And while we’re on the subject of artists not averse to making a quick buck, this picture just popped up on Twitter, depicting a little soirée Warhol threw at the Factory for (among others) Quentin Crisp, Keith Haring and, uh, Marilyn. A dream dinner party for many – so why do they all look so bloody glum?
Showing posts with label Duchamp. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Duchamp. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 05, 2022
About farts
Monday, June 24, 2013
Marcel Duchamp is alive and well and living in Stockholm
And I find myself in the lovely capital of Sweden, where I eat a great deal of herring, watch the Changing of the Guard (because I Am A Tourist), go out and buy a toothbrush in broad daylight at 10:30 pm (because it’s midsummer) and walk up a gentle hill to the Moderna Museet for the Surrealism & Duchamp exhibition. The museum has an impressive collection of pieces by the arch-conceptualist, although closer inspection reveals that most of them are in fact the work (if by that we are discussing the person who physically made the thing) of one Ulf Linde; Duchamp visited Stockholm in the early 1960s and authorised copies to be made of his major works.
Does it matter? Since Duchamp’s appeal is all about provocative, incongruous ideas rather than fine craftsmanship, should it bother us that some of the pieces we view might never have been touched by the hands of the man to whom they’re credited? It’s the idea that matters, right? Well, yes, and after a century there are still people who are challenged by the idea of encountering a urinal in an art gallery. But ultimately, if the idea is so much bigger than the execution, why go to the bother of remaking a readymade? Why not just write down the idea on a PostIt note and put that in a gallery? But then Ulf Linde might copy the PostIt...
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
I’m Damien Hirst and so’s my wife!
An interesting article in the Independent introduces a couple of artists who call themselves Damien Hirst. Inevitably, it’s not just a straightforward case of fakery or passing-off. These ersatz Hirsts claim to have aesthetic motives for their appropriation, one turning Hirst’s name into a Duchamp-style readymade, the other commenting the lack of originality in the echt artist’s work, and his own lack of direct involvement in many pieces that go to market under his identity.
Hirst and/or his representatives appear to be unhappy with the situation, which is odd; surely, neither of the provocateurs would have changed their names had young Damien not appeared on the scene, so he can legitimately claim both artists to be his own creations, which gives him the right to auction them off for some absurd sum. If they’re really lucky, he might dismember them first and put them in a fishtank.
PS: While we’re there, Jonathan Jones disembowels Hirst’s latest exhibition.
PS: While we’re there, Jonathan Jones disembowels Hirst’s latest exhibition.
Thursday, September 06, 2007
Of mice and postmodernists
On the advice of Ian Hocking (who is now, I trust, happily ensconced in Canterbury), I've been reading Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes and it's very good, as he declared. I won't bother to review it, as Ian's done a fine job of that already, but two points suggest themselves.
First, dear God, the title. Before Ian began hymning the book's praises, I'd noticed it on the shelves of my second favourite second-hand bookshop in Bangkok, and walked past, simply because the title seems to suggest some sub-Wildean soft-porn potboiler about golden-haired youths fumbling each other into manhood behind the bikesheds of Eton in about 1905. When a movie version was made in 1968 (of Keyes's novel, not of my imaginary posh gay smut), they retitled it Charly. I normally object to that sort of thing as inane d***ing d**n that insults the intelligence of the audience and the integrity of the author, but in this case I think it was a good call.
The other thing is that some aspects of the novel (or, more specifically my reading of it - hold that thought, I'll come back to it in a moment) provide a neat clarification of Roland Barthes's 'Death of the Author' theory. This is something I touched on in Welcome to the Machine (available at a half-decent bookshop near you, if such a thing still exists), but hell, why not give it another run round the digital paddock?
Essentially, Barthes argues that it's pointless to second-guess the intentions of an author of a piece of writing, whether by reference to his or her biography, or to the words themselves. A book is 'created' not by the author, but by the reader, whose own experiences, opinions, prejudices, previous readings, etc all have an influence on the meaning derived from the reading. By extension, it's quite feasible to argue that Book B is an influence on Book A, even if B was written after A, and even if the author of A never read it. If the reader of A has already read B, it can influence the reading of that text.
In WTTM, my example was the perceived influence of a book by Philip K Dick on the themes of OK Computer, even though Thom Yorke protested that he'd never read the book in question. As I read Flowers for Algernon, elements of the book triggered thoughts of books I'd read before. Parts of the book are written in a deliberately primitive first-person voice, suggesting the intellectual and social 'otherness' of the narrator, as in Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker or Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. (This does raise an unrelated issue, one that's been niggling me for some time: if we're getting to the stage when the majority of people communicate in sub-literate txtspk, how does an author convey the notion that a character is sub-literate? Or will the concept of sub-literacy cease to exist?)
Also, a white mouse plays a more significant role than you might expect (see Zadie Smith's White Teeth and The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams); and the moral ramifications of using medical intervention to take someone to a state of intellectual 'normality' have their echoes in Awakenings by Oliver Sacks. Now, all five of those books were published well after Flowers for Algernon first saw the light of day. But, according to Barthes, they all influenced it, because they affected my reading of it.
By pure serendipity, I just found a quotation from Marcel Duchamp on the Radiohead site Pulk-Pull*:
"All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act."
Now, I don't know whether Duchamp had read 'Death of the Author'; he died just a year after it was published, so the chances are that he didn't. But of course, according to both Barthes and Duchamp, that's a very minor detail.
First, dear God, the title. Before Ian began hymning the book's praises, I'd noticed it on the shelves of my second favourite second-hand bookshop in Bangkok, and walked past, simply because the title seems to suggest some sub-Wildean soft-porn potboiler about golden-haired youths fumbling each other into manhood behind the bikesheds of Eton in about 1905. When a movie version was made in 1968 (of Keyes's novel, not of my imaginary posh gay smut), they retitled it Charly. I normally object to that sort of thing as inane d***ing d**n that insults the intelligence of the audience and the integrity of the author, but in this case I think it was a good call.
The other thing is that some aspects of the novel (or, more specifically my reading of it - hold that thought, I'll come back to it in a moment) provide a neat clarification of Roland Barthes's 'Death of the Author' theory. This is something I touched on in Welcome to the Machine (available at a half-decent bookshop near you, if such a thing still exists), but hell, why not give it another run round the digital paddock?
Essentially, Barthes argues that it's pointless to second-guess the intentions of an author of a piece of writing, whether by reference to his or her biography, or to the words themselves. A book is 'created' not by the author, but by the reader, whose own experiences, opinions, prejudices, previous readings, etc all have an influence on the meaning derived from the reading. By extension, it's quite feasible to argue that Book B is an influence on Book A, even if B was written after A, and even if the author of A never read it. If the reader of A has already read B, it can influence the reading of that text.
In WTTM, my example was the perceived influence of a book by Philip K Dick on the themes of OK Computer, even though Thom Yorke protested that he'd never read the book in question. As I read Flowers for Algernon, elements of the book triggered thoughts of books I'd read before. Parts of the book are written in a deliberately primitive first-person voice, suggesting the intellectual and social 'otherness' of the narrator, as in Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker or Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. (This does raise an unrelated issue, one that's been niggling me for some time: if we're getting to the stage when the majority of people communicate in sub-literate txtspk, how does an author convey the notion that a character is sub-literate? Or will the concept of sub-literacy cease to exist?)
By pure serendipity, I just found a quotation from Marcel Duchamp on the Radiohead site Pulk-Pull*:
"All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act."
Now, I don't know whether Duchamp had read 'Death of the Author'; he died just a year after it was published, so the chances are that he didn't. But of course, according to both Barthes and Duchamp, that's a very minor detail.
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