A Neo-Duchampian Catchphrase

August 30, 2011

"Hmmm. We do have a slogan for Benrik: ‘Your values are our toilet paper.’ Or in French: “Vos valeurs sont notre peru."

–the creators of The Situationist App (touted as the first Marxist social media tool)

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Donald Judd or Cheap Furniture?

August 29, 2011 Donald Judd can be quite spectacular. Out in Marfa, Texas for instance, where the minimalist sculptor purchased land, his giant stone boxes eerily offset the empty horizon and rustling waves of yellow grass: a cipher in the landscape. But some of his works do, truth be told, look exactly like cheap furniture. If you doubt this, take the quiz at reverent.org. The point is to guess whether a given image is a priceless Donald Judd sculpture or a piece of cheap furniture. I scor.. read more...

Picabia Was Also a Post-Impressionist

August 28, 2011 Francis Picabia, a good friend of Marcel Duchamp who would have been the cold-veined hitman if Dada had been an organized crime organization, is best known for his allusively erotic faux-machinic diagrams. He once splattered an inkblot on a piece of paper and called it a portrait of the Virgin Mary. But as the blog "Adventures in the Print Trade" points out, he also had a reasonable career etching fuzzy naturalistic prints of boats, people and landscapes, in t.. read more...

Bicycle the Last Artistic Transportation?

August 27, 2011 "No other icon in sport or transport has retained such constant or potent significance [as the bike]. The car, once all open road and opportunity, now evokes the dystopia of Jeremy Clarkson and carmageddon. The train has surrendered its Brief Encounter romance to the absurdity of leaves on the line, and the misery of the sweaty commute." -Matthew Wright, in the Guardian Meanwhile: "The centrality of flight to culture and ‘social drama’ .. read more...

Daniel Spoerri’s Multiplication d’Art Transformable

August 26, 2011 The following was written by critic Pierre Restany in 1966 for Daniel Spoerri's Edition MAT— which, for about a decade in the late nineteen fifties through the sixties, offered mass-produced and affordable works of art to the general public:(printed here thanks to Will Brand of Art Fag City) A permanent manifesto of social art. I. MAT is firstly an adventure, an episode in the capricious career of a "beat" poet-dancer who is in a perpetual state of wan.. read more...

“This is the Apocalyptic Nature of Our Modernity”

August 25, 2011 Part of our challenge here at marcelduchamp.net is figuring out where to draw the boundaries for what is pertinent to the subjects of “modernism” and “avant-garde.”  Personally, I have always found the effort to narrow the historical or general “avant-garde” into a single definition confounding.  For anyone who may be experiencing a similar problem, I’d like to propose taking a close look at the following passage.  B.. read more...

Ai Weiwei exhibition to open in L.A.

August 24, 2011 There are artists that break all the rules, and then there's Ai Weiwei. Activist Ai Weiwei's installation, "Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads", is on exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art until February. Although Ai will not be attending the opening of "Circle" because his bail arrangements prevent him from leaving Beijing, he was in a "chatty" mood while talking with an L.A. Times reporter. He opened up about his art, health and .. read more...

Bolano’s Literary Prophecies: Breton Shall Return Through Mirrors

August 22, 2011 "Vladimir Mayakovksy shall come back into fashion around the year 2150. James Joyce shall be reincarnated as a Chinese boy in the year 2124. Thomas Mann shall become an Ecuadorian pharmacist in the year 2101.   For Marcel Proust, a desperate and prolonged period of oblivion shall begin in the year 2033. Ezra Pound shall disappear from certain libraries in the year 2089. Vachel Lindsay shall appeal to the masses in the year 2101.   César Vallejo.. read more...

Quay Brothers’ New Film Opens

August 21, 2011 The Quay Brothers, the experimental animators (of Street of Crocodiles fame) who sinisterly blur the line between animation and animism, are coming out with an eagerly awaited new production. It's to be based on swoon-inducingly grotesque Mutter Museum exhibition of alternative anatomy (which includes ballooning esophagi, cadavers with horns, skeletons of conjoined twins, Jibaro shrunken heads, and a screaming woman, somehow, soapified) at the College of Physicians in Philad.. read more...