A Paradigm Shift in 20th Century Art : Anthony Bond

Twentieth-century art includes many strategies intended to deal with the perceived crisis in representation that arose as modernism separated representations of the world from the illusion of its appearance. What relationship could art now to have to life?

Picasso and Duchamp each learned from tribal art which they recognised as conceptual. Tribal art represents an understanding of events and forces at work in the world rather than recreating the appearance of things.

Their reintroduction of objects and materials as signifiers also opened the boundary between art and life, contravening modernist orthodoxy that maintained the autonomy of art. This strategy can not be seen only as an avant garde innovation it was in part a return to pre-Renaissance applications of the index.

Their ideas exceeded the scope of prevailing critical ideologies since their time ie; Formalist criticism that describes the compositional/optical aspects of a work and The rhetoric of the avant-garde that constantly redefines the institution of art and its market. Semiotic analysis more recently provided a tool for unpicking the text embedded in the image but it is seldom sensitive to the sensory effect of materials that engage bodily memory.

Some of the most powerful art of the post war period draws upon the mnemonic function of materials and the inherent characteristics of particular objects once they have been freed from their purely instrumental role in the process of image making.

The fact that every viewing produces a reading based on the specific memory (including body memory) of the viewer, entails an indefinite delay in the foreclosure of meaning.

The paradigm shift
In 1912 Picasso made an extraordinary conceptual leap forward and at the same time a step back in time to a pre-iconic form of representation.

SLIDE 1. Still Life with Chair Caning 1912
This work is a marvellous and complex experiment in the possibilities of a visual language that incorporates the index.

The medieval icon could function as a holy object with spiritual power over and above its pictorial/iconic content. It could claim a special status as relic, when for example, the frame was said to contain a piece of the true cross or the shinbone of the saint.

Handling this object could simultaneously stimulate an intellectual appreciation of the story depicted and deliver a bodily impact by virtue of actual contact with the saint.

In this still life Picasso makes a secular point about representation which none the less holds metaphysical connotations.

At the heart of modern art lies a dilemma. If art is no longer to be valued for its mimetic effects what is its relationship to reality. This precipitates a crisis in the idea of art as representation, which can also be viewed as a special case of the place of art between nature and culture.

Still Life with Chair Caning will be very familiar to everyone here but I would like to note some relevant points for this paper.

1. The shape of the canvas. At that time Picasso and Braque often used ovals in their analytic cubist works to subvert the tyranny of the rectangular frame. The rectangle which always suggests a window onto reality. Their cubist compositions clustered to the centre refusing the compositional hegemony of the frame. This is unusual, in being horizontal. It gives the impression of a circle seen in perspective. Ie the table top itself.

2. The composition seems to be of a still life on a tabletop but the edge of the table is the frame of the painting. Already the frame is within as well as without the composition. It now has at least two functions.

3. The rope is a real rope coil made by a sailor. It binds the work in a literal sense as if parodying the role of a frame. It also mimics a table in Picasso�s studio that has a carved rope motif at its edge. It is a real thing standing in for its own representation. Picasso is still twisting the relationship between things and their representation.

4. Among the painted elements of the composition there is an applied piece of oilcloth. This was a common material used to cover tables in Paris cafes. The motif of the cloth simulates or is a representation of the caning of a chair. This suggests that the still life may be set up on a chair rather than the table we supposed. More likely it is simply being the tablecloth. In Paris at the time such tablecloths were often held in place by a rope coil.

5. The surface of the painting has been put in a compromising position because the table top is represented by the rope which is perfectly vertical on the wall as we can see and feel and yet it represents something absolutely horizontal. This is normal in illusionistic painting but now the surface is being made real in its own right as a vertical plane. (An important component of modern painting!) A real rope inserted within the iconic status of the composition further contradicts it.

SLIDE 2, Duchamp Bicycle Wheel 1912/15
In the same year 1912, Duchamp placed a bicycle wheel onto a stool as an object of reverie when the wheel was spinning. Three years later he had his sister Suzanne go to his studio and sign and title it as a Readymade sculpture.

This is another complex action that questions the nature of the real and its representations. There are several of Duchamp�s strategies represented in this simple act.
It is a found object,
It was made into art by proxy,
At a delay, according to a set of rules invented by Duchamp for the readymade.
The hand of the artist was very much at a distance,
The title is an irrational adjunct that deflects attention away from the purely visual and delays resolution of the object�s representational status. For example The Snow Shovel, also completed by Suzanne at a distance, was to entitled In Advance of The Broken Arm Duchamp�s instructions to Suzanne in his letter 15/1/1916 warns her �do not struggle too much to understand the meaning, romantic, impressionist, or cubist has nothing to do with it.� really helpful advice.
Delay is about keeping the process of interpretation or response open. It encourages endless conjecture. Duchamp�s project was to find ways to delay closure indefinitely. It can not be reduced to a Marxist critique of the art market although it entailed a good laugh at its expense.

Duchamp�s famous �delays�, take us �through the looking glass�. The reflective and transparent nature of glass itself engaging the viewer�s actual participation, making the boundary of the image and real time ambiguous. The final great delay in Etant Donn�s also coopts the viewer as a found object.

Chance
Found objects were not the only strategy Duchamp employed to keep the work open to the world, allowing chance to direct his choices was a critical strategy which employed nature to contaminate culture.

SLIDE 3. Dust in The Large Glass
The dust accumulated in the production of The Large Glass
SLIDE 4. Large glass detail
SLIDE 5 The Standard Stoppages.
SLIDE 6. Lingering veils in Large glass
SLIDE 7. The Large Glass see how the veils determine the form of the brides blossoming. and the Stoppages form the capillaries for the bachelors secretions.

The content in materials
Glass itself is an important element in Duchamp�s work. It carries a number of associations such as fragility, transparency, reflectivity, cleanliness, it is clinical, scientific etc�because of its transparency and reflectivity the viewer can see others beyond its screen and catch their own reflection in it (on it) as a part of the visual experience of the piece. It is a work that is remade with each viewing.

SLIDE 8. Door of Etant Donn�s
The viewer bends to view and becomes a part of the tableau
SLIDE 9. View through the door of Etant Donn�s

The manual becomes a 20yr delay, which reveals a new dramatic interpretation to the work. In this folder that Duchamp gave to Philadelphia subject to a 20 year moratorium on its publication, we discover a new and dark strand to the work including apparently gratuitous fragmentation of the female body. In place of the promoted sexual and pastoral idyll there is evidence of an atrocity.

As Duchamp often said, it is better to do it in art than it is to do it in life.

SLIDE 10. Pages from the manual
SLIDE 11. Page from the manual

These uses of material, of found objects and chance are strategies for opening the work to the effects of the world. They rupture the seal between art and life /nature and culture! This in turn creates an open viewing situation � there is an indefinite delay that allows every subsequent viewing to recreate the work.

I am not going to trace every step along the way although there are many examples of the use of found materials in Surrealism and Dada, Neo Dada and of course Nouveaux Realisme. John Cage�s 3�33� is an example in music where the found sound within 3�33� of silence is an acknowledged Duchampian gesture.

In stead I want to jump to Joseph Beuys. His work evolved into an environmental campaign, but at its heart there was a commitment to investigating the boundaries of art and culture.
Beuys made his connection to the material world in a less conceptual way than Duchamp; his great gift was to bring out the inherent voices of objects and substances and to orchestrate them into highly provocative assemblages.

Beuys experienced two traumas. The well known story of his near death in a war time air crash -presumed dead and brought back to life by nomadic people in the Crimea,
And:
After an enthusiastic participation in the Hitler youth, revelling in the sense of power and energy it created, he came back from his physical trauma to realise he had been an active and willing participant in the holocaust.

His subsequent mental collapse is a significant personal fragment of the greater trauma of the whole of Europe.

While he was recovering he spent time on a friend�s farm where he took refuge in the cow barn whenever he was unbearably troubled. Here he recalled how the smell of manure, milk, straw and cows breath connected him back to a material and in a way a feminine world that his war time experiences had separated him from. He equated the feminine principle with a pre iconic civilisation before language and knowledge of mortality (Prometheus/Adam) separated mankind from nature.

SLIDE 12 Untitled drawing 1955
His many drawings of animals and of prehistoric goddesses during the time of his convalescence provide a clear demonstration of this idea.
SLIDE 13. Fat Girl 1955

The restorative organic connotations of the cowshed come back in the Queen bee. Bodily secretions that build a kind of sculpture fascinated him. Chemical changes in the body are seen as providing the engine for creativity. Just as the bee makes its architecture out of its own bodily processes. In such a case culture and nature become one and the same.
SLIDE 14. Queen Bee 1952
SLIDE 15. Queen Bee 1952

Beuys� repertoire of materials and objects continued with a series of assemblages incorporating sculptures often also inspired by prehistoric forms. The Auschwitz vitrine at Darmstadt dating from 1958 for example
SLIDE 16. Auschwitz 1958.
SLIDE 17. Auschwitz 1958.
SLIDE 18. Auschwitz 1958.
SLIDE 19. Auschwitz 1958.

Performance is akin to the found object since it occupies our everyday time and space. Beuys made many performances as rituals of healing and later in life he became more and more active in radical green politics.

The earlier performances were cathartic and some residues found their way into vitrines at Darmstadt. Bitten pieces of fat for example.

SLIDE 20. Mainstream, Land down under 1967
SLIDE 21. Mainstream, Land down under 1967
SLIDE 22. Mainstream, Land down under 1967

SLIDE 23. Explaining pictures to a dead Hare 1965
The bone radio is also an important part of this reiteration of the idea of communication, as central to Beuys� work, including the idea of communicating between those aspects of humanity implicated in culture with those that reflect its origin in nature The hare often symbolises passage between the world of the living and the spirits in antiquity.
SLIDE 24. Explaining pictures to a dead Hare 1965 RADIO
SLIDE 25. Explaining pictures to a dead Hare 1965 STOOL
Note the felt on the chair, an insulator, part of the story of energy and bodily chemistry.

SLIDE 26. Manressa 1966
In Manressa he actually created currents by making layers of insulation and conductors. He made a series of works known as Fonds or batteries. In Manressa sparks flew form his fingers.
SLIDE 27. Fonds II 1968
SLIDE 28. Fonds II 1968

His later works became more literal as political and green actions.
SLIDE 29. Saving the Woods 1972
Note the young Kiefer behind Beuys.

Anselm Kiefer has been the natural heir to Beuys. He began by continuing to maintain the post war trauma in Germany and gradually progressed to more metaphysical concerns.

His debt to Duchamp is clearest in the relation between AGNSW collections Glaube Hoffnung Liebe and The Large Glass. In an earlier version at the studio, Kiefer tried to make a vertical diptych with the rocks and sea below as in this painting and above three windows in the sky. These were to be a feminine opening however the rectangular shape made them Apollonian. Kiefer liked these contradictions but was not pleased to have Duchamp�s lingering veils invoked at the time. he later abandoned the top panel and replaced it with the propeller which would have the potential to fly over the horizon except that being made of lead it would never get off the ground. ( like the chocolate grinder of the material bachelors apparatus).

SLIDE 30. Glaube Hoffnung Liebe 1984/5
SLIDE 31. The Large Glass. 1915-1923

SLIDE 32. Lilith 1989
In another case, Etant Donn�s appears in this photomontage by Kiefer of the mythical figure of Lilith. The figure of a woman is lying with her head nearest us, her spread legs facing away from us. In the distance the ruins of a city is framed by her legs, it is a reverse image of Etant Donn�s. We are encouraged to identify with Lillith giving birth to and despoiling culture.

Like Beuys Kiefer is fascinated by knowledge including arcane and ancient thinking. They both think of this accumulation of knowledge as secretions of the human organism. Kiefer�s High Priestess is akin to Beuys� Fonds. This interpretation accords with his continuing investigation of the connection between nature and culture.

SLIDE 33. The high Priestess 1990
He also collects herbs and ancient texts about their use. Like Beuys he sees nature as having the potential to heal culture.

The studio gives a strong sense of his obsessive use of diverse materials including his herbal collections.
SLIDES 34. to 43 The Studio 1996

SLIDE 44. Doris Salcedo Atrabilliarios 1991
The body stores responses to materials and objects which artists may engage. Doris Salcedo is perhaps the most extraordinary contemporary artist to engage with this bodily memory.
Doris Salcedo is able to raise our empathic engagement with others to an exquisite level of pain.
SLIDE 45. Doris Salcedo Atrabilliarios 1991
In Atrabiliarios, an installation from the collection of The Art Gallery of New South Wales, she evokes absence and loss by using materials and processes that locate memory in the body. The viewer�s response is, in turn, emotional�even visceral�rather than purely intellectual. Niches cut into the plaster wall contained shoes as relics or attributes of lost people donated by the families of those who have disappeared in the political and economic violence that has racked her native Colombia. The niches are then sealed with a membrane of animal caul which is literally sutured into the plaster of the wall. Barely visible through the membrane, the shoes are a particularly haunting evocation of their absent owners. The animal skin and the shoes inevitably recall the grizzly souvenirs of Nazi death camps.

The shift that these works exploit is an opening of art to life. The cat is out of the bag and the index is back in the icon.

Anthony Bond