robert j coady, man of the soil.


- bill 4-17-2011 3:10 pm

Coady’s editorial is highly Whitmanesque, containing long lists of American items, names, and places: the automobile, the boxer Jack Johnson, Pittsburgh and Duluth, the Panama Canal. He mentions canonical American writers—Whitman, Poe, and Hawthorne—as well as Alfred Steiglitz and Gertrude Stein. In so doing Coady attempts to boost the standing of ‘American Art’ at the expense of its European competition: the ‘refined granulation’ of European cubism, the ‘delicate disease’ of European aestheticism. These ‘isms’, principally European in origin, were crowding American works out of the market. So American art had to be touted as something different: healthful, natural, ‘of the soil’. In so doing, of course, Coady was promoting his own theory, despite his disavowal of that word. He was, in effect, promoting an American ‘ism’.

‘Anyone interested in America’, Marcel Duchamp wrote a few months after Primordia appeared, ‘should read The Soil’.[11] Duchamp knew Robert Coady; it seems possible, even, that he mentioned the editor and his magazine to Wallace Stevens, as I haven’t been able to find any other obvious connection between Stevens and this magazine. Duchamp promoted Coady’s publication in the founding editorial of his own little magazine, the Blind Man, which he founded to accompany the Independents’ Exhibition of 1917. That exhibition was planned by the Society of Independent Artists, which included Arensberg and Duchamp among its founding members. They intended the show as a more free-wheeling sequel to the Armory Show, alike in scale and, perhaps, in its ability to shock. Duchamp submitted a work that, though not as famous as his Nude, was even more baffling to most who saw it. In keeping with his earlier comments in the Tribune and his more recent support of Robert Coady and the Soil, Duchamp’s new work was not cubist, but was, he claimed, distinctly American. Entitled Fountain, it was a common urinal, signed by Duchamp with the pseudonym R. Mutt. The R, Duchamp later explained, stood for Richard, a derogatory French term for an American. He took the last name from Mutt n’ Jeff, a popular American comic strip. Defending the work in the Blind Man, Duchamp wrote: ‘The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges’.

- bill 4-17-2011 4:04 pm [add a comment]


the great american thing


- bill 4-18-2011 3:09 pm [add a comment]





add a comment to this page:

Your post will be captioned "posted by anonymous,"
or you may enter a guest username below:


Line breaks work. HTML tags will be stripped.