An exegetical hermeneutical commentary on Marcel Duchamp's essay 'The Creative Act,' where Duchamp summarized his views on the nature of the creative process, the 'work' of art, and the roles played by artists, art participants, and posterity.
See Full PDF See Full PDFThis essay is a speculative attempt to draw some distinctions between four types of artistic agency, considered from the point of view of their signifying dimension: the symbolic effects of artistic actions rather than their physical ones. This is done by adapting four types of action talked about by Jacques Lacan. In order to show what is at stake in drawing these distinctions, I first bring the actions described by Lacan together in a diagram, to demonstrate the ways in which they are connecting to, and distinct from, each other. Having provided a gloss on this diagram, I present a second diagram, where the actions described by Lacan are replaced with equivalent actions in art. Keywords Agency Jacques Lacan The Act Social Practice Activist Art Institutional Critique
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This paper criticizes contemporary approaches to artistic creativity that tend to see everything as determined by the Duchamp, and conceptual idioms of art practice. As an alternative to this western consumerist model of artistic creativity, I develop ideas from Kant and Merleau-Ponty.
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The essential Marcel Duchamp; these are his own words. Collected from a range of interviews and published sources these statements are direct transmission; there is no interpretation. "By and About Marcel Duchamp" works symbiotically with, "ACETICaesthetic_ What Is Art" in the essay series "CHANGEchance_ The Duchamp Paradigm."
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Journal of Beliefs & Values
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MA Dissertation | Central Saint Martins
This paper takes its departure from philosophies of subjectivity and agency that have emerged from poststructural discourses, and meditates on how their theories might reimagine the identities of artist and artwork alike, and the relationship between them. It begins by considering philosophy as, not only background context, but an artistic material, that can be pliable and instrumental to an artist. Introducing performative accounts of identity formation, from Michel Foucault through to Jacques Derrida, I reimagine my own subjectivity as interpellated by a network of sensitive relations, and begin to visualise my agency as ‘disturbances in the causal milieu’ (Gell, 1998). I then argue that these theories of agency are applicable to artworks, or fictional agencies, and not only human subjects. An expanded concept of the line (in a drawing, a sound, a gesture) is introduced to explore an artwork’s capacity to inhabit and exhibit ‘character’, which is contagious and transferable between agents, whether ‘artificial’ or ‘organic’. From there the paper becomes a platform to consider an experimental art practice, taking a novel I am writing as a proposition for such an art experiment, where the distinctions between the agencies of real maker and artificial character are blurred and challenged. This leads me to conclude in asking questions I may previously not have thought askable, such as: to what extent is something as close to home as the human mind, written; inscribed by ancient grooves of genetic memory, articulated by chains of DNA text and ventriloquisedby a culture of stories? And, is it possible to write a person? My research addresses how art, narrative and fiction might contribute to and extend contemporary studies of subjectivity and self-representation.
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Marcel Duchamp and the Art of Life (MIT Press, November 2019)
Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) drew on a wide range of sources for his art, from science and mathematics to philosophy. Largely overlooked, until now, have been Asian spiritual practices, including Indo-Tibetan tantra. The new book Marcel Duchamp and the Art of Life (MIT Press 2019) presents evidence that Duchamp's version of artistic realization was grounded in western interpretations of Asian mind training and body energetics designed to transform erotic energy into mental and spiritual liberation. This groundbreaking reading of Duchamp argues that his work was informed by an energetic spiritual practice that identified creativity with the erotic impulse. For Marcel Duchamp, art making was part of an esoteric continuum grounded in eros, a process of making available to the initiated viewer an attitude toward creativity not talked about and unmarketable, but which he believed constitutes "the basis of everything." Understanding Duchamp requires not so much knowledge as a certain attitude of mind. His art asks us to unlearn what we think we know, both about art and about life, in order to be open to experience.
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Introduction on RELIEF Revue Electronique de Littérature Française, 2016, volume 10, issue 1
Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) has a peculiar status in the art world. This is, of course, mainly due to the revolutionary concept of the readymade – a concept that has effectively undermined the meaning of the word ‘art’. Duchamp has since then mainly been looked upon as an iconoclast, an artist who aimed at destroying the arts from inside out. It would however be a serious mistake to play down his contribution to the arts to a dadaist conception of destruction. First of all Duchamp never looked upon his readymades as traditional works of art. As a tool the readymade was an ambiguous conception, aimed at the overall importance that was contributed to aesthetics in the valuation of art. Duchamp stressed the importance of personal experience, personal judgement, free from handed down aesthetic values. Secondly the readymade was intended to undermine the idea that a work of art is solely to be looked at. Duchamp stated that he was not interested in ‘retinal’ art. He wanted to expand the effects of a work of art towards other regions of the mind, more cerebral or intellectual – towards what he called ‘the grey matter’ of the human brain. Even though he started off as a cubist, Duchamp did not think much of the intellectual qualities of the painters he knew. He much rather looked for inspiration elsewhere: in contemporary science for instance, both serious and popular, in the language of technique, commerce and advertising, and in literature. ‘I felt that as a painter,’ he stated, ‘it was much better to be influenced by a writer than by another painter.’ Duchamp made no secret of his examples. He considered the work of painters like Matisse and Cézanne as less inspiring than the poetry of Jules Laforgue, the curious novels of Raymond Roussel, the quasi-etymology of Jean-Paul Brisset and the pataphysics of Alfred Jarry. This is why a main part of this review is devoted to the ‘litteral’ character of Duchamp’s work. Although he produced most of his work before the Second World War, it was only in the late fifties and early sixties of the 20th century that the name Duchamp became known to a larger audience. In the Netherlands the reception of Duchamp began in the late fifties through the museum valuation of Dada, in parallel with the introduction of the work of the new generation of artists of Assemblage Art, Neo-Dada, Nouveau realism, Fluxus and Pop Art. Unlike elsewhere this reception also gained a literary dimension, mainly due to the attention of young writers K. Schippers, J. Bernlef and G. Brands, who published some of Duchamp’s texts in their literary journal Barbarber. K. Schippers came in the wake of Duchamp through his interest in Dada, particularly Arp and Schwitters. His knowledge of, and admiration for Duchamp grew when he read the autobiography of Man Ray (Self Portrait, 1963), the articles of Calvin Tomkins in The New Yorker and the monograph of Robert Lebel in 1959. A year earlier he had discovered Marchand du Sel, the first edition of the writings of Marcel Duchamp, of which an English translation appeared in 1963. Schippers published his translation of some of Duchamp’s notes in Barbarber in that same year. These notes are included in his contribution to this issue. They illustrate the translation in French of a chapter from Schippers’ recent book De Bruid van Marcel Duchamp (Marcel Duchamp's Bride), in which he looks back at the circumstances of his encounter with Duchamp’s work – an encounter related to seeing the Nouvelle Vague films of Truffaut, especially Jules et Jim. As Bert Jansen in his contribution to this review discloses, Duchamp, as a Frenchman, was keen on wordplay and puns, especially if they were of an ambiguous nature. Sexual innuendo was present in his early work – in the cartoons he made for humorous newspapers and magazines – and formed the base for most of his later work. Duchamp thought of language as an extra means to attribute ‘colour’ to his images. His reading of the extra-ordinary linguistic theories of Jean-Paul Brisset – Brisset ‘proved’ that the French language was derived from the first words of the frog (words that were an articulation of the discovery of the ‘sexe’) – made him aware of the mechanisms of homophonic words and sentences, in French and later on – after he moved to the United States – also in English. There he elaborated on this discovery with the punning titles of his readymades. Jansen, moreover, discovered some hitherto unknown sources and facts considering Duchamp’s readymades. Dutch author Dirk van Weelden stresses the importance of Alfred Jarry’s ‘neo--science’ of pataphysics as a source of inspiration for Duchamp. As Van Weelden notes, Duchamp was not solely interested in concepts or ideas, his drive was ‘towards the virtual, ambiguous, irrational side of perception’. Van Weelden states that at the basis of Duchamp’s ideas about art, literature, science and philosophy lay the concept of tautology – even ‘patatautology’. The same goes for Duchamp’s ideas about language, as Pieter de Nijs argues in his contribution. Duchamp and Jarry seem to have had a comparable interest in humanoid machinery and eroticism as a driving force. As Dirk van Weelden already brought forward, they also shared an ironic attitude towards science and the widely spread believe in universal applicable scientific laws and principles. More importantly however is a comparable view on the laws of language. Both Jarry and Duchamp strain the laws of language to the utmost, trying to establish new relations between words and sounds in order to draw attention to unexpected, seemingly illogical and therefore surprising, often homophonic relations. Bastiaan van der Velden draws upon his extensive knowledge of French popular 19th century images in order to illustrate Duchamp’s statement that the theme of his Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (Le Grand Verre or Large Glass) was inspired by a fairground attraction, called Massacre des innocents – an attraction Alfred Jarry was well known with and wrote and spoke about several times. Duchamp knew Jarry’s writings and these might very well have drawn his attention towards the theme of the massacred children known from the Bible, in relation to the puppets representing wedding guests that were supposed to be beheaded in the 19th century ‘baraques foraines’. Next to Brisset, Duchamp considered Raymond Roussel as essentially responsible for his main oeuvre, the Large Glass. Roussel’s famous ‘procédé’ was based on two homophonous sentences. Duchamp visited the theatre play Roussel presented in 1911, based on his novel Impressions d’Afrique, and must have guessed the importance of the homophonic relations Roussel took as a starting point for his novels and theatre plays. Sjef Houppermans, by means of several homophonic equations, links the secrets Roussel verbally hid in ‘L’étang aux grebes ’ (the lake with the great crested grebes), figuring in his play L’Étoile au front, to Duchamp’s latest work, Etant donnés, in which there also figures a lake, clearly visible in the background. In her article Caro Verbeek expands on the importance of one of the sensual experiences generally not closely related to works of art: smell. In several of the exhibitions he designed on request of his surrealist friends, Duchamp installed some ‘smelling devises’, and – in addition – obstructed the view of the visitors by darkening the exhibition rooms or obstructing them in another way. The olfactory experiments he undertook were meant to address other of the visitors’ senses than the habitual visual one. Marian Cousijn takes Duchamp’s exhibition designs as an early example of the growing importance of the curator in the art world. With his exhibition designs and in his later artistic practice, especially in regard to his readymades, Duchamp restricted himself artistically to selecting and displaying. But, as Cousijn puts it, ‘selecting and displaying are also the core tasks of the independent curator’. Duchamp proved early on how powerful an exhibition maker can be. This poses a question, that is also valid for the artistic practise of th
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