A few months back I was rummaging around the web, looking for Duchamp’s 1959 lecture ‘The Creative Act’. I was interested in the history of the idea of “interactivity” within works of art.
Famously, Duchamp said:
All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.
As well as finding the full text of this short lecture here, and an audio recording of it here, I stumbled upon a great little essay by Brett Schultz called ‘Pissing on Duchamp’. Schultz looks at the work of artists Yuan Cai and Jian Jun Xi, whose practice takes literally the provocations of artists (like Duchamp) who import everyday objects into the art gallery context. For instance, in 1999 they stripped down to their undies and romped around on Tracey Emin’s bed, as well as urinating on Duchamp’s Fountain (his urinal from 1917) in 2000.
In his essay, Schultz quotes from Lev Manovich’s seminal book The Language of New Media:
All classical, and even moreso modern, art is ‘interactive’ in a number of ways. Ellipsis in literary narration, missing details of objects in visual art, and other representational ‘shortcuts’ require the user to fill in missing information (p. 56).
But the point that Schultz is making goes beyond mere “filling in the gaps” in a cognitive sense - the work of Cai and Xi goes as far as to change the stable physical nature of the art object itself:
Cai and Xi’s atypical interaction is noteworthy because it favored physical form over the cerebral, making tangible the audience’s contribution to the creative work.
This, of course, is always going to cause friction when the “works of art” are not merely intellectual propositions, but also valuable and fetishised commodities. But Schultz thinks, in fact, that pissing on Duchamp has in fact done the dada grandmaster a great service:
Perhaps we should praise Yuan Cai and Jian Jun Xi, these momentary liberators of a conflicted urinal, for at least now La Fontaine knows that it is still fit to serve. With a golden stream of answers, the two Chinese-born artists rather boldly resumed the dialogue Duchamp began in 1917 when he first presented the work. In spite of the Tate gallerists’ outrage over the incident, one can imagine Marcel would have approved – he, himself, proposed using a Rembrandt as an ironing board. The potential for meaningful, (though not necessarily desirable) destructive interaction exists in every work of art.
You can read Schultz’s full essay here [pdf, 100kb].
