Duchamp Research Articles

W. S. Graham’s already made voices

ABSTRACT This paper constitutes a radical re-reading of W. S. Graham’s long poem, The Nightfishing (1955). It begins by attending to the poet’s brief but significant time spent in New York and how the resonant influence of Marcel Duchamp may have unexpectedly influenced Graham’s composition of The Nightfishing, which has previously been read as a metaphysical journey out into language-as-ocean, and while such a reading is valid, it is also selective; this paper, instead, reads The Nightfishing as equally – if not more – indebted to Graham’s parallel experiments with and interest in what he calls ‘already made phrases’. John Cage is introduced as a comparable second-generation Duchampian, and whose experiments with tape-recorders form an important parallel example to Graham’s own interest in vocal materiality. The paper thereby provides a new transatlantic inflection to Graham’s verse-composition, and reveals it as structured by the indeterminate qualities of recording equipment, radio, quotation, citationality, and sampling. In this light, his work becomes recontextualised as a curation of found voices – a reading that relates also to larger questions of intention, contingency, and the critic’s own mode of composition.

“The work is only in a moment”: Max Dvořák and the Meaning of the Work of Art

This study examines Max Dvořák‘s previously unknown papers prepared for his one-semester lecture series at the university of Vienna in 1913. Dvořák titled these lectures “explanations of Selected Works of Art“ (Erklärung ausgewählter Kunstwerke) and in doing so developed a distinctive method within the art historical research of the so-called vienna School of Art History. The paper interprets the lectures through a close reading of the method as a parallel to the change in the concept of the work of art as it occurred in the philosophy and practice of art at the beginning of the twentieth century, demonstrated in the study by examples from the thinking of the German philosopher Oskar Becker and a transformation of the meaning of painting by the French artist Marcel Duchamp. As the study shows, such analogies allow us to understand the meaning of the work of art in Max Dvořák‘s art history in a new way.

CHE$$

The exhibition CHE$$ by Till Bödeker at Weiden Space presents a chess-inspired perfume titled CHESS. It addresses the fusion of art and consumption, inspired by Marcel Duchamp and chess, and communicates on both a visual and olfactory level.

The Difference of Indifference: Marcel Duchamp and the Possibilities of Dialogical Personalism

Joseph Kosuth, one of Concept Art’s influential practitioners, credited Marcel Duchamp in an important 1969 essay, “Art After Philosophy”, with instigating the shift from the visual to the conceptual by means of indifference and dematerialization. Duchamp’s approach to art was not limited, however, to the realm of artistic intention but also included the (re)contextualization provoked by his readymades. This (re)contextualization elucidated the embodied, dialogical encounters of the artist-artwork-audience, what I identify as an “aesthetics of difference”. This designation sets forth a framework of meaning that draws upon a burgeoning subset of early-twentieth-century personalist philosophy called dialogical personalism in order to offer a more suitable plausibility structure than the usual explanations of Duchamp and his approach to art, which typically revolve around nihilism, absurdity, and a solipsistic understanding of freedom. In doing so, Duchamp’s artistic approach retains not only a more viable ontology for continuing to question the nature of art, but also has important epistemological and ethical implications.

HISTORY OF THE USE OF WASTE MATERIALS IN VISUAL ARTS: CONCEPT AND ROOTS

Today the whole world is struggling with the problem of waste materials and their proper maintenance. Examples of the use of waste material are also found in art. An artist always needs a medium to create their artwork, and also, in contemporary art, many artists are creating artwork from waste materials and beautify their environment and make people aware of its reuse. The process of making artwork from waste material is today known as ‘Scrap Art’ or ‘Junk Art’. An early example of the use of waste materials in art comes from the ‘Dadaism’ Art Movement, which started in France in the 20th century, when artists started exhibiting industrially produced objects as artwork, along with their titles. From here, a question mark was raised regarding the idea of ‘Readymade Art’ and its aesthetics. Behind this was the main artist ‘Marcel Duchamp’ whose work 'Fountain' in 1917. The other two major Artists were Man Ray and Francis Picabia. The second developed form was seen in Picasso's 'Bull Head' artwork in 1942, where Words like ‘Found objects’ and ‘Ready-mades’ became popular in the history of art. Many artists in contemporary art are creating artworks using these waste materials. This is not only enhancing the beauty of our public places but also making people aware of their reuse and also showing a new dimension of art creation. This research paper analyses what new changes have taken place in terms of style and thought due to the use of waste material in art from the beginning till today.

Bimodule coefficients, Riesz transforms on Coxeter groups and strong solidity

In deformation-rigidity theory, it is often important to know whether certain bimodules are weakly contained in the coarse bimodule. Consider a bimodule H over the group algebra \mathbb{C}[\Gamma] with \Gamma a discrete group. The starting point of this paper is that if a dense set of the so-called coefficients of H is contained in the Schatten \mathcal{S}_{p} class p \in [2, \infty) , then the n -fold tensor power H^{\otimes n}_{\Gamma} for n \geq \frac{p}{2} is quasi-contained in the coarse bimodule. We apply this to gradient bimodules associated with the carré du champ of a symmetric quantum Markov semi-group. For Coxeter groups, we give a number of characterizations of having coefficients in \mathcal{S}_{p} for the gradient bimodule constructed from the word length function. We get equivalence of: (1) the gradient- \mathcal{S}_{p} property introduced by the second named author, (2) smallness at infinity of a natural compactification of the Coxeter group, and for a large class of Coxeter groups, (3) walks in the Coxeter diagram called parity paths. We derive several strong solidity results. In particular, we extend current strong solidity results for right-angled Hecke von Neumann algebras beyond right-angled Coxeter groups that are small at infinity. Our general methods also yield a concise proof of a result by Sinclair for discrete groups admitting a proper cocycle into a p -integrable representation.

Mocking the Canon: Irony, Subversion, and Play in Iconoclastic Portraiture

This qualitative research paper examines how iconoclastic artists use techniques of irony, subversion, and play to undermine the conventions of traditional portraiture. Canonical portraiture aims to convey status and power through dignified representation. Iconoclastic portraiture rebels against this pretense through incongruous, caricatured, and role-reversed depictions designed to mock canonical norms. The paper analyzes selected artworks by Marcel Duchamp, Cindy Sherman, Yue Minjun, and others that exemplify iconoclastic approaches. Visual analysis reveals how incongruity introduces discordant elements to undercut meaning, caricature exaggerates features comically, and role reversal portrays subjects in undignified ways that contravene tradition. The paper interprets these techniques through the lens of postmodern theories of parody, carnivalesque inversion, and deconstruction. Findings demonstrate that by ironically mocking canonical conventions, iconoclastic portraiture destabilizes traditional hierarchies and reimagines portraiture as a critical, subversive art form. The research advances understanding of how iconoclastic artists deploy irony and play to contest establishment orthodoxies. This study elucidates iconoclastic portraiture’s aims and significances as a challenge to the canon’s pretensions and demonstrates humor and subversion as profound artistic strategies.

Hybridity and the Unifying Space of Painting: Larry Abramson in Conversation with Theolonius Marx

Abstract While the drive toward homogeneous and pure visual languages was at the foundation of early twentieth-century utopian modernist art systems, the Dadaist and Surrealist reaction to this utopianism took the form of extreme and often violent hybridity. Marcel Duchamp's 1913 “readymade” of a bicycle wheel placed atop a kitchen stool is a paradigmatic manifestation of the linguistic hybridity characteristic of post-utopian twentieth-century art. In the 1920s Francis Picabia made paintings constructed of separate and discrete layers of images, which, when viewed together, produced an unsettling visual “monster.” Picabia's practice of superimposition was a significant forerunner of prevailing contemporary practices in postmodern painting. In his essay “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” philosopher Fredric Jameson (1991) identifies pastiche as one of the main characteristics of cultural production in the age of postmodernism. Pastiche is defined as a work of art consisting of motifs borrowed from one or more sources, an incongruous hodgepodge of materials, forms, and images. In this age of pastiche, what are the options open to artists—to endlessly quote, imitate, or parody existing images and styles, or to construct a new and significant system of meaning? To discuss the centrality of the principle of hybridity in postmodern art—and in my own artistic practice of the past fifty years—I summoned Theolonius Marx, a fiction of my imagination who helped me handle the dilemmas of conceptual art in the 1970s. In this “conversation,” Theolonius and I ponder how hybridity has placed a challenge to utopian modernist concepts, and what the conditions are for it to thrive today as a relevant and sustainable medium.

Logarithmic Sobolev and interpolation inequalities on the sphere: Constructive stability results

We consider Gagliardo–Nirenberg inequalities on the sphere which interpolate between the Poincaré inequality and the Sobolev inequality, and include the logarithmic Sobolev inequality as a special case. We establish explicit stability results in the subcritical regime using spectral decomposition techniques, and entropy and carré du champ methods applied to nonlinear diffusion flows.

24 February 2022 - for a Geocinematic Use of Found Images

Underlying the idea of precarity and the moving image, this paper describes the and theorizes about the original artwork 24TH FEBRUARY 2022 as a video-installation interconnected with the concepts of precarity in production, circulation, and participation in media culture today, this art-based research artwork tries to underpin the very nature of found material as a gateway from the public to the private, commenting on the spectacle of mass media images and also the production of “anarchival” gestures through which its possible to research a specific historic event. Included in a research project entitled FrameScapes that the authors are undergoing at this time, this research outcome relates to the war that Russia brought again to the gates of Europe when it invaded the Ukrainian territory, and also to the conflict in real-time - live action we could call it - in a way we haven’t seen since Desert Storm back in 1991. A continuous feed of videos and photographs in an era of multi-screen distraction and tiktokian dystopias, artists and creatives have the upper hand in constructing from scratch, just like the cubists would glue together a piece of old newspaper and a matchbox to paint a still-life. The precarious nature of found material to make art is present since the first vanguard movements, from Picasso to Duchamp. Through the arts, we’ve been always confronted with gestures of appropriation, quotation, found-footage, archival art, collage or the ready-made, all of these related to meager images. From Marcel Duchamp to Kurt Schwitters, from Douglas Gordon to Christian Marclay, artists have always looked into the metaphor of the precarious as a recontextualization and remediation of image and sound. The artwork 24TH FEBRUARY 2022 is an exploratory artwork about the world-as-camera-screen, responding critically and creatively to different structures of the social, economic and political contexts in today’s art research practice that deals with found materials. The phenomenon of a tele-visual structure presupposes different atopic tele-communities, built under the aegis of tele-presence and tele-objectivity – a dissolution of real space, that embraces geocinematics as a strong narrative contemporary structure, constructed with and bound by precarious images – images that are consistent with a tangible structure of the Real.

Points of Balance and the Infra-thin in Éliane Radigue’s Endless Music

ABSTRACT This paper examines Éliane Radigue’s ‘musique sans fin’ (endless music) of 1968–1970. The period marks her development of acoustic feedback techniques for free-duration performance, where two or more tape loops are set into asynchronous, continuous mechanical playback. Drawing on interview material with Radigue, critical analysis of her ‘endless music’ works and my own study of audio feedback to identify technical details of her studio practice, I argue the importance of this short, relatively under-researched, but formative period of her composition. In the creative, musical use of acoustic, or ‘Larsen’ feedback, musicians control sounds that resonate in the space between a microphone and a loudspeaker under certain acoustic conditions and there is a thin point of balance between pure feedback tones and distortion. A similar fine balancing point is the basis of Marcel Duchamp’s concept of the ‘infra-thin’ which refers to an almost imperceptible gap between two fluid states or experiences during the creation of a work of art. I have chosen to employ elements of Duchamp’s ‘infra-thin’ to guide my analysis of Radigue’s feedback techniques which are similarly based on an atomic, transformational fluctuation between different sonic conditions.

Found Objects as Art: Influence of Marcel Duchamp on Contemporary Pakistani Art

Found Objects as Art: Influence of Marcel Duchamp on Contemporary Pakistani Art

Constructive constraints: On the role of chance and complexity in artistic creativity

Creativity is sometimes understood as the individual, mental creation of novelty which is then imposed as form onto a material substrate. On this view, constraints would feature only as obstacles in the creative process. In contrast, we support the view that creativity emerges from the interactions between human agents and the material, cultural, and social constraints that comprise a particular situation. In this account, constraints play a key enabling role, scaffolding the space of possibilities in which improvisation and chance give rise to novelty. In this paper, we review experimental work on interpersonal synergies between jazz pianists, which provides a scientific framework from which to approach the complex relationship between chance, constraints, and creativity. We also explore two case studies from the science of complexity and the creative arts in order to substantiate this notion of creative constraints: Anthony Braxton’s musical innovation at the intersection between composition and improvisation, and Marcel Duchamp’s radical interventions in the fields of sculpture and conceptual art.

Rigidity results for the p‐Laplace type equations on compact Riemannian manifolds

In this paper, we obtain two rigidity results for ‐Laplace type equation and ‐Laplace equation with exponential nonlinearity on ‐dimensional compact Riemannian manifolds by using of nonlinear flow and the carré du champ methods, respectively, where rigidity means that the PDE has only constant solution when a parameter is in a certain range. Moreover, an interpolation inequality is derived as an application.

Marcel Duchamp’s ‘The Creative Act’

ABSTRACT An exegetical hermeneutical commentary on Marcel Duchamp’s essay ‘The Creative Act,’ where Duchamp summarized his views on the nature of the creative process, the ‘work’ of art, and the roles played by artists, art participants, and posterity.

Things In Themselves: The X‐Ray and Its Embodied Space

AbstractAt the dawn of the 20th century, the development of the X‐ray and new‐found visions of the interior of bodies inspired artists including Marcel Duchamp. Visual artist and architect Paul O Robinson explores these ‘bones and organs’ within contemporary contexts, artistically exploiting the shadowy, invisible world of interiority, visible exterior form and the uncanny correspondence between them through transformative spatial and material manifestations.

Diaphorology: from the Inventory of Shimmering(s) to New Didactics

Diaphorology, coined by Roland Barthes in relation to his concept of Neutral, remains uncommented upon and insufficiently explained. It is worth noting that this word not only describes but problematizes his pedagogical project. This article defends the thesis that there are multiple points of exchange between the notion of “diaphora” and diaphorology. The didactic role of both is, on the one hand, to de-hierarchize, declassify, and deindividualize differences, showing that dividing an object’s features or the recipient’s abilities is an unproductive theoretical and pedagogical approach. On the other hand, diaphorology has an explicit self-critical impulse, i.e., it brings both itself and the object of research.What Barthes presented is interwoven with other theoretical constructs: the notion of “diaphora,” appropriated from literary and linguistic studies (with the theory of metaphor being the most obvious field of origin), the diaphorological method (as well as a certain motivation or a kind of research intention incorporated in such an approach), and diaphorology itself, but in more extended context. It is important to note that these constructs do not undermine each other but rather form an almost coherent field of knowledge. The didactic power of diaphorology as a science of “small differences” and nuances also becomes a kind of invitation to resist discourses of intimidation, subordination, domination, self-assertion, and arrogance.Other issues considered include whether it is worthwhile to search for one “pure” diaphora and whether the artistic research practice can serve as a non-theoretical alternative to Barthes’ approach. In this particular study, the work by Marcel Duchamp is provided as an example.At last, by drawing on Barthes’s theory, the study aims to re-examine the significance of a light effect, such as shimmering, in conveying a certain didactic and ethical attitude of the researcher.

Creative rotation in conceptual art: Marcel Duchamp is a composer, John Cage is an artist.

The subject of this study is the intersection points of music and visual art, demonstrated by the example of the creative interaction of conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp and composer John Cage. The possibility of reformatting creativity from the visual to the sound field is considered as a role rotation, within which Duchamp appears as a composer, and Cage as an artist. An attempt has been made to explain the motivation for such a choice. What is the meaning of this, and what do people mean when they choose this or that image for themselves, and create this or that image for themselves. How important it is to change the artistic image and creative image for the master. The research methodology consists in a comparative analysis of these concepts using already known works on this topic and the author's personal observations. In conceptualism, an idea is valued above the process of its materialization in a work of art, and therefore, the technique of execution is not a decisive factor. In such a creative paradigm, the artist's tools themselves become not so essential, which can be paints, a brush or other means of visual representation of the concept, as well as sheet music or a graphic score. The means of artistic expression – sounds or visual elements – also turn out to be equivalent. They all focus around the concept – the dominant point of any kind of creativity. This conclusion becomes the key to the research conducted in this article.

Between the Retina and the Celestial Dome: Challenging the scaffolding of spatial imagination

Taking as a starting point French artist Marcel Duchamp’s preoccupation with a poetic portrayal of stereoscopic vision and the red and blue expansion of depth in the technique of the anaglyph, Between the Retina and the Celestial Dome playfully challenges the disciplinary constraints and conventions of spatial thinking. The text takes the form of shorter or lengthier annotations on a twin ‘essayist drawing’ that exists in two versions: a hand-drawn gilding on parchment and a digital film. It proposes that our understanding of visual perception in combination with the perceived immediate environment and its expansion in the cosmos creates an underlying matrix that shapes our scientific and philosophical thinking and projects itself onto built form: an intellectual ‘scaffolding’ on which spatial thought is erected. This scaffolding is not one or constant, but shape-shifts historically, geographically and sociopolitically, affecting not only how we see but also how we conceive, design and construct spatial structures. Since the invention of perspective during the Renaissance, orthographic projection became a potent and often unquestioned scaffolding for architectural thought and representation. Between the Retina and the Celestial Dome uses the drawing’s playful character, which does not follow the rules of normative architectural representation, to question the forgotten, implicit or taken-for-granted aspects of orthographic projection: the curvilinear image created on each retina; stereopsis, how depth is formed by the combination of images on two eyes; and the existence of the flat picture plane. In search of an alternative scaffolding of architectural representation, the collection of drawn figures on the parchment and the digital film refers to the physiology of vision and stereoscopy; the picturing of the celestial dome in religion and popular astronomy; and specific instances of domed structures in architectural history.

Everyday Life vs Art: Effects of Framing on the Mode of Object Interpretation

Everyday objects have often been used in contemporary art since Marcel Duchamp introduced the concept of the ready-made. However, it is not clear how everyday objects are perceived in art contexts in comparison to everyday contexts. We investigated how individuals interpret pairings of images of everyday objects as artworks and as objects in everyday life. In Study 1, we found that participants evaluated pairings of unrelated images of objects as fitting together more under the art condition compared to the everyday condition. In Study 2, using the thought-listing technique, we found that participants ascribed symbolic meanings to everyday objects more often under the art condition. In Study 3, we found that associating unrelated images of objects under the art condition primes cognitive access to symbolic meanings of visual scenes. Overall, the studies show that everyday objects are interpreted differently in an art context as compared to an everyday context.