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...

On Pharmaceutical Conceptualism

May 30, 2011 To my nearly-non-existent collection of avant-garde and contemporary art has been added a small conceptualist gem: a single translucent red pill inside a plastic bag labeled: Speak, write and read perfect German "inmiatly" (sic). It's by the excellent painter and documentary photo- and video-grapher Adriana Bustos, from Cordoba, Argentina, who happened to be classmate of mine in language study. I can only assume that her lengthy studies in psychopharmacology and neu.. read more...

Does the Avant-Garde Need Marx?

May 30, 2011 It's official: Marx is back. At least that seems to be an increasingly acceptable veiwpoint within mainstream, English-speaking intellectual circles that would've not so long ago viewed the great 19th Century economic and political thinker as no more than a passe obsession of the Cold War era, a fetish of sheltered English departments in the ivoriest of ivory towers (about as relevant to contemporary economics as Freud is to cognitive psychology), or a dubious authority to be.. read more...

Weston’s Aesthetic Vision Poses Alternate Modernist Path

May 29, 2011 "The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges," (probably) wrote Beatrice Wood, an American modern artist and lover of Duchamp, defending the signed urinal he had submitted to the Salon des Independants in 1917. The legacy of the urinal is often understood to be Conceptualism on the one hand -- a paradigm where ideas and gestures resonate over and above the technical skill of the artist -- and on the other, Avant-Garde (anti)-.. read more...