Effects of the isolation are many. Perhaps, the first to notice is the spatial confusion and the loss of clarity of your physical presence. Where are you when you partying over Zoom? And where are those twenty people (with you) whom you impress with the Covid knowledge? The mere number of activities and the geographical distribution of their reference points and impacts, questions the relevance of the territorial coordinates defining the position of your body, and maybe even questions the physicality of your body itself.
Paradoxically, the opposite is also true. The significance of the physical space you spend your time in is vastly magnified. You study your place anew, you explore it, adapt it and bend it. You pay very close attention to various objects that copopulate your narrow habitat. Sometimes such attentive observation brings a discovery of a new facet in the familiar, a new essence or a new utilization.
For example: running a treadmill. A very isolational activity, manifesting both of the aforementioned properties. Spatially, it’s not clear whether, after thirty minutes of running, you have moved 5 miles or stayed in-place. Auditory, you discover the musical-instrumental aspect of it. Indeed, it produces sound and you can listen to it, play with it, affect it with your steps. You can put a synthesizer on top and start processing and filtering it, turning this exercise into something a bit less rodent.
Set against the backdrop of John Cage’s composition, this audio collage features Marcel Duchamp discussing his ego-driven intention to ‘kill art.’ It then transitions to John Cage, who advocates for creating art free of the artist’s ego, focusing on its removal from the process.
The narrative of art history is a tale of shifting perspectives and cyclical evolution. Initially, art served as a medium for conveying grander concepts and moral narratives, acting more as a signifier than an autonomous aesthetic experience. This paradigm shifted with the advent of modern art, a period marked by the unity of form and aesthetic essence, focusing on “art for art’s sake” and the pure pleasure of visual beauty.
Yet, this trajectory was reversed, influenced notably by artists like Marcel Duchamp, who labeled the works of modern period “retinal art” to condescendingly describe art that appealed only to the eye. This was a counter-revolution, bringing back the traditional, conceptual approach to an artwork, valuing the idea, the concept, over the aesthetic value. Or poetics. Or beauty. This marked a shift to the new regime, the regime of conceptual interpretations and intellectual engagement which, unexpectedly even for Duchamp, became the new canon, the doctrine for the next (at least) 100 years.
Duchamp (1968): […] The fact they [Ready-mades] are regarded with the same reverence as objects of art probably means I failed to solve the problem of trying to do away entirely with art. It is partly perhaps because I have only a few Ready-mades. If I can count 10, 12 gestures of this kind in my life, that is all. And I’m glad I did now because this is where the artists of today are wrong, I think. Must you repeat? Repetition has become the great enemy of art in general.
– What you were also attempting to do, as I understand, was to devalue the art as an object, simply by saying “If I say it’s a work of art, that makes it a work of art”.
– Yeah, but … work of art is not so important for me. I don’t care about the word art, because it’s been so, you know, discredited.
– But you in fact contributed to this discrediting, didn’t you, quite deliberately?
– Yes, deliberately, so I really wanted to get rid of it, because the way many people today have done away with religion, it’s sort of unnecessary adoration of art today which I find unnecessary. And I think, I don’t know, this is a difficult position because I’ve been in it all the time and still want to get rid of it, you see? And I cannot explain everything I do because I do things, the way people do things, and they don’t know why they do it, you know?
