ANTHONY CRISAFULLI

WRITINGS

Birth of the Modern

What Made 20th Century Art so Inconceivably New!

- Anthony Crisafulli

Film. Art prior to the 20th century consisted of a

bevy of biblical scenes, landscapes, myths, historical
events, naked women, still lives, and portraits of rich
folks as represented in the medium of painting or
sculpture.
The art world had a narrow perspective and
was committed to formulaic and metaphorical
realism that reflected the middle class tastes of the
Academy, the School of Fine Arts, and the Salon. It
was dominated by the classical guild, which solely
provided legitimacy and acceptance to that artist
who supported and mimicked their contextual
agenda. Likewise, artists who deviated to pursue a
novel approach or did not fit into the old boys
club, were either consider apostates (traitors in the
tradition of Judas) or not worthy of such honors. For
example, Vincent Van Gogh came to painting late, as
he was in his mid twenties. He lacked formal
training and as a result was not accepted as a
member of the invisible guild.

Up until the twentieth century our concept of

art was pretty much defined by Painting and
Sculpture. Drawings and Prints were considered
kind of art. Ceramics and Jewelry were craft.
And nobody knew how to classify Photography or

DIALOGUE

Crisafulli: Should I tell them the

point of the chapter at the start?
Lyles: Then they might not read it.

By the middle of the nineteenth century the

academic system that had nurtured two hundred
years of the French artistic tradition had become so
uncompromising that it degenerated into a club of
myopic narcissists who made it impossible for artist
to show anything new.

art was elevated over depiction,

content, craftsmanship and
tradition.

Lyles makes the sound of a baby

Crisafulli: Oh, what the heck.
crying and then says, Ma it looks
Something happened in the
like we gots ourselves a modern.
beginning of the 20th century that
facilitated a paradigm shift, and as
a result the concept of a work of

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In 1874, the group later to be known as the

Impressionists: Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Degas,
Morisot, and Sisley revolted against the machine of the
nineteenth century academic system and formed an
alliance to publicly exhibit their work outside of the
canon.

before. Great fortunes were amassed as factories

turned out mass quantities of increasingly cheaper
products for public consumption, with no end in sight.
Trade unions were striking for better working
conditions and a bigger piece of the profits. Auguste
and Louis Lumiere invented the cinematograph.
Picasso and Braque were promoting Cubism. Freud
was telling us that we wanted to sleep with our
mothers and kill our fathers, while Einstein was
turning our universe inside out. The new world was
booming. The old world was quickly losing ground
and everything was up for freaking grabs. But with
every boom theres a bust, and within 18 years the
British would all but lose the empire, Russia would be
plunged into a communist revolution, the AustroHungarian state would cease to exist, the seeds of
national socialism were planted, a global flu epidemic
ravished a generation, and 20 million lay dead on the
fields of a decimated Europe. Looking back, it must
have seemed as if the world had gone insane. But
compared to the 25 years that followed, this was a
cakewalk.

Their act of defiance laid the groundwork for

the Postimpressionists: Seurat, Czanne, Gauguin, and
Van Gogh, and the beginning of the aesthetic
revolution that we call Modern Art.
But, if our shared befuddled histories have
taught us anything, it is that sooner or later, the
moment comes when an age ends. When we step out
from the old to the new and when the sound of human
longings for freedom of expression, long suppressed,
finds utterance.

Understandably, somewhere between the late 19th

The beginning of the twentieth century was a

time of radical change, as old heroes were being
deposed and new ones were being raised up in their
stead. Paris was still the art capital of the western
world. It bubbled with writer, critics, poets, and artists
from every nation. The fruits of human ingenuity
provided more opportunity for more people than ever

century and the early 20th century, something had

dramatically changed that caused the greatest artists

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and thinkers of the time to long for new models

for humanity and the arts in the same way that
science had done 50 years prior with Darwins
publication of the On the Origin of Species
(1859). Three distinct types of thinkers would
come to the forefront and compete for the hearts
and minds of future generations. For our purposes
we will call them the Reclaimationist, the
Teleologist, and the Introspectionalist.

important to remember that Hitler was an art

school reject because he couldnt draw.)

The Reclaimationist

Humanism is a system of thought that is based on

the values, characteristics, and behavior that are
believed to be best in human beings, rather than
on any supernatural authority. Existentialism is a
20th century philosophical movement that denies
that the universe has any intrinsic meaning or
purpose, and requires individuals to take
responsibility for their own actions and shape their
own destinies. A wide constituency that included
the Marx, J. S. Mills, the members of the Bauhaus,
Abstract Expressionists, Jackson Pollock, Clement
Greenburg, Jules Verne, and H.G. Wells, popularly
adopted this group of thought.

Those who looked backward were

reclaimationists, who looked to a mythical golden
age before mankind was corrupted. They
contended that mankind needed either to reclaim
an ideal societal state that existed somewhere in
the mythical past or return to a state of nature
where mankind is akin to the noble savage. This
diverse camp can be characterized as longing for a
Utopian past, and was embraced by Gaugin, Puvis
de Chavannes, and Hitler alike. (Note: It is

The Teleologist
Teleologists reject the idea of the Utopian past and
look to establish the conditions in the present that
seek to further a Utopian future. For the most part,
members of this group are characterized by
humanism and existentialism.

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Introspectionalist
The Introspectionalist looked neither to a Utopian
mythical past nor an idealized future but rather to
within. They concerned themselves with the
universality of: the inner world of human sensations,
perceptions, and imagination, the gestalt of
consciousness and reality, the primacy of visual and
linguistic signifiers, scientific principles, and political
critique. This group of folks would include Freud,
Jung, Einstein, Picasso, Duchamp, Man Ray, Braque,

WRITINGS
Chagall, the Surrealists, and the Russian
Constructivists.
The reality is that no one fits neatly in any of these
categories, but rather is a mix of all of them. Of
course this creates a great deal of internal conflict
and misgivings. They were as we are; most of us have
a belief in the past and are simultaneously skeptical of
the past. We have great expectations of the future but
acknowledge that our expectations are surely bound to
never be fulfilled. We ardently look inside of our
conscious self and devise metaphors to make sense of
what we realize, but do not trust the metaphors.

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Marcel Duchamp
Dada came into being in 1916 as the cards came
tumbling down. The seeds of the movement began in
1910 when Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia met
and become friends. In 1912 they attended,
Impressions dAfrique, the scandalous and
humorous play, written and produced by Raymond
Roussel that featured a painting machine activated by
sunlight. The work of Roussel anticipated Dada and
will help shape both the Surrealist and OuLiPo
movement.
Roussels approach becomes a major influence on the
Dada movement through his non-rational association
of sources that produced what he called found
sentences. Later that year Duchamp would
appropriate this concept and re-contextualize it to
apply it to objects. Roussel posthumously describes
his method of literary construction that facilitated the
found sentence.
Roussel: I find a sentence and then produce
a new sentence that is identical, except for the
last word. I appropriate a word that sounds
like the last word of the first sentence and use
it to complete the second sentence. Now I
have two found sentences.
If a sentence reads:
Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux
billard (The white letters on the cushions of
the old billiard table.)
And we change the last word from Billard to
Pillard,
Then it would read:

WRITINGS

Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux

pillard (Letters by a white man about the
hordes of the old looters.)
Thus, the result would be a new sentence that
is almost unrecognizable from the first.
French is a very structured but flexible language.
Therefore, when Roussel replaces the final word of
the sentence, he completely alters not only the
sentences meaning but also its context. Moreover,
present concrete relationship between the words in the
sentence becomes plastic, as the abstraction of
meaning is temporary lost. As words struggle
against one another for dominance, the context shifts,
the sentence is re-contextualized, and a new sentence
emerges or in other words, it is found.
Roussels approach liberates the imagination not by
the working with the blind unconsciousness of
Freudian free association but rather by fracturing the
underlying rational conformity between how any two
word sounds, what they mean, and the manner in
which they change the context and direction of the
narrative that they signify. Underlying his
methodology is a deep-seated interest in philology.
Philology is the study of the relationship of languages
to one another, their cultural histories, and how
meaning changes, mutates, or is remediated. The
study, which originated in late 19th century and
continues until the present, has had a profound effect
on continental thought and will have a heavy
influence in the 20th century on both literary theory
and biblical exegesis.
Roussels approach provides him with new
opportunities to construct narratives while freeing him
from the predictability of linear thought. Or in other
words, it liberates him from the historical canon of
how a story is written by investing chance relations

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into the process of developing plot and narrative
form. Roussel, like many of his contemporaries, is
invested in the paradigm of progress and modernity

WRITINGS
Prelude to a Broken Arm (1915), and Fountain
(1917), all of which employed the assembling of
common and found objects.
Duchamp immigrated to America in 1915
because French society and cubism were kicking the
crap out of him. In his words, For a Frenchman,
used to class distinctions, you had the feeling of what
a real democracy could be, Or in other words,
getting out of Dodge completely freed him from all
cultural influences and expectations of home while
enabling him to undergo relaxed revolution quite
unconnected with anything in the art of cubism.
In January 1916, after he was living in New
York for almost a year, he wrote to his sister Suzanne,
asking her take care of some work that he regarded as
very important that he left behind in Paris: "Now if
you went up to my place you saw in my studio a
bicycle wheel and a bottle rack. I had purchased this
as a sculpture already made. And I have an idea
concerning this and the bottle rack.
In New York (1915), I purchased some objects in the
same vein and I treat them as readymade, he
explains. Duchamp bought a snow shovel from a

and the belief that they can discover the big ideas that
will change the world for the better, by embracing a
kind of rationality where concept informs form, and
thus function, rather than the other way around.
Two years after meeting Roussel, in 1913, Duchamp
renounces traditional painting and produces the first
readymade. Using a method akin to Roussels Found
Sentences, and the idea of Concept, Duchamp
mounts a bicycle wheel on a white stool. It was a
revolutionary moment. The first readymade was done
at the same time that he was painting he famous
cubist painting Nude Descending a Staircase.
During the next several years he would produce some
of his most important work, Bottle Rack (1914),

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recontextualed the object. Now it was no longer a

common snow shovel but rather a piece of
readymade art. Yet, it was not art by the artist, but
rather from the artist. By the act of signing and
mounting, Duchamp renders the objects intended
functional useless and invests in to it a new meaning.
At that very moment, Duchamp unequivocally
declares that art is first and foremost about concepts
and that form is simply a matter of taste. Maybe this
is why Robert Morris, the American sculptor, called
Duchamp a, freeing influence. Perhaps, this is why
he was considered revolutionary in art circles.

DIALOGUE
Lyles: First of all, I am not sure this is revolutionary,
and second of all I dont see the connection between
Roussels philology, that you talked about three
paragraphs back, and Duchamps work.
Crisafulli: You knowI dont blame you for calling
me on this one. Let me tell you how I came to this
conclusion, Get comfortable because this could take
a while.

corner hardware store in the winter of 1915. He

brought it back to his studio and inscribed on it, In
Advance of the Broken Arm, from Marcel Duchamp,
1915 and hung it from his ceiling like a guillotines
blade ready to be put into service. It is as formidable
as the bicycle wheel is inviting. By signing it, he

About a month ago, I interviewed Lorenzo Pace

about his work. We talked about his career, the artists
whom he admires, and all that stuff. Now, Ive been
a friend of Lorenzos for twenty years, so I have a
good take on his work. Anyway, the conversation
gets around to his relationship to the found objects
and how he deals with them in his installations. And
it was interesting. Well, to make a long story short,
we ended up spending the next half hour talking
about how Duchamps invention of the found object
and how his use of the concept influenced not

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only Installation, but also Conceptual Performance and Crisafulli: Ill get around to it; this story is kind of
Post-Modern Art.
important in the grand scheme.
Lyles: Yeah, but dont you think that Man Rays
assemblages also influenced the idea of the found
object or, even more, Picasso and his early colleagues.

Lyles: Go ahead.

Duchamp at the MOMA

Crisafulli: Frank Gillette was one of the first video
artists to emerge in New York in the 1960s and he told
me this story.
One day, in the early 1960s, Duchamp goes to
the Museum of Modern Art down on 8th Avenue.
Thats where it used to be before it moved to 52nd
Street. So he goes in and goes upstairs to the gallery
where his work is. Sitting in the middle of the room is
this stool with the front forks of a bicycle sticking
right through the seat; the front tire was still
connected. Today they have the piece behind
bulletproof glass. But in the 1960s, nobody cared.
Now, its early and its a weekday, so, nobodys
there but him and some old guard, whos half asleep
on a folding chair. Duchamp walks up to the sculpture,
looks around and spins that damn tire as fast has he
can. With that, the guard wakes up and goes to
Duchamp, Hey buddy, youre not spose to touch this
shit.
Crisafulli: Yeah, but I not thinking about Man Ray
and Picasso right now, I am talking about Duchamp.
Lyles: Well, maybe you should be thinking about
them.

Duchamp looks at him with a stern look and

says, You call this art! The old guard shrugged and
shook his head in agreement.
As Duchamp slowly walked out of the gallery
the Guard said offhandedly, Dont worry about it.

Crisafulli: Anyway, let me tell you a story.

And Duchamp left smiling like a 12-year-old boy.
Lyles: You havent finished the last story.

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THE SVA LECTURE

One of the last lectures that Duchamp gave was in
the late 1960s. I think it was SVA, the School of
Visual Arts in New York City. And he was paid a lot
of money for the lecture, so I was told. Anyway, he
arrives at the auditorium (it sat about 300), about 10
minutes before the lecture was to start and there are
already about 150 people there. People are coming in
and theyre talking and moving around, but nobodys
paying attention, because its early.
So Duchamp walks on stage and hes wearing slacks
and a button-down shirt and hes carrying this straw
hat. So when he gets halfway across the stage he
stops, lies down, and covers his face with the hat.
So, now its seven oclock, time for the lecture, and
all the seats are filled and nobodys saying a word.
Theyre all just scrutinizing this nut thats lying on
the stage with a hat on his face. So now 45 minutes
goes by and the place is jammed and they were still
coming in.

DIALOGUE
Lyles: On one hand it sounds like Duchamp was
bemused by the situation and on the other hand it
seemed as if he is taking a poke at the pretension of
how folks view art.
Crisafulli: I think there is some truth in that. Let me
tell you another story that Frank told me. I think it
will further our understanding of Duchamps
character.

At the end of the hour, Duchamp gets up, walks to

the podium and puts the straw hat on his head and
says, Ill take one question. So some dork sitting
on the front row jumps up and hes waving his hand
in the air and making the oooh sound. I think he
must have been a graduate student cause he had
long hair and a beard and was wearing one of those
corduroy jackets. You know the type. Now a lot
people had their hands up hoping to get picked, but
Duchamp chooses the corduroy boy. The kid gets up
and walks to a microphone that was set up below the
stage, so everyone can hear him. He pushes the hair
out of his eyes, taps the microphone to see if its on,
and proceeds to ask his question.

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ART APPRECIATION

Graduate Student: In
Heideggers Being in Time,
what is the difference between
being with a big B and being
with a small b?
Duchamp took a second and
replied: Typographical Error,
Thank you. And walked off
the stage while the crowd just
sat there with their mouths
open.
Lyles: You didnt answer the
question.
Crisafulli: Yes, I did just not
the way you wanted me to.
Lyles: Hey, you cant end a
sentence with a preposition!
Crisafulli: Just watch me.

Jerry Lyles

Jerry Lyles is an artist and Assistant Professor of Art at

the University of Texas. His work chronicles light and the
changing landscape that it reflects. Professor Lyles
received his BFA from Kansas City Art Institute and his
MFA from American University in Washington D.C.
He presently lives and works in Edinburg, Texas.