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

Rauschenberg's Retrospective at MoMA

The Rauschenberg retrospective on the scale of the Stella show that closed last year is on its way to New York. I am wary of any attempt to see this exhibit, since my visit to the Stella retrospective at the Whiney in 2016 got my car towed with a hefty ransom to get it back. The dichotomy of the physical world where an object (my car) violates very real traffic laws because it interferes with the flow of traffic (a very real concern in NYC) and the museum show of an artist’s flights of  fancy troubles me and got me thinking about the disconnect between truth and art. So I will not risk my car in New York and, since I already have a feel for for the show from comments by the Abstract Critical  followers on Twitter in England ,where Rauschenberg's work was on exhibit at the Tate, and now by a review of that same show by Jed Perl in the New York Review of Books, I will risk  some opinions on Rauschenberg's oeuvre without the whole package in front of me.

Rauschenberg

I mention my real car and real laws of the outside world as this has some resonance with an often repeated quasi- Delphic statement made by Rauschenberg about how neither life nor art can be made and how his painting functions in the space between the two. Life is considered by him to be the hubbub outside the window except that it is not really outside of us in so far as we can successfully move in it only if we acknowledge its rules and regulations, which I didn’t when I ignored the no parking signs in NYC. His is a rather sophomoric statement on the level of the declarations of cosmic meaning of the stoned frat bros in “Animal House”. Perl does a good job of deconstructing the statement’s illogic. My first reaction is that, if for Rauschenberg painting exists between art and life, then does that mean that painting is not art. As for life, it follows very real laws. They may be hard to discern at times but they are formative. Perl points out Picasso’s drive for perfection. Is not this drive for perfection a struggle to discern rules that shape our world, of putting things back together again into a higher level of order. Rauschenberg is someone who knows how to take apart but does not know how to put things back together again in any meaningful way. He  has no interest in doing so and does not feel bad about it.

I was faulted by an artist, whose work I recently blogged about, for not discussing  her work on its own terms. I drew a distinction between her realism and the realism of Edwin Dickinson. Her work seemed unable to breach the distance between observer and the observed that was achieved in Dickinson’s work. It did not provide her any solace that I threw my work into the same categorical bin. I just wanted to define a category of painting that yearns for that connection between the self and the world but in the end fails to make the leap. That is a rather interesting position to be in rather than naively thinking you can bridge that gap. And as for making a leap of faith that may only be allowed to a few mystics.

I guess in that sense we have to be careful not to force Rauschenberg into a manner of thinking he consciously avoided. Except, that judging from Perl’s experience of the show as a whole, it seems to have left a bad taste in his mouth. He uses the adjective “unseemly”. From my knowledge of his work, the compilations of this work on a large scale in one building might elicit the response that someone should come to rework it and make radical sense out of it. I may have to venture to MoMA to experience this surfeit of undigested clutter.  I believe intuitive responses to the whole can be critical in understanding an artist’s work.While else have retrospectives.

I wrote in a blog awhile back about an interesting response that Heidegger made to a quote from Hegel. I tried to tie it to an understanding of de Kooning. The original statement by Hegel goes as follows:” A mended sock is better than a torn one.” Heidegger transforms it into his preferred form: “A torn sock is better that a mended one.”( a lot more violent construction than the Hegel comment) The discussion, which involves several philosophers, revolves around unity. When the sock is whole and being worn we are not aware of its unity. When it is torn we become aware or self-conscious of what holds it together in its being a sock. The tear points to a preceding wholeness. To mend the sock makes it whole again with a new self-awareness of an underlying unity. Is this not what de Kooning does: using cubism he takes the world apart and then aggressively with the template of the human body tries to mend it. Hegel says the scission points to a need for philosophy. This bringing back together is powerful in two ways: #1 the effort implied in the mending.#2 the force that resists this mending and wants to tear it apart again. de Kooning’s work participates in this dialectic as it moves back and forth between the whole and its parts to create a new whole.

de Kooning

Keeping with  sartorial metaphors, we could say that Rauschenberg is the master of mix and match. Because he ignores categories he can draw his playthings from all over the place. The effect of this strategy on subsequent generations of artist has been overwhelming. I wrote about this stylistic habit in the blog “Shake and Bake”. The artists in the show I reviewed have to be commended for not falling into the trap of Zombie Formalism, however there is a flaccid putting together of odds and ends that is clearly derivative of Rauschenberg. There is no anxiety in accepting the world as having fallen apart and needing mending. Perl says some critics see Rauschenberg as achieving the ”these fragments I have shored against my ruins” majesty of T.S. Eliot and is therefore the artist of the modern condition. Except that, as in the shake and bake crowd, there is none of the anxiety that Eliot felt about a world torn asunder.

Did Rauschenberg foreshadow the post-modern condition? According to Perl such a claim is made by Leah Dickerman in the catalog accompanying the show. I believe he did. For him the world is a sandbox where modernism provided him with all the uprooted and disembodied parts to play with. He was the artist perfectly suited for the new globalist space where everything is dislodged from its original context and shaped into momentary illusions of meaning which in the end are nothing more than an excessive piling of things on top of things. He is the happy prankster that mocks the emblems of the King’s claims to power. But being only a prankster and nothing more he has not the worries of a king nor interest in picking up the pieces.

If you like your postmodern condition you can keep your postmodern condition and Rauschenberg's your guy, but if not then you are left with a queasy feeling that art and society took a wrong turn in the middle of the last century and there is no turning back.

Elaboration of a recent essay from my blog appears on Berkshire Fine Arts

Berkshire Fine Arts

                                             A work by Don Shambroom in the Met

Starting with Anthony Powell and ending with De Kooning via Hegel

 

Several weeks ago I was invited to lunch by a good friend,Addison Parks, who asked several mutual acquaintances to join us. I recalled that one of the guests in his role

of gallery director had shown the work of a friend of mine, Don Shambroom,whom

I had met at college almost forty years ago. I told the gallery director,John Wronoski,

that this friend had appeared and disappeared in my life and had

recently reappeared after an absence of ten years by being highlighted

as someone I might want to link up with on LinkedIn. The gallery director, 

who is also an antique book dealer, said that my description of this

 relationship reminded him of the Anthony Powell twelve volume book

”A Dance to the Music of Time”, that follows the lives of a group of Oxford

 graduates over a lifetime as their movements conjoin or pull apart.

 Recently I decided to make the leap from virtual reality to

 the real world and actually get together to chat with this artist friend.

 We arranged a visit at his home in Massachusetts.

 One thing we learned in our five hour talk is that there

 were other people, whom we both knew, who were participating in

 this dance, some, in particular, art professors from College whom we

 both knew and others whom we had become friends with separately. The first

 of these latter connections was our visits with Norman Rockwell in the

 Sixties as aspiring young teenage artists. We both got the same

 advice from him to go to art school and not college, which

 we both ignored.Our conversation touched briefly on my blog and in particular the piece on

 the “Humpty Dumpty Effect”. My description of this process had a strongly

 entropic bias to it. As Yeats said in "The Second Coming: ” Things fall apart
 the center cannot hold”. De Kooning’s name came up as someone who took
 things apart and then tried to put them back together again. Cubism allowed him
 to tear  apart but the holism of the human body and the force of his gesture
 allowed him to tie everything back together in a way that the human body had
 never before been subjected to: centripetal and centrifugal

 at each others throats. Last night I came across a book on Heidegger’s late

 writings entitled “Four Seminars” that are transcripts and analyses of

 gatherings of Heidegger and his students in the South of France to discuss

 in particular some portentous Hegelian sentences. All of this is off the cuff.

 His references range from Wittgenstein to Marx to Norbert Weiner. A quote

 from Hegel becomes the source material for a long discussion, which I think is

 relevant to what has been said above in regards to de Kooning.The original

 statement by Hegel goes as follows:” A mended sock is better than a torn one”.

  Heidegger transforms it into his preferred form:” A torn sock is better than

 a mended one.” His discussion revolves around unity. When the sock is whole

 and being worn we are not aware of its unity. When it is torn we become aware

 or self-conscious of what holds it together in its being as sock. Therefore the split

 points to a preceding wholeness. To mend it brings it whole again but with a

 self-awareness of an underlying unity. Is this not what de Kooning does: he

 takes the world apart and then tries to mend it. Hegel says that the scission

 points to a need for philosophy. I think that this bringing

 back together is explosive in two ways: #1 the effort to tie things back, the

 mending. #2 The force that resists this mending and wants to dissolve again.

 His work participates in a dialectic as it moves back and forth between

 the whole and its parts and back again to a new whole.