Creative Destruction

( Or: Three Failures in Search of Resolution )


I.

It was conceived as a sort of ballet mécanique. Wheels set into motion by a complex network of pulleys; a robotic automatic painting device churning out random patterns of pigment; a flaming upright piano automated from without -- its keys being unharmonically hammered by an array of pistons; a go-cart racing madly in place; an inflating weather balloon; a bathtub filled with a smoking chemical concoction; a fire extinguisher discharging aimlessly; numerous bells and klaxons. Flames, smoke, intricate engineering amounting to nonce spasmodics, eventually collapsing in on itself. Perhaps the flames provided warmth on a cold New York evening, provoking a few of the huddled spectators to lean in closer that they should, risking endangerment. Did the museum have the foresight to take out a liability policy in advance, or have attendees sign a waiver on admittance? Not likely.

The ballet at hand being Jean Tinguely’s “Homage to New York” as it was presented to the public for its "performance" in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art on a winter evening in early March, 1960. Assembled from a load of rubbish carted in from a garbage dump in neighboring Newark. Tinguely enlisted the help of Swedish-born engineer Billy Klüver during construction, with Robert Rauschenberg contributing a "money-throwing machine" to the works. Its operational lifespan lasted – by some accounts -- less than a half-hour before it began to fall apart, catch fire, and the New York Fire Department intervened on the side of the public behalf, with some of the audience boo-ing them for ruining the event by performing their civic-minded service.

Even though it was a machine designed to serve a function, a function that was effectively dysfunctional, it failed. Portions of the contraption that were supposed to do one thing or another did something else or nothing instead, and needed some interventional nudging on the part of the artist. It was devised to be a catastrophe -- involving equal parts contrivance and chaos -- and once it was set in motion, the catastrophic inevitably ensued. Clanking and grinding, smoke and flames. And in the end, debris. Wreckage and scattered parts to be picked apart and taken home by the witnesses, with the most desirable remnants being claimed by the Museum itself. From junk to salvage, twice over. Three weeks’ worth of parts and labor for something that would undo itself within a short span of a late evening.

The Unshaven Bride (or: Marcel Duchamp vs. the Mona Lisa Overdrive)

The work above probably needs no introduction. Marcel Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q., in which the French Dadaist drew a moustache and goatee on the Mona Lisa, inscribing a cheeky pun beneath the image. As modern art jokes go, it's the most widely known.

The piece is an example of one of Duchamp's "Readymades," or – more specifically – it belongs to a subcategory of same which Duchamp called "rectified" Readymades, on account that they involved some minor addition or alteration on the artist's part. It's also a piece that is usually cited in relation to a couple of general, overarching generalization that are commonly made about Duchamp’s work – survey-level Intro to Art History clichés that are often and endlessly repeated; with each amounting to a problematic oversimplification.

The first of these being: By putting his Readymades on display, Duchamp said that anything could be art. Well, yes and no. He did and he didn't. It was really more of a theoretical question than a flat declaration. More a hypothesis than a prescript, more of an ideal than a charter or project. The second usually come up in relation to the work above, regarding it as an épater–le-bourgeois masterstroke; as a first-order avant-gardist attack on the classical canon, if not on art and notions of beauty in general. This second point also seems a bit inadequate, if only because it reduces the work to a mere act of petty vandalism, or some offhanded prank – effectively making it no different from a bored schoolboy idly defacing illustrations in a history book.

But as far as the Western canon is concerned, it’s an easy and fair enough assumption. Mainly because there’s no reason that the Mona Lisa couldn’t serve as a representative (or in this case, prospective effigy) for the canon, the painting’s iconic status being what it is. For instance, here's the Victorian über-aesthete Walter Pater waxing effusive in his 1873 book The Renaissance, singling the painting out as an exceptional work by Da Vinci:

"Hers is the head upon which all 'the ends of the world are come,' and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there,...

"She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants, and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has molded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands."

For Pater, the painting wasn't so much a portrait of its sitter, but rather an embodiment of the essence of timeless, archetypal femininity. Which may or may not have had something to do with why Duchamp added the sniggering pun of a title beneath the image, commenting on the nature of the woman's (undepicted) badonk.¹


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Despite whatever case Vasari or Walter Pater might've made for it, Da Vinci's Mona Lisa didn't always top the list of the artist's masterpieces, as far as critical and popular consensus was concerned. Sure, it was ranked among the artist's Greatest Hits, but it didn’t hold the same iconic status that it’s held in popular culture over the past century. That degree of notoriety and ubiquity didn't come until 1911, when the painting was stolen from the Louvre.

Whatever the painting's place in the art historical canon at the time, it was still considered the Museum’s most valuable possession. So naturally the theft was a huge scandal, one that immediately called in question the laxity of security at the museum (which itself quickly led to the resignation of the Museum's director). Police posted “MISSING”-styled posters that sported a photographic reproduction of the painting throughout the streets of Paris. The press offered constant updates on investigation, reporting loads of ill-founded speculation about the painting's whereabouts and the possible motives for the theft. French newspapers competed in offering the highest reward for the return of the painting, with one publication going so far as to consult a clairvoyant on the case. Law enforcement agencies the world over eventually took part in the investigation, pursuing an ever-escalating swirl of rumors and bogus leads.

Conspiracy theories made the rounds. Some thought the thief must've been German, others suspected an Italian; but the majority suspected that the heist was done at the bidding of some American tycoon, with financier J. P. Morgan being everyone’s favorite candidate. Still others thought the whole thing a hoax, a distraction staged by authorities to get the public’s collective mind off of the threat of an impending world war.

If the disappearance of the painting had been an orchestrated ruse, then it seems that it must’ve worked. In the months that that followed, the Mona Lisa became an international fixation, if not a household celebrity, a pop-culture sensation. Songs were written about the painting (and about the woman depicted therein), fanciful tales were spun, thousands of likenesses appeared in publication and on commercial products, and many thousands more postcards were printed. The way people talked about the Mona Lisa sometimes, one might’ve thought the incident involved the kidnapping of an actual person rather than the theft of an artwork.

The painting was finally recovered in the autumn of 1913, eighteen months after it vanished, when authorities received a report of someone offering to unload the painting on a art dealer in Florence. This led the to the hotel room of Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian immigrant carpenter who’d been living in Paris for several years, and who had been doing miscellaneous handyman work at the Louvre. There they found the painting, which Peruggia had removed from its frame during the theft, carefully rolled up and tucked away beneath the false bottom of a homemade trunk.

Figure-Ground Relationship

A few peripheral thoughts to crossed my mind while writing that prior post...

Inasmuch as the work of Philip Jeck and Christian Marclay involves specific technology and the products of a particular era, in the end it continues an aesthetic that dates back to the earlier part of the previous century. It can be traced back through a series of artworks made from junk and discarded material -- from Rauschenberg's "combines" to the décollages of Jacques Villeglé -- to a certain aestehetic sensibility that many would peg as distinctly Dadaist in origin.

I'm thinking specifically of Kurt Schwitters' series of Merz collages and assemblages, his paste-ups of detritus gathered from the streets of Hanover in the years after WWI. Tram tickets, old invoices, scraps of newspapers and advert posters, miscellaneous rubbish and bits of smashed or broken furniture -- each element a signifier of the structure and material workings of quotidian modern urban life. Yes, these works connect with Cubist notions of collage as a merging of art (the picture plane, the plasticity of paint, etc.) with items from everyday life, as well as with the Dadaist use of chance, randomness and the arbitrary in the creative process. That they were composed from waste and residuum additionally connotes the exchanges and the political economy that shape that modernity. It's of no small ironic significance that Schwitters' title for this series of work was derived from a random fragment of printed material that he used in an early collage -- Merz, truncated from kommerz (or from Commerzbank, depending on which account you trust).¹

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Dadaist ideas have reemerged repeatedly throughout the past sixty years of art history, most notably making a grand re-emergence with the "Neo-Dada" work of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns in the years immediately following the Second World War. Rauschenberg's "Erased de Kooning Drawing" of 1953 is widely regarded as a consumate Oedipal coup de grâce, the palimpsest for a new generation of emerging artists turning their backs on Abstract Expression -- saying "no thanks" to its romanticism and subjectivity, its agonistic interiority, its swaggering masculinity, etc.

All of which would make a perfect sense if Rauschenberg had bought the de Kooning drawing at auction before trying to destroy it.² But instead he approached Willem de Kooning directly, told of him what he was aiming to do, and more or less asked him to collaborate on or contribute to the project. De Kooning agreed, selecting for the young artist a drawing that he guaranteed would require a lot of work to un-do. Several weeks and dozens of erasers later, Rauschenberg emerged with the finished product -- a sheet of paper on which a few smudges and markings from the original artwork remain faintly visible. But perhaps better to let Bob explain his actions for himself...





Some might describe the concept behind the work as being very "zen," but it was also one that firmly hinged on romantic faith in the nature of the creative act and artistic intent.³

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On the American Breakbeat compilation from back around the turn of this century, the short-lived, laptops-are-the-instruments-for-the-new-folk-music duo of Alejandra & Underwood turned up to supply the outing's most incongruous (and rewarding) track, "Erased Aphex Twin, After Rauschenberg." The track was an as-promised affair -- four minutes and fifty-one seconds of silence, occasionally interrupted by murky, fleeting peek-a-boo granules of melodic IDM. (The source material may've been "Xtal," if memory serves). The random, sporadic fragments of sound become more teasingly frequent as the track progresses, coalescing into something graspable or recognizable in the final few seconds -- just in time for the the original tune's denouement, with the fade-out/wind-down remaining more- or less intact.

In some ways, the track is the opposite of the Rauschenberg's from which it takes it premise. Whether it meant as a pugnacious defacement of a widely-hailed (or perhaps overrated, depending on your point of view) artist of the day, I have my doubts. If anything, it was more of an agnostic response to all the inflated talk in the 1990s about "future music" and the supposed fidelity and permanence of digital media. Files get corrupted, data gets lost, and art -- often fueled by the desire to surprise and intrigue -- can't be so easily prescribed.



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1. This is merely one way to read the work. By some accounts, Schwitters was an aesthete to the core. So much so that his efforts to network with the Berlin Dadaists were spurned early on, with (reputedly) Richard Huelsenbeck later commenting that he couldn't stand the sight of Schwitters' "bourgeois face." For Schwitters, the Merz work was as much about liberating the varied fragments from their original context, thus permitting them to transcend their intended purpose/use-value and operate as purely visual elements.

2. In this respect, I'd argue that the work is one of the most commonly misread works of 20th century art, perhaps only second to Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q..

3. Somewhat similar to Rauschenberg's comments about his own ideas behind "Erased de Kooning": During my undergrad days, I had a painting instructor who -- when discussing the presence of "graffiti"-like elements in work I was doing -- said that he'd sometimes entertained the hypothetical question about whether it was possible for an artists to "vandalize his/her own work." I didn't have the heart to point out to him that such a thing begs all sorts of brambly aesthetic questions about the nature of "authorial intention," but that it was theoretically impossible due to the way that it ultimately involves the issue of property.

Slates, Slags, Etc.

There's nothing so quaint as a manifesto. Artists don't write them like they used to.

And for good reason, because the idea of the manifesto is so very nineteenth-century. All polemics and oppositional decrees, tied inextricably to the notion of an artistic avant-garde. In those days, vanguardist movements usually had pretty comprehensive goals, usually intending to launch some enterprise that would -- in the name of cultural transformation -- encompass a number of disciples, media, or realms of creative activity (art, literature, music, theater, interior design, etc. etc.).

But the practice of issuing manifestos started to taper off about the early-mid twentieth century. Sure, certain groups like the Lettrists and CoBrA and the S.I. went the direction of publishing their own collaborative bulletins or journals. But increasingly, the tradition atomised into individual artist's statement and writings; like those of Ad Reinhardt, or the various explanatory texts produced by artists of the Minimalist or Conceptualist stripe. (With that latter one being it's own separate modus, actually.) Perhaps this unraveling traces back to Bataille and the big schism among the Surrealists; with Bataille dissenting from Breton's self-appointed leadership, and going off on his own to crank out volumes of theoretical writings that left his former colleagues in the dust.

One reason that manifestos fell by the wayside was the inherent theoretic glitch: that they tended to subordinate the arts to some a prior discursive component, if not to an overarching meta-narrative. All of which was to varying degrees rendered obsolete (e.g. quaint) as art developed throughout the twentieth century, as it pursued increasingly fragmented modes of discourse, practice, interrogation -- opting for methods that were less combative, more speculative, tangential and circumscriptive.

At any rate, I bring it up because of this; Terry Eagleton sounding off on the topic in the conext of reviewing the new volume 100 Artists’ Manifestos for the Times online. As a general gloss of the topic, it has its highlights...

"In this cultural revolution, two broad currents can be distinguished. The more positive strain of avant-gardism sought to transform human perceptions in order to adapt them to the new technological age. Avant-gardes tend to take root in societies still in the first flush of modernization, when the oppressive aspects of the new technologies are less obvious than the exhilarating ones. History is now skidding by so fast that the only image of the present is the future. Nothing is more typical of these activists than a mindless celebration of novelty – a brash conviction that an absolutely new epoch is breaking around them, that twentieth-century humanity is on the brink of greater, more rapid change than at any time in the past (they were to be proved right about that), and that everything that happened up to ten minutes ago is ancient history. How one would set about identifying absolute novelty is a logical problem that did not detain them."

...Although there's a lot else that could be said on the matter, but the bit about the "macho" element of it all was a welcome acknowledge. But the whole matter of its machismo ultimately points back to the initial notion of an avant-garde, which was militaristic in origin.

And there's also the argument to be made that the manifesto (in the artistic context, at least) was never much more than a PR release. Which is probably why after a certain point on manifestoes were mostly written for the sake of satirizing the act of writing a manifesto -- mocking the rhetoric and bombast of the whole conceit. As Eagleton points out, this is where the Dadaists enter the picture. Of that lot, I'm a bit partisan to the Berlin division. More specifically, I'm pretty fond of Raoul Hausmann, whose "Return to Objectivity in Art" (ca. 1920-ish) ranks as one of my favorite faux-polemics ever...

"Art is a question of nations. Nationality is the difference between polenta, bouillabaisse, povidla, roast beef, pirogi and dumpling soup. Thus it is important to lend art a national character, in order to exploit these gastronomic subtleties, which could establish a better art than Expressionism, for example, from an international standpoint. Objectively, it is impossible to eat minestrone or bouillabaisse while dabbling in mysticism, or to confuse pirogi with clarity -- all this is a question of the gastronomic climate and therefore the brain, which functions differently in Russia than it does in Italy. [...] A nation like Italy, with its veal, its polenta and its red wine, must always tend towards clarity in worldly situations, whereas the German, by contrast, with his soups and buttered bread and beer, has achieved only that repulsive darkening of things called Expressionism. The first Expressionist, a person who discovered 'inner freedom,' was the gluttonous and drunken Saxon, Martin Luther. It was he, regrettably, who made the German turn toward an inexplicable 'subjectivity,' mendacity, a juggling with imaginary torments, abysses of the 'soul' and its power, as well as a base servility in the face of magical authority. He is the father of Kant, Schopenhauer and the current artistic nonsense that stares through the world and in doing so considers it subdued. His clearest expression, after all, is frankfurters, which only arose, by the way, as a protest against the Jewish view of reality, just as anything German exhibiting the the slightest degree of clarity is manipulated out of protest and not out of any grasp of reality, or of the human condition. [...] Goethe's clouds reappear in an expressionist art of enigma, of gastric disorders. One may counter these abstract airs with Courbet's dictum: 'Paint angels? -- Yes, if you've seen angels,' and rejoice in the prospect of naturalness, of moderation in food and drink that here reveals itself, even though Courbet liked a beer from time to time."

It goes on like that at length. And of course is best understood in the context of Germany after the first World War, with all its escalating nationalism and jingoism, as well as in in the context of Die Neue Sachlichkeit -- with Hausmann taking the piss out of the former while making a case for the latter.