 |
 |
I'm not so sure about Duchamp's infamous toilet. His "original" got broken, tate modern has one of three remakes. Which is nonsense: the art event was the thing, the original insertion of the non-art object into the (then) hallowed art space. Duchamp, I think, wasn't about the fetishism of the object. His role - and that of his art objects - was about inserting a question into the discourse: is this art?is this ... so, for the toilet, any toilet would do, so long as it was inserted into the "right" space. All such echoes since of the toilet are reminders of the original insertion. The art-space isn't hallowed, fetishism of the art-object cannot be the primacy of our motive for looking at art. If it is, then we uphold the hierarchies that were manifest at the time of Duchamp's toilet. Maybe Duchamp's toilet is the centurion whispering in Caesar's ear, reminders of mortality. Cuts away the privilege, as much as any filmic masterpiece issued for 12.99 on the Tartan label. His Nude Descending A Staircase. Dave's comment about it copying film is right ... but the tone is all wrong. All of modern art - including poetry - has been turned by the mechanisation of the means of production, to whit, the photograph then the film. Nothing could be the same afterwards: for centuries, artists had sketched horses in terms of "realism", yet their realism became undone. If the novel usurped the poem as the means of telling a long story, then photography usurps painting as the prime means of recording events, painting has to find another role. Artists could not work out from observation how a horse ran. Realistically. Yet artists had been looking at horses for millenia, millions of years. It was only in the 1890s that people worked out - using photography - how horses ran. Millenia. So Duchamps painting becomes an incessant reminder of how well painting doesn't work, of it's dead end, it's inability to compete with film. Of how painting could diverge on a different path when faced with these challenges. Listen to Brian Sewell all you want, it doesn't alter these facts. No one can paint in the manner of Pousssin anymore. The photograph has perverted our gaze. Roger On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 6:42 PM, Christopher Walker <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > <snip> > I have been to the Prado and seen works such as Guernica and Las > Meninas in actuality and its a great deal different to seeing > reproductions of them. [DB] > <snip> > > Quite so. Viewing in the flesh privileges the facticity and the craft of any > given piece, reproduction its status as information. But neither is really > *the work*, which (in order to engage with it) requires a richer > (re)construction, whatever that entails; and it varies, of course, from case > to case. > > CW > > _______________________________________________ > > 'Life is too precious to spend it with important people.' > (Harry Partch) > -- My Stuff: http://www.badstep.net/ "She went out with her paint box, paints the chapel blue She went out with her matches, torched the car-wash too" The Go-Betweens