Duchamp and the Secret of the Object

August 16, 2011 Our last post included the following quote from the cultural critic Jean Baudrillard: "The obscenity of the commodity stems from the fact that it is abstract, formal, light in opposition to the weight, opacity and substance of the object. The commodity is readable: in opposition to the object, which never completely gives up its secret, the commodity always manifests its visible essence, which is its price. It is the formal place of transcription of all possible objects; t.. read more...

Secret, Object, Ecstasy

August 15, 2011 "Marx set forth and denounced the obscenity of the commodity, and this obscenity was linked to its equivalence, to the abject principle of free circulation, beyond all use value of the object. The obscenity of the commodity stems from the fact that it is abstract, formal, light in opposition to the weight, opacity and substance of the object. The commodity is readable: in opposition to the object, which never completely gives up its secret, the commodity always manifests it.. read more...

Even the Exquisite Corpse Festival wonders…

August 14, 2011

…what “exquisite corpse taxidermy” means and why they have it. (Exquisite Corpse is a well-known Surrealist game in which one player draws on a piece of paper, folds over their drawing, and passes the paper to the next player, who repeats). The meaning of exquisite corpse music can be extrapolated pretty easily. But taxidermy? Puzzlement all around.

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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...

Quotable Avant-Gardes: The Appetite and the Dish.

August 8, 2011

“I am against all morals, against discipline. To be a painter, it is necessary to have guts [foi, liver], the sacred fire. Just like eating: first comes the appetite, then the choice of the dish.”
-George Braque

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Capricorn Bicycles Unrolls the Duchamp

August 7, 2011 Capricorn, a purveyor of steel bikes handcrafted by Minneapolis's Brad Wilson, now makes Duchamp and Selavy models intended to capture, natural, elegant Euro-style: "bikes on which you would never think to wear lycra." (Whether the designers at Capricorn are appraised of some of the truly awful shorts worn by males around European capitals these days is another matter). The Selavy features an easy-mount step-through frame for the ladies. There is something a bit .. read more...