Exhibition Idea and Project:
Adriana Rosenberg y Jorge Helft Curator: Elena Filipovic Production: Fundación Proa General Coordinator:
Cintia Mezza Assistant and producer:
Iara Freiberg Exhibition Design:
Caruso - Torricela, Architteti Catalogue Coordinator:
Debbie Grimberg Sponsor: Tenaris - O. Techint
February 27, 2008
Marcel Duchamp. Press repercussions
www.ambitoweb.com
Fundación Proa will re-open its building in November presenting an anthological show of the artist
Marcel Duchamp will be on display for the first time in the country.
By: Ana Martínez Quijano
From the moment it opened its doors in a beautiful building in La Boca with the paintings of the Mexican Rufino Tamayo on display, Fundación Proa has been giving its public a chance to see the works of many great masters who marked art history.
Now, while there are expansion works in the building which has turned out to be too small for the activities that the foundation has in its agenda, Proa’s director, Adriana Rosenberg, gets ready to inaugurate it in November with a major exhibition of Marcel Duchamp. He is the artist who pushed modern art further and set forth the ideas for contemporaneity but, in spite of this, never had an exhibition of his own in Latin America. Most important of all is the fact that this show is not a poor-quality undertaking, many of which travel around the world, but it is produced and organised by Proa, which will also present it in the Museo d’Arte Moderne in Sao Paulo.
Exhibition
The Buenos Aires exhibition gathers together 130 works (objects, documents and photographs) and its title is «Marcel Duchamp: a work that is not a work ‘of art’», a parody of Duchamp’s famous question: «Can one make works which are not works ‘of art’? ». It looks like a joke; however, the criteria on what is considered «art» have changed from this question onwards.
Rosenberg emphasises that the show «aims to underscore the artistic ruptures that Duchamp caused from the moment he created the readymade in 1913, and also to analyse the new perspectives that have sprung in art since then». From 1913 onwards, with his first readymade, Duchamp elevated ordinary everyday objects industrially produced to the category of «work of art», some examples are the «Bottlerack»,«Bicycle wheel»or the famous «Fountain».
Thanks to the urinal of 1917, to which he added the signature R. Mutt, as if it were a trademark and submitted to an art show where it was rejected, his revolutionary ideas became visible. By giving importance to these objects of inexpressive appearance, he broke off with the criterion of what so far was deemed artistic and made art take a different turn.
The mysterious and disconcerting nature of the readymades makes it possible to reconstruct Duchamp’s intention; he wanted spectators to refer to themselves, he demanded that they decipher what they had in front of them, and made them come up with their own interpretation. In other words, his oeuvre includes the onlooker; it involves him in the artistic process, even if it is through the feeling of rejection.
« The creative act is not performed by the artist alone, since it is the spectator who brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications», Duchamp points out in his writings.
With a provocative attitude, the author of the readymades induced the spectator to observe in a critical way the real appearance of things and reality.«Art is not what is visible, but it is found in the gaps it opens», explains the ever-enigmatic Duchamp, who, through the «negative presence» of his objects, finds the way to «deny the possibility of defining art», changes the course of history and turns a urinal into an avant-garde fetish.
As a result of these works, with an unprecedented freedom, the Dada movement introduces chaos into the artistic scene; Pop art turns the shining steel of cars, comics and consumer goods into real works of art, and the way is paved for objectual art and the complexity of «non-retinal» art which results in the dematerialization of the work.
Expansion
With a boundless experimental imagination and energy, art expands towards the use of new materials and expressive media such as photography, film or literature, fields that had remained strictly apart from one another up to that moment. Therefore, the works which will be presented in Proa tell a story full of secrets, whose understanding is essential to grasp Duchamp’s decisive influence on contemporary art.
In addition, only after the experience of seeing the original works, will it be possible to evaluate the art of the numerous followers that the master has had up to today. Duchamp renders nowadays art’s repertoire predictable: the appropriation, the quote, the derivation, the subversion or negation of the model and even the copy.
The exhibition is curated by the American Elena Filipovic, art historian and specialist in Duchamp. Rosenberg comments that the project sprang from a proposal made by the art collector Jorge Helft, who stressed the importance of organising an exhibition in Latin America. «At the beginning of 2006 we started working on the design with the wholehearted and essential support of the artist’s step daughter Jacqueline Matisse Monnier», he adds.
The organization requires a lot of hard work. The important pieces belong to private collections or museums which will lend them for the show, such as the Pompidou, the one from Philadelphia, that of the University of Indiana and the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm, owner of two fundamental pieces: «La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même» (or «The Large Glass»),and the miniature portable museum, the «Boîteenvalise».
The project goes beyond the vernissage. Proa’s new auditorium will be inaugurated with the first international Symposium on Duchamp in Latin America, coordinated by Paul Franklin, director of the journal «Etant donné. Marcel Duchamp».
Rosenberg points out that since Duchamp lived in Buenos Aires and in Brazil, where unpublished material was found, this debate arouses international interest. «The show and the symposium will be a platform for debate and research on contemporary art and the influence of Marcel Duchamp’s work in the visual arts, music, literature, film, theatre and other fields», adds the director.
In conclusion, we will have to wait until November, but the ‘porteños’ will see an oeuvre that is scattered around the museums of the world, hard to find together, and which above all, still puzzles artists.
