Defamiliarization minimalist artists8/10/2023 ![]() Pages from our new book reproducing KAWS's near abstract work GLASS SMILE, 2012 Perhaps this is why his clear-lined appropriations of SpongeBob SquarePants, the Simpsons, the Smurfs, Snoopy and co. As our book explains, following graduation, the artist moved to Manhattan to take a job at Jumbo Pictures, an animation studio, where he worked from 1996 until 2002. Afterall, Andy was a hugely successful magazine illustrator prior to making the jump to screen printing soup cans and starlets for KAWS, cartoons were already his fulltime job. KAWS turned towards the canvas around four decades after Warhol, though he may have approached it with a greater level of pop acuity. To become serious art, all that stuff had to pass through the canvas.” “But ultimately it all had to be filtered through the prism of art. “All of Warhol’s extra-artistic activities-Interview magazine, the Velvet Underground, innumerable commercials, and appearances on TV-were part of the machinery and helped him accumulate vital material,” he writes. What do you need to do in order to turn pop culture into pop art? In our book, KAWS: WHAT PARTY, the critic and curator Daniel Birnbaum, argues that you really need to paint. “Totally lost, I enter a world of intensities” writes critic and curator Daniel Birnbaum in our new book Photo Farwad Owrang / © KAWS When KAWS pushed cartoons to the point of abstraction However, Duchamp did not really care about possible controversy, since gender reversal was his thing: he had even adopted his own female pseudonym, which again played on sexual innuendos: Rrose Sélavy, pronounced “Eros, c’est la vie”, meant “Eros, that’s life” (Eros was the god of Love).īy ridiculing the epitome of Renaissance ideals, Duchamp rebelled against everything that ‘traditional’ art stood for, in particular the appeal to harmonious and solemn beauty.URGE (KUB1), 2020, Acrylic on canvas. As you can imagine, in 1919 this image trespassed upon the traditional understanding of gender roles, and adding a mustache to one of the most celebrated works of art ever created was considered a sacrilege and an act of aesthetic vandalism. However, the caption is totally not random it demonstrates how much Duchamp adored playing with words and conventions: if one read at loud the letters in French, they would sound like “Elle a chaud au cul”, which in rough translation means “She is hot in the arse”, or “There is fire down below”, which referred to alleged sexual restlessness of the mustached Mona Lisa. It worked well with Fountain from 1917, and it also worked with his version of Mona Lisa, to which he added a mustache and goatee and wrote a seemingly insignificant sequence of letters “ L.H.O.O.Q.” By often using controversy and provocation, he hoped to inspire change and make society question the idea of what art was at his time. Marcel Duchamp, La Joconde/L.H.O.O.Q., 1964 replica of 1919 original, Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA, USA.ĭuchamp’s idea worked on a basis of defamiliarization, which was meant to spark some reflection in the viewers who would be confused looking at an everyday object set in an unsuitable setting of a museum. La Joconde was too made exactly in the same way, and it instantly became one of Duchamp’s most famous readymades and a symbol for the Dada movement. He came up with an artistic technique called ‘found objects’, which relied on a basic principle: you find any mundane object, you alter it slightly by adding or subtracting something to/from it, you call it a piece of art. Marcel Duchamp was one of the first artists of the 20th century who began questioning the status of art in the contemporary world and the criteria according to which an object became an artwork. ![]() ![]() Yet, this time, it was not just an ‘immature prank’ but turned out to be a work of art. Well, Marcel Duchamp, the father of the Dada movement, did the same on a postcard of Leonardo da Vinci‘s Mona Lisa. I used to do it on the covers of my grandma’s crossword booklets. We all did it at some point in our lives: we drew a mustache on somebody’s printed face in a color magazine or a street poster. Marcel Duchamp, La Joconde/L.H.O.O.Q., 1919, Tate Modern, London, UK. In other words, it’s an epitome of Dada and Marcel Duchamp‘s entire oeuvre. This masterpiece, La Joconde, is all about codes, reversals, play with conventions, and provocation.
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