TRACY
EMIN’S “MY BED”
INTRODUCTION
“Anyone who is engaged in art or lays claim to it
would know that to ask whether something is or is not art is at best
misleading”
“Art’s way resists
definition. Yet we never seem to get tired or even bored of posing the same
question: “Is it art?” The problem with this question is not that one cannot
answer questions about art. The issue lies with the tautological import of the
question’s subject: art.” (Art’s Way Out) In
the process, Art is first made, then perceived and “validated”. What actions of
execution do and what don’t make something “art”?
If one is to inquire, a professor and a museum goer
probably won’t be able to give you a clear answer. Now, more than ever, in
contemporary aesthetics, the word ‘art’ is tangled up with a bucket list of
connotations and blurry meanings. What classically is referred to as art has
slowly become much fuzzier, and much of this confusion owes it’s birth to
Duchamp. The readymade phenomenon is the trigger point of what is commonly
referred to as so-called conceptual art.
Tracy Emin’s “My Bed” installation was presented for
the first time at the XXY in 10029. It is a representative example of
contemporary Conceptual Art, which has spurred an overbearing dilemma of its
definition over the past decades. Questioning the artistic value of a piece of
“Conceptual” art like that of Emin’s Bed would be an action able to fill books
of questions that many have asked before, yet in hundreds of years they might
have never come to a concise answer. In looking at Tracy Emin’s “My bed”, we
must ask ourselves to consider these aesthetic queries. This piece in it’s
fullness, isn’t so much about how art is made, but, how it is perceived. So
what are the criteria’s by which we judge art?
Artist, Grayson Perry, held the 2013 Reith Lectures. In
his lectures he questions art as a whole, and in a way it looks like he could
have done a lot of hard work for us.
According to Perry the criteria’s which we judge art be could be, “Financial
value, popularity, art historical significance, or aesthetic sophistication.”
Supposing that these are the only four criteria’s by which art is generally
judged we should go ahead and try to interpret, with the help of Perry, and
other educators that have brought forth the same question:
Financial value:
The financial value of art regards the market of goods
that are pacifically negated as characteristic of art.There are many issues
surroundings the techniques in which one keeps the price of a product high.
These methods are well explained in the documentary: The Contemporary Art
Bubble.
Popularity Art
Art Historical Significance
Aesthetic Sophistication
What do
we intend by conceptual art?
What is an artwork if it lacks execution, can
it still be considered as such and what does this entail?
In this
thesis we will bring forward the following:
i.
A review of the major
opinions expressed on the argument.
ii.
An indication of the
main issues in the relationship between Tracy Emin’s “My Bed,” and the
definition of a work of art in classic terms.
iii.
Art a priori, a
demonstration, the shift in form: From object to persona?
It will be attempted, through analysing Tracy Emin’s
“My Bed,” to grasp further knowledge on the term “Conceptual Art.”
Additionally, to dissect the various changes in art aesthetics that began at
the turn of the century, which radically altered how we see art and the
aesthetics today. As we stand at the starting gates to the debate, it is important
to note when reading, that contemporary art in general is not our focus. Much
of post-Duchamp contemporary art is not categorized as so called ‘Conceptual
Art.
Though it is no doubt fraught with risk and challenge,
this thesis will include attempts at confronting certain philosophical theories
from the past that have tried to articulate an understanding of the
relationship between idea of concept and execution of form. Bringing into the
fold of the conversation, contemporary philosophers, thinkers, and artists
whose voices shed light on the conceptual art of the past century.
With every philosopher comes a body of thought relevant to the time and society in which he lived. Nonetheless, in regard to aesthetics, some philosophical theories are so timeless in their grasp that it is possible to cull them from their origins as tools for one's encounter with Modern Art in general. In the case of this thesis, using a philosophical theory that was written centuries before the rise in Conceptual Art can still be useful. These theories may articulate universal truths spoken by ancient thinkers that are still applicable today. Immanuel Kant lived hundreds of years before Conceptual Art was conceived, yet can be quite useful in our discussion of aesthetics in the visual arts.
[In Chapter one we will start with. In chapter two we
will apply the review of notions and opinions. USING KANT’S CRITIQUE OF
JUDGEMENT AND HIS DEFINITION OF ARTISTIC GENIOUS (IN PARTICULAR) TO COMPARE AND
ANALYZE TRACY EMIN’S “MY BED” AND DUCHAMPS URINAL. In Chapter three Grayson
perry’s second Reith lecture on art]
Technological and
industrial advancements at the beginning of the century shall be taken into
account when speaking of the separation between art and aesthetics that takes
place. The distribution of photography, for example, was made easily accessible
via a specific device that made the representation of reality much easier and
accessible to many. This, alone, has broadened accessibility to creativity and
representation. Gradually, the notion has grasped society that anyone can be an artist.
Before getting to Emin’s Bed and Duchamp’s Urinal, we
shall gain a better understanding of the primary source that will help us
during this journey, Kant. In Kant’s Critique of Judgment, he separates the
understanding of aesthetics in art into two slices. Genius.
CHAPTER 1
Why Tracy’s Bed?
It would be legitimate to bring forward the answer to
the question as to why the work “My Bed” by Emin has been chosen, in
particular, as an example to support the argument. Tracy Emin’s bed, in our
case, can be considered a tool to question the artistic value of so-called the “conceptual”
auto-referential celebrity art similar to it, which, critics often quip, lack
execution of form. Emin’s art is very well known, especially, for her
capability of putting her self in the work as the main protagonist and subject.
Usually, her art includes either an object of her use, belonging, or something
describing her life and suffering as a person. Undoubtedly, her art is always
extremely autobiographical.
The two main problems that are criticized in Emin’s
work is firstly the lack of execution of form and secondly herself being the
only protagonist as her auto-referential subject. It is important to remember
that Emin was part of the YBA movement (Young British Artists) in the late 90s,
at the point when Saatchi was surveying this landscape. She was and is subject
to a very vast public, which is mainly what the YBA’s are notorious for. By
being artist celebrities, it is easy for a piece of work of it’s kind to be
identified with the person rather than with the piece of work per-se: transporting
the work of art from an object to a person.
Tracy’s Bed is probably one of the most popular works
of its kind: As time passes, we can be sure that the popularity of this work of
art is not that of an underground fading trend, as it is widely discussed and
exhibited today. Therefore we don’t have to question the popularity of the work
It can be interestingly, in looking at the execution
of the work, be compared with one of the most iconic symbols of readymade,
Duchamp’s Urinal. Where the question “Can still exist in the situation of
absence of form? And why?” dominates the debate.
It is easy, in a theoretical thesis that deals with
aesthetics, to go on a stream of consciousness and loose track of what the main
debate is about. We will try to keep our objective very clear by using Emin’s
bed as the reference to always come back to question.
When confronting a relatively contemporary work of art
with problems and questions of form it is unlikely that one will not look back
to when the problem first arose: Duchamp’s first unassisted ready-mades.
Let’s try there to understand what problems my bed has
in common with Duchamp’s “Fountain”.
Marcel Duchamp exhibited his urinal fountain in New
York in 1917.
This event in the history of art arose an important
question.
This is the moment when in the context of art, concept
for the first time tilted way over form, nearly eliminating form in its
entirety, stepping out of the boundaries of what was considered “FINE ART”
This is an Interesting moment for art, and Ready-mades
were a big sensation.
“Conceptual” Artist Joseph Kosuth which writes 25
years after Duchamp’s golden moment in the late 10’s endorses post Duchamp art
and sees the realization of the readymade phenomenon as the one big stone mark
of progression in contemporary art:
Joseph Kosuth says:
‘The event that made conceivable the realization that
it was possible to ‘speak another language’ and still make sense in art was
Marcel Duchamp’s first unassisted Readymade. With
the unassisted Readymade, art changed its focus
from the form of the language to what was being said. Which means that it
changed the nature of art from a question of morphology to a question of
function….
This change – one from ‘appearance’ to ‘conception’ –
was the beginning of ‘modern’ art and the beginning of ‘conceptual’ art.’
(Joseph Kosuth, 1945, 856)
Kosuth’s words are relitavley difficult to dismantle:
although it is nearly objective to say that this event made art focus from
“form” to “what was being said”(the idea)
We are to understand from this text that according to
Kosuth after the readymade phenomenon the ‘nature of art’ changes from ‘a
question of morphology’ to ‘function’.
Hereby Kosuth is suggesting that the dominance of
concept value over aesthetic value is more ‘functional’ since it is not
focusing so much on the ‘form of the language’ but to ‘what was being said’.
He continues:
‘It is necessary to separate aesthetics from art because aesthetics
deals with opinions on perception of the world in general. In the past one of
the two prongs of art’s function was decoration. So any branch of philosophy
that dealt with ‘beauty’ and thus, taste, was inevitably duty bound to discuss
art as well. Out of this ‘habit’ grew the notion that there was a conceptual
connection between art and aesthetics, which is not true.’(Joseph Kosuth, 1945,
p. 854)
Whilst Kosuth does have a strong and valid point in
believing that conceptual art was revolutionary in focusing on a concept (idea)
rather than on the form of something, like Thierry De Duve suggests when he confronted
Duchamp’s urinal with the question of Kantian Genius in his text Kant after
Duchamp:
‘It symbolically granted the layman the right to
produce art aesthetically, that is, by dint of a feeling whose source – to be
taken with a grain of salt, for sure- was not merely ‘taste’ but also ‘genius’,
in the provocative guise of a disgustingly plebeian taste and a ridiculously
sick genius.’ (Kant after Duchamp, p. 116)
by tackling some interesting points when he suggests
Duchamp Act of artistically Contextualising the Readymade was an act of
execution that he states can be seen as ‘genius’ (referring to Kant).
But If extracting idea of concept from an art piece
creates something without “spirit” (as Kant might refer to it,) then can’t
eliminating form be equally as damaging?
So how do these two pieces of work relate?
Starting off with the most important examples, both in
a way it can be said lack execution of form,
Other than the choice of the “ready-made” or
“ready-used” object, no art critic has been found to be observing the
‘execution’ of that specific piece they have not look at the urinal and said:
“how impressively the artist has executed the form of
this urinal, and the place and way in which he has signed it in makes the whole
form of it perfect.”
First of all because the execution is not his and
secondly because that it was officially not in the intent of the artist to
execute the form of the urinal.
And nor have
they said about Emin’s bed: “look at the way the form of the covers, she must
have spent hours getting that fold in the sheet perfectly carved into the
blanket”
The critics that judge Emin’s bed are judging it by
what the bed represents, not by its Execution of form and that we will see, is
one of the main problems that the piece gives us to solve.
In other ways these two pieces are extremely
different, we must make no confusion with this.
Their “concepts” or ideas are very distant, Emin’s bed
is a very auto-referential piece, it is objects that she has owned that that
her body have been in contact with taken as they are and exposed to the world.
As instead Duchamp’s urinal is a very unlinked to
himself object.
He took a simple factory urinal that was going to be
used as an object of common use and placed called it art as to mock the art
world of the time, what he considered to be a joke as he called it “ the end of
art”.
The Concept or idea of Duchamp’s urinal is more of a
sociological declaration of rebellion.
“Duchamp’s ready-made’s are often understood as the
most blatant affirmation of the reproducibility of the work. For the first
time, the work is no longer nostalgically opposed as a handmade thing to the
serialized existence of everyday objects. Nothing differentiates the readymade
from its ‘mates’, as Duchamp said, other than the fact of choice, which is
reflected in the date and signature. (Sebastian Egenhofer, 1945, 856)
CHAPTER 2
WHAT
CRITICS SAY ABOUT EMIN:
The moment Emin’s bed was presented at the Turner
prize awards,
It received an astonishing amount of media attention,
which came along with some heavy criticism.
It would only be fair to analyse some of it to help us
understand where the piece of art’s it’s focal problems lie.
Typically Emin is accused by the critics of making
public display of her own emotivism in her work… But in this particular piece
it was also noted that there was a notable lack of execution of form.
Which is popular characteristic of conceptual art in
general
We will later analyse what is intended exactly by
execution of form
(Small description)
The Saatchi gallery’s official website/ online
catalogue describes tracy Emin’s bed in the following way:
“Tracey shows us her own bed, in all its embarrassing
glory. Empty booze bottles, fag butts, stained sheets, worn panties: the bloody
aftermath of a nervous breakdown. By presenting her bed as art, Tracey Emin
shares her most personal space, revealing she’s as insecure and imperfect as
the rest of the world.” (Saatchi webpage:
http://www.saatchigallery.com/artists/artpages/tracey_emin_my_bed.htm)
But by just transporting the bed and objects of common
use and by displaying them in an artistic context. Where does the execution
lie? Let’s keep this question in mind for chapter three.
What we can seem identify in all critics evaluations
of “My bed is that they all have a common feature they agree on, as we were
saying before, they all agree on the fact that Emin’s particular piece lacks
execution of form, or better that it’s not their purpose. Secondly, that Emin’s
subject matter is constantly autobiographical. Tract herself states that “
documentary quote: when I die all things will be worth less I am work of art
blabla”
CHAPTER 3:
The Bed and The shoes
Heidegger helps us understand if Emin’s Bed can
transmit to us a “world”.
As we investigated in Chapter 2, to be able to reveal
the “idea” behind Emin’s Bed, one must to know about Emin. One must understand
her story, and what she’s been through before looking at the piece. This goes
against what a very famous philosopher once defined art by, the notorious
philosopher, Heidegger.
Heidegger analyses the example of a pair of old shoes
painted by Van Gogh in The ‘Origin of the Work of Art’. Written in the mid
-1930’s, the work remained a focal point for discussions about the art of its
time. It began as an exposition of the history of ontological concepts that
issued in the distinctions between form and matter “usually employed” in
aesthetics. He did so, as he put it, because we mistrust this concept of the
thing, which represents it as formed matter.’ ”(Stephen h. Watson first p.)
Heidegger’s describes Van Gogh’s shoe painting:
From out of the dark opening of the worn insides of
the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth… The shoes vibrate with
the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain [i.e.,
“earth” makes “world” possible by inconspicuously giving
itself to the world] and the earth's unexplained self-refusal in the fallow
desolation of the wintry field [i.e., it is also constitutive of earth that it resists
this world by receding back into itself]. (PLT 33–4/GA5 19)
The
point of Heidegger's phenomenological interpretation of Van Gogh's painting of
the shoes is not to engage in an armchair anthropology of farming, but, rather,
to suggest that attending to the “nothing” in Van Gogh's painting reveals the
deepest level of “truth” at work in art. Namely, the essential tension in which
the phenomenologically abundant “earth” simultaneously makes possible and also
resists being finally mastered or fully expressed within the “world.” (Stanford
encyclopedia _ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger-aesthetics/#PheVanGogPaiOntArt)
Heidegger is telling us that the piece of art reveals
a “world”. The work of art goes beyond the artist. To understand the boots you
don’t need to know Van Gogh as a person. If it were possible to know him as a
person, his art would still reveal more about the “world” he is trying to tell.
(quote by Grayson test of the trashcan)
In Tracy Emin’s case, the piece of “My Bed” obtains a
meaning only after you have heard her story about the bed. If you were to find
“My Bed” outside it’s gallery context, you probably wont be able to recognize
it as a work of art.
The context of the gallery is telling you from the
beginning that it is.
A work of art like that of can Gogh, never needed to
strive to survive out of its gallery context. It might be hung in a gallery now
but that wasn’t the aim of the work of art, it could have easily be created
with the idea of it not hanging in an artistic context, but in an ordinary context,
where the work of art would have functioned as extra-ordinary.
Sure, Emin’s reply to Heidegger would be that her bed
does reveal a world – in the context of a gallery. Once one knows who she is,
or maybe, if one assumes that this is the re-enactment of a tragic break-down.
The Saatchi Gallery says that the bed is Emin showing others she is just as
vulnerable as them. However, she would have to describe why the ‘vulnerability’
her bed supposedly shows, if taken out of the gallery context, is different to
the vulnerability of millions of other beds of women going through a hard time.
“The truth disclosed by Van Gogh's
particular (“ontic”) work of art is thus ontological. That is, the tension between
emerging and withdrawing that is visible
in Van Gogh's painting implicitly conditions all artistic creation, which (we have seen) means all
bringing-into-being, that is, all historical intelligibility.
Heidegger thus goes so far as to claim that:
The world
is the self-disclosing openness of the broad paths of the simple and essential
decisions in the destiny of an historical people. The earth is the spontaneous
forthcoming of that which is continually self-secluding and to that extent
sheltering and concealing. World and earth are essentially different from one
another and yet are never separated… The work-being of the work consists in the
fighting of the battle [der Bestreitung des
Streites] between world and earth. (PLT 49/GA5 35–6) (stanford
encyclopedia of philosophy= http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger-aesthetics/#PheVanGogPaiOntArt
)
Heidegger
envisions the artworks world in a battle with the earth and it’s striving
reality. Which is not to be confused with the “truth” the “world” shows us.
That Said, an interesting question to try and answer
is: What if we were to put a pair of old shoes just like the ones in the
painting in a gallery context, like Emin did, eliminating the form of execution
of the painting would it give the same effect? We will try to answer this
question in our conclusive chapter.
Roger Scrutons documentary “Why Beauty Matters” (Why Beauty
Matters, 2009) Scruton
analyses an interesting difference between Eugene Delacroix’s unmade bed
painting and Tracy Emin’s ‘My bed’ by contemplating on the difference what he
says to be:
“Real work of art, which makes ugliness beautiful and
the fake work of art which shares the ugliness as it shows”.(Why Beauty
Matters, 2009, 44 min.)
Although in a way one can understand what Scruton is
trying to say, his phrase is a loophole in its entirety because it is
immediately attaching very strong labels in the confrontation between the two
pieces.
He insists one (Delacroix’s unmade bed) is Real as oppose to Emins Bed, which is Fake.
Scruton is questioning the authenticity of the art
piece by its means of Execution.
Following in the documentary is an interview with
Tracy In ‘Breakfast with Frost’ when the presenter confronts Tracy with the
question as to why she would say her bed is an art piece, her answer is: “The
first thing that makes it art is because I say that it is”.
Hereby we arrive at the door of our next point, By
saying this Tracy is claiming her art to be art a priori, so
simply because her ‘genius’ (Kant, 1892, p.188) states it. To which further on
in the documentary Roger Scruton objects: “How can this be a beautiful work of
art if it makes no attempt to transform the raw material of an idea?” (Why Beauty
Matters, 2009, 45 min.)
By saying
that it’s art because she say’s it is she is claiming what commonly reffered to
as “art a priori” from latin:
CHAPTER 4:
NIETCHE
We reach the second step of the discourse: that if
art, can only exist in the idea and not in the form. The idea is solely that of
affirming that an object is art by art a priori, so art because I say it is. In
this case, the artistic value tilts from the object to the subject. As we may
otherwise put it, the persona.
What is profoundly unique about this style of art, is
that it cannot be imitated. The form or the idea can inimitable in any way, as
it often requires no particular skill that would change the idea. It is on the
other hand, precisely, because the person is not inimitable.
THE POPULARITY OF AN ARTIST (CELEBRITY)
“I mean the fifth most popular art exhibition in
the world last year was the David Hockney show at the Royal Academy, A Bigger
Picture, with those big joyful landscape paintings, and it was paying. Soon
after I was having a conversation with, I shall remain nameless gallery
director of a major contemporary art gallery in this country, and she said she
thought it was one of the worst shows she’d ever seen. … And I don’t think she
was alone in thinking that you know such a popular exhibition wasn’t to the
taste of someone who’s perhaps job was to advance the taste in art of people in
this country. Grayson Perry.”
|
|
|
|
|
|
“The self-consciousness is in the very DNA of
modernism. I mean
modernism really, the whole of modernism, the last
hundred years
of art leading up to say the 1970s, it was all about
the fact that it was self-conscious about the idea it was making art and so
self-consciousness is crippling for an artist. “
The overman is a dionsian artist of the First Rank,
whose greatest, and most original creation is himself. (Gary Catona, 446)
CHAPTER 5:
KANT
WHAT ACTIONS OF EXECUTION PRECLUDE ART AND AN
INRODUCTION TO THE CRITERIA’S BY WHICH WE JUDGE ART TODAY
(Here
Tracy Emins bed and objective image analysis) Image analysis
Find an author that has analysed emin’s bed.
I will briefly review some of the major opinions expressed on the
argument, to get a better idea of how to use them as a tool that further after
will help us when we confront these thesis’s with the conceptual art dilemma of
Tracy Emin’s “my bed”. So would it maybe be easier, instead of asking what art
is, to ask what isn’t art? And furthermore, narrowing down to what we are
mostly interested in our Thesis; execution: What can’t be considered an
artistic execution of form?
The first figure that
we will use, In his time has repeatedly tackled the question of action of
execution of art, and is one of the first that has talked about art in such a
modern way developing many thesis’s: Immanuel Kant.
Kant formulated
theories on concept and form and artistic genius. Which as we will see
philosophers today are still actively re-interpreting.
Kant believed that to
make “beautiful” art one had to posses the faculty of genius
Beautiful art is the art of genius
Genius is the talent (or natural gift), which gives
the rule to art. Since talent, as the innate productive faculty of the artist,
belongs itself to nature, we may express the matter thus: genius
Bradley Murray in his
essay Kant on genius and art describes very concisely what Kant meant by
‘artistic genius’.
He sums up Kant’s
genius in a separation of two factors that can’t survive without the other in
what is referred to as genius:
‘One is that of producing aesthetic ideas, and the
other is that of producing rules guiding an agent’s production of objects with
beautiful forms. Call these the ‘aesthetic idea-giving’ and ‘rule-giving
functions’, respectively.’ (Bradley Murray, date, 200)
Basically Murray is
dividing the Kantian notion of genius in two parts:
Idea of a concept and Execution of a form.
Generally ‘aesthetic idea giving’ and ‘rule-giving
functions is referred to as concept and form.
We will interpret the word ‘concept’ with the word
‘idea’
Idea of a concept and Execution of a form.
Aesthetic idea giving and Rule giving functions
Let’s try and analyse with the help of more
contemporary figures how this idea can survive in contemporary art and how it
can help us in out quest.
To try and understand if a piece like that of Emin’s
can be art if disinvested of form.
Idea of or or Concept:
This is the aesthetic idea giving process:
Joseph Kosuth
Kant
Benjamin . w
Execution of a form:
Another source
What Kant believes to
be necessary for the execution of a form and it’s rule Giving function, is something he
describes as mechanism:
In his own words:
It is not inexpedient to recall that in all free arts
there is yet requisite something compulsory, or, as it is called, mechanism, without which the spirit, which
must be free in art and which alone inspires the work, would have no body and
would evaporate altogether; e.g. in poetry
there must be an accuracy and wealth of language, and also prosody and metre.
[It is not inexpedient, I say, to recall this], for many modern educators
believe that the best way to free art is to remove it from all constraint, and
thus to change it from work into mere play.
(Kant,
1892, p.184)
In describing fundamentally what qualities form might
posses, Kant shed’s light on an interesting concept if we put it into relation
with what is intended by conceptual art today. Kant tells us that (what he
considers to be) a mechanism is
compulsory in the execution of art as with the example of poetry that requires
“accuracy and wealth of language” he recalls that also in art it is requisite
to contain a mechanism by which an external viewer can discover the true meaning of art by finding it’s
truth (heid) and without which in his words it would “thus change it
from work into mere play”
“As an antinomy
art claims to be both form and non-form. For art to be form it needs
to also play the part of non-form.” (Art’s way out)
So for it to
be art the form cannot survive without its idea
In this chapter Tracy Emin’s “My Bed” will be
confronted with the readymade phenomenon, Kant in this case will help us
individuate in which part of the work of art the Form can reside (if it
resides). We have summed up
what comes with artistic execution, and what the criteria by which we judge it
is.
Now, we come
back to and important point in the execution of an art piece.
Could it be
that the execution of a form can simply happen by the choice of a medium?
But Duchamps’ intent to signal the end of art – and not just the kind
of post-auratic art Benjamin speaks about – was doomed to fail. A urinal or a
bicycle loses its quality as equipment as soon as the artist divests it from
its usefulness and reliability. “Reliability” is what Heidegger, who
ponderously discusses the origin of the work of art, pins down as “an essential
being of the equipment”. Taken away from it, the urinal, now called Fountain,
is stripped of its previous role as a pisser; it ceases giving the “world” its
“reliability” and “security”.
Heidegger’s thesis, despite its rambling prose, provides a good conceptual
framework to examine Duchamp’s aesthetics (or his denial of it). Writing about
the origin of the work of art, the author of Being and Time points out that
“the production of equipment is finished when a material has been so formed as
to be ready for use”. Now we understand why Fountain has something unfinished
about it – something that has transformed it into a subject of endless
discussion among critics, historians and philosophers. Right after Duchamp used
it as a provocative sign and presented it to the New York’s Society of
Independent Artists, it departed
from, to use Heidegger’s words, the “boringly obtrusive usualness” of
“use-things” falling into disuse. Fifty years after the show, Duchamp recalled,
“I threw the urinal in their faces and now they admire it for its aesthetic
beauty."
Duchamp should have known why. The urinal, or the bicycle, is admired
or distinguished as a work of art once it has the distinction of having been
created. The “createdness” of the object makes it separate from things “made”.
It is true that the Greeks use the same word techne for craft and art, but
Heidegger warns us that the word denotes also “a mode of knowing”. The nature
of knowing consists of aletheia, that is, “the uncovering of beings”.(duchamp’s
failiure= http://biennale.cp-foundation.org/2003/essays04.html )
CONCLUSION:
Indeed a bounty of aesthetic viewpoints have been
discussed up to now, and it can feel like a lot of questions have been asked.
We can rest assured that many have now found a solution.
In the society we are living in today, more people go
to see exhibitions than they go to see movies. In light of this, it is
important to reflect upon aesthetics because as we must come to terms that art
has now become extremely publicised. This is neither a good or bad thing, it
simply is.
“Hans Belting, he thought that the idea of art we have today - of things
we go to see in galleries and that we contemplate as objects - started in about
1400. And this kind of trawled along and it was refined and we sort of took it
for granted - oh yeah that’s art, that’s art - until modernism came along, late
19th century/mid
19th century.
People started questioning what was art, what’s this thing we’re doing? And it
went through this long transition, this very self-conscious thing where people,
artists started questioning the nature of art until along came Duchamp who
famously posited that anything could be art.”
It’s been twenty years since the “My Bed” was made it
is likely that it will become
Although change is inevitable and one must be able to
endorse progression.
“Dont
start with the good old things but the bad new ones,’ Brecht famously said.”
(A. Broomberg, O. Chanarin, 2011)
It is difficult to sometimes analyse such change as
progressive, but rather see it as regressive under certain aspects. How can an
anti-cultural, anti-aesthetic pro-consumerist art be seen as a progression when
in doesn’t help the viewer to higher his state of conscience, intellectuality
and inspiration but just gives him a picture of ignorance and degradation?
No comments:
Post a Comment