Dada South

January 14, 2010 Zurich, Berlin, Koln, Paris, New York ... Cape Town. The ambit of dada defied easy geographical classification as well as artistic convention and authoritarian politics, sometimes emerging half a century and half a world away from its Swiss origins. To explore dada's influence on South African "resistance art" and, in turn, echoes of non-Western art on the dadas themselves, the Iziko South African Art Gallery in Cape Town has collected works from the usual suspects (including.. read more...

Disciplined Spontaneity

January 13, 2010 The elegance of chance is on display at New York gallery ZONE: CONTEMPORARY ART, featuring variants on the Surrealist game of exquisite corpse as well as other works created by Jackie Matisse, Sol LeWitt, John Cage and Joseph Beuys. Potentially destructive processes are prominent; one of the Cage pieces was created by pressing glass shards into paper, effectively operating as a meditation on the resultant image as the record of incremental damage to a once-blank surface, whil.. read more...

The Magical Films of Joseph Cornell

January 12, 2010 A rare screening of Joseph Cornell's short films provides an occasion to reflect on the apparent relationships between his artistic preoccupations (assemblage, microcosm, memory) and those of longtime associate Marcel Duchamp (assemblage, "the waterfall and the illuminating gas"). The word "dreamlike" is often used to characterize these blind cinematic anecdotes, where significance is elusive, bound primarily by the film frame; the effect is paradoxically neither purely "reti.. read more...

“Blind Man” Show in London

January 11, 2010 The Institute of Contemporary Art has brought the successful exhibition, "For the Blind Man in the Dark Room Looking for the Black Cat that Isn't There," featuring a new printing of Marcel Duchamp's proto-dada journal Blind Man, to London. Taking its title from a quote attributed to Charles Darwin (who compared the blind man's search to the work of mathematicians), the show celebrates the quixotic and speculative nature of the hunt for facts -- especially the facts of art -- .. read more...

Seduction of Duchamp Opens in San Francisco

January 8, 2010 The extraordinary "Seduction of Duchamp" exhibition that gave 35 Bay Area artists a place to comment on Marcel Duchamp's preoccupations and career is re-opening at ArtZone 461 in San Francisco on Saturday, January 9. Two panel discussions, one on chance operations in art (January 19) and the other on the lingering influence of Duchamp on today's artists (January 31), are planned. (For a thoughtful review of the show in its original venue in a former slaughterhouse in nearby .. read more...

(Masked) Man Ray

January 7, 2010 As art critic Richard B. Woodward points out, the artistic establishment that Man Ray and his Dada compatriots were rebelling against now seems impossibly distant from contemporary concerns, which forces contemporary critics to dig beyond mere provocation as a justification for the work's current relevance. Ultimately, yes, Man Ray was a self-created enigma, revealed through his art and forensic biography. But ultimately, the objects and the images have to speak for themselve.. read more...

Dada Drawings of Clara Tice

January 5, 2010 Known as "the Queen of Greenwich Village" in her prime, Clara Tice was an illustrator, designer and (along with Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Stella and others) member of the artistic salon that crystallized around collector Walter Arensberg before his 1922 departure to California -- and then, afterward, continuing on without him. An assortment of her mordant ink drawings is currently on display at Meredith Ward Fine Art in New York, through January 15... read more...

Ready-made or Bespoke: The Artist as Dandy

January 5, 2010 Early reviews of an upcoming exhibition of contemporary images of dandyism in art refer to Marcel Duchamp as a "leitmotif" of the artist as appropriator of utilitarian objects (shoes, belts, wheels, urinals) into gestures that liberate the commonplace through the application of taste. Arguably the successful dandy -- and Andre Breton called Duchamp “the end of the whole historical process of the development of dandyism” -- produces more or less nothing, becoming a commodi.. read more...

Warhol-Duchamp

January 4, 2010 While Andy Warhol cultivated significant creative distance from his dada forebears, that didn't stop him from occasionally documenting the movements of Marcel Duchamp in the 1960s, or from flirting with a more substantial project filming Duchamp on the model of his eight-hour Empire. Those interested in plumbing the connections between the two artists should find plenty to think about at the Warhol Museum's upcoming show, "Twisted Pair: Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol." (May 2.. read more...