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The Radical Negativity and Paradoxical Performativity of Postmodern Iconoclasm: Marcel Duchamp and Antonin Artaud
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2009
Extract
‘Iconoclasm grew from the destruction of religious images and opposition to the religious use of images to, literally, the destruction of, and opposition to, any images or works of art and, metaphorically, the “attacking or overthrow of venerated institutions and cherished beliefs, regarded as fallacious or superstitious”’. Dario Gamboni.
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References
Notes
1. Gamboni, Dario, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), p. 18.Google Scholar
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7. Fountain—the ‘Buddha of the Bathroom’—icon of iconoclasm—contrives to act as a reference for conceptual artists such as Yoko Ono, Sherry Levine, Robert Gober, and Sarah Lucas.
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10. de Duve, , Kant After Duchamp, p. 292.Google Scholar
11. de Duve, Thierry, Au nom de l'art: Pour une archéologie de la modernité (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1989), p. 77Google Scholar. Cited in Jones, , Postmodernism …, pp. 208–9.Google Scholar
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13. For a more detailed discussion of speech act theory and performativity see Carlson, , Performance, pp. 56–75Google Scholar; definitions of illocutory and perlocutory speech acts appear on pp. 61–12. See also Austin, J. L., ‘Performative Utterances’, Philosophical Papers (second edition) edited by Urmson, J. O. and Warnock, G. J. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 233–52Google Scholar; and Rozik, Eli, ‘The Function of Language in the Theatre’, Theatre Research International, Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 104–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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17. Graver, David, The Aesthetics of Disturbance: Anti-Art in Avant-Garde Drama (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1995), p. 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In this respect Duchamp becomes the progenitor of the self-determination of the body performed in the writings of Artaud in the 1930s, the direct art of the Vienna Actionists of the 1960s, and the performances and installations of COUM Transmissions in the 1970s and 80s. Graver's conclusions however fail to take full account of the radical negativity of Duchamp's indifference to art.
18. See Jones, , Postmodernism …, pp. 131–5.Google Scholar
19. In this context, attention should also be paid to the portraits of Duchamp by Man Ray where Duchamp appears with a star shaven into his hair or as the ambivalently gendered alter ego, Rrose Sélavy, where his identity is indeterminately performed as neither male nor female.
20. The radical laughter inherent in Duchamp's formulation of the ‘an-artist’ is closely followed by Allan Kaprow's conception of the ‘un-artist’. In his 1971 essay, ‘The Education of the Un-Artist, Part I’, Kaprow writes that, in order to overcome the outmoded category of art, it is the duty of the artist today to work against his own profession and invoke a critical laughter: ‘I would propose that the first practical step towards laughter is to un-art ourselves, avoid all aesthetic roles, give up all references to being artists of any kind whatever. In becoming un-artists … we may exist only fleetingly as the non-artist, for, when the profession of art is discarded, the category is meaningless, or at least antique. An un-artist is one who is engaged in changing jobs, in modernizing’. Kaprow, Allan, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, edited by Kelley, Jeff (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 103–4Google Scholar. Kaprow goes on to suggests the more fluid term of ‘player’ as an alternative for ‘artist’: ‘Replacing artist with player, as if adopting an alias, is a way of altering a fixed identity. And a changed identity is a principle of mobility, of going from one place to another’. ‘The Education of the Un-Artist, Part II’, pp. 125–6. Shedding, once and for all, the worn-out skin of the ‘artist’, the un-artist becomes a playful cultural nomad, constantly shifting through a series of performed (double) identities— an eternal fugitive from art.
21. There is an important structural affinity between the embodiment implied in the radical laughter of Fountain and the literal ejaculation of Duchamp, 's Paysage fautif (1946)—Google Scholar seminal fluid on Astralon, backed with black satin.
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23. Carlson, , Performance, p. 64Google Scholar. Carlson is summarizing the discussion on the ‘radical negativity’ identified in the texts of Nietzsche, Lacan and Kierkegaard by Felman, Shoshana in The Literary Speech Act: Don Juan with Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages, translated by Porter, Catherine (Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983).Google Scholar
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26. Artaud's explosive quality is recognized in the biography by Barber, Stephen titled Antonin Artaud: Blows and Bombs (London: Faber and Faber, 1993).Google Scholar
27. Artaud, , ‘Van Gogh The Man Suicided by Society’, Artaud Anthology (San Francisco: City Lights, 1968), p. 158.Google Scholar
28. Artaud, , Selected Writings, edited by Sontag, Susan, translated by Weaver, Helen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 108Google Scholar
29. Artaud, , ‘Manifesto for an Abortive Theatre’,13 November 1926, in Schumacher, Artaud on Theatre, p. 32–3.Google Scholar
30. Derrida, , Writing and Difference, p. 235.Google Scholar
31. Ibid.: ‘The stage is theological for as long as it is dominated by speech, by a will to speech, by the layout of a primary logos which does not belong to the theatrical site and governs it from a distance’. p. 235.
32. Gillespie, Michael Allen, Nihilism Before Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 1.Google Scholar
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36. Artaud, , ‘The Alfred Jarry Theatre’Google Scholar, in Schumacher, , Artaud on Theatre, p. 31.Google Scholar
37. Barber, , Artaud: The Screaming Body, p. 102.Google Scholar
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39. Artaud, , ‘Theatre and Culture’Google Scholar, in Schumacher, , Artaud on Theatre, p. 130.Google Scholar
40. de Duve, , Kant After Duchamp, p. 292.Google Scholar