Donald Shambroom's"Duchamp's Last Day" and some musings on art and technology

Donald Shambroom has added to the long list of exotica on Duchamp with the publication of “Duchamp’s Last Day” by the David Zwirner Gallery. Exotic in that everything about Duchamp is strange at first although the more one understands his oeuvre the more one realizes his notion of the visual image would be exoteric to its unfolding in the 20^th and the 21^st century. With Marcel we are always playing catch-up. He is central to understanding the shift of the image from the individual-made to the proliferation of machine-made imagery. Not that anything he created bespoke of the assembly line as did the silkscreens of his follower Andy Warhol. The “Large Glass” remains gnarly and difficult in its homemade construction, oddly metamorphic in its subsequent history and prescient in its anticipation of the glass TV screen as the platform for mass-produced imagery. Nietzsche’s death of God quickly translates into the death of man but we would be better served to think that Duchampia presages not the death of man but just presents another concoction of man, a man whose boundaries are physically dissolved so as to function more as an object among objects in mass culture. Another epithet of Nietzsche comes to mind: ”There was one Christ and he died on the cross.”  You can see Duchamp’s destruction of the flat reflecting image all over Rauschenberg but Duchamp himself left traditional painting far behind. He makes it nigh impossible to go back to the image reflected off the flat canvas, unless like the Zombie Formalists you drain it of any residual power.

The large glass

The book describes the movements of the characters, who were present before and after Duchamp’s death. Crucial to Shambroom’s telling of the story is Duchamp’s visit earlier in the day to a bookstore to buy a book that came with 3D glasses to create Geometric anaglyphs. He had used it in the past as it allowed him to playfully dally at what he thought to be the edge of the 3D and the unimaginable fourth dimension. Shambroom cites Gertrude Stein’s statement that Duchamp was a young man who “talks very urgently about the fourth dimension.”  This strangeness will be featured at the end of the book in a playful Duchampian act of the imagination by Shambroom, which I will not relate so as not to spoil a very fanciful summation to the story.

In the interim after Duchamp’s purchase of the “Geometric Anaglyphs” we find him in conversation with the poet Georges Herbiet whose wife has recently passed away. In the evening he dines at his apartment with his close friends Man Ray, Robert Lebel, who had published the first monograph on Duchamp and their respective wives.  The topic of death keeps cropping up. The transition from life to death seems to haunt him. a phrase keeps recurring, which would become the epitaph on his tombstone: “Besides, it is always the others who die.” In other words very simply we witness the death of others but not our own.  At one point while walking Lebel outside to his car after dinner, Man Ray slipped and fell. He blurted out:” You’d thought I dropped dead.” Another premonition.

Duchamp and Man Ray taken by Cartier-Bresson

After all the guests had gone, at one in the morning, Teeny, Duchamp’s wife, found him collapsed and moribund in the bathroom. As though Man Ray was ready for this eventuality, when informed of the death, he returned camera in hand to take a deathbed photo. This photo was only made known to the public in 2011, suggesting some sort of intentional act on the part of the Duchamp estate to withhold it from the public realm. This delay provided Shambroom with ample opportunity to discuss notions of the artist deciding what is art and what isn’t and in this case something controlled conceivably from the grave. Its reproduction in the book is apparently its first appearance in the public realm.

At the very end of the story some very intriguing words are cited apropos Duchamp that were written by the artist collective: Lu Cafausu:

“Perhaps art demands that one play with death. Perhaps it introduces a game, a bit of play in the situation that no longer allows for tactics or mastery.”

“To die well is to die in one’s own life, turned towards one’s own life and away from death…the good death shows more consideration for the world than regard for the depth of the abyss.”

These words express the sine qua non of Duchamps's work that looks away from  mastery, fear and trembling before the abyss that underlie so much of Western and Eastern art for that matter. It brought to mind an essay I wrote on the sculptor Billy Lee whose early work embodied that sort of seriousness, that I always found appealing. Sculpted out of granite and shaped like the helmets of hoplites, it conveyed a notion of power and conflict embedded in the very substance of life. His new work done in China has jumped out of conflict and is all about play and fabricated in glossy material that is produced in Chinese factories.  It is also done to be part of the urban fabric not an aestheticized sculpture garden. In its use of industrial car finish it is reminiscent of the work of Anish Kapoor. In one instance of playfulness it makes fun of the imagery of his early work. It got me thinking about the energy that can be liberated when you break the barriers of art and technology and the global media.

Billy Lee Sculpture

The media of mass culture lifts the individual out of its locality and lets she/he vibrate in a global holism, especially now as globalism has reached its apogee and maybe subcomeing to populism. Duchamp made that merger allowable in his destruction of the flat canvas. It has since split the art world irreparably into several camps: Those who still believe in the canvas and the power of its language to affect the viewer, those who want to use that language but as something absent of any power like the Zombie Formalists, those who still try to deconstruct it in the ongoing tradition of Duchamp and finally those who take advantage of the split to merge art and technology.

Billy Lee Sculpture in the urban landscape

Don Shambroom has achieved the latter merger in his new work, taking his paintings online to merge with moving images and sound. He does not cool down the story with irony but heats it up with a kind of global and even cosmic power. If Duchamp according to Lu Cafausu turns toward his own life  and away from death Shambroom turns his work toward the depth of the abyss. His creations start out from his paintings and are augmented with news imagery and sound to take their place on the global scene.

Painting by Shambroom that leads into video manipulation

The New Realism:Ananian, Deyab, Lee and Mugar

I am not talking about Realist art per se, although a realist painter will be included in my discussion, but an attitude toward life that is realistic. I first touched on this in my critique of the Boston Art Scene and the Marathon bombings. I had just finished up a show in Boston that winter with Paul Pollaro. I had not shown in Boston since 2007, so it was a re-acquaintance with the Boston art world. The then current Boston art scene seemed to me to be more interested in providing well-crafted objects and weak sentimentality than with trying to understand the depths of the world we live in. Just the ripples on the surface not the powerful forces that shape that surface.  The political elite’s reaction to the Bombings later that Spring seemed to say that they had rather support a veneer of meaning, propped up by platitudes, than deal clearly with the nature of the world that produced such horror. In the case of the Marathon deaths, the political class brought out the big guns to channel Boston’s enthusiasm for sports so as to heal an emotionally rattled city overcome by this tragedy. It all reeked of Babbitry.

I recall in high school working late one night on an essay on "Moby Dick". I could not figure out the mystery of it all and the solution of a mystery seemed to be essential to the book and to writing a successful essay. Who is Ahab, what drives him? How do we function is a world shaped by mad leaders? It seemed ridiculous to hand in a paper that left the big questions unanswered.  I am sure that most of my classmates could have cared less. I remember going to bed at midnight, the night before the paper was due, somewhat disheartened with my unresolved essay, only to wake up a few hours later with an insight into the problem. It lay in the “Try Works” chapter. Recently, because I couldn’t remember what the chapter was about , I googled the title of the chapter.  I was not surprised it was a meditation on the need for perseverance and faith as one passes through the dark night of evil and sorrow, captured by the patterns of fire and smoke spewing from the rendered flesh of a freshly killed whale. “There is wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.” says Ishmael. How do we navigate that distinction? It made me think of Clint Eastwood in “The Outlaw Josey Wales” who hovers between the two woes; one a wisdom born of sorrow; the other a kind of madness, akin to Ahab’s?

All I have reread at this point is that chapter but I am astonished how much there is to unpack in each sentence. The end of the short chapter describes Ishmael’s realization that he has been steering the Peqoud ass-backwards and is close to capsizing the whole boat for me is a searing image of an upside down topsy-turvy world full of mistakes that are combined to weave the fabric of reality itself.

 

"Victim "2014 Deyab

There are a handful artists, and I will include myself , who are emotionally robust enough to look at the shape of things and depict them accurately. I think the key to their way of thinking and feeling is an ability to see things in context: a kind of intuition of the whole or a knack at seeing what “is” in the context of the unseen. Larry Deyab at first glance can appear to be a so hip and contemporary with his preferred use of spray paint, photographic journalistic source material and a Richard Prince sense of the edit and erasure. But his art embraces a totally un-contemporary sense of horror more akin to Goya than Prince as he responds to the ongoing chaos of the Middle East. His preferred media of spray paint provides an identification with the lives of the victims who have been reduced to poverty and terror and if asked to paint their condition could not go the a fine art store to buy brushes. It conveys a sense of urgency and identifies with the victims with the brush of urban anger,spray paint. His subject matter heretofore dealt the Arab-Israeli conflict, now stands aghast before the unwillingness of the Western powers to engage in the Syrian conflict that is moving rapidly toward genocidal proportions: Images of blind fate, the hammer of doom. Victim and victimizer. The emotions go beyond the photo journalistic source of the images but seem more akin to some generational and macabre dance of evil.

 

"Sargasso Sea," Mugar 1997

Excess is at the heart of these conflicts. Over the top annihilation of the opposition, a fury that knows no boundaries. Confronting and engaging this aspect of life and death is not something easily achieved with Realism, nor with Abstraction for that matter. I attempted to engage these issues in my work from the late Nineties, shown at Crieger-Dane in Boston and has remained an issue that seems to escape the critics. Or maybe they see it but it is that very notion of excess that puts them off. Somewhere in my career I lost any desire to make art as a vehicle of self-expression. The Neo-Expressionism of the 80’s seemed to be the last gasp of that self-centered version that came out of Germany in the 20’s and 30’s.I wanted a language that would embody the state of things of things as they are. Things as they are swimming in a sea of forces bigger than themselves. But also as inevitably forced into conflict with each other. The titles of the work gave them away: “Mackerel Crowded sea “,”Sargasso Sea”, “Footprints”. The first title is taken from Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”, a poem that establishes a sharp contrast between the modern reality of man as swarm and a more god based hierarchy that lends a ground of eternity to our individual existence. “Sargasso Sea” created in my mind a sort of organic island without substance that houses enumerable species….”Footprints” imagines a larger force squashing lesser forces. The latter title and painting is no permission for this sort of oppression but a rather sang-froid description of academic politics. I have always felt that the sadism that we love to imagine is so far from our day-to-day lives virulently in the perverse little politics of the world we work in.

 

"Self Portrait" Ananian

Mike Ananian’s realism evokes implicitly a kind of male stoicism that reminds me of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman”: the life of someone who has to get up for work each morning to fulfill his sales quota, whether there is pleasant background music or not. I also think of Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross”, where real estate brokers driven by the Darwinian will to prevail, are capable of undercutting their colleagues, selling questionable properties and committing  crime. There is no room for humor or grace, only the hope that their life of struggle has some heroic meaning. The characters in Ananian’s portraits seem to carry their faces like Roman portrait busts without any halo of divinity.

"Helmet" by Billy Lee

They are strangely reminiscent of his UNC-G colleague Billy Lee’s sculptures of heroic hoplite heads. Guardian’s and sentinels that are eye-less. They don’t observe anymore; they have been reduced to pure will. They are holding their ground full of a contained phallic fury.

Maybe my work and the work of Deyab, Lee and Ananian is lacking in irony, the staple of contemporary art. We are  not fetishistic in the creation of our art objects, just forcing our images to remind the viewer of the hardness of survival. No bromides, no fatuous statements about commodification. This work is not fun. No matter how hard we try to create fantasies about the human condition and leaders and gurus to fulfill them we can’t escape the grim reality of conflict.