Duchamp Meets Turing: Art, Modernism, Posthuman (original) (raw)
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THE INFLUENCE OF POSTHUMANISM ON POSTMODERN ART
Masters Degree Thesis, 2007
This paper is an investigation into the posthuman influence on postmodern art and the potential for art production in a posthuman context. It emphasises one particular period in art history. The period spanning from the late twentieth century to the early twenty first century is an era bent on the domination of the media and the promiscuity of technologies. It is an era that provokes the onset of posthumanism, where the distinctions that once held humanity in place have become dated; because it is no longer clear who makes and who is made in the relationship between human beings and machines. In this way, it is no longer necessary to write science-fiction since we are currently living it. Our time is a posthuman era where the body has become vestigial and obsolete; expendable under the confines of the global village, which has imploded under the weight of its own progress. Posthuman art comments on this paradigm shift, where man submits to the vestiges of hyperreality and a dependence on the media.
2022
The article is an extended review of the recent Stefan Lorenz Sorgner's book Philosophy of Posthuman Art (2022) that explores the content and the aesthetic values introduced by the author as well as his shift to Critical Posthumanism, while he also keeps the philosophical essence of his own approach to Transhumanism, the main ideas of his contribution to Metahumanism and the desire of convergence of Trans-and Posthumanism. Sorgner's insight to contemporary art surpasses the boundaries usually set by art historians and underlines the artists' worldview and the philosophical meaning of their works in the context of the several trends of Posthumanism including social and cultural views and politics. Visual arts and music are studied in parallel with the evolution of posthumanist theories and arguments, while the issues of non-dualities, technology, religion, truth, ethics, reason, leisure, the western philosophies of the past and moreover "the need to coin new terms" are the crucial points of Sorgner's discussion with the readers. The book is more than valuable for its commitment to the notion of the philosophical meaning of contemporary artworks as well as for its opening to a new understanding of Posthumanism.
Postmodernism and the Limits of Art .pdf
This is a renamed version of Chapter 1 of my book Geneses of Postmodern Art: Technology As Iconology, published by Routledge in their Advances in Art and Visual Studies series, 2019. In the book, the chapter is entitled ‘Contingent Objects, Permanent Eclecticism’. If you wish to cite this discussion please refer to the version as presented in the book . This discussion describes how Postmodernism takes art to its logical limits. The origins of this are found in the delayed influence of Duchamp's legacy of the 'found object'. In Part 1, we discuss the emergence of minimalism, conceptual, and performance art. In Part 2, it is shown how the legacy of the found object is made into the positive basis for artistic creation in the form of Pop Art and other tendencies that affirm the worth of mass culture. It is argued further, that effect of all the tendencies described is to exhaust the possibility of further radical innovations in art. Part 3 explores some key aspects of the permanent Postmodern eclecticism that is consequent upon this.
Posthumanism and Contemporary Art
[NOTE: This is an essay commissioned and published by the Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art for its Spring, 2016 Art Exhibition, and can also be found at their website, here: http://www.mocacleveland.org/sites/default/files/files/lagrandeurpaperfinal.pdf\] The idea of the posthuman--the transformation of humanity by its convergence with emerging technology--is a big new philosophical and scientific concept, and big new philosophical or scientific concepts often cause paradigm shifts in the way we think about our world, about ourselves, and about our relation to the universe. And that, in turn, changes art. Which changes us, because art reflects and anticipates our struggles to absorb and assimilate new ideas and how they relate to us.
Marcel Duchamp's Language: Deconstructing the Meaning of the Image
As the ‘inventor’ of the readymade, Marcel Duchamp left an important legacy to twentieth century art. Considered by many critics as the father of post-modernity, certainly a bachelor and bastard father, not only did he successfully displace the question of the ontology of art, but he also questioned art and representation itself. This paper will examine a lesser-known aspect of his work, the ‘Boîtes-en-valise’, (boxes in a suitcase). This will allow me to analyze Duchamp’s impact on visual art, as well as his impact on language and systems of signification. According to Duchamp, the work of art must aspire to transcend the experience of the visible, thus positioning himself as ‘anti -retinal’. He values the idea, the intellectual experience of art, which is why the work that he creates does not exist by itself: works of art are not autonomous. They are manuals, real operating systems that are available to the public, who must use them to complete their interpretation. The text of these manuals will be examined here with the aim of understanding the impact of Duchamp’s language, which is mechanic, neutral and indifferent, but always ends up in an ironic word game. It is a language that also suggests anamorphosis, where the transformation of meaning breaks the relation to the reference. I suggest that this use of language can be thought of as a critique of the institution of art, because the work of art cannot operate without its accompanying commentary. However, it is not up to art history to establish this discourse anymore, for a democratization of the artistic experience is offered by our potential accessibility to this specific language. The ‘boîtes-en-valise’ contain these manuals, as well as all the handwritten notes, letters and sketches of every major work by Duchamp. ‘The White Box,’ for example, is entirely dedicated to the ‘Big Glass’. The last proposition that I will explore concerns the reproducibility of these boxes. Already criticizing authorship and authority, Duchamp uses the reproducibility of the text as a way to position language in the center of the experience of visual art. As such, language is inseparable from the intellectual experience; the work of art does not exist without a public, a public that understands it, that comments on it, that allows art to pursue its trajectory further than the retinal/visual. After all, as Duchamp said, it is the viewers that make the painting.
ART & POSTHUMAN BEING: A New World & Its Appearances (2022)
With the enormous chaotic changes taking place today, contemporary artists are showing us a vast and mystifying range of artworks that show glimpses of nascent worlds coming into being and just as quickly disappearing into oblivion. In Part One the author explores a world that seems to be gaining some traction-the world of the post-human. Contemporary art is showing glimpses of this still-forming world in artworks produced from a collision between, or interpenetration of virtual reality and empirical reality, giving rise to weird, horrific, and sometimes strangely beautiful forms. In Part Two the author seeks to penetrate "behind" this post-human art to the activity of the artist, in order to find the original "bringing forth" (Heidegger) of post-human artworks. This move reveals the fundamental place of revelation and prophecy as the origin of any artwork and thus indicates the essential nature of the post-human world.
The Bride Machine: Duchamp's Theory of Art Revisited
Aisthesis. Pratiche, linguaggi e saperi dell’estetico, 2021
It is a commonplace in certain areas of art theory and contemporary art practices to consider Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades as ordinary objects, which have an artistic value that depends more on a theoretical or institutional framework than on an aesthetic experience. The aim of this paper is, on the one hand, to show the historical emergence of these artifacts on the light of the impact of the industrial production in avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century. Discussing Walter Benjamin' s and Jean Brun's insights, it argues that Duchamp's practice has an explanatory principle, both in the mechanical reproduction of the work of art and in the aestheticization of the machine. On the other hand, it brings forward some observations regarding Duchamp's insight on the "total lack of good or bad taste" and the perceptual dimension of a sculptural object as the Large Glass, coming back to Arthur Danto's interpretation of ready-mades and to the notion of "implementation" introduced by Nelson Goodman to define "the process of bringing about the aesthetic functioning that provides the basis for the notion of a work of art".