Word: duchamp
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...except a generalized homage to revolutionary thought. Art's elimination of semblances to the physical world corresponded vaguely with Einstein's way of seeing time and space, but it really sprung from an atmosphere of change, in which Einstein was yoked with Freud, Marx, Picasso, Bergson, Wittgenstein, Joyce, Kafka, Duchamp, Kandinsky and anyone else with original and disruptive ideas and an aggressive sense of the new. By that tenuous connection did the discoverer of relativity become a major figure of a world consisting of individuals interpreting the world individually. He was similarly associated with the pluralism of modern music...
...desecration of religious symbols and sacred objects of singular significance is out, but what about art meaningfully representing subject matter that merely conflicts in a serious way with ones worldview? Should a born-again evangelical have to see his tax dollars spent on representations of homosexuality? How about Marcel Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase?" He might just fear hellfire and brimstone as punishment for underwriting any display of carnality. Heck, what about a fanatical tree-hugger--should his tax dollars help house murals depicting the brutal subjugation of the American West...
Frankly, however, holding the line at sacred representations and symbols of faith strikes me as tenable. Duchamp's artwork and Mapplethorpe's photography are not so much frontal attacks on another's worldview as independent assertions of other, potentially conflicting visions. Where conflicts of such a nature arise, Aristotle's advice to rely on democracy as the distiller of wisdom greater than that possessed by any single individual might perhaps be heeded. But democracy should not be able to marshal public funding in those cases of work either intended to, or reasonably construed as, desecrating the symbolic moorings of another...
...what, to me at least, is the late-twentieth-century culture. We've been seeing an aesthetic of what I call recombinant. Whether you're dealing with the visual, photography, sculpture, painting, you name it. But the appropriation an reminding of different elements has been in everything from Duchamp's early work, to Picasso, to John Heartfield, Hannah Hoch. Sampling is an extension of that tradition, but on another level it's what's been going on in African-American culture from mainly a jazz side of things...
...Duchamp, famous for the signed urinal and The Large Glass, and Joseph Cornell, not so famous for living with his mother in Queens, N.Y., and making densely intricate boxes of ephemera such as apothecary jars, photos, paper clippings and decorated wood cubes, formed a kind of pack-rat pack of two in the '40s after Duchamp enlisted Cornell to work on his portable museum, Boite-en-Valise. Cornell's collection of the trimmings--notes, receipts, old glue boxes--of their meetings forms the Duchamp Dossier and the centerpiece of this show. Neither a great Cornell nor a great Duchamp exhibition...