Duchampian News & Views
-
-
Hermetic Duchamp?
July 31, 2011"Marcel Duchamp had exhibited found objects as art with his famous urinal. But Duchamp’s art is hermetic, introverted, it doesn’t go out to the viewer. Rauschenberg’s reflects his own personality: it’s extrovert, generous, non-judgmental.” -Ealan Wingate, co-curator of the current Rauschenberg exhibition in Edinburgh
read more... -
Surrealist Lab: Whose Unconscious? (Part 2)
July 29, 2011 In a recent post, "With A Lunatic Gesture We Forsook Jujitsu" (Automatism A), I tried my hand at some automatic writing. This was a practice codified by the Surrealists under the direction of Andre Breton, but its provenance dates to long before that. Its purpose has depended on the historical circumstance. For instance, it used to be seen by 19th century psychics as a way of channeling supernatural sources, even aliens. For others, namely the Beat poets, it was mer.. read more... -
An Argument for Tactile Art
July 26, 2011“It is clear that the liberative importance of the tactile resides in the fact that it can only be decoded in terms of experience itself: it cannot be reduced to mere information, to representation or to the simple evocation of a simulacrum substituting for absent presences.”
Kenneth Frampton (from “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance”)
read more... -
Physics Comes to the Defense of Modern Art
July 26, 2011 If Duchamp's "Standard Stoppages" lampooned the precise measuring systems of scientists, a Harvard mathematician is now doing something of the opposite for Jackson Pollack: rescuing him from the perception that abstract expressionists are just random paint-slingers. Through a close data analysis of "Untitled 1948-49," professor Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan uncovered some of the secrets of Pollack's technique: he must have "held his brush or trowel high off the canvas, moving.. read more... -
Picabia’s 391, up for sale, sold.
July 26, 2011Francis Picabia’s magazine, 391, showcased the one time dadaist’s eroto-mechanomorphic diagrams and his anti-aesthete’s wisdom. (It still exists in fact, in bastardized digital form http://www.391.org/) Three of the more historical issues went on the market recently, and were offered for around $9000 a piece. They sold almost immediately.
Booktryst has the goods:
read more... -
The Scent of Belle Haleine
July 24, 2011Can the smell of Duchamp’s famous perfume be reconstructed? The blog “Olfactory Art” tells all. Unfortunately, even OSX Lion doesn’t come with scent-receptors.
Time for Steve Jobs to team up with William Gibson…
read more... -
Indifference: the Musical Score
July 24, 2011This composer and nonsense aficionado Gary Bachlund sets a short, meaningless verse (cited, or curated, by Douglas Hostfadter in his excellent Metamagical Themas), to a tongue-in-cheek arrangement of chromaticism and diatonic sextuplets.
read more... -
Surrealist Lab: In Search of Automatism (part 1)
July 24, 2011 In a recent post, "With A Lunatic Gesture We Forsook Jujitsu" (Automatism A), I tried my hand at some automatic writing. This was a practice codified by the Surrealists under the direction of Andre Breton, but its provenance dates to long before that. Its purpose has depended on the historical circumstance. For instance, it used to be seen by 19th Century psychics as a way of channeling supernatural sources, even aliens. For others, namely the Beat poets, it was mer.. read more...