The Bride Machine: Duchamp’s Theory of Art Revisited
From Firenze University Press Journal: Aisthesis
Ricardo Ibarlucía, CONICET- Centro de Investigaciones Filosóficas and Universidad Nacional de San Martín
There is a photo of the First International Dada Fair in 1920 which shows Raoul Hausmann and John Heartfield holding a banner with an inscription in German: «Art is Dead. Long Live Tatlin’s New Machine Art!» (Hausmann [1972]: 44, 120)1. With this phrase, Dadaists from Berlin not only expressed their commitment to the Russian Revolution in paying tribute to Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, but they also proclaimed an idea that summarised a common aspiration for avant-garde artists. Some of them pondered the aesthetic value of machines regardless of their utilitarian value; others, the function that form of art could assume in the construction of socialism: all of them were conscious of the profound changes artistic forms were experiencing as an effect of the deployment of the techniques of production and reproduction in the modern industrial society.On the pages that follow, I intend to examine Marcel Duchamp’s seminal developments in the field of plastic arts against the backdrop of such machine art.
My approach is both theoretical and historical. In its general outline, it differs from the contemporary outlook on the works produced by Duchamp during his Dadaist and Surrealist period as precursors of conceptual art. At the same time, it turns away from the reductive interpretation of Duchamp’s ready-mades as ordinary manufactured objects, whose artistic status is decidable in the context of a given theory of art or institutional system, with independence from their perceptual and formal properties. The thesis I defend is that Duchamp’s idea of artwork can be explained by two converging effects the developments of industrial production had over artistic practices, both of which have been pointed out by Walter Benjamin in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility (1935–1936): the birth of new artistic forms — such as photography and film — and their repercussion on «art in its traditional form» (Benjamin [2012]: 55, 98, 164, 210).I argue that an sculptural object like the Large Glass (1915–1923), which exemplifies Benjamin’s notion of the «assembled artwork» (montierbar Kunstwerk) from the industrial age in the field of plastic arts (Benjamin [2012]: 32, 66, 111–112, 176), can be considered as an expression of the «aestheticization of the machine» that Jean Brun has studied with regard to Italian Futurism and other artistic movements from the beginning of the xxth century (Brun [1992]: 258–274). To show this, my reasoning will unfold in three steps. First, I will give a historical account of the avant-garde fascination with the aesthetic potential of the machines. Then, I will focus on Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp to show how their works extol to the point of erotization the perceptual and formal properties of mechanisms, devices and products manufactured for massive use and consumption. Finally, I will advance some ideas on what could be seen as a pragmatics of the aesthetic object, recovering what Nelson Goodman called «implementation» in order to define «the process of bringing about the aesthetic functioning that provides the basis for the notion of a work of art» (Goodman [1982]: 282, [1984]: 145).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/Aisthesis-13216
Read Full Text: https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/aisthesis/article/view/13216
