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Breaking Glass to Save the Frame: William Carlos Williams and Company

Lisa Siraganian

in Modernism’s Other Work: The Art Object’s Political Life

This chapter explores the polarity between spectator or readerly irrelevance on the one hand and bodily incorporation of the reader’s body on the other, to investigate writers and artists who ... More

This chapter explores the polarity between spectator or readerly irrelevance on the one hand and bodily incorporation of the reader’s body on the other, to investigate writers and artists who articulate positions negotiating between these two poles. In particular, this chapter examines the paradoxical figure of William Carlos Williams, who understands collage as a way to productively complicate the notion of readerly irrelevance. The autonomous art object of Stein and Lewis finds its most serious early challenge in the Dada aesthetics of Marcel Duchamp and Mina Loy, who contest both the frame’s integrity and art’s removal from politics by insisting on the inseparability of art and life. Responding to Duchamp’s and Loy’s notions of framing, Williams’s Spring and All (1923) negotiates a shifting compromise between art that rejects the incorporation of the spectator’s world and art that insists upon it, while his less-known work, The Great American Novel (1923), implies that this new theory of framing facilitates specific forms of social progress that he hopes could preempt the state’s progressive goals.Less

Introduction: Mechanical Recording and the Modern Arts

Michael North

in Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word

Recording methods such as photography seemed to offer a new and more immediate method of transcribing sense impressions. They seemed to constitute a new and better form of writing. This introductory ... More

Recording methods such as photography seemed to offer a new and more immediate method of transcribing sense impressions. They seemed to constitute a new and better form of writing. This introductory chapter describes the impact of this idea on painting from Manet to Duchamp, and on modern literature from Pound to Isherwood. It also describes the appearance of hybrid forms as poetry becomes more self conscious of its visual aspect and painting begins to include alphabetic elements.Less

The American Eccentrics

Eric Salzman and Thomas Desi

in The New Music Theater: Seeing the Voice, Hearing the Body

This chapter discusses Harry Partch and “ corporeality”; the music theater of Partch (“Delusion of the Fury”, “Revelation in the Courthouse Park”) and his ideas about tuning, instruments, and voice; ... More

This chapter discusses Harry Partch and “ corporeality”; the music theater of Partch (“Delusion of the Fury”, “Revelation in the Courthouse Park”) and his ideas about tuning, instruments, and voice; Marcel Duchamp and “de-semiotization” in the work and ideas of John Cage (from his early experiments to the late Europeras); the influence of Cage and Cage's circle in America and Europe; theatrical and conceptual work and concepts of Mauricio Kagel, an Argentinian working in Europe; and the conceptual work of Tom Johnson, an American composer living and working in Europe.Less

The Bride is Dance

Douglas Rosenberg

in Screendance: Inscribing the Ephemeral Image

This chapter uses Marcel Duchamp’s well-known sculpture The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even as a metaphor for a particular kind of courtship that is identified as present throughout the ... More

This chapter uses Marcel Duchamp’s well-known sculpture The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even as a metaphor for a particular kind of courtship that is identified as present throughout the history of mediated dance. This courtship, which begins with the advent of technologies for extending vision and continues through the histories of film, video, digital imaging, and beyond, is one in which the very nature of dance is contested and reconsidered.Less

Recycling the Readymade: Marcel Duchamp and the Rendez-Vous in Walkaround Time

Carrie Noland

in Merce Cunningham: After the Arbitrary

This chapter establishes the historical and aesthetic links between Cunningham and Marcel Duchamp through an analysis of Walkaround Time (1968), a dance based on Duchamp's Large Glass, and René ... More

This chapter establishes the historical and aesthetic links between Cunningham and Marcel Duchamp through an analysis of Walkaround Time (1968), a dance based on Duchamp's Large Glass, and René Clair's Entr'acte, a film that provided movement material for the dance. Cunningham explores (and exploits) the way in which Duchamp's instructions for the Ready-made produce encounters or "rendez-vous," which then engender potentially dramatic moments.Less

The Age of Mechanical Production

Alex Kitnick

in Distant Early Warning: Marshall McLuhan and the Transformation of the Avant-Garde

This chapter explores how McLuhan’s interest in the French-American artist Marcel Duchamp allowed him to innovate a wry brand of cultural criticism that would in turn influence artists such as ... More

This chapter explores how McLuhan’s interest in the French-American artist Marcel Duchamp allowed him to innovate a wry brand of cultural criticism that would in turn influence artists such as Richard Hamilton and others affiliated with London’s Independent Group.Less

Reflection: efficient causation in art

Tina Rivers Ryanp

in Efficient Causation: A History

One of the central assumptions of Western art is that the artist is the efficient cause of the work of art. One source of this idea is the Renaissance sculptor Michelangelo, who famously refused to ... More

One of the central assumptions of Western art is that the artist is the efficient cause of the work of art. One source of this idea is the Renaissance sculptor Michelangelo, who famously refused to work with assistants, contributing to a conception of art making that has remained hegemonic for centuries. A major challenge arose in the twentieth century, particularly when Duchamp emphasized the role of the viewer (and chance processes) in the determination of the work’s ultimate form and meaning. Duchamp’s ideas were popularized by Warhol, who claimed to want to efface himself entirely from the artistic process. Though the attempt by successive generations of artists to distance themselves from their work is one of the major stories of twentieth-century art, the art market today undermines this attempt by fetishizing the artist’s name as guarantee of a work’s quality.Less

Limbswish: Baroness Elsa’s “Ready-to-Wear” Poem-Objects

Yasna Bozhkova

in Modernist Objects: Literature, Art, Culture

This chapter explores the interrelation between the everyday object and the art object in the work of New York Dada poet, pioneer assemblage sculptor and performance artist Baroness Elsa von ... More

This chapter explores the interrelation between the everyday object and the art object in the work of New York Dada poet, pioneer assemblage sculptor and performance artist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Her intermedial poetics revolves around an unprecedented intrusion of quotidian objects and mass-produced commodities in art and poetry, while her hybrid forms radically redefine both the visual artwork and the poem and do away with the boundaries between different kinds of artistic objects. This chapter situates her artistic practice in the context of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, while making important distinctions between them. Although the Baroness’ assemblages have been eclipsed by Duchamp’s work, she came up with a strikingly original poetics that is literally “ready-to-wear,” integrating singular arrays of objects into her radical self-performances which work toward developing new genres such as a living body assemblage or a body performance poem. This chapter argues that in Baroness Elsa’s “ready-to-wear” poem-objects unravels a radical and ironic craft which inextricably welds together the consumer product and the unique artwork.Less

On Duchamp and Beuys as Latin American Writers

Héctor Hoyos

in Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel

This chapter explores appropriations of the concerns and methods of contemporary art as a strategy for global inscription by offering a reading of César Aira's “Duchamp en México” (1997) and Mario ... More

This chapter explores appropriations of the concerns and methods of contemporary art as a strategy for global inscription by offering a reading of César Aira's “Duchamp en México” (1997) and Mario Bellatin's Lecciones para una liebre muerta (Lessons to a Dead Hare, 2005). It considers how Aira and Bellatin refashion the republic of letters by adopting the conventions of a neighboring construction, “the art world,” and how they operate within literary circuits as if they were curators and contemporary plastic artists themselves. Aira assumes the persona of Marcel Duchamp, while Bellatin takes on that of Joseph Beuys. It also examines how allusions to landmark works of international contemporary art destabilize the rituals involved in the promotion of literature, calling on their underlying exoticism.Less

Re-Reading the Machine Age: The ‘Audacious Modernity’ of the Techno-Bathetic Avant-Gardes

Eric B. White

in Reading Machines in the Modernist Transatlantic: Avant-Gardes, Technology and the Everyday

Chapter 2 explores how the proto-Dada artists of New York City proposed new ways of reading Machine Age America. Rather than invoking the power and efficiency of its machines and infrastructure, it ... More

Chapter 2 explores how the proto-Dada artists of New York City proposed new ways of reading Machine Age America. Rather than invoking the power and efficiency of its machines and infrastructure, it argues that these vanguardists emphasised their delicacy, intricacy and fragility. Sections one and two detail the divergent aesthetics of two key modernist formations: the technological sublime of Alfred Stieglitz and his ‘Young American’ literary acolytes (including Waldo Frank and Lewis Mumford); and the techno-bathetic proto-Dadaists of the magazine 291, exemplified by Francis Picabia. The third section analyses the techno-bathetic practices of Marcel Duchamp in his New York Dada phase, as well as crucial responses to that work by Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Mina Loy and William Carlos Williams. The fourth section focuses on the work of the Baroness, who interrogated the implications of socio-technics for problems of sex, gender and nationality. Finally, section five focuses on Loy’s poetry, fashion designs, inventions, and technicities; for the first time, it unveils her invention ‘verrovoile’, a translucent thermoplastic she profiled in a previously unknown 1929 newspaper article. The chapter argues that, through her poetry and inventions, Loy helped introduce the concept of the artist-engineer to transatlantic discourse in the mid-1920s.Less

Overture: Why Kant Got It Right

Thierry de Duve

in Aesthetics at Large: Volume 1: Art, Ethics, Politics

What are aesthetic judgments according to Kant? How do they work? What do they mean to us? Why do we make them? In simple terms, this chapter argues that in supposing the presence of the faculty of ... More

What are aesthetic judgments according to Kant? How do they work? What do they mean to us? Why do we make them? In simple terms, this chapter argues that in supposing the presence of the faculty of taste in each of us, judgments about natural beauty postulate that all humans are endowed with what Kant called sensus communis, here interpreted as the faculty of agreeing by dint of feeling. However, being a postulate, our endowment with sensus communis in the empirical world is forever indemonstrable. It is and remains an idea of reason, theoretically necessary and ethically mandatory. That admitted, the “Kant after Duchamp approach” consists in asking ourselves if anything fundamental would have to be changed to Kant’s thesis if we updated Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment for “post-Duchamp” times by substituting an artifact for a natural object and replacing the judgment “this is beautiful” with “this is art.” The answer is no.Less

Cessation and inaction externe: Gertrude Stein and Marcel Duchamp

Zuzanna Ladyga

in The Labour of Laziness in Twentieth-Century American Literature

The chapter focuses on modernist fascination with vitality and movement to show how this “vitalocentric” tendency is matched by a cultural countercurrent of the aesthetics of cessation. The chapter ... More

The chapter focuses on modernist fascination with vitality and movement to show how this “vitalocentric” tendency is matched by a cultural countercurrent of the aesthetics of cessation. The chapter uses Raymond Williams’s concept of emergent cultural value, the chapter examines modernist art and literary manifestos and essays, their deep-seated distrust towards all signs of what Filippo Marinetti called lethargy, a distrust coupled with a special privileging of vitality-as-animation. As far as the classical interpretations of modernism go, it was this valorization of vibrant vitality over lethargic inactivity that provided necessary fuel for the modernist rebellious claims to uniqueness. The chapter challenges the vitalocentric interpretation of modernism and focuses on previously unacknowledged counter-vitalist impulses within the modernist project. Such impulses can be traced in Gertrude Stein’s philosophy of art, generally considered as one of the pillars of early 20th century vitalocentrism. While apparently consistent with vitalist sensibility, Stein’s ideas -- when read through the lens of Marcel Duchamp’s concept of inaction externe and Giorgio Agamben’s notions of impotency and inoperativity-- go beyond the modernist sensibility and capture in an embryonic form the structures of feeling traditionally associated with modernism’s successor, postmodernism.Less

The Life of a Shopgirl: Art and the Everyday

Catherine Driscoll

in Modernist Cultural Studies

The shopgirl is one of those “types” that Walter Benjamin describes as the only way people can appear in the marketplace. In The Gender of Modernity (1995), Rita Felski discusses a set of types by ... More

The shopgirl is one of those “types” that Walter Benjamin describes as the only way people can appear in the marketplace. In The Gender of Modernity (1995), Rita Felski discusses a set of types by which modernism has explored the importance of gender to modernity — focusing on the hysteric, the “voracious consumer,” the prostitute, the feminized aesthete, and the sexual pervert. She aims in this text “to establish points of connection between the texts of the past and the feminist politics of the present,” and the shopgirl is a particularly telling figure for such a discussion. This chapter focuses on the shopgirl to explore the modernist invention of the everyday as well as modernist reflection on everyday life, including in new modes of social theory and in the work of artists like Marcel Duchamp and Jean Rhys. Now solidly located in the canon of cultural studies, the concept of the everyday is usually discussed using more recent reference points.Less

Contemporary Art: Art Contemporary with Itself

Steve Redhead

in The Jean Baudrillard Reader

This is an extract from Baudrillard’s The Intelligence of Evil or The Lucidity Pact, with an editorial overview

Postscript: “Castle of Purity”

Kálra Móricz

in Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Music

This chapter cites an excerpt from Octavio Paz's “The Castle of Purity,” an essay on Marcel Duchamp. In ancient religions, purity and impurity were strongly associated with taboos. Western culture ... More

This chapter cites an excerpt from Octavio Paz's “The Castle of Purity,” an essay on Marcel Duchamp. In ancient religions, purity and impurity were strongly associated with taboos. Western culture inherited the concept via Judaism. From the perspective of realized social utopias, purity can be seen as a tool of violence, hence the discomfort one feels in evoking the concept. Despite its central role in twentieth-century art, the significance of purity has been rarely, if ever, discussed, as if critics have wanted to “purify” history of the concept. The genocidal purification practiced during World War II and the numerous attempts at ethnic cleansings that still haunt the world have tainted the word with horrific associations.Less

The Bride Stripped Bare

Nicholas Mee

in Celestial Tapestry: The Warp and Weft of Art and Mathematics

Hinton’s writing on higher dimensions influenced artists as well as writers. Chapter 19 looks at how higher-dimensional geometry influenced the development of the visual arts in the twentieth ... More

Hinton’s writing on higher dimensions influenced artists as well as writers. Chapter 19 looks at how higher-dimensional geometry influenced the development of the visual arts in the twentieth century. Hinton’s influence was both direct through his own books and through the spiritual movement known as the Theosophists who latched onto his more mystical ideas. The cubists were the first modern artists to abandon the use of traditional perspective, and they were rapidly followed by other art movements. A number of the pioneers of abstract art were influenced by the Theosophists, including Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich. Marcel Duchamp played a key role in determining the future direction of the visual arts, and some of his major works were developed around ideas of higher dimensions. These include Nude Descending a Staircase and Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even. Duchamp also led the way toward today’s conceptual art.Less

Genealogy of the surrealist work refusal

Abigail Susik

in Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work

Chapter 1, ‘Genealogy of the surrealist work refusal’, reviews the development of a surrealist discourse of work refusal in French surrealist texts and statements primarily from the 1920s and 1930s ... More

Chapter 1, ‘Genealogy of the surrealist work refusal’, reviews the development of a surrealist discourse of work refusal in French surrealist texts and statements primarily from the 1920s and 1930s by writers such as André Breton, Louis Aragon, and André Thirion. The discussion proceeds by outlining the key historical sources from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that influenced this position, including texts by Marcel Duchamp, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Lafargue. Chapter 1 also situates surrealism’s war on work in relation to techno-optimist avant-gardes such as Italian Futurism, and also in comparison with the prominence of Taylorism in Allied nations. Surrealism’s ongoing interaction with labour critique and theories of societal rationalisation such as those propounded by Karl Marx, Max Weber, Walter Benjamin, and Thorstein Veblen are broadly considered, as is the existing scholarly literature on surrealism, work, and play. The legacies of Marxist surrealists or surrealist supporters of Leon Trotsky’s Fourth International, such as Pierre Naville, who by the mid-twentieth century was a sociologist specialising in labour studies, are also evaluated, as is the early 1930s controversy over surrealism’s stance on proletarian art in conjunction with its membership in the Revolutionary Artists and Writers Union (AEAR) in France, which was modelled on a workers’ union.Less

Indexicality: A Trauma of Signification

Margaret Iversen

in Photography, Trace, and Trauma

This chapter is a re-evaluation of the concept of indexicality as introduced by Charles Sanders Peirce and revived by Rosalind Krauss’s ground-breaking two-part article, “Notes on the Index”, of ... More

This chapter is a re-evaluation of the concept of indexicality as introduced by Charles Sanders Peirce and revived by Rosalind Krauss’s ground-breaking two-part article, “Notes on the Index”, of 1977. The photographic index came under sustained criticism during the 1970s and 80s as it seemed to fix the meaning and establish the truth of the image. More recently, as in the writing of Mary Ann Doane, the index has been rehabilitated as a type of sign caught up in contingency, chance, and accident. It is understood as a type of sign really affected by its object, but non-mimetic. An excursus on Leo Steinberg’s conception of the ‘flatbed’ picture plane as a model of creative receptivity is followed by a survey of artworks composed of the accumulation of dust. This includes discussions of works by Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Mary Kelly, and Gabriel Orozco.Less