When Avant-Garde Becomes Mainstream
Doilies make things look precious, dainty and cute, like snowflakes without the hassle of puddles. They look good on mantels, under candelabra and posh clocks. But doilies made from cheap paper simply look tacky when they frame paintings — exactly the look Marcel Duchamp wanted when he hung the Société Anonyme’s first show in New York in 1920.
The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America, currently showing at the Phillips Collection, is the first visiting show of the Société's work, which was donated to the Yale University gallery in 1941. The show replicates Duchamp’s curatorial conditions, from the floor mats to the doilies. Although the upstart rapscallions of their day, the works by artists like Kandinsky, Miró, Mondrian, Brancusi, Calder, Ernst and Léger now feel disappointingly tame—like stuffed tigers in a natural history museum.
The exhibit raises similar questions as the Dada show (which we visited). How are viewers to respond to art that has become canonized in the museum world, when it was launched as anti-art (Duchamp famously said of Fountain, "I threw the urinal in their faces and now they come and admire it for its beauty")? Wouldn't Duchamp be furious to see how he has become the very establishment that he meant to critique? And if he would be satisfied, does that not prove that he was simply a publicity-crazed fraud?
Judging artists always seems to fall short of discussing art, though, and the Phillips has sought to recreate what it calls the Société's philosophy of presenting works "as seen through the eyes of artists — instead of critics or curators" and offering "a non-hierarchical view of modern art, giving equal weight to noteworthy works by both critically acclaimed and lesser-known artists."
The ultimate in anti-Salon curating, the Société, it seems, seeks to evade criticism and historical nitpicking. Instead, viewers can enjoy the museum as fun house, entering the exhibit to see Joseph Stella's masterful Brooklyn Bridge, a disorienting, cubist-styled maze of girders and cables. The Phillips playfully hangs Duchamp's To Be Looked At (From the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close To, for Almost an Hour against a wall, so viewers could not follow directions even if they wanted to. Alas, Duchamp's Rotary Glass Plates do not rotate, but a video in the next room shows the optics machine at work.
In a gallery world that is getting used to Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle and Damien Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, it is amusing to see what was considered provocative in the 20s. And yet, unlike Barney's and Hirst's work, the Société Anonyme members created work that questioned the boundaries of what was appropriate artistically, whereas the two postmodernists used art to be provocative. In this sense, Duchamp is a welcome sight for sore eyes.
The Phillips Collection is located at 1600 21st Street NW and is open Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Thursday, 10 a.m. to 8:30 p.m., and Sunday 12 p.m. to 7 p.m. The Société Anonyme closes on January 21, 2007.