![]() We might not be surprised, then, to find a readymade object transformed into a work of art, or becoming a part of a work of art, as a fragment of trompe l’oeil. In this kind of art (the term “trompe l’oeil” did not come into use until the 19th century, but its referent was clearly in existence much earlier), painting and representation pretend to destroy themselves on behalf of the objects they represent. This tension constitutes the only real interest of trompe l’oeil. Love of the object a painting represents and love of painting itself are antithetical we cannot give to one without taking away from the other. From here to Duchamp, the everyday object most often exercises its fascination through this filter. The object depicted may be utterly commonplace and everyday in becoming an element in a mosaic or painting, however, it is placed at a remove from reality by an act of representation, or, more exactly, of mimesis-a manifestation of techne. 7) Before becoming a genre in Western art of the 17th century, the still life, often rendered in trompe l’oeil, was regularly practiced by the Greek painters and then by the Romans, as several fresco fragments at Herculaneum and Pompeii attest. (Historians have attributed this mosaic to Sosos of Pergamum, who lived in the second or third century B.C. Jumping a few score millennia we find a similar link in Roman mosaics, in which, under the title “The Unswept Room,” appear such modest objects as the leftovers of a meal. ![]() Nevertheless, in the fact that ”these natural forms were noticed by our zoologica l predecessors“ Leroi-Gourhan sees ”a degree of esthetic interest” 6-a perception we may amp lify by noting the relationship between these found objects and the esthetics of the readymade. These include a thick spiraled shell of a fossil mollusk of the Mesozoic or Secondary era, a ball-shaped cluster of coral of the same epoch, and oddly shaped blocks of iron pyrites.” 5 There is no suggestion here that these things are works of art, nor even that they are artifacts, that they were marked or worked on for some long-forgotten human end. “At Arcy-sur-Cure (Yonne),” notes André Leroi-Gourhan, “I discovered a number of odd objects picked up by the inhabitants of the Cave of the Hyena in the course of their wanderings. 4) But can another interpretation of the recurrence of the everyday object in 20th-century art be formulated? Is it possible to plot a genealogy of object art in which Duchamp would have another significance besides his influence on the work of his so-called descendants? I would argue that the Duchampian readymade can be recognized as a manifestation-a premonitory and spectacular one-of a logic more general than the narrow trajectory that has been charted for it, and that from this view we can arrive at some basis for esthetic comparison among works calling on the values and virtues of the readymade.ĮVERYDAY OBJECTS SEEM TO HAVE exercised a fascination over human beings since well before recorded history. The only way out of this dead end is a full stop (the assertion that Duchamp’s readymades alone have undergone the magical transmutation of object into art) or a shift into reverse (the idea that Duchamp’s readymades were only transformable into art as a continuation of painting by other means. Theoretically, no amount of difference between one readymade and another can serve as a basis for esthetic distinctions. ![]() Yet having labeled an object a readymade, having validated it as “art,” must we then wash our hands of the critical burden, as though an “equals” sign ran through every object ever designated a member of the class? Duchamp actually remarked once that “taste-bad or good-is the greatest enemy of art.” 2 But if the readymade has become a genre, an artistic technique, 3 is it the first such to dispense completely with the judgment of taste? What happens if we replace the couplet ”this is beautiful/this is not beautiful,“ the formula of traditional esthetics, with the phrase ”this is art/this is not art"? Hasn’t the readymade in one stroke canceled the distinction between good and bad art? Duchamp’s readymades transformed esthetic judgment, challenged the functions and powers of critical discourse. Though the mere reenactment of Duchamp’s maneuver would seem to lack any intrinsic interest, 1 it is nevertheless among the most often-repeated artistic gestures of our century. CONVENTIONAL WISDOM TELLS US THAT the father of “object art” was Marcel Duchamp-that in transplanting the perfectly ordinary manufactured urinal of his 1917 Fountain from the vendor’s shelf to the exhibition space Duchamp rattled the foundation of the work of art itself.
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