Word: duchamps
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What Dada did was to release art from the burden of its exclusive past in order to find it everywhere--thought was relative, logic false, final truth non-existent, morality but a plague produced by the intelligence, art meaningless. Duchamp's bottle rack read "art is junk" and his urinal "art is a trick." Nothing was real or true except the individual pursuing his whim, the artist bestriding his Dada. Dada overturned any object, mocked it and displaced it as an experiment in apprehending it. Yet beneath the Dadaist irony lay a desperate protest. Dada was an act of rebellion...
...intellect and methods are favorably compared with those of Vladimir Nabokov, Jasper Johns and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Even Leonardo da Vinci is hauled in to serve as an artistic ancestor. The aim of this coercive litany is to persuade doubters that Nauman is a home-grown successor to Marcel Duchamp, whose every pun and jeu d'esprit, no matter how limp, must be given the solemn study once reserved for Holy Writ. In short, Nauman has had the full treatment. Mount Culture labors, and out he pops...
What remains startling is the urbane unoriginality of his work. Whenever an image or process appears in Nauman's show that looks vaguely interesting, one may be sure it was worked out years before by either Johns or Duchamp. So with Nauman's casts and templates of parts of his body, which are merely spin-offs and rip-offs from Johns in the late '50s and, more distantly, from Duchamp's own interest in molding. That some of these Naumans are made of neon tubing does not alter this, any more than the fact that some...
...Octavio Paz, Mexico's most distinguished poet and essayist (TIME, Jan. 29), impresses the reader as one of the most provocative thinkers in the West. Gracefully, lucidly, he talks of topics as diverse as the rebellion of modern youth ("an explosion of despair"), the art of Marcel Duchamp, Sade's philosophy ("His model is not a volcano, although he liked volcanoes very much, but cold lava"). Paz even notes the first feminist, Penthesilea, legendary queen of the Amazons, who ruled from "a throne of vertigo and tides...
...faced with the choice between amateur therapy and finicky, arid footnotes to Duchamp, the mind recoils. In fact, the term avant-garde has outlived its usefulness. The hard thing to face is not that the emperor has no clothes; it is that beneath the raiment, there is no emperor...