Miklos Legrady - Writing

^{MIKLOS LEGRADY STUDIO}

how DADA and a bannana elected Donald Trump

Miklos Legrady, 36" x 48" - 91.44cm x 121.92cm, acrylic on cardboard, Jan. 20, 2021

How DADA and a Bannana Elected Trump.

By Miklos Legrady,
Edited by Gabor Podor

Blueberry, strawberry, huckleberry pie. Who will be her lucky guy. Syd and Nancy sitting in a tree. K I S S I N G. First comes the love, then comes the marriage, then comes the baby in a baby carriage. But that’s not all, that’s not all, the baby drank some alcohol.

We’ve never seriously looked at the morality or ethics of art but maybe, in the age of Trump, we should. Did Dada create MAGA? What about the political science that says your culture is your future? For example... German artist Joseph Buys’ career is built on lies, yet even 20 years ago, no one cared. Critic Laura Cummings wrote in the Guardian, “the artist fabricated a story of having been healed by Tartars, who wrapped him in fat and felt after his Luftwaffe plane was shot down over the Crimea. That the tale is a myth seems unimportant now and doesn't make the work inauthentic. What's more significant is the way in which it drives both art and interpretation”. To unpack that, Critic Laura Cummings says when art is anything you can get away with, a lie is totally ok.

Except the tale is not a myth, it is a self-serving fabrication. He didn’t even have to lie but he was too lazy to figure that out. Critics and curators praise his strategies of deception that made fools of the art world. Fake it if it entertains the gullible. Look at Buys’ lips pressed tight, as if to keep from blurting out a truth.

How did Beuys drive the art world, as Laura Cummings put it? He achieved success at a time when incomprehensible art was all the rage, so we had galleries filled with felt and fat. Was this inspirational? If we build an art world on deceits, can we really complain of a political world that consists of anything Trump can get away with? Did we pave the road? What are the consequences of professional dishonesty, of ignoring moral judgment? Or believing that art is a urinal whose semiotic statement is that we piss on art? Didn’t Duchamp constantly say that art sucks and we should get rid of it like some people got rid of religion?⁽¹⁾ Why praise piss,, saying it’s the thought that counts? What kind of a thought was that?

Ostensibly, we are rebelling against the system. But at Basel Miami, when performance artist David Duna walked in and grabbed Marizio Catellan’s banana off the wall, and ate it, he was pointing out that the banana was not worth $125,000. Else Catellan would have called for a stomach pump to retrieve his valuable property.? What about someone who considers themself a rebel against the system, when they are the head of an art department, earning $12,500 U.S. a month?

I started writing about art after reading William Deresiewicz’s article, titled “The Death of the Artist and the Birth of the Creative Entrepreneur” in the Feb 2015 issue of the Atlantic. Deresiewicz’ writes that a really good artist today is a social butterfly, a skilled sales person who knows how to hire other artists to actually do his or her artwork. I was so angry, I was not going to let this stand; my fingers hit the keyboard. I typed so hard and furious the plastic keys started melting, then the keyboard burst into flames..

An avalanche starts with a single snowflake that sets all the others rolling. We look back to 1935 when Walter Benjamin critiques capitalist art in view of the highly anticipated global revolution when the working class would cast off their chains. Today, Garage Publishing and Ad Marginem Press, write that “Walter Benjamin (1892 – 1940) was one of the most influential cultural philosophers of the 20th Century. His essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” remains one of the central texts in understanding the role of art within an industrial society.” Francis Naumann, whom we will return to later, is a critic who writes for the Washing ton Post. He wrote recently that “Benjamin’s essay is — without doubt — the most penetrating analysis ever attempted to evaluate the way in which society will come to envision the concept of originality in a work of art.”

Naumann should know better. Time had not been kind to Walter Benjamin who, while a poetic and lyrical writer, was a Marxist hack. In “Mechanical Reproduction”, Benjamin writes “The art of the proletariat after its assumption of power… or the art of a classless society… brush aside a number of outmoded concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery”. This prediction didn’t age well, since today, 90 years later, those values are still appreciated. Benjamin’s core argument in this article is “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art”, aura referring to the spiritual and emotional force of a work of art. These supposedly vanish when a work of art is reproduced.

Johhanes Guttenberg begs to disagree; books are made by mechanical reproduction yet printed words and images retain their power of seduction through multiple reproductions over centuries. Munch's The Scream is known primarily from mechanical reproduction since few have seen the original, yet the image remains haunting, just as haunting as any Raven perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door. Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”

We need to address changes in contemporary art as of the 1930s on, where previously the nature of art went through various styles that expressed the culture of the times. By the turn of the 19th-20th century, impressionism, pointillism, and all the variations of style were essentially an exploration of the vocabulary and grammar of visual language. Then things reached an enantiodromia, a term coined by psychologist Carl Jung meaning that when things get extreme they turn into their opposite. Marcel Duchamp and Picabia were among the pioneers of an existential movement that sought to alter the nature of art. Picabia wrote in the DADA manifesto that art was the opiate of idiots, while Duchamp said that art was an unnecessary obsession we should get rid of, the way some people got rid of religion. Neither of them meant it since they remained artists. Their stylistic revelation was to see marketing as an essential aspect of art, and being Dadaists, they hit on shocking the bourgeoisie as their modus operandi.

As coined by then MOMA curator Robert Storr, in the 1950s and 1960s, art moved from the Cedar Tavern to the Seminar Room. Artists started earning a living not by selling art but by teaching at any of the numerous art departments established in universities following the Second World War. The GI Bill gave all white veterans a free university education, denying that opportunity to anyone black, indigenous, or people of colour. Art is a “use it or lose it” proposition and teaching does not leave you much time for studio work. The academy moved the goalpost. Until that time, art was what you did; now it became what you said. Art became what was clever, as typified by conceptual art. Such a change actually opened the gates to extended creativity in traditional modes, as seen in installations, earth works, or the products of such artists as Anish Kapoor. But academic art also led to a fork in the road, where a different type of art was accredited; boring art, ugly art, undesirable art, all born of the traditions of rebellion invented by Picabia and Duchamp to shock the bourgeoisie.

The artist as social critic

“Artist's Shit” is a 1961 anti-artwork by Piero Manzoni. The work consists of 90 tin cans, each reportedly filled with 30 grams of feces, and measuring 4.8 by 6.5 centimeters, with a label in Italian, English, French, and German, stating: Artist's Shit, Contents 30 gr net Freshly preserved Produced and tinned in May 1961. The tin can in the Tate Gallery collection bears the serial number 004. The cans, which supposedly contain plaster of Paris, sell today for upwards of $100,000, while Artsy has a listing of $989,000.

Marizio Catellan followed suite with “America” (2016) an 18k golden toilet, which was first shown at the Guggenheim Museum, New York. Four years later, it was exhibited at Blenheim Palace, Oxford, England, from where it was stolen one early morning, perhaps by art critics. In September 2019, a gang of seven people broke into Blenheim Palace just before 5 a.m. and ripped the solid-gold, fully functioning toilet out of the ground. The toilet was meant to be part of an exhibition by the Italian artist but was stolen before his show opened.

Not only did the thieves make off with the 96-pound toilet, whose worth is estimated at $6 million, they also caused “extensive water damage” to the wood paneled lavatory that was situated right next to the room where former UK prime minister Winston Churchill was born.

Artists such as Picabia, Duchamp, Manzoni, and Catellan, created a concept of the artist-critic, who shocked the public by denigrating art. Since the bourgeoisie could not understand why an artist would discredit their own profession, the public was informed that art was now intellectual; the average person assumed they were outclassed by these intellectual artists who produced work that seemed “enigmatic”. A careful reading of political science informs us that your culture is your future. Picabia, Duchamp, Catellan , Donald Jud, and Thierry de Duve claimed art was anything you could get away with; then MAGA replied, without any public opposition, that politics was anything that Donald Trump could get away with. A banana elected Donald Trump

Of course the meaning of art differs for each person. For an American like William Deresiewicz, art is about making a lot of money. For others art is cultural magic, a value judgment, and it is also like the scientists’ chalkboard, where those scientists scribble equations that create future technology. It is obvious that what artists scribble in their work creates future sociology. Political science says your culture is your future.

Marshall McLuhan wrote in Understanding Media that art was a radar, identifying targets in plenty of time to learn how to cope with them. We learn a lot from Duchamp’s confidant and biographer, the critic Francis Naumann whom we mention in relation to Walter Benjamin. When I emailed him asking what if the bicycle wheel is not a work of art, Naumann replied saying Duchamp said it was, and that’s good enough for him. What a disappointing level of critique from the canonical Duchamp scholar. He sent me a pdf of the chapter in his book, "The Recurring Ghost”, where he cites Duchamp claiming the Bicycle Wheel as a found object, a Readymade. Naumann wrote that at that moment, the Bicycle Wheel became a work of art. I sent him Duchamp’s quotes in the Cabane interviews

“Please note that I didn’t want to make a work of art out of it ... when I put a bicycle wheel on a stool ... it was just a distraction.” The word ‘readymade’… seemed perfect for these things that weren’t works of art, that weren’t sketches, and to which no term of art applies.” Duchamp clearly said Readymades are not art works, which the art world has since then conveniently ignored. Naumann failed to reply. This man is the canonical Duchamp scholar; it is unacceptable that he was so ignorant, as we all are, worshipping false gods.

For me that was just the start of a horrific realisation that so much of our cultural history, was a collection of misinformation created by vested interests to promote their own agenda. R.A. Fisher was the founder of modern statistics. In 1947 he was invited by the BBC to talk about science; his words also apply to the arts.

“A scientific career is peculiar in some ways. Its reason d’être is an increase in natural knowledge and on occasion an increase in natural knowledge does occur. But this is tactless and feelings are hurt. For in some small degree it is inevitable that views previously expounded are shown to be either obsolete or false. Most people, I think, can recognize this and take it in good part if what they have been teaching for ten years or so needs a little revision, but some will undoubtedly take it hard, as a blow to their amour propre, or even an invasion of the territory they have come to think of as exclusively their own, and they react with the same ferocity as any animal whose territory is fought over. I do not think anything can be done about it… but a young scientist may be warned and even advised that when one has a jewel to offer for the enrichment of humankind some people will clearly wish to tear that fellow to shreds.”

Variations of vested interests exist not only in territorial competition. A worse case is when the critic achieved renown not through scholarship but through networking skills or nepotism. My studies over ten years focused on the corruption of art ,and the latest paper submitted to this academic journal was titled The Malfeasance of Marcel Duchamp. I know, I know, everybody knows that Marcel Duchamp had a deep, deep understanding of art. Everybody knows this except the very few people who actually studied Marcel and realized, much to their horror, that Duchamp had very little understanding of art, if any. No one who does would say the things Duchamp said throughout his life. What did Marcel Duchamp say?

In a 1968 Youtube video, shot a year before he died, Joan Bakewell interviews Marcel Duchamp for BBC’s Late Night Line Up series, where Duchamp talks about that after his early career, after the Large Glass, he stopped painting. It is then that he decided that art was unimportant to him or to us; art was discredited; it was an unnecessary adoration, and we should get rid of it the way some people got rid of religion. ⁽²⁾ Duchamp is an easy target - no one who understands art would say such a thing. So how did Marcel achieve a global reputation? One possible answer is that he did posses a brilliant talent for visual language, though not for intellectual comprehension. The art world admired his visual art and assumed he was equally intelligent. But visual art, or the body lanngague of dance, or acoustic art are all non-verbal expressions. Non-verbal langue’s express what cannot be thought about nor said in words.

The journal to whom I submitted my paper sent it out for peer review and what was a dismal failure of that process. The reviewer said that painting never recovered from Duchamp adding a moustache to the Mona Lisa, and so he could not recommend publication of my text. I emailed my objection to the editor who replied the reviewer was a well-established art historian, highly respected in his field. Which translates to saying this reviewer was teaching in the same faculty as the editor, who was protecting them, not about to offend them by overriding their veto. A sad example of nepotism, of the failure of integrity at the highest levels when vested interests apply.

Roger Scrutton wrote in Aeon that “A Cult of Fakery has taken over what’s left of high culture”. “Faking depends on a measure of complicity between the perpetrator and the victim, who together conspire to believe what they don’t believe and to feel what they are incapable of feeling…Anyone can lie. Faking, by contrast, is an achievement. To fake things you have to take people in, yourself included. The liar can pretend to be shocked when his lies are exposed, but the fake really is shocked when he is exposed, since he had created around himself a community of trust, of which he himself was a member. Understanding this phenomenon is, it seems to me, integral to understanding how a high culture works, and how it can become corrupted.” A year later The Atlantic celebrated William Deresiewicz’s “The Death of the Artist - and the Birth of the Creative Entrepreneur”. Ten years later Trump was elected to his second term and is destroying the United States using techniques warmed up and cooked by DADA.

1968 BBC interview with Marcel Duchamp where Duchamp says we should get rid of art.
https://youtu.be/Zo3qoyVk0GU?si=bYdw47iUJ7CsWK8h

2 Ditto.