DOCSLIB.ORG

The Artwork Caught by the Tail*

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
The Artwork Caught by the Tail* The Artwork Caught by the Tail* GEORGE BAKER If it were married to logic, art would be living in incest, engulfing, swallowing its own tail. —Tristan Tzara, Manifeste Dada 1918 The only word that is not ephemeral is the word death. To death, to death, to death. The only thing that doesn’t die is money, it just leaves on trips. —Francis Picabia, Manifeste Cannibale Dada, 1920 Je m’appelle Dada He is staring at us, smiling, his face emerging like an exclamation point from the gap separating his first from his last name. “Francis Picabia,” he writes, and the letters are blunt and childish, projecting gaudily off the canvas with the stiff pride of an advertisement, or the incontinence of a finger painting. (The shriek of the commodity and the babble of the infant: Dada always heard these sounds as one and the same.) And so here is Picabia. He is staring at us, smiling, a face with- out a body, or rather, a face that has lost its body, a portrait of the artist under the knife. Decimated. Decapitated. But not quite acephalic, to use a Bataillean term: rather the reverse. Here we don’t have the body without a head, but heads without bodies, for there is more than one. Picabia may be the only face that meets our gaze, but there is also Metzinger, at the top and to the right. And there, just below * This essay was written in the fall of 1999 to serve as a catalog essay for the exhibition Worthless (Invaluable): The Concept of Value in Contemporary Art, curated by Carlos Basualdo at the Moderna Galerija Ljubljana, Slovenia. To date, the catalog has not been published. The material presented here is drawn from my dissertation on Francis Picabia and Paris Dada. It has benefited from close critical readings at the hands of Rachel Haidu, Rhea Anastas, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh. For reasons far exceeding the date of its composition, it is dedicated to Rosalind Krauss. OCTOBER 97, Summer 2001, pp. 51–90. © 2001 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2001.97.1.51 by guest on 28 September 2021 52 OCTOBER Francis Picabia. L’oeil cacodylate. 1921. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2001.97.1.51 by guest on 28 September 2021 The Artwork Caught by the Tail 53 him, is Cocteau. And there is Gabrielle. And there is Marcel. All so many heads floating free of their bodies, they roll through the space of this painting, turning now this way and now that—backward, forward, sideways, and upside-down—dis- persed products of the art of collage practiced in the key of castration. “At the heart of our projects,” as Louis Aragon later described Dada’s activities in 1921, “there was always the gleam of the guillotine.”1 These heads, however, had companions. For the heads were joined, not to bodies, but to words. To signatures. So that along with Picabia, there is Germaine. And there is Tristan, and Man Ray, and Georges. And there is Isadora, and Pierre, and Marthe, and Clément, and Suzanne, and Marguerite, and Benjamin. And there is Jean, and Hania, and Renata, and Léo, and Michel, and René, and Paul, and Alice, and Marie, and Roland, and Serge, and Céline, and Valentine, and François. Faces and names. Heads and signatures. Photographs and language. These are the signs offered up by Picabia’s 1921 painting L’oeil cacodylate. These are the signs offered up by a painting that seems somehow to be newly about the logic of the sign, about the full infiltration of the space of painting by a procession of deracinated signs. For here images, painted images, are in short supply. Picabia provides an eye, a cartoonish, figurative punch line—far from the geometric rigor that characterized the artist’s increasingly abstract “mechanomorphs”—to accompany the painting’s written title. But that is about it. And painted images aren’t the only thing suddenly missing. Hair seems to have become a scarce commodity. Picabia has retained his, of course—this was a mane that would accompany him to the grave. But look at Gabrielle. She seems to have given up her locks in return for the plunging blade of her décolletage, its point functioning as the flip side of the jagged, ghostly peaks left by the excision of any trace of hair from the photograph- ic image of her face. And look at Cocteau. He too seems to exist as a face without a summit, his hair manifestly occluded by the “crown of melancholy” scrawled across his image. And look at Marcel. In his case, as always, the loss has become real, literal, as Duchamp places two images of himself on Picabia’s painting, two images focused—to a greater or lesser degree—on his gleaming scalp. Amid the panoply of personages and signs within L’oeil cacodylate, Duchamp presents himself as bald. Something like an allegorical image forms here, for me at least. Its point was tongue-in-cheek, deeply hermetic, perhaps unreadable, even to the majority of the collective that worked to create this painting. Its meaning seems driven home by the one image that manifestly contradicts Duchamp’s hairlessness, or at least (literally) redirects it: the photograph by Man Ray of a woman smoking a ciga- rette, positioned directly below Duchamp’s face. Taken from a radically oblique angle, the one nameless image in L’oeil cacodylate reads as reversed, the woman’s hair—excessive and thick—splayed out in a tangle as the image’s ground, her chin 1. Louis Aragon, Projet d’histoire littéraire contemporain [1923] (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), p. 105. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2001.97.1.51 by guest on 28 September 2021 54 OCTOBER substituting itself for the bald pinnacle shared by the other portraits, a summit extended by the appendage of a rigid cigarette. We see something like a body flipped and dehumanized, a face becoming an object—a phallic one, yes, but also one with painterly connotations. More or less dead center in Picabia’s painting, we see something like a face transformed, solidified into a cipher for the infamous “stick with the hairs on its end” that is the painter’s brush. Such a reading is perhaps easier to project onto the image now, with many years remove, as Dada’s later progeny have decoded the body in this way with increasing frequency, from Nam June Paik’s Zen for Head to Shigeko Kubota’s Vagina Painting to Janine Antoni’s Loving Care. But such an allegory of painting and its renunciation, or—what amounts to the same thing—painting and its cor- porealization, had its own horizon of expectation at the moment of the historical avant-garde. And it had its own horizon of expectation among the Dadaists, among Picabia’s friends. For it had been in 1910 that Roland Dorgelès had taken the step of attaching a loaded brush to a donkey’s tail, allowing it to swish and sway, and submitting the resulting painting to that year’s Salon des Indépendants under the pseudonym Boronali.2 Dorgelès’s action attained immediate currency among the European avant-garde, spawning a Russian exhibit in 1912 entitled “The Donkey’s Tail,” or inspiring the young Max Ernst at the same moment to dash off a drawing with roughly the same title. And it was a blague that the Dadaists began to incorporate into more and more of their own actions. We find oblique reference to it at the moment of the emergence of Duchamp’s readymades, in the flur- ry of written responses produced to protest the rejection of Fountain from the Independents Exhibition of 1917. “I suppose monkeys hated to lose their tail,” the Dadaists intoned, in the opening lines of their defense. “Necessary, useful and an ornament, monkey imagination could not stretch to a tailless exis- tence (and frankly, do you see the 2. On the Dorgelès episode, see David Cottington, Cubism in the Shadow of War: The Avant-Garde and Politics in Paris 1905–1914 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 9–11, and D. Grojnowski, “L’Ane qui peint avec sa queue: Boronali au Salon des Indépendants,” Actes de recherche en sciences sociales 88 (June 1991), pp. 41–47, cited in Cottington, p. 198. Nam June Paik. Zen for Head. 1962. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2001.97.1.51 by guest on 28 September 2021 The Artwork Caught by the Tail 55 biological beauty of our loss of them?), yet now that we are used to it, we get on pretty well without them.” Evolution would be invoked, from monkey to man, but also implicitly from painting to the readymade, from the stick with bristles to the head with hairs, from the paintbrush to the intellect, as the writer concluded, “But evolution is not pleasing to the monkey race; ‘there is a death in every change,’ and we monkeys do not love death as we should.”3 Later, Man Ray would enter the fray, announcing that such a dynamic was definitive for Dada: “Dada is a state of mind. It consists largely of negations. It is the tail of every other move- ment.”4 And Picabia, more than any of the others, would make this dynamic his own, make his own, that is, both the radicality and the rear-guard nature of Dorgelès’s sneering prank.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Dada Bros Man Ray & Picabia
    MAN RAY & PICABIA DADA BROS MAN RAY & PICABIA The Avant-Garde Masters at Vito Schnabel Gallery By Ines Valencia April 26, 2021 Man Ray, The Tortoise, 1944. Oil on canvas, 20 x 24 inches (50.8 x 61 cm) © Man Ray 2015 Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris 2021. Vito Schnabel Gallery, in New York, is hosting the historical different media types (including painting, photography, exhibition Man Ray & Picabia. This show brings together collage, and sculpture,) although he considered himself a two of the most legendary artists of the avant-garde and painter. In Paris, he joined the Dadaist group and became essential contributors to the Dada movement. It runs well known for his photography (his subjects included through May 15, 2021. some of the biggest names in the art world, including Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Peggy Guggenheim, Gertrude Stein, Man Ray & Picabia focuses on nine carefully selected and Jean Cocteau). However, he abandoned the medium for paintings produced between the late 1920s and mid-1950s painting in 1937. (some of which have not been on display to the public for decades.) Both artists did meet briefly in 1915 (Marcel Francis Picabia (1879-1953) was a French artist specializing Duchamp introduced them). Still, the dialogue presented in in painting, poetry, and typography. Like Man Ray, he was the exhibition is an imaginary one between the two, one one of the central figures in the Dada movement. Having that uses juxtaposition to bring their similarities to light. moved on from Impressionism, Pointillism, and Cubism, Both were prominent figures in the Dada and Surrealist Picabia identified with the provocative spirit of Dada and movements, and breaking rules played significant roles was active in both Paris and Zürich but renounced his ties in redefining what can be considered art and what it can to the movement in 1921, the same year Man Ray arrived in contain and do.
    [Show full text]
  • Cubism in America
    University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Sheldon Museum of Art Catalogues and Publications Sheldon Museum of Art 1985 Cubism in America Donald Bartlett Doe Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/sheldonpubs Part of the Art and Design Commons Doe, Donald Bartlett, "Cubism in America" (1985). Sheldon Museum of Art Catalogues and Publications. 19. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/sheldonpubs/19 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Sheldon Museum of Art at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Sheldon Museum of Art Catalogues and Publications by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. RESOURCE SERIES CUBISM IN SHELDON MEMORIAL ART GALLERY AMERICA Resource/Reservoir is part of Sheldon's on-going Resource Exhibition Series. Resource/Reservoir explores various aspects of the Gallery's permanent collection. The Resource Series is supported in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. A portion of the Gallery's general operating funds for this fiscal year has been provided through a grant from the Institute of Museum Services, a federal agency that offers general operating support to the nation's museums. Henry Fitch Taylor Cubis t Still Life, c. 19 14, oil on canvas Cubism in America .".. As a style, Cubism constitutes the single effort which began in 1907. Their develop­ most important revolution in the history of ment of what came to be called Cubism­ art since the second and third decades of by a hostile critic who took the word from a the 15th century and the beginnings of the skeptical Matisse-can, in very reduced Renaissance.
    [Show full text]
  • HARD FACTS and SOFT SPECULATION Thierry De Duve
    THE STORY OF FOUNTAIN: HARD FACTS AND SOFT SPECULATION Thierry de Duve ABSTRACT Thierry de Duve’s essay is anchored to the one and perhaps only hard fact that we possess regarding the story of Fountain: its photo in The Blind Man No. 2, triply captioned “Fountain by R. Mutt,” “Photograph by Alfred Stieglitz,” and “THE EXHIBIT REFUSED BY THE INDEPENDENTS,” and the editorial on the facing page, titled “The Richard Mutt Case.” He examines what kind of agency is involved in that triple “by,” and revisits Duchamp’s intentions and motivations when he created the fictitious R. Mutt, manipulated Stieglitz, and set a trap to the Independents. De Duve concludes with an invitation to art historians to abandon the “by” questions (attribution, etc.) and to focus on the “from” questions that arise when Fountain is not seen as a work of art so much as the bearer of the news that the art world has radically changed. KEYWORDS, Readymade, Fountain, Independents, Stieglitz, Sanitary pottery Then the smell of wet glue! Mentally I was not spelling art with a capital A. — Beatrice Wood1 No doubt, Marcel Duchamp’s best known and most controversial readymade is a men’s urinal tipped on its side, signed R. Mutt, dated 1917, and titled Fountain. The 2017 centennial of Fountain brought us a harvest of new books and articles on the famous or infamous urinal. I read most of them in the hope of gleaning enough newly verified facts to curtail my natural tendency to speculate. But newly verified facts are few and far between.
    [Show full text]
  • This Project Brings Together Girls' Studies, Feminist Psychology, And
    1 Distribution Agreement In presenting this thesis or dissertation as a partial fulfillment of the requirements for an advanced degree from Emory University, I hereby grant to Emory University and its agents the non-exclusive license to archive, make accessible, and display my thesis or dissertation in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known, including display on the world wide web. I understand that I may select some access restrictions as part of the online submission of this thesis or dissertation. I retain all ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis or dissertation. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation. Signature: _____________________________ ______________ Kelly H. Ball Date “So Powerful a Form”: Rethinking Girls’ Sexuality By Kelly H. Ball Doctor of Philosophy Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies _______________________________________ Lynne Huffer, Ph.D. Advisor _______________________________________ Elizabeth A. Wilson, Ph.D. Advisor ________________________________________ Cynthia Willett, Ph.D. Committee Member ________________________________________ Mary E. Odem, Ph.D. Committee Member Accepted: _________________________________________ Lisa A. Tedesco, Ph.D. Dean of the James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies ___________________ Date “So Powerful a Form”: Rethinking Girls’ Sexuality By Kelly H. Ball M.A. The Ohio State University, 2008 B.A. Transylvania University, 2006 Advisor: Lynne Huffer, Ph.D. Advisor: Elizabeth A. Wilson, Ph.D. An abstract of A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies of Emory University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy In Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies 2014 Abstract “So Powerful a Form”: Rethinking Girls’ Sexuality By: Kelly H.
    [Show full text]
  • Albert Gleizes Y Las Leyes De La Pintura: Un Retorno a La Edad Media
    Albert Gleizes y las leyes de la pintura: un retorno a la Edad Media CARME BONELL Les Arts, parce qu'ils sont pratiques, ne sauraient etre exclusivement a la merci d'une fantaisie échevelée. II leur faut s'appuyer constamment sur des principes relativement exacts, c'est vrai, mais suffisants pour satisfaire la sensibilité et la raison,,. Albert Gleizes <<Lapeinture et ses lois. Ce qui devait sortir du Cubisme)>,es un artículo de Albert Gleizes publicado en La vie des Lettres et des Arts, en marzo de 1923'. Es un texto doblemente interesante si se tiene en cuenta, por una parte, el trabajo teórico de Gleizes, y, por otra, el movimiento de retorno al orden en el período de entreguerras. En cuanto a la primera cuestión, este texto se ha de valorar globalmente de acuerdo con la trayectoria biográfica y artística de Gleizes, y en relación también con otros textos suyos anteriores, especialmente el libro Du ~Cubismen,escrito en colaboración con Jean Metzinger2. En cuanto a la segunda l Este artículo fue nuevamente publicado como opúsculo en 1924, con numerosas varian- tes, y reeditado en 1961. Para todas las citas se utiliza la versión publicada en La Vie des Lettres et des Arts, París, 2eme série, n. 12, marzo de 1923, p. 26-74. (Todas las citas son traducción de la autora.) 2GLEIZES, A. y METZINGER, J. DU ~Cubismew,París, Eugene Figuiere, 1912. Reed. Sisteron, Présence, 1980 (todas las citas se refieren a esta edición y son traducción de la autora).Vers. cast.: Sobre el Cubismo, Murcia, C.O.A.A.T., 1986.
    [Show full text]
  • The Richard Mutt Case'
    248 Rationalization and Transformation Dadaism - a mask play, a burst of laughter? And behind it, a synthesis of the romantic, dandyistic and - daemonistic theories of the 19thcentury. 2 Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) 'The Richard Mutt Case' Duchamp, having abandoned painting and emigrated to America, began to produce 'Readymades', works calculated to reveal, among their other effects, the workings of the art institution as inseparable from the attribution of artistic value. In 1917, under the pseudonym Richard Mutt, he submitted a urinal to an open sculpture exhibition; the piece was refused entry (as he no doubt intended). The present text was originally published in The Blind Man, New York, 1917. It is reproduced here from Lucy Lipparcl (ed.), Dadas on Art, New Jersey, 1971. They say any artist paying six dollars may exhibit. Mr Richard Mutt sent ih a 'fountain. Without discussion this article disap­ peared and never was exhibited. What were the grounds for refusing Mr Mutt's fountain: - 1 Some contended it was immoral, vulgar. 2 Others, it was plagiarism, a plain pkce of plumbing. Now Mr Mutt's fountain is not immoral, that is absurd, no more than a bathtub is immoral. It is a fixture that you see every day in plumbers' show windows. Whether Mr Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view - created a new thought for that object. ' · As for plumbing, that is absurd.
    [Show full text]
  • Tristan Tzara
    DADA Dada and dadaism History of Dada, bibliography of dadaism, distribution of Dada documents International Dada Archive The gateway to the International Dada Archive of the University of Iowa Libraries. A great resource for information about artists and writers of the Dada movement DaDa Online A source for information about the art, literature and development of the European Dada movement Small Time Neumerz Dada Society in Chicago Mital-U Dada-Situationist, an independent record-label for individual music Tristan Tzara on Dadaism Excerpts from “Dada Manifesto” [1918] and “Lecture on Dada” [1922] Dadart The site provides information about history of Dada movement, artists, and an bibliography Cut and Paste The art of photomontages, including works by Heartfield, Höch, Hausmann and Schwitters John Heartfield The life and work of the photomontage artist Hannah Hoch A collection of photo montages created by Hannah Hoch Women Artists–Dada and Surrealism An excerpted chapter from Margaret Barlow’s illustrated book Women Artists Helios A beginner’s guide to Dada Merzheft German Dada, in German Dada and Surrealist Film A Bibliography of Materials in the UC Berkeley Library La Typographie Dada D.E.A. memoir in French by Breuil Eddie New York Avant-Garde, 1913-1929 New York Dada and the Armory Show including images and bibliography Excentriques A biography of Arthur Cravan in French Tristan Tzara, a Biography Excerpt from François Buot’s biography of Tzara,L’homme qui inventa la Révolution Dada Tristan Tzara A selection of links on Tzara, founder of the Dada movement Mina Loy’s lunar odyssey An online collection of Mina Loy’s life and work Erik Satie The homepage of Satie 391 Experimental art inspired by Picabia’s Dada periodical 391, with articles on Picabia, Duchamp, Ball and others Man Ray Internet site officially authorized by the Man Ray Trust to offer reproductions of the Man Ray artworks.
    [Show full text]
  • Genius Is Nothing but an Extravagant Manifestation of the Body. — Arthur Cravan, 1914
    1 ........................................... The Baroness and Neurasthenic Art History Genius is nothing but an extravagant manifestation of the body. — Arthur Cravan, 1914 Some people think the women are the cause of [artistic] modernism, whatever that is. — New York Evening Sun, 1917 I hear “New York” has gone mad about “Dada,” and that the most exotic and worthless review is being concocted by Man Ray and Duchamp. What next! This is worse than The Baroness. By the way I like the way the discovery has suddenly been made that she has all along been, unconsciously, a Dadaist. I cannot figure out just what Dadaism is beyond an insane jumble of the four winds, the six senses, and plum pudding. But if the Baroness is to be a keystone for it,—then I think I can possibly know when it is coming and avoid it. — Hart Crane, c. 1920 Paris has had Dada for five years, and we have had Else von Freytag-Loringhoven for quite two years. But great minds think alike and great natural truths force themselves into cognition at vastly separated spots. In Else von Freytag-Loringhoven Paris is mystically united [with] New York. — John Rodker, 1920 My mind is one rebellion. Permit me, oh permit me to rebel! — Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, c. 19251 In a 1921 letter from Man Ray, New York artist, to Tristan Tzara, the Romanian poet who had spearheaded the spread of Dada to Paris, the “shit” of Dada being sent across the sea (“merdelamerdelamerdela . .”) is illustrated by the naked body of German expatriate the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (see fig.
    [Show full text]
  • Before Zen: the Nothing of American Dada
    Before Zen The Nothing of American Dada Jacquelynn Baas One of the challenges confronting our modern era has been how to re- solve the subject-object dichotomy proposed by Descartes and refined by Newton—the belief that reality consists of matter and motion, and that all questions can be answered by means of the scientific method of objective observation and measurement. This egocentric perspective has been cast into doubt by evidence from quantum mechanics that matter and motion are interdependent forms of energy and that the observer is always in an experiential relationship with the observed.1 To understand ourselves as in- terconnected beings who experience time and space rather than being sub- ject to them takes a radical shift of perspective, and artists have been at the leading edge of this exploration. From Marcel Duchamp and Dada to John Cage and Fluxus, to William T. Wiley and his West Coast colleagues, to the recent international explosion of participatory artwork, artists have been trying to get us to change how we see. Nor should it be surprising that in our global era Asian perspectives regarding the nature of reality have been a crucial factor in effecting this shift.2 The 2009 Guggenheim exhibition The Third Mind emphasized the im- portance of Asian philosophical and spiritual texts in the development of American modernism.3 Zen Buddhism especially was of great interest to artists and writers in the United States following World War II. The histo- ries of modernism traced by the exhibition reflected the well-documented influence of Zen, but did not include another, earlier link—that of Daoism and American Dada.
    [Show full text]
  • JIL FL C1 Oct 00.P2T2
    MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION JJOB IINFORMATION LLIST FOREIGN LANGUAGE EDITION • OCTOBER 2000 CONTENTS Accessing the Electronic JIL and Subscription Departmental Job Listings Information ............................... inside front cover Foreign Language Positions (by language)........... 1 Information for Candidates .................................... i Multiple Language Listings ................................ 82 Advice to Search Committee Members and Job Seekers ......................................................... iii Comparative Literature ...................................... 84 Checklist for Job Seekers ....................................... v Linguistics and ESL ............................................ 88 Dos and Don’ts for MLA Convention Department Chair/Deanships ........................... 90 Interviews ......................................................... vii Technology and Language Teaching ................. 93 List of Administrations Censured by Post Doctoral ...................................................... 94 the AAUP ............................................................ ix MLA Statement on the Use of Part-Time and Nonacademic Listings ........................................ 95 Full-Time Adjunct Faculty ................................. x Additonal Entries ............................................... 95 Published by the Modern Language Association in cooperation with the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION The print version of the Job Information List is
    [Show full text]
  • Marcel Duchamp and the Forestay Waterfall Symposium – Concert – Intervention – Exhibitions
    Marcel Duchamp and the Forestay Waterfall Symposium – Concert – Intervention – Exhibitions Program 6-9 May 2010 www.bxb.ch/kunsthalle/ OPENING RECEPTION Thursday, 6 May 2010 18:00 Welcome to the event by Stefan Banz Andreas Glauser plays «Musical Erratum» by Marcel Duchamp → Salle Davel, Cully 19:00 Ecke Bonk → Vernissage Kunsthalle Marcel Duchamp, Cully (until 13 June) I want to grasp things with the mind the way the penis is grasped by the vagina → Vernissage Galerie Davel 14, Cully (until 13 June) SYMPOSIUM Friday, 7 May → Salle Davel, Cully (with simultaneous interpreting English – French – English) CONTEXTUALIZATION OF ETANT DONNÉS 09:00 James W. McManus (USA) Digging through Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Un amas d’idées’ – considering ‘infra-thin’ correspondences between apparently disassociated actions, events, and projects – 1946/1947 Antje von Graevenitz (Holland) Duchamp as a scientist, artifex and semiotic-philosopher: his notes of the ‘infra-mince’ (1934/35-1945) Discussion 11:00 Herbert Molderings (Germany) Le bonheur même. A la recherche du ‘Rayon vert’ de Marcel Duchamp Molly Nesbit (USA) The Hinge at the End of the Mind Discussion 14:00 Hans Maria de Wolf (Belgium) Beyond Swiss Cheese and Bullet Holes (second version) Mark Nelson (USA) Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder Philip Ursprung (Switzerland) The ‘Spiritualist of Woolworth’ – Duchamp in the Eyes of Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson Discussion 18:00 SPECIAL OPENING RECEPTION Roman Signer → Intervention at the Forestay Waterfall, Bellevue/Chexbres (until 9 May) SYMPOSIUM Saturday, 8 May → Salle Davel, Cully (with simultaneous interpreting English – French – English) THE WATERFALL, THE LANDSCAPE 09:00 Stefan Banz (Switzerland) Paysage fautif.
    [Show full text]
  • Linking Local Resources to World History
    Linking Local Resources to World History Made possible by a Georgia Humanities Council grant to the Georgia Regents University Humanities Program in partnership with the Morris Museum of Art Lesson 5: Modern Art: Cubism in Europe & America Images Included_________________________________________________________ 1. Title: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon Artist: Pablo Picasso (1881– 1973) Date: 1907 Medium: Oil on canvas Location: Museum of Modern Art, New York 2. Title: untitled (African mask) Artist: unknown, Woyo peoples, Democratic Republic of the Congo Date: c. early 20th century Medium: Wood and pigment Size: 24.5 X 13.5 X 6 inches Location: Los Angeles County Museum of Art 3. Title: untitled (African mask) Artist: Unknown, Fang Tribe, Gabon Date: c. early 20th century Medium: Wood and pigment Size: 24 inches tall Location: Private collection 4. Title: Abstraction Artist: Paul Ninas (1903–1964 Date: 1885 Medium: Oil on canvas Size: 47.5 x 61 inches Location: Morris Museum of Art 5. Title: Houses at l’Estaque Artist: Georges Braque (1882–1963) Date: 1908 Medium: Oil on Canvas Size: 28.75 x 23.75 inches Location: Museum of Fine Arts Berne Title: Two Characters Artist: Pablo Picasso (1881– 1973) Date: 1934 Medium: Oil on canvas Location: Museum of Modern Art in Rovereto Historical Background____________________________________________________ Experts debate start and end dates for “modern art,” but they all agree modernism deserves attention as a distinct era in which something identifiably new and important was under way. Most art historians peg modernism to Europe in the mid- to late- nineteenth century, with particularly important developments in France, so we’ll look at that time in Paris and then see how modernist influences affect artworks here in the American South.
    [Show full text]