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...

The Assemblage Alive and Well in, For Example, Virginia

June 19, 2011 Assemblage, or sculptural construction utilizing found or mixed materials, was one of the most radical genres invented by the early 20th Century Avant-Gardes. It became a staple of the output of such figures as Marcel Duchamp, Dada's Raoul Haussman, the Constructivist Vladmir Tatlin, and the American Surrealist Joseph Cornell, and it appeared in post-war Pop Art courtesy of Robert Rauchenberg and Jasper Johns. One the earliest and most powerful examples of what the assembl.. read more...

Yoav Sivan and The Restroom of King Francis

June 13, 2011 Yoav Sivan is not primarily an installation artist, but rather a journalist, who recently graduated from the Columbia Journalism School and has written about politics and gay rights for the Huffington Post, The Guardian, Haaretz and Moment Magazine. But he recently decided to enter the conceptualist fray, attempting the subtle science of the Duchampian homage, with suitably mixed results: As detailed on his website, Sivan submitted a work entitled the Restroom of King Fran.. read more...

Concrete Utopia, and a poem from the Editor

June 11, 2011 Concrete Utopia, a "collaborative project space" in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is emerging as an intriguing site for the examination of the legacy of 19th and 20th Century aesthetic and political discourses; though it is also, of course, squarely forward-looking. Their current show (and print publication), "I'm not a good enough feminist," grapples with the theory, history, and future of the feminist movement. I generally appreciate C.U.'s eagerness to combin.. read more...

Cow Clicker: a Fountain for a New Generation of Online Gaming?

June 8, 2011 Previously on marcelduchamp.net, we posed this question: whether Marx remains inescapable to the formulations of subversion fundamental to the survival of an avant-garde in the present day. Certainly, structuring a leftist mode of critical thought in an era, no longer modern and no longer even post-modern and increasingly defined by the reaches of interconnectivity and globalization, poses numerous difficulties. What, for instance, truly belongs in the scope of the avant-g.. read more...

The God-Trap in the Young European Landscape

June 5, 2011 "The Young European Landscape", an upcoming exhibition at the Galerie Wolfsen Aalborg D.K. to be curated by Uwe Goldstein, aims to revive the landscape genre as a "framework for the reception, coordination and mirroring of our present-day lifeworld," with painting, photography and sculptural works by Gabor A. Nagy, Franziska Klotz Peter Hampel, Mirjam Siefiert and others. One subsection, "Into the Wild" focuses on "wilderness as a utopi.. read more...

Bill Berkson Dreams

June 2, 2011 Stereotypes, whether true or false, would like to have us believe that poets, perhaps above all others, record their dreams for beauty, self-indulgence, or posterity.  However, the poets interested in the dream and the logic of the subconscious today, are perhaps not the same poets that inherited the logic of the avant-garde.  The surrealists were, certainly, heavily invested in the dream state, but the topic has not stood out as a particular interest since then.&nb.. read more...