an overlooked implication of the formalist reduction of the art object to pure form: the possibility, henceforth, of apprehending all objects, and not merely those that arrogate to themselves the designation of “art,” as pure form. This happened around the same time that the Futurists were proposing that the acme of modern beauty is the machine. For the Futurists this mostly meant the displacement of traditional subject matter by depictions of force and speed. Duchamp took the decisive step of replacing depiction by appropriation. In so doing, he forced upon art a confrontation with its own redundancy as source of formal invention. The readymade proves to be as formally engaging as anything labored over by studio artists. The nominative authority of the artist revealed by the readymade is in itself of trivial importance. The greater significance of the readymade is its revelation of the unintended consequences of the modernist fetishization of form.
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