Lacan with Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy: From "Modernist Myths" to Modernism as Myth (original) (raw)

Marcel Duchamp's Fountain: One Hundred Years Later. London: Palgrave Macmillan, December 12th, 2017.

2017 marks the centenary of an artwork judged to be the single most influential of the twentieth century: Marcel Duchamp’s famous “readymade” entitled Fountain. The final verdict on Fountain has been widely accepted, despite the fact that the circumstances surrounding “Mr. Richard Mutt” have never resembled an open-and-shut case. On the contrary, since Fountain’s appearance in 1917, when it was rejected as “a plain piece of plumbing” only to be subsequently celebrated as a work of conceptual art, numerous questions remain unanswered, several facts remain unexplained. Now, one hundred years later, Robert Kilroy attempts to answer these questions by examining the evidence with fresh eyes. Central to the investigation is the primary witness – Duchamp himself – whose statements are forensically analyzed. The facts themselves are interrogated using the methodology of a detective: precisely speaking, an art historical approach with a critical edge sharpened by a new interpretation of psychoanalytic theory. In weaving an alternative narrative, Kilroy shows us that, not only has Fountain been fundamentally misunderstood, this very misunderstanding is central to the work’s significance. The final verdict, he argues, was strategically stage-managed by Duchamp in order to expose the apparatus underpinning Fountain’s reception, what he terms “The Creative Act.” By suggesting that a specific aesthetic “crime” has gone unnoticed, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain: One Hundred Years Later asks the reader to radically reassess his/her precise contribution to “the creation of art.” This urgent, if somewhat troubling question, could have far-reaching implications for the field of scholarship, the course of contemporary art and the discipline of Art history.

Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain: Is it Art?

Given that Marcel Duchamp’s readymades mock and repudiate artistic conventions, the claim to aesthetic merit for such works seems contradictory. Yet their conception is today generally considered one of the most influential ideas of Modern Art. Qualifying readymades as art seems paradoxical: is an artwork not supposed to be a beautiful object created by the hands of an artist? The fact that they are mass-manufactured objects that anyone could purchase further insults aesthetic sensibilities. Such questions and contradictions about what ‘Art’ is or should be form the basis of this essay, which seeks to clarify its constructs. As ambiguous artworks, Duchamp’s readymades serve as the ideal focal point to interrogate the definitions of art and to problematise its discourse. This discussion will firstly, introduce and contextualise Duchamp’s Fountain (1917); secondly, question conventional definitions and assumptions of art by exploring how Fountain ruptures these criteria; and lastly, reconsider if Fountain is art and the implications of Duchamp’s gesture.

Art Since 1945: Questioning Modernism

The history of art since 1945 is typically understood in terms of the ascendance, crisis, and transformation of modernism. In this account, a select group of 19th and early 20th-century European avant-gardes established the models by which subsequent advanced art would be produced and judged. The influence of centers like Paris, Berlin, and Moscow was disrupted by the events of World War II, after which New York City became the hub of an increasingly global art world, one in which modernist styles were the common language. However, the dominance of modernism, which began to be challenged in the 1950s, was gravely undermined in the 1960s as successive movements like Pop, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art challenged its most basic assumptions. In the decades that followed, as these critical tendencies themselves became accepted wisdom, modernism was transcended (as in the case of postmodernism), recuperated (by artists like the Neo-Expressionists of the 1980s), or transformed (as when contemporary artists use modernist histories as the basis for artistic research). In recent years, prominent critics and curators have even tested the idea that “modernism is our antiquity,” serving much the same role for us as the classical era did for the modernists. Like all “master narratives,” this one has its share of truth, and we will begin our survey of modern and contemporary art by studying its core features. We will evaluate some of the most influential critical accounts of modernism and modernity, viewing these categories from political, economic, and artistic perspectives. Surveying the development of the historic avant-gardes in Western and Central Europe, we will define and contrast two competing critical models: one based on a commitment to formalism, the other on the transformation of art’s social function. Turning to the postwar period, we will explore the moment of “high modernism,” when various forms of abstraction were thought to be the paragon of artistic achievement –– and when this consensus supported the new cultural politics of U.S. hegemony. Moving forward, we will examine the ways in which the dominance of modernism came into question, whether in new forms like Happenings and installations, or in locations outside the North Atlantic that were thought by many to be “peripheral.” We will pay close attention to the numerous forms that questioned modernist dogmas during the 1960s and 70s, including performance, actions, Arte Povera, Land Art, artists’ publications, social practice, and various modes of media art. The course will end by examining some of the many ways in which modernism has survived its supposed demise, whether on the art market, across the biennial circuit, or even in the experimental forms that would seem to have left it behind. However, even as we tell ourselves this story about modernism, we will also be critically attending to its oversights. In surveying the broad range of pre-war modernisms, we will ask how and why American critics like Clement Greenberg privileged a formalist modernism over other possible definitions, considering how these other models might allow us to better grasp the interplay between different media, or between art, technology, and mass culture. When possible, we will consider examples from fields that were often overlooked by modernist critics, including dance, textiles, and design. We will think critically about the role that exhibitions and museums have played in popularizing and historicizing art. The course will pay especially close attention to the ways in which the international hegemony of modernism was contested from its supposed margins, analyzing practices from Latin America, Eastern Europe, South and East Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. In doing so, it aims to revise our understanding of how this history might yet matter in the present and future.

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.