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Francis Picabia's Bobinage (Bobbin, Winding or Coil) is a pencil and ink work produced on gouache-painted paper between 1921–1922. The free-floating forms in this piece appear, at first glance, to be studies in geometric abstraction. Yet, they, and the work's title, make both semiotic and real-world references. The admixture of perspectives is notable, for it retains traces of the Cubist visual language that motivated Picabia and his peers as well as the imagery of the early twentieth-century technical diagrams that, as has been demonstrated by scholars, inspired his work. Examining Coil and other of Picabia's artworks in tandem with the scholarship that has investigated these influences, this article explores the artist's engagement with the very issue of representation. Through this investigation, this paper considers the ways in which Picabia's work alludes to gender in a manner that privileges masculinity yet calls attention to the destabilizing effects of modernity—and modern representations—on notions about gender and, even, what it means to be human. Contextualized thusly, Coil represents not an abstract divergence but rather a continuation of the artist's technical, gender, and, one could say, even cyborg investigations, revealing his engagement with new and innovative ways of perceiving, conceiving, and depicting modern experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Arte, Individuo y Sociedad is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Francis Picabia’s Bobinage (Bobbin, Winding or Coil) is a pencil and ink work produced on gouache-painted paper between 1921–1922. The free-floating forms in this piece appear, at first glance, to be studies in geometric abstraction. Yet, they, and the work’s title, make both semiotic and real-world references. The admixture of perspectives is notable, for it retains traces of the Cubist visual language that motivated Picabia and his peers as well as the imagery of the early twentieth-century technical diagrams that, as has been demonstrated by scholars, inspired his work. Examining Coil and other of Picabia’s artworks in tandem with the scholarship that has investigated these influences, this article explores the artist’s engagement with the very issue of representation. Through this investigation, this paper considers the ways in which Picabia’s work alludes to gender in a manner that privileges masculinity yet calls attention to the destabilizing effects of modernity—and modern representations—on notions about gender and, even, what it means to be human. Contextualized thusly, Coil represents not an abstract divergence but rather a continuation of the artist’s technical, gender, and, one could say, even cyborg investigations, revealing his engagement with new and innovative ways of perceiving, conceiving, and depicting modern experience.

Este artículo trata sobre las metodologías y el proceso creativo de Miguel Berrocal a través del análisis de una de sus esculturas múltiples, concretamente, Il Cofanetto. Homenaje a “Romeo e Giulietta” en la ciudad de Verona (Opus 123), 1969-1975. La hipótesis central de este trabajo relaciona esta obra con la configuración de un pequeño museo portátil autorreferencial análogo al planteamiento de la Boîte en Valise (1942) de Marcel Duchamp. Se trata de una aproximación no explorada hasta el momento, y cuyo análisis se sostiene en el estudio de fuentes primarias y directas. Se han podido analizar dibujos, anotaciones, planos y bocetos inéditos del propio artista, conservados en el centro de documentación de la Fundación Berrocal.

A afinidade entre a atividade artística de Duchamp e o zen-budismo se revela no nexo comum estabelecido com uma dimensão do sentido que, em referência a Kant, pode ser denominada estética. Em ambas as perspectivas, o sentido se agarra com total fidelidade à prática e à experiência mundana. O ready-made duchampiano e o koan zen-budista obtêm destaque na abordagem, ao exibirem com maior nitidez a pertinência da aproximação proposta. Dialogando especialmente com a filosofia de Wittgenstein, o texto expõe e discute a mencionada afinidade.

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Taking as the focus of enquiry the engagements of Félix Guattari with Marcel Duchamp, namely, those rare passages in Schizoanalytic Cartographies and Chaosmosis, the question of the encounter is posed in the field of the sign, but of a sign 'destructured' (as Duchamp du signe), in the sense also that Guattari started by destructuring Lacan (from Psychoanalysis and Transversality to Anti-Oedipus). Introduced by the relationships between Guattari and Foucault to better play in between the early and the late Guattari, Guattari's key insight into the Bottle Rack readymade as an existential function is critically discussed from a reopening to enunciation through the 'Duchamp effect'. If the latter seems to privilege language contrary to Guattari's own semiotics, it is to derail it as a machinic unconscious. Duchamp's writings on his readymades and other machinations are analysed, with the role of Raymond Roussel for Duchamp (and Deleuze-Guattari via Foucault), as well as the implications of a trans-Duchamp, his alter-ego Rrose Sélavy, as an opening to a machinic alterity undoing and queering gender binarity and phallic centricity, recovering the singularity of the bachelor machine and its rupture of subjectivation. The article shows how it could be transversally returned to the very middle of the Guattarian trajectory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Este trabajo explora la presencia del ideal de obra de arte total en la trayectoria de Marcel Duchamp, desde sus creaciones más ambiciosas pasando por la concepción del conjunto de dicha trayectoria como una unidad, para acabar presentando el taller del artista en Nueva York, durante los años 1916-1918, como un verdadero ejemplo de arte de instalación.

“Duchamp y el procedimiento de Roussel (malentendidos hermenéuticos)” versa sobre el papel esencial que los tropos poéticos del lenguaje adoptan en el universo artístico de Marcel Duchamp. Aborda la confluencia de su arte con la literatura de Raymond Roussel, a partir de un análisis sistemático del famoso procedimiento de escritura del escritor francés. Siguiendo una metodología analítico-comparativa estricta, el presente artículo alinea los textos duchampianos con los mecanismos del procedimiento rousseliano apoyándose, a su vez, en las aportaciones históricas de Michel Saounillet (dirigidas a otra de las influencias del artista francés: La Gramática lógica de Jean Pierre Brisset). Se establece en este artículo, en definitiva, una base metodológica sobre la que hacer una revisión de la lectura que ha sido predominante en la crítica de la obra duchampiana: la hermenéutica procedente del movimiento Surrealista. Es decir, el antecedente crítico que emparenta los juegos verbales duchampianos con diferentes tradiciones esotéricas para dotar a su obra de un sentido oculto.

Un des enjeux de la sémiotique des arts plastiques nous semble être, aujourd’hui, de forger des outils lui permettant de se distinguer, dans sa pratique, des approches de l’histoire de l’art, tout en s’en nourrissant et en l’éclairant en retour. Au nombre de ces outils, nous comptons la figure, le geste, le processus, le protocole, le rythme… à condition de reconstruire ces concepts à nouveaux frais dans une optique morphodynamique et ce en vue de mettre au jour le sens à partir de la structure de l’œuvre et non selon une approche descriptive.Dans cette optique, nous nous proposons ici de dégager le rôle de la figure du retournement, successivement dans les œuvres de Rubens, Picasso et Duchamp, en montrant la mutation de son rôle structural par-delà les contextes historiques, les modifications des pratiques et la diversité des médiums.

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In this essay I want to focus on Jean-François Lyotard’s interpretation of Marcel Duchamp’s “The Large Glass” which I confront with Duchamp’s idea of pictorial nominalism. I invoke the main thesis from Lyotard’s important essay “Freud selon Cézanne,” to draw a line between Lyotard’s analysis of artistic experience of space in Cézanne’s work and the topological conceptuality traced by Lyotard in spatial relations within Duchamp’s “The Large Glass.” I want to show that the concept of “transformation” that is introduced in Lyotard’s interpretation of Duchamp’s works, operates within certain spatial analysis which lays the foundations for philosophical analysis in situ, or, as Lyotard writes, “topological politics.” For Lyotard this is the exact context to proceed the meditation of transformational potential hidden within the idea of presentation and representation of the space that becomes visible when one starts to notice incongruences as well as congruences.

Este breve paralelo que faço entre a obra e o pensamento do polonês Tadeusz Kantor e do francês Marcel Duchamp, tem como especificidade a relação que os dois artistas estabelecem em suas obras com os objetos ou ready-mades. Essa relação aponta caminhos para pensar o Teatro de Objetos, uma vertente do Teatro de Formas Animadas.

Resumen Este texto pretende analizar un aspecto concreto de la idea de “convención” en la obra de Robert Venturi: la incorporación del objeto cotidiano a la arquitectura en un contexto, el del Pop, en el que parece recuperarse, transformada, la dialéctica del ready-made duchampiano. Se propone así un doble ejercicio de análisis. En la aproximación propuesta se señalarán, en primer lugar, posibles intervenciones que a través de los objetos puedan entenderse como próximas al ready-made, junto a un estudio de posibles variantes en su utilización como recurso. En segunda instancia, se estudian distintos casos en los que el objeto deja de ser un elemento como tal dentro de la naturaleza de la obra para devenir, sin ambages, en su propio motivo formal: arquitectura como ready-made. Esta operativa condujo al estudio, como se analiza en el último apartado, a determinadas paradojas conceptuales. Abstract This text aims to analyse a specific aspect of the idea of “convention” in the work of Robert Venturi: the inclusion of the everyday object into architecture, in the context of Pop culture, which would seem to re-establish the dialectics of the Duchampian ready-made, albeit transformed. A dual analysis exercise is undertaken. The proposed approach points at, firstly, those interventions by means of objects that may be understood as pertaining to the ready-made, together with a study of possible variants of use of said objects as a resource. In the second instance, different cases are studied in which the item ceases to be distinguishable element within the work, to become a full-blown formal motive on its own: ready-made architecture. This methodology led to the study, as analysed in the last section, of obvious conceptual paradoxes.

There is an arc of 'chunkiness' (collage, montage and assemblage) which runs through much art and architecture, pulling together art practices and eras that at first seem very different from each other. Mario Carpo, Reyner Banham Professor of Architectural Theory and History at the Bartlett, University College London and Professor of Architectural Theory at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, eloquently takes us along its path. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article proposes a 'reconfiguration of aesthetics' through an interpretation of Duchamp's readymades. The reconfigured aesthetics results in the emergence of the readymades as the common objects that they are; it is an aesthetics driven by objectivity and which encounters facts, rather than things. Facts are non-neutral and value-laden arrangements of things. Hence, the article proposes what it calls 'the aesthetics of facts'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical reception of Marcel Duchamp since the 1970s has tended to elevate him into the very figure of the Artist he sought to attack. One aspect of this domestication has involved neglecting Duchamp's fin de siècle 'eroticism' with its sexual innuendos and double-entendres. Yet this very readymade vulgarity allows us to recover a Duchamp still capable of disrupting the genres of Art and the gendered Artist, by revealing a theory embedded in his work which continually reverses and displaces phallocentrism in a game consisting of the confusion of genders and genres. We argue that Duchamp's disruption of the discursive typologies of the genre of art can be profitably read through this apparently trivial sexualized wordplay, particularly in the transgender passage into Rrose Sélavy. Reading this aspect of Duchamp after, i.e. within and against, Lacan demonstrates how Duchamp's singular regime of signs governed by equivocity and indetermination subverts the 'phallic function' of the signifier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article argues that Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) is a genderqueer narrative of alternating identities related to artist Marcel Duchamp's appearance as his female alter ego Rrose Sélavy (Man Ray 1920–1921; Man Ray 1921b). Art historians assume that Stein's textual word play and outsized personality influenced Duchamp. Few scholars, however, have addressed the possible influence of Duchamp on Stein's work. The similar ways in which Duchamp and Stein play with gender privileges gender ambiguity above gender identity. Seeing Stein's work in relation to Duchamp's genderqueer performance enables Stein to be recognized as an innovator of genderqueer aesthetics, which also leads to a recognition of Stein's alternative approach to fine art: as this article will discuss, Stein's interwar essay 'Pictures' (1935) reveals an undoing of such distinctions as copy and original that anticipates the achievements of the avant-garde and the Pop art movement of the late twentieth century. Stein's gender play was integral to her development as a writer, popular author, and artists' muse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If we reread carefully some main texts written long ago by Walter Benjamin and Jean Baudrillard, we may find a scene of problematization not only of contemporary art but also of the contemporary state of the world, where nihilism in its different shapes should be met with resistance, both political and artistic. It really has become the world of simulacra, as Baudrillard would say, or the art in the age of technical reproducibility, as Benjamin suggested. To add to this problematic, the ambiguous status of Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, produced, or, rather re-produced during the First World War and revived in art criticism and art practice after the Second -- an oeuvre which is deemed as "the most influential work of art in the 20th century" -- we are faced with the enigma of questioning our own response as a start of resistance to the historical nihilism we live today. This text of ours does not seek to give all, nor even some answers to this enormous problematic, but rather to sketch a framework of the ways we could look at the questions we need to ask ourselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shrewsbury Museum Service invited Dew Harrison to create a work relating to Charles Darwin for the bicentenary of his birth in the UK town. Her research is practise-led and uses computer technology to interlink series of related thoughts and ideas, in multimedia form. Texts, images, animations and sounds are networked into one overarching ‘concept’. The complete concept is then exhibited as a looped projected film or interactive screen work offering a contemporary understanding of a complex issue. She had previously worked with the ideas encapsulated within the work of Marcel Duchamp, in particular his Large Glass, which she transposed together with his boxes of notes and associated previous work, into one hypermedia system. Duchamp being the instigator of current Conceptual practice, his thinking began the shift of value within art from aesthetic to idea. This new challenge was to explicate the ideas of Darwin by synthesising them into one concept which could be grasped through audience interaction. Harrison is interested in relational works that invite an audience to participate together in revealing an understanding of the ‘concept’ on display. Earlier works used mouse and keypad to access a work, now the interfaces can involve sensors and physical movements for more playful and instinctive engagement. To develop the new project, Harrison worked in collaboration with two programmers and an animator to explore the ‘big idea ‘ of evolution and elicit an understanding of Darwinian adaptation through interactive installation.For the new installation entitled Shift-Life they have produced an alternate, or fantasy, biological life as a project which delivers an implicit understanding of Darwinian evolution and examples the rapid life changes necessary for survival in accelerated alternating climatic conditions. Shift-Life is an installation which focuses on ‘hands-on’ possibilities for witnessing an evolutionary process in alternate life forms as they struggle to adapt to a volatile environment. In response to Darwin’s idea, the aim of this work was to create an ‘alternate’ biological life as a set of artificial or virtual organisms that possess similar biological processes to their ‘real’ counterparts, such as growth, reproduction, and adaptation. The virtual life forms exist in a nutritional (trophic) relationship of prey/predator, and include both rooted (sessile) and free ranging (vagile) organisms. Animal-intelligence was programmed into the virtual organisms to allow them survival strategies. The project also involved the construction of an enhanced mixed reality-based virtual environment to support the organisms. The climate of the virtual environment was directly influenced by the data gathered by wireless sensors (phidgets) in the real world landscape (sand box), plus implements (lights, shakers, pourers…) that altered the parameters (temperature, humidity, acidity, stability…) and so allowed visitors to change the condition of the virtual landscape.The installation comprised of a large ’sand-pit’ box representing the virtual world terrain, this encouraged interactivity for visitors who could physically manipulate a set of implements to radically alter the living conditions of the fantasy creatures in their virtual ecosystem, projected into the installation space. By pouring liquids, switching on lights, moving objects etc., in the sand box, visitors could see immediate responses to their actions played out in the animated ecosystem as the life forms adapted to survive. Interacting with the real world landscape and observing the instant affect a visitor’s actions had on the animated ecosystem projected into the installation space, proffered an understanding of how causing changes in environmental conditions, forces evolutionary developments on the life-forms in them.2009 is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin in Shrewsbury and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. As part of the national celebrations underway, Shift-Life was exhibited at Shift-Time – a festival of ideas in Shrewsbury, summer 2009. It was still in its prototype stage and, following this beta-testing, it will be modified and enriched with extra behaviours and more sensitive environmental changes as we develop the project to more closely demonstrate Darwinian ideas for further exhibition.

The present article explores an unusual meeting (1940) between the French artist Marcel Duchamp and the Irish writer Samuel Beckett at Arcachon, southwest region of France. This meeting is only possible because of the Nazi invasion of Paris, as well as the interest both manifested for the game of chess. First of all, we briefly make allusion to the relation of the game with literature and philosophy, then we read the Beckett`s piece Endgame, a fundamental work in his poetics – taking into account it was written and staged after the Second World War – from some chess assumptions referred to the third moment of a game of chess (namely the endgame) of Duchamp.

Entre noviembre y diciembre de 1911, Marcel Duchamp realiza en Neuilly tres dibujos sobre papel que ilustran, mediante un lenguaje esquivo y harto sumario, otros tantos poemas del simbolista francés Jules Laforgue: Médiocrité; Siesteéternelle; y Encore à cet astre. Este último supuso el primer boceto para su primera obra de repercusión internacional, Desnudo bajando una escalera, nº 2, la cual constituye, a su vez, el primer “asiento” para la revolución artística llevada a cabo en el Gran Vidrio. Los roles que el sol –la luz, lo masculino– y la luna –la sombra y lo femenino– adquirieron en la poesía de Laforgue fueron retomados por Duchamp para cimentar la arquitectura del nuevo régimen visual por él concebido.

Over the past 40 years a strange and worrying behavioural split has taken place concerning the arts and governing powers. For me The 1975 Trilateral Commission report, The Crisis in Democracy (1975), represents a triggering point when the arts in western society started to become more disengaged, maybe even fearful with presenting an effective, inventive and critical voice on the side of the public in relation to governing forces. An artist's understanding of an ever expanding picture plane continued and possibly even accelerated well into the twentieth century. By the early 1970s however, time had long caught up with the go-to space for presenting these changes, the gallery context; the location associated with much innovation throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. It is my belief that today the gallery and art institution pulse more with the brotherly echo of the Too-Big-To-Fail-Banks, systemically flawed; underwriting any ideas-with-legs, in order to inevitably to cripple them. This is further complicated by artists not seeing or choosing not to see this; so in the same way that banks and corporations exercise huge power over how society is structured, contemporary galleries and art institutions have unwittingly or not, become the authoritarian interphase or gatekeeper between visual ideas and the public. The curious split however, is in the contrast we see between the arts, increasingly retreating behind a showy but compromised context and how the powers that be (or shouldn't be) have emerged out of that mid 1970s triggering point. The governing powers appear to have shown themselves to be the true descendent of the spirit of Dada and Duchamp; far more ready to diversify, infiltrate and step out of their comfort zone. Represented through the inventive zeal, excessive chance taking, increased double speak, contradictions, flip flopping, lies, fakery, spying, spinning, torture and complex layering employed in their work. Unlike the pioneering work of the artists mentioned throughout this text, whose central concerns, I would site as, less to do with power and more to encourage the liberation and freedom of their fellow man, this contemporary trickery of governing power is manifest as a brutal form of repressive control. What is more they don't seek to promote the artistry of their work and although people from all walks of life highly suspect something fishy is going on, the powerful keep the mechanisms of their ever evolving work well hidden and often within plain view. This text is a call to the artist within us all to connect from ground up with the important visual heritage that questions and invents in the service of humanity. To pursue a life where we can act as ourselves in relation to others, not one where every action is taken in fear of how it will be interpreted, praised or condemned by a more powerful party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In 1963 Duchamp described his vertical installation of three Readymades at the Pasadena Art Museum as "readymade talk of what goes on in the Large Glass." Elsewhere, he spoke of the Readymades as "vehicles for unloading ideas," and during the years 1912-15 his mind was filled with ideas as he invented the "playful physics" for his techno-scientific allegory of quest, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even [The Large Glass] (1915-23). This essay argues that the "ideas" being unloaded in the Readymades were rooted in his extensive study of contemporary science and technology as well as the biographical experience of his stay at Herne Bay on the English seacoast during August 1913. Readymades addressed include the Bicycle Wheel, With Hidden Noise, Paris Air, and Fresh Widow. Central themes include string or thread, traced from his preoccupation with tennis during his holiday, and the impact of the electrical spectacle of the illuminated Pier Pavilion at Herne Bay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Duchamp’s readymade is usually interpreted as a bold and cerebral emancipation of modern art from the material, the craft and natural beauty, and the discovery of the continent of conceptual art. Duchamp however was very sceptical and made fun of abstract reasoning, concepts and theories. This essay states that Duchamp ostensibly found inspiration with Alfred Jarry’s work and particularly his ‘neo--science’ of pataphysics, like many dadaïsts, futurists, surrealist did around 1910. And that he did so openly. Beyond art and the possibility of conceptual art lies the pataphysical, the vast and rich realm of the senses. Duchamp’s interest was not in concepts or ideas, his drive was towards the virtual, ambiguous, irrational side of perception. All we have is the senses, the unique moments, the unique objects and bodies, our memories, and what the chaotic abundance of information they give us means, is unknown. Probably nothing. Duchamp thought that all science, art, religion, madness, literature and philosophy are creative efforts starting from tautologies; he was no conceptualist but a radical ‘sensist’.

A preocupação com o modo como o inconsciente irrompe na cena do cotidiano foi uma constante na obra de Sigmund Freud. Desse modo, um dos temas mais caros para o criador da psicanálise foi a questão do ato falho. No que diz respeito a esse conceito, nos reportaremos a alguns textos no qual ele aparece de forma central, como em “Os atos falhos”, uma das conferências introdutórias de psicanálise proferidas entre 1915, 1916 e 1917 e no texto “ As sutilezas de um ato falho”, escrito de 1935. Sendo assim, busco entender como, embora o ato falho carregue uma aparente conotação negativa, a partir do campo semântico no qual a noção de falha se inscreve, ele é, ao contrário, um elemento positivo na medida em que dá notícias da vida psíquica do indivíduo, permitindo que a partir do momento do lapso se propicie um maior entendimento sobre a articulação do inconsciente. Tomando por base essa consideração, a intenção deste artigo é estabelecer uma conexão entre psicanálise e arte contemporânea no que concerne ao modo como as obras de arte começaram a se constituir a partir do século XX: não como criações bem sucedidas por parte de um artista, mas sim como algo que engendra conceitos como fracasso, falha, perda ou abandono. Assim, Duchamp é o primeiro a lançar mão desses aspectos negativos revirando-os e fazendo deles o motor da sua práxis artística. A partir do artista francês, veremos como em torno da arte contemporânea orbita um campo da negatividade que, através da prática psicanalítica, pode ser, na verdade, pensado enquanto positividade. Tomarei como ponto de partida nesta investigação o readymade Armadilha ( Trébuchet, 1917), que consiste em um porta-casaco pregado no chão do ateliê do artista. O que nos interessa aqui não é a materialidade da obra, mas o fato de Duchamp, ao se ver tropeçando seguidas vezes no objeto que estava disposto sob o assoalho, ter resolvido pregá-lo definitivamente no local, alçando-o, com esse único gesto, à condição de obra de arte e o denominando-o enquanto readymade. Não por acaso, o tropeço do artista evoca a ideia de repetição em psicanálise. Desse modo, o presente texto traz essa obra como referência fundamental e cruza o pensamento de Freud com o do filósofo italiano Giorgio Agamben, propondo entender a arte contemporânea como um meio que assume a possibilidade da derrota ou do malogro, inscrevendo-os no cerne dos processos artísticos. Em um mundo que submete os indivíduos a darem provas de sucesso e produtividade a todo tempo, refletir sobre como a falha é estrutural para forjar nosso estatuto de sujeito pode ser uma promessa de encontrarmos uma via reconciliadora com nossa própria existência, um solo no qual a arte sempre teve um papel basilar.

In this article I will place Leth's clip of Andy Warhol in the tradition of artistic gestures, as they evolved after Duchamp's 1917 Fountain. By treating Warhol as a ready-made, Leth posed the same questions as Duchamp, Joyce, Pound and even Warhol himself and provided an elegant solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]