Dear Ray Johnson, Charles Stuckey

Like many eccentric people of my generation I have a folder of artful, profoundly prankish souvenirs from the late Ray Johnson. Too bad I made no log of his frequent phone calls, when they happened or what was said back and forth. (Imagine the size of Johnson’s telephone bills! If only he had kept his monthly statements listing the numbers he called and the minutes he invested. Was there anyone connected to art who did not hear from him regularly?) While I was aware already as a student in the sixties of Johnson’s existence as a pioneering contemporary artist whose small collages were illustrated in every survey of Pop art, it was not until 1977 while I taught art history at Johns Hopkins that I first received one of the amazing artist’s multitudinous mailings. The cover letter seductively acknowledged my article just published in Art in America about women without heads appearing in works by Marcel Duchamp. Among the assortment of other sheets in the same initial mailing were two folded 17 x 11” photocopies of works from the ongoing series of silhouette portrait collages that Johnson had begun in 1976, both including reproductions of the headless (and so antithetical to portraiture) female featured in Duchamp’s Étant donnés. As I would learn, Johnson characteristically incorporated such favorite images over and again in different collage compositions throughout the course of decades, suggesting in the way of Wagnerian leitmotifs that otherwise varied collages sharing some particular image were partly interrelated in his obsessively creative mind. Betraying his sympathy for the great nineteenth-century Symbolists like Gauguin and Munch who quoted details from their own previous works the same way, Johnson’s capacity for allusion by repetition was greatly abetted by the advent around 1958 of the office photocopy machine that could endlessly replicate any source image small enough to fit folded into an envelope. No less important, I would come to realize that the muted black tones of the photocopies, ubiquitous in his mail art no less than in his more substantial collage works, implied a baseline nocturnal mood. But I never seriously heeded the pervasive obsession in his works with death, so obvious ever since Johnson took his own life in 1995. (For anyone still unfamiliar with John Walter’s 2002 eye-opening documentary, How to Draw a Bunny, put this pamphlet down right away and watch the DVD.)



Back to 1977: of course, I liked the idea that a famous artist kept up with my arcane investigations. In his initial letter Johnson asked whether I was aware of his own works incorporating the headless Étant donnés figure. Or whether I knew about the vandals who decapitated Edvard Erichsen’s 1913 mermaid sculpture installed at the Copenhagen waterfront in honor of Hans Christian Anderson’s story. (Finnish by heritage, Ray was well informed about Scandinavian art.) Taking his bait with pleasure, I hurried to call the telephone number he provided and so received an unforgettable lesson in anything goes art history. Unable to keep up with Johnson’s imaginative leaps and encyclopedic erudition, I missed more in his art than I ever yet saw. Already aware that bunnies were kid’s stuff, my three-year-old son burst into tears (“I am not a bunny head!”) not long before Easter 1994 when the mail brought a Johnson mail “portrait” of him. It never occurred to me to connect Johnson’s bunny mania to the trademark gentleman’s magazine with fold-out revelations, any more than to the hares used as performance art props by Joseph Beuys, or to the famous discussion of double images in E. H. Gombrich’s 1960 classic, Art and Illusion, referring to Wittgenstein’s commentary on a drawing of a rabbit’s head that looks like a duck’s. But in an incredible and ongoing series of publications Johnson’s fanatical friend William Wilson has described many such labyrinthine threads of interconnecting and superimposed meanings. Johnson’s works call for annotations, like those prompted by the writings of James Joyce. (In the late 1950s Johnson famously made a proto-Pop “portrait” collage of the abstruse Irish writer as a cigarette advertisement he-man.) What is most needed now where Johnson studies are concerned, however, are publications with lots of comparative illustrations showing works by other artists so that the promiscuous range of his visual references can be appreciated on the same level as his literary ones.



I finally met the artist in person when I moved back to New York in 1980 and after a few years he arranged for me to sit for one of the silhouette profiles that he used as the basis for many of his mostly black and white collages of the period. When he had the twenty-six Stuckey profile collages “finished” he brought them all to my Chinatown loft and spread them around like units of a mysterious alphabet. Always one for situational ground rules, Johnson had explained in advance that this would be my one and only viewing opportunity, after which he intended to cannibalize bits of these “portraits” as stuff for other collages under development as his imagination insatiably fed upon itself. From start to stop the process for my “portraits” coincided roughly with the retrospective of his art presented at the Nassau County Museum of Art in 1984 when I first had the opportunity to get an overview of Johnson’s art. While his works are now the subject of exhibitions all around the world, during his lifetime Johnson managed to derail many efforts to show his work. But he seemingly adored curator Phyllis Stigliano, who arranged to borrow from a variety of impressive institutional and private lenders, attesting to how widely collected Johnson was as an artist, notwithstanding his own self-effacing outlook. Contrary to the ever more inflated size widespread in 1950s, 1960s and 1970s art, nothing in this show was over thirty inches high. The issue of intimate scale aside, the exhibition made it quite clear that Johnson was unsurpassed as a collage artist throughout this thirty-year period. Lucy Lippard put it especially well in 1999: “made by the most tenderly time-consuming methods,” Johnson’s collages are “overflowing with wit, charm and enigma.” A longstanding Johnson fan, Lippard excused herself in 1973 for leaving Johnson out of her famous account of de-materialized art from 1966-1972. According to Madeline Gins, Johnson was furious. In truth, Johnson was far more than a collage artist, as we learned at the 1984 opening night, on which occasion one of the guests was Frances Beatty, who has subsequently taken charge of the artist’s estate. Johnson’s old friend, Timothy Baum recalled how the artist spent the evening outside the museum rather than inside. For those who noticed (and I did not) it was a performance. Suggesting his discomfort as an artist with the idea of being the center of attention, suggesting even contempt for the concepts of recognition and status, Johnson’s behavior was just one more sign that he was contemplating his own permanent self-removal.



Utilizing scraps displaced from various possibly unrelated printed papers as parts of amalgamated images, strangely multifarious, collage as a mode diagrams and frames the capacity of imagination to experience at once any number of different times and places, people, things and feelings in all sorts of ways as a potluck stream of consciousness. More than any kind of new technology collage is what is essentially modern about twentieth-century art. And yet with its impure intermixture of means, collage continues to be marginalized as an exception in museum collections organized along the lines of old-fashioned mediums or in displays predicated on large (and so, supposedly important) works. With the exception of caricature and comic strip art, collage is the static art form best suited to humor and play, still antithetical to many people’s standards for truly great art. The ambivalent status of collage could only make it more appealing to Johnson who enjoyed every chance to make light of sacred culture cows.



For an artist who would decide to specialize in collage, Johnson came of age at an auspicious moment. After schooling at the ultra-progressive Black Mountain College in North Carolina, in 1948 he settled in Manhattan where presumably he attended the first solo exhibition of Black Mountain instructor Willem de Kooning presented that same year at the Egan Gallery. Both as process art and as fluid black and white compositions, many of Johnson’s collages of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s recall de Kooning’s paintings of the late 1940s that so appealed to Johnson’s influential neighbor, John Cage, because they had no center of interest. These nocturnal works show traces of de Kooning’s dynamic studio practice of cutting up his own drawings and then merging the remnants from different ones, so to incorporate (and preserve) previous ideas in constantly evolving hybrid images. In 1949 Johnson likely saw the three extraordinary gallery exhibitions staged by Joseph Cornell, whose orchestrations of humble old-fashioned childhood ephemera were object lessons in how a truly inspired artist gifted with an abundance of imagination could work exclusively in collage and assemblage. Cornell’s symbolist tendency to include similar elements repeatedly in many different works made over the course of years gave license for Johnson to do the same for the rest of his life. I can only assume that Johnson eventually saw some of Cornell’s collage letters. (When Johnson in 1968 moved away from Manhattan to Long Island he gained in physical proximity to de Kooning in Springs and Cornell in Flushing, far more than he lost by distancing himself from the ever more hectic downtown art scene.) Besides the opportunities to study works by de Kooning or Cornell, New York offered the young Johnson the ultimate chance to develop his connoisseurship during the collage rich survey exhibition of classic Dada art organized by Duchamp for the Sidney Janis Gallery in the spring of 1953. No wonder that Johnson, sophisticated with such experiences, destroyed so many early works from dissatisfaction. The dancer Carolyn Brown in her autobiography tells how she received a request from Johnson in 1965 to borrow a small piece of a large 1952 painting that he had already cut up and distributed piecemeal to friends in the mid-1950s. (In 1965 he was evaluating the chances of reuniting the pieces.) Rauschenberg, Twombly and Johns, to choose from artists Johnson knew in the 1950s, were hardly less self-critical with respect to their own early works. Learning that Johnson incinerated substandard works in Twombly’s fireplace, Johnson’s ultra-supportive new friend William Wilson began in 1956 to save every work and every scrap of Johnson-related material that he could, an ongoing devotion.



The collage emphasis aside, no New York event would have more lasting influence on Johnson’s art than the in-depth retrospective presented at the Museum of Modern Art in 1950 of the works of Norwegian symbolist, Edvard Munch. The mask-like faces in Munch’s urban crowd scenes, the spermatic and embryonic marginalia in his Madonna lithograph, and most of all his hallmark image of moonlight as a phallic shaft reflected on dark waters, have all haunted Johnson’s works ever since. (As if in response to the fact that Richard Lippold was working on an ambitious Sun sculpture when he and Johnson became lovers, the younger artist specialized in moon art.) Among living European artists, it was the works of Jean Dubuffet (resident in New York in the early 1950s) teeming with graffiti faces and jigsaw puzzle piece shapes that exerted the most lasting impact on Johnson. When he adopted a monkish look by shaving his balding head, Johnson began slightly to resemble Dubuffet in appearance (and to resemble van Gogh in the 1888 Self-Portrait famously gifted to Gauguin). Look-alikes are everywhere in Johnson’s art. The famous Carjat photograph of Rimbaud that Johnson used as the basis for the cover illustration to the 1957 New Directions edition of Illuminations looks to me rather like the Pop poet portrayed in Elvis Presley #2, made at the same time. Of course, in relationship to the older Lippold, Johnson in the 1950s himself played Rimbaud to a more established Verlaine. Johnson presumably read the 1961 biography of Rimbaud by Enid Starkie, which stressed the source materials that inspired the young Symbolist. As if making a case for Johnson’s insightful brand of appropriation, Starkie concluded: “genius might be said to be the faculty for clever theft.”



An exhibition earlier this year at Andrew Roth in New York featured the mail sent by Johnson to Carolyn and Earle Brown already in the mid-1950s. The many enclosures were rendered with considerably more refinement than the photocopied mail art that the prolific Johnson sent off widely beginning in the early 1960s. No matter what the contents of his postings, however, Johnson’s concern for mail was evident already in the 1940s in illustrated letters that he carefully preserved. One precociously self-aware mailing to his parents includes a watercolor of a boy with Johnson’s features listening to the buzz of a cross-pollinating bee. Tailored provocatively to his gossipy personal relationships with the recipients, in the 1950s Johnson’s letters prompted him to integrate text and image incessantly and he soon became a virtuoso, rivaling and surpassing his associates Rauschenberg and Twombly, no less addicted to text-image art. Considering the amount of time Johnson devoted to his letters with their references to various art personalities and issues, it hardly comes as a surprise that Johnson included the famously letter-mad Vincent van Gogh and his art dealer brother Theo among the seventeen historic figures he planned to celebrate around 1970 in “Famous People Memorial collage-paintings.” Whereas van Gogh wrote the bulk of his letters to a single confidant, however, Johnson as an only child developed a sprawling brotherhood and sisterhood of correspondents. Parallels between Johnson and van Gogh are striking in hindsight: both artists were compulsively and widely interested in art and literature, both preferred to move away to small towns on the periphery of the art world and, of course, both took their own lives. From today’s perspective it seems incredible that Johnson’s library did not contain any edition of van Gogh’s letters. (But then it is incredible that van Gogh, as if unaware, never mentioned the published correspondence of Delacroix.)



How about a collected edition of Johnson’s countless letters?! Although it would be seemingly impossible to track down all of them, in imagination such a compilation would be no less a literary treasure than a visual feast. In its small way, The Paper Snake, Johnson’s 1965 book based upon his mailings to fellow Fluxus artist, Dick Higgins, gives a good idea of what such a huge undertaking could yield. Johnson’s collected correspondence would probably begin with the letters written home to Detroit from Black Mountain, among them an October 29, 1945, letter in which the 18-year-old confided: “I plan on getting a job as a mail man when I come home for Christmas vacation.” The bulk of the letters would be an antic journalistic record of Johnson’s remarkable art world, spanning at least three generations of cutting edge artists, dancers, musicians, critics, curators, dealers, collectors and art groupies. As for Johnson’s non-mail art, there has long been talk of a catalogue raisonné, with Stigliano volunteering to undertake the task already in the 1980s, when it was still impossible to imagine the scope of his output as a whole. Of necessity such a publication will be one of the strangest oeuvre catalogues ever. Whereas his performances and activities could be described in conventional chronological order, for the most part his collages will need to be described as works in progress over a lifetime. Unlike the works of any previous artist, these collages are often inscribed with three or more different dates, as Johnson made modifications, adding bits of his own earlier works (and so erasing evidence of their existence for future cataloguers). Cross-references will abound of necessity, just as they do in his works with all their starts and stops. Whatever the rules of the game turn out to be, however, this eventual overview should establish Johnson’s achievement s among the richest bodies of art from the second half of the last century.


above copied from: http://www.rayjohnsonestate.com/essays.php

To Change Names, Simply, Marcel Duchamp (Interview)

Interview of Marcel Duchamp
on Canadian Radio Television, July 17, 1960
(translated by Sarah Skinner Kilborne)



GUY VIAU. Marcel Duchamp, what power do you attribute to humor?

MARCEL DUCHAMP. A great power; humor was a sort of savior so to speak because, before, art was such a serious thing, so pontifical that I was very happy when I discovered that I could introduce humor into it. And that was truly a period of discovery. The discovery of humor was a liberation. And not humor in the sense "humorist" of humor, but "humor" humoristic of humor. Humor is something much more profound and more serious and more difficult to define. It's not only about laughing. There's a humor that is black humor which doesn't inspire laughter and which doesn't please at all. Which is a thing in itself, which is a new feeling so to speak, which follows from all sorts of things that we can't analyze with words.

G. Is there a large amount of rebellion in this humor?

M. A large amount of rebellion, a large amount of derision toward the serious word, entirely unconfirmed, naturally. And it's only because of humor that you can leave, that you can free yourself.

G. When is humor black?

M. Black, that's a way of speaking, since it was necessary to assign a color. Obviously there wasn't a more explicit color because black is somber, the somber of this humor makes it a thing almost mean instead of friendly and dangerous. It's almost like a sort of dynamite, of the spirit, isn't it? And that's why we call it black. Black doesn't have any meaning but it's a little like the black curtain of anarchy, if you will, things like that. Black generally took this somber side and burial that we were obligated to accept, then that was it.

G. You've said somewhere that possible reality is obtained from a little stretching of the laws of physics and chemistry. What do you want to say about that?

M. About that, it's simply the idea that it's easy to believe that by scraping a match one gets a fire, that is, cause creates effect. But I find the laws of physics such that they are, such that they have taught us, aren't inevitably the truth. We believe in them or the experiences each day, but I believe that it's possible to consider the existence of a universe where these laws would be extended, changed a little bit, precisely limited. And as a result, one immediately obtains some extraordinary and different results which are certainly not far from the truth because, after all, every hundred years a new scientist comes along who changes the laws, right? Since Newton, there have been more and since Einstein there have been even more, haven't there, so we must wait for changes to the laws in question.

G. But all your activity, I think, aims at the possible beyond the immediate.

M. Sure. In every case, without being a scientist myself, one can hope to arrive at obtaining some results parallel to the influence, if you will, in art. And what gives satisfying results in every case… satisfying in the sense of the new of the thing, what appears like a thing which was never seen before. Of the not already seen.

G. This said, Marcel Duchamp, you weren't less of an impressionist at the start of your career than anyone else.

M. Yes, absolutely, like all youth. A young man can't be an old man, it's impossible. One must pass through the network of influence. One is obligated to be influenced and one accepts this influence very naturally. From the start one doesn't realize this. The first thing to know: one doesn't realize one is influenced. One thinks he is already liberated and one is far from it! Therefore one must accept it and wait for the liberation to come itself, if it must ever come, because certain people never obtain it, never see it come.

G. But it's been said that you made these impressionistic experiences a little to prove that you could make them.

M. No, no…

G. … like a tour de force.

M. No, I don't believe that this was so. If you wish, when one paints like an impressionist from the age of seventeen or sixteen, one is already so content to paint, since one loves this, that there isn't analysis, self-analyzation that explains why one makes this rather than that and above all one never knows these things until forty years later.

G. And what was the Section d'Or back then?

M. The Section d'Or dates from 1912. It was a small salon which took place for only a year, where all the cubists of that era got together, except Picasso and Braque, who stayed in their corner. There was, already, a sort of schism between the two groups of cubists. And there we made, thanks to my brother Jacques Villon, and Picabia … quite an exposition of paintings, with Apollinaire, that had a lot of success. Apollinaire, I believe, created a meeting place for presenting young painters who, at that time, were iconoclasts, as well you'd think.

G. And this cubism, did it not contain, if I may say … a little futurism?
Click to enlarge
Figure 1
Marcel Duchamp,
Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912

M. Yes, there was a relationship in everything. The time was made for this. With the futurists there was something a little different, which was the preoccupation of producing a movement, of producing the movement. To try, if one produces the movement, to produce it from an impressionistic manner, which is to say naturalist, to give the illusion of movement, this was the mistake in itself, since one can't produce a thing, one can't produce a movement--in any realistic manner--from a static tableau, you see? It's not possible. Why did it fail, because it was the continuation of the impressionist idea attributed to the movement, given to the movement. Whereas, for example, in my case, where I wanted to make the same thing with Nude Descending the Staircase, (Fig. 1) it was a little different. I realized very well that I couldn't produce the illusion of movement in a static painting. I was therefore content to make a state of thing, a state of movement, if you will, like the cinema does, but without the development of the cinema like a film. To superimpose one upon the other.

G. Each of these phases?

M. Each of these phases … indicated a completely graphic way and not the intention of giving the illusion of movement.

G. And it's this that made Nude Descending the Staircase a sensation at the Armory Show in 1913.

M. That was it.

G. … in New York.

M. And this was a sort of scandalous success which was so much so, that a lot of people knew Nude Descending the Staircase itself and they never knew who had made it. And this absolutely didn't interest them--knowing who was the painter. Because the painting was interesting them in the painting and this was the only thing which was interesting to them, so that I was completely … how should I say …

G. … ignored.

M. … ignored by the public because the public knew my work without knowing who I was or that I existed.

G. Was it from this moment that you renounced more or less the traditional notion of a painting?

M. Yes, it was around 1913, around 1912, and it was 1913 when I even began to doubt my cubism. I began to… I was probably very difficult to satisfy then, I suppose… And when I had already thought that that was the end, that this wasn't going to lead very far, except that it would have been able to make a lot of money perhaps if I had continued. But then, I had already changed ideas in 1913, and I found myself engaged in another form of expression where the painter loses his priority, if you will. The idea for me was, at that time, to bring in gray matter in opposition to the retinal. For me the retinal is a thing that has lasted since Courbet. After Romanticism, with Courbet, every series for a hundred years of painting or plastic art was based on the retinal impression.

G. For you, it has been a hundred years since painting wasn't so uniquely retinal.

M. No, not at all, far from it, on the contrary. Everything which represents religious painting, painting since the Renaissance, through the Italian Renaissance, is entirely gray matter, if I dare to use this term when I mean that that the idea was to glorify a religion, the catholic religion, the catholic God or something else, in the end, but the painting aspect itself, the retinal aspect of the painting was very secondary … more than secondary … it was the idea that mattered then. And this is what happened, this is what happened to me then in 1912 or 1913 with the idea of wanting to change or at least to rid myself of the retinal heritage of the last 100 years.

G. You said at that time, "Paintings have the dust of the past."

M. What made me say things like that was because it was necessary to get rid of and to obtain another opening onto other landscapes, so to speak.

G. Was it then, Marcel Duchamp, that Dada took place?
Click to enlarge
Figure 2

Marcel Duchamp,
The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, 1915-23

M. No, that was still in the distance. That was still later. I spoke of 1912 and in 1912 I had already elaborated upon the idea of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bach…by Her Bachelors, still without a hint of Dadaism. There was obviously a germ of things resembling Dadaism, but it didn't have the organized character of a movement like the Dadaism of 1916, 1917 and 1918. There had already been indications of such a movement, and even in The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even there are some details or developments which are of the Dadaist domain. But all the same, that was something a lot larger in spirit than a tendentious thing like Dadaism was … After all, Dadaism was a tendency to get rid of a violent way of accepted and permitted things. But then it was still a personal thing which alone concerned me, of making a picture or some kind of work with my responsibility alone and not a manifesto of the general order. Later, around 1916, 1917 in fact, Dadaism intervened and I collaborated there because it immediately went along with my views.

G. All right, if you want, we will revisit Dadaism now. I would very much like you to speak to us more about The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. (Fig. 2) What is the key to this painting? I believe I read from André Breton that there was a son of Ariane in the painting?

M. There isn't a son of Ariane. There is the fact that from the start this painting wasn't conceived like a canvas on which you put a picture. The painting is like a morsel of glass. From the start, it was painted on glass, which is in effect painted upon. Some oil paint is painted, but the forms which are there were from the start were seen with the idea of transparence. The idea of canvas disappeared. In order to still satisfy me, to satisfy me with the idea that the painting isn't a painting, which is to say a frame with some canvas on top and some nails around. I wanted to rid myself of that, which is a physical impression. After this, each part of the painting, of the glass, was minutely prepared with ideas and not with the strokes of a pencil. From ideas written on little papers as they came to me. And finally some years after I gathered in a box called the Green Box all these ideas, these little papers… cut up or torn up, rather, which I made torn up in order to make an edition of 300 exemplary copies and which are in the same form as the cut, original papers and on which nearly all the ideas that are in this big glass are written, or indicated in any case.

G. Who were the principal protagonists of Dada then?

M. The first demonstrations of Dada took place in Zurich in 1916, with Tzara and Arp and Huelsenbeck and that was about it. And this lasted two or three years. After that Tzara went to Paris, where he made the acquaintance of Breton, Aragon…several others who became the Dada of Paris. The difference is that, in Zurich, there wasn't really a big public demonstration, which is to say there was a Cabaret Voltaire with some demonstrations but more or less private, in the cabaret. In Paris, it reached a much larger scale and Breton and Aragon made some demonstrations in rooms like la salle Gaveau, where the public really went, en masse, with the idea of very copiously causing an uproar, you might say. And moreover, this is what made all the fuss about Dada. For three years there had been different demonstrations in each of the big rooms of Paris, and this was only terminated around 1920, 1922 or 1923, when truly there was some internal dissentions between the different dadaists, who were no longer content. With each wanting to be the big protagonist, naturally there were some disagreements. They had a falling out and Breton decided to begin another thing called Surrealism. What's more, the name Surrealism had been given by Apollinaire during the war without knowing it, to a piece called les Mamelles de Tirésias, in a small Parisian theater and it was called, I believe, Surrealist Drama. But in any case the word "Surrealism" was…fabricated by Apollinaire and he didn't know that it was going to take on such importance, I am sure of that, when I think about it.
G. And your friendship with Picabia dates back to then?

M. Oh yes! Picabia naturally was one of the big ones, was, so to speak, the go-between, he was different because he was in New York and we had already known Dada in 1916 in New York when he was here and then he left New York in 1917-18, he went to Barcelona. From there he went to Switzerland. He went to Switzerland where he made the acquaintance of Tzara. Tzara and he went back to Paris, made friends with Breton and really the movement began then. Besides, this is what wasn't approved by the German Dadaists, who wanted to make it a completely political thing, a political order only, in the communist sense of the word.

G. You spoke of Dada demonstrations. What were these demonstrations? Were they about manifestos, or what?

M. No. They were theatrical demonstrations. And yet! There was a scene, for example in la salle Gaveau which wasn't a scene, but anyway it was a scene just the same where the orchestra sat to play concerts. There were theatrical pieces created for the occasion by Breton, by Ribemont-Dessaignes, by people like that, which were played with the appropriate décor, which is to say, with cotton caps, funnels, everything was like a fantasy…imaginative.

G. Marcel Duchamp, what is a ready-made?

M. A ready-made [laughs], was from the beginning an invented word that I took to designate a work of art which isn't one. In other words, which isn't a work made by hand. Made by the hand of the artist. It's a work of art which becomes a work of art by the fact that I declare it or that the artist declares it a work of art, without there being any participation from the hand of the artist in question to make it so. In other words, it's an object already made, that one finds, and generally an object of metal…more than a painting in general.

G. Would you want to give an example of a ready-made in its pure state?
Click to enlarge
Figure 3
Marcel Duchamp,
Fountain, 1917
Photograph by Alfred Stieglitz (1917)
Figure 4
Marcel Duchamp,
L.H.O.O.Q., 1919

M. We have…the urinal, that I exhibited at the Indépendants in 1917 in New York and which was a thing that I had simply bought at the M. Mutt Works, and that I signed Richard Mutt. (Fig. 3) And which was moreover refused by the Independents, who weren't supposed to refuse it. But anyway, they refused it, they threw it behind a partition and I was obligated to find it after the exhibition in order not to lose it.

G. But there is what you call an "assisted" ready-made.

M. Okay, with the "assisted ready-made," it's just an object in the same genre to which the artist adds something like a moustache to the Mona Lisa, (Fig. 4) which is a thing added and which gives a special character [laughs] to the Mona Lisa, let's say.

G. Had you thought of adding a title to this work?

M. Oh that, I don't dare give you a translation of it, even in English.

[laughter]

G. And now what is a "reverse ready-made"?

M. A "reverse ready-made"…that was the case of…that wasn't made, but it would have been able to have been made. That would be to take a Rembrandt and to use it like an ironing board, you see, that would be the reverse by the fact that the tableau [or painting] became the ready-made of a true tableau [or table] made by Rembrandt, which becomes a ready-made for ironing shirts, you understand?

[laughter]

G. I think that you have always been…an intransigent spirit, your work was rare, this rare act, but you reunited it in the space of a portable museum…
Click to enlarge
Figure 5
Marcel Duchamp, Boite Series F, 1941

M. Yes, I made a big box, la Boîte en valise, (Fig. 5) which is to say a box which was a carton more or less where all the reproductions of the things I've made, almost all, everything I have been able to find in any case, and besides this only represented 90 or 95…articles and I had reproductions of them made and I had…in color, in black and there are even three small ready-mades which are reduced in dimension from the originals, which are the typewriter, the ampoule of Paris air that I brought to my friend Arensberg as a souvenir. I had filled an ampoule, of Paris air, which is to say I simply opened an ampoule and let the air enter it by itself and closed the ampoule and brought it to New York as a gift of friendship, in any case. And there was also the play on words.

G. I think that that is one of your specialties.

M. Yes, I don't know if you recall them…I don't recall all of them by heart, but anyway I'm going to read you one or two: "Avez-vous déjà mis la moelle de l'épée dans le poil de l'aimée?" ["Have you already put the marrow of the sword into the mane of the adored?"] One must read very slowly, because it's like a play on words, one must…

G. [laughs]

M. "Nous estimons les ecchymoses des esquimaux aux mots exquis.' ["We dodge the bruises of the Eskimos in exquisite words]. And one more: "Inceste ou passion de famille à coups trop tirés." ["Incest or family passion, on very bad terms."]

G. [laughs]

M. And how about: "Moustiques domestiques demi-stock pour la cure d'azote sur la Côte d'Azur." ["Domestic mosquitoes (half-stock) for the nitrogen cure on the Côte d'Azur."]

G. [laughs]

M. There's still another of them: "Le système métrite par un temps blenorrhagieux." [" Inflamed uterine system due to a gonorrheal condition."]

G. [laughs]

M. What's one more? "Parmi nos articles de quincaillerie paresseuse, Rrose Sélavy et moi recommandons le robinet qui s'arrête de couler quand on ne l'écoute pas." ["Among our articles of lazy hardware, Rrose Sélavy and I recommend the faucet which stops dripping when nobody is listening to it."]

G. What kindness! And, tell me, does the name Rrose Sélavy come up often in your works? What does "Rrose Sélavy" mean?

M. In 1920, I decided that it didn't suffice me to be a lone individual with a masculine name, I wanted to change my name in order to change, for the ready-mades above all, to make another personality from myself, you understand, to change names, simply. And this was a…

G. You speak of the negation of Dadaism. What was the surrealist affirmation? What was that…

M. There were a lot of points of affirmation. One of the important points was the importance of dream. The importance of dreamlike poems and the Freudian side also, the self-analytical interpretation side. Although they didn't completely feel like students of Freud or disciples of Freud at all, they used Freud. They used Freud as a component in analyzing their subconscious, in any case.

G. And all these surrealist works of which we speak right now, did they have, then, an importance of prefiguration of…

M. Yes, I believe. All written work is a hint of a little surrealism and all work, even a visual work of paint. One feels that the painter who made it saw the surrealism before, even if he refused it, you understand.

G. One has the impression that surrealism gave us a new orientation entirely…very distinct in the imagination of the contemporary man.

M. Very distinct, and I said…it was an absolute split and as always, given by literature and by painting and by the arts, this split will have repercussions in the political or interplanetary or some other actual world, just about.

G. The fact is that your activity, Marcel Duchamp, took place in the United States…did this used to give this activity a particular urgency, being in contrast or in…

M. No, the contrast was for me personal. Life in the United States was a lot more simple than in France, or than in Europe. Because…there is a respect for the individual here that isn't found in Europe. The individual isn't respected in Europe. One forces the individual to enter into a category, either political or social, or educational or something else. Here you are completely alone if you want to be. And there is a respect for the individual that is remarkable, in my opinion.

G. And you believe that this generous liberty…isn't compromised here, that it is without danger for the moment?

M. A lot less than elsewhere, in any case. Here, a free man is a man almost free, whereas in Europe there isn't a free man.

G. And you believe that he can, that he will be able to remain that for a long time, almost free?

M. Probably. We will go back there, to the free man, because…we wouldn't, we won't become ants for the pleasure of becoming ants.

above copied from: http://www.toutfait.com/issues/volume2/issue_4/interviews/md_guy/md_guy.html

NO PLACE TO SIT (a walk around the new context), Federica Bueti

The last hundred years of work indicate that it’s demonstrably impossible to destroy or dematerialize Art, which, like it or not, can only gradually expand, voraciously synthesizing every aspect of life. Meanwhile, we can take up the redemptive circulation of allegory through design, obsolete forms and historical moments, genre and the vernacular, the social memory woven into popular culture: a private, secular, and profane consumption of media. Production, after all, is the excretory phase in a process of appropriation. (From Dispersion by Seth Price)

Today we are constantly faced with the option of being able to transgress spaces, to reconfigure our positions from bygone eras towards the immanent future. We are all nomads in spaces and time. We are travelers from country to country. From one form to the next, we are surfing between contents in an endless negotiation with the Other. Our struggle has become more clear in the here-and-now sense as being part of a configuration of what the future might hold. See you there, in that interstitial space (that we are currently working on). We are trying to define our position in relation to the socio-cultural context. Nomadism, hyper-mobility, hybridization, de-territorialized space and the idea of liquid-modernity are all terms used to define a general tendency within our current cultural climate. Our contemporary reality in which we live and work as artists and critics is in a free-floating state. Here, the site is our starting point, and time is our tool.

There is a fundamental shift that is taking place that transforms spatial necessity with temporal contingency, temporal presence that makes spatial experience possible1. Contemporary practices are engaging in the use of time in an attempt to activate reflections, not only through forms but also in the way that they are producing discourses. These contemporary modes of production are based on nomadic practices, not simply in terms of freely moving around or upon merely physical space, but upon time-based practices, which are allowing individuals to engage in different time based dimensions, floating in a universe of expanded forms and meanings, where past, present and future are unique fragments of the real. Nomadism is a practice of time-displacement, a process of remembering or actualizing, where virtual actualization is a form of creation (Gilles Deleuze). This form of nomadism is not simply a form of post-production, it is a way of rethinking the past by changing the point of view of reflection, opening up minds with the aim of finding alternatives in terms of production, distribution and in general with the fruition of culture. We are no longer in a society of the spectacle nor in a society of total control. We are stepping out, using what society has produced in terms of mechanisms and products, and going beyond. We have become radicant as Nicolas Bourriaud points out, in a measure in which our consciousness of the real, in all of its forms has become the instrument of change. We are settled in being ‘in motion’. The crisis has shifted and has become our potential for rethinking our previous models. The consequence of the crisis is a state of precariousness, where the ephemeral constitutes our contemporary aesthetic. Artists are working within a critical discourse by transgressing media and engaging in political issues using means like writing or intersecting boundaries between different media, using different disciplines as instruments to broaden the trajectories of their discourse. This is an attempt to reflect on the present and the immediate futures, taking into account all of the perspectives offered by the multiple languages of contemporary culture. To be political also means to think of possibilities of the future.

The new generation share a transmedial attitude which brings them to broader and more diverse forms and contexts within their practices. In what we can define as a practice of Nomadism sets in motion the real in all its forms tending to an endless displacement where thoughts and forms are translated and reassembled into new narratives, producing alternative social contexts using existing materials. There is no longer one tendency or specificity, but a broad range of approaches using different practices as tools for subjective narration. In this process of embracing multiplicity, it is difficult to define and distinguish between those who are truly engaged in a critique of the social and cultural system with the aim of inciting real change, and those who are trying to ride the wave according to the roles of that system. But from our point of view, we will always be partial and each possibility will imply the exclusion of another who is different.

Between the good and the bad there are many shades in between and what has to be recognized is a generation of artists, curators and critics who are aware of the present condition, who are working on new definitions and parameters. Those working with or without the banner of history, using fiction or science, comics or sculpture, writing, or any other discourse. We are all using a range of possible materials. Now the problem is not WHY we use them but HOW we use them. Artists are responding to a new globalized perception. They traverse a cultural landscape saturated with signs and create new pathway between multiple formats of expression and communication (Nicolas Bourriaud). This is not about chaotic movement as it probably appears, but it is an organized and fully conscious path that opens up to infinite progressions and changes. Nomads don’t move randomly, but plan their journeys by drawing them on a map. These contemporary artists reconfigure cultural practices through the use of existing codes and practices. Culture is a mobile entity, a multiple proliferation of the visual and of narratives bound within. We could also use the term nomadism-in-time, as a way of describing a certain propensity to engage with time as a place of critical thought. Here we are enabled to build a new social aesthetic based not only on the practice of collective movement, but on the unfolding of individual mythologies 2 (collective experience is now based on simultaneous private experiences, distributed across the field of media culture, knitted together by ongoing debate, publicity promotion and discussion- Seth Price). We are no longer in search of a collective doing, but we operate as monads in the flow of the real.

Every monad, as Leibniz explained, is characterized by the power of representation, through which it reflects every other monad so that one can look in every other monad to observe the whole universe reflected there. In the same way, contemporary culture is a proliferation of individual mythologies or subjective narratives that contribute to the definition of a cultural landscape, opening a multitude of points of view. Different from the Postmodern era, that proliferation is not so much a lack of inclusive ideologies and a naive multiplicity of claimed cultural diversity, but it is instead a consciousness of us and of all that surrounds us, it is a critical dimension in which we are able to put into question neo-liberalism in all its dimensions and build on our functional utopias 3. If we consider the current situation, many artists share a sense of engagement that is completely different from its political connotation, which points more to the will of making the world work. They are no longer required to represent anything. They produce discourses, improving their practices with their existences within the cultural field. We often misunderstand the sense of these progressions, which take place slowly and are often imperceptible, but for this reason they are more complex and probably more effective than a quick fall of the Bastille. In this flow between bodies, sounds, images and words there are some artists using time-based practices with the aim to re-access meaning and produce discourse using the short-circuit as a praxis of reenactment. They don't occupy any specific place, but instead move backwards and forth on a kind of timeline, never quite taking a seat. Quite to the contrary, they try to perform a dialectical relationship with the environment that surrounds them. Nomadism-in-time may not be quite the right definition, but it is certainly functional in defining an interest in breaking with the modern and the post-modern and with its conception of time, overstepping any clear definition and trying to produce alternative energies.

In a recent article Dieter Roelstraete4 put into question the tendency of many contemporary artists to use history in their practice, like he defined it as a “historiographic turn in art.”5 Even if I don’t completely agree with his perspective, I’m interested in the difference between the notions of the historical and the historicist. While the historicist suggests a tendency of conforming us to a state of affairs where history is determined by immutable laws, the historical seems a better term to identify the social and cultural phenomena that changes throughout time. The nuances in these two terms seem loaded and open to consideration. Of which, they might be the kinds of approaches that we will use in considering history in the development of our future. Thinking in historical terms is one way that we approach the endless possibilities of a critical thought, of building a future with a consciousness of how things can be transformed and elaborated upon by the passage of time. Re-enactment is a form of reassessing our trajectory, not merely as a cut and paste of anachronistic forms of expression. In the past year the phenomenon of these historical tendencies in art practice has taken place at all levels. However we must ask: do these tendencies represent obstacles towards the consideration of the importance of history, both personal and collective, in the writing of a new future?

Situating nomadism in-time clarifies the concept through specific analysis. It positions events and points of view, re-appropriating ideas and overcoming myths. Today some artists feel the urgency in practices to incite change. Their strategies involve the sharing appropriating from everywhere and everything: the present, the past and the future in the form of images, google maps, wikipedia tools, symposia, workshops, dance floors, critical discourse, informal conversations, sculptures, installations, video, sound, performances and so on in a heterotopia that implies fluctuation in a universe of signs and meanings, inhabiting spaces in between. Never filling a seat, these modes of working occupy different positions in different moments, depending on the contingencies that affect the direction of their efforts. In conclusion, what seems to emerge from this panorama is a progressive change that could be defined in terms of a re-appropriation of time. The various practices of temporally based artists are responding to this new re-appropriation, they are based on the will of creating a condition for the discursive.


above copied from:http://artandeducation.net/papers/view/18

Pataphysics - A Religion In The Making, Asger Jorn

The history of religion fails into three stages. Materialist, or natural religion, completed the final phase of its development in the Bronze Age. Metaphysical religion emerged with Zoroastrianism and advanced through Judaism, Christianity and Islam, before maturing in the Reformation. Pataphyslcs, the third religious stage - set to galvanise human thought and action in about two hundred years time - emanates from Alfred Jarry's visionary system.

It is only recently that the religious content of Pataphysics has become apparent. Prior to this development, Jarry's invention remained largely unknown beyond the small circle who published the esoteric Cahiers du College de Pataphysique. But all this changed when a special Pataphysical number of the Evergreen Review was published in New York.

Although the Americans have now claimed the honour of presenting Pataphysics to the world, they didn't dare mention the word religion in their journal. Nevertheless, the enormous success Pataphysics enjoyed last year among the New World intelligentsia has inaugurated an epoch in which the essentially religious nature of this phenomena will be carefully analysed. You'd have to have a cold to miss the stink its causing! Natural religion is the spiritual confirmation of material existence. Metaphysical religion represents the establishment of an ever deepening rift between material and spiritual life. The various metaphysical religions indicate the degree to which such a polarisation has already taken place. The process by which this rift advances is complicated, and often retarded, by an attachment to natural rites - which are transformed, with varying degrees of success, into metaphysical ceremonies and myths. The stupidity of maintaining a metaphysical culture in an age already overtaken by a scientific paradigm is illustrated by [the] dictum Kierkegaard chose as confirmation of the Christian system of knowledge - that is, that it is necessary to have faith in the face of absurdity. The question that naturally follows from this is: 'Why?' The answer is immediately apparent: the secularised authorities require a spiritual justification of their power. This materialist argument dates from the period in which the critique of all ancient mythologies was beginning.

Simultaneously to the development of this materialist critique, a mythology capable of answering the new social exigencies was fashioned from spare parts. Surrealism, existentialism and lettrism all disappeared up this metaphysical back alley.

Indeed, the classical lettristes persevered so nobly in their effort to reunite all those elements which had become irreconcilable in the modern world, that - by working backwards - they ended up reviving the ideas of the messiah and the resurrection of the dead; anything and everything that guarantied the unilateral character of faith! Now that politicians possess the means of total destruction, anyone who concerns themself with the end of the world takes on the perspective of the state.

Completely secularised, Metaphysical opposition to the physical world is definitively destroyed. The struggle terminated by total default.

The scientific paradigm is the only victor in any such debate.

A religion cannot be considered objectively true if its truth conflicts with what is known as scientific truth; and a religion which falls to represent the truth is no longer a religion. It will soon be generally recognised that this conflict has been resolved by Pataphysics. Jarry and his followers have placed on the level of the absolute a basic idea of modern science: that is to say, the concept of the constancy of equivalents.

The ground was prepared for the theory of equivalence by the Christian concept of man's equality before God. But it was only with scientific and industrial development that this principle was imposed on all sectors of life; and finally arrived, via scientific socialism, at universal social equality.

The fact that the principle of equality could no longer be limited to the spiritual world led to plans for scientific surrealism - as sketched out in Alfred Jarry's theories. Here, the Kierkegaardian principle of the absurd has been supplemented by the axiom of the equivalence of absurdities (equivalence of gods among themselves; and between gods, men and things). In this way a future religion is founded, one which is indestructible on its own ground: pataphysical religion encompasses equally all the possible and impossible religions of the past, present and future.

If Pataphysics had been taught anonymously, and avoided criticism, it might have slipped unnoticed into the world. Had this had happened, the apparently insoluble problem of Pataphysical authority - the consecration of the inconsecratable - would not have occurred.

But, alas, we are only too aware that Pataphysics appeared in the wake of other religions to fulfil an identical function. And so, Pataphysics can't be materialised into a social authority without recourse to an antiPataphysical praxis; because to become socially recognisable it would have to be invested with a social power. Consequently, Pataphysical religion is an unconscious victim of its own superiority over all prevalent metaphysical systems. It should not be necessary to emphasise that no reconciliation is possible between the principles of superiority and equivalence.

The great merit of pataphysics is to have confirmed that there is no metaphysical justification for forcing everybody to believe in the same absurdity, possibilities for the absurd and in art are legion. The only logical deduction that can be made from this principle is the anarchist thesis: to each his own absurdities. The negation of this principle is expressed in the legal power of the state, which forces all citizens to submit to an identical set of political absurdities.

It must by now be apparent that once a Pataphysical authority is accepted, it becomes a demagogic weapon against the Pataphysical spirit. Thus the Pataphysical programme itself, prevents the existence of any Pataphysical organisation; and from this fact we can deduce that it is impossible to form a Pataphysical church. The impossibility of creating a pataphysical situation in social life also prevents the creation of a social situation in the name of Pataphysics. The reasons for this have already been outlined. Equivalence entails the complete elimination of any concept we might have of situations or events.

Now that Pataphysics finds itself placed in an objective cultural situation, the inevitable consequence of the preceding definition is a split in the body of Pataphysical believers; between pure antisituationists and those who - holding to the pataphysical premise of equivalents - still favour the development of organised absurdities. Such absurdities maybe referred to as games.

The game is the Pataphysical overture to the world. The realisation of such games is the creation of situations. A crisis therefore exists, caused by the crucial problem which each Pataphysical adept must resolve: s/he must either apply the situlogic method and attack the conditions of the reigning society, or else simply refuse to do anything whatsoever about the situation. It is in the latter resolution to this problem that Pataphysics becomes the religion best adapted to life in the society of the spectacle: a religion of passivity and pure absence.

The Situationist International, the organisation of antiorganisers, faces an equally serious choice. Whether or not it should adopt the Pataphysical principle as an antimetaphysical weapon: one that is forever reinvented in the creation of new games. The absurdity of superiority and absurd superiority are the key elements of these games. Authority is their essential goal. If the game is liberation, it is best to begin by applying the principle of equivalents: the situation can then be constructed with an appearance of superiority. On the other hand, if a metaphysical base is used as the starting point, the situlogic will be dragged down to the level of the spectacle: a modernised servitude.

After a long process of fermentation the basic elements for a new game are now emerging from their previously obscure existence.

Time alone will tell whether these elements are compatible or antagonistic.

above copied from: http://www.infopool.org.uk/6104.html

Generic Objects, Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza

1.

By generic objects we don’t mean objects that affect a kind of generic quality—brilliantly commonsensical and ordinary objects that come from the rarefied space of the designer’s studio, and draw their value from that space. We mean really generic—milk crates, plastic buckets, shipping containers, wooden palettes, traffic barricades, decorative concrete blocks, urban trash cans and dumpsters, rubber tires, scaffolding, Scotch tape. It’s not that any of these aren’t designed, but rather that they are designed so incredibly well as to function with unparalleled efficiency within the systems of circulation for which they are intended. Their most telling quality is that they have slipped below the threshold of what would otherwise mark their identity as designed artifacts.

Functioning within the large field of conventions inevitably established by global markets and transnational productive systems, generic objects are designed with such programmatic exactitude that spaces accommodating authorial expression are reduced to make room for qualities that foster efficient and competitive performance in commercial processes. The more extensive and decentralized the circuits of production and distribution in which generic objects participate, the more numerous the universal norms by which they are informed. The space for authorial display or geographically specific markers is compressed to a minimum, when not eliminated altogether.



2.

Generic objects are synthetic genetic objects: a genome or a strict chain of codes, a tight script of metric chromosomes, cuts across them and the systems to which they are attached. The shipping container, for instance, like the bucket and the milk crate, is marked by multiple conventions, by a global consensus—a genome—established between all the parts of the system in which it functions. This guarantees compatibility at every interface. The weight and structural resistance of metal used for the container, the dimensions of the cranes and of the storage facilities in ships, the width of the trucks, the width of the interstate highway lanes used by the trucks, the walkways in the storage areas of ports, the width and reach of forklifts—they all work together. It’s an alliance that generates, in proportion to the efficiency of the system, an internal violence—a force, like that of genetic coding, which imposes morphologies, from the minutest detail of the object to the very edges of the system. Everything is determined by everything else.

In the generic universe every artifact plays a double role: it’s a fount of exigencies, putting its demands to the rest of the system, while at the same time it is irrevocably shaped by the enormous pressure that the remaining elements of the system exercise over it. Object and system are co-extensive. The illusion of the individual artifact and the crystallized complete system dissolves into an active and shape-producing field of exchanges and relations, internally held by the tension of provisionally optimal or near-optimal solutions but intermittently bombarded by demands that come from the outside, demands that it must address: new codes or laws, increased volumes of traffic, technological advances in other fields, administrative and marketing decisions, climate, regional conflicts, and so forth.

What we have, then, is a group of objects determined by a metric regime that they themselves empower, a genetic pool and the shapes it produces through relationships of mutual reinforcement, affected occasionally by exterior demands (which then translate into alterations in the system, into new information). In this sense, every aspect of the generic object has its own dimension of necessity. And every object is an elastic surface: if it receives a blow, it channels it to the entire system, and the blow is manifested in the individual objects that make up the system. If the resistance of the container’s metal changes, then the gripping power of the crane has to be altered. The shape or weight required by these objects, for instance, produces invisible expansive waves that mark the global landscape of trade. The process dictates compatible features to all the elements with which the object engages. Likewise in the opposite direction, a massive change at the global scale of trade sweeps down as a series of awesome waves that alters the shape of the individual elements.



3.

One of the visual “frequencies” transmitted by generic objects metonymically signals the massive and elastic systems to which they belong. These are systems to which we often remain physically, if not cognitively, blind. A run-of-the-mill shipping container, once deprived of its emblematic status on the sales catalogue page and the corporate website, becomes inseparable from the systems of distribution, transportation, and storage for which it was undoubtedly designed and manufactured—even when other uses may be possible. One conceives the container, within the stacks in ports and storage yards and on ships, as a small but essential and interconnected part of an intricate web of lines bustling with activity—lines that mark not only the routes of global/national/urban transportation of which it is an obvious part, but also the exchanges of capital that produce and benefit from these routes. These lines also link back to the factories that produce the goods stored and transported by the container, as well as to the offices that draft marketing plans for these goods and to the retail stores where they are sold. These lines to the factory, the ad agency, and the points of retail sale are, in turn, plugged in to lines that lead back to the farms, forests, mines, and rigs that generate or collect the raw materials necessary for the production of goods. And if we are imaginative enough, these lines can be linked to lines that map out the systems that allow the raw material to emerge in the first place. Every container plots a massive arabesque of relations as it dissolves into it and relinquishes the illusion of its singularity.

And this complicated weave of interpenetrating lines is crossed by other patterns, such as the one that tracks the fuel production necessary for the factories to be fired up and to keep the transportation vehicles moving. And woven into it are the patterns of war that keep oil economies in place, and the patterns of intricate investment and political maneuvering that keep those wars going. Even where murky zones appear in this complicated tapestry, they too are abuzz with obscure and connected activity. Discreet realms—the military site, the factory, the boardroom, the advertising firm, the port, the shopping mall—all collapse into one another. Or, more accurately: the idea of a world of discrete realms collapses altogether. Adjacencies become interpenetrations. The container languishing on a dock can beam us, if we zoom in just right, to a woven substrate of invisible materialities, to an intricate matrix of flows and forces that spreads out like a chemical LSD sky before us. It may not be there, but it’s there.

4.

Generic objects encourage us to consider the field over its individual elements. The singular seems superfluous in defining generic objects. Surely, a bucket is a bucket—irreducibly particular. But a bucket is a generic object only in the presence of another bucket (or, at the very least, in its implied presence). Generic objects draw on the dense fields of repeating specimens for their very definition. It is in the presence of other objects of their kind that they actualize their individual capabilities. Coupling and stacking and nesting are, after all, relations between multiples; instant replaceability implies equivalency and sameness among a large quantity of identical artifacts. Generic objects are defined by and live through a monstrous contiguity that mocks atomized conceptions of the world. Fields find meaning and function in ways that their individual components may not.



5.

Within their systems of circulation, generic objects are alien to the way a city produces meaning. Plastic crates used to distribute milk are abstract and autistic objects, blind and rigorously inelastic artifacts that unwaveringly respond to a set of specific demands. They are collections of data, programmed to function with the utmost efficiency, and nothing else. Though the crates surely carry the potential for a social function, they have been optimized to such a degree that their relation to the human is reduced to a single value or dimensional datum, inscribed by the weight of a gallon of milk or the storage capacity of a delivery truck. Milk crates in this environment are surfaces radically devoid of meanings, figures of such alarming blankness on a symbolic plane that their emptiness overwhelms.

Milk crates invariably leave full and return empty. They are part of a loop that, as a continuum of contiguous, melded information units, can remain active forever. If the world stood still, the loop that milk crates sketch out in the city would continue to flow, defying entropy and apocalypse. If one crate exits the loop, due to loss or damage, another simply takes its place. The loop is like a tide cycle or a whirlpool. Its indifference, its inwardness, the silence generated by its centripetal flows, should terrify us. It is monstrous in the way its energy absorbs all forms and meanings. As objects move in this flow, their contours, weights, surfaces, articulations, and inscribed data (date of production, type of plastic, percentages of recycled material, ownership markings) dissolve. It’s as if they move under such pressure that they are rendered liquid-like and incorporated into a perpetual spiral of activity.



6.

Generic objects accommodate the temporal modes of the situations in which they find themselves, and two modes of time are in play here: our segmented, finite, and familiar one; and that of the flow. These two modes of time, in turn, make two scales of perception visible. Generic objects integrated into the cycles of the flow tend towards invisibility; the articulation of their qualities remains hostage to and stalled by a movement exceeding that of everyday life in scale, duration, and inflexibility. All the elements caught in this flow dissolve in a confluence of obscured characteristics. Typological markers melt into pure metrics. The possibility of holding on to a familiar trait is rendered impossible by the abstracting impulse of the flow.

As soon as this object exits the flow, however, it is transformed. If a truck takes too long to recover emptied milk crates, the crates are exposed to forces external to the cycle. Someone steals one to carry the mangoes he will sell on the side of the road to earn his rent money. Once outside its “natural” flow the object becomes visible, familiar, autonomous, gains an identity, reveals potentials that hadn’t coalesced until then. Its time and ours synchronize. In such a situation, we can finally think of what to do with the generic object, how to manipulate it, make it serve new functions.

But these statements need to be qualified. They tie things up too neatly. The responses to the generic object extracted from its system are as varied as they are contingent on particular geographies and behaviors. The nature of the extractions and the places where the loop registers loss are not insignificant with regard to the way generic objects will be “re-drawn” away from their startling blankness.

7.

As a palpitating lattice of activity laid over the city’s orthogonal spread, the flow moves with the ineluctability of a stampede. And as with a stampede, individual elements are picked off. The rear of a supermarket becomes a site where the herd suffers losses. But it’s not the rear of every supermarket. It depends on the neighborhood. Geography and economics, specific demands and patterns of behavior, all matter. Where privation is greater, the voracity swells, the losses multiply. In affluent areas one instead usually finds the predator is satisfied. The flow itself, with its endless supply of replaceable parts, remains coldly indifferent and unaffected by these variations. It is indifferent because it reserves the right of reclamation, always threatening to pull stray elements back into its current.

The collection of points where individual specimens are extracted or expelled from the flow, diagrammed, produces a littoral—pockets of activity closely bound to their systems of circulation, both in terms of physical proximity and in the understanding of the object’s function. When there, generic objects are suspended on a middle ground in which they are regarded as somewhat less abstract than when in the flow, yet neither are they regarded as elements inserted into rhetorical relationships with the broader culture or design disciplines. The object’s alarming blankness is only slightly dissipated by the introduction of a calculus that links real needs to functional potentials.

8.

In the littoral, which usually materializes in economically depressed neighborhoods, the individual’s engagement with the generic object is modulated by need. The pressure of hardship demands appeasement. A contextual strain takes on a constitutive role by exerting pressure on the potentials in objects. If rolls of toilet paper need to be transported, then surely the nesting potential of the buckets used for the task will remain invisible.

If generic objects are patterned information, then in the littoral that information is processed with the efficient satisfaction of a particular goal in mind. The processing is endowed with a discriminating filter that necessity provides. Objects are treated as pure resource. They retain an abject rawness. This inhibits deployment of the artifact in rhetorical terms. What the object or usage of the object may mean, what values it may embody, what criteria it may be judged by—these are matters sacrificed to the necessary resolution of an immediate predicament. It’s almost as if the prerogatives are no longer those of the individual: the situation determines the possibilities for engagement. If there is something like a liberated sweep of the generic object’s potentials in the littoral, it is rendered available and substantive only in relation to the range of hardships that it meets there. The object’s set of freed potentials is an inverted diagram of the needs that structure its context.

Under these circumstances, objects are still not integrated in any fundamental sense, but remain in a condition of partial concealment. The individual’s gaze is pressed too close to them to obtain a full picture. The field of vision is filled by one or a limited number of the objects’ qualities or potentials. Need pushes the individual up against the objects’ potential for satisfying it. If, after being laid off from the supermarket, a person has to urgently figure out how to carry all his cleaning supplies from parking lot to parking lot as he washes cars, the milk crate’s metric precision in relation to the delivery truck will be relegated to a blurred edge of his field of vision, if not simply ignored altogether. Need determines what is useful or adequate at that moment. For an individual whose predicament is how to survive, a bucket is simply a body of condensed physical qualities, a bunch of physical “morphemes,” a complex library of connections, information to be applied, and always in light of a problem demanding an immediate solution. Interpretation and consideration of the object as such is minimal. Hardship engenders urgent relationships based on functionality, it unbinds an ineluctability that—like the ineluctability that renders the crate-in-the-flow an indivisible assemblage of information—possesses the individual to drag generic objects to the ravine of survival. Impossible to plot within moral and rhetorical universes, the object’s use is justified solely by its effectiveness in alleviating need—the very need that determined the scope of engagement that was possible with the object in the first place.



9.

Imagine two adjacent spheres—one the flow of generic objects; the other the realm of human activity in the city. Occasionally, their edges make contact and the flow releases elements. This is how we come to see, just outside a bodega, a group of milk crates captured by human need and intuitive ingenuity. They’ve become chairs in a domino game, a display structure for a handful of sugarcanes, a base for the cooler of the water vendor at the stoplight, the “mobile unit” of a car washer working in the empty lot next door. The transient nature of these activities always threatens to return the object to urban drift along with the leaves blowing on the sidewalks. The abbreviation of the object in the littoral finds a counterpart in the provisional quality the object takes on as solution or appeasement of a need. If another object appears that provides a better solution, the original one will be discarded. The object is always recognized as a temporary substitute. A rock that serves as a doorstop finds a homologue in a bucket full of water. A kind of non-rhetorical analogy occurs. The preferred object is the result of a comparative operation that pivots on the performance and potential of objects, and not on their physical or conceptual similarities; that is, on typologies of use and not of form. In fact, since both rock and bucket are structured by abstract forces—natural processes in one case and super-optimized industry on the other—they find themselves in this context without any affective mnemonic dimension or symbolic baggage. It is their mobilization as pure information that allows them to be interchangeable.

10.

All this is not to say that solutions aren’t repeated, that a bank of local knowledge doesn’t accumulate and grow in the littoral. It is to say, rather, that the transfer of solutions out of their immediate moment, that of linking necessity to potential, is incidental, even if highly significant. Contingent relationships are stabilized as recurring solutions, folded into a common repertoire. Future users can draw on it. This is where experience, repetition, and habit enter the frame and fortify the temporary repertoires of new activities for generic objects.

11.

In summary, the generic object finds itself in at least three situations: first, in the flow for which it is manufactured; second, in the littoral where need determines use and the generic object, due to the very conditions in which it functions, escapes rhetorical manipulation; and third, in a space of symbolic production, for example, within culture or design disciplines. Different criteria are prominent in each situation. The first and second situations, flow and littoral, seem determined by a certain ineluctability—the flow by the autism that propels the avalanche of optimal production; the littoral by the forces that cut through the individual in precarious situations. In both cases, the milk crate is treated less as an object per se than as information. In a cultural environment the milk crate is understood as a sublimated representation of the other two situations.

A relation to the object is, then, to be determined by the situation in which it is encountered: a prohibitive and prohibited one in the flow; a performative one in the littoral, guided by need and survival; and a rhetorical one in cultural spaces.

12.

In the last of these situations, in cultural spaces and within design disciplines, when the question arises of what to do with generic objects, analogy (in a rhetorical sense) has proven the easiest answer. Turn the bucket over and it becomes the lampshade it always looked like. Cut holes out of the shipping container and it becomes the shed it always suggested. But these easy analogies (easy because they lack that leap across deep divides and the magic of conjoining apparent incommensurables that rich analogies thrive on) always attempt to extract the generic artifact from its condition as nondescript and anonymous. They project a designer’s intention onto a thing that was circulating in the world fine without it. The appeal to the obvious, to what the object already suggested, is a thinly veiled pretense to rescue the generic from its dreadfully flat world of sameness by pulling it onto the lifeboat of differentiated artifacts.



13.

The easiest analogies treat the generic less as resource than as topic. The mundane artifact is infused with the designer’s “intelligence.” And the designer is celebrated for his or her resourcefulness, DIY ethics, poetics of the quotidian, critiques of the commodity system, imperative to recycle, and sympathy for the demands of sustainability. The rapport established by these analogies, however, while supposedly doing the opposite, narrows the view and hinders the object by subsuming its productive potential into a set of familiar typologies. It treats the object as only its meanings and manifested physical traits. What is most interesting about the generic quality is that it clarifies objects as compressed and manipulable energy and information, free of the magical cloak of meaning and added value with which the fairy dust of sanctioned creativity wraps them.

14.

It may be more interesting to place these generic objects in scenarios in which they are confronted with “deformative” forces—forces that will “torque” them. These twisting forces can be perceived when unexpected protocols are applied to a situation, by plugging in a vector usually absent from the contexts in which generic objects function, or by plotting generic objects within the coordinates of a program that is alien to them. It’s not, then, a matter of working against the traits inherent to generic objects, of making a bucket or a milk crate do the work of established furniture and architectural typologies as an ultimate horizon of productivity. On the contrary, it is the inherent capacities of the objects that give discipline to the experiment. What possibilities does the stackability of the bucket or the container open up when an unexpected demand is put to it, when a tiny catastrophe makes it swerve off course? What does its modularity permit beyond the functions and contexts it was designed for? What can be done with the object’s portability, with the fact that it’s structured to couple with a large array of other artifacts, just as the container couples with cranes in ports across the planet?

What are the unintended consequences of the artifact’s design, and how does one smoke them out and allow them to reveal their potential? How can new options be inserted into the seemingly closed systems in which these objects function? How can these systems be rendered sites of potential and unexpected plasticity? How is topographical instability introduced into a flattened pattern of uses? What can be done about the fact that these objects are already being put to unexpected uses in which their function is less optimal than their original designed intended? Can additions, joints, inserts, or deformed clones be produced that enlarge the range of their functions and generate new systems for which they can become basic building blocks? One begins to look for ways to tap into these objects’ pregnant infrazones for latent potentialities. One attempts to tease aberrant forms from the objects’ “natural” tendencies through uncommon modulations. One feels for malleable segments or “holes” in the pattern of the original design processes, and applies pressure there.



15.

To consider the generic in this way, we may need to temporarily padlock the studio. We may need to turn a bucket over or bore a few windows into the walls of a container. It is the work one is supposed to be doing. But it comes at the cost of ignoring what is truly amazing about the generic: that it functions in relation to a series of forces; that it is always part of a field of interconnecting vectors; that to think through it is to think in terms of large, nearly unfathomable landscapes. The generic is globalization’s inevitable “aesthetic”—the quality that is dominant in the objects that seem most at home in it, most comfortably bound to massive and invisible materialities and networks.

The scuffed bucket in which we keep our clay-stained baseballs is like Calvino’s suburban trash can: the mirage that it is a self-contained artifact, dumbly sitting there, independent from the world swirling around it, quickly evaporates.1 The object begins to unfold as a pattern constructed of a series of relationships that bind it, irrevocably, to infrastructural circuits, economic pressures, and social contracts. In Calvino’s trash can the city’s entire system of garbage collection and management—not to mention the amounts of energy, accumulated knowledge, and economic demands that lead to its particular morphology—is inscribed. It was inscribed even when the object was still a shiny new waste receptacle on the vendor’s shelf. Bound up in it, like virtual ribbons of data, have always been all the networks and vectors that it will course through—all the systems of design and production it results from, all the systems of distribution and storage it is made to lock into. Understanding how this is already so fantastically complex, so much better than producing a new lamp or a new shed, or turning out a new variant on a typology in the way it has been turned out so many times, one looks to apply new pressures and invent unexpected scenarios until “aberrant” and novel functions in generic objects are set free.

above copied from: http://e-flux.com/journal/view/165

An intelligent view of the Avant-Garde at the end of 1955

Unattributed
Potlatch #24, 24 November 1954

URBANISM. In Paris today we recommend visits to: Contrescarpe (Continent); Chinatown; the Jewish Quarter; Butte-aux-Cailles (the Labyrinth); Aubervilliers (at night); the public gardens of the 7th Arrondissement; the Medical-Legal Institute; rue Dauphine (Nesles); Buttes-Chaumont (play); the Merri neighborhood; Parc Monceau; Ile Louis (the island); Pigalle; Les Halles (rue Denis, rue du Jour); the Europe neighborhood (memory); rue Sauvage.

We do not recommend visits, under any circumstances, to: the 6th and 15th Arrondissements; the grand boulevards; Luxembourg; Champs-Elysees; Place Blanche; Montmarte; Ecole Militaire; Place de la Republique; Etoile and Opera; the whole 16th Arrondissement.

DECORATION. Project by J. Fillon for decoration of a living room: three quarters of the room, occupying the part that one crosses on entering through the only door, are elegantly furnished and have no particular purpose. At the far part of the room there is a barricade, partitioning off the functional part of the room, occupying one quarter of its total area. The barricade is absolutely authentic, built from cobblestones, sandbags, barrels, and other objects commonly used for this purpose. It is approximately as high as a person is tall, with several peaks and a few gaps. Loaded guns may be laid across the top. A narrow passageway leads to the functional part of the room, which is tastefully furnished and laid out in such a way as to provide a pleasant place to receive friends and acquaintances.

This living room, which of course also requires the appropriate lighting and ambient sound, could be used as a departure from the standard layout of a run-of-the-mill house, merely introducing a superficially picturesque element. Nevertheless, its true purpose is to form a part of a wider architectural complex where its decisive value in the construction of a situation comes to the forefront.

EXPLORATION. In the near future, a team of Lettrists, operating from a base on rue des Jardins-Paul, will undertake a thorough exploration of the Merri neighborhood, which has not yet appeared on any psychogeographical map. WE INVITE ALL AND SUNDRY JOIN THE LETTRIST INTERNATIONAL. We will keep a few.

EDUCATIONAL GAMES. A recent development, "ideological debate structured as a boxing match," seems to have a brilliant future among the intellectual elite, for whom it seems ideally suited. (IDEOLOGICAL DEBATE STRUCTURED AS A BOXING MATCH WILL HELP TO INCREASE YOUR PRESTIGE WHILE WASTING TIME.) Here are the rules:

The two opponents and the referee, whose decision is final, sit at the same table, separated from each other by the referee. The length of the match is decided beforehand along with the number of rounds and their precise duration.

When the referee declares the match has begun, the two opponents size each other up for a moment and then the first to go on the attack makes a statement on whatever subject he feels is appropriate. His opponent then responds, either with a vigorous rebuttal of the argument just formulated, or by making some statement on a related or unexpected topic, or -- best of all -- with a combination of the two. The referee makes sure that the opponents do not interrupt each other. nevertheless, any contender speaking for too long loses points. A chronometer marks the end of the round with an appropriate signal and the debate is broken off immediately.

The referee then awards the round to one of the opponents or calls a draw. During the break, the contenders' fans and trainers may bring them alcoholic beverages or cups of coffee (and in some cases, drugs). The match begins again when the order is given. The referee calls a knockout when either of the opponents, surprised by the vehemence or subtlety of an attack, is unable to continue the debate. Should no knockout occur, the winner of the match is decided at the end on points, depending on the number of rounds won. Cheating, even when obvious, is not penalized.

Already noted as favorite topics are Zen, the New Left, phenomenological ontology, Astruc, Gallic coins, censorship and the intelligence of chess.

The Lettrists, who would be unbeatable, do not play this game.)

above copied from: http://www.notbored.org/1955.html

Taking Art Seriously: Understanding Studio Research, Bernard Hoffert

Importance of the Visual

The degree to which art is integral to our way of life is scarcely worth noting. Most of us accept without question that access to art, both historic and contemporary, is part of any community and the diversity of contemporary art practice touches almost every aspect of our lives-public, commercial, creative and social. Experimental and media Arts reflect, enhance and influence culture and enrich our daily experience, while individual art choices provide a source of personal fulfillment and satisfaction. At a broader level it is the products of visual culture—the art, design and architecture—which direct our travels; it is the museums, galleries, buildings and spaces of past as well as present visual culture, which shape much of our holiday itinerary and our purpose in traveling. At a panoramic level it is not too extravagant to claim that it is the visual which shapes our experience of the world; every building we enter, every object we use and every image we enjoy is the product of a creative visual impulse, every city is the outcome of conscious aesthetic decisions, some good some bad, some motivated by function not excellence, but all in part visual.

The visual environment is so fundamental that we do not think about it. We accept the outcomes of art, design, architecture and the proliferation of visual forms, but we fail to acknowledge their status. We appreciate and enjoy the individual example, but as a category of learning with its own academic integrity, we do not accord it an equivalent recognition to the sciences, humanities or technologies.

As this paper explains, it is time we took art seriously, accepted it as a domain of knowledge and integrated it and its associated visual forms into the broader context of our knowledge culture.



Art and the Knowledge Environment

Research has become an increasingly important concept in the visual arts. Encouraged by government policy, universities place increased emphasis on research output. Artists and art educators describe art making in terms of research and academic art staff apply for grants as a source of research income. Disciplines known for their creativity are now equally acknowledged for their research. ‘Practice-led’ or ‘practice based’ research is becoming an aspect of research discussion, in part to establish the prestige of academic institutions, but also to link with the push for innovation and new outcomes from research knowledge, as government policies attempt to justify expenditure on research.

The UK tertiary sector has undergone a series of Research Assessment Exercises which evaluated the research outputs nationally. These mechanisms for quality assurance required the demonstration of research outcomes and accountability for research. An academic hierarchy of institutions has resulted from these Exercises along with a system of institutional funding based on research excellence. New Zealand has performed a similar exercise, Australia is about to do the same and other nations may well follow. Integral to this research data gathering is the inclusion of research in visual culture, not research about the visual, undertaken through the humanities, but research in the visual-Art as Research. This discussion contends that research in art and the visual contributes to knowledge in the same way as all disciplines do - research results in new knowledge and the final test of new knowledge is what it contributes to the human condition.



Research and Culture

Consider the relationship between the development of knowledge and its contribution to culture in the following disciplines:

New knowledge in science contributes to new technological development

Benjamin Franklin is well known for his experiments with electricity. In 1746, while watching a summer storm, it occurred to him that lightening looked like an electrical phenomenon, resembling the spark generated from an electrified body in his experiments. His research showed that a pointed object, like a finger or an electrified body attracted electrical discharges. Applying this discovery in nature, he found that lightning was attracted to such objects, confirming his suspicion it was electrical. He then invented the lightning rod - a simple, but effective device to dispel the destructive energy of these electrical impulses. He wrote: “may not the knowledge of this power of points be of use to mankind, in preserving houses, churches, ships and cont, from the stroke of lighting, by directing us to fix on the highest parts of those edifices, upright rods of iron made sharp as a needle…”. The lightning conductor is now integral to technologies associated with building, navigation and the environment (Koestler, 1970).

New knowledge in medicine results in improved health care

In 1879, Louis Pasteur was working on a cure for chicken cholera, a devastating poultry disease that was the nineteenth century version of bird flu. He was injecting healthy chickens with laboratory cultures of the disease and then attempting to treat the infected birds. During the summer his work was delayed for several months, and when he returned to his experiments, he found that chickens injected with the culture which had stood in his laboratory unused through the hot summer months, did not develop all the symptoms of the cholera, but contracted what appeared to be a very mild dose of the disease. Further testing confirmed that the weak culture had vaccinated the chickens against the cholera. Extrapolating from this example, Pasteur initiated a system of preventative medicine which has been integral to healthcare ever since (Koestler, 1970).

New knowledge in microbiology results in improved medical treatment

In 1922 Alexander Fleming was working at St Mary’s hospital in London when by chance he discovered that an active ingredient in nasal mucus, what he identified as lysozyme, had the ability to destroy bacteria. Although it was not a powerful germ killer, it pointed the way for his future research until seven years later he discovered penicillin. This laid the foundations of microbiology and the revolutionary impact antibiotics have had on improved health care ever since (Koestler, 1970).

New knowledge in engineering contributes to better structures and machines

In December 1903 Orville and Wilbur Wright mounted an engine onto a glider they had built and flew for 59 seconds, covering a distance of about 260 metres they effectively launched the aeronautical industry. What was revolutionary about the Wright brothers’ work was neither the glider nor the engine, although each was a significant development on existing technology; it was the shaping and structure of the wing which allowed a pilot to manipulate the aerodynamic impact on the structure while in flight; it was an issue of structural design. The whole aircraft industry reflects the innovations which flowed from their research. (Mc Farland, 1953).

Each of the above developments contributed to the betterment of the human condition; they also contribute within their disciplinary domain to culture. As a result culture improves in intellectual and material terms and we have an enhanced quality of life. Similarly, art produces new knowledge by a parallel contribution to culture, in which new art directly adds to the quality of cultural experience.



Art and Culture

Consider the following examples of developments in art that have contributed to cultural quality and experience:

New knowledge in environmental art contributes to a richer experience of nature

In the early 1840s a number of painters interested in recording the landscape were working in the small village of Barbizon, on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, near Paris. Although not a formal group they are often collectively called the Barbizon painters, due to the similar themes their work conveys in the celebrating of nature and recording the beauty of the landscape. Different artists produced work that fluctuated between realism and romanticism, but each was inspired by working directly from nature. One of the foremost artists associated with Barbizon was Theadore Rousseau, whose painting fell at the more realistic end of the scale. He recognized that the expansion of industry in Paris, the growth of the city beyond its walls and the popular indifference to nature, was devastating the forest. He sucessfully petitioned the Emperor of France, Napoleon III to establish a protected park in the forest and in 1863, 1,097 hectares of the Fontainebleau forest was set aside as a réserve artistique, which could not be exploited commercially. This was the first protected nature reserve and began a world wide movement to preserve the environment, still gaining momentum today. Rousseau and the Barbizon painters had considerable impact in the USA, reflecting the impact of the Hudson River Painters. This celebration of the land contributed, in 1864, to Abraham Lincoln signing a declaration of protection for the Yosemite Valley. In 1872 the American Congress established Yosemite National Park - the world’s first protected wild life reserve and forest. The Barbizon and Hudson River artists succeeded in awakening cultural sensibilities to the pleasures of nature (Chagnon-Burke, 2004).

New knowledge in populist art contributes to a richer experience of popular culture

In Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century a number of artists emerged who celebrated the Parisian nightlife and popular society. Linked mostly with the Impressionists and Post Impressionists, they used cafes, bars, dance halls and theatres as their subjects, shaping some of the most memorable images of early Modernism. Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergere (1881) and the Moulin Rouge paintings of Lautrec introduce popular entertainment as the subject of art; the scenes of ballet and opera by Degas show us the world of the Parisian elite as they enjoy the pleasures of the new Garnier Opera House; the paintings by Berthe Morisot provide insights into the more restricted female world, the domestic environment, family and entertainments of the upper middle class. These artists and many others of the period, bring us the everyday world as the content of art, the entertainments, celebrations, private moments and debaucheries, the contemptuous underbelly of polite society which had previously been eschewed by art. This opened the door to popular culture and the richness and diversity of art which deals with the world around us, culminating in the Pop Art of the 1960s and its celebration of modern life. It spawned the vast use of ‘the popular’ as content in advertising, media, films and all of the other offshoot entertainments which enrich our lives; these 19th century artistic insights turned cultural awareness away from high art to the enjoyment of popular culture which is integral to modern living.

New knowledge in art and design contributes to beautifying our surroundings

In 1861 the firm of Marshall, Morris, Faulkner and Co. was formed in London to craft furniture based on truth to materials, celebrating their natural beauty; and simplicity of design, rather than overlays of decoration. Reacting to the excesses of Victorian abundance and poor quality industrial production, William Morris and his friends began what turned into the Arts and Crafts Movement. Their inspiration came from nature and a romanticized notion of Mediaeval times when happy craftsman celebrated their skills in the creation of beauty. The ideal led to a revolution in both art and design with major artists and designers working together to beautify and refine furnishings, revive historic ideals and improve the quality of life. While the social ambitions of the Movement might have fallen short, their aesthetic ideals influenced generations of artists and designers and are integral to craft design today.

New knowledge in perception contributes to richer personal experience

In 1910 in the village of Murnau in the Bavarian Alps, the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky painted the first intentionally abstract painting, a small watercolour that set him on the pursuit of abstract imagery as the subject matter of art. His book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, outlines his theories, explaining how abstract colours and forms carried meaning that could enrich our experience. Through the work of Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich and the work of other abstract artists, the expressive and communicative power of colour, line, texture and form became evident to a broader audience. Aspects of image construction, previously regarded as the building blocks of meaning, were recognized as having expressive meaning of their own. It was as if a new sensibility had been unleashed as artists, architects and designers of all types adopted the power of colour and simple, direct form to enliven their creations. Abstraction has since become an integral aspect of all visual communication, in which the components of making any image - shape, colour, tone and texture - are as least as important for the message as the image itself. The whole visual spectrum has developed using the perceptual innovations of the early abstractionists (Kandinsky, 1977).

New knowledge in the scope of art contributes to a broader appreciation of culture

The creative excitement of Russia in the early twentieth century is best evidenced through two major design movements, the Suprematists, founded by the painter and designer, Kasimir Malevich and the Constructivists, who are linked most closely with the designer for social needs, Vladimir Tatlin. A major figure who spanned both movements was Isador El Lissitsky, an engineer, architect and designer who, fascinated by the discoveries of science, sought to represent these movements’ inspirational ideas in geometric shapes and composite lines. Lissitsky’s drawings and designs, inspired by speculations on a fourth dimension, provided a conceptual leap into a new way of considering space and introduced visual forms that suggested the interplay of science and life, paralleling the innovations of Kandinsky and Mondrian in their impact on visual culture expressed through typography, architecture and industrial design (Hoffert, 1995).

New knowledge in the application of art contributes to a richer quality of human experience

In 1916 the Expressionist, then Cubist and eventually abstract painter, Piet Mondrian, joined the Dutch group De Stijl, which combined artists and designers in a search for a style that represented the needs of the twentieth century. Influenced by the Theosophical teachings of Madam Blavatsky and using the terminology of the philosopher, H J M Schoenmaekers, Mondrian refined his visual language to the artists’ primaries, red, yellow and blue and the tones, black grey and white. This was the language of his art for the remainder of his life, used in different formal relationships and always built around a formal geometric basis. Mondrian and his colleagues defined a style of design which has permeated the last 80 years, applied through architecture and interiors, furniture and fabrics. Who has not walked on Mondrian linoleum or worn a Mondrian jumper? So strong was the impact of De Stijl that its characteristic design is better known today than it was when it was begun in the 1920s (Hoffert, 1995).

The list of additions to art knowledge is almost endless, the innovations of Russolo’s noise music in the development of pop; the impact of Futurist theatre on modern performance, both as theatre and as art; the insights of Surrealist and Pop Artists which have fed advertising, media and now multimedia imagery. All demonstrate the vast contribution that research in art has made to culture; new knowledge has been developed in art and this has led to development, enrichment, diversification and expansion in culture at large.

These examples demonstrate that while art contributes to culture, within the domain of its discipline, it also creates new knowledge which enables/inspires other disciplines to contribute to culture within their domains. Both functions are research developments, evolving from art practice. In recognizing this, the challenge becomes to establish the academic infrastructure and a research methodology through which art can be undertaken as research in university degrees; to allow practice based research the same recognition and status accorded other research. To achieve this is a major task of art education.



A Proposal for Research Degrees in Art

As mentioned earlier, increasingly art schools are addressing the research potential of visual culture; in the UK research in art was integral to the Research Assessment exercises and the same will be the case in Australia.

Research degrees in art practice have been established at Master’s level since the 1980s and studio-based PhD degrees emerged during the 1990s in the UK and Australia, attracting major artists and artist-academics as well as younger artists using the university context, with its seminars, critiques and interrogative engagement, as a means of further their practice.

The Faculty of Art & Design at Monash University has been developing formats for research degrees in art and design for the last fifteen years. Monash is one of Australia’s major research universities and all its academic disciplines are required to contribute to the university’s research objectives. The Faculty addressed this demand by developing an approach to visual research which has developed into the largest, practice based research degree program in the country and one of the largest in the world. The problem was to recognize the quality and achievement of professional visual production and to reformulate art production as research without compromising its quality as art.

The Monash research degree program is structured around an exhibition, which is the outcome of the research process. This is supported by a dissertation which bridges the expectations of professional art practice and university expectations of PhD degrees, to contextualize the visual research. Coursework components facilitate the integration of practice and theory, but the dominant emphasis is on the development of a body of studio research, for examination. With over 250 candidates at Masters and PhD level, the program’s success has been as a result of the support system developed to translate the expectations of professional art practice into research. The methodology coursework subjects explore issues of terminology and ways for visual research to be contextualized, to demonstrate its innovation. They also develop a theoretical context by which professional production can be taken further into the realms of research and cultural production. Seminars and critiques underpin the creative interaction within the program. The outcome has been a community of artist-scholars who create, discuss and critique each other’s art as part of the process of enhancing their visual output. They are art professionals who use their visual exploration to inspire visual research, using the academic experience to build and enhance their understanding of and contribution to visual culture. Art becomes an equal partner in the academic disciplines of the academy as a bastion of research and innovation within society.

‘Taking Art Seriously’ means we understand not just its creative potential, but how we can use its research knowledge to contribute, parallel to other disciplines, in the development of culture.

above copied from:http://artandeducation.net/papers/view/21