readymades and iconoclasts
"Bad art is still art in the same way as a bad emotion is still an emotion."
-Marcel Duchamp from a lecture in Houston, Texas, 1957
Recently I've been listening to Duchamp speaking. I was expecting his ideas to sound much more outdated but I find them to still be very resonant. I wonder if an artist who is as unpopular in Europe as Duchamp was early in his career would find such a warm reception in the United States these days. And really, why would any artists come to America now?
I do love hearing Duchamp talk about the Dada spirit, he describes it not as a movement or moment but a spirit, an attitude that makes the act of art a tightly contested game between viewer and object. I also love hearing him speak of eroticism as a kind of tube of paint that you can inject into any work. He goes on to say, "eroticism is a very dear subject to my life" in the touching voice of an old man.
One of my favorite writers on the arts, especially poetry, and the games it plays is Marjorie Perloff. Her book Radical Artifice was a wonderful antidote to the stuffy music theory classes I was taking as an undergraduate. Here she sounds in on Duchamp via Wittgenstein by way of Roubaud.