Navin Rawanchaikul

There Is No Voice, 1993

John Armleder

Popoxcomitl, 2006

Convallaria Majalis, 2003

Paris Quadrifolia, 2003

Larry Poons

Windmill

Lycoming, 1977

Untitled

Han-San Cadence, 1963

Frank Stella

Empress of India, 1965

Quathlamba, 1964

Sinjerli Variation IV, 1977

Bertrand Lavier

Black Adder II, 2005

Empress of India II, 2005

Walt Disney Productions, 1998

Treatise on Navigation / Art & the Quotidian Object

Words of the day: 

indifference (Bourriaud) and disinterestedness (Iversen)

1. "The found object shares with the readymade a lack of obvious aesthetic quality and little intervention on the part of the artist beyond putting the object in circulation, but in almost every other respect it is dissimilar. The difference is attributable to Breton's positing the found object in a different space--the space of the unconscious. . . . The contrast between the Duchampian rendezvous and the Bretonian encounter should now be clear. While the readymade is essentially indifferent, multiple, and mass-produced, the found object is essentially singular or irreplaceable, and both lost and found" (Iversen 48-50). What, then, distinguishes the quotidian object from the the readymade or the found object? 

2. ". . . Duchamp himself preferred to see his readymades as proof that art is in fact no different from anything else in the world. Instead of elevating the commonplace, this interpretation casts art off its pedestal and into everyday life" (Heartney 40). How does this compare to Bourriaud's quote: "With this radical gesture, which consists of presenting an everyday object of consumption as a work of art, the entire lexical field of the visual arts found itself augmented by a new possibility: signifying not with the aid of a sign but with that of reality itself" (146)?

3. "'When you make an ordinary painting,' [Duchamp] explains, 'there is always a choice: you choose your colors, you choose your canvas, you choose the subject, you choose everything. There isn't any art; it is a choice, essentially. There [with the readymade], it's the same thing. It is a choice of object.' . . . The beauty of indifference championed by Duchamp flies in the face of the purely retinal beauty of painting and sculpture: 'Instead of choosing something you like or dislike, you choose something without any interest, visually, for an artist. In other words, you arrive at a state of indifference toward that object" (Bourriaud 147). How do you arrive at this state of indifference? Simply by making a choice, aren't you engaging with that object? 

4. "Appropriation, with its aggressive connotations, implies competition, a dispute over a territory that could equally well belong to any one of the combatants. Insofar as the readymade implies 'giving a new meaning' to an object, or more precisely removing it from its territory or place of origin, the notion of appropriation doesn't make any sense here; it doesn't really apply. Moreover, the readymade is in essence immaterial; it has no physical importance. If destroyed, it can be replaced, or not. No one owns it" (Bourriaud 147).  Is appropriation competitive? Can it be mutually beneficial? When Sherri Levine re-photographs Walker Evan's work, doesn't this appropriation give new life to Evan's work while imbuing her own work with a past? Are either works diminished for it?

5. "Couldn't GNU/Linux be said to operate on the principle of the reciprocal readymade? It runs up against a certain fear related to being a user of technology. This fear stems from our panic at the prospect of reaching our threshold of incompetence. . . . We cannot conceive of manipulating objects beyond certain limits: the ideology of competence induces us unconsciously to refuse reading what we are not supposed to understand, operating machines without an instruction manual, making use of worlds that feel foreign to us; this is doubtless misguided" (Bourriaud 152-53). How do we overcome this threshold? Perhaps, by taking a seminar class and reading "what we are not supposed to understand" (i.e. The Radicant)?

6. "And if the mechanically reproduced image can be understood as 'disinterested,' so also might the factory-made, mass-produced object--provided that it is denatured so as to neutralize its status as a commodity intended to satisfy desire. The celebrated autonomy of the work of art, it turns out, implies the obliteration of the poet or painter in his or her medium. It is fundamentally about the displacement of one's own agency so that something other can surface. The aim is to cut through stereotype and sentiment so as to discover what Mallarme called 'a strange new beauty'" (Iversen 47). How does an artist displace their own agency? What is this "strange new beauty"? 

7. "[Hal Foster] suggests that Breton's conception of the found object anticipates Lacan's objet petit a--the lost object which sets desire in motion and which, paradoxically, represents both a hole in the integrity of our world and the thing that comes to hide the hole" (Iversen 49). Explain. Please.

Heartney, Eleanor. "Art & the Quotidian Object: The Transformation of the Readymade."

Iversen, Margaret. "Readymade, Found Object, Photograph."