Posted by Marsh Oil Mc Clue in on March 27, 19100 at 18:29:48:
In Reply to: Is this a quotation by Marcel Duchamp - please? posted by alun owen on March 24, 19100 at 13:56:25:
: "The work of Art is always based on these two poles of the maker and the onlooker, and the spark that comes from this bi-polar action gives birth to something like Electricity." This is not A HARD DAYS NIGHT, no ringoisms, jingoisms or prisms of isms; this is a man who collected dust and small pieces of paper torn in exact precision...
Authorship. A difficult issue, a painfully thorny one, especially for people who believe that art is primarily a vehicle
for self-expression. Really: why should one care about the expression of a private self? About the expression of a
self, when everybody has a private self to take care of? True: solipsistic exercises may be highly creative… so long
as one does his/her best, like the Balinese… but the products of this creativity become interesting only as individual
examples of a collective condition (blissful or neurotic, it doesn’t matter). And therefore what makes this art (all is
art, remember?) interesting and worthy of our attention is the charge of collective consciousness it contains. How to
measure the level, the type, the expressions of this charge? I really don’t have an answer for that, but I believe I
know — that at least — where to look for being in the electric age one must look for electric charges.
"Authorship – in the sense we know it today, individual intellectual effort related to the book as an economic commodity — was
practically unknown before the advent of print technology. Medieval scholars were indifferent to the precise identity of the
‘books’ they studied. In turn, they rarely signed even what was clearly their own. They were a humble service organization. […]
The invention of printing did away with anonimity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort
as private property. Mechanical multiples of the same text created a public — a reading public. The rising consumer–oriented
culture became concerned with labels of authenticity and protection against theft and piracy. The idea of copywright — ‘the
exclusive right to reproduce, publish, and sell the matter and form of a literary or artistic work’ — was born" (122).
The two axioms are so obvious, and encompassing such a wide spatial and temporal dimension, that no single artist or specific
work of art could be easily chosen as the most explanatory or even representative of the "new" electric environment.
We could pick, however, any of Marcel Duchamp "machines," or perhaps his simple "Bicycle wheel" of 1913 to see an expression
of "electric art" already well established at the beginning of the century.