Duchamp and the Infrathin

August 12, 2011 "In the wake of modernity we once again find ourselves in the abyss of the infra-thin, a concept that permeates Marcel Duchamp’s entire oeuvre, a shorthand label for his life-long desire to overcome the distance between Signifier and signified, thing and meaning, love and knowledge, inner and outer, up and down, appearance and apparition, mold and molded, of and in. To be precise, the word “infra-thin” was to him “not a noun but an adjective, al.. read more...

The Looting Imperative

August 12, 2011

"Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance. It instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state’s monopoly of armed violence" -Guy Debord

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Of Rhetoric and Modern Art

August 10, 2011 The onset of modernity, underpinned by the bourgeois revolution, saw art develop into a marketplace commodity sought by many. The critic's pen emerged partly as a substitute for the suspect taste of the buying public. The magazine n+1 recently printed an essay entitled "Against Reviews" excoriating the impersonality and blandness of the whole arrangement (though the author was talking about fiction, and mostly, it seemed, describing bad reviews). But can criticism .. read more...

The Art of Substitution

August 9, 2011 "A long freeze seems to paralyze the diners, substituting for the usual ice-cream which as it happens is bad for stomachs which have become so heated in the acrobatic juggling of happiness, alarming mushrooms and dynamic partridges..." -The Futurist Cookbook ("Gelato," or ice cream, is also the Italian past participle of "to freeze": noted in Anti-Diets of the Avant-Garde: From Futurist Cooking to Eat Art, By Cecilia Movero) .. read more...

A Comparative Analysis of Duchamp and Dr. Dre.

August 6, 2011 "Neither Dre nor DuChamp were happy in their circles, however, so they formed new ones. Dre left Death Row and formed Aftermath, while DuChamp formed the Societe Anonyme. These would be the organizations the dudes would stick wit’. DuChamp continued exploring the relationship between the artist and spectator with kinetic mobiles – moving sculptures and conceptual extensions of his readymade works like The Fountain. Dre did the same, rapping on Dr. Dre Present.. read more...

Marjorie Perloff: Endgame and the “End of Art”

August 5, 2011 A bit ago, I posted a selection from Arthur Danto’s “The Physical Disenfranchisement of Art” in which he elucidated upon his conception for the “end of art.”  In her book, Radical Artifice, Marjorie Perloff continues in the vein of his initial investigation.  She calls upon John Cage, Marcel Broodthaers, and Charles Bernstein for her investigation at the beginning of her first chapter, “Avant-Garde or Endgame?” “But.. read more...

Thing/Thought: Fluxus at MOMA

August 4, 2011 Recently we covered the exhibition of editions at the Gallery Perrotin in Paris, which featured catalogs, multiples, and posters, by Takashi Murakami, Joseph Beuys and Marcel Duchamp. The issue came up then as to whether and how the artist-signed reproductions, manufactured series, and microcosmic miniatures (like the Box en Valise, kits which held small versions of Duchamp's entire ouevre),  can be vehicles for the democratization of art or simply more efficient means o.. read more...

Annals of the Surreal

August 3, 2011 "Lilliputia, the MIdget City: If dreamland is a laboratory for Manhattan, Midget City is a laboratory for Dreamland. Three hundred midgets who had been scattered across the continent as attractions at World's Fairs are offered a permanent experimental community here, 'a bit of old Nuremberg m the fifteenth century.' Since the scale of Midget City is half the scale of the real world, the cost of building this cardboard utopia is, at least theoretically, quartered, so that.. read more...

On Anamorphosis

July 31, 2011 "Distortion may lend itself...to all the paranoiac ambiguities, and every possible use has been made of it, from Arcimboldi to Salvador Dali. I will go so far as to say that this fascination complements what geometral researches into perspective allow to escape from vision. How is it that nobody has ever thought of connecting this with...the effect of an erection? Imagine a tattoo traced on the sexual organ ad hoc in the state of repose and assuming its, if I may say s.. read more...