"In this context Duchamp's creation of the readymade...". I think you meant Duchamp's use of a ready-made created before him. Boris Shoshensky
---------- Original Message ---------- From: Saul Ostrow <[email protected]> To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Subject: Let us try this instead Date: Wed, 9 Jun 2010 19:47:37 -0400 The shift away from traditional forms of art were also advanced in the early half of the- 20th century, by not only technological and formal means, but the effect of philosophers, linguists and semioticians hypothesizing that the relation of the lingual signifier to signified is arbitrary as they set about to systematically explore our primary means of representation. The logical conclusion drawn form this propositon is that beyond a certain category of pictorial/ mimetic images and indexical signs we live in a world of potentially endless signifiers. In this context Duchamp's creation of the readymade is often art historically represented as a radical anti- art and anti-aesthetic gesture meant to expose art's institutional existence, it might more likely reflect his awareness of the role that semiotics plays in art and culture. In support of this proposition one need not forget that Duchamp's production in varied media demonstrates that the readymade was just one possibility form of signification, among a plethora of other possible artistic proposition focusing on the phenomenal (the optic machines) as well as the assignment and layering of meaning (the Large Glass). The artistic and theoretical investigations of the everyday in turn was not only a consequence of 20th century modernism's heuristic and nihilist logic applied to the question of what was essential to art as a system of signification, but was part of an earlier tradition as well. In th e19th Century groups of artists, writers, and poets had long met in cafis to discuss and engage in spontaneous performances of their work. In the late19th century these casual get-togethers were transformed into significant sites for group entertainment, collaboration, and self-promotion - this was the birth of Bohemia and its anti-establishment ethos premised on decadence. From this cafe society there arose such anti-art manifestations as Les Hydropathes <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Les_Hydropathes&action=edit&am p;redlink=1><http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Les_Hydropathes&action =edit&redlink=1> , which as a group and a journal existed around the period 1878-1881 and had ties to the Decadent and the Symbolists literary movements. This gave rise to The Incoherents (and Les Arts Incohirents) another short-lived French art movement founded by writer and publisher Jules Livy <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jules_L%C3%A9vy&action=edit&am p;redlink=1><http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jules_L%C3%A9vy&action =edit&redlink=1> in 1882, which anticipated the nihilism of Futurism, Dada and Surrealism. The Incoherents presented work, which was deliberately irrational and iconoclastic consisting of "found" art objects, the drawings of children, and drawings "made by people who don't know how to draw." Livy exhibited an all-black painting by poet Paul Bilhaud <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Paul_Bilhaud&action=edit&r edlink=1><http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Paul_Bilhaud&action=edit&; redlink=1> called Negroes Fighting in a Cellar at Night. The early film animator Imile Cohl <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89mile_Cohl><http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/% C3%89mile_Cohl> contributed photographs, which would later be called surreal <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrealism><http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrea lism> . In an 1883 show, the artist Sapeck (Eughne Bataille) <http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Bataille_%28Sapeck%29><http://fr.wi kipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Bataille_%28Sapeck%29> ( contributed an 'augmented' Mona Lisa <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa><http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Li sa> smoking a pipe. Although small and short-lived, the Incoherents were certainly well-known. In October 1882, to view the exhibition entitled Arts incohirents over two thousand curious invitees including many of the artist associated with impressionism, and such celebrities as Richard Wagner and the king of Bavaria crowded into Livy's Left Bank apartment, where they could see Among other works a relief painting of a postman from which protruded an actual worn-out shoe, a landscape painted by a dancer from the Paris Opera on a ballet slipper and a painting on a garlic sausage. By November 1883, the Incoherents <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incoherents><http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incoh erents> had become so big that an exhibit was arranged at the Vivienne Gallery, open to the public. The exhibit accepted any and all entries, so long as they were not obscene or serious. The public was taken with the show, and the profits were donated to public assistance. The movement wound down in the mid 1890's. In a more serious vein, the questioning of the systemic potentiality of art's linguistic, formal, and phenomenal means is especially apparent in the emergence and development of both the Bauhaus and the Russian Productivists - whose employment of an industrial aesthetic coincided with their recognition that art and design were rhetorical devices both form and content, which could be used to advance a model of daily life that was aesthetically utilitarian, practical, and public. Though highly misrepresented as existing without precedents and generally mis-understood, these avant-garde's utopian projects, which sought to expand the notion of art in all directions or those like that of Duchamps who incorporated everyday reality and social engagement into art in that they establish a tradition of alterity continue to exert influence on contemporary culture. By the late 1950s, the appropriation of every-day life by art led to what Allan Kaprow identified as the "blurring of art and life." This process seems to culminate in 1960-70s with the conceptualism, whose practices deploy a broad-range of nonrepresentational and aesthetic strategies - including activism, semiotics, political, social and critical practices meant to transform into objects of self-reflective deliberation subjective and collective situations and their conditions.
