Word: duchamp
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...centerpiece of the 1986 Biennale is called "Art and Alchemy." It was curated (if that is the word) by Arturo Schwarz, an Italian art dealer whose purplish prose has long been one of the hazards of Marcel Duchamp scholarship. Alchemy sought to change base metals into gold and silver. More broadly, it embraced astrology and occult religion, being founded on the picture of a fourelement universe (air, water, fire and earth) proposed by Empedocles in the 5th century B.C. There was an early link between alchemy, technology and art, since ancient glassblowers and metalworkers were always trying to make base...
...layer of frustration into the image: it seems perverse to take objects that are only, or mainly, of scientific interest and handle them in a way so calculated to frustrate scientific curiosity. The dandy's thumbprint lies lightly on this show, a sign that both Johns and Marcel Duchamp have been there before, one with his puzzling equivocations between things painted and things named, the other with his mock- scientific glosses. But this is no bad paternity for an artist to have, and the slightly skittish intelligence of Winters' paintings is bound to appeal to those sated...
...shamelessly existed from a horror Film seen this year-yes, Brad Dalton's... whatever? is all of this, three and one-half hours of all of this. Generally well-choreographed, often amusing, absurdly comic, emotionally unencumbering, less tedious than its length suggests, it has that same cheeky appeal as Duchamp's "Mona Lisa" or a bust of George Washington with a tinted-blue Mohawk: it makes us laugh well enough but makes us feel nothing...
...Dadas is in the backgrounds of their members. The Dadas were artists dissatisfied with the art form over which they had achieved a reasonable degree of mastery. They were, in a sense, trying to unravel the fabric of society from the inside. The most famous Dadaist, Marcel Duchamp, said "Dada was the extreme protest against the physical side of painting, a metaphysical attitude, a blank force." In the late teens, Duchamp became an accomplished chess player and decided to give up painting because it "bored" him. Thus, the Dadas were not street corner vandals: intellectually, they were seeking to turn...
...works was far above that of the man in the street: it often required knowledge of two languages to understand their puns. The punks require no such education. Anyone who is willing to endure the disgusted stares of his parents can be a punk. Through punk, one can experience Duchamp's "blank force" of protest at its basest level. Because punk is a fashion, it will surely fade away eventually. But because almost everyone in the country has at least a vague idea of what punk looks like--if not what it is--punk will not fade as completely...