Marcel, no more painting: go get a job (original) (raw)

Abstract

In his book Pictorial Nominalism. On Marcel Duchamp's Passage from Painting to the Readymade (1984), Thierry De Duve proposes to read the birth of abstraction in painting, Marcel Duchamp's abandonment of the pictorial practice, his "invention of the ready-made" and industrialization as events which are fundamentally intertwined, and are not independent from one another, as modernist critic Clement Greenberg proposed. Moreover, the ready-made has to be considered in continuity with Duchamp's pictorial practice; in fact, this pictorial practice is what De Duve proposes to consider as "pictorial nominalism", which would imply the passage from an ontological to an epistemological conception of painting; from the conception of "painting as being" to the conception "painting as knowing". Taking De Duve's analysis as a point of departure, the present paper will explore the passage from modernism to postmodernism in art critical discourse and its implications for digital art theory and practices using the development of the concept of "medium" and its "reinvention" as the file rouge for this analysis; considering also that, so far, what is called "postmodernism" has been examined mainly through the categories of modernism (historicism or avant-garde). Duchamp's artistic practice and his invention of the ready-made has been definitive in eroding from within the basic modernist conceptions, mainly conceptualized by Greenberg such as the "intrinsic properties of the medium"; and in opening the possibilities for an implosion and reinvention of the medium itself. In this regard, the relationship between obsolescence, innovation, authorship and originality in relation to the historical avant-gardes and digital media strategies will also be addressed, trying to understand how and which contemporary digital art practices (i.e. hackering, culture jamming, net art, Second Life, etc) are reappropriating and re-signifying strategies developed by the avant-gardes, and especially by Marcel Duchamp, at the beginning of the twentieth-century.

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