations’. McCarthy, D., ‘Pop Art,’ Tate, 2000. A succinct account of the Pop Art Movement in USA and Britain. Claes Oldenberg particularly loved to make small objects unusually large, hard objects soft. His cheesy, fake animal skin-covered furniture are frozen in perspective like three dimentional photo shoots. 10. Claes Oldenberg, ‘Bedroom Ensemble’, 1963. Like Dada artworks, Pop Art objects were displaced from the kitchen, supermarket shelves [a new way of marketing life sustaining products] lounge room, bed and bathroom into the art gallery or public place. An account of Pop Art, however brief, would not be complete without mention of Andy Warhol and the promotion of celebrity. Not only did he use mass media images of famous people as the subject of his art, such as Marilyn Monroe, Mao Tse Tung, Jackie Kennedy, Elvis Presley, he also promoted himself as an ‘Art Star’, in their league – a new thing in the visual arts. Warhol’s one liner that everyone would be famous for fifteen seconds, made in 1968, the year Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated propelling their murderers to notoriety, Ibid. Chapter 4, Fame. was an acknowledgement of the new phenomenon of ordinary people, for a blazing moment - often for the slightest of reasons - becoming the intense focus of mass media. Andy Warhol’s silk screens of race riots, the electric chair, car crashes; his ‘200 Campbell’s Soup Cans’; Richard Hamilton’s celebrity drug bust, ‘Swinging London 67’, showing hand cuffed Mick Jagger and art dealer, Robert Fraser; James Rosenquist’s ‘I Love You With My Ford’; Jasper John’s targets and flags, suggest both ironic and fearful eyes on events of the time. ARTE POVERA The artists of the Arte Povera movement in Italy, ‘poor art’, were identified as a group and named in 1967 by Germano Celant, Italian art critic and curator, who referred their work to the experimental, ‘poor theatre’ of Poland’s Jerzy Grotovski. ‘Arte Povera: Art from Italy 1967 – 2002’, catalogue, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2002. Carolyn Christov-Bakergiev, ‘Arte Povera circa 1967 to Today’. The Arte Povera artists assembled lowly readymade objects and materials to make, what later became known as ‘installations’ of penetrating philosophical intent, often directed at a clash of new world values represented by cast off consumer items and junk juxtaposed with symbols of sacrosanct European heritage. Raw materials, live animals, plants and food, rubbish, were often exhibited in palaces, venerable museums and galleries, the context of the artworks completing the conceptual reading and sensibility. The artists’ childhoods were over shadowed by the wreckage of Italy post World War II – bombed and abandoned buildings, destroyed infrastructure, poverty, the economy a shambles, death, the disabled, and mass migration – yet everywhere layered evidence of other wars, other civilisations, other cultural milestones, other catastrophes, the country’s memory, its powerful legacy. This was followed by reconstruction – the industrialisation of the north, the vigorous emergence of Italy as an innovator and design centre of Europe. 11. Giuseppe Penone, ‘Patate’, [Potato] 1977. Installation, variable dimensions. Bronze, potatoes. Penone caste parts of his body then attached a potato to the inside of each mould. He re-buried them, then dug them up when they had grown into the form of his body parts. He then caste these potatoes in bronze and exhibited them in a pile of real potatoes. ‘Nature … is artifice, is man-made [sic], is a cultural landscape’. Penone Ibid. p 101.. 12. Michelangelo Pistoletto, ‘Venus of Rags’, 1967. Mica-covered cement cast of Venus, cloth. Installation, dimensions variable. Arte Povera is theatrical in the sense that the viewer physically engages with large scale ‘productions’, precisely composed, or choreographed. The viewer interprets the ‘signs’ provided by the artist, as if participating in a mute narrative between unexpectedly juxtaposed, yet familiar objects: unsettling, transgressive, problematic, open, non specific ‘conversations’. The work is characterised by both a force of energy generated by fresh aesthetics that allude to decay, disorder, the ephemeral alongside the weight of gravity, materiality, and the shadow of conflicted historical murmurs. 13. Giovanni Anselmo, ‘Tortion’, 1968. Iron bar, fustian cloth. 160 cm x 160 cm. The weight of the bar along with the twisting of the cloth to its limit, held in tension by the wall, load the work with immense energy in metaphoric tension. All is contingently positioned, an art constructed upon an unstable, multiplicity of conceptual layerings. Celant describes this methodology as ‘nomadic’ Ibid, Germano Celant, p 23.. CONTEMPORARY CROSS CULTURAL ART This lecture, a cross cultural skip through a history of the found object, introduces developments in today’s art practice where it could be argued cultural definition has become porous and international art described as MacWorld Art, like MacDonald’s identical international eateries. Too cruel, for the most interesting international artists retain an emphatic sense of cultural identity whilst engaging in poetic art practices that speak incisively to concerns of universal significance. ‘Let all human races keep their own personalities, and yet come together, not in a uniformity that is dead, but in a unity that is living’. Rabindranath Tagore, Indian poet and Nobel Prize winner, 1924. [Shuyun, Sun, ‘Ten Thousand Miles without a Cloud’, 2004, Harper Perennial, London. P 229.] 14. Xu Bing, ‘Classroom Calligraphy’, 1995. The viewer learns ‘Square Word Calligraphy’, Xu Bing’s invented way of writing English words so they look like Chinese calligraphy. Xu Bing is continuing the ancient Taoist art form, Chinese calligraphy – graphic improvisation that had such an influence on the development of Abstract Expressionism. Post colonial issues are examined as a badge of identity, often presenting the tenets of Western Modernity back upon itself from the authenticity of its cultural origins. On the other hand, electronic technologies, highly researched and developed in Asia as commodities for Western markets, are the home grown vehicles for artists to examine interpolations upon traditional culture: Japanese woodcuts vis a vis Manga comics; calligraphy as a means of cultural critique; traditions of craft as the vehicle for social commentary; re-interpretations of enduring belief systems and social protocols; affirmations of traditional values. 15. Montien Boonma, ‘Sala for the Mind’, 1995. Asia/Pacific Triennial, Queensland Art Gallery. Boonma’s work is a contemporary exploration of Buddhism. The viewer may enter the cylindrical towers to find their head/hearing filled with sound, like a private reverberant chamber. Artists living under repressive regimes have risked their freedom speaking out against human rights abuses, social instability and corruption. Many now choose to live in exile. 16. Suh Do Ho. Hundreds of identical figures hold up an edifice. 17. Lee Wen, ‘Journey of the Yellow Man, No. 13: Fragmented bodies/shifting ground’, 1999, September, Brisbane. Performance/video. Many artists speak with a united voice about environmental issues, the human condition, metaphysical ideas, political ideologies, relationships between Art and Science, the erosion of identity and culture and homogeneity caused by globalism and the hegemony of mass communications. Artists quote each other’s cultural forms and practises to establish dialogue and deepen understanding. Parody, irony, improvisation and appropriation are commonly used as tools of critique and poetic insight. Amongst these methodologies the readymade object remains the starting point of many contemporary artists’ tool kits for visual representation. 18. Yayoi Kusama, ‘Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli’s Field [Or Floor Show]’ 1965. [reconstructed 1998]. Sewn stuffed fabric, plywood mirrors. Room measures 250 x 500 x 500 cm. FURTHER READING Sawelson-Gorse, N., [ed.] ‘Women in Dada: Essays on Sex ,Gender and Identity’, MIT Press, 1998,. Friedman, K., ‘The Fluxus Reader’, Academy Editions, 1999. Pinto, S., [ed], ‘A History of Italian Art in the 20th Century’, Skira editore, 2002. Zabel, B., ‘Assembling Art’, University Press of Mississippi. 2004. Mamiya, C., ‘Pop Art and Consumer Culture: America Super Market’, Austin, 1992. ‘The Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ catalogues. Queensland Art Gallery. ‘Xu Bing Words Without Meaning, Meaning Without Words’, Asian Art and Culture Series, pub., Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Instit., University of Washington Press. 2002. 14