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Against Design |
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The Ready-Made, Again |
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Thanks to Duchamp's intervention, the humble bottle rack underwent nothing less than transubstantiation, the alchemists' dream. It became sculpture, albeit not a very good one.
On a more absurdist note, the Ready-Made thumbed its nose at art's assumptions and conventions by implying an equality between artworks and anything/everything else. This wry but undeniable logic further suggested that any human thought or endeavor can be similarly reduced from the meaningful to the meaningless, and vice versa.
The combination of mystical power and profound irony that Duchamp demonstrated with the Ready-Made has proven irresistible to artists ever since.
In Against Design, some of the works are directly imported in Ready-Made fashion from outside the art world, while other works are constructed to look like they come from such a place.
Jorge Pardo,
"Untitled," 1998
In the same ninety years since Duchamp rolled out the first Ready-Made, artists have yet to solve its underlying shortcoming as visual art -- the fact that its appeal exists primarily as an intellectual construct. Visual form is wholly secondary and is taken into consideration only because of the object's presence in art's domain. Indeed, an attractive looking Ready-Made probably would be inconsistent with the underlying idea.
So you don't need to see a Ready-Made in order to appreciate what it has to offer. You just need someone to tell you the story -- essentially a shaggy-dog story; with the complexities of artistic consideration being the set-up, and the dumb looking object being the punch line.
By
way of contrast, consider a Matisse painting. Just seeing it is enough to
provoke appreciation and enjoyment. There's plenty that can be analyzed and
thought about in a Matisse, but right up front is a wonderful visual experience.
