Duchamp, Danto: the object in art

The use of terms to describe Art appears challenged. For one, Danto himself refutes “postmodernism” as a descriptive label, offering the term “post-historical” to describe the aesthetics of Contemporary art after Modernism. His reasons are equally confounding:

“[P]erhaps “postmodernism” was too strong a term, to closely identified with a certain sector of contemporary art.”

Here, we uncover two differing crisis at hand that have been misinterpreted as one. Firstly, we have the crisis of temporality: the crisis that styles or intentional categories of art outlive their labels. For example, “Modern” art has ceased to denote a state of art produced “now”. Secondly, this gives rise to a crisis of semiotics, or the crisis of the functions of the signifier and the signified. The functions of “Modernism” as a label had outlived its original temporal function, and, as Danto reveals, developed to embody “a stylistic meaning and a temporal meaning”.

Such was the crisis similar in the Contemporary in art, a description of an artistic consciousness that transcends “what is happening now”, to a term that “has come to mean an art produced within a certain structure of production”. The Contemporary in art, according to Danto, no longer identifies with modern art created by contemporaries today. Rather, is a state or condition that reflects “a period of information disorder” and of “perfect aesthetic entropy” that eloped from the binds of Modernism. “Contemporary” has come to signify the liberating paroxysmal in Art after Modernism, a “post” situation that has come to signify a lack of artistic unity, a release from its own existential crisis. Likewise, this release has affected the traditional role of the Object of Art as an actual ‘real’ material construct, drawing attention to the conceptual role of the Object rather than the Object-in-itself in a prepared artistic encounter.

In this light, Dadaist Marcel Duchamp’s controversial “Readymades” (works of art derived from al-ready pre-manufactured commodities) places the very idea of the “object of art” in jeopardy. Two of his famous works Fountain and Bicycle Wheel present the viewer with commonplace objects that occupy a space set-aside for artistic display. Fountain presents the viewer with a porcelain urinal, a vulgar gesture made at preexistent notions of artistic beauty signed off by the Duchamp under a pseudonym “R. Mutt”. Bicycle Wheel consists simply of a bicycle fork inverted and screwed upside down onto a white stool. Duchamp seems to slander at preconceived notions of aesthetic objects, perhaps hinting at the evanescent quality and constructed-ness of beauty and aesthetics itself. Interestingly so, Duchamp denies creating Bicycle Wheel with a categorical sense of the Readymade as a stylistic gesture. He acknowledges:

“The Bicycle Wheel is my first Readymade, so much so that at first it wasn’t even called a Readymade. It still had little to do with the idea of the Readymade.”

Duchamp’s own artistic process reveals a central concept of the Contemporary in art and the aesthetic experience: that which Danto points at a “turn from sense experience to thought […] to philosophy”. There is a clear separation between the creation of Art and the contemplation of Art, a separation that both legitimizes all Contemporary art and leaves the experience of Art wholly upon the shoulders of the viewer.

As with Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain is thoroughly indistinguishable from the common urinal, save the artist’s signature. Even so, the gesture of signing that functions to legitimize art and attribute it to a sense of an artistic authorial stamp of approval (a renaissance concept) is sabotaged. “R. Mutt” is but a fictional persona, created to lead the spectator to retrace the act of creation to a bogus source of origin, a source that is of and imagined by the viewer himself. In a certain way, Duchamp “disowns” his work, perhaps even inviting the viewer to take artistic ownership over the commodity. Encounter leads to an establishment for contemplation and discourse. Danto thus describes the functions of the Contemporary artist:

“[Contemporary Art] had delivered itself of a burden it could now hand over to the philosophers to carry. And … [contemporary artists] were free to make art in whatever way they wished, for any purposes at all.”

Objects of Contemporary Art are likewise liberated from the Artists’ hand; any object placed under the conditions of “Art” could pass off as such. The job of the Contemporary artist is therefore not to present, but to set-up the conditions for an Artistic-encounter that is central to the viewer. However, the Contemporary in Art has to tackle with yet another outstanding issue, that of aestheticism, or the “aura” of Art as postulated by Walter Benjamin. Without consistency or standards, how does one judge, criticize, evaluate or appreciate Contemporary art? How does one experience the metaphysical aesthetics central of art? Perhaps it is in the amorphous quality of the imagined (or projected) object of art which is prepared for viewing, or simply the evaluation of an art-viewer encounter. Even more possible is the conferring of the aesthetic quality by virtue of the presentation of an object of Art, such as Duchamp’s Readymades, so the work is, in essence, the event of presentation in itself. Presentational conditions ‘confer’ an artistic aura upon the object (for example, Duchamp’s urinal), opening it up to new platforms of viewing, new angles of contemplation and new ways of interpreting. Bathed in these conditions, Duchamp’s urinal ceases to be a urinal, but a point locality for discourse and interpretation, a point locality set-up for an encounter.

Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel establishes such an encounter. And whilst the artist suggests his ‘reading’ from his personal encounter with his work (making references to the cyclic movement mimicking dancing flames in a fireplace), Contemporary objects of art are open to multiple readings that are mutually exclusive to that of the artist’s. Bicycle Wheel sets out to explore different encounter-pairs: wheel/stool, presentation/interpretation, immobility/mobility and so on and so forth. However, these encounter-pairs are secondary constructs in which the viewer assembles through the fundamental art/viewer encounter.

Once the object of Art is encountered, its material set-up of the encounter loses its purpose. Like the urinal, the wheel and the stool, these materials return to the corporeal non-aesthetic realm. In the minds of the viewer, however, the material undergoes a sea-change through the encounter; the physical transcends into the sensuous into the cognitive and conceptual. Viewer becomes artist, Art becomes idea. In shaping an encounter, Duchamp inevitably surrenders all ownership of artistic aestheticism because the work does not draw towards itself, but draws towards the viewer and his past-histories. The contemporary artist constructs the parameters of the encounter, the viewer steps in to fill that void; the history of art displaces its burden of aesthetic interpretation onto the tools of the history of the viewer