Marcel Duchamp

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Marcel Duchamp
Marcel came from an artistic family. Of the six
children of Eugene and Lucie Duchamp, four would
become successful artists. Duchamp was a
interested chess player and painter. Duchamp
prodded thought about artistic processes and art
marketing, not so much with words, but with
actions such as dubbing a urinal art and naming
it Fountain, and by "giving up" art to play
chess. Marcel Duchamp took aim at conventional
notions of "high art," "culture" and commodities
by presenting mass-produced objects such as a
bottle rack or a snow shovel as sculpture. He
coupled his visual assaults on "art" with verbal
puns he signed his Fountain, "R. Mutt," and
named a Mona Lisa defaced by a drawn-on goatee
beard and moustache L.H.O.O.Q., a coarse French
pun (when the letters are pronounced in French
they sound like the phrase "elle a chaud au cul",
meaning "she's got a hot ass").
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Readymade

• Duchamp developed the term "readymade" in 1915 to
  refer to found objects chosen by the artist as
  art.
• The objects where then remanufactured to create
  new objects. One of the most famous was
  fountain by Marcel Duchamp.

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Fountain
The Fountain was one of Duchamps Most
recognizable readymade. It was Constructed from
a men's urinal.
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Fluxus
is an art movement noted for the blending of
different artistic disciplines, primarily visual
art but also music and literature. Fluxus was
loosely organized in 1962 by George Maciunas, a
Lithuanian-American artist who had moved to
Germany to escape his creditors, along with his
fellow Lithuanian and personal friend, Almus
Salcius. Besides America and Europe, Fluxus also
took root in Japan.
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Joseph Kosuth

• His work generally strives to explore the nature
  of art, focusing on ideas at the fringe of art
  rather than on producing art per se. Thus his art
  is very self-referential, and a typical statement
  of his goes
• "The 'value' of particular artists after Duchamp
  can be weighed according to how much they
  questioned the nature of art."
• One of his most famous works is "One and Three
  Chairs", a visual expression of Plato's concept
  of The Forms. The piece features a physical
  chair, a photograph of that chair, and the text
  of a dictionary definition of the word "chair".
  All three representations are merely physical
  abstractions of the one true idea of the chair,
  thus the piece is both the three physical
  representations of a chair, and the one universal
  notion of a chair.
• In an addition to his artwork, he has written
  several books on the nature of art and artists,
  including Artist as Anthropologist. In which he
  argued he argued that art is the continuation of
  philosophy.

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Ray Johnson

• Raymond Edward Johnson was an important
  post-Surrealism, pre-Pop collage artist. Johnson
  was also the founder of the New York
  Correspondence School, and therefore the
  originator of "correspondence art," the
  inter-disciplinary art form that uses the postal
  service in some way (Mail art). For decades, in
  the legendary privacy of his own home in Locust
  Valley, Ray worked from morning until night,
  often with the television on in the background,
  always making up new incarnations of his
  CorresponDANCE School. In the last years of his
  life, Ray Johnson used inexpensive throw-away
  snapshot cameras as a tool to make pictures of
  "set ups" in natural settings of his silhouettes,
  portraits and other 2 and 3 dimensional objects.

Mail art is also, simultaneously, a message that
is sent, the medium through which it is sent as
well as one of the longest-lasting art movements
in history. To be precise, an amorphous
international mail art network evolved of
thousands of participants in over fifty countries
between the 1950s and the 1990s from the work of
Ray Johnson. Mail art is also, simultaneously, a
message that is sent, the medium through which it
is sent as well as one of the longest-lasting art
movements in history. To be precise, an amorphous
international mail art network evolved of
thousands of participants in over fifty countries
between the 1950s and the 1990s from the work of
Ray Johnson
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Piero Manzoni

• When Manzoni did paintings, he experimented with
  various pigments and materials. In one case he
  used phosphorescent paint and cobalt chloride so
  the colors would change over time. However, he
  had some less ordinary ideas as well. They
  included sculptures made of white cotton wool,
  fiberglass, rabbit skin and fake bread rolls. In
  1958 he had "pneumatic sculptures", 45
  blow-up-membranes. The buyer could also have
  Manzoni's own breath inside the membrane. He also
  tried to create a mechanical animal as a moving
  sculpture, using solar energy as a power source.
  In 1960 he created a sphere that was held aloft
  on a jet of air. He signed naked people for
  exhibitions and even gave certificates of
  authenticity. He also designated a "magic base"
  as long as someone was standing on the base they
  were a work of art.

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Erased De kooning Drawing
By Robert Rauschenberg
In 1959, Robert Rauschenberg, a young though not
inconsequential artist, asked Willem de Kooning
to participate in an art project. De Kooning, who
was not only older and much more established than
Rauschenberg, but whose works sold for
considerable sums of money, agreed to participate
and gave Rauschenberg what he considered to be an
important drawing. The drawing de Kooning
selected was executed in heavy crayon, grease
pencil, ink, and graphite. Rauschenberg spent a
month on the work, erasing it completely. Then he
placed the de Kooning drawing in a gold leaf
frame and hand-lettered the date and title on the
drawing "Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953".
Rauschenberg had not only erased de Kooning's
work, but he had also exhibited the "erasure" as
his own work of art. Traces of ink and crayon
remain on the paper, which measures 19" x
14-1/2". The "work" is now in the private
collection of Raushcenberg.
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Art and Language

• The name Art Language was first used in 1968
  by the British artists Terry Atkinson, David
  Bainbridge, Michael Baldwin and Harold Hurrell,
  who had been collaborating on works since around
  1966, and who were at that time teaching art in
  Coventry. Their early work, as well as their
  journal Art-Language which first appeared in
  1969, is regarded as an important influence on
  much conceptual art both in the United Kingdom
  and in the United States. Art and Language played
  a key role in the birth of Conceptual Art both
  theoretically and in terms of the work produced.

The following slides are examples of works
created by the Art and Language group
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