The Great Peeps Extravaganza: A Duchamp edition

May 2, 2011 Pioneer Press, a daily running out of St. Paul, just concluded its 2011 Pioneer Press Marshmallow Peeps Diorama and Video Contest. . For those of you who do not keep up with local news in St. Paul, Minnesota or with the near cult favorite kingdom of Peeps, the Peeps Diorama contest has been an annual tradition for the inhabitants of the Twin Cities for the past 8 years. And Peeps are those pink and neon colored soft marshmallow candies, often shaped into teen.. read more...

"Who's Your Dada?": Com&Com Commission a Readymade Baby

April 30, 2011 Com&Com's latest project offers to bring a work of art to life. Or perhaps, it would be more apt to say that they aim to transform life into a work of art, quite literally. Last month, the Swiss arts duo, comprised of Marcus Gossolt and Johannes M. Hedinger, proposed this unusual arrangement: they will pay a Russian couple, chosen from applications submitted online, $10,000 to name their baby "Dada." The conditions are simple: the couple must poss.. read more...

Duchamp Owns Everything

April 29, 2011 Several nights ago, I ate dinner at the apartment of a couple who had pasted a copy of the famous "Art History Poster," up in their bathroom (so there was plenty of time to study it while digesting potato strudel and too much wine). It's the print with a long laundry-list of artists defined on the basis of what they "own": Flavin Owns Neon, Hirst Owns the Pharmacy, Judd Owns Shelves, Picasso Owns the Century, Gilbert owns George, Calder owns Mobiles, etc. .. read more...

Warhol’s Self-Portrait to sell at Christie’s

April 27, 2011 Before Warhol was Warhol, there was Duchamp.  In fact Andy Warhol (1928-1987), the arbiter of Pop Art and cool, was greatly influenced by Duchamp’s ready-made concept and redefinition of art.  He was the high priest of engaging “ready-made” objects, perhaps photos, with the finer mechanics of art such as acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas; which dominated his oeuvre.   Among his seminal works is this four-paneled self-portrait aptly tit.. read more...

Vassar Students Explore the Dizzying Effects of Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs

April 24, 2011 What's part turntable, part optical-art, part children's toy? A Duchamp rotorelief: a colored, spiral-patterned disk the artist designed to create a three-dimensional visual effect when spun (hence the term "relief"). Duchamp designed them in 1935, and tried unsuccessfully to sell them, not on the art market, but at Concours Lapie, a trade-fair for Inventors. They were first exhibited at  jazz club called La Cachette, where they spun at a booth you'd otherwise.. read more...

Jodorowsky Contends with the Surrealist Ego

April 23, 2011 Those who are not yet familiar with Alejandro Jodorowsky's works would do well to check them out. His surreal, and Surreal, films have always artfully, and pleasurably, wreaked havoc upon their viewers' minds. They are always monstrous to behold and can be absolutely devastating to watch and enjoy. His infamous masterpieces, El Topo (1970) and Holy Mountain (1973) became cult classics almost immediately upon release, however limited those releases may have been. .. read more...

Artist Gets Into the Head of Duchamp, literally

April 20, 2011 Marcel Duchamp’s gesture of drawing a mustache and a goatee on the Mona Lisa in L. H. O. O. Q. (1919) redefined art and our perception of art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  At first glance, or using Duchampian rhetoric, “retinal art,” we see only the sexually ambiguous Mona Lisa espoused by her feminine fingers and bosoms, and a masculine, albeit comical, goatee.  By that interpretation, Duchamp only redefined art by deconstruct.. read more...

The Irony of Institutions: What the Battle over Kafka Can Tell Us about Duchamp (and vice-versa)

April 20, 2011 Duchamp, Kafka. Kafka, Duchamp. Seemingly an odd pairing, though both famed modernists. But bear with me. Duchamp was many things, but always French. Kafka on the other hand, wasn't Czech or German. In fact, neither country existed when Kafka was doing the bulk of his writing. The author lived in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a polyglot territory stretching from Bohemia to Transylvania. Neither was Kafka Israeli; in fact he had a notorious falling out with a good friend over .. read more...

Alfred Jarry Celebrated in Philadelphia

April 18, 2011 The first of April marked the opening of The Insolent Eye: Jarry in Art at Locks Gallery in Philadelphia, PA. Beautifully curated, it fulfilled its promise: "to recreate the beguiling atmosphere of Jarry's absurdist scenarios" and ground them in a "historical prologue." In other words, the exhibit centers around the re-imagination of the 'Ubu landscape' by contemporary and modernist artists such as Pablo Picasso, Thomas Kentridge, and, our pe.. read more...