Recycling the Readymade

February 18, 2010 In the tradition of the first readymades, Gallery 705 in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania is showing a collection of assemblages, photos of assemblages and wall sculptures created from "recycled" or discarded objects and other "found" materials. Highlights include Minnesota artist Nick Schleif's monumental portraits of Abraham Lincoln and cigarette mascot Joe Camel, assembled from thousands of pennies and butts, respectively.While Duchamp's Fountain is often invoked as ancestor of c.. read more...

Dada Against Context

February 17, 2010 According to a new study, we like art better when it has not been interpreted for us -- and that goes for both representational styles and more "difficult" or conceptual work. Kenneth Bordens, a psychology professor of Indiana University - Purdue University Fort Wayne, split 172 students into two groups, neither of which had much formal art background before the experiment began. Members of the first group were simply asked to rate their response to a wide range of art (Renai.. read more...

Fashion Descending the Runway

February 16, 2010 An especially insightful review of Alexander Wang's recent New York Fashion Week runway show compared the designer's deconstruction of his fall line to "Art 101," and the Nude Descending a Staircase in particular. Like Duchamp's nude, the new season's wardrobe becomes visually fragmented on the runway, distributed across the show in a way that invites the audience to not only mentally remix the clothes into new ensembles but to apprehend all the possible combinations and the .. read more...

Richard Hamilton Remembers Duchamp

February 14, 2010

Now 88, Richard Hamilton, father of pop art and transcriber of the notes contained in Duchamp’s Green Box, is still active and profoundly influential if not famous. In a recent in-depth interview, he looks fondly back to his encounters with Duchamp (“the most charming person imaginable”) while blasting his “ignorant” descendants in the world of conceptual art.

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En Plein Air

February 12, 2010 A longtime associate of John Cage, painter Ray Kass has explored the reverberations of the retinal for decades through abstraction, chance operations, nature studies and critical work. A recently opened show in New York gallery IR77 Contemporary Art brings together examples of his recent output along with several of the "readymade" paintings of the "28 Trays" series. The "Trays" are especially resonant in a Duchamp-Cage context; while they superficially resemble abstract expr.. read more...

Daughter of Dust

February 11, 2010 Images like "A cause de l'elevage de poussiere" ("Because of Dust Breeding") and the 71-part Fait/Fact series have won Sophie Riselhueber (1949-) a nomination for the 2010 Deutsche Boerse Prize. One of four photographers so honored, Riselhueber began her career as a journalist. After a 1991 insight into the parallels between the dust accumulating on the back of Marcel Duchamp's now-perpetually-damaged Bride Stripped Bare and the wreckage of Gulf War Kuwait, her initially docu.. read more...

The Return of “Le Mouvement”

February 9, 2010 After 55 years, the seminal "Le Mouvement" exhibition has returned to remind connoisseurs of the possibilities of sculptural art that employs color, light, motion and time. Duchamp works on display at Basel's Museum Tinguely include Rotary Demisphere/Precision Optics and Rotoreliefs; other artists represented include Yaacov Agam, Jesus Rafael Soto, Victor Vasarely, Pol Bury, Robert Jacobsen, Richard Mortensen, Jean Tinguely himself and Robert Breer, as well as mobile pioneer .. read more...

Readymades, More or Less

February 9, 2010 The Duchampian gesture of ascribing totemic power -- "art" -- to otherwise arbitrary objects precipitated the inherent tension in the Surrealists' relationship to the commodity and its consequences, material and spirit, the everyday and the sublime. But while Duchamp himself appeared willing, even eager to market and re-market his readymades, bypassing the utilitarian function ("job") of his toilets, shovels and perfume bottles to translate them into a personal brand and, ult.. read more...

Virtuoso Illusions: The Artist as Transvestite

February 8, 2010 A recently opened show at MIT's List Visual Arts Center lays bare the deep associations between cross-dressing and the artistic avant-garde, from classical drama to the (as always somewhat) polymorphous present. Naturally, the labors of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray to give birth to the transvestite persona Rrose Selavy are fundamental; guest curator Michael Rush provides rare insight into how the act both resonates and defies the profound ambivalence with which the core Surrea.. read more...