Word: picabia
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...nude woman descending a staircase, which had no woman visible, just strange, machine-like, abstract forms. All three artists did parody paintings, mocking taste. Ray painted in a bright, cheerfully kitsch style recalling décor in the background of middle-class apartments in old Hollywood movies. Picabia painted textured abstracts that had nothing but a few primitive dots on them resembling enlarged points of light. (In 1950, the art critic for TIME said they had "all the monotony and none of the scientific interest" of astronomical photos.) And he painted gaudy, figurative scenes of absurd blonde nudes in boudoirs...
...wheels and shafts. They plundered popular-?science books for imagery. They were exhibitionists in the pathological sense, having themselves photographed in nutty get-ups: Duchamp with his hair shampoo-lathered into devil-horn shapes or shaved in the form of a star, or dressed up as a woman; Picabia with his bare chest puffed out, posing as a classical god; and Ray in a photographic self-portrait with half a beard...
...Sloth Ray, Picabia and Duchamp all earnestly educated their audience in seeing new ways for art to be art, while at the same time insulting that audience with attention-grabbing laziness and insouciance. They socialized and threw parties, and helped the rich collectors who were intrigued by them to choose the right works by the right established figures - Matisse, Picasso, Brancusi and so on - to improve their collections. But they pretended they couldn't be bothered to compete with such masters...
...whom he'd had a long, clandestine love affair.) But for years, Duchamp, who lived in a modest, $40-a-month apartment in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, told his friends he'd given art up for chess and philosophical writing. He said he believed in "masterly inactivity." Indeed, he, Picabia and Ray shared a talent for cerebral sloth. They all thought up endless word games that boil down to jokes about sex. This too was art. The Tate Modern exhibition is dense with doodles and scraps full of dark joie de vivre...
...that we now associate with successful art. The fun of this exhibition is the evidence of a whole culture or philosophy gradually building up, more or less by chance, from scratch. What you come away with is a great insight into unconventional ways of making art. Duchamp, Ray and Picabia were not faux rebels or officially sanctioned pets like the art stars of the present moment. Being original for them was not an affectation, but a necessity...