Modernism: Heidegger's
The Origin of the Work of Art
Michael Lazarin, Ph. D.
Somehow I too must find a way of making things; not plastic, written things, but
realities
that arise from the craft itself. Somehow I too must discover thesmallest constituent element, the cell of my art, the tangible immaterial means of
expressing everything.
Rainer Maria Rilke to Lou Andreas-Salome, August 10, 1903
Three Schools of Literary/Art Criticism
According to Western critical theory, artistic production is a matter of (a) artists creating (b) artworks for an (c) audience, Consequently, there are three main schools of critical theory, each emphasizing one of the three elements above and tending to understand the other two from the point of view of the first: Classicism, Romanticism and Modernism. Based on the Poetics of Aristotle, Classicism, and later Neoclassicism, appears to emphasize the form of the work of art since so much attention is given to orderly, harmonious, logical plots, characters and figures of speech. However, these are merely matters of technique. The excellent work of art is judged by what kind of effect it has on the audience because in such matters the final cause always has preeminence. The three goals of the poetic arts are: (a) entertainment, (b) moral education and most important (c) catharsis. Concerning entertainment, the main effect should be a relaxation of strife so as to produce a more convivial - 46 - Modernism: Heidegger's The Origin of the Wark of Art (Lazarin)
social order. It is also useful for luring youth to study ever more difficult works. The aim of moral education in effecting a positive social order is obvious. Virtuous and vicious character types are presented so as to educate the public about the consequences of certain kinds of actions. According to Aristotle, in the best literary works, everything is to be arranged-even if it is necessary to break orderly arrangements of plot and character development-to produce a catharsis in the audience. Ca-tharsis is difficult to define, but in general, it means some kind of mental purification leading to transcendence of ordinary consciousness. Thus, the purpose of literary or art criticism is to promote or censor artworks according to whether or not they promote desirable social behavior.
Classicism dominated Western culture for nearly 2200 years until the late 18th century. Romanticism rejected the classical ideals of order, harmony and logic concerning the work of art, but it retained the goals of catharsis, purification and transcendence. A new aesthetic vocabulary was developed to distinguish the feelings of pleasure produced by the classibal ideals (beauty) and the discomfort, sometimes horror, produced by the goal of transcendence (sublime). For Romantics, the artist is an original genius, which derives from Latin genius, a household guardian deity. Later genius came to mean a divinely inspired person, and finally (1649) a person with transcendent creative talents. Early Romantics, e. g. Wordsworth and Coleridge in the preface to Lyrical Ballads, argue the goal of the artist is to communicate an experience of the sublime softened by the pleasurable accessories of the beautiful. For later Roman-tics, e. g. Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, the goal was not so much to communicate an experience of the sublime through artworks, but rather to inspire the audience to become themselves artists. Rather than passive recipients, the audience should become active artists.
Modern art questions the model of production upon which both Classicism and Romanticism are based. According to the Classical (and Romantic) definition, art is an imitation (mimesis) of nature, but Moder-nism believes that artworks must be realities, not imitations. As Gertrude Stein (10) writes in her portrait of Pablo Picasso, "In the nineteenth
century painters discovered lhe need of always having a model in front of them, in the twentieth century they discovered that they must never look at a model." Rather than a re-presentation of reality, the artwork itself must be a reality in its own right. Therefore, the artwork itself gains a central role. It is not so much an essence (what is conveyed by artists to audiences) but rather the exisience (how artworks allow us to live in the world poetically) of art that is important.
In striving to create realities rather than imitations of reality, artists began to present their creations in different ways. Stein (14) writes,
... the framing of life, the need that a picture exist m its frame, remain in it's frame was over. A picture remaining in its frame was a thing that always had existed and now pictures commenced to want to leave their frames ...
Here, "frame" means not only the literal picture frame but also the conceptual framework in which the artwork was regarded by society. Modernism rejects the productive model of artist-artwork-audience. Such a model is essentially a way of technological thinking. As such, it is mainly a way of "framing" things, of keeping things under control. In order for art to be an experience of transcendence, the "frameworks" of art must be broken.
The Hermeneutic Circle
Hermeneutics is the science of interpretation. Traditionally, her me-neuitcs established orthodox interpretations of the Bible in order to settle disputes between the various schools of the early church. An important feature of protestant Christianity is that individuals should develop their own, personal interpretations of the Bible. This, of course, led to an explosion of interpretations that challenged the very notion of orthodoxy and shook the foundations of interpretation theory.
In the 19th century, scholars of hermeneutics such as Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) and Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) argued that - 48 - Modernism: Heidegger's The Origin of the Wark of Art (Lazarin)
all interpretation is circular. 5chleiermacher argued that in order to understand any part of a text, the whole text must be understood; but in order to understand the whole, the parts must be understood. This paradox was applied to other fields, including linguistics, history and literary criticism For example, in order to define a word, other words must be used; however, in order to define these other words, the original word will be used. In history, to understand a particular document, e. g., the Declaration of Independence, the historical period must be studied; however, the historical period is known only from documents of the period. A similar case can be made when we try to understand a work of literature or art.
From the late 19th century to the 196Cs, Formalism (Clive Bell, Clement Green) and New Criticism (I. A. Richards, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, R.P.Blackmur, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, T.S.Eliot, and William Empson) dominated Anglo-American art and literary criticism respectively. To avoid the hermeneutic circle, both argued that artworks should be interpreted only by internal formal elements; external elements such as the intention of the painter or author, the impression on the audience and the historical context should be disregarded.
In the 1980s and 90s, New Historicism (Steven Greenblatt, Michel Foucault) reacted against extreme formalism and attempted to consider external elements but only if they are seen as textual. That is, external elements such as historical context or the life of the author help us understand a work of literature, but-following the insights of Formalism and New Criticism-the external elements are to be understood as the same form as the literary texts_ In other words, knowing something about the career of Faulkner helps us understand a novel, but we never have Faulkner the man. We must understand that we only have texts written by or about Faulkner.
The main proponents of German hermeneutics, following Schleier-macher and Dilthey, are Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002). Both accept that hermeneutics is circular, but they deny that the circle is vicious_ One approaches experiences with
expec-tations that are constantly modified by the experience. If one can get into the hermeneutic circle in the right way, expectations will become more accurate and interpretations can be validated.
In The Origin of the Work of Art (1935), Heidegger ventures to enter the hermeneutic circle of literary and art criticism by posing a thought experiment that runs roughly as follows: What is an artwork? Something made by artists. What are artists? People who make artworks. Thus, a circle. And, it should be remarked that this series of questions is mainly posed by the audience lest we think Heidegger has ignored the third term of the traditional framework of art production.
In order to escape the circle, we have to know what art is. This will allow us to decide who is an artist, what is an artwork and who ex-periences such things. But the essence of art derives from artists, artworks and audiences: Art is something that happens when artists, artworks and audiences come together. Thus an even wider and more difficult circle with art on the one side and the elements of art on the other.
Heidegger argues that, in fact, everyone does have a general idea of what art, artworks and artists are, but it is difficult to define precisely. It is easier to say what they are not. They are not the stones, fields and trees of the natural landscape. Neither are they the ordinary things made by humans such as shoes and desks, that is, what may be generally called equipment. From this ordinary understanding, Heidegger argues that the difference does not distinguish three regions of being but rather defines a hierarchy, where equipment plays a central role. The things of nature are on the bottom rung as a storehouse of materials waiting to perfected as equipment. Artworks occupy the highest rung as equipment with some special added value.
The whole range of beings from stones to statues are really con-ceptualized as elements of a technological framework. Furthermore, this framework does not aim simply, or even mainly, at efficiency: coherent structures of connectedness of "in-order-to" structures. Instead, the real measure employed by technological thinking is "reliability." Shoes work best when they don't pinch; indeed, when we do not notice them at lall. - 50 - Modernism: Heidegger's The Origin of the Work of Art (Lazarin)
This flies in the face of our normal experience of artworks: surprise and awe. He realizes this by examining a painting of peasant shoes by Vincent van Gogh.
The painting reveals that the essential worth of the peasant shoes is reliability. The painting also reveals the world of the peasant and makes us aware of how different this world is from our own or that of a ballerina. In short, the painting reveals reliability in, a way that we do not usually come upon reliability. Finally, the painting reveals that efficiency and reliability cannot be the last word about the fields these shoes trod, the shoes themselves and van Gogh's artistic expression of this world.
Heideggerian Poetics
For Heidegger, poetics is not merely a matter of literary studies. He traces the word back to its Greek root (poiesis) which means making in general: production. In Heidegger's worldview, production is the essential way of Being-in-the-world of Weste.In man. In a golden age, this was realized as a flowering of the arts; in the modern age, production has become mechanical reproduction of equipment that lacks authentic value. It is a theme that can be found as early as Being and Time but which he focused on explicitly in the post-war years as a "critique of technology." During this period, he wonders whether the nihilistic tendencies of the present age are rooted in the beginning of science (Greek geometry) or the industrial revolution. In either event, thought itself cannot think its way out of the modern predicament. Only through a dialogue with artists can Western culture liberate itself from the frameworks within which it has imprisoned itself.
When Heidegger looks at Van Gogh's painting of a peasant woman's old shoes, the painting shows him the world of the peasant woman. Not only the shoes, but the working in the fields, the evening rest after the shoes are removed, etc. He says that he does not know this world before looking at the painting. The artwork is not a representation of images I already have; it is the production of new images. The artwork shows
the truth of something in the context of its world. The artwork:
sets to work the truth of the thing brings the thing into the light of Being
lets the Being of the thing shine steadily (Origin, 36)
Art sets truth to work; it is not mainly about beauty or the sublime. Heidegger asks if this association of art and truth is a revival of the classical definition of art as an imitation of nature, where imitation means aedequatio, homoiosis (correspondence of idea and thing). However, he denies that art is an imitation, representation or reproduction of anything already existing.
The artwork opens up in its own way the Being of beings. This opening up, i. e., deconcealing, the truth of beings happens in the work .... Art is truth setting itself to work .... What is this setting-itself-to-work?" (Origin, 39)
The way to what is at work in the artwork can be found neither in the artist nor in the audience. In great art, the artist releases the artwork to exist by itself. In terms of the audience, the typical experience of art today is no experience at all. To place artworks in museums or libraries. destroys them. Even if left in their original setting, they cannot be experienced due to the nihilism of the present day. For Heidegger, in the age of nihilism, there is no art at all. The search for the "origin of the work of art" is also a search to recover art, to re-establish art, to restore the original power of art.
The Van Gogh painting of shoes was chosen to deconstruct the classical definition: art is an imitation of nature. Heidegger showed that the painting is not a picture of shoes but rather a revelation of the world of the peasant woman.: the fields and sky, sun and rain, labor and rest, etc. Next, Heidegger chooses a non-representational work from a world that is completely forgotten: the temple at Paestum.
Artworks are typically "set-up" in museums in order to display them to a public. In the history of Western museum curation, two purposes of display have been proposed. One purpose is the preservation of national symbols. For this purpose, museums collect and commission portraits or statues of leaders, paintings of victory, the beauty of the national lands-cape, the magnitude of national architecture, etc. The second purpose is conservation of works so that they may be available as models for future artists and the education of the public. In short, artworks are set up in museums in order to save the past. On the other hand, when an artwork is originally "set-up," for example the temple at Paestum, the purpose is to initiate, to open up a new world. Heidegger describes three aspects of initiation:
consecration-the holy is opened up and the god invoked measure-the artwork defines practices
force-the artwork gives power to a world created by the artwork (Origin, 44)
Because the temple has been built, humans may gather at this place under the protection of the god. Market places and dwellings will also be constructed to provide for this gathering. Out of this will come a vital community with the power to sustain itself.
The WQrld is neither the totality of things nor the structure of things. Heidegger says, "the world worlds." The world is an activity of decisions and involvements, setting the pace of time and the horizon of space. The world is the "Open," a free place in which events can happel'l. The world is possibility and power. "The work as work sets up a world." The work also "sets forth the earth."
In the production of equipment, a form is imposed on matter. If the production process is successful, the matter disappears into the use-fulness of the equipment_ On the other hand, in the artwork, the matter is "set-forth" as something special to be seen. In a technical manual, language is neutralized and disappears; in a novel, language (diction and
syntax) stands out. In the temple, the stone is carefully selected and arranged to provide an impressive and delightful image. But, at the same time, the luminous surface of the stone makes us attentive to the shining sun; the massiveness of the stone makes us aware of the strength of the ground to bear such a weight. The great artwork not only draws our attention to it but also arouses our sensitivity to the material environment. This making matter important is allowing matter to enter the "Open" as "Earth."
The setting up of a world and the setting forth of earth are two essential features in the work-being of the work. They belong together, however, in the unity of work-being. This is the unity we seek when we ponder the self-subsistence of the work and try to express in words this closed, unitary repose of self-support. (Origin, 48)
However, this unity is not the repose of balanced elements of the classical ideal. The relation of World and Earth is Striving (Streit) as constant Agitation (Bewegtheit) in the artwork because World is the self-opening and Earth is the self-secluding. The story is always struggling with language; the figure with the stone, the dance with the body.
Though Heidegger does not say this openly, it is possible to see his concept of the work (ergan) as the kind of conflict (agan) that occurs in a drama. Heidegger's discussion of the work contains many of the elements of dramatic action. The work "instigates" the striving conflict between World and Earth like the "exciting force" sets the action of the plot in motion. In the great work of art, the striving comes to an extremity of complication, a "climax" of the striving, where each side (World and Earth) grasp the other in ultimate battle. There is a kind of "discovery" in which World reveals mere matter as Earth, and Earth allows the elements of the work to appear as a World. There is also a moment of "peripety" in which the World is brought back to its foun-dations and not allowed to escape into a self· defined, self-sufficient fantasy
world. Also, the Earth is forced to show itself in its power. In average, everyday life, language secludes and hides itself in "idle talk," but in a poem or novel the power is forced out into the open by the world of the artwork.
The difference between the typical drama and the struggle of World and Earth in the work of art is that neither decisively triumphs over the other in a great work of art. The "denouement" of the striving of World and Earth in the work appear is mutual support in their opposition to one another. The support for this opposition derives from the activity of artists and the audience. Recall that the Anglo-American school of modernism attempts to avoid the problems posed by the hermeneutical circle by excluding the role of the artist and audience. On the other hand, Heidegger accepts the circularity as a necessary condition for thinking seriously about artworks. He has entered the circle by bracketing the question of the role of the artist and audience, that is, by focusing on the artwork. But this is not to deny that the artist and andience have nothing to do with the process of truth coming to be in the artwork.
In the concluding section of The Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger considers the role of the artist and audience, but he rejects the traditional understanding of these two which is based on a technological framing of the world. From this point of view, poetics in the broadest sense is primarily a matter of making: using natural resources to make equipment or artworks. Certainly, the mastery of materials has some importance in this matter, but since the artwork is essentially concerned with the happening of truth, it is not making but rather knowing which is primary. This results in a reversal of the usual order of dependency in the relation of artists, artwork and audience.
The artist "brings forth" the artwork by maintaining the harmonic opposition of World and Earth. If we watch a film of a modern artist, for example Pablo Picasso or Jackson Pollack, it is clear that they do not have some fixed Image toward which they are working. Each artistic gesture resolves some tension between line, color field and empty canvas, and at the same time, poses a new tension. Paul Klee described his artistic
activity as "taking a line for a walk." Even in the case of Renaissance masters, where the final product seems to be a matter of transferring a design to canvas, wood or plaster, the variety of sketches that precede such works show that playful interaction between artist and work is im-portant. The activity of the artist brings forth a Riss (rift), which may be expressed by the English word "cleave," which means both to cut and to join. These contradictory meanings can also be found in the Japanese word "en" (~), which means both edge and connection, and interestingly fate or destiny, denoting some special connection between two elements while maintaining their distinctness.
The conflict is not a rift (Riss) as a mere cleft is ripped open; rather it is the intimacy with which opponents belong to each other. This rift carries the opponents into the sour~e of their unity by virtue of their common ground .... it brings the opposition of measure and boundary into their common outline. (Origin, 63)
In "Poetically Man Dwells" (1951), Heidegger argues that poetic activity is taking a measure of the fundamental poles of human experience, the Fourfold (earth, sky, divinity and mortality). Poetic measuring does not capture the interval between two points; such a determination is the goal of technological thinking: measure as framework (Gestell). Rather, poetic activity stretches out the differences and blurs the boundaries.
The argument of "Poetically Man Dwells" is based on some lines from a late poem by Friederich H5lderlin (1770-1843), In LovelY Blueness. Early in his career, at the time he was struggling to write the never completed drama, "The Death of Empedocles," H5lderlin rejects the possibility of synthesis between nature and art, mortals and divinities, the finite and infinite. In "Procedures of the Poetic Spirit," he writes,
Place yourself, by free choice, in harmonic opposition with an extreme sphere, so as you are in yourself, by nature, in harmonic opposition (harmonischer Entgegensetzung), though in an unknowable way - 56 - Modernism: Heidegger's The Origin of the Work of Art (Lazar in)
(unerkennbarewiese), so you remain in yourself." (H5Iderlin, 671)
As perceptive, noetic beings, humans span toward and come near the measure, but human logos, explanation, logic fails to grasp the measure because the measure is fleeting, never fixed. The measure is an harmonic opposition which lasts for a moment, then vanishes. Poets have the power to intensify the harmony and thereby retain its mystery in poetic language. Imagination is the human faculty that combines the heterogeneous. In this case, the imagination combines the familiar and the alien, the knowable (measuring as noein) and the unknowable (the measure as legein). Poetic imagination is a matter of making decisions about the harmonic balance of World and Earth such that it can unfold as a basis of cultural life while remaining itself baseless. "Every decision, however, bases itself on something not mastered, something concealed, confusing, else it would never be a decision". (Origin, 55)
The artist is forever playing with possible harmonies of World and Earth, pushing the opposition of World and Earth to ever greater extremes. For a work of art to find repose depends on the audience preserving the work of art. This repose does not mean a final resting place in museums and tourist sites. To be so archived is the death of the artwork. To be framed as Exhibit 63A, comprehended by a three minute "walking guide" explanation, is to shift the work from imagination to memory, from noetic perception to logo centric memorandum.
Just as a work ... is essentially in need of creators, so what is created cannot itself come into being without those who preserve it. Preserving the work, as knowing, is a sober standing within the ex-traordinary awesomeness of the truth that is happening in the work. . .. Yet knowing does not consist in mere information and notions about something. He who truly knows what is, knows what he wills to do in the midst of what is. (Origin, 66-68)
sets up a world and sets forth the earth; it decides upon a gestalt and thrusts it forward into existence, it moves a people to ecstasy and en-courages them to preserve the truth of the artwork.
By preserving the work of art in its truth, the audience founds the possibility of the truth of the culture. When artworks becomes emblems of state power, educational excursions for school students, resources for practicing artists, the culture begins to lose its foundations and so ceases to be a culture.
Heidegger argues that the founding function of preservation has three modes: (a) bestowing, (b) grounding and (c) beginning. As bestowing-preserving genuine art is not a development or progress based on the past. It is always "unfamiliar" and "extraordinary." As grounding-preserving genuine art never happens for no reason and with no purpose. It already calls to a people to gather in its openness. Art demands that the people preserve it. As beginning-preserving genuine art already contains its end in its beginning. The beginning is the first of a series which leads in an unknown direction from the point of view of the beginning. The beginning as origin is at the same time the first as the leader, the judge. Art not only opens up and grounds, it also provides a measure to judge and resolve the strife of truth in the artworks.
In this essay, Heidegger reverses the usual order of dependency in the artist, artwork, audience structure. The artist depends on the truth happening in the artwork to enliven his/her imagination. That works remain vital depends on the way the audience preserves them. In "Poeti-cally Man Dwells," the reverse seems to be the case. In order for there to be a culture that genuinely appreciates art, there must first be artists that challenge the public. Of course, as a modernist, the artwork itself always retains a primary role for Heidegger. Nevertheless, Heidegger's inability to fully comprehend his own modernism and dispense with the technological framework of artists making artworks for audiences may be a result of his failure to fully consider the artworks of his own time. Though he praises the modern work of the Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida (1924-2002), who illustrated Heidegger's Art and Space (1969), - 58 - Modernism: Heidegger's The Origin of the Work of Art (Lazarin)
for the most part his examples come from 19~b century poetry and pain-ting.
Modernism and Anti-Art
At the end of the 19tb century, the highest achievements of Western culture: the representational painting, the symphony and the novel were challenged by technological inventions: the camera, the phonograph and the movie, respectively. Such challenges motivated artists, musicians and writers to search for new foundations of their works since the new in-struments of mechanical reproduction seemed insuperable in accomplishing the goal of imitating nature. There followed a fundamental questioning of the "equipment-character" of works of art and the role of artworks as elite expressions of "so-called" high culture.
One important development in this search for a new reality for art-works was the discovery of art-works already existing in modern culture. Marcel Duchamp (French/American, 1887-1968) introduced the idea of "ready made" art (like ready-made clothes) by selecting mass-produced objects and sending them to art galleries or museums (c£. Illustrations i-vi.). In 1913, he affixed a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool. Two years later, he bought a snow shovel upon which he wrote "in advance of a broken arm." He explained the development of this idea in the lecture "Apropos of 'Readymades'," at the Museum of Modern Art in October, 1961:
A point which I want very much to establish is that the choice of these "readymades" was never dictated by esthetic delectation. This choice was based on a reaction of visual indifference with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste ... in fact a complete ane-sthesia. (Salt Seller, 141-142)
In order to create a work of art for the modern age, it was first necessary to demolish the elite status of archival art. This was most notoriously accomplished when Duchamp signed an ordinary urinal with
the name R.Mutt and submitted it to a trendy gallery as "Fountain" in New York. Even the avant garde was outraged by this gesture. According to Walter Benjamin, the aim of the readymades and other similar acti-vities of the Dadaists "was a relentless destruction of the aura of their creations," (Benjamin 237-238) that is, to destroy the elite status of the work of art and the position of the artist in society.
However, the readymades were not simply a nihilistic rejection of art. Duchamp intended to produce artworks, but ones which were more a "bringing-forth" of potential conflicts of World and Earth than a "making" of refined equipment. He also wanted the works to appeal to the ima-gination more than the eye. Many of the readmades include a verbal expression. Thus, they are not completely readymade. There is still a role for the artist beside "bringing-forth" the artwork for the public view. There is also poetic "measuring" in the sense of expanding the possible meanings of an ordinary object or assemblage of objects.
One important characteristic was the short sentence which I occa-sionally inscribed on the "readymade". That sentence instead of describing the object like a title was meant to carry the mind of the spectator towards other regions more verbal. (Salt Seller, 141-142)
The added expressions were not so much "titles", that is, frameworks by which the artwork can be identified as "a picture of x, y or z," but a way to open up a thoughtful dialogue. Most visitors to a museum cruise past the works as if they were sitting an exam to enter art school. They look at the works in order as the curator has arranged them, appraising them only long enough to make an identification, then checking to see if there judgment was correct or not by glancing at the nameplate next to the work.
In an interview with the art critic Pierre Cabanne, Duchamp says, "Before Courbet, painting had other functions: it could be religious, philosophical, moraL .. (but] our whole century is competlely retinal". (Dialogues, 43). In Duchamp's view, since Gustave Courbet (1819-1877), - 60 - Modernism: Heidegger's The Origin of the Work of Art (Lazar in)
art has been too interested in images for the eye and not enough in images for the mind. Of course for Duchamp, art as provoking thought is always based on some "thing," even if it is randomly chosen at a department store. Nevertheless, his emphasis on art for the mind rather than the eye set off several important movements in the 20th century.
For example, John Cage (American composer, 1912-1992) wants us to be able to find art in almost nothing at all. Cage's most notorious work is 4'33" (first performed by David Tudor in 1953 at Woodstock, NY), in which the pianist sits at the piano, lifts and closes the keyboard lid twice, then leaves the stage. During the three intervals (while the lid is closed), Tudor turned the pages of the score and measured the intervals with a stopwatch (movement I: 30"; movement II: 2'23"; move-ment III: 1'40"). Similar to the reception of Duchamp's "Fountain," ,the audience was outraged by this performance, even though they were ex-pecting an experimental composition.
One interpretation is that the total number of seconds is 273, and minus 273 Celsius is Absolute Zero. While Absolute Zero in music would be silence, Cage insists, "There is no such thing as silence. !::omething is always happening that makes a sound." Cage wants the audience to pay attention to the chance sounds in the auditorium and regard these as music. For him, the work of art is essentially "attentive experience;" there is no need for a prepared object or event, nor for someone to prepare it. The truly modern artist finds art anywhere; it is available to the audience everywhere. If we find it difficult in our modern mass-produced age to find something that delights us in any venue at any time, then maybe we will be more attentive to the lived environment and insist on something more interesting. At least, this was the hope of the more radical movements in modern art, music and literature. The signs of progress are not promising.
For three months (March-May, 2006) iMomus exhibited his ordinary life as Click Opera-My Life as a Living Sculpture at the Whitney Museum Biennial in New York. This is perhaps the most avant garde exhibition at a large venue in the United States, and one would expect the audience
to expect the unusual. On his first two attempts to speak to visitors in the museum, he was arrested by museum guards. The solution was to equip him with a security badge and a general annonncement stating, "There's an artist doing an unreliable tour guide in the galleries; he's part of the Biennial, it's okay, let him do it!" (iMomus)
Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936), Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, New York: Schocken, 1968. Cage, John. Silence. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1973.
Duchamp, Marcel. Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, interviewed by Pierre Cab anne, tr. Ron Padgett, New York: Viking,
1971-- 1971-- . Salt. Seller: The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp (Marchand du Sel), eds. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson,- London: Thames and Hudson, 1975.
iMomus, Click Opara·My Life as a Life as a Living Sculpture, March 3, 2006. www.livejournal.com/177166.html
Heidegger, Martin. "The Origin of the Work of Art", in Poety, Language, Thought, tr. by Albert Hofstadter, New York: Harper Colophon, 1975. - - . "Poetically man Dwells", in Poetry, Language, Thought, tr. by Albert
New York: Harper Colophon, 1975.
H6lderlin, Friederich. "Uber die Verfahrungsweise des poetischen Geistes" W erke und Briefe, V. II, Frankfurt: Klosterman, 1988.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. "Letters on Cezanne," tr. Joel Agee, New York, North-point Press, 2002.
Stein, Gertrude. Picasso (1938), New York: Dover Publications, 1984.
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Courtesy of Arturo Schwarz
v. Fou1ltaill 1917/64(original lost)
Urinal turncd on it's back hcight 24 5/8 in. signed R. Mutt.
iv. With Hidde1l Noise，
Metal andt wine， 5 in. high Philadelphia Muscum of Art Louise and Walter Arensberg
Collection
1916
ω IIIustrationsfrom Perloff. Marjorie. StanfordI-IumanItiesReview. Vol.7.1. 1999;except III. from
http:/arthist.binghamton.edu/duchamp/Shovc.lhtml.For a comprehensive calalogue ofrcadymaclessee
hltp:/arthist.binghamton.edu/duchamp/main.readymad町 hlml
