Framing The Everyday - Legacies of the Readymade.  Tony Bond  1/9/98

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 have to life?

Much of the energy of modern art came from the struggle to establish meaningful positions on this question.  I will concentrate on one set of strategies that can be traced back to Picasso and Duchamp.  One important discovery that each of them made in their different ways was the conceptual nature of tribal art.  While much is made of the expressive nature and spiritual power of tribal art as a stimulus for modernism, the simple proposition that this art often represents an understanding of events and forces at work in the world rather than recreating the appearance of things is the crux of the matter. 

This realisation permitted a leap forward in the trajectory of modern art epitomised by C�zanne�s emphasis on sensation over finished or complete pictorial representations.  Art, they realised, could embody abstract ideas directly rather than illustrating them pictorially.  In this way modern art made contact with ancient traditions that had been displaced by mimetic virtuosity that had reached its climax in nineteenth century academic painting.

Both Picasso and Duchamp made further discoveries arising from pre-modern representational practices.  Their reintroduction of objects and materials as signifiers opened the boundary between art and life, contravening modernist orthodoxy that maintained the autonomy of art.  Their ideas exceeded the scope of prevailing critical ideologies and continue to do so to the present.  I take these ideologies to be; 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.

The introduction by these artists of the trace within the iconography of modern art produces a critical change in the nature of visual communication.  Picasso made use of the chair caning and rope to make a secular point about the boundary between art and life.  This was in effect a return to a pre-modern use of the index which flourished in medieval iconography.  The inclusion of the saint�s shinbone or the true cross in an image allowed the text to be read visually while conveying the power of the relic directly and bodily to the viewer.  While this is not a view often attributed to Picasso and Duchamp it becomes fundamentally important in post war art with Joseph Beuys being a key example.

The outstanding result of this and related practices in this century has been to open art to life and maintain this openness.  As a consequence of the open object, the viewing situation is also kept open indefinitely allowing each observer to engage the work with their specific experience of the world.  While this was a situation described elegantly by Malarm� earlier this century it remains contentious in art criticism.

In May 1912 Picasso reintroduced a pre-iconic form of representation where real things or fragments appear within representations thereby multiplying any iconic signification.   Still Life With Chair Caning.  is an oval composition framed by an endless mariner�s rope loop made to order for Picasso by a sail maker.  Since the rope is the edge of the sign for the table on which the still life is displayed, it is easy to connect it to Picasso�s studio table which had a rope motif round its rim.  Here Picasso is using the original model of a decorative conceit to stand in for its copy; a curious inversion of the illusionism of painting.  As a framing device it simultaneously suggests the boundaries of the picture and the boundaries of the surface on which the objects rest.  It can also be seen as an ironic parody of the traditional picture frame.

The endless rope has very strong associations with the ancient symbolism of the serpent swallowing its tail in the wheel of life, death and rebirth absence and presence.  Picasso's use of the rope frame secures "a reality effect" within its boundary reifying the object while seeming to deny the right of that reality to be part of the external world, now you see it now you don't. 

This reality effect is however undermined because the frame is also standing for the subject depicted, a table edge.  It would be pure speculation to suggest that this element in the image is a conscious metaphor for the processes involved in cubist deconstruction of the pictorial image and the rebirth of allegory through the onset of synthesis.  Nonetheless the devices Picasso has employed in this collage prefigure fundamental new opportunities not only for formal meaning in the construction of an autonomous painted surface but also for complex layering of meaning through association with real objects and the painted image.

An oval of rope inevitably carries with it other associations from everyday use which are not subordinated to an abstract function.  It could be the rope belt of a sailor, a coil of rope seen in perspective on a ships deck or the hangman's noose. It is in fact a real object.  The only real thing in the whole composition and retains its meaning as such. 

It is interesting to note that the motif of a rope had been recurrent in Picasso's analytic cubist paintings since 1910.  It was one of the signs that he introduced along with fragments of musical instruments and letters.  This may have been simply a visual attachment to the table edge in the studio but it had clearly had some time to work on his imagination so its rebirth as real rope in this work particularly in the form of a frame which paradoxically excludes "the real" could not be seen as an arbitrary choice.

The many other references to French table coverings held in place by rope coils and the ambiguous functioning of the motif on the oil cloth are all well known and continue this convolution of readings of art and life in an endless loop.

1912 was also the year when Duchamp placed a spinning bicycle wheel onto a stool to provide himself with a device to stimulate reverie.  Three years later he had his sister Susanne go to the studio and inscribe it as a Readymade.  Readymades and their strange titles adopt a Surrealist strategy for avoiding interpretive foreclosure and keeping the meaning of a work alive. 

In 1914 he dated and titled another Readymade, Egoutoir, this metal bottle rack was a common object in France where wine bottles were filled for clients from larger vats.  After washing the bottles were left upside down on the Egoutoir to drain . The word sounds much like the French word egouter literally to remove taste a humorous but very significant coincidence for the idea of the Readymade.  Duchamp commonly used language and images in a punning way to generate double meanings.  The rejection of taste is a formative example of the avant-garde rejecting the established system of incorporation by the market.  It is a realist position because it resists fixed questions of taste, good or bad, right or wrong because these are very blunt tools for revealing the world.  If we want to discover what the world is like, how it changes and how our very looking and being, affects it we must find more subtle questions.

While the rhetoric of the avant garde limits Duchamp�s contribution to this conceptual critique of the institution of art, Duchamp�s strategies for confounding rational analysis and closure have far more significant and troubling connotations.  His famous �delays� ( The Large Glass was subtitled a delay in glass), take us through the looking glass into a world where fragments of ideas circulate freely and colliding to form endless unstable sequences. 

The reflective and transparent nature of glass itself engages 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.  Duchamp found other ways to keep the work open to the world such as allowing chance to direct his choices.  The dust accumulated in the production of The Large Glass,  The Three Standard Stoppages and The Lingering Veils

Joseph Beuys made materials/objects resonate with our bodies.  Eg. Auschwitz vitrines *** from the Str�hrer collection at Darmstadt.  Performance art also addresses the boundary of art and life.  Beuys� Performances gave rise to traces or relics that seem to preserve his energy in vitrines or installations. eg.  Mainstream, Manressa and  Explaining Pictures to a Dead Hare. 
By accumulating layers of insulation and conductors eg.  felt and copper Beuys created energy flows that he saw as metaphors for bodily creativity bridging culture and nature.  These arrangements were known as Fonds or batteries.

Anselm Kiefer�s The High Priestess  1990, is another form of battery or accumulation of cultural energy.  Kiefer�s Studio contains a mass of materials including traditional herbs and ancient manuscripts about herbal cures.  Like Beuys he investigates the history of scientific and arcane thinking on healing the wound separating nature and culture.

Doris Salcedo�s Atrabiliarios is a contemporary example of how materials can be made to speak directly through our nervous system while functioning to embody memories.  Today many artists use the impedimenta of daily life as a form of portraiture.  See MCA exhibition of personal effects.

Anthony Bond