What distinguishes art from ordinary objects? What is the role of the artist in “making” art? In 1913 Marcel Duchamp (see page 22) showed his first readymade, a bicycle wheel. It was followed in later years by a bottle rack, a urinal, and other “outrages.” These were, as surrealist author André Breton defined them, “manufactured objects promoted to the dignity of art through the choice of the artist.” This was the opening salvo in the assault on the status, on what some later artists called the “fetish,” of the art object. It wasn’t until the late 1950s, however, that the real battle was joined. Sculptors and collage artists had long incorporated found objects for their value as abstract visual elements. But when Rauschenberg exhibited a stuffed goat (see page 20), he was implying that everyday things were not any less interesting in themselves than the representations of them that we had been calling art. Warhol (see page 30) suggested that, well, anything could be art. Such views of course tended to undermine the object. Eventually conceptual artists asserted that the object was nothing but a residue of the real art that was the artist’s idea. No longer possessed of its former aura, the object per se was up for grabs, ready to be appropriated, copied, or even negated. Must a work of art be unique? What constitutes originality? What distinguishes original and copy? In a famous essay entitled “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (published originally in the mid-1930s), Walter Benjamin mused about what authenticity meant in the twentieth century. “From a photographic negative, for example,” he noted, ”one can make any number of prints: to ask for the ‘authentic’ print makes no sense.” He worried about the “depletion” of art’s “aura,” which he defined as the “here and now of the work of art—its unique existence in space and time.” These words still haunt the discussion.
Both Rauschenberg and Warhol (see pages 20 and 30), at about the same time, started to use photosilkscreening. This was a mechanical—in fact a photographic—process that took an image not of the artist’s own making and put it at the center of his work. Warhol compounded the issue by repeating his images (coke bottles, soup cans, and Marilyn Monroe, for example) many times over. Moreover, art emerged from Warhol’s studio, which he called the Factory, that he had not touched himself. He teased and provoked the public with comments like this one to an interviewer: “Why don’t you ask my assistant Gerard Malanga some questions? He did a lot of my paintings.” The question of originality becomes even more complex when we look at the reuse of images that are not simply everyday things such as soup cans but that were themselves created as art by someone else. In appropriating images in this way, artists such as Sigmar Polke (see page 74) can comment on the very practice of art. Must a work of art endure, or can it be ephemeral? In the 1970s a number of artists turned to the landscape to make art. One of the largest landart projects undertaken in the United States was Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (see page 55). Massive quantities of earth and rock were moved at great expense and human effort. The work has since sunk into the Great Salt Lake, disappearing by design. In the work of conceptual artists such as Sol LeWitt (see page 46), whose pieces exist more as ideas than as things, the question of permanence is even more complicated, since ideas are able to be reconstructed indefinitely—or may never be given physical form at all. And for process artists, the ephemeral quality of their materials was in itself an art medium, one that adds change and the unpredictability of experience to their “palette.” Art is part of lived experience. Does
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