Picabia Was Also a Post-Impressionist

August 28, 2011 Francis Picabia, a good friend of Marcel Duchamp who would have been the cold-veined hitman if Dada had been an organized crime organization, is best known for his allusively erotic faux-machinic diagrams. He once splattered an inkblot on a piece of paper and called it a portrait of the Virgin Mary. But as the blog "Adventures in the Print Trade" points out, he also had a reasonable career etching fuzzy naturalistic prints of boats, people and landscapes, in t.. read more...

Bicycle the Last Artistic Transportation?

August 27, 2011 "No other icon in sport or transport has retained such constant or potent significance [as the bike]. The car, once all open road and opportunity, now evokes the dystopia of Jeremy Clarkson and carmageddon. The train has surrendered its Brief Encounter romance to the absurdity of leaves on the line, and the misery of the sweaty commute." -Matthew Wright, in the Guardian Meanwhile: "The centrality of flight to culture and ‘social drama’ .. read more...

Daniel Spoerri’s Multiplication d’Art Transformable

August 26, 2011 The following was written by critic Pierre Restany in 1966 for Daniel Spoerri's Edition MAT— which, for about a decade in the late nineteen fifties through the sixties, offered mass-produced and affordable works of art to the general public:(printed here thanks to Will Brand of Art Fag City) A permanent manifesto of social art. I. MAT is firstly an adventure, an episode in the capricious career of a "beat" poet-dancer who is in a perpetual state of wan.. read more...

“This is the Apocalyptic Nature of Our Modernity”

August 25, 2011 Part of our challenge here at marcelduchamp.net is figuring out where to draw the boundaries for what is pertinent to the subjects of “modernism” and “avant-garde.”  Personally, I have always found the effort to narrow the historical or general “avant-garde” into a single definition confounding.  For anyone who may be experiencing a similar problem, I’d like to propose taking a close look at the following passage.  B.. read more...

Bolano’s Literary Prophecies: Breton Shall Return Through Mirrors

August 22, 2011 "Vladimir Mayakovksy shall come back into fashion around the year 2150. James Joyce shall be reincarnated as a Chinese boy in the year 2124. Thomas Mann shall become an Ecuadorian pharmacist in the year 2101.   For Marcel Proust, a desperate and prolonged period of oblivion shall begin in the year 2033. Ezra Pound shall disappear from certain libraries in the year 2089. Vachel Lindsay shall appeal to the masses in the year 2101.   César Vallejo.. read more...

Quay Brothers’ New Film Opens

August 21, 2011 The Quay Brothers, the experimental animators (of Street of Crocodiles fame) who sinisterly blur the line between animation and animism, are coming out with an eagerly awaited new production. It's to be based on swoon-inducingly grotesque Mutter Museum exhibition of alternative anatomy (which includes ballooning esophagi, cadavers with horns, skeletons of conjoined twins, Jibaro shrunken heads, and a screaming woman, somehow, soapified) at the College of Physicians in Philad.. read more...

Of Being Numerous, No. 12

August 20, 2011 ‘In these explanations it is presumed that an experiencing subject is one occasion of a sensitive reaction to an actual world.’   the rain falls that had not been falling and it is the same world   . . .   They made small objects Of wood and the bones of fish And of stone. They talked, Families talked, They gathered in council And spoke, carrying objects. They were credulous, Their things shone in the forest.   They were patien.. read more...

Duchamp and the Paradox of Art Spaces, Even

August 19, 2011 In the vein of several recent posts of ours re: the relationship between the readymades and the power of institutions and centrality of art spaces: "post-Duchampian art-beyond-labor reveals itself, in fact, as the triumph of alienated “abstract” labor over non-alienated “creative” work. It is this alienated labor of transporting objects combined with the labor invested in the construction and maintenance of art spaces that ultimately produces artistic value under.. read more...

Romania and the Avant Garde

August 17, 2011 Romania is not exactly the first country that comes to mind when one thinks of modern art, but exhibitions in Bucharest and Amsterdam are shedding light on this often overlooked center of the avant-garde.   The Amsterdam exhibition, “From Dada to Surrealism: Jewish Avant-Garde Artists in Romania, 1910-1938” highlights works of many iconic Jewish Romanian artists. Curated by art historian rabbi Edward Van Voolen and collector Dr. Radu Stern, the exhibition f.. read more...