YSIWYG

Darren Bader, Rocks and Mirrors, at Franco Noero Gallery (3/11–23/12/2015).
Darren Bader will be at Artissima 2015 with Franco Noero Gallery, Torino.

Peter Eleey: What is your art about?
Darren Bader: My art is about what I think art might be about. By this I think I mean that there’s this quantity/entity that people consider to be art, and my wish to (make) art involves trying to figure out the locus of this quantity/entity. And maybe that’s all my art is about—where this “art” quantity and entity lie together, so to speak. Lie/lie. In any case, I guess my art is about metaphysics and the world we live in. The world we live in? I don’t know, I think it’s a matter of what the word “world” connotes for me. It’s still a grand thing in my mind. The world is still the globe-as-defined-by-the-canopy-of-the-firmament and it’s also the exotic. Ultimately it’s the Romantic. [check out the full interview: DID YOU REALLY MEAN THAT? on Mousse Magazine)

Darren Bader
Life as a Readymade
full text in pdf

Installation shots from the exhibition An Unruly History of the Readymade curated by Jessica Morgan at Fundación Jumex, in 2008.

Jessica Morgan
The Readymade

To recap: The term ‘readymade’ was used by the French artist Marcel Duchamp for describing works of art he made from manufactured objects. He adopted this English term from the world of fashion, where it was applied to the notion of ready-to-wear clothing. Duchamp’s earliest readymades include Roue de bicyclette of 1913—a wheel mounted on a wooden stool, and En prévision d’un bras cassé of 1915—a snow shovel inscribed with that title. In 1917, Duchamp made his most notorious readymade in New York, Fountain—a urinal signed by the artist under a false name, R. Mutt, and exhibited placing on its back. It was submitted for the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in April 1917. However, Fountain was effectively censored by the Society—which thereby went against its own rule of open entries. A defense of Fountain and a theory for the readymade was soon after put forward in an article, anonymously authored but almost certainly by Duchamp himself, in the May 1917 issue of the magazine The Blind Man (a volume produced by Duchamp and two other friends). The article stated:

Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, and placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view—created a new thought for that object.

David Joselit
The Artist Readymade
Marcel Duchamp and The Société Anonyme
full text in pdf

CAW INVENTORY

CAW is the acronym for Contemporary Art Works, but Caw is also the sound that the crow makes. It’s a word. More precisely it’s an already existing word. A very simple, “three letters word”, but instead a very ambiguous word in its spelling (being similar to “cow”) and representing one of the most annoying and repetitive sound that a bird can vocalize.
Synthesizing: it represents a lot of different things, but, to us, it mostly represents the intention of our project.

It was 1914 when Marcel Duchamp conceived the “Bottle-Rack”, stating that art could be even something not really made by the artist. The simple act of taking an article from life, and of placing it so that its useful significance disappears under a new title and different point of view, created a “new thought” for that object. This practice has qualified the work of countless contemporary artists from that year until today.

CAW’s ambition is to put order within the artistic practices that in the last hundred years have considered objects as raw materials. Through the methodology of cataloging, and therefore bringing together very similar works, the intent of CAW is to test a possible way to overcome factors such as the copyright jurisdiction, the idea of intellectual property or the supposed uniqueness of the creative subject, to investigate instead the concept of difference and repetition. CAW aims to explore the limits of originality and authorship in relation to the mechanisms of production, circulation, reception and canonization of the Image and the Imaginary of contemporary art.

Based on these premises CAW Inventory is especially interested in cataloguing ready-made works and the use of objects in contemporary art, those kind of artworks in which artists do almost nothing to create art.

GIGANTIC GALLERY

Ketchup Drool: An Alphabetical Countdown to Artissima 2015
Ketchup Drool: Un conto alla rovescia alfabetico ad Artissima 2015
by Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti