Duchamp is invariably referred to as an "anti-artist" and an "iconoclast." This is entirely false. Duchamp was a great art adviser to collectors. He wasn't against art at all; he was against the hypocritical aura surrounding it. More importantly, Duchamp may be the first modern artist to take God's prohibition against "hewn" objects to heart. Fountain is not hewn or made in any traditional sense. In effect, it is an unbegotten work, a kind of virgin birth, a cosmic coitus of imagination and intellect. Like a megalithic stone, Fountain is merely placed on view, pointed at as the locus of something intrinsic to art and as art itself. Duchamp's work relies on a leap of faith: that new thought structures can be formed based on things already in the world. Fountain is the aesthetic equivalent of the Word made Flesh: It is an incarnation of the invisible essence of art, an object in which the distance between image and prototype is narrowed to a scintillating sliver. Just as Christians perceive Christ as the invisible made visible, Jesus said "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father," so Fountain essentially says, "He that hath seen me hath also seen the idea of me."

Duchamp adamantly asserted that he wanted to "de-deify" the artist. The readymades provide a way around inflexible either-or aesthetic propositions. They represent a Copernican shift in art. Fountain is what's called an "acheropoietoi," an image not shaped by the hands of an artist. Fountain brings us into contact with an original that is still an original but that also exists in an altered philosophical and metaphysical state. It is a manifestation of the Kantian sublime: A work of art that transcends a form but that is also intelligible, an object that strikes down an idea while allowing it to spring up stronger. Its presence is grace.

An aside, but Duchamp related:
I am re-reading "off the wall" by Calvin Tomkins. The collection of essays has been re-released in paperback on the occasion of Rauschenberg's show at the Met. I was just reading last night about Duchamp's ready-mades and a story where Rauschenberg and Johns - only first seeing Duchamp’s work in 1953 - went to see some of his work in a show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Rauschenberg, trying to steal one of the cube marbles from "Why not Sneeze?", was suddenly caught by a security guard. When Rauschenberg began to make excuses, the guard responded "Don't you know that you're not supposed to touch that crap?"
- selma 3-06-2006 11:09 pm [add a comment]

nice!
- bill 3-06-2006 11:14 pm [add a comment]

The actual name of the piece in question is "Why not Sneeze, Rrose Sélavy?"
And here is the lovely Rrose
- selma 3-06-2006 11:30 pm [add a comment]

I find it disturbing that Rauschenberg tried to steal art from a museum. Not really--but that'd be a career ender nowadays.
Also, a current studio art class would give demerits for a "readymade" that included fabricated objects (marble sugar cubes.)
Interesting how times (and readings of work) change.
- tom moody 3-06-2006 11:37 pm [add a comment]

Shafrazi is still going strong - although he didn't try to steal, but only vandalized a Picasso.
To be fair, I misquoted, Tomkins calls it an "'assisted' readymade" and somewhere else I saw it referred to as a "semi-readymade".
It is interesting.
- selma 3-06-2006 11:51 pm [add a comment]

there were students from my high school at moma that day. witnesses.we always heard that no shafrazi artist would ever make it into the permanent collection because of. assisted readymade if its partly manufactured, partly found. and the duchamp drag bit always colored my drag reading. it made the pyramid club extra fun and significant.
- bill 3-07-2006 12:19 am [add a comment]

Has a Shafrazi artist made it into the MOMA collection?

Duchamp himself seems to have called Why Not Sneeze? a readymade. That's what I was commenting on. His followers' understanding of his work is more doctrinal and parsing of categories than his own...possibly...over time.
- tom moody 3-07-2006 1:53 am [add a comment]

readymade vs ready-made

Types of readymades
Readymades - un-altered
Assisted readymades
Rectified readymades
Corrected readymades
Reciprocal readymades - using Rembrant as an ironing board. ?162
retroactive readymade



and as tom points out :

"It is a Readymade in which the sugar is changed to marble. It is sort of a mythological effect."


- bill 3-07-2006 2:22 am [add a comment]

(Wikipedia continues to amaze me.)

But for sure no entry for Shafrazi, although he does make the Guernica page. I do not understand how he got from there, to here. What happened in-between? Do we have such a short memory? Or simply don't care? (Or are both these options too extreme and he reinvented and redeemed himself in some way?)
- selma 3-07-2006 8:05 am [add a comment]

There was a critic--Paul Taylor?--who made a serious effort to put the Shafrazi act in the context of the early '70s and the "stickin' it to the Man" one-upmanship of the conceptualist scene. After he did the spraypainting he went to whatever watering hole they went to and other conceptualists clapped him on the back and said "right on, brother."

Whereas Robert Hughes just calls him a "disturbed Iranian sleazeball."

The problem with giving it any credence as art is it opens the discussion up to the include that idiot that keeps slashing Newmans in Holland.

Considered as art, keeping all sentimentality and false Picasso worship out of it, painting "Kill Lies All" (which was apparently supposed to be "Kill All Lies") on a famous painting is pretty lame.
- tom moody 3-07-2006 8:16 am [add a comment]