READING DIARY: APRIL 2022- TT SESSION 16: TRACINGS- WAYS INTO WITTGENSTEIN WITH MICHAEL BOWDIDGE- Readings 1 & 2
APR22- READING 1. “Surveyable by a Re-Arrangement: Wittgenstein, Grammar and Sculptural Assemblage" by Michael Bowdidge. [excerpts].
"...My work is driven by a longstanding and fundamental sense of excitement about the visual richness of everyday stuff and its potential for recombination and reconfiguration. This approach echoes that of the ‘bricolage’ described by the anthropologist and ethnologist Claude Levi Strauss, as ‘the rules of [the] game are always to make do with ‘whatever is at hand’ and ‘elements are collected or retained on the principle that ‘they may always come in handy’’ (1966, p.11)."
From my reading of your Introduction, and the 16 or so pages assigned of your "Surveyable..." Michael, I kept thinking of dadaist Marcel Duchamp's Readymades and Readymade-Aideds, (aka assisted readymades), which are the beginning of the assemblage genre. Your use of chairs, and writing about using them specifically brings his work to mind. I.e., Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel, 1913, an actual bicycle wheel mounted on a four-legged stool... both every day items that are immediately recognizable, because they are disrupted (the wheel is mounted upside-down onto the stool, so neither can be used "normally"...(the wheel spins, but not on the ground, and no one can sit on the stool), they are transformed into something new.
"Duchamp wrote, "The Bicycle Wheel is my first Readymade, so much so that at first it wasn't even called a Readymade. It still had little to do with the idea of the Readymade. Rather it had more to do with the idea of chance." As he further defined his concept of the readymade, he called this work, an "assisted readymade," indicating the alteration or combination of various found objects, a technique that greatly informed the development of Assemblage as a distinctive genre." www.theartstory.org/definition/assembla…
Also, your writing about your piece Caught, and Ann Hamilton's use similar use of tables, "...This sculpture provides a good example of the twofoldness of the ‘click’ (even if chairs like this do not make such sounds when brought together). It can be said that these things appear to fit each other, yet it may be worth digging a little deeper into what is meant by that...", brought to mind Surrealist Dali's work...both written and painted. I think the 'click' is related to, or rooted in Dali's idea of his "paranoaic-critical" method. It is defined by Dalí as "irrational knowledge" based on a "delirium of interpretation". In your writing, including in your conclusion, you discuss "Duck-Rabbit", which is a perfect example of a piece created using Dali's "paranoaic-critical" method.
All of that made me think of Lacanian "paranoaic knowledge", which if not identical to, then must be related to what you write about Wittgenstein's ideas, i.e., again the 'click', ‘aesthetic impressions’, and the ‘noticing an aspect’. Through Lacan's reading of dada-ism, via Duchamp (they played chess together...some say that Duchamp fed Lacan his "gaze theory" and other kingpin Lacan-ian ideas), and of surrealism, via Dali, he came to read Freud and develop his own ideas on paranoiac knowledge.
Lacan wrote, "...paranoiac knowledge is all comprehension by humans, imbued with a sense of the "I" or the ego", which is notedly different than paranoia, disturbed thinking characterized by excessive anxiety or fear, sometimes to the point of irrationality and delusion.
Anyway, in my first very brief read of your work and your thoughts/writing on it, these are the artists, works, and the linguist/philosopher I think of. And for me, it's as engaging and smart as contemporary art gets...so inspired and inspiring.
POST SESSION FOLLOW- Based on your comments on Duchamp's stolen "Fountain", Michael, I re-read this piece, which is the first I read on it be accurately re-attributed to Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927) www.theartnewspaper.com/2014/11/01/did-…
And I read for the first time, this article that accurately describes the situation, which "...is not that Duchamp “allegedly stole the concept for his urinal” from Von Freytag-Loringhoven, but rather that she was the one who found the object, inscribed it with the name R Mutt, and that this “seminal” artwork rightly belongs to her." (haha)
And very interestingly, maybe even more to the point...is what Siri Hustvedt writes near the end for her 2019 The Guardian article "A woman in the men's room: when will the art world recognise the real artist behind Duchamp's Fountain?"
"To open oneself to any work – a sculpture, a book of literature or philosophy – is to acknowledge the authority behind it. When the spectator or reader is a man and the artist or thinker is a woman, this simple act of recognition can give rise to bad feelings of emasculation, what I call “the yuck factor” – the unpleasant sensation of being dragged down into fleshy feminine muck. But because the feelings are automatic, they may never be identified and can easily be explained away: she couldn’t think. She was a wild woman who wore tin cans for a bra. She turned her body into Dada. In 1913, she picked a rusted ring off the street, a found object, and named it Enduring Ornament, a year before Duchamp’s first readymade, Bottle Rack, but she wasn’t thinking. She couldn’t have influenced him. She was emotional, out of control – crazy. Duchamp, on the other hand, was dry, witty, a chess-playing genius of pure conceptual mind, a hero of high culture.
www.theguardian.com/books/2019/mar/29/m…
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APR22-READING 2. Geremia, Allison. "Maker, Wearer, Viewer, Object: the reflexive destabilisation of brooches in a contemporary jewellery making practice" pp. 13-35.
The two most engaging aspects of Alisson Geremia's "Maker, Wearer, Viewer, Object..." are her:
1. Outlined purpose, i.e.,
"...I have investigated the implications of considering jewellery as a social indicator as well as an aesthetic object. To remain within the notion of habitus, I refer to makers that reflect my cultural capital. By cultural capital, I refer to Bourdieu’s notion of the social assets of a person including education, style of speech, style of dress, and the access to these cultural symbols. I refer to makers as if they are a part of my “family tree”, so to speak, and therefore represent my own cultural capital and my specific social mobility."
(Note: Geremia contextualizes much of her thesis within a Marxist framework i.e.,
A. Social context
B. Social structure
C. Socio-economic class)
2. Philosophical reasoning, structured/un-structured rationale, i.e.,
"This structure of this thesis resonates with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations in which he uses numbered remarks to structure his argument. This borrowing provided me with a useful way of clarifying research that was often so multi-layered that more traditional methods of relaying it did not do it justice.
Wittgenstein looks to disrupt language-games to reveal that the grammar that governs language. The concept of disrupting a language-game takes a normative definition of grammar and changes its familiarity. This can be done by the subversion of expectation of the acknowledgment of language as an active thing that we do; the subversion looks at the mental processes and the production of the sentence in terms of the order of words."
The result is a thesis that is:
1. Smart
2. Challenging
3. Fun to read
I.e., "The structured un-structuring of the thesis subject is also an intentional choice. By dividing the subject into sections and also striving for the reader to notice their inherent dependencies on one another, I aim to have the reader bear witness to the interdependence of the Maker, Wearer, Viewer, and Object. The proposed sections of the normative structure (i.e.: MWVO) are overlapping, dependent, categorical nuances of brooches. The identity of each category is the result of the process of questioning."
And in laying out the structured/un-structured format of their thesis, and specifically while discussing brooch and jewellery making, Garemia heavily relies on a Ferdinand de Saussure based linguistics, including:
A. Sign --> readily becomes --> B. Signifier (or C. Signified)
B. Signifier --> might become the --> C. Signified (or A. Sign)
C. Signified --> that may become an --> A. Sign (or B. Signifier)
…as well as on post-structuralist Derrida's methods, they adopt multiple definitions of:
1. Brooch
2. Jewellery
3. Craft
This allows for open-ended interpretations, and/or for one to ask questions. And my take-away question is, was this thesis as fun to write as it is to read?
