letting go of duchamp
In my younger years, I had a developing awareness of the power of art; I see that power more in the past than the present and it bothers me.
Then, art was the medium that could give tactile reality to the soul’s desire to belong to a greater reality – to be part of a heaven that enveloped the senses, the body the mind and the spirit – all together, all at one time. However, art was not only a window to Olympus, Elysium, Nirvana, Paradise, Heaven – it was a presence, a metaphor, created by the mind and body together, to be experienced all at once; an epiphany, sometimes a revelation, but always embodied in the material world.
Last year I visited the the 20th century Modern displays at the Pompidou Centre in Paris and became very aware again of the key themes of modernity fragmentation and the machine - broadly, the relationship of man and machine; speed, dynamism, rotational energy, the grid, social fragmentation, alienation, mass production, mediated reality and, essentially, at its core, the reduction of the perceived to the conceived - the sign.
The sign is the Ford model T (or Bauhaus chair) of art; quickly produced and easily reproducible, it is a highly efficient stripped-down vehicle to carry complex visual ideas. It is easily dissembled and reassembled, adaptable and versatile. It also requires the viewers’ prior experience and understanding of its subject matter to mentally complete it whilst viewing. In time, forms generally became more diagrammatic and the relationship of meaning and form became more narrowly focused and less embodied as an experience. It was logical that this process should lead to a separation of the two. Marcel Duchamp made his move with the readymade in 1915, “In advance of the broken arm “, a mass-produced snow shovel, suspended, renamed and recontextualised by language. This leveraged the power of the artist to create art by declaring it to be so, thereby bestowing meaning to the recipient form. This dematerialisation of process was the template for much Conceptual art, which, almost 100 years later, is generally regarded by art institutions (museums and universities) as the voice of our times (and seems to echo the dematerialisation of money over recent decades).
Despite my faith in Modernism, few of its works seemed to match (or aspire to) the spiritual and emotional power of, for example, York Minster, the humanity of Rembrandt, Caravaggio and Chardin, or the sublimity of Piero della Francesca. Some great 20th century art didn’t quite fit the Modernist ethos - Monet’s late paintings of vibrating fields of lilies and water, Matisse’s chapel in Vence, Morandi’s quiet bottle paintings, the infinite yet closed webs of late Pollock, the deep pathos of Sean Scully’s wall-like abstracts and Bill Viola’s video meditations. In the art world today, the relationship of beauty, spirituality and the modern / contemporary is problematic. As a serious young artist trying to express being here and now it was axiomatic that one couldn’t go back but there seemed to be more one couldn’t do than what one could do. As I got older I became more uneasy with what increasingly appeared to be a reductionist and partial art culture.
I also read outside art and like many others feel that we are living in a time of great change and uncertainty. I have a layperson's interest in modern science and its remarkable progress in looking objectively at subjective experience and how we understand the world. New discoveries across disciplines are creating striking connections that suggest a new or post-Enlightenment that unifies old divisions - matter and energy, mind and body, objectivity and subjectivity, the whole and parts - which test our language’s ability to describe them. Systems and chaos theories have changed our way of thinking about life and nature and quantum physics has completely altered how we understand matter. Its shocking discovery was that the universe is not atomistic - it cannot ultimately be reduced to its parts. We can study aspects of its behaviour at moments in time (even “moments” is a misnomer) but we cannot separate ourselves from the process. The universe is relational, not particular and we are part of it. Attempts to translate quantum theory into language by physicists Werner Heisenberg and Neils Bohr almost resemble Taoist, Zen or Hindu writings.
Yet over 80 years later, its philosophical implications seem rarely discussed and our use of language and educational structures still defer to the Enlightenment. Adherence to the machine metaphor, atomism and the Cartesian division of mind and body are still very much alive today and are mirrored in the underlying tenets and processes of conceptual art - the voice of our times....
Then, art was the medium that could give tactile reality to the soul’s desire to belong to a greater reality – to be part of a heaven that enveloped the senses, the body the mind and the spirit – all together, all at one time. However, art was not only a window to Olympus, Elysium, Nirvana, Paradise, Heaven – it was a presence, a metaphor, created by the mind and body together, to be experienced all at once; an epiphany, sometimes a revelation, but always embodied in the material world.
Last year I visited the the 20th century Modern displays at the Pompidou Centre in Paris and became very aware again of the key themes of modernity fragmentation and the machine - broadly, the relationship of man and machine; speed, dynamism, rotational energy, the grid, social fragmentation, alienation, mass production, mediated reality and, essentially, at its core, the reduction of the perceived to the conceived - the sign.
The sign is the Ford model T (or Bauhaus chair) of art; quickly produced and easily reproducible, it is a highly efficient stripped-down vehicle to carry complex visual ideas. It is easily dissembled and reassembled, adaptable and versatile. It also requires the viewers’ prior experience and understanding of its subject matter to mentally complete it whilst viewing. In time, forms generally became more diagrammatic and the relationship of meaning and form became more narrowly focused and less embodied as an experience. It was logical that this process should lead to a separation of the two. Marcel Duchamp made his move with the readymade in 1915, “In advance of the broken arm “, a mass-produced snow shovel, suspended, renamed and recontextualised by language. This leveraged the power of the artist to create art by declaring it to be so, thereby bestowing meaning to the recipient form. This dematerialisation of process was the template for much Conceptual art, which, almost 100 years later, is generally regarded by art institutions (museums and universities) as the voice of our times (and seems to echo the dematerialisation of money over recent decades).
Despite my faith in Modernism, few of its works seemed to match (or aspire to) the spiritual and emotional power of, for example, York Minster, the humanity of Rembrandt, Caravaggio and Chardin, or the sublimity of Piero della Francesca. Some great 20th century art didn’t quite fit the Modernist ethos - Monet’s late paintings of vibrating fields of lilies and water, Matisse’s chapel in Vence, Morandi’s quiet bottle paintings, the infinite yet closed webs of late Pollock, the deep pathos of Sean Scully’s wall-like abstracts and Bill Viola’s video meditations. In the art world today, the relationship of beauty, spirituality and the modern / contemporary is problematic. As a serious young artist trying to express being here and now it was axiomatic that one couldn’t go back but there seemed to be more one couldn’t do than what one could do. As I got older I became more uneasy with what increasingly appeared to be a reductionist and partial art culture.
I also read outside art and like many others feel that we are living in a time of great change and uncertainty. I have a layperson's interest in modern science and its remarkable progress in looking objectively at subjective experience and how we understand the world. New discoveries across disciplines are creating striking connections that suggest a new or post-Enlightenment that unifies old divisions - matter and energy, mind and body, objectivity and subjectivity, the whole and parts - which test our language’s ability to describe them. Systems and chaos theories have changed our way of thinking about life and nature and quantum physics has completely altered how we understand matter. Its shocking discovery was that the universe is not atomistic - it cannot ultimately be reduced to its parts. We can study aspects of its behaviour at moments in time (even “moments” is a misnomer) but we cannot separate ourselves from the process. The universe is relational, not particular and we are part of it. Attempts to translate quantum theory into language by physicists Werner Heisenberg and Neils Bohr almost resemble Taoist, Zen or Hindu writings.
Yet over 80 years later, its philosophical implications seem rarely discussed and our use of language and educational structures still defer to the Enlightenment. Adherence to the machine metaphor, atomism and the Cartesian division of mind and body are still very much alive today and are mirrored in the underlying tenets and processes of conceptual art - the voice of our times....
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