The Ready-Made And The Question Of The Fabrication Of Objects And Subjects - Critical Essay

Afterimage, Jan, 2001 by Suzana Milevska

SUZANA MILEVSKA, art theorist and curator, lives in Skopje, Macedonia and works for the Museum of the City of Skopje.

NOTES

(1.) Marcel Duchamp, "The Richard Mutt Case," in The Blind Man (No. 1), April 10, 1917. (The Blind Man was a magazine published on the occasion of the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, Inc. at the Grand Central Palace in New York City.)

(2.) Gene Swenson, "What is Pop Art," in Art News 62 (November 1963), p. 26, quoted according to Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge: MIT Press. 1996), p. 130.

(3.) Thierry De Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), p.413.

(4.) Ibid., p. 295. The statement," I threw a bottle rack and urinal in their faces as a challenge and now they admire them for their beauty" once attributed to Duchamp, now, according to De Duve, is re-attributed to Hans Richter.

(5.) Trajko Slavevski, Makedonska ekonomija vs tranzicija (Eko Press: Skopje, 1955), pp. 83.87. In this book, a professor from the Faculty of Economics at Skopje University investigates different models of privatization in western and eastern countries, arguing with the local government and solvency officials that the fast model of privatization employed in the Czech Republic would be more appropriate than the slower approach already employed in Macedonia.

(6.) Of course, Adorno's thesis should be applied from the appropriate distance, taking into account his theory of negative dialectics and eternal tension between art and society.

(7.) Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, The Anti-Oedipus (New York: Viking, 1977), p. 19.

(8.) The last presentation of a new version of this project took place within the "After the Wall" exhibition in 1999 that Bojana Pejic, curated for Moderna Museet in Stockholm. (It also traveled to Budapest and Berlin.)

(9.) This situation inevitably reminds us of the desiring machine concept from Brian Massumi, trans., Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 161.

(10.) Ibid., pp. 100 and 501-514.

(11.) Wilhelm S. Wurzer, "wild being/ecart/capital" in M. C. Dillon, ed., Ecart & Differance: Merlcau-Ponty and Derrida on Seeing and Writing (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1997), p. 235.

(12.) J. L. Austin, How to do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 106-108.

(13.) De Duve, pp. 89-142.

(14.) This relationship calls to mind the Dialectic of Enlightenment by Adorno and Horkheimer: "the single relation between the subject who bestows meaning and the meaningless object."

(15.) Argument given during a round table discussion at the European Biennial Manifests 2 in Luxembourg in 1998 as an answer to Joseph Bakhstein, art theorist from Moskow.

(16.) George Dickie, Art and Aesthetic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), p.34.

(17.) The documents belong to the personal collection of Ivan Tosevski, the artist's father, who was employed for many years as an expert in the UNO Committee for Human Rights.