Art

Do you ever get the feeling that modern art is hard work? Have you not spent precious minutes scrabbling at the coalface of some contemporary art exhibition trying to scratch out any sort of meaning, only to leave none the wiser? Perhaps you should blame Marcel Duchamp, as it was he who began placing everyday objects in galleries – combs, shovels, bicycle wheels – and straight-facedly calling them art. A brilliant and informative show at Tate Modern reveals how Duchamp came to ‘select’ (rather than create) these head-scratching works early in the twentieth century, while the ICA looks at current artists who make others – us viewers included – do the hard graft of creating and interpreting art for them.
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While Duchamp’s ‘readymade’ art makes him the apotheosis of the modern, concept-driven, hands-off artist, the Tate’s capacious survey also includes his co-conspirators and fellow artistic rulebook manipulators, Man Ray and Francis Picabia. These three friends met in New York and formed an experimental and intellectual gang that broke away from the European anti-art Dada movement and expanded the idea that the form of a work of art had no more weight than the thought that went into it. This freethinking trio seemed intent on taking the very notions of creativity apart, replacing them bit by bit with machine components or industrial processes. Picabia painted emotions or people as pistons and steam engines, while Duchamp depicted his ideal ‘Bride’ of 1912 as a contraption of pumps and bellows. The American of the bunch, Man Ray, turned to photography, the latest and most mechanical of means; posing a female nude in harmony with the cogs of a huge iron printing press.

Marcel Duchamp's 1913 'Bicycle Wheel'

Not just precocious, Duchamp, Man Ray and Picabia were also narcissistically obsessed with themselves and each other. Numerous portraits and self-portraits here show Duchamp dressed up as his female alter ego, Picabia pretending to be a Rodin sculpture with a puffed-up chest and Man Ray sporting half of his beard shaved off for an unnerving schizophrenic look. In a similarly juvenile vein they played endless word games, changing ‘French windows’ to ‘Fresh Widow’ or ‘Eros, c’est la vie’ (Eros, that’s life) to Rrose Sélavy for Duchamp’s punning drag name.

Beyond their psychotic neurotic erotics, there were more than just rampant egos at work or at play within the group. In some ways Duchamp’s revelation that common objects could be shown as art – so long as they were successfully decontextualised, cleverly re-titled and somehow made strange by their manner of exhibition – was a way of hiding his tracks as an artist. It reduced his importance within the system of art production that he’d been working towards changing. Instead, his dangling spade (wittily called ‘In Advance of the Broken Arm') and his defacement of Mona Lisa with a moustache, placed the onus of artistic creation back on to the viewers – do we view it as art, can this object be anything other than what it is? The hatstand, bottle rack and coat hooks are cleverly presented in the gallery for us to try and hang meanings on them. In their struggle for newness and difference, the three chess-playing artists arguably reached the end game of art very early on, but this shouldn’t stop us going back for more.

Just as Duchamp and friends talked about employing an ‘economy of effort’ in their work, so too it seems that today’s artists are a more than lazy lot. Certainly the first piece in the ICA’s new group show ‘Double Agent’ once again forces us gallery-goers to do all the work. As if contemplating an 80-minute video retelling 9/11 as set in a German colony in Namibia wasn’t off-putting enough, the poor art reviewer then has to get strapped into a Stannah stairlift that ascends to another smaller video screen that’s revealed beneath a flap of cloth. In the next room there’s a screen on to which an attendant (the real artist lives in Belgium) types a circuitous narrative about – guess who? – yep the put-upon visitors again. She comments on my attire and I get my own back by making furious notes about her; only she can’t read what I’m writing.

Just when you think that all this solipsistic art will eat itself, there’s a great video by Artur Zmijewski in which various Polish church and student groups engage in his staged game of religious and moral tolerance. He gives each faction a banner on which to display its values and encourages the others to paint over or disagree with the symbols. What ensues is an almighty ruck between Christians, Jews, Young Socialists and the nationalistic All-Polish Students. They deface and set fire to one another’s ideals while the artist only pops up with a fire extinguisher before the place burns down.

The show’s title, ‘Double Agent’ makes you suspicious of everyone and everything you see in the gallery, just as Duchamp did with his readymades. This has meant we have to work that much harder to get to the motives behind these hidden artists’ choices. We can’t just assume that they relinquish control over their art because they want an easy life; we just haven’t figured them out yet.

'Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia' is at Tate Modern to May 26 and ‘Double Agent’ is at the ICA to Apr 6.