D A D A isme

Masih inget gerakan seni Dadaisme di sekitar tahun 1950an? Gerakan seni ini adalah suatu reaksi para seniman terhadap akibat yang dibawa oleh Perang Dunia II. Pada saat itu muncullah dua macam aliran
kesenian, Dada adalah salah satunya, dan satunya lagi Art-Deco. Art Deco lebih menekankan pada semangat baru para seniman untuk membangun kembali dunia yang telah hancur oleh peperangan, sedangkan Dada lebih menekankan pada kemuraman yang menjadi akibat dari peperangan itu.
Akibatnya Dada lebih mengarahkan produk kesenian mereka ke anti-estetis, sedangkan Art Deco lebih berkutat pada estetika baru yang modern. Hoho, terima kasih banyak buat temen gw anak DKV teladan, Andrew Putra Zaluchu alias Chu2...informasi yang dibagikan sangat berharga!

Yaa, sebenernya Dada itu sendiri uda berawal di Swiss sekitar taon 1916an. Namun kedua jalur ini menjadi dua kutub yang sangat dominan di bidang seni apapun. Estetis dan anti-estetis. Namun keduanya sebenarnya bermuara pada sesuatu tujuan yang sama: E K S P R E S I !!

untuk info lebih banyak soal gerakan DADA ini silakan klik ke:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dadaism
untuk Art Deco: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_deco

Nah, Marcel Duchamp adalah salah satu tokoh penting dalam gerakan Dada ini. Pernah dia membuat suatu pameran seni rupa di mana dia memajang urinoir (tempat buang air kecil pria seperti di toilet2 umum) di sana. Udah, gitu ajah. Dan bagi dia, itu adalah objek seni. Karya2 Duchamp sangat memancing kontroversi dalam publik penikmat seni. Dan seringkali karya-karyanya dianggap sebagai suatu banyolan konyol saja.

Di bawah ini ada artikel yang menarik ini, kayanya asik juga untuk kita simak, moga bisa jadi refrensi yang bagus buat kita semua di sini. Monggoo....


Taking Jokes By Duchamp To Another Level of Art
By SARAH BOXER

In 1913, a decade before Marcel Duchamp gave up art for chess, he took
a bicycle wheel into his studio and mounted it on a stool. He liked to
watch it spin. The next year he took home a bottle rack. In a letter
to his sister, Suzanne, he said it was a sculpture "already made." For
the next few years he collected common, mass-produced objects, treated
them as art and called them readymades: a snow shovel (which he named
"In Advance of the Broken Arm"), a urinal ("Fountain"), a hat rack, a
comb and a dozen or so more.

The influence of Duchamp's readymades on 20th-century art is
incalculable. Without Duchamp, would Jasper Johns have painted flags
and targets? Would Andy Warhol have made his Brillo boxes? Would there
be any Conceptual Art at all?

Well, take a deep breath and imagine art without the readymade. Last
month, Art News reported that Rhonda Roland Shearer, an artist, had
been trying for two years to prove that Duchamp's readymades are not
really mass-produced objects. She thinks he altered or made them all,
then cunningly covered up the evidence to create a time-release surprise.

To Ms. Shearer, this is like discovering that "there was no historical
Jesus." She explains: "You can't just say he was a jokester and move
on. What happens to the artists who took the readymade as a sacred
truth? It has meant too much to the people who believe it."

This has caused a small stir among Duchamp scholars. First is the
factual question: Could she be right? Second, and perhaps more to the
point: Would it matter?

Ms. Shearer has spared nothing to prove her case. She has a number of
research assistants and a bank of computers working for her. She has
bought hat racks, coat racks, advertising signs, bicycle wheels,
postcards of the Mona Lisa, snow shovels, perfume bottles and urinals
as well as old catalogues advertising the above. Linda Dalrymple
Henderson, the author of "Duchamp in Context," calls her work "all the
scholarship money can buy."

But there are complications even money and drive can't overcome.

Duchamp himself admitted altering some of his readymades, including
"Apolinere Enameled," a sign for Sapolin enamel paint whose letters
Duchamp changed to honor the poet Apollinaire, and "Why Not Sneeze
Rrose Selavy?" a bird cage filled with marble cubes, a thermometer and
cuttlebone. Duchamp called these assisted or rectified readymades.

Ms. Shearer is not fazed by Duchamp's admissions. She insists his
alterations always exceeded what he claimed. Duchamp, for example,
says he penciled a mustache and beard onto a cheap reproduction of the
Mona Lisa to create "L.H.O.O.Q." (now on view in the Museum of Modern
Art's show "The Museum as Muse"); Ms. Shearer says he also painted in
his own face.

The assisted readymades aren't the only troublesome cases. Many of
Duchamp's readymades -- the bottle rack, bicycle wheel, snow shovel,
urinal, coat rack and hat rack -- vanished during his life. They have
been preserved only in photos of his studio, in replicas that he
sanctioned and in miniature models and photographs he packed in his
Boite-en-Valise, his museum in a suitcase (also displayed in "The
Museum as Muse"). So, in many cases, Ms. Shearer is working with
circumstantial evidence. She doesn't mind. She says the absence of the
original readymades supports the idea that they never existed as
advertised.

This is Ms. Shearer's case against the readymades so far.

Duchamp's readymade glass ampoule, which he named "50 cc of Paris
Air," is larger than any that would have been readily available to
pharmacists. (And she has a tape of a man from Corning Glass saying so.)

"Beautiful Breath," the readymade perfume bottle with Man Ray's
photograph of Duchamp on it (now owned by Yves Saint Laurent) is
green, she says; the real bottles of "Un Air Embaume," from Rigaud,
are peach-colored (like the empty but still-fragrant one that Ms.
Shearer bought for $650).

The readymade snow shovel, which now exists only in photographs and
replicas, "would hurt your hand" if you tried to use it, Ms. Shearer
says, because it has a square shaft. And it doesn't have the normal
reinforcements to keep it from breaking. (She has hired people to make
her a snow shovel like Duchamp's and use it until it breaks.)

There is more: the bird cage is too squat for a real bird, the iron
hooks in the photograph of the coat rack appear to bend in an
impossible position, the French window opens the wrong way, the bottle
rack has an asymmetrical arrangement of hooks and the urinal is too
curvaceous to have come from the Mott Iron Works, where Duchamp said
he bought it.

"It is not just one case," Ms. Shearer says. "It's one thing after
another. You start feeling like a fool for taking him at his word,"
she says. "Does this make him more interesting? Absolutely. He has
been dead since 1968, but it's as if he's alive now, because we have a
whole new set of objects."

As Ms. Shearer explains in a two-part article in the journal Art and
Academe, it is time to stop thinking of readymades as objects Duchamp
brings home from the store and start seeing them as objects dragged
"from the unconscious mind." She says that Duchamp was influenced by
the mathematician Henri Poincare's concept of the invisible fourth
dimension, and she says the readymades were created to evoke it. She
calls Duchamp's readymades "three-dimensional shadows" of his
"fourth-dimensional creativity machine." (Don't ask.)

If Ms. Shearer has proved nothing else, she has proved an irritant to
Duchamp scholars. Although some are impressed by her tireless research
and her extensive collection of Duchampiana, they grumble that she is
using her money (including some from Paul Mellon) and influential
connections (including her husband, Stephen Jay Gould, a Harvard
zoology professor) to get attention. (She has arranged a symposium at
Harvard University on Duchamp and Poincare, starring herself.) They
scorn her "scientific method." And they are astounded that a
"hobbyist" can get so far. Molly Nesbit, an art historian at Vassar
College, says Ms. Shearer has introduced the kind of
"overinterpretation" fans tend to make.

Ms. Shearer, facing down her critics, vows to "smile and keep
tap-dancing." But why all the fuss and bother anyway? At this point in
history, does it matter if all the readymades were Duchamp-made?

David Joselit, the author of "Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp
1910-1941," says no. It doesn't matter now whether Duchamp's
readymades were mass-produced commodities or objects made to look like
commodities. The point is, "everything is a commodity," and there are
some commodities we choose to call art. All of Duchamp's readymades
are assisted in some sense, he says. "They were transformed the minute
he inscribed them."

Other critics are not so blase. Ms. Henderson says it does matter
whether there was a genuine readymade, at least to start with. "The
key issue is the first readymade, the bottle rack" of 1914. And "at
that point Duchamp had no audience to fool by manufacturing a fake
object," she says. He had no motive for deception.

"You have to have the concept of the readymade before you challenge
it," says Francis Naumann, the author of a forthcoming book, "Marcel
Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."
After that, it matters less and less. Once Duchamp established the
idea of a readymade, he was constantly monkeying around with it. He
offered a "shaved" version of the bearded Mona Lisa, and even created
a "reciprocal" readymade: "Use a Rembrandt as an ironing board."

In any case, even if Duchamp intended to deceive, the readymade "has
already affected a half century of artists," Mr. Naumann says. "You
can't take that away."

The readymade proved that "a work of art only is a work of art if you
accept it," Mr. Naumann says.

The readymade proved that "art is a set of relationships, not a
thing," Mr. Joselit says.

The readymade proved that "everything and anything can be art," says
Thierry de Duve, the author of "Kant after Duchamp."

So maybe the readymade is safe and sound. But what about Duchamp? "My
opinion of Duchamp would change if she's right," Mr. Naumann admits.
"It would be a grand act of deception."

Arthur Danto, the art critic for The Nation, is more blunt. "I guess
it's possible that he made a commercial porcelain urinal and a
grooming comb. But what would I think of him if his great contribution
was as a ceramicist or a woodworker? I think it would make him far
less important." Of course, "that wouldn't change the readymade;
that's part of the discourse now."

"But if she's right," he adds, "I have no interest in Duchamp."

http://www.nytimes.com

GRAPHIC: Photos: "Why Not Sneeze Rrose Selavy" (1921), upper left, is
a bird cage containing marble cubes, a thermometer and cuttlebone.
"Fountain" is what Duchamp called the urinal. At right, "50 cc of
Paris Air" from 1919. ("Fountain" photographed by Alfred Stieglitz;
others from the Philadelphia Museum of Art)

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