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Photo Attribution By Coldcreation and Marcel Duchamp - Own work and Marcel Duchamp, File:Marcel Duchamp, 1917, Fountain, photograph by Alfred Stieglitz.jpg, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74694278
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I) From Palindrome's to Taste
Extensions of the palindrome "A man, a plan, a canal -- Panama!"
- "A man, a plan, a cat, a canal – Panama!"
- "A man, a plan, a cat, a ham, a yak, a yam, a hat, a canal – Panama!"
- "A dog, a plan, a canal: pagoda!"
- "A dog, a-panic in a pagoda!"
- "A car, a man, a maraca!"
This brings up an aesthetic point: super-long palindromes aren't good. I don't know that we can ever improve on "A man, a plan, a canal -- Panama!" because 1) it has meaning, 2) it tells a story, and 3) it has great rhythm.
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, #minimumEffectiveDose
II) Math to Marcel
As I start working more and more on math, and become drawn to a beauty that is very hard to communicate to others, I think about how after Marcel Duchamp released a few masterpieces, he focused on chess most of his life, somewhat abandoning art.
- glossy-style, but fun article.
- a riotous A-Z of his secret life
- How good was Duchamp at chess?
Perhaps we should see Duchamp's path as another example of a minimum effective doses: he made a definitive piece of Cubism/ Cubo-Futurism, definitive pieces of Readymades -- Bicycle Wheel and Fountain, a definitive piece of Dada and then . . .
. . .
At the very least, very much empty space.
. . .
III) Marcel's Metaphorical Fountain
During his chess years, Duchamp hung out with a lot of artists that were coming up, and that leads to debates about influence, but for this paragraph I am thinking more about life-style. Duchamp hung out with artists, got to be part of their stunts, such as playing chess with a naked woman in an art gallery (see "glossy-style" piece above) but virtually everyday he pursued his own craft which he found more beautiful, and more pure than what we call art. And sometimes he got to do so with naked women.
This brings us to John Cage, the composer who wrote (?) a 4 minute 33 second piece of silence -- really an invitation to notice ambient sound. He saw himself importing in Zen Buddhism into art. He hung out with much the same scene as Duchamp. Furthermore, Cage
is considered a co-inventor of “happenings” and performance art; the Fluxus movement essentially arose from classes that Cage taught at the New School, in the late nineteen-fifties. (One exercise consisted of listening to a pin drop.) Cage emulated visual artists in turn, his chief idol being the master conceptualist Marcel Duchamp. [emphasis added]Who deserves more credit? Probably Cage, but I cannot really say. I only called this section Marcel's Fountain because I like the pun. Yes, I could almost certainly have come up with a Cage pun, but I had already put in a picture of "fountain" and everything.
I am interested in how both artists explored negative space. I am also interested in the dynamics of creative groups. And the creative group of the time, this John-Marcel Cage-Fountain, however it may have flowed, was important to the development of many artists.
From the already cited Big Think piece:
In the end, Larson’s Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists provides a fascinating new lens through which to see the whole course of modern American art. Where many see Pop Art as devoid of philosophy and purely as the use of the detritus of commercialism, Larson suggests seeing Andy Warhol, for example, as modern Zen master. The sometimes maddening lack of answers from the enigmatic Warhol thus becomes the strategic silence of the teacher of Zen desiring the student to discover the answer for him or herself. Warhol’s 8-hour film Empire (1964) capturing subtle changes in the Empire State Building in real time becomes an extended moment of Zen. (emphasis mine).My critique of an 8-hour film of the Empire State building is similar to that of Palindome's that go too long -- you out-run the human observer and make something gaudy, meaningless, just in bad taste. It can only be glossed over, or ignored.
I don't know if this then leads to a critique of Zen or of Americans messing Zen up inside of the context of art as profession -- I hope the latter, but it shows the importance of having concepts of sufficiency, dosage . . . dao.
I imagine Zen has a relationship between master and student, where the master at least attempts to build up a sequence of practices to move the student along. Warhol's "Empire," on the other hand drops you into 8 hours with no regard for your prior experiences or preparation. Caveat emptor. There is the extra layer that an artist like Warhol down the flow of the fountain (or trapped in the cage) exposes the absurdity of unequal financial results -- but that wears pretty thin after the most minimal of repetitions [1].
But 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence seems like a better amount of time to get people to step out. After all, they might actually do it, not just talk about the implications of some one else doing it, and then laughing at people who don't get the thing the professional has done.
Another way to step out is to examine other beauties, outside of certain social warpings. Perhaps a game of chess, a math problem set, or recreational linguistics -- Panama! Ricercar!
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[1] At least for those not at the top. Much of the joy in Modern Art is of course the gas-lighting. I'm not endorsing it, but it is evident.
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Dude, check this palindrome out.
(See also a maker's commentary).
