Readymade Art

This research aims to answer the question of how the artwork of Jeff Koons, specifically in his series, The New, epitomizes the consumeristic culture of today’s society. The paper asserts that by using ordinary objects in provocative ways, Jeff Koons successfully creates suggestive sculptures reminiscent of the consumerism that has been prevalent since early 20th century America. Through the paradoxical scenario of elevating and celebrating ordinary goods to then sell them as “works of art,” a consumeristic microcosm is formed. Further, it provides quotes giving insight from Jeff Koons himself. Using mostly secondary sources, the research presented is a comprehensive look at The New and its theme of consumerism in America. Sources include magazine and newspaper articles, as well as published works, that focus on Jeff Koons as an artist, as well as image archives from various museums and auction houses. Written in subsections, this paper focuses on the background information, controversy, the readymade form of art, exhibited artworks, consumerism, real world parallels, the microcosm created by The New, and conclusive statements associated with The New series. After taking a general look at the artist and his work, a deeper look is taken into the specific series as well as how it fits in to the context of modern consumerism. Comparison to modern day retail stores is given in relation to Bed Bath & Beyond. Using historical fact and critical analysis, Koons’ work is evaluated from a consumeristic point of view.

This book explores the readymades of Marcel Duchamp from different perspectives in three parts: In the “Ready- made Index,” we study the origins and consistency of Duchamp’s  concept  during  the  first  50  years  of  the ‘Readymade Century’ from 1914 to 1964. In the second part, “Readymade Exposition,” we follow the reception history of that concept, which still continues long after Duchamp’s death. A hinge between these two halves of the ‘Readymade Century’ is offered by Duchamp’s edition of his readymades as multiples, as well as Andy Warhol’s exhibition of his Brillo Boxes. Simultaneously yet independently, these two events in 1964 mark a turn- ing point midway through the ‘Readymade Century.’ They  still  have  a  direct  impact  on  today’s  artistic practices of the “already made,” even on artists that may not see themselves in the tradition of Duchamp’s readymades. The development and expansion of the readymade concept is discussed in the book’s epilog, “Readymade Contemporary.”"

With a contribution by Olaf Nicolai

Graphic Designer: Dan Solbach, http://dansolbach.ch/

2017 marks the centenary of an artwork judged to be the single most influential of the twentieth century: Marcel Duchamp’s famous “readymade” entitled Fountain. The final verdict on Fountain has been widely accepted, despite the fact that the circumstances surrounding “Mr. Richard Mutt” have never resembled an open-and-shut case. On the contrary, since Fountain’s appearance in 1917, when it was rejected as “a plain piece of plumbing” only to be subsequently celebrated as a work of conceptual art, numerous questions remain unanswered, several facts remain unexplained.
Now, one hundred years later, Robert Kilroy attempts to answer these questions by examining the evidence with fresh eyes. Central to the investigation is the primary witness – Duchamp himself – whose statements are forensically analyzed. The facts themselves are interrogated using the methodology of a detective: precisely speaking, an art historical approach with a critical edge sharpened by a new interpretation of psychoanalytic theory.
In weaving an alternative narrative, Kilroy shows us that, not only has Fountain been fundamentally misunderstood, this very misunderstanding is central to the work’s significance. The final verdict, he argues, was strategically stage-managed by Duchamp in order to expose the apparatus underpinning Fountain’s reception, what he terms “The Creative Act.” By suggesting that a specific aesthetic “crime” has gone unnoticed, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain: One Hundred Years Later asks the reader to radically reassess his/her precise contribution to “the creation of art.” This urgent, if somewhat troubling question, could have far-reaching implications for the field of scholarship, the course of contemporary art and the discipline of Art history.

Marcel Duchamp’s controversial decision to produce an edition of replicas of his best-known readymades in 1964 remains one of the more puzzling and unexpected moves in a career already identified with defiance and provocation. Duchamp’s decision to sell reproductions of the readymades challenged his own customarily anti-commercial approach to art, eliciting unfavorable responses from his contemporaries and followers. In this article I intend to demonstrate that the 1964 edition of the readymades was the culmination of a series of events that motivated Duchamp to more firmly establish himself as the foundation of the Pop art movement. Duchamp’s decision to create an edition of the readymades also came shortly after he first met Andy Warhol in Pasadena in 1963, at which time Duchamp would certainly have been thinking about his legacy and how it would come to measure up against the new generation of appropriation artists. It is also impossible to consider these replicas without taking into account that they were produced during Pop’s meteoric rise. With this study, I hope to emphasize that the reciprocal impact of Pop on Duchamp is just as important in shaping our current understanding of the readymade.

Ever since Marcel Duchamp devised his 'readymades' in the early twentieth century, the majority of the critical literature on artworks that comprise readymade and found objects focuses on the commodity status of these items and the critique of consumer culture. This session, instead, invites papers that explore the links between found object-based sculpture and its relationship to the economies and technologies of production in industrial and postindustrial metropolitan areas-as Anne Wagner has argued, the history of sculpture is in constant dialogue with the history of technologies of production. From the dominance of industrial zones in early twentieth-century modern cities around the world to the waning of industry, the emergence of service-based economies and the growth of the financial sectors in postindustrial, postmodern urban areas, this panel explores how artistic practices that incorporate found objects negotiate the shifting texture of cities on the level of the street, the neighborhood, the workplace, the local store, real estate and urban life. This panel encourages the participation of art historians, curators, museum professionals, artists and theorists whose work and scholarship encompass the study of readymades, found objects, and simulated everyday objects in modern and contemporary sculpture and explore its links to obsolete and emerging technologies and sites of production in the context of industrial and postindustrial cities worldwide.

* Please send proposals for a paper including title, abstract (250 words maximum) and a short bio to Dr Natasha Adamou at adamou.natasha@gmail.com

For more information concerning the conference, see: http://www.collegeart.org/programs/conference/

Robert Walser schuf zweckfreie Kombinationen von trivialen Gegenständen und erhob sie zum ‚anderen’ Kunstwerk — etwas der Begriff „gefundener Gegenstand“ genau auf den Punkt bringt. Er verwendet mehrere Erscheinungsformen dieser Konzeption und das sogar häufig innerhalb eines kurzen Textes von vier Absätzen.  Diese Prosaskizzen haben Besuche, Spaziergänge oder Reisen zum Gegenstand, deren episodische Struktur des Erlebens die Reduktion des Erzählens motiviert.  In den zwei früheren Texten, Asche, Nadel, Bleistift, und Zündhölzchen und Reisekorb, Taschenuhr, Wasser und Kieselstein, konzentriert sich jeder Absatz zum größten Teil auf einen Gegenstand, aber verfeinert eigentlich die Sorgsamkeit des Schreibens. Die Struktur setzt sie der Zerstreuung gegenüber, in deren Gewand die beschriebenen Gegenstände plötzlich auftauchen.

Visual Art in the C20th could be divided into two main categories – figurative or non-figurative art – the former, representations of recognisable imagery, the latter, abstraction. A 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 . 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. 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.

A theory that Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ was in fact conceived by Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven can now be definitively discounted with the discovery of an unpublished reminiscence by Louise Varèse that reveals her crucial role in helping Duchamp submit the work to the Society
of Independent Artists in 1917.

It is a commonplace in certain areas of art theory and contemporary art practices to consider Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades as ordinary objects, which have an artistic value that depends more on a theoretical or institutional framework than on an aesthetic experience. The aim of this paper is, on the one hand, to show the historical emergence of these artifacts on the light of the impact of the industrial production in avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century. Discussing Walter Benjamin' s and Jean Brun's insights, it argues that Duchamp's practice has an explanatory principle, both in the mechanical reproduction of the work of art and in the aestheticization of the machine. On the other hand, it brings forward some observations regarding Duchamp's insight on the "total lack of good or bad taste" and the perceptual dimension of a sculptural object as the Large Glass, coming back to Arthur Danto's interpretation of ready-mades and to the notion of "implementation" introduced by Nelson Goodman to define "the process of bringing about the aesthetic functioning that provides the basis for the notion of a work of art".

The many permutations of modern art can be viewed as strategies to cope with the threat of obsolescence. The threat from the industrialisation of method and materials challenged painting’s claim to social utility as constructor of resemblances. Consequently, painting changed its "regulations", and was followed by a challenge to the definition of “art”. The readymade was one such strategy. It copes with these threats by completely upturning any ordinarily intuitive idea of aesthetic judgement. This is the challenge to the “retinal” or “physical” aspects of art. Whilst this has great intellectual significance, Duchamp, as its flagbearer, still owes much to the “retinal” in his conceptual steps. This amounts to a crossover with Kantian aesthetics. A history of the readymade will be given, with mention to Dada's two primary schools. It will be argued that a Kantian or "objective" aesthetics is able to accommodate the readymade without the need for Thierry de Duve's "Duchampian substitution". It is suggested that the substantive leap from readymade to “art” is unnecessary and this does not harm the importance of Duchamp's work. This will be investigated with respect to two of Duchamp’s works: In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915) and Trébuchet (1917).

This paper seeks to explore the enduring rhetorical impact of Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” created in 1917. The research presented stems from theories and findings in various disciplines including art history, sociology,
psychology, as well as rhetoric and composition. While there is a brief presentation of the artist and formal qualities of the work, emphasis is placed on the reception of “Fountain” and the semiotic structures that led to the audience’s complex reaction. I assert that Duchamp’s work initially drew fierce attention because it disrupted the audience’s capacity to make meaning based on established structures and upended traditional rhetor-spectator expectations. This “thing-power” chaos compounded as stupefied academic and artistic bystanders attempted to explain its “curious ability...to animate, to act, to produce effects [both] dramatic and subtle" (Gries). In many regards, “Fountain” finds itself in conflict with many other works of art even though the original was never publicly displayed. The artist “had chosen a urinal in part because he thought it had the least chance of being liked” (Bennett) However, it continues to hold tremendous power in our cultural consciousness largely because it created a chaotic rhetorical situation.

This is a supplementary text for the exhibition called HANEDEN / HOUSEHOLD and therefore should be reviewed together with the exhibited works. In this text, the concepts of home and domestic objects are examined through the artworks exhibited. Based on research in the fields of psychology, consumer studies and art, I intend to elaborate on the relationship of the individual with the object(s) in the light of various novels that are being selected on the basis of the personal relationship between the characters and the domestic objects. The quotes from novels act as unfamiliar agents in the same way that domestic objects became unfamiliar or estranged when placed in an exhibition space. When a domestic object is detached from its habitat (home) to an art space, the scent of the object changes as well. As Freud mentioned in his famous 1919 essay on the uncanny, the familiar object, described as heimlich, becomes the unfamiliar, un-heimlich, uncanny. The role of a person also changes from the user of an object to the viewer of an art object in this situation. This process of defamiliarization takes place in the form of novel quotes to illustrate what is explained in terminology throughout the text. By creating sort of a mise en abyme with exhibiting domestic objects in the first place and connecting the writing about them with literary quotes that are equally having an effect of estrangement, “art removes objects from the automatism of perception.” (Shklovsky 1917)

Conceptual readymades-a contemporary artist's use of a classical work selected as a key point of reference taken out of time-have developed in recent years as part of contemporary art's appropriation of Greco-Roman statuary. This investigation argues that a contemporary artist's use of the classical does not represent 'copies' but cultural readymades. Contemporary digital and sculptural work foregrounding the classical sheds light on the parallel phenomenon whereby Roman reinterpretations of Greek sculpture may have been equivalent to contemporary classicism. Contemporary case studies featuring digital media, generative art, and sculpture are approached both from the perspective of what they can reveal about contemporary art's use of the classical and what contemporary art's use of classical sculpture can suggest about Roman reinterpretations as cultural readymades. Remade as part of contemporary art, classical sculpture is uniquely positioned as an accessible point of reference with which to comment on our own time by concurrently reframing the past.

A consideration of the author's Museum of Forgery as a continuation of a line of institutional critique that traces back to Marcel Duchamp. The author examines specific programs of the Museum of Forgery, especially "excessioning" (the practice of creating works for other artists' oeuvres) and "do-it-yourself forgeries," which merge the self-skilling of traditional crafts  with the taboo practice of creating marketable fakes. Published in: Tout-Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal, vol. 4, # 2 (2002) .

Ernest Becker described society as a symbolic action system designed to serve as a vehicle for earthly heroism. He advocates for a 'creative solution', which suggests that heroism can manifest itself objectively, through artworks. By further developing this idea (doubled by a Durkheimian perspective, and given that things can be people-like), I argue that some things can become heroic when being archived or put on display. Like heroic individuals, heroic objects are privileged things that distinguish themselves among stuff that goes unnoticed, while also being the central points of earthly heroic systems. Instead, heroic objects constrain the individuals to relate to them in a specific contemplative way, gaining cult value through exhibition. This used to be the case for relics and hero remains, but also the standard metre bar, which Marcel Duchamp cleverly ridiculed, underlining the contingent nature of cultural archived truths. Therefore, after broadly discussing heroic objects, I will narrow it down to the case of the standard metre and the readymades, further developing the idea of things becoming heroic objects.

This article proposes a history of the use of reproduced images in art that attends to the interruptions of productivist models of artistic creativity and cultural value. Situating work by Manet, Duchamp and Warhol in relation to forms of institutional and social censure and approval of kinds of art and spectatorship, the article explores moments in the history of the reconstruction of the Western, in relation to the Far East, post-World War I reconstruction and cultures of post-World War II US immigration, and the ways in which their work citing images made for reproduction witnesses these orientational tensions. Further consideration of work by Sherrie Levine and İnes Doujak, referring to discourses and practices of motherhood and to the history of art, shows how these women artists press these issues further to expose the politics of the female body as model, continuing to re-open idealisms and idealisations of Western art to its others.

Garvin Sierra desvela algunas de las claves para descifrar Y líbranos del Malamén, una exhibición valiente en la que reflexiona sobre los males que permean en las entrañas de la sociedad puertorriqueña./ Garvin Sierra reveals some of the keys to decipher Y líbranos del Malamén [And Deliver Us From Evyl, Amen], a courageous exhibition in which he reflects on the evils that permeate in the bowels of the Puerto Rican society.

Published on the conference proceedings website:
http://frontiercountry.blogspot.com/search/label/Synthetic%20Dirt

ABSTRACT:

Two recent conceptually linked works by the author, employing dust as vehicle and metaphor for the challenging of established values and meanings attached to the archive, form the basis of this paper. The horizontal cornice surfaces of the Johannesburg Art Gallery’s (JAG) exhibition halls bear testimony to the fact that dust – in its cumulative undisturbed presence – effortlessly bridges the constructed divides between colonial, apartheid and post-apartheid space. The first work (Accumulation #1, 2010) was made for the 2010 show, Time’s Arrow: Live Readings of the JAG Collection.(1) It uses the pervasive ‘apolitical’ nature of dust – specifically the more or less 100 year old accumulation of dust on the above-mentioned museum cornices – to interrogate and undermine the traditionally measured and ascribed notions of value attached to the contents of the museum archive. Further the work embodies a response to the exhibition curator’s interest in notions of ‘excavation, doubling and reversal.’
The second work discussed here (Accumulation #2, 2010), unpacks the initial work and continues an ongoing engagement with alternative readings and probings of conventional definitions of the archive situated within the author’s current and broader interest, of a critical-spatial pursuit of the ‘undoing’ of site-specific architectural spaces. Dust is not selected or selective – it is uninvited and invasive and forces its way into every nook and cranny of the recognisable and recognised archive. It is uncannily unsettling in its main characteristic – its tendency to settle. In its stubborn omnipresence it prefers the horizontal position of rest to the vertical surface of display. It is in and of the world and, in the Bourriaudian sense, relational to the core. Ironically, its unstoppable, accumulating and viral presence is the most alive aspect of the dead museum and dead archive. In a sense, it represents a permanently persistent homage to Kasimir Malevich’s 1919 call (in On the Museum) for the reduction of museums and their collections to space-saving powder (via his suggested burning of everything old and outdated, to make way for the new). Dust is ambiguously and simultaneously peripheral and central. It is not to be underestimated: its mostly marginal connotations recently slipped into a radically central position – in its ashen Icelandic form – inflicting prolonged global paralysis on the world’s transport systems. Dust ‘reminds’ the increasingly synthetic world that it is real, and longs to make the virtual world more real – perhaps, through its particle nature, it could ‘learn’, through the ultimate nth degree of pulverisation, to infiltrate the virtual and in so doing, at last, alchemically link the two realms.

(1) For an overview of the exhibition, visit: http://www.timesarrowatjag.blogspot.com/

Cet article se propose de mesurer l’apport des propositions théoriques d’Anne-Marie Christin sur l’image de l’écrit à l’étude de ce que nous appelons les « poésies ready-made ».  Défini comme l’équivalent poétique d’un type d’œuvre inventé par Marcel Duchamp, le poème « ready-made » procède d’un geste de prélèvement et de déplacement d’un élément a priori non poétique (objectal, iconique ou textuel) dans un cadre qui se donne pour tel. Or l’importation dans le domaine poétique d’images ou de textes relevant d’autres champs discursifs et pragmatiques, coïncide dans la majorité des cas avec un changement de medium : partant, le geste de prélèvement/déplacement dont procède le ready-made contribue à une mise à nu des propriétés matérielles du poème, de celles de son support comme de sa visualité propre, typographique et graphique : l’image de l’écrit s’y donne à voir. Ce qu’Anne-Marie Christin perçoit comme une propriété de l’écriture mise en sourdine dans notre civilisation de l’alphabet, se voit ainsi ravivé par certaines pratiques avant-gardistes sur le mode de la radicalisation. Nous tenterons de décrire comment le cadre théorique des travaux de la fondatrice du Centre d’Etude de l’Ecriture et de l’Image nous a permis d’appréhender des objets poétiques qu’une approche textualiste ne pouvait que manquer.