quondam @ archinect/79/7912n.htm
understanding Marcel Duchamp
Rita Novel 2005.04.06 07:10
Re: new Trumbauer fan (system)
2005.03.22 10:42
here's some of my favorite quotations from:
Philadelphia Museum of Art. Etant Données: 1° la chute d'eau. 2° le gaz d'éclairage. Reflections on a new work by MARCEL DUCHAMP. Texts by A. d'Harnoncourt and W. Hopps. (Bulletin. Vol. 64, No. 299/300.) Philadelphia, 1969
so far:
"The timing of Duchamp's artistic activity always ranged between the carefully planned and the chance creation, the long-drawn-out deliberate process and the swift decision."
"Bored with the very practice of wielding a brush and deeply dissatisfied with painting as the only means to "make" something, he not only decided to stop being a painter in the conventional sense but set his mind to work on the whole problem of the artist's engagement with the real world. Rejecting established approaches to art as well as the contemporary modes of the Cubists and Furturists, and suspicious of the very concept of "reality" which his colleagues still attempted to explore (in however radical a way), he began to construct his own alternative version of reality: a mythic, pseudoscientific system which brought the tools of chance, humor, and ironic indifference into play."
"Not as explicit as water or gas, but equally present in Duchamp's "amusing physics" is the invisible current of electricity. The potential connection between Bride and Bachelors is an "electrical stripping" with all sorts of eccentric fixtures: the "desire-magneto," the "motor with quite feeble cylinders." The failure to connect is a short circuit. The same current runs quite literally through Duchamp's rotating optical machines of 1920 and 1925, and the Rotoreliefs of 1935. An early note in the Box of 1914 proposes: "L'electricite en large, Seule utilization possible de l'electricite 'dans les arts.' Duchamp's metaphor to describe the encounter between the spectator and a work of art is that of a "spark" which "gives birth to something, like electricity."
emphasis added
[I wonder what sparked this thread.]
get a bird's eye view
or look in the back door (while it lasts)
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