After I responded to some of her questions, I re-read the email with my answers and decided to post it here. Below is an expurgated version of our email conversation.
KAT:
...while, as you say, close-reading your blog,
I find myself looking up all kinds of things. As something of a
dilettante with only a cursory grasp of the Futurists I peruse their
wikipedia entry, as I recalled primarily their deliberate and violent
break with the past, but not that which would lead them to resent (or
not allow) their works to hang in a museum. And so here would be a
point in which I ask you for clarification, because my basic
understanding of their ideals is that they wanted to completely
overturn the ideas of what is art, but not to eradicate the concept --
in fact they were trying to be the state art of Italy? So that would
be a gap you could help with.
WILL:
Yes. It appears there is a dimension of the Futurists that you are not familiar with. Here is a line from the initial Futurist manifesto, written by Marinetti: "destroy
the museums, the libraries, every type of academy." There was another
time when he went to Venice, climbed the bell tower in Piazza San Marco
and threw hundreds of mimeographed pieces of paper onto the ground.
Those papers had similar sentiments written on them, and he cited
Venice as the primary offender of Italy's learned habit of archiving
everything. That archival tendency was something the Futurists hated.
They wanted war to obliterate everything so that people could start
over. That sentiment is complicated, and because many people don't
fully unpack its complexity it has become commonplace to link the
Futurists to the Fascists. This is not to say that they didn't have
Fascist ideals, but the link between, say, Marinetti and Mussolini is
not one-to-one. So, on the one hand, the Futurists did indeed want to
overturn art. On the other hand, that desire required the destruction
of Italy's historical sensibility, which meant the simultaneous
destruction of museums and all old forms of art.
Also your example of the Fountain, which I do vaguely know as the
thing that got people to think just a fucking urinal was art, and your
discussion of the rest of the readymade -- I want to unpack this
paragraph here:"Why, for example, is one item in a museum but another is not?" --
QED that which is in an art museum is art, and is it overly simplistic
to say that it is art because somebody suggested that it was and
somebody else agreed? Perhaps, but it seems to me that when it comes
to this sort of thing it is always about the first thing that made us
shift our boundaries of art -- no other urinal will be in a museum just
because, there will only be one canvas painted entirely black, one
empty room. The idea is the art, not the execution (yeah, your three
year old could have painted that, but she didn't think of it first,
etc). And that's sort of what they were going for, no? Going all
Cultural Revolution without all the mass famine (though these movements
do seem to coincide with totalitarianism) [aside: I have always been
wildly enamored of the layout of the modern art wing at the Art
Institute of Chicago, you access it by walking through the ancient
Chinese art section, and as you approach the only visible painting
facing out is Andy Warhol's portrait of Mao Zedong. Delightful].
WILL:
I'm not sure what your point is exactly here. I
mostly agree with what you've written, but it's not necessarily the
case that there will be only one black canvas, one empty room, etc. In
fact, one of the things that Duchamp's readymades reveal is the process
of mechanical reproduction that had begun to infiltrate the production
of artworks in the beginning of the twentieth century. There is a
contemporary artist named Shirley Levine who has made her entire career
by copying other people's works of art. There are many copies or
derivations of Duchamp's urinal in many museums throughout the US and
Europe. The interesting question is: why? What makes those interesting?
KAT:
"Can I touch this piece of art? No? Why not? What’s it worth? 27
million dollars? Is that ridiculous?" Worth, like worth, like 27
million dollars could buy 13.5 million rounds of antibiotics or save 3
million kids from dying of malaria and so on? Yeah, that's
ridiculous. But that's not how we measure things, that sandwich isn't
.4 kids, that Mercedes isn't 120,000 puppies, that's just what we'll
pay to get the thing we want, and isn't it all ridiculous? Everything
has a price that's exorbitant to some and cheap for others and now
we're back to capital, immanent to itself.
WILL:
Again, I mostly agree, but that wasn't my point.
Note the question marks at the end of those short discursive
articulations. I'm mostly interested in asking the question. Viewed in
its historical specificity, I believe that Duchamp's act of submitting
the urinal is a better work of art than the urinal itself, since it was
that act and not the object that made certain practices in the world of
modern museums visible. But, looking at the object itself, which has
detached itself, perhaps I'd say become semi-autonomous, from its
historical specificity, (sorry about the grammar here) then I'd say we
have to re-appraise the situation. As a semi-autonomous art object with an
appraised monetary value of 27 million dollars, what is the urinal
today? Well, a lot of things. It's certainly a teaching tool. It's also
a type of non-errupting, perpetually-about-to-explode object that draws
(or should draw) one's attention to the monetary value of art in
general. Not in order to bicker about capitalist practices of wealth
accumulation, but to open a conversation about money, value, exchange,
use, art, labor, and history. The conversation is interesting. Perhaps
I was too heavy-handed with the rhetoric in my blog post...
KAT:
"The readymade objects displayed, tacitly, an agreement between
museum-goers and the museum establishment itself that basically
reserved the space of the museum for a kind of art that only a certain
slice of the population could afford and that another slice could pay
12 euro to see." Do you mean that it flies in the face of this
agreement? I am not sure I follow otherwise as we're talking about
objects that clearly are affordable to many, but perhaps this just
flows into this next sentence:"Again, though, the last laugh may be on Duchamp and his ilk
because all of that “junk” has been transformed into high art, and the
everydayness to which those objects once spoke is now lost to
history." I actually don't buy this: though I get where you're coming
from, I do not think this kind of art strips these objects from their
everydayness. Yeah, that one urinal is now far beyond the
accessibility of the every day, but I think it makes us look at all the
other lowly urinals we (not me, but you know what I mean) see every day
with a different eye. They may not all be art, but they all have
potential. It seems to me that the class of things we term everyday
now includes objects that are art, instead of removing those
individual everyday objects from that class. I feel that now we as a
culture are more adept at finding the beauty in "ugly" industrial or
utilitarian objects, seeing art where a century ago we would have only
seen hulking piles of junk, and entirely on our own, not being told
that it's "Art". Maybe that's just me?
WILL:
Yeah, I'm confused about what I wrote as well.
"Lost to history" is a phrase that was linked to a thought process that
I can no longer recall. I think what I intended to point out was that
the object in the museum, while resonating with its own history and
everydayness, does not immediately display that history and
everydayness to museum-goers. Obviously, for me, the history and
everydayness of the urinal is alive and throbbing within the object.
Curators of museum shows, however, those people that write the blurbs
on placards placed near the artworks, rarely do a good job of
extracting the complexity of the artwork. Instead, the placard shows
the artist's name, the date of creation, and usually the medium of the
object (porcelain, or maybe that rock from the Dolomite Mountains in
Italy, in this case).
KAT:
"Packed inside the objects is an certain enigmaticalness, to use a
word coined by Theodor W. Adorno, which consists in the split
personality of artworks. On the one hand, they represents and (again,
tacitly) speak to the everyday, but on the other hand they point to
another place, one in which neither high nor low art exists because
there is no need for art, no need to point out a disparity between high
and low classes because the disparity has been rectified." And here is
another point in which I request clarification. I do not
understand what the second sentence means. Recognizing readymades as
art points to a place for which there is no need for art? The
disparity between classes has been rectified? Because this is low class
stuff that is being classified as high class art? And there is no need
for art because art is only about class disparity? I am not following;
can you elucidate a touch on these thoughts?
I'll elucidate by making things more complicated.
Sound fun? Here are several quotations from Adorno for you to chew on.
These are dense, but you may enjoy trying to unpack them and breaking
them down. All of them come from his Aesthetic Theory (Trans.
Robert Hullot-Kentor, University of Minnesota Press, 1997). But, so as
not to be totally opaque, I'll add that, for Adorn, art objects like
some of Schoenberg's compositions and Beckett's plays are always saying
precisely what cannot be said. They say something that we can't hear in
this time and place. That 'something' could only be heard in a time and
place conditioned by a completely alternative historical unfolding.
But, at the same time, and here's the dialectical turn, if we inhabited
that other place, say a time and space in which there was no Holocaust,
then we wouldn't need to hear to what those artworks articulate. We
need to hear them in this time and place, but we can't. Instead of
speaking in the here and now, artworks gesture. They point to that
other time and space, a type of coordination we will never experience:
p. 120
"The enigmaticalness of artworks
remains bound up with history. It was through history that they became
an enigma; it is history that ever and again makes them such, and,
conversely, it is history alone—which gave them their authority—that
holds at a distance the embarrassing question of their raison d'être.
The enigmaticalness of artworks is less their irrationality than their
rationality; the more methodically they are ruled, the more sharply
their enigmaticalness is thrown into relief. Through form, artworks
gain their resemblance to language, seeming at every point to say just
this and only this, and at the same time whatever it is slips away."
"That artworks say something and in the same breath conceal it expresses this enigmaticalness from the perspective of language."
p. 127
"Ultimately, artworks are
enigmatic in terms not of their composition but of their truth content.
The indefatigably recurring question that every work incites in whoever
traverses it—the 'what is it all about?'—becomes 'Is it true?'—the
question of the absolute, to which every artwork responds by wrestling
itself free from the discursive form of answer."
p. 248
"The dual nature of artworks as
autonomous structures and social phenomenon results in oscillating
criteria: Autonomous works provoke the verdict of social indifference
and ultimately of being criminally reactionary; conversely, works that
make socially univocal discursive judgements thereby negate art as well
as themselves."
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