Tuesday, November 5, 2013

The Anti-Realism of Marcel Duchamp




In Oscar Wilde's dialogue entitled, "The Decay of Lying," Vivian says that “Art is a veil, not a mirror” This is a very indirect, but ultimately a very pessimistic, statement. A mirror offers us a distorted picture of actuality. A veil covers up something in order to make it appear mysterious – only appropriate if the object is also a boundless subject, and thus mysterious. Nevertheless, a veil obscures. Art is a window. Art is a 60 megapixel lens to our 2 megapixel lens: the artist allows the real to be actualized by means of an appeal to the imagination. Art attempts to reveal the mystery that is reality which we see with clouded vision because of our imperfections. Art is corrective therapy. Sometimes it is laser surgery.


As Oscar Wilde's Vivian says, referring to the character of Hamlet: “The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy.” This is exactly right. In the volatile conditions that surround such a dangerous enterprise as creating art, one is constantly in peril of making mistakes. The lens can become convex, concave, variously distorted. The lens can focus on one part at the expense of the whole, or vice versa, and when Art has gained a whole host of disciples, magnified unreality can cause great harm.


“Art,” then, can be “a veil” – e.g. Duchamp's "Fountaine" – but ideally it reveals the real, the beauty that lies hidden, and thus affects the course of human life positively. Marcel Duchamp asserts that the real (and the beautiful) is exactly what he perceives – in this particular case, a urinal. This assertion would rest on the infallibility of human reason as its foundation. Fortunately -- for this case -- human reason often fails. However, because of the authority of art – “the world has become sad because a puppet was melancholy” – Duchamp set off a current that has caused a great “veil,” if not a black curtain, to fall over reality: the anti-avante-garde in art.

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