Centuries Before Duchamp, Spanish King Elevated Chess Strategy to Occult Art

July 2, 2011 The deep affinity between chess and Marcel Duchamp is well known. It's not only that picture of him playing with a nude Eve Babitz, or the striking, abstract set he designed with his friend Man Ray, or even his official decision to abandon art production for a period of 20 years whilst cultivating his tournament game. There is also the sense that the rhythms of chess were deeply intertwined with everything Duchamp did: from the carefully laid Fountain gambit set to trap.. read more...

How to Buy a Lawrence Weiner

June 30, 2011 If Hannah Weiner wrote a poetics that bore witness to a her schizophrenic environment, a spectacle of linguistic topologies, Lawrence Weiner—member of the Postminimalist Conceptualism movement from the 1960s with others including artists Robert Barry and Sol LeWitt—actively constructs his own peculiar conceptual landscape, by inscribing its signifiers into the real.  Unlike Hannah, Lawrence Weiner dares his audience to do more than read, he dares us to make. .. read more...

Sometimes Conceptualist Photographer Jeff Wall Charted Crooked Path Past Duchamp

June 30, 2011 Today among the most prominent photographers exhibiting in the world, Jeff Wall has navigated a complex route towards the goal of making large-scale photography safe for top art museums. Along the way he has incorporated influences from classic photography (portraiture, documentary, photo-essay), academic modernist painting (like Post-Impressionism), Minimalism (Dan Flavin), and Conceptualism. A new show at the Bozar Palais Des Beaux Arts in Brussels, entitled Jeff Wall.. read more...

An Epitaph for Immortality: Dali on Potsdamer Platz

June 28, 2011 After crumpling up that poster of The Persistence of Memory for post-college interior redecoration, the specter of an anti-Salvador Dali backlash presents itself. It's all too easy to decide that the wax-mustachioed Spanish showman was a commercial, cliched hype-machine and somehow your adolescent self was tricked into buying the Kool-Aid. The error of such a position, in my view, is revealed time and time again. It's refuted as much as anything by the permanent exhibiti.. read more...

Virtual Duchamp and The Paradox of Art Spaces

June 26, 2011 Earlier this month I wrote about the journalist Yoav Sivan, who submitted a Duchampesque art concept to the Columbia Arts Initiative exhibition at Lincoln Center: calling his work "The Restroom of King Francis," he proposed to build a replica of the Louvre hall that contains the Mona Lisa, and then hang a Duchamp urinal on the wall next to it; meanwhile, an adjoining men's room would be hung with a copy of the Mona Lisa, perhaps defaced with the infamous mousta.. read more...

Dollar Store Project Pays Tribute to the Readymade in Texas

June 25, 2011 When Duchamp's confederate wrote in defense of Fountain that the only works of art America had given the world were its plumbing and its bridges, she might have been remiss not to mention the Dollar Store. This mini-mall staple is a bona-fide USA original: no other culture could have spawned the genius that allows the suburban shopper to acquire a condom-packet keychain, 5000 pipe cleaners, a slutty-mental-hospital-inmate halloween costume, and a box of olive-fuschia constru.. read more...

Augmented Reality Fertile Ground for Contemporary Surreal?

June 23, 2011 Wired magazine's"Beyond the Beyond" blog has kept up a fairly good tally of forays into Augmented Reality, meaning technology-aided fusions of our virtual and terrestrial worlds. Past entries have included a "Top Owl" helmet offering synthetic digital visual aids for pilots, and a computer-generated light-show playing across Sydney's famous opera house and skyline. This cutting edge field is clearly bait for avant-gardists to come. Already a recent p.. read more...

The Color of Dreams

June 20, 2011 There is something about surrealism that inspires people to cast off their inhibitions, act out their dreams and fantasies, play with words, and invent bad puns. That is exactly what the organizers of the Vancouver Art Gallery’s major summer show, The Colour of My Dreams: The Surrealist Revolution in Art, were counting on.   On certain Fridays, the Vancouver Art Gallery hosts live performances—FUSE events—and its June 17th evening of dance, caba.. read more...

Duchamp Mix Tape

June 20, 2011 McSweeney's Internet Tendency just published, as is their wont, an entire biography of Marcel Duchamp made only of pop single titles. (I'm listening to it now on Grooveshark.) How many of the references do you get? (By Dorothy Gambrell) Side A “Parisian,” Brent’s TV “Hop With The Jet Set,” Dead Kennedys “Naked Girl Falling Down The Stairs,” The Cramps “Moving,” Sarah Dougher “New York City,” Cub &ldqu.. read more...