Ready-made Objects Research Articles

Somewhere beyond hyper-reality

According to Baudrillard who states that the introduction of ready-made objects to art that started with Duchamp andcontinued with Andy Warhol, the result of the summation of reality and art is nothing from this point on. The reason is thatall the scientific, philosophical and socio-economic fields have been experienced, explored or defined, thanks to Modernity.According to Baudrillard, the reality has changed and turned into a reality simulation, namely a hologram. It is thistransformation that made Baudrillard say ‘God is not dead, he has become hyper-real’ in response to Nietzsche’s ‘God isdead’ discourse. Kevin Robins, who states that the deference of the object by image, the rejection of the object is apostmodern discourse, suggests that this expresses a meaningful disengagement from modernist aesthetics, whichcorresponds to the age of mechanical production.Keywords: Digitalisation, reality, hyper-reality, image, hologram, post-1990s.

Remediation and hypermediacy: Ezekiel’s World as a case in point

This article deals with Kovner’s graphic narrative Ezekiel’s World (2015) as a case of remediation and hypermediacy. The term ‘remediation’ refers to adaptations which involve the transformation of the original work into another medium. While some adaptations strive to eliminate the marks of the previous medium, others highlight the interplay between different media, resulting in ‘hypermediacy’. The latter approach characterizes Ezekiel’s World due to its unique blend of artistic materials adapted from different media. The author, Michael Kovner, uses his paintings to depict the story of Ezekiel – an imaginary figure based on his father, the poet Abba Kovner who was one of the leaders of the Jewish resistance movement during World War II. While employing the conventions of comics and graphic narratives, the author also makes use of readymade objects such as maps and photos, simulates the works of famous artists and quotes Abba Kovner’s poems. These are indirect ways of confronting the traumas of Holocaust survivors and ‘the second generation’. Dealing with the Holocaust in comics and graphic narratives (as in Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, 1986) is no longer an innovation, nor is their use as a means to deal with trauma; what makes this graphic narrative unique is the encounter between the works of the poet and the painter, which combine to create an exceptionally complex work integrating poetry, art and graphic narration.

Slapstick homes: architecture in Slapstick Cinema and the Avant-Garde

Slapstick film comedies of the 1910s and 1920s are marked by a highly ‘mechanical’ use of space as indicated by its fascination for the skyscraper. First and foremost, slapstick’s interest in architecture focuses on the house. Ridiculing bourgeois respectability, slapstick chuckled at the destruction of the bourgeois home—Laurel & Hardy in particular mastered this practice. In addition, slapstick celebrates the house as a mechanical object. In films by Charley Chase, for instance, the interior is presented as a precision mechanical apparatus for a perfectly timed choreography of characters chasing each other. Moreover, with their foldaway beds and electric utensils and gadgets, slapstick films present the home as a machine à habiter, which also fascinated avant-garde architects and designers.By focussing on slapstick’s encounter with architecture, this article also addresses the relationship between slapstick cinema and the European avant-garde. While Dadaist, Surrealist and Constructivist artists as well as leading modernist architects such as Le Corbusier, Hannes Meyer and Karel Teige applauded American slapstick as the embodiment of mechanisation, slapstick’s interest in skyscrapers and mechanised houses also shows unmistakably Dadaist and Surrealist sensibilities, particularly in its fascination for the conflation of bodies and machines, animated ready-made objects and obstinate interest in bathroom fittings. Celebrating both mechanisation and slapstick cinema, European avant-garde artists and modernist architects contributed to the cult of Americanism.

The Many Lives of Chief Kisco

This paper deconstructs the folklore surrounding an early twentieth-century zinc figure of an American Indian that stands in the center of the village of Mount Kisco, New York. The identity that “Chief Kisco” has assumed over the past hundred years elides the nature of the origins of the statue, which was intended not as a statement of communal identity, but rather as the exact opposite. As a ready-made art object, the statue was emblematic of a new network of commodified goods that transformed the cultural geography of the United States; as it was utilized in Mount Kisco, the statue was a piece of temperance propaganda with strong nativist undertones that tapped directly into the class, religious, and ethnic divisions running through the turn-of-the-century village.

La influencia de los objetos cotidianos en el acondicionamiento interior: Loos y Le Corbusier, 'Profesores de Vivienda'

In the early 20th century, a new phenomenon arrived in domestic architecture: the need for interior design with ready-made objects that were often heterogeneous. This revolution weakened the ideas of Gesamtkunstwerk ( the Work of Total Art) and architects as Formmeister ( Form Master). Yet some architects such as Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier realized and accepted the change of the paradigm. According to Loos’ claims, residents had to organize the interior space by themselves. Instead, Loos assumed architects started to have a new role, which was Wohnungslehrer ( Housing Teacher). In this context of architect’s new task, Le Corbusier also tried to lead people to make the choice of functional objects and the modern “ art of inhabitation” by using the publication of writings as well as architectural work.

AUTO‐MATICITY: RUSCHA AND PERFORMATIVE PHOTOGRAPHY

Ed Ruscha's ground‐breaking 1963 book, Twentysix Gasoline Stations, consists of a series of photographs of gas stations along Route 66. Ruscha explained in an interview that he liked the word ‘gasoline’ and the random specificity of number 26. This paper argues that the title, formulated in advance, provided the nub of an instruction. Ruscha set himself a simple brief and understood the photographs as records of large‐scale readymades. Depersonalization or ‘auto‐maticity’ pervades the work in terms of the pre‐set project, the readymade object, the car and the uninflected snapshots. Jeff Wall's positioning the work of Ruscha and other artists of the period in relation to ‘non‐autonomous’, photojournalistic or amateur photography does nothing to capture this deliberately affectless, depersonalized use of the camera. The books are better understood if related to a certain reception of Marcel Duchamp in the United States which might be called the instructional and performative Duchamp, exemplified most clearly in his 3 Standard Stoppages.

Compositional programming: theory and practice

Methods, means, and tools of compositional programming are considered. The fundamentals of composition of multilanguages objects in fourth-generation languages in the OS/ES environment are considered. New approaches to the formal declaration and standardization of data types in modern languages and practical aspects of systematization of ready-made objects with a view to reusing them in composing large systems in modern environments are shown. New ideas and approaches to the support of interaction between multilanguages objects in the environment of a family of application systems are described.

Is presence a technology issue? Some insights from cognitive sciences

The International Society of Presence Research, defines “presence” (a shortened version of the term “telepresence”) as a “psychological state in which even though part or all of an individual’s current experience is generated by and/or filtered through human-made technology, part or all of the individual’s perception fails to accurately acknowledge the role of the technology in the experience” (ISPR 2000, The concept of presence: explication statement. http://ispr.info/ Accessed 15 Jan 2009). In this article, we will draw on the recent outcomes of cognitive sciences to offer a broader definition of presence, not related to technology only. Specifically, presence is described here as a core neuropsychological phenomenon whose goal is to produce a sense of agency and control: subjects are “present” if they are able to enact in an external world their intentions. This framework suggests that any environment, virtual or real, does not provide undifferentiated information, ready-made objects equal for everyone. It offers different opportunities and produces presence according to its ability in supporting the users and their intentions. The possible consequences of this approach for the development of presence-inducing virtual environments are also discussed.

On the linguistic expression of subjectivity: Towards a sign-centered approach

The various assumptions on which linguistic elements, structures, or usages are subjective in which respect seem to agree in relating subjectivity to a speaking subject. In the communication process, this speaking subject is usually ascribed the agentive role, language is thought of as ready-made object, and the hearer remains a rather passive recipient. However, conceptions of subjectivity relying on these assumptions are circular (in referring to a speaking subject) and tautological (every choice of linguistic entities reflects a speaker's choice).

Readymade, Found Object, Photograph

The 1936 Surrealist Exhibition of Objects brought together a bewildering range of items including natural objects, interpreted natural objects, incorporated natural objects, found objects, perturbed objects, readymade objects, American objects, Oceanic objects, mathematical objects, and Surrealist objects. Of the nonethnographic types listed, only the readymade and the found object still retain any currency, and the readymade can no longer be subsumed under the Surrealist umbrella. Marcel Duchamp's readymade and André Breton's found object have such different legacies that they now arguably constitute a categorical distinction. This was not so clear in the mid- 1930s when Breton could define readymades as “manufactured objects raised to the dignity of works of art through the choice of the artist.”2 Yet, even now, the terms are still often run together and used interchangeably. What I want to do in this paper is to drive a wedge between them. We will find that their distinctiveness hinges on the kind of subjective relation each assumes. They turn out to embody different aspects of the most influential account of what might be called the subjective dimension of our relation to art—Immanuel Kant's conception of the aesthetic.

Endquote: Sots-Art Literature and Soviet Grand Style by Marina s> Balina Nancy Condee , Evgeny Dobrenko (review)

REVIEWS 335 diasporic literature was being produced freely beyond the ethnic borders of the homeland, thus creating a dvokoliinyi protses ('two railsprocess').Ukrainian literature, therefore, possesses its own thematic and ideological dimensions. Drawing on a vast range of bibliographical sources, Lanovyk contributes an erudite and comprehensive study, covering in three chapters Tarnawsky's biography,poetry and prose. In spite of their delayed publication in Ukraine, these two volumes deserve the attention of Slavists,particularlythose dealing with Ukrainian studiesand literatureas well as comparativestudiesand diasporicliterature. Department ofModern Languages andCultural Studies M. I. SOROKA University ofAlberta Balina, Marina; Condee, Nancy, and Dobrenko, Evgeny (eds).Endquote. SotsArt Literature and SovietGrandStyle.Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 2000. XX+ 241 pp. Notes. Bibliographicalreferences.Illustrations.$24.95. SOTS-ART, lucidly described in Nancy Condee's Introduction, 'Sots-Art, Conceptualism, and Russian Postmodernism',as 'the mock use of the Soviet ideological cliches of mass culture' (p. vii), undoubtedly had 'a profound influence on contemporary Russian literature,figuringboth as distinct texts and as a range of citational devices within larger,more diverseworks'(p. vii). Also true, however, is that 'thisvolume offerslittle agreementon the historical or aesthetic boundaries of sots-art'(p. viii). This is, indeed, a strikingfeature of the variousarticles'approaches. The book is divided into three parts:'Sots-Art:Between Socialist Realism and Postmodernism';'Sots-Art and Poetry';and 'Sots-Artand Prose'. In the first, four articles tackle general aspects of sots-art: Mikhail Epstein's 'Postmodernism,Communism and Sots-Art'fallsinto twoparts,'Postmodernism and Communism' and 'Socialist Realism and Sots-Art'; in the first he offers a series of postmodern parametersof communism which, he considers could be describedas the communist elements of postmodernism,such as, for instance, the creation of hyperreality, determinism and reductionism, and ideological eclecticism. This strategylinked to the author's characteristically lucid style makes this a valuable contribution to our understanding of a complex phenomenon. Boris Groys's 'Text as a Ready-Made Object' is mainly concerned with Moscow conceptualism. Less illuminating, to the present reviewer at least, is Viktor Lettsev's 'The Reading, Understanding, and Discursive Genres of Conceptualism'which stressesthe reader'selement of choice in conceptualist texts. Finally, in the first section, Marina Balina's 'PlayingAbsolute Time: Chronotypes of Sots-Art'discussesmainly accelerating absolute time (Prigov)and the retardationof absolute time (Rubinshtein, Kibirov, Pelevin). Some of the writersdiscussedin Balina are also featuredin the four articles of PartTwo, 'Sots-Artand Poetry'.In the first,Evgeny Dobrenko, under the title 'Socialist Realism, a Postscriptum: Dmitrii Prigov and the Aesthetic Limits of Sots-Art', gives a well grounded assessment of Prigov as a 'classic' 336 SEER, 8o, 2, 2002 writer,no longerpartof the currentartisticprocess,who continues to produce texts at a phenomenal rate. GeraldJanecek writes interestinglyon the early conceptualism of Lev Rubinshtein's Programmes of Works. Another writerwho may be a classic outside the current mainstream is the subject of Gregory Freidin's'Transfigurationsof Kitsch Timur Kibirov's Sentiments, which he regardsas a farewellelegy for Soviet civilization.The lastarticlein thissection is Vitaly Chernetsky's'losif Vissarionovich Pushkin,or Sots-Artand the New Russian Poetry'. Here, as elsewhere in the volume, the abundant verse quotationslose considerablyin translation. Part Three, 'Sots-Art and Prose' begins with Mark Lipovetsky'salready familiar 'Vladimir Sorokin's "Theatre of Cruelty"', which begins with an attack on the views of other critics, including the use of the term postmodernism for sots-art by such 'postmodernist "gurus" as Boris Groys, Mikhail Epstein and Aleksandr Genis' (p. I67), noting that 'sots-artists themselves prefer to be regarded as conceptualists' (p. I67). Marina Kanevskayaanalysesa centralworkby a well-knowncomic writerin "'The Diary of a Writerfrom Teplyi Stan": TheBeautifulness ofLifeby Evgenii Popov'. Larisa Rudova offersa thoroughreadingof SashaSokolov'smostrecent (last?)novel, 'Reading Palisandria:Of Menippean Satire and Sots-Art', although this reviewer's name is misspelt on p. 21 I. The final article, by Gerald McCausland , 'Viktor Pelevin and the End of Sots-Art' is rather discursive and unfocused. Pelevin himself might well take it equitably, but a spurious bilingualtitle in the article, Chapaev andPustota, reflectsa more generallaxity. Forthe most part, however, thisis an enterprising,stimulatingand thought provoking book, particularly in its first two-thirds. In places it breaks new critical ground...

Quotation and iconoclasm in the work of Juan Dávila

In a celebrated 1968 essay titled ‘The Death of the Author’, Roland Barthes defined identity as ‘a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centres’.1 Although Barthes was referring primarily to the intertextual construction of discursive meaning, this whimsical, poetic metaphor suggests that we make the text of our lives through constant processes of appropriation. A sense of these processes is nowhere more apparent than in the work of Chilean-Australian artist Juan Dávila. In landscape paintings, murals. wall-hangings and ready-made objects produced since moving from Chile to Melbourne in 1974. Dávila offers a Pop art vision of metropolitan chaos cluttered with a complex network of visual codes and transcultural signifiers. Using television and newspaper images, comics, art history, literary references and pornography from three continents, Dávila's quotes range from Madonna to Matta-Echaurren.

Three Conversations in 1985: Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Robert Morris

Buchloh: Did you know Duchamp? Did you have any exchange with him at all? Oldenburg: I had some interesting encounters with him, but not long talks or anything. In Pasadena, in 1963, was really the first time I saw the work, I mean really saw the work, except for rumors, and it was a very exciting show. Then he made himself available after the show to talk to people and sign things and so on. And he used to come, before that, to performances. Buchloh: Yes, he does actually mention this, that he sometimes went to Happenings. Oldenburg: He came to at least three performances that I had done. I remember one performance in 1965 which took place in a movie theater where the performance was in the seats and the audience had to stand. Duchamp asked if he could sit down because he was too tired to stand, so he became the only person in the audience sitting in the performance. Another performance, in 1962 in The Store, ended with performers in burlap bags, crawling out of the bags, expiring at the feet of the audience. Buchloh: That was one of your performances? Oldenburg: Yes. I found that I was expiring at his feet. So there were contacts, but never anything more than a cordial hello if I met him at a party, and so forth. I never played chess with him. Buchloh: Also, if, as you say, in the early sixties the major points of departure in your own work were already clearly defined ... Oldenburg: Yes, he was a historical figure. Buchloh: What about iconography? That is obviously an art-historical problem; you are, as I see it, the first sculptor after Duchamp who uses a kind of iconography that is completely alien to all preceding sculpture, which is the industrially produced, ready-made object. Oldenburg: Well, I saw some of Duchamp's work at Yale when I was an undergradu-

Michael Asher and the Transformation of "Situational Aesthetics"

While questioning such received notions the organic unity, autonomy, and purity of the modernist work of art, the Duchampian paradigm-inserting a readymade object within an art context-exposed the legitimizing function of the institution, its crucial role in the definition of what should be considered art. At the same time, it also revealed its own discursive limitations, since the significance of the readymade was entirely dependent upon the institution a context. This may explain why, in the late sixties, Daniel Buren was attacking the Duchampian strategy, directing his critique toward the institution itself through the introduction in situ of a visual tool, constant in terms of its structurel--making no authorial claims regarding its inner relations-but site-specifically variable in terms of spatial extension, configuration, and modes of application, and thereby able to produce specific meanings in each situation according to the particular contextual (architectural) relations. This kind of strategy, however, eventually lost its edge, the constant became a signature and its various uses just so many means toward the conquest of space. Meant to bypass such a double bind, Michael Asher's situational aesthetics excludes any inserted authorial/personal traces whatsoever, defining itself as an aesthetic system that juxtaposes predetermined elements occurring within the institutional framework, that are recognizable and identifiable to the public because they are drawn from the institutional context itself.2

Bakhtin, Genres, and Temporality

patterns. In Bakhtin's terms, the great systems imagine the world entirely in terms of what is given and thus leave no room for what is created. The result is that nothing is surprising because everything is ready-made: An object is ready-made, the linguistic means for its depiction are ready-made, the artist himself is ready-made, and his world view is ready-made. And here with ready-made means, in light of a ready-made world view, the ready-made poet reflects a ready-made object. But in fact the object is created in the process of creativity, as are the poet himself, his world view, and his means of expression.2 A fundamental impulse of Bakhtin's thought was to formulate an alternative to such reductionism. Properly conducted, humanistic disciplines describe a world in which events are irre- ducibly particular, individuals are partially free, and time is con- sequently open. It is therefore especially ironic that Bakhtin's American admirers should have consistently presented him as an adherent of one or another great system of explanation. Despite his frequent attacks on structuralism and semiotics, Jakobsonians initially claimed him for both; as deconstruction gained adherents, a poststructuralist Bakhtin emerged; and despite his unremitting attacks on Marxism, Bakhtin has been repeatedly treated as an adherent of that ideology.