DADA and SURREALISM: (Duchamp, Magritte, Höch, and Oppenheim) ARTISTS ASSOCIATED with the DADA MOVEMENT
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CHALLENGING TRADITION: DADA and SURREALISM: (Duchamp, Magritte, Höch, and Oppenheim) ARTISTS ASSOCIATED WITH THE DADA MOVEMENT Online Links: Marcel Duchamp - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Readymades of Marcel Duchamp - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Nihilism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Armory Show - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Duchamp and Readymades – Smarthistory Duchamp's Fountain – Smarthistory Duchamp's In Advance of a Broken Arm – Smarthistory Jean Arp's Untitled – Smarthistory Hoch's Kitchen Knife - Smarthistory ARTISTS ASSOCIATED WITH THE DADA MOVEMENT Online Links: Hannah Höch - Wikipedia Hannah Hoch - Whitechapel Gallery exhibition (with video) Hannah Hoch Art Punk Whitechapel - The Guardian Hannah Hoch and Photomontage - Video made by MOMA Schwitter's Merz Picture – Smarthistory Kurt Schwitters Ursonate - Dada Video on YouTube 1928 Dadaist Film by Director Hans Richter - YouTube MAX ERNST Online Links: Max Ernst - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Surrealism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia André Breton - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Ernst's Two Children Threatened by a Nightingale – MOMA Modern Art: Max Ernst - YouTube RENE MAGRITTE Online Links: René Magritte - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Review/Art - Magritte And His Defiance Of Life - Review - NYTimes.com ART - ART - Surreal Hero for a Nation of Contradictions - Biography - NYTimes.com Magritte Treacher of Images – Smarthistory Rene Magritte Documentary - YouTube In February of 1913, the Armory of the Sixty- ninth Regiment, National Guard, on Lexington Avenue at 25th Street in New York was the site of an international exhibition of modern art. A total of 1,200 exhibits, including works by Post-Impressionists, Fauves, and Cubists, as well as by American artists, filled eighteen rooms. This event, known as the Armory Show, marked the first widespread American exposure to the European avant-garde. No exhibition had ever had such a media blitz. But since America is the country where enough bad reviews almost equal good ones, as long as they create a critical mass of celebrity for their subject, one artist in particular benefited from the Armory Show. This was Marcel Duchamp, and on the basis of one picture: Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912. It became the freak star of the Armory Show- its bearded lady, its dog-faced boy. People compared it to an explosion in a shingle factory, an earthquake on the subway; Theodore Roosevelt, a shade more benignly, likened it to a Navajo blanket, which it did not resemble in the least. Marcel Duchamp. Nude Descending the Staircase No. 2, 1912 The idea of “anarchy in art”’ meant something graver than mere esthetic disorder to a newspaper reader in 1913. It suggested deliberate subversion, coming across the Atlantic to derange its cultural polity and making monsters or fools of real American artists. Fear of anarchism fitted into the general matrix of suspicion of the foreign immigrant. This ran strong and hot in 1910s America, toward the end of its first age of mass immigration. Duchamp recorded his own version of the Nude’s place in the history of art: “My aim was a static representation of movement- a static composition of indications of various positions taken by a form in movement- with no attempt to give cinema effects through painting.” It was a humorous attack on Futurist proscriptions against traditional, Academic nudity. The image has a kinetic quality consistent with the Futurist interest in speed and motion. At the same time, the figure is a combination of Cubist form and multiple images that indicate the influence of photography. Its overlapping planes were partly derived from the sequential images of the French photographer who analyzed motion, Etienne Jules Marey. Its very title was ironic, almost insupportable. Nudes, in art, were not expected to move, let alone walk downstairs. They were meant to stand or lie still, to imitate the chaste condition of statues. It suggested decorum fractured almost to the verge of pornography, even though this nude had no detectable sexual characteristics- not that the public didn’t try to find them. Flying pelican captured by Etienne Jules Marey around 1882 With the war as a backdrop, many artists contributed to an artistic and literary movement known as Dada. This movement emerged, in large part, in reaction to what many of these artists saw as nothing more than an insane spectacle of collective homicide. They clearly were “revolted by the butchery of the World War.” The international scope of Dada proves this revulsion was widespread; although Dada began independently in New York and Zurich, it also emerged in Paris, Berlin, and Cologne, among other cities. Dada was more a mind-set or attitude than a single identifiable style. Marcel Duchamp. Bicycle Wheel, (third version made in 1951 after original of 1913), assemblage In 1913, at a single stroke, the artist fathered two of the major innovations of twentieth-century sculpture: the mobile- sculpture that physically moves- and the readymade, or “found” object- sculpture made from or including existing objects, usually commonplace. In the readymades, Duchamp found forms that of their nature raised questions regarding historic values in art. Marcel Duchamp. Fountain, readymade Despite his anti-aesthetic attitude, readymades, as he warned, did finally become works of art and have taken on a perverse beauty of their own. Younger artists have continued to make readymades or found objects, and the question of whether they are works of art at all is argued to the present time. Duchamp was clear on the matter: the conception, the “discovery”, was what made a work of art, not the uniqueness of the object. To the 1917 exhibition of the New York Society of Independent Artists he submitted a porcelain urinal entitled Fountain and signed R. Mutt. When this entry was rejected, he resigned from the association, and the Fountain became one of the most notorious of all Duchamp’s readymades. Duchamp had bought the urinal and simply placed it on its flat side so that it would stand “erect.” Although the signature was inspired by the comic-strip characters Mutt and Jeff, and the “R.” stood for “Richard”, French slang for “moneybags”, the hanging committee probably though first of a filthy cur. But Duchamp was also playing on the real name of the company he bought it from, the “Mott Works” in New York, which he changed slightly, in the manner typical of him. Complaints were made when the work was rejected. Walter Arensberg offered to buy Fountain to support the artist, but it couldn’t be found. After a while the urinal was discovered behind a partition wall, where it had waited out the entire duration of the exhibition. Alfred Stieglitz was persuaded to take an almost ennobling photograph of Fountain, which appeared in the second issue of The Blind Man, a magazine published by Duchamp, Beatrice Wood, and H.-P. Roche. Duchamp was not the first to kidnap everyday stuff for art; the Cubists had done so in collages, which, however, required aesthetic judgment in the shaping and placing of materials. The Readymade, on the other hand, implied that the production of art need by no more than a matter of selection- of choosing a preexisting object. In radically subverting earlier assumptions about what the art- making process entailed, this idea had enormous influence on later artists, particularly after the broader dissemination of Duchamp’s thought in the 1950s and 1960s. The components of Bicycle Wheel, being mass-produced, are anonymous, identical or similar to countless others. In addition, the fact that this version of the piece is not the original seems inconsequential, at least in terms of visual experience. (Having lost the original Bicycle Wheel, Duchamp simply remade it almost four decades later.) Duchamp claimed to like the work’s appearance, “to feel that the wheel turning was very soothing.” Even now, Bicycle Wheel retains an absurdist visual surprise. Its greatest power, however, is as a conceptual proposition. Marcel Duchamp. The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (or the Large Glass), 1915-23, construction The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, or The Large Glass, was completed in 1923, as far as it could be completed. Whatever its state, the works seems the summation of the artist’s dreams of a machine age, the mathematically derived love goddess, below whom swarm her bachelors, mere drones or empty malic molds being infused with the sperm gas or fluid constantly ground forth by the rollers of the chocolate machine. Large Glass can only be explained as a complex love machine full of sexual overtones that terminate in a curious pattern of sterility and frustration. Duchamp’s machines were never intended to have a rational or logical solution, and his own exegeses add to the dimensions of the problems. He made his first sketches for the piece in 1913 but did not begin work on it until he arrived in New York. Notes he made while working on it confirm that it is enormously complex in conception and operates on several esoteric levels. At the most obvious level it is a pessimistic statement of the insoluble frustrations of male-female relations. The tubular elements encased in glass at the top represent the bride. These release a large romantic sigh that is stimulating to the bachelors below, who are represented by nine different costumes attached to a waterwheel. The wheel resembles and is attached to a chocolate grinder, a reference to a French euphemism for masturbation. A bar separates the males from the female, preventing the fulfillment of their respective sexual desires. Furthermore, male and female are not only separated but fundamentally different. The female is depicted as a gas- the three strips of gauze in her sign punningly reveal this- while the males are represented as liquids.