Duchamp: The Creative Act
In this piece there were many new ideas bringing together the art, artist, and spectator in relation to the creative act. There were some very interesting points that Duchamp brings about when he says that the,"artist acts like a mediumistic being who ... seeks his way out to a clearing." I found this important because he says the artist is the medium, in essence, finding a way to express his/herself, instead of it being about ideas and mediums that the artist chooses. The artist becomes the medium that finds the art and the spectator.
Another provoking quote in this piece was,
"Millions of artists create; only a few thousand are discussed or accepted by the spectator."This quote brought up a lot of questions like: Does art have to be successful only because of the viewer, or can't art be successful if only in the eyes of the beholder? I feel that it could go either way and because of this I feel that Duchamp is overlooking the fact that the viewer isn't everything. However, is Duchamp's point with this piece that the viewer makes the art successful and if it isn't successful it doesn''t matter otherwise. But then Duchamp goes back to the idea of art and touches on the fact that art is art if it is bad, good or indifferent.
This causes many reactions and sometimes they are intended and others could be inevitable.Dick Higgins: Intermedia
This piece was slightly harder to understand in terms of what the meaning and ideas he wanted to express to the reader of his piece were. I guess I kind of got out of it he wanted show through through the evolution of art through history how the word and art of intermedia came about. I thought it was interesting at the begining when Dick Higgins pointed out that art was always separate before. In other words, sculpture couldn't be painted or ceramics couldn't be part of painting. Aside from this, there is a lot of other things he goes on to say which leads him to Robert Rauschenberg, who started looking at objects in their work and called them "combines". I like the ending of the piece most because he relates the time the first part of the piece was written to the present time the piece was written in the later part. He says "intermedia ... is ... a useful way to approach some new work." Is this really the case? Is this all of intermedia?
Selections from DADA Almanac
The selections were interesting in the fact that they didn't ever really get down to what DADA art was representative of, except that it depicted the feeling of artists that were moved by the war. It was expressing the ideas that expressionists they say suppressed.
