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Fine Art Dissertation Daniela Cordi University College Chichester 2008

What you see is not what you get

Analysing the critical function of art through an interpretation of the roles of creativity, image and object as reflected in the works of Marcel Duchamp and Sigmar Polke.

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Contents

List of figures Introduction Chapters 1 Creativity 2 To see and to look 3 Image and object 4 Marcel Duchamp 5 Sigmar Polke Conclusion Bibliography

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List of figures
Cave painting of a bull in Lascaux Grotto, near Montignac, France. Image [online] available from: http://www.whytraveltofrance.com/images/lascauxA.jpg Accessed: 10/10/07 Pablo Picasso, Head of a Bull, 1943, assemblage of handlebar and saddle of a bicycle (16 x 1/8" high) Image [online] available from: http://ttrefuge.proboards55.com Accessed: 3/09/07 Reversible vase, 1977, created for Queen Elisabeths Silver Jubilee. (maker unknown) Image [online] available from: http://psyc.queensu.ca/~flanagan/PSYC100/lecture1/lecture1.html Accessed: 10/10/07 Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917, porcelain urinal, sat on its back on a pedestal, signed by the artist under the name of Richard Mutt. As photographed by Alfred Stieglitz for P.B.T. The Blind Mind, No. 2 May 1917 (From plate No. 37 of The Dada Reader, A Critical Anthology, ed., 2008, exhibition catalogue, Tate Publishing.) Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel, 1964, replica, assemblage of a bicycles wheel and a wooden kitchen stool (50 high). The original was assembled by the artist for the Exhibition Climax in 20th Century Art, in 1913. (From plate No. 154 Duchamp Manray Picapia, ed., 2008, exhibition catalogue, Tate Publishing) Sigmar Polke, Rasterzeichnung (Portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald),1963, Poster paint, pencil, and rubber stamp (37 5/16 x 27 3/8"). Collection Raschdorf (From plate No. 7 Sigmar Polke: The Three Lies of Painting, ed., 1997 Thames & Hudson) Sigmar Polke, Bunnies, 1966, synthetic polymer on linen (58 3/4 x 39 1/8 ) Joseph H. Hirshhorn Bequest and Purchase Funds, 1992 Image [online] available from: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/140/320408907_c5e7c3766e.jpg Accessed: 01/11/07

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Sigmar Polke, The Axis of Time, 2007, mixed media on polyester fabric (10 x 16 ft) Venice Biennale: Think With the Senses - Feel With the Mind. Art in the Present Tense. Image [online] available from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/80389077@N00/577650643/ Accessed: 01/10/07 Sigmar Polke, The Axis of Time, 2007, (paintings jointly titled), mixed media on polyester fabric (10 x 16 ft) Venice Biennale: Think With the Senses - Feel With the Mind. Art in the Present Tense. (Photographed by the author)

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Introduction

The aim of this dissertation is to examine processes behind the making of art and to assess how they provide us with vital explorative and adaptive means that aid our critical abilities.

It will show how creativity, generally assumed to be a merely gratifying interest, hides a forceful imaginative ability that serves two purposes: firstly projecting the subjects inner images (conscious and subconscious) onto the outer world and secondly establishing connections between visible things. This can have therapeutic effects as well as a cognitive function, originating unconventional associations that at least offer an evaluation of reality alternative to mainstream canons; if not an altogether revolutionary approach that opposes what is commonly perceived as the only possible truth.

In a visual world such as ours, where power/knowledge - the discourse in Faucaldian terms - is produced through (artificial) images, creativeness assumes a new decisive role in counterbalancing control. The thesis will show how inventiveness is strictly entwined with the act of seeing, allowing for a pondered understanding of what surrounds us. The fundamental principle behind any creative act, in the realm of the visual arts,

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lies in the ability to use sight as a vehicle for providing information about our surroundings. It will also be shown how visual perception could be deceptive. Although reliable enough to still offer a crucial survival instrument, our sensorial observations are not absolute but relative in the sense that they can be subject to various interpretations. It is the plurality of attributed meanings that allows finding more than one solution to a specific problem. We also come to recognize the importance of context in the reception of images/objects. These can become symbols (signifiers or codes) for abstract concepts. The decoding of those signs are subject to the altering of our cultural points of views, making us conclude that there are multiple ways of seeing.

Instrumental to this study is the brief analysis carried out on two of the most famous ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp, whom, with his playful and mischievous attitude, offered an anarchist approach to the making and the reception of art. This threw the seeds not only for the majority of the art-movements that followed him, but also for post-modernism. Sigmar Polke displays an equally inquisitive stance, shifting his interests from arts to politics, to the creative act and the magic involved in it, and thus relying on the interconnectedness of all visible things. The three key elements of creativity (here analysed through the lens of Anthony Storrs study), seeing and object will provide a matrix to sustain and contextualise the argument. The work of Duchamp and Polke will be juxtaposed to highlight how perception is subject to intuitive, spontaneous processes as well as cultural modes.

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This is important in order to form a critical comprehension of how reality is narrated.

Creativity
How to understand the world through the act of re-creation Creativity as play From sublimation of instinctual urges to a survival tool

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According to psychoanalytical theories, creativity responds to a basic human instinct that allows the sublimation and projection of subconscious urges, as well as enabling a basic cognitive act. Starting as a need to grasp the world, a playful act through which we aim at replicating the visible around us, we use creativity to produce original outcomes, which are nonetheless copies of pre-existing models. This skill to re-create what is seen relies on the capacity to attribute meaning to the visible. This means the more open or uncertain the attribution of significance is, the higher the possibilities for interpretation. Regardless of the media or modes chosen, the making of art as an extension of creativity does not only express aesthetic desires or therapeutic needs but, a reflection/response to reality, it aids humans to analyse and criticise what constitutes the real as well as making the world a more manageable and desirable place to inhabit.

In his Dynamics of Creation (1972), Anthony Storr gives an account of the various reasons for creativity, and of the many possible reasons investigated, one view relies on the human need to understand the world where depicting it is a way to reach this aim. The activity of drawing executed by Palaeolithics primitives, of which the Lascaux cave is a famous example (fig. 1), embodies a practical rite designed to help the primitive in his pursuit of the animal (Storr, 1976, p.177). Facing a great amount of potentially fatal risks, man extended and deepened his perception of the world by representing it. Extrapolated by Herbert Reads Icon and

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Idea, Storr quotes a fascinating account of a ritual perpetuated by African Pygmies.

Q uickTim e and a TIFF (U ncom pressed) decom pressor are needed to see this picture.

Fig.1 Cave painting, Lascaux, France

The ceremony is described by the anthropologist Frobenius, and recalls the activity of drawing as a passage to realize the object upon which magical powers were to be exercised and which was later to be pursued in reality (Storr, p.178). The rite culminates when an arrow is shot into the neck of an antelope drawn on the dirt, while pronouncing words of auspice. Moments later the men leave for the hunt. Drawing becomes a tool to put into view the object of desire; creating a likeness of the object would give the pygmies the impression of having a power over its

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materialization. Acting out a performance that involved the figurative presence of the animal, helped the tribe to have more control over their emotions once they would have to face the real creature. Emphasising the limits of an argument that sees the creative attitude responding exclusively to a neurotic impulse, Storr addresses Freuds thesis on creativity as an activity of sublimation of instinctual urges. As Storr highlights, pre-genital desires are thought to be the drive behind the artists activity: according to Freuds point of view, the artist must presumably suffer from some unusual overemphasis of his infantile sexuality, or some degree of failure to attain genitality (sexual maturity). Or why would he need the special sublimation implicit in the artistic impulse? (Storr, pp. 20-1) Storr finds this thesis reductive: if a work of art is merely conceived to be a surrogate of sexual or self-preservative urges, then art, as well as play, cannot be seen as an adaptive, cognitive act, but one which works against survival. Ernest Jones is quoted to oppose Freuds view and to propose that not only sublimation, but the most extreme denial of infantile enjoyments is realised by bringing out orderliness out of chaos. Storr sees the playful aspect of art much more than just a fulfilling activity that offers a refuge from the world. Both art and play enhance and deepen our appreciation and understanding of reality, rather than providing just an escape from it. Therefore, without completely dismissing Freuds theories, which the author finds partial, greater emphasis is attributed to creativity as an act of re-creation. Art is subsequently seen as an activity that serves a valuable function in the human scheme of things (Storr, 1976, p.149).

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Carrying on his investigation, Storr draws on the analogies between human and animal play. Desmond Morriss The biology of art is cited as a source to analyse the undertaking of self-rewarding activities in animals - mostly primates. It is observed how activities for activities sake are often initiated by animals that have already their survival problems under control (1976 p.156) and that have a surplus of energy to which they need to find an outlet. Storr questions what real advantage comes from such activity and finds that in subsequent researches undertaken, Morris succeeds in providing a pertinent description of the use of art and play as self-rewarding activities that hide a survival need. Both man and other primates require constant stimulation to enable their nervous system to function at the best of its capabilities. If there are no direct external stimuli, the animal seeks them or creates them. A distinction is made between animals defined as

specialists and those called opportunists. Those that depend on defined, specialised techniques for their survival, relax when that technique finds realisation. Opportunists, on the other hand, rely for survival on any chance, thus being constantly alert. Their nervous system is used to continuous stimulation, which they crave when the latter is somehow impaired. This is why some caged animals resent the inactivity of captivity: boredom inevitably precedes restlessness, which might lead to self-destruction.

It is in this latest analysis that Morris sees the real reasons behind the creative act. Some of the activities in which man indulges himself and which are not immediately related to survival or reproduction, are adaptive in the sense that they provide additional stimulation to the nervous system, keeping it alert and averting

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boredom. In the human zoo this creativity principle[carries] the individual on to such high planes of experience that the rewards are endless [F]ine arts philosophy and the pure sciences not only effectively combat under-stimulation, but also at the same time make maximum use of mans most spectacular physical property - his gigantic brain. (Morris, 1969, pp 1194-5) Storr comes to the conclusion that what drives the visual artists has its origin in the need to understand the world through sight, that is, in the necessity to exert an attitude that derives from the exploratory behaviour characteristic of primates (Storr, 1976, p.188). We have better chance of survival if we know how to use the right resources to sustain our endurance and if we know where the perils lay in order to avoid them or fight them.

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To see and to look

Forming theories through visual perception How the act of looking has changed in a world of hyper-realities

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The (Western) world we live in is saturated by images that serve strategic propagandistic and political agendas of which we are only partially aware. The language of advertising has become so imbedded in the ordinary vehicles of information that facts can easily be manipulated and narrated like slogans void of any substantial truth. The threats we face today are posed by virtual, as well as real, enemies that an eye addicted to artificial images might no longer be able to identify. In exercising creativity, the subject exploits the ambiguity of mans visual perception, thus proposing an alternative way of seeing that question the dogmatic hegemony of hyper-realities and their fallacies.

For Leonardo da Vinci, one of the greatest artists and original inventors of the Renaissance, sight was the noblest and most certain sense. The one that provided access to experience, showing us how nature works accordingly to mathematical rules. Any knowledge that could not be certified by the eye was, for him, unreliable. From Leonardo onwards, this view is still mostly shared today. The belief that seeing equals knowledge is widely accepted, at least in popular culture, as the way of saying explicates: I believe it when I see it (St. Thomas). Sight is, among the five senses, that which seems most reliable. It is through sight that we formulate theories: prior to the articulation and expression of hypothesis through language, is the act of looking.

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With regards to speculations on how we come to form theories through visual perception, journalist Barrie Zwicker explains that the Greek root thea is in both theasthai, which means to look, and in theorema, whose meanings are: speculation, intuition, theory. Behind the etymological concept of theory is to look. This concept was then developed, through contemplation, into mental concept (in Chiesa et al, 2007, p.328). Modern psychology explains that what people see is not merely transferred on the retina as a faithful copy of the original. The image of the retina is created through a complex act of perception where personal experience is determinant in the evaluation of the shapes apprehended. Psychoanalysis goes even further by asserting that the modernist notion that to see is to know (Rose, 2001, p.103) has no reason to exist. The notion of the unconscious focuses attention on the uncertainties of subjectivity and on the uncertainties of seeing; psychoanalysis is especially interested in visual confusion, blind-spots and mistakes. (Rose, 2001, p. 103)

If vision is influenced by the subjectivity of experience, cultural understanding is pivotal in attributing meaning to images. Subjectivity is thus culturally as well as psychically constructed (Rose, 2001 p. 104). We learn to know the world through a series of prohibitions and permissions. If, as children, these rules teach us how to behave, as adults these codes of conduct are extended to the realm of the visible, where certain ways of seeing are more acceptable than others and thus are reinforced each time we look. The relevance this has on the critical function of art, is addressed by Gillian Rose in the first chapter of her book Visual Methodologies

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(2001). Acknowledging Stuart Halls analysis of culture as a process, a set of practices where members of society produce and exchange meanings which are attributed to what is going on around them, Rose explains that this ensemble of made meanings structure the way people behave in everyday [life] (2001, p. 6). In Western culture the visual occupies a fundamental role, insofar that Martin Jay (Rose, 2001, p. 7) uses the term ocular-centrism to define the omnipresence of images created by visual technologies through which we come to know the world we live in. Rose addresses the contemporary debate sparked by various writers and philosophers, arguing these technologies render a vision of the world that is never innocent (2001, p. 6) because they are culturally constructed to offer particular interpretations of it.

In turn, the interpretation of visual images must address questions of cultural meaning and power (Rose, 2001, pp. 2-3). In a world where we exchange notions and products through imagery, where we rely on the latter to consume and to communicate, to be informed and entertained; in a era where images have become integral part of the fabric of our existence, having more access to them raises the question whether we are closer to reality or more distant from it. Journalist Paolo Jormi Bianchi suggests technologies have destroyed images and that no image can longer be considered as proof of whatever fact has been happening in reality (in Chiesa et al, 2007, pp. 357-8). This apocalyptical view validates the necessity to employ a creative and critical interpretation of those modes that constitute our visuality. Bianchis observation is in line with Walter Benjamins belief that the reproducibility

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of art objects implied a change in the impact those objects had in peoples lives. Benjamins theory had set the ground for much speculation on the perceptual, cultural - and political - revolution caused by the technological (now digital)

production of images. Extending Benjamins thought, the philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1981) argues that not only the threshold between real and unreal has become very feasible, but that we live in a society dominated by simulations or simulacra, a hyper-reality where images are no longer related to actual facts, yet they stand for the only accessible certainty. Art critic John Berger suggests (1972) that the ability of looking not only at one thing, but also at the relation between things and ourselves, draws on the critical ability of the artist - and the viewer - to reflect on the different ways of seeing. In a culture where the predominant view is the notion that knowledge is delivered and accessed through images, one can envisage a crucial role played by those subjects that, in the realm of the visual arts, contemplate and re-create images. If, quoting Foucault: [d]iscourse[is] the way in which power is generated and flows in society, and is always integrally interwoven with the production of knowledge (Aagerstoun, 2004, p. iii) then, when knowledge is equated with seeing, the realm of vision becomes another instrument, if not the most important one, to carry the hegemonic discourse. Altering our way of seeing is altering our way of understanding the world around us. Abundance of images do not necessarily make us closer to actuality, nor better informed on it; on the contrary, it creates a habitual and distorted perception of the world where the flat, weight-less and one-dimensional representations become more real - assume more symbolic weight - than the multifaceted dimension of

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reality and its perspectives. In this new universe where replica substitutes the real, artificial images impair the ability to contemplate (reflect, weight up, ponder, etc.) what is in front of our eyes.

We truly become passive observers, from explorers of the world to consumers of images that stand in the way of the world. In Burnetts vision (2005), a central trope for the activities of seeing in the modern and postmodern era is the window, as an entity that frames and mediates the possibilities of vision." By setting a boundary between the perceived and the perceiver, a separation is established between the world and those who see it. In this partition Burnett detects what sets: the stage, as it were, for that retreat or withdrawal of the self from the world which characterizes the dawn of the modern age. Ensconced behind the window the self becomes an observing subject, a spectator, as against a world which becomes a spectacle, an object of vision. (Burnett, 1995, p.5)

It is in this division, that a misconception takes place: the perception of images that stand for the world replace the perception of the world.

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Image and object

Visual perception and its role in the creative process Image as object Object as icon The transitional object

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If psychoanalysis has taught us that the perception of the external world is primarily dependent on our physical (tactile) experience (Storr, 1976, p.86), Albert Einstains theories on relativism have endorsed the unreliability of the evidence of the senses. The study of physics has highlighted the limits of our sensory

perception and how different such experience is with regards to other forms of life. Tastes, smells, colours, tones, etc. are all mental constructions and have no correspondence in the world of physics. Our experience of the world is an act of mediation between what is perceived and what is created in our brain. In his book Perception (1984), Irvin Rock explains that no matter how ambiguous or ambivalent our perceptions are, they are though mainly correct or veridical, enabling us to survive in the world. And yet, the correctness of our sensorial interpretations is not derived nor influenced by knowledge. Illusory perceptions do not disappear once science or physics show us that they are deceitful. Perceptions are the source of visual information but they are largely independent of other cognitive processes (1984, p. 5).

To understand how we see, Rock suggests we discard what philosophers refer to as nave realism and embrace the concept that the mind does not simply record reality, but creates its own picture (1984, p.3). This is evident when we face unclear figures that can be read either as a vase or as two faces (fig. 2). If our knowledge allows it, we will be able to identify Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip,

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inserting an additional layer of information to our decipherment. Otherwise, we will still distinguish the outlines of a male and a female profile - by relying on internal archetypes that allow us to recognise human profiles and not for this failing to identify the vases outlines. We can conclude that an objects form and the shapes perceived by the eye could not always match. Schemata are relied on to apprehend anything we take in and when something happens to disrupt those existing stereotypes we realize the ambiguity of visual perception.

Fig. 2

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Reversible vase, 1977

In Analogy-making as Perception (1993, p.2) Melanie Mitchell hypothesizes that percepts do not have rigid boundaries so they can overflow into each other and alter accordingly to the circumstances in which the perceiver is in. Central to all activity is the phenomenon of conceptual slippage, in which, under the pressure of a given context, a concept can slip into (i.e. can be recognised as) another conceptually related concept. (Bolland, 1997) This theory draws attention to the mechanism behind most inventive processes, from design to engineering, from music composition to science discoveries. Applying this attitude to the realm of the visual gave form to the unexpected juxtapositions for which Surrealism is often remembered. It is the ability of abstraction and analogy-making that allows us to perceive accidental or fortuitous events as meaningful. In the perception of shapes resides the origin of conceptformation. Simplifying and abstracting are activities that require a mind capable of recognising the momentary and partial as elements of a larger picture which unfolds in a sequence. Abstraction allows for the perception of an object and its functions independently from its context.

By assembling a saddle and a handlebar, Picasso can evoke a bull (fig. 4). It is difficult not to mingle the image of the bull with that of a mere conglomerate of a bicycles parts. Yet one reading does not invalidate the other, while it makes the viewer constantly shift between the two modes of interpretations. When the image is raised to the status of icon, it becomes an object with functions.

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It turns into a carrier of significance.

QuickTime and a TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor are needed to see this picture.

Fig. 4 Pablo Picasso, Head of a Bull, 1943, assemblage

The image of the bull, evocated by a real object, becomes an (symbolic) object itself, emblem of both Spain and Picasso, the representation of the fierce force and

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virility of a country as well as that of a man (the artist who chose it).

This process of investiture with higher meaning of an otherwise common item, is the same observed by pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott in his analysis of the role of play in children. Inanimate objects are empowered with special abilities to aid children in keeping off anxiety in particular stressful times. The objects or toys provide comfort when the mothers care is not available. The chosen item becomes a trait dunion between the inner, subjective world of the child and the outer, objective reality around him. In trying to control at least some of the most painful aspects of reality, the object allows an imaginative leap that makes the grief more bearable. The tools used to make sense of reality are defined by Winnicott as transitional and sometimes as transactional objects. In Creativity -Theory, History, Practice Rob Pope clarifies that they are transitional in the sense that they allow change to take place and transactional because they involve exchanges between oneself and others: over life such transitional/transactional objects might range from a corner of blanket clutched by an infant to making tea, from relishing a single word to sharing the practices of language and culture at large. (Pope, 2005, p. 55) The blanket assumes a symbolic value in an infants life, but its factual attributes are as important as its representative ones. If the infant is to reach autonomy away from the mother, the fact that the blanket stands for the breast is equally important to the childs awareness that it is not the mothers breast.

In her The I and the not I (1977, pp. 36-57), M. E. Harding, describes what she

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calls participation mystique: a projection of unconscious thoughts into the surrounding environment (or people, objects, situations) as if they were attributes of it, rather than reflections of ones own psyche. Harding illustrates a practice in use among certain aboriginal tribes in Australia, whereby each member of the community posses a stone or piece of wood invested with curative attributes. The sacred fetish or amulet, the churinga, is kept buried in a specific location whose whereabouts is known only to its owner. In time of need the churinga is unearthed to be rubbed and to benefit from its good power or mana. Once the mana passes from the churinga to the man, the object is hidden again so that the earth can restore its energy. This account reiterates the concept that the appropriation and interpretation of things seen constitutes a metaphorical bridge between ourselves and the world. Seeing and creativity are strictly connected and represents just an aspect of this need. Both in the act of creativity and in the act of seeing, two opposing forces seem to be at work: one that aims to obtain the most objective examination of reality and one that inevitably tries to attributes certain arbitrary and internal values.

One could conclude that the most important aspect of creativity in exercising a critical function is the ability to project inner images onto outer ones and to establish connections between apparently unrelated images or concepts. Drawing from the archives of imagery that we store in our memory we determine new and original meanings. This ability is not always conscious. Most of the times it is a reflex that originates a multitude of thought processes and theory formings. Those able to recur to a richer spectrum of percepts have an insight of things perceived

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that allows innovative outcomes to be imagined, freed from conventional readings.

As Laurie Scheider Adams notes in her The Methodologies of Art (1996, p. 201): The significance of transitional objects and transitional phenomena is their role as cultural basis for later creative pursuits. The transitional object becomes the paradigm of all art, which has a transitional aspect.

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Marcel Duchamp
Duchamp as precursor of Post-modern era Chance, context, and the art coefficient in creativity From the everyday to the ready-made

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Duchamp restored the intellectual dignity of the artist - the freedom to think and act in disregard of any authority principle (but rather by obeying to the pleasure principle). (Schwarz,1969, p.47) a truly revolutionary artist, whose epoch-making works and deeds between 1912 and 1923 turned all previous art forms and the world upside down. (Muller-Alsbach et al, 2002 p.6) In a talk given in Huston in April 1957, Duchamp expressed his view on the creative act, stating that the subjectivity of the artiste was not always consciously applied and a gap is detectable between what is purposefully wished for and what is in fact realized. In this divergence the act of viewing and perception become, for Duchamp, crucial, and so did the role assigned to the spectator. The missing link was what Duchamp defined the art coefficient: an arithmetical relation between unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed (Muller-Alsbach et al, 2002, p. 43). Not always what is planned to be achieved is actually accomplished, while fortuitous events might lead to original discoveries. It is the spectators role to give completeness to the objet dart, by deciphering and deconstructing its inner qualifications, of which the creator cannot always be aware of.

With this claim Duchamp was throwing light on the conceptual or philosophical reasons behind the creation of what made him, years earlier, the father of postmodernism and whose ready-mades constitute a land-mark in modern art. If the perception of an object (chosen by art-critics or art-curators and on whose selection the artist has little input or none) exhibited in a museum is validated, in its

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artistic attribution, by its context, then the reverse might also be true: by choosing an everyday object and exhibiting it in an art circuit, it becomes an objet-dart. In a quizzical game of opposites, it was by acting out the second assumption that Duchamp aimed at disclaiming the first one. With this paradox, he wanted to draw attention on the marginal role the artists played in the reception of their artifacts, realizing the importance of context and modes of viewing in the discernment of art and calling on artists and viewers to question the status-quo.

If the artist is credited with the mere role of medium to convey an intuitive creative act, but no responsibility is assigned to him in explaining or judging the outcome of that act, who is accountable for the reading of the artists labour? The spectator will facilitate this deciphering, explains Duchamp, as well as accepting those artists choices that make of him a more active player than just a medium. In a painting, the simple choice of colour expresses an act of will, although some parts of the work of art, like the canvas for instance, might constitute its ready-made attributes. All formal aspects will give rise to a theoretical resonance in the viewer, who will endow with comprehensiveness the work of art, by way of interpreting and attributing meaning to its attributes.

Mirroring this principle in the assignment of significance, Duchamp infers that selecting an object by chance is still a reflection of a preference or desire, since, by merely choosing it, regardless of aesthetic qualities, the artist leaves his signature. In this way, chance becomes for Duchamp another determinant factor in the creation and perception of art as it allows for true freedom from aesthetical

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constrictions and avoids perceptual routine. Chance and context - how an object (or painting) is chosen, where it is shown and how it relates to its observer, the space and other objects surrounding it - were the two main innovative features through which Duchamp articulated his position.

Duchamps views were expressed through a very subversive and humorous act carried out on April 1917, for the exhibition organized in New York by the Society of Independent Artists. A director of the society, he anonymously submitted a sculpture which turned out to be a mass-produced urinal, sat on its back on a pedestal. It was called Fountain (fig. 5) and signed by a certain R. Mutt, who, of course, did not exist. Fountain was rejected and only came to view through a

photo in Dadas review The Blind man of May 1917.

The outcry that followed was understandable: art was changed for ever and with a single act of mischief.

In June 1967, in an interview with Phillippe Collin (Muller-Alsbach, et al, 2002 p.37), Duchamp expressed his views on what he considered to be a wide-spread attitude: to be visually seduced by a sterile abstract art that carried no meaningful messages, despite being highly praised by critics. Fountain preceded and

anticipated this stand: it was both a witty joke and a solemn gesture of protest against an art-world that Duchamp thought not engaged in a constructive debate about artistic practice. This was a Jokers way of - quite literally - taking the piss and disclaiming the emperors new cloths.

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Fig. 5 Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917, porcelain urinal

It would be wrong to neglect the element of the huge practical joke in Fountain and its general air of disconcertingly ridiculing the art world as well as, with complete seriousness,

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reconfigurating everything it thought it believed about art. (Hensher, 2008)

To endow a ready-made with transcendental attributes, albeit enigmatic, was a very dexterous act that allowed Duchamp to postulate his critical position, without clearly stating so. Viewers, after all, would have to make out its meaning, accordingly to personal preferences. Still today art critic Philip Hensher (2008) speculates on the beauty of the object despite beauty was, of the possible raison d'tre for the Fountain, the less wished for by Duchamp. Hensher evokes its resemblance with the Virgin Mary, drawing a parallel between the outlines of the pissoir and the veil embracing the holy figure. Acknowledging Duchamps fondness for multiple readings, the art critic also sees in it also a sum of the artists penchant for sexual difference, a receptacle with womb-like attributes yet a phallic symbol in a priapic figurine. And what to make of its signature? As the piece was chosen from the J.L. Mott Iron Works in New York, it is easy to pick up on the phonetically assonance between Mott, the manufacturer, to Mutt, the pseudonym chosen to sign the piece. It was also a conceptual assonance/dissonance: if Mott created the urinals through a process of mass production, Mutt created it through an act of choice.

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Fig. 6 Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel, 1964, replica, assemblage In an interview with Swartz (1997, vol. 2, p. 588) Duchamp reveals how the concept

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of ready-made was first conceived. In 1913, he had the idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool, to watch it turn. What later become to be know as The Bicycle Wheel (fig. 6), was thus created - by chance - in his studio. It was simply an object that the artist had enjoyed watching as the turning of the wheel had a soothing effect on him, comparable to the comforting effect provoked by the flames dancing in a fireplace (Swartz,1997, p.588). The wheel almost offered itself up to Duchamp, whom chose it only on the basis of the pleasure it provoked in him. It is through it, though, that Duchamp created conceptual art and severed forever the traditional link between the artists labour and the merit of the work (Hensher, 2008), expressing his profound adversity for an art that he reckoned to be merely retinal or visual (Muller-Alsbach, et al, 2002 p.37). Proposing to stimulate the most intellectual aspects of a viewers comprehension, Duchamp invested a mundane object, firstly chosen on instinctual grounds, with symbolic, transitional attributes that were the sum of much more complex and sophisticated concepts.

Accordingly to Margaret Iversen (2004, p. 9): the modernist tradition of disinterested art displaced subjectivity in favour of the medium; the effect of Duchamp's (postmodern?) intervention was to expand the idea of medium to include the whole institution of art. The effect of the ready-made was to de-subjectivise art by continuously testing and negating the limits of what is regarded as art. This attitude is at the base of every contemporary art practice. In the analysis of Octavio Paz (1970, pp. 12-13) the ready-mades are not anti-art, but an-artistic in the sense that their intention is more critical or philosophical rather than plastic. They are active criticism because they

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question the meanings of taste first and of work of art in the second place.

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Sigmar Polke
Polke as heir of Duchamp: playfulness as a way to see differently Chance as alchemy Mass-reproduction technique against the originality of the artist

we are taking part in the uncertain game of perception. Painting makes truths easier for us by clothing them in

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transparent lies. It uses lies which can express truths. By exposing lies it reveals the truth of painting. (Belting, et al, 1997, p. 129) Often combining abstract with representational motifs, painter and photographer Sigmar Polke defies any static classification. The only leith-motif in this incessantly innovative artist is his playfulness which allows for disparate means and processes to co-exist, without any formal or conceptual preoccupation or limitation. If we want to detect a recurring theme, we could say that the work transpires with ideas of looking and perceiving. Images from the mass-media are often used as tools to investigate the very act of seeing; blown-up photographs extracted from newspapers become objects to inspect how we differentiate between abstraction and figuration and therefore how we come to attribute meaning to the world around us. Polke juxtaposes chance - as a way of questioning or denying the authorial subjectivity of the artist, embracing Pop Arts refusal of traditional painting (Belting, et al, 1997, p. 44) - to processes that employ a rigorous, methodical approach. Unlike Warhol, though, who questioned the uniqueness of the painting by serialising the same image, Polke embeds each work with originality, both celebrating and ridiculing the trivial, offering an ambivalent insight into it and showing us his ironic distance from it.

Sometimes, chance-based techniques are employed alongside printing modes that illustrate representational motifs. Other times, limit-less experimentation seems to be the subject matter of Polkes investigations. A third methodology sees Polke reproducing a print in its most recognisable features, through dots painstakingly applied by hand, where mistakes and splodges become a way of

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contrasting organization and neatness.

In these sense Polkes creative urge

seems to be an act of ritualisation of his own need to grasp the world. In his appropriation of popular imagery, Polke reinforces his use of the creative act as a way to make order out of chaos, in the same way gregarious primitive and pagan celebrations envisage a better perception of the external world an thus a way of controlling at least some aspects of it.

In the raster paintings, newspapers provide inspiration for both subject matter and means of production: the half-tone dot technique proper of broadsheet and tabloid illustration is borrowed to render overblown images appropriated by the press. The distorted scale provokes a disquieting oscillation between what is visible and what is recognisable. In Rasterzeichnung (fig.7), by de-constructing the printed image, supposed to represent a most objective view on reality, and by re-construing it through the use of paint, supposed to be a means of fiction - if not of deception - Polke exchanges the modes of objectivity and subjectivity. By putting the viewers in a field of ambiguity and uncertainty, he reminds them that both the coding and de-coding of the image are mediated events. The viewer is invited to take a closer look at how printed images are created, to then discover the fictional nature of the process.

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Fig. 7 Sigmar Polke, Raster Drawing (Portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald), 1963, poster paint on paper

Through the Ben-day dots commercial printing process (fig. 8), Polke overlaps the means of information to those of advertising. True facts are either illustrated along commercials or through techniques employed in publicity. The truth of the news is narrated against what is commonly perceived as an inflated or embellished version of reality, if not an altogether deceitful one. Polke does not seem to take any particular stand with regard to what is true or false, it is the context chosen by the artist that suggests a horizontal alignment between images, where no hierarchy is established.

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Fig. 8 Sigmar Polke, Bunnies, 1966 Synthetic polymer on linen 58 3/4 x 39 1/8 in.

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I like the way that dots in a magnified picture swim ad move about. The way that motifs change from recognisable to unrecognisable, the undecided, ambiguous nature of the situation, the way it remains open [] Lots of dots vibrating, resonating, blurring, re-emerging, thoughts of radio signals, radio pictures and television come to mind. (Belting, et al, 1997, p. 54) By supposedly getting nearer to the source from where our understanding of the outside world initiates, we realise how the divulgation of a given discourse, or truth, is actualised through an act of fiction. In analysing the modus operandi of the artist, not only do we reflect on Polkes creative force - which is at once the manifested subject of his art as well as that of our scrutiny - but, as Martin Hentschel reveals by quoting Vilem Flusser, we also reflect on that discourse recoded as symbolic facts (Belting, et al, 1997, p. 54). This, in turn, makes us ponder over the critical role of the artist in refusing to accept an interpretation of reality as if it was reality itself; or at least to offer alternative views to those universally accepted.

If Duchamp used chance to defy any aesthetic categorization, Polkes use of chance - as a magical event - draws attention to the alchemical nature of painting. The transformative nature of creativity is sought after and the legacy to what the Surrealists called objective chance (Belting, et al. 1997, p. 57) is evident. The hasard objectif, as defined by Andr Breton, represents what coincidences can reveal to the artists in their search for meaning. In a world where everything is seen as connected, there is no hierarchy. No place for distinction between beautiful and ugly, truths and lies, high and low culture. The carnival grotesque celebrated by Dada and taken on by Fluxsus takes a new stance in Polkes art.

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[the carnival-grotesque] consecrates inventive freedom to permit the combination of a variety of different elements and their rapprochement, to liberate form from the prevailing view of the world, from conventions and established truths, from clichs, from all that is humdrum and universally accepted. This carnival spirit offers the chance to have a new outlook on the world, to realise the relative nature of all that exist, and to enter a completely new order of things. (Belting, et al, 1997, p. 58) Polke poses himself as an actor/spectator of a methectic participation (Storr 1976, p. 176) where the performer participates in a natural phenomenon in a way to actually feel as he/she has initiated it. Of course Polke facilitates the collision between certain minerals, resins and pigments within the specific territory of the canvas, but the very way this encounter is actualised is in itself a replica of natural phenomena on which men (and women) have little influence or impact.

Polkes understanding of Heisenbergs uncertainty principle - that the mere act of looking can provoke a change in the object of our gaze could be at the base of his investigations. The artist becomes, through his explorations, an alchemist that can alter the course of history by simply looking at it. For me the image isn't important, it's the human behavior of wanting to touch it that is (Vogel, 2007). With this statement Polke makes his position clear: even when imagery is borrowed from newspapers narrating political or social events, it seems to be employed as a mere prompt for investigations on the very ontological nature of seeing.

In the six paintings presented for the Venice Biennale 2007, we detect formal and conceptual allegories that have resonances in the act of viewing. The

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dimensions of the paintings (fig. 12) resemble both cinema screens and billboards, while the see-through polyester fabric, employed as canvas, is equally evocative of screen-printings mesh and of a curtain veiled over a gigantic window.

Fig. 12 Sigmar Polke, The Axis of Time, 2007 mixed media on polyester fabric (10 x 16 ft)

The visible structure of the stretcher, a signifier in itself, poses as a physical bearer of a hidden dimension and of a receding field of vision constantly requiring our eyes to re-adjust and re-assess our judgment. The reflective surface of the canvas adds new elements in the composition as beams, lights and grids are juxtaposed to the existing scenery, enriching the

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perception and making it an extraordinary sensorial experience.

Fig. 13 Sigmar Polke, The Axis of Time, 2007 mixed media on polyester fabric (10 x 16 ft)

The reflections are not only very difficult to discern from what is actually on the fabric, but, by virtue of their instable nature, they create an illusion of movement that adds a three-dimensionality rarely experienced in non-optical painting. Crouching down, pulling ourselves up, aiming our gaze upwards and downwards, left to right, peeking in from the side, we lose our sense of self to discover the non-corporality of Polkes paintings.

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Fig. 14 Sigmar Polke, The Axis of Time, 2007 mixed media on polyester fabric (10 x 16 ft)

The figures represented in three of the six paintings are all engaged in the act of looking. Children (fig. 13) lean over an edge to admire an unidentified object or landscape (unless the object of their scrutiny is the painting itself); adults (fig. 14-15) point at what can only be outside our field of vision. By removing the subject of their gaze, the painter seems to want us to intensify our own ability to observe and ponder, making our looking the protagonist of its work.

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Fig. 15 Sigmar Polke, The Axis of Time, 2007 mixed media on polyester fabric (10 x 16 ft)

What Polke offers is a complex experience that gathers multiple modes of seeing: seeing what is behind an image (the stretcher), what forms an image (the painted surface), and what is projected over an image (the physical objects

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reflected on the surface of the fabric and finally those projected onto it by our sensitivity and imagination). The critical attitude that Polke shows towards

everything that aims to reflect the world through imagery, is thus provoked in the viewer who is encouraged to contemplate what it is that he/she is seeing and how the experience takes place.

Conclusion

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We have seen how, behind any creative act, stands the ability to invest objects and/or images with transitional attributes. In this resides also the aptitude to attribute meaning to objects and images that come to incarnate wider concepts. In this way objects and images become symbols for ideas and theories.

Choosing an object whose intrinsic attributes are reminiscent of others, reveals an associative talent that is at the basis of language as well as creativity. Signs (words): the signifiers (speech) and signified (mental concepts) are to be find in verbal and written communication - and in culture at large - as well as in the realm of the visual.

As seeing is equated with knowledge, information is carried through images. In a culture dominated by visuality, any hegemonic discourse is predominately carried out through the imagery of the mass media. Relying on the ability of recurring to a wider spectrum of associations that is typical of any creative, transitional seeing (Adams, 1996, p.206), the artist makes use of a critical viewing that does not conform to traditions and main-stream canons, thus challenging the status-quo.

Marcel Duchamp, sceptical of the institutionalization of artistic practice, questioned the authority of those entities that determined the perception and reception of the work of art. The object was raised to the status of icon, symbolic representation of the crisis he envisaged in painting. The ready-made became with Duchamp a

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statement of the inter-relation of art and life as well as a signifier for the relativity of our belief-systems.

Sigmar Polke paradoxically poses himself as the moral heir of Duchamp. Focusing on imagery borrowed from newspaper and advertising, Polke gives new significance to the role of the artist within our post-modern society; a probing subject that detects and dissects the hegemonic discourse, opposing to it a less addicted perceptual experience that establishes the act of looking as a critical tool enacted through creativity. (7, 688)

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