Word: duchamp
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...lifetime. And it is quite possible that none ever will be again, now that the mandate to set forth social meaning, to articulate myth and generate widely memorable images has been so largely transferred from painting and sculpture to other media: photography, movies, television. Though Marcel Duchamp, that cunning old fox of conceptual irony, has certainly had more influence on nominally vanguard art over the past 30 years than Picasso, the Spaniard was the last great beneficiary of the belief that the language of painting and sculpture really mattered to people other than their devotees. And he was the first...
...from then on the idea of literal movement in art kept growing on Calder. He experimented from time to time with sculpture whose abstract elements were driven by motors, acting on them through more-or-less hidden bands and pulleys. These were the works that Marcel Duchamp, when he saw them in 1931, christened "mobiles"--the word by which Calder is known. But these motorized pieces were too predictable. Calder's genius was for the unprogrammed--natural, as distinct from mechanical and repetitious motion. What he did best was present metaphors of natural movement in the simplest technical terms...
Fernand Leger (1881-1955) is the only one of the great early 20th century French Modernists who hasn't had a major museum show in America in nearly half a century. Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Duchamp and others, yes; but not Leger--a fact that is doubly odd, since no French painter, indeed, no French cultural figure of any kind, was more fascinated and stimulated by American culture, or did more to make a bridge between Paris and New York. Now, with an excellent and tightly focused show at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, this has happily changed. Curated...
Fischli and Weiss also employ this unassuming and ambiguous approach when questioning the status of the art object, another favorite line of inquiry for '80s artists. Here, they follow in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp, and ally themselves with contemporaries, including Sherrie Levine and Alan McCollum, who address problems of mechanical reproduction and authorship. The ICA show includes several black, rubber and Beracryl castings of mundane objects like a candle or a doggy dish. Although these hand-made "readymades" may be overly indebted to Jasper John's light bulb or flashlight castings of the early 1960s, other pieces...
...also, without living peer, the artist of free association. Within the languages of art, Rauschenberg started more hares than he could possibly chase, including performance. His work with Cunningham and Cage, always under the influence of Marcel Duchamp, made artistic collaboration seem feasible, after the image of the artist had been monopolized by the go-it-alone individualists of the New York School. Younger artists of every kind latched on to his work, which meant that, particularly from the '50s to the '70s, there was hardly an area of "advanced" American art that didn't contain some...