Archives for September 2020

This short essay will talk about how I made sense of my project “readymade — pool” using ideas in Forms of Readymade: Duchamp and Brancusi by Rosalind Krauss. 

My project consists of an inverted mug placed on a surface and a pool of water that is put on the concave at the bottom of my mug. In the following paragraphs, I will talk about how did I choose to make it this way.

In the reading, the writer discusses the similarities between Duchamp and Brancusi and also attempted to make sense of “what is readymade” through close examinations of both artists’ works and work by scholars who studied them. One thing that stands out to me early on in the passage is that “fine object did not appear as something coming from the matrix of the sculptor’s personally held, ideas or emotions.” (Krauss, 72), which in other words means the project itself doesn’t contain my own emotion or attitude or opinion towards anything. This is very unusual for me because when I reflect on what projects I have done throughout my IMA career, I find myself being always driven by my opinions and emotions in real life. So in this project, I purposefully didn’t go for my former idea which is to combine a comb with some charging cables and cords to illustrate the frustration to sort out the messy cables in my bag. I realized readymade doesn’t have to have any connections with the maker’s personal or internal life. So I let my feelings go and let my imaginations flow.

The second point I got from the reading is that the art piece has to be “chosen” by the artists and that its original function as a pre-made object fades away. The former point I thought could really be applied to most of the artworks — especially contemporary — which has little to no meaning if not given by the artist themselves. But the second point I personally resonate a lot with. I Always thought that for a readymade object, one must deprive it off of its practical uses, otherwise, it seems that one is adding meaning onto an object with meaning by brute force, which feels fabricated. And this is the exact reason why I have the mug turned upside down — so that it can no longer hold water in any meaningful way. As the reading also suggests, “But for Duchamp, the work was no longer a common object, because it had been transposed. It had been “flipped” or inverted to rest on a pedestal, which is to say that it had been repositioned, and this physical repositioning stood for a transformation that must then be read on a metaphysical level.” (Krauss, 77)

One last element I found interesting in the readymades is that it is so reduced and so bare-bone, as noted “irreducible under traditional analysis “, that it leaves the observers to wonder: why is that an art piece? This is something I thought I could not achieve through my own project. My thought process was around the struggle on if I should add the water on top. Because if so it could convey more clearly its original use, but in the meantime it adds more context to the piece so that it no longer feels irreducible, and also the viewers can discern at least some of the context from this project and would not be left wondering WHY.

Those are my thought process in making this piece, I will keep altering the blog and the project itself if needed.

(or could I say it is with the decision of removing the water this project becomes the readymade I was going for?)

Added on Oct.1st:

For this project I thought that I should focus on readymade as much as possible and try not to look at other projects that may cause me to come up with too many ideas and unwanted contexts in this project. Because when reading the essay by Krauss, the biggest worry that I had was I may add so much context that it no longer feels simple, while the readymade projects of Duchamp feels reduced to atoms — which is one of the ultimate goals that I tried to reach. However in the end, I still chose to add that pool of water on top, mainly for exhibition purposes — to highlight the fact that it no longer holds water in a meaningful way, but by doing that, as I discussed earlier, introduced more context. So if I were to keep this project for myself to look at, I will remove the pool of water. Because to me the point that I want to highlight through the water is obvious enough, and also it’s reduced to the most possible. And for everyone else, the process that I put on the water and then removed it is enough — in other words, it is with the decision of removing the water this project becomes the readymade I was going for.

I want to talk about the piece “order in disorder” (I cannot remember the exact name). It is basically groups of ball-shaped strong magnets installed and scattered on a wall to form a square shape. Each group has a number of balls from 0-3, which means where there could be a group of balls, there could be a blank. 

From the look of this piece and the description of it, I could tell that it is trying to convey the idea of order in disorder because the piece is ordered with a solid pattern of formation for each group of balls, but disordered in terms of the number in each group. But upon first look, I just think of other ways that are better in terms of representing this very concept. 

For example, I would replace the ball shapes to a more random shape because the sphere in itself is too much of an organized shape and thus makes the whole piece look less random than it actually is. I would choose like “L” shaped pieces to increase the randomness because shapes like that already have directional randomness in them.

Also, the shape which the groups of magnets create doesn’t have to be a check-boarded square. I get that it might be because using other more complex shapes may introduce redundant information and thus undermine the concept of ‘organized’ or ‘order’ (since the square is one of the most basic shapes there is). But still, like the former paragraph, I think the square is so organized of a shape that it feels somewhat rigid here. I would go for a “splash” shape, where the most intensely placed pieces can form the rough shape and the less dense ones can spread out like a radiant.

When I further think about this, for me it is all about the balance of the two parts that the artists want to show here: organized and disorganized. The reason I didn’t quite like the piece in the show is that it looks too organized for me and that “the organized” intensely outweigh the other part. Some artworks down below I found in Pinterest look better balanced for me. (linked on the pictures)

For the organized part, they all used similar designs, or follow similar patterns. And for the disorganized part, 1 and 3 looks like an assortment of random lines and shapes; for 2, the table and chairs and their shadows are randomly scattered around the whole picture. 

I especially like pic 2 in the way that it just looks so random and messy if not examined closely, but also so uninformed when the pattern is recognized. It truly pushed both parts of the definition to the extreme while maintaining good balance.