fountain cd

["dp" <dp@xxxxxxxxxx>]

this debate is getting very interesting! 

i'll give it a couple of midnight thoughts. 

though i see some analogies with duchamp's fountain, i tend to think that
droplifting is different in its essence. 

 

>> Arguably,
>> Duchamp makes the same mistake by bringing readymade art objects into the
>> gallery; the gallery STILL fulfills its traditional, authorizing, endorsing,
>> and legitimizing function. Thus, Kim, the Duchamp analogy also strikes me as
>> somewhat backwards, though I do appreciate his prankster habits.

if one traces back the events it is easy to see that this could
happen to .microsound as well. 

in fact the organizers of the exhibition were at first astonished
and offended by fountain, not reckognizing mr.mutt as anyone. it was
when they came to know that mr.mutt==marcel duchamp that they acknowledged
the piece as worthy of being exposed. 

i can see this pattern transposed:
let's say i drop a few cd-rs at the store where i usually buy stuff.
the people there might not know .microsound, but they surely know
who kim cascone is. so they would most likely act the same way
as soon as they would come across the information. 

that's an analogy! 

of course a shop is not a museum, so in the end, they would have
a little problem in selling this "outer object"... but if they are
smart enough they could raise money out of it: cash always works
well at defeating bar codes. 

there are differences too: 

if the cd-rs are dropped at music stores which have no idea of,
let's say, electronic music, or (as i suggested a few mails ago)
in stores which have nothing to do with music in general,
then things would go in a very much different way. 

possibilities would really expand. 

this is a profound difference with fountain which was placed in a "proper"
context, meaning that its questioning the establishment was a consequence
of the fact that it had been brought to the establishment and left right
there in the middle. 

of course it would have had no effect if duchamp had left it in a public
urinal (how many of those have writings on them... who would have noticed?) 

droplifting doesn't need a context (stores aren't the only possibilities)
so it makes this analogy fail a little bit. 

> disagree...here's why: taking an unsolicited product into a CD shop and
> placing it in their inventory without the approval of the establishment is
> like (not exactly) bringing an 'autographed' urinal into a museum and
> presenting it as 'Art'...I agree that the Duchamp analogy falls apart on
> many levels: approval of the establishment (museum/gallery) and its desire
> to create an aura of controversy, an active effort by the artist to devalue
> 'Art' by contributing a commonly found object thereby 'questioning' (read:
> thumbing nose at) the generally accepted metrics used to judge 'Art', etc.
> but I don't feel it's altogether 'backwards'...there are some similarities,
> the prime one being
> performing a subversive act of infiltration and raising political/economic
> issues concerning cultural consumption... 
> 

i agree with all of this except the conclusion: duchamp did not try to
raise a political/economic issue (he usually never did in his art):
he wanted to sell the piece! 

and that's why he got mad at the organizers and started making
all the replicas: to sell more. 

he was making a point on art itself (as kim perfectly sums up), but i
tend to exclude that there was also the consumption issue. 

 

 

> the goal in 'droplifting' is to infiltrate/subvert the normal means by which
> a commodity's value is exchanged and perceived...the CD shop is unaware of
> the 'droplifted' product in its inventory but let's assume a consumer
> stumbles across it and wants to buy it...the normal exchange (the value of
> money for the value of the commodity) can take a few paths at the point of
> purchase: the shop won't sell anything without it first existing in its
> inventory and then sets aside the 'droplifted' object to investigate its
> sudden appearance in its economic microcosm, or a sale is made and the
> product is entered into inventory afterwards (although some fudging is
> required by the shops bookkeeper since the object was not purchased by the
> shop in order to sell)...in either case the 'object' introduces chaos into
> the system because it arrived uninvited and hence no metric exists with
> which to judge it...the object is a chimera and asks to be 'made real' so
> that an economic exchange can take place and it is this act of 'making real'
> that raises important issues...Duchamp's urinal is also a chimera asking to
> be 'made real' in order for an accepted exchange to take place...i.e., 'in
> order to accept this object as Art I need the correct type of cultural
> currency with which to trade for it'...
 

i love the chimera 'to be made real' part: i perfectly agree. 

still i want to point out that the definition one seeks here is economic
or political but not artistic.
for one, in the cd-rs there could be anything, so its
artistic definition is ambigue. plus, if we limit the cd-rs
to only .microsound music, i think we would not be questioning
its artistic value at all (it has a structure, a concept,
all of the participants know what they're doing, etc.) 

duchamp instead was questioning the artistic value of fountain. he was
saying: "you idiots, its a pissing device!" 

we wouldn't be saying something similar. 

 

>>I think it
>> would be more interesting, and more of a "droplifting" act, to put Mona Lisa
>> in a public urinal than to put a urinal in a gallery.
> disagree...the act of putting the Mona Lisa in a public urinal fulfills none
> of the requirements of 'droplifting' as an clandestine act of infiltration
> which results in the questioning of a mode of economic consumption...a
> public urinal is not a place of economic exchange (except for dropping a
> coin in a dish for the attendant); it is a place of utility where issues of
> cultural consumption are not typically raised due to the function of the
> environment...but I do agree that putting the Mona Lisa in an airport WC
> would raise *other* sorts of issues...

placing cd-rs would too... 

 

in the end i think that even if some analogies are possible, droplifting
has the possibility to have wider implications as well as wider situations. 

in a way there are more links with "gift" by man ray
(e.g. the fact that anyone can do its own...) 

both the originals of fountain and gift where lost,
and thats my last analogy for tonight... 

 

 

 -l-@dp 

 

partial derivative of a point 

http://www.l-ll-l.org

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