Alfred Stieglitz
In 1903 Stieglitz founded an influential journal initially
called Camera Work. Under its subsequent name of 291 it became a
fairly independent American anti-art art development enriched by some
subsequently famous European émigrés, for example from 1913
contributors included the French Cuban artist Francis Picabia.
The photographer Alfred Stieglitz stated ‘Art is dead, long
live Art’. Primarily he was talking about the development of photography and encouraging
people to think of it as art rather than journalism but, retrospectively, it
also has a Dadaist anti-art ambiguity. Stieglitz and Edward Steichen founded a
group called Photo Secession in 1902 echoing this withdrawal from
mainstream painting in the definition of art. In 1905 their gallery opened at
291 Fifth Avenue, New York. Ironically modern painters were also represented by
a group Stieglitz founded called the Association of American Painters and
Sculptors. They included John Marin, Alfred Maurer, Charles Demuth, Abraham
Walkowitz, Max Weber, Morgan Russell, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Patrick Bruce,
Arthur Dove, Joseph Stella and Marsden Hartley.
The Association of American Painters and Sculptors, founded
in 1911 by their chairman Arthur Davies and secretary Walt Kuhn, organised an International
Exhibition of Modern Art in the armoury of the 69th Infantry
Regiment on Lexington Avenue. It became known as the Armory Show and opened on
17th February 1913. The most celebrated painting in the exhibition
was Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase of 1911. It introduced
modern art to a much larger American public and press albeit controversially.
In 1915, when Camera Work changed its name to 291,
it published Picabia’s diatribes against art, together with some of his
‘machine pictures’. In one of 291’s successors, 391, Picabia
extended his ideas of freedom from all values associated with art.
Arthur Cravan
Another figure from Europe that had an impact on the New
York cultural scene around this time was the Swiss boxer and literary agent
provocateur Arthur Cravan. He arrived in New York on 13th
January 1916 on the same ship as Leon Trotsky. Cravan already had a reputation
for provocative and often violent gatherings earning him the admiration of Marcel
Duchamp, Francis Picabia, André Breton and the hatred of Guillaume
Apollinaire. His career in New York was short lived, including a drunken
lecture on “The Independent Artists of France and America”, and he moved onto
Mexico on 1st September 1917 where he disappeared the following year
presumed drowned at sea.
Marcel Duchamp
Most famous for the “ready-mades” such as the Bicycle
Wheel, Bottle Rack and Fountain of 1915. These objects became
art works merely by the artist saying so and presenting them for exhibition. Duchamp
was trying to make people aware of the inherent beauty of utilitarian objects
as a philosophical gesture to challenge accepted concepts of crafted hand-made
works of art. As a member of the jury of the First New York Salon des Indépendants
he submitted the Fountain signed R. Mutt (the name of a firm of sanitary
engineers). When it was rejected Duchamp resigned from the jury.
Further works, with or without minimal personal intervention, included
Mona Lisa with moustache, Cheque (completely hand drawn in
payment for a dentist’s bill), a closed window with the title The Battle of
Austerlitz and Why not sneeze Rose Sélavy? in which Duchamp had
marble cut to look like sugar lumps and put them in an iron cage. The recurrent
theme of these works was to blur or ridicule the barriers between high art and mundane
reality.
The Great Glass or the bride laid bare by her bachelors,
even was largely completed in 1918. He let New York dust settle on one
section of the structure. Then he cleaned all but the cones on which he secured
the dust with a fixative. The glass was fractured in transit and, acknowledging
the element of chance, Duchamp declared if thus finally completed in 1923. By
this time Duchamp had more or less given up spending time on art in favour of
playing chess. But produced the Glass Machine of 1920 in which segments
of circles revolve to create the illusion of a continuous form. In 1925-6 he
designed a number of similar optical machines or ‘rotoreliefs’ exploring the
nature of vision. He incorporated some of his discoveries into a film Anémic-Cinéma
of 1926 in which he brought the reality of science into art.
Duchamp said, “the solution of this artistic problem finally came with
the Discs (1925) in which true three-dimensionality was achieved, not
with a complicated machine (for example the Glass Machine of 1920) and a
complicated technique (such as development by hand using four hundred nails)
but in the eyes of the onlooker, by a psycho-physiological process.”
Man Ray
Man Ray began his career as a painter but, influenced by
Stieglitz, he also took up photography. He became known for “the invention of
the useless” or anti-art objects such as Boardwalk of 1917 or Object To
Be Destroyed of 1923 which was shot at in the Paris Dada Exhibition of
1957. It was a metronome with a photograph of an eye clipped to the swinging
arm. The machine with its usefulness taken from it enables the elements of
humour, and potentially pathos, to enter an otherwise sterile object. Man Ray
also used photographic techniques to produce images by shining lights on
photographic paper. These he called ‘rayograms’.
Both the American Man Ray and the Frenchman Francis Picabia
shared a disklike of conventional art and a contempt for many of the tropes and habits
of mankind and share a passion for the game of chess. As well as Stieglitz they
shared an association with the patron Walter Arensberg, the Life
caricaturist Marius de Sayas, the composer Edgar Varèse and the cubist Albert
Gleizes. They found publicity, political and cultural support from de Haviland
who was editor of the Washington Post. From 1915 to 1923 Walter Arensberg had a
salon on West 67th Street in New York that was regularly used.
Francis Picabia
To avoid the war in Europe Picabia travelled to New York in
1915. He contributed to Stieglitz’ magazine 291. 1915 also sees the
start of his mechanomorphic style. In an interview with the New York Tribune in
October 1915 he said, “Almost immediately upon coming to America it flashed on
me that the genius of the modern world is in machinery, and that through
machinery art ought to find a most vivid expression…of life. It is really a
part of human life – perhaps the very soul. In seeking forms through which to
expose human characteristics I have come at length upon the form which appears
most brilliantly plastic and fraught with symbolism.”
Picabia seems to use the machine, not as an object in
itself, but as the modern image of the human, with all that the term ‘human’
implies ie. pathos, wit etc. Picabia was familiar with the Italian Futurists
who glorified the modern, machine-orientated era. He also knew the robot-like
figures of Léger.
The description of the machine as being ‘born of man without a mother’ was used
for Picabia’s first metamorphic drawing Girl Born Without a Mother (1916-18)
and his Portrait of a Young American Girl in the State of Nudity (1915)
is a spark plug. With Here, This is Stieglitz (1915) the choice of
camera is obvious. The faint form behind the camera on the right is formed from
the gear and brake levers of an automobile. The gears are in neutral and the
camera is broken. This may be interpreted as a parody of Stieglitz who often
seemed to be criticised in his own magazine 291. His lithograph portrait
published in 291 as the Saint of Saints is purely diagrammatic and taken
from technical camera documentation. A diagrammatic approach can also be found
in De Zayas of 1915.
But in Here She Is the sexual symbolism of pistol and
target form a fairly obvious metamorphosis from human to mechanical and
represent an automatic repeat-firing love machine. There are other examples of
sex as a mechanical action in Amorphous Procession (1917) and The
Marquesas Island (1916-17) which was a sketch for a work called Universal
Prostitution. You could draw parallels with Marchel Duchamp’s The Bride
Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even. In American (1917) a retouched
photograph of a light bulb associates it’s on/off switch with a flirt/divorce
dichotomy.
Picabia helped to launch a sequel to 291 which was 391.
One of the covers of the New York edition was his Mechanical Ballet of
1917. This was an automobile which resembled a circle of dancing figures.
Ballet mécaniques
were quite a common theme. The best known being Léger’s 1924 film of the same
name. Picabia’s other mechanomorphic works have the same symmetrical
diagrammatic frontal presentation. Other examples of mechanomorphic work from
1915 to 1919 include: Machine without name, Girl born without a mother, Guillaume Apollinaire irritable poete, Very
rare picture on the earth, Amorous Procession, The Child Carburetor,
Composition Mecanique, Mona Lisa with Moustache, Femme!, Voila Elle De Zayas and
Dada 4-5 (Picabia with Tzara).
Man Ray
Man Ray’s early mechanomorphic wrks were rather painterly
compared to Picabia’s. In the following years he mastered the technique of the
air brush and would use it in conjunction with whatever happened to be lying
about. La Vallière (1919) was made from a dressmaker’s dummy which his
landlady had abandoned in the studio; Composition with Key and Triangle
(1919) derived from items picked up on his drawing desk. He also used his
sculptures as stencils in pictures eg. Sclulpture By Itself II (1918)
and Untitled (1919). ‘I put all kinds of things in it, a press for
holding wood together, parts of a camera, pieces of cut out cardboard, some of
my draughtsman’s instruments etc. I moved everything around and sprayed, and
moved again and sprayed, changing their position all the time.’ Man Ray used found objects in both painting
and sculpture. The idea of the found object is something which was pursued by
Surrealists and used to create novel semi-sculptural objects indicative of a
dream state of mind. New York (1917) is Man Ray’s first sculpture to
incorporate bits of found wood. Sculpture By Itself I and II
(1918), Portrait of Marcel Duchamp (photographed in 1920), Gift
(1921) and Emak Bakia (1926) followed.
Emak Bakia is an interpreted found object. It is the
neck of an old cello picked up in the Paris fleamarket. The horse hair is taken
from its bow and hung loose. The cello had grown old so Man Ray gave it a long
white beard. The top of the cello neck is a spiral which is a form that
appealed to Man Ray. ‘Nature,’ he said ‘from the sea shell to the galaxy, is
full of spirals; when I was a young man, I was already obsessed by this form.’
Lampshade (1919) was the first fully Found Object. It
was a discarded paper wrapping of a lampshade, attached to the top of a log
rod, around which it revolved. However, when it was later exhibited, the
janitor thought it was a paper wrapping for the stand, so crumpled it up and
threw it away. Man Ray hurriedly had some metal cut, twisted and painted it
white, and so, by the time the exhibition opened, it had become a metal
sculpture.
In 1918, two years before his first true Found Object, Man
Ray chose his first object which he subsequently termed a Readymade. A
Readymade is a common manufactured object which is redesignated as a work of
art by the artist. Unlike the Found Object, which may be a product of the
action of time, weather and accident, the Readymade is an artifact used in its
original unaltered state but within an altered context: that of art. The assisted
Readymade is an extension of this concept which may be equated to the interpreted
found object; though in both cases the intervention of the artist may only be
slight. Man (1918) is an egg-beater. Woman (1918) is an
assemblage of two hemispherical reflectors (symbolising vanity) and six laundry
pins (to indicate domestic duties) pinching a sheet of glass with a strong
light to exploit the shadows. Man Ray was in a difficult marriage at the time
and so his satire included the idea of woman being symbolised by the egg and
himself as the egg-beater. His wife’s name was Donna which is related to the
Italian for woman. Certainly Man was a pun on his own name.
Gift (1921) was an assisted readymade . Man Ray was
in Paris in an exhibition when the composer Erik Satie approached him and they went off to a corner café to
talk. On leaving the café they passed a shop of household utensils and bought a
flat iron, tacks and glue/ Back in the gallery Man Ray stuck some tacks to the
bottom of the flat iron, added it to the exhibition and called it the Gift
since he wanted to give it away by drawing lots amongst his friends.
Marcel Duchamp
Considering the dates of Man Ray’s readymades it is almost
certain that their inspiration lies with his close friend Marcel Duchamp. Influential
pieces include Apollinaire Enameled (1916-17), Nine Malic Moulds (1914), The
Coffee Mill (1911), Chocolate Grinder No.1 (1913), Cover of the Blind Man
(1917), Nude descending a staircase
(1911), Large Glass and Tu’m in K Dreier’s library (1937), LHOOQ (1919), Dust
Breeding (1920?), Revolving Glass (1920), Rotoreliefs (1935), With Hidden Noise
(1916), Fountain (1917), Bottle-rack (1914), Fountain etc (1917), Why Not
Sneeze? (1921), In advance of the broken arm (1915), Duchamp’s studio with
Bicycle Wheel and Trap (1917-18), Revolving Glass in Motion’ (1920), Rotary
demi-sphere (1925), 3 Standard Stoppages (1913-14) and Pharmacy (1914).
Duchamp’s interest in mechanical imagery may be traced to a
much earlier date than Picabia’s (1915). In 1911 Jacque Villon decided it would
be nice to have some paintings to decorate his kitchen. Marcel’s contribution
was The Coffee Mill (1911). It was the first of his paintings to display
an interest in mechanical objects and the first to use the sequenced
overlapping phases of representation to depict movement which he used in Nude
descending the staircase.
The International Exhibition of Modern Art in the
Armoury of the 69th Infantry Regiment on Lexington Avenue which
opened in 1913. The Armoury Show, as it became known, is often credited with
introducing modern art to America. Whether that is the whole story or not, it
is significant that the most talked about painting in the exhibition was
Duchamp’s Nude descending a staircase.
Duchamp’s first painting after his declared renunciation of
traditional painting was Chocolate Grinder No.1 and confirms his
interest in the world of machines. It was inspired by a chocolate grinder featured
in a shop window. It is basically a still life of a machine.
As for readymades as early as 1913 Duchamp conceived the
idea that a work of art, such as the Bicycle Wheel (1913), could be made
by choice of standardised objects with very little intervention by the artist. The
following year, in a shop for artists materials, Duchamp bought three copies of
a sentimental winter landscape. To each he added two small marks: one in read
and the other yellow. These rectified readymades, or readymades aided,
incorporated the idea of limitless quantity.-
Bottleneck (1914) was purchased in the same year.
Duchamp was not necessarily trying to show the inerent beauty of these objects,
he was showing that art could be produced by the action of choice upon
commercially available materials. After all the tubes of paint an artist uses
are manufactured readymade products. A painting is a sort of readymade aided.
Duchamp first coined the term readymade in 1915 in association with his work In
Advance of the Broken Arm (1915).
Apollinaire Enameled (1916-17) was originally an
advertisement for Sapolin Enamil but Duchamp has crossed out the S and added
the rest of Apollinaire’s name. In
pencil, in the mirror above the chest of drawers, he added the reflection of
the hair of the girl. The commercial slogan at the bottom right was altered to
make it nonsensical.
In 1917, as a member of the First New York Salon des Indépendants,
Duchamp submitted the Fountain signed R. Mutt. Although there was no
jury system the work was rejected and Duchamp resigned. A unsigned anonymous letter
from Duchamp complained ‘Whether Mr. Mutt, with his own hands, made the
fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of
life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title
and point of view – created a new thought for that object.’
Duchamp has always regarded the reverence bestowed upon
artists and the financial values placed upon their products as ludicrous. If a common
object can be made into art then art can be made into a common object. His
Ready Reciprocal L.H.O.O.Q. (1919) asks us to ‘use a Rembrandt as an
ironing board’. L.H.O.O.Q., when spelled out in French, sounds like ‘elle
a chaud au cul’ which in American slang would be ‘she’s got a hot ass’.
Throughout this period Duchamp was working on a Large Glass
machine entitled The Bride Stipped Bare By Her Bachelors Even. Working on the
glass solved the problem of provided a background since the transparency of the
glass would provide a readymade one. He
used lead wire, oil paint and lead foil; he also allowed New York dust to
settle on part of the structure - Dust Breeding. Several parts of the composition were tried
out as independent works eg. Nine Malic Moulds (1914). The first version was
broken in transit. Duchamp accepted the breaks as a chance contribution to the
composition. The composition itself is impossibly complicated, as witnessed by
the body of literature that was part of
the work, but is basically a seduction machine. The bottom half is the bachelor’s
domain and the upper half is the bride’s. The object of the machine is to ‘strip
the bride of her garments’ and spark off the bride’s points of desire.
Other machines were designed by Duchamp to explore visual
perception such as Revolving Glass (1920) in which segments of circles revolve
to create the illusion of continuous circles. In 1925 and 1926 he produced a
number of optical designs or rotoreliefs such as Rotary demi-sphre (1925). Some of these were
incorporated into a film Anémic – Cinéma
(1926).
