For someone who has anger issues, entering the Audubon’s The Birds of America exhibition was like entering a whole new world. Upon the entry, I saw giant screens showing details from Audubon’s work and I could hear quiet bird noises in the background. It was an incredibly calming experience, as much as one can consider stuffed birds and plates depicting birds massacring another bird calming. Naturally, this wasn’t the centre of the exhibition – it truly celebrated the skill and the creativity of the bird illustrator with a passion for nature.
The exhibition is running in the National Scottish Museum in Edinburgh from the 12th of February to the 8th of May of this year. It displays over 40 plates, each measuring almost one metre in height. Most of them have never actually been shown to the public before. It is split into 4 sections, each of them with its own theme – the first one, ‘Meet the Birds of America’ introduces the ‘world’s most expensive book’ and Audubon, in general.
John James Audubon was a 19th-century ornithologist and naturalist. He made a point of studying and cataloguing the birds he encountered in their natural habitats. A son of a sugarcane plantation owner and a chambermaid, he must have had a conflicted childhood. Audubon moved to the US to avoid participation in the Napoleonic Wars – and focused on birds instead.
The second section of the exhibition titled ‘An Art and a Science’ examines the influence of other illustrators on Audubon as well as the scientific, or sometimes quasi-scientific context. With the Industrial Revolution clashing with the Romantic movement, the transcendental search for nature was at its peak. The illustrations at the time were generally quite dull due to drawing from taxidermy and lifeless study skins.
Audubon, however, made a point of painting directly from wildlife, by personally hunting the birds and sometimes getting others to hunt for him. He would then paint the birds he gathered by pinning them into lifelike poses observed in the wild. This resulted in his art being vivid and life-like. He didn’t want to paint the taxidermied birds as he felt this would take away their lively spark from them. He was known for sometimes romanticising the birds he saw in the wild, for example when painting the Mocking Bird, in which a rattlesnake attacks birds in a bush, where it would be impossible for a rattlesnake to do so. Audubon would also sometimes add more human behaviours to the birds to allow the audience to relate to the birds. He was sometimes accused of not exactly presenting the truth.
The third part of the exhibition called ‘Audubon in Edinburgh’ explores the role of Scottish intelligentsia in ensuring that Audubon was embraced by the art society, after his rejection by the scientific community in Philadelphia. He befriended William Home Lizars and started engraving. Edinburgh was central to Audubon’s beginnings as a bird illustrator, making it extremely relatable to the Scottish audience, and it became somewhat a privilege to live in the same city where Audubon once found inspiration and was embraced by the art world.
The fourth section called ‘The Great Work: The Making of a Masterpiece’ deals with technical and artistic achievements. There are short films available for those whose attention span is longer than mine. However, this section also shows the bound edition of Birds of America which is extremely large (100 x 130 cm when open). Audubon insisted that the illustrations would show the birds life-size. Only two paper mills in the UK were capable of printing these, as he used a double elephant folio which is 96 x 66 cm. For those who are capable to rotate shapes in their head, this number will probably mean a lot.
The fifth section ‘Naturalist or Showman’ focuses on his contribution to discovering new species. Audubon identified 25 new species. This part of the exhibition explores some of the ‘controversies’, for example, Audubon was known for his strong belief in phrenology, the science which is now deemed ‘pseudoscience’ by some. Phrenology suggests that one can find details about someone’s personality from their skull shape. Seeing what kind of person he was, he probably used phrenology to mock his rivals. He was often accused of plagiarism and scientific fraud due to misidentifying some species and fabricating scientific data. Sometimes he invented new species to impress people who might then buy his work. Reportedly, he even stole the specimen of Harris’s hawk from his subscriber to then pretend he never knew him. He also lied in his own autobiography.
The sixth and final section of the exhibition ‘Birds of the World’ considers the impact of the modern era on the preservation and extinction of many birds. Some, such as the Carolina parakeet is entirely extinct – they used to always flock in large groups which made it easier for the hunters to kill them. They’ve also been considered a pest by farmers, which contributed to their demise. The exhibition ends on a thoughtful note, advising us to consider the repercussions of human behaviour on the natural world.
This prompted many conversations, such as the possibility to clone the extinct animals using their DNA tissue, however, so far, this was only tried with Pyrenean Ibex in 2003, but this one died not long after from lung defects. It might be a way forward in the future though.
The exhibition was a visual feast for the eyes and the birds are engraved and painted beautifully. The sheer skill of Audubon’s art is undeniable, and it trumps any accusations he received. He may not have been rigidly adhering to the scientific advice, but he created something that’s still worth looking at. Audubon inspired George Bird Grinnell to create the National Audubon Society in 1905 (although the idea goes back as far as 1895 when the first Audubon Society was created). The organisation protects the birds and their habitats in the Americas. If you like birds, you can donate here.
Audubon’s exhibition included a wealth of important items, including some study skins of birds and many taxidermized birds as well as his diaries, plates, and his hunting double-barrelled rifle. The exhibition is beautiful, thoughtful and certainly fascinating. For anyone who craves the return to transcendentalism and ancient values – it’s a feast for their eyes. If you fancy a trip to Edinburgh before the end of the exhibition on the 8th of May – make a point of stopping by at the National Scottish Museum to look at some birds, I strongly recommend it.
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On the Invention of British “Values”
Contender for the Conservative Party leadership and Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, has declared that he would widen the scope of our PREVENT programme to include those with “anti-British” attitudes. He didn’t bother to define those attitudes but no doubt they include equality, diversity and inclusion to the extent that I will be sent to the Sensitivity Hub in the Leveled Up North for saying I don’t think young girls should cut their breasts off and that a wider cuisine base is the price worth paying for a million immigrant.
British values have had to be invented in the 21st century because they never existed. I’m sorry, but it’s true – otherwise David Cameron wouldn’t have had to try so hard to either define them or legislate for their respect. I still remember that cringe Google advert from circa 2014 that asked “what are British values” and delighted in showing us a picture of two men wearing kilts getting married. But culture, like air, is only felt in its absence. What’s worse, the definitions that have been foisted upon us of “British values” are only British in the sense that they can be found in Britain, but they are not uniquely British. Is it wrong to say that most of Europe respects the values of “equality, diversity and inclusion”?
Diversity built Britain, claims a fifty pence piece with a smug Rishi Sunak behind it. This is only true if you buy the Blairite lie that Britain was born in 1997 and actively chose to depart from its millennium-long history thereafter. Yet, these invented values are clearly not powerful enough to inspire the one thing that keeps a country together – loyalty. The chairman of this publication asked the question “what is a nation if it cannot inspire loyalty?” but neglected to interrogate the cultural dimension of that question, focusing on the legal questions of identity. This is like describing a human in terms of their body only, and making no distinction between living or dead bodies; a body needs a soul to be a person. If you don’t believe me, try and sit in the presence of the corpse of someone you know.
It does not have to be this way; and, when you climb out of the political rabbit hole built for us, you realise it actually is not this way. “Britain” is stamped across everything and pushed into your face at every opportunity – and I’ll tell you what Britishness is shortly. Instead, there is a richer dust beneath that impoverished earth that can be found, if only you look for it: Englishness.
The left fears Englishness because it is real. It does not fear Englishness because it does what the left wants to do, and better – it does not offer “an inclusive and diverse” society – but they fear it because it inspires so much loyalty and with so much ease. And as with oxygen, you only find it when you’ve been denied it for so long; but this actually makes finding it easier since we are so starved of it already. You can find it in a country pub, at a church fête, at a garden party, at a Christmas church service, in the architecture of Buckingham palace, in the music of Herder and Elgar, in the tailors of Saville Row – in short, in all the places you would not find anywhere else in the world. You don’t find it in a cup of tea, or in a queue, or the other twee nonsense that is so important to the 21st century project of multiculturalism.
You have to find these things, though. They are hidden, and consciously so – otherwise they threaten the damp, empty and meaningless focus of loyalty you’re supposed to feel, “British”. And Englishness threatens Britishness because it’s so much more powerful. I don’t blame the SNP or Plaid Cymru or Sinn Fein for being so successful. I blame our gutless, cowardly elites.
It wasn’t always like this. Britain and “Britishness” was only ever a legal identity supported by an English hegemony. There’s a reason that, for so long, writers would use the words interchangeably – it’s because they were. Englishness was unique and different to Scottishness (Welshness doesn’t exist), and quite clearly the animating spirit, the soul of Britishness. Scottish and Irish people might complain today that their culture was “erased” by the British state under an English hegemony, but to the victor, the spoils. England and Scotland had the same population sizes for centuries, and went to war so very often, it’s hardly surprising that one of them would eventually triumph.
English people were aware of this. It’s no surprise that Enoch Powell spoke about this – typically eloquently and with deeper understanding than any living politician – and urged that “Britain” concede its diminished place in the world, surrendering the Empire (and its step-child, the Commonwealth), instead accepting that England is the only real entity worth loyalty. Powell thought that clinging on to a vaguely defined “Britain” at a time when her seapower was basically gone, the massive waves of immigration were becoming the norm, and the European Economic Community was expanding, meant the hegemonic English identity would be turned in on itself, swallowed up, and hollowed out by the desire to make “Britain” as palatable as possible. As with everything else, on this issue Time has proved to be Enoch’s greatest ally, to the extent that David Lammy – who has no cultural or ethnic connection to Englishness – can call himself English. The only reason he can, is because Englishness and Britishness are still mistaken for one another. We have made the mistake of letting an English hegemony be captured by those who hate England.
But this hegemony is almost dead: whilst the last bits of “Englishness” that have dominated “Britishness” are swallowed up, it became the project of the Left in the post-Thatcher years to become even more aggressive in simultaneously undoing that hegemony whilst also turning it in on itself. That first part, of undoing this hegemony, was fuelled by Leftist desires for “equality” between Scotland and Wales, and England, and the farcical idea of Britain as a “nation of nations”, culminating in the devolution programmes that created the fake nation of Wales (still a principality of England, really) and threw the rabid dog of Scotland a steak as if that would satisfy its hunger. You don’t feed the strays.
Peter Hitchens’ Abolition of Britain catalogues that second arm of the Leftists strategy, of taking the ‘kind and gentle’ civilisation of Britain and weaponising it against the England upon which it was built. Another article published by the Mallard, written by Eino Rantanen, put this point well – “British friendliness has created not only complacency, but rather powerlessness in the face of people and ideologies that have no qualms asserting themselves, often violently”.
One violent ideology of this kind is the hated enemy of Blairism. Blairism was the final legal victory of the Leftist assault on English hegemony: again, the Blairite elements of the British state have been rightly identified before, but I will list them for the sake of explaining my point: the Supreme Court (which is a nonsense name, the Monarch in Parliament is still supreme); devolution, as I say above; the eradication of our educational heritage by devaluing university; and so on.
But, this publication has made it its job to be more optimistic, or so I’m told. The situation may look bleak, and I doubt I’ve helped, and this next point might make me sound even more blackpilled: the British project is nearly exhausted. The values that had to be invented in the sundering of the English hegemony of Britain were a sort of proto-globalism – that triumvirate of mediocrity, “equality, diversity and inclusion” have proven to be as empty as the French Revolution’s “liberte, egalite et fraternite” – but some kind of pseudo-cultural identity was needed to keep Britain going. In a way, the Left has dug its own grave, because it took away the only real substance that gave Britain an identity, and replaced it with a set of contradictory inventions.
And you can see this new public culture everywhere. Indeed, it is stamped across everything, in such a way that you cannot avoid it: for example, despite the fact that June has (somehow, unquestioningly) become “pride month”, there are still “pride parades” everywhere and all the time, and in such public spaces that you need to actively try to avoid them – an inconvenience that they are counting on, of course. And “pride parades” are not even about being gay anymore, or LGBT, or whatever, they’re just an excuse to get drunk and be promiscuous in the street, and you can take part – provided you wear the dress and make up and face paint necessary to mark you out as “one of us”, whoever the “us” is.
Contrast this, quite literally, with the fact that Eid is celebrated by thousands of Muslims on the streets of London, a religion that is less tolerant of homosexuality than Christianity. And again, you don’t even really need to be Muslim to take part in the celebration of Eid. The fact that these contrasting belief systems are publicly supported and worshipped is the sign of the absence of a communal identity, not its existence; deep and contradictory belief systems cannot be present in the same collective identity. It is just proof that different collectives live in the same space now; and the simultaneous celebration and sublimation of each is the only way their contradiction can be held in check. In the same way that Patrick Deneen wrote in Why Liberalism Failed that the expansion of atomistic individualism required a stronger state, so too does multiculturalism (another invented British “value”).
Then there’s the fact that every advert – every advert – is full of black people (or, if you want to see intersectional London’s one-step-further form of this, spot the Tube advert with an interracial lesbian couple in which both are wearing face masks). To such an extent that British people think the British population is 20% black (it’s 3%, by the way); and never mind the fact that black people are not Britian’s biggest ethnic minority, we now have a “Black history month”, apparently. You would be forgiven for thinking we lived in America – but maybe that’s the point.
Where is the room for Englishness in all of this? That’s just the point: there isn’t any, and by design. The desire to strip the England out of Britain by the Left meant that Englishness has to be sublimated in order to for “Britishness” to be viable. But here is the optimistic point of this article: the twin facts that the British project is fraying, and that English culture has to be suppressed, points to a single, irresistible conclusion. Englishness is both too powerful for the new British “identity” to counter, and that it is ripe for rediscovery.
The final point here is that, the word “rediscovery” is intentional – Englishness has to be found, partly because it is so smothered by that new British pseudo-culture I lay out above, but also because real culture is physical and tangible. You can find English culture hiding in an Anglican church, in a garden party, in the squat village pubs – basically, in all the places that are unique to England and around which a recognisable pattern of behaviour has been built. Englishness can be found once again – you just need to look for it.
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Rip Up the Roads
Driving may well be the biggest psy-op in modern history. The car has often been depicted as the symbol of freedom, the ability to go wherever one pleases – to emancipate oneself from the circumstances they find themselves in, and to strike up a new existence elsewhere. There’s a reason they talk of the ‘open highway’. Maybe in America this imagery resonates. After all, America has the size necessary for road trips to take you to genuinely isolated places. But America is America, and Britain is Britain. If you woke up at a random place on the British Isles, you could walk in any direction and find a marker of civilisation and follow it to safety before you were seriously close to death.
This fact is part of Britain’s charm, we really are the national equivalent of The Shire. A place where just the natural landscape lends itself to safety. Our island status makes it easy to defend, and our size allows us to grow, but not isolate ourselves from one another. Considering this, there really is no escape from civilisation in Britain. This may well be why exploration and adventure are such a large part of our culture: the only way to experience these things was to leave the country.
These facts make cars not so much a freedom, but a restriction. There is no ‘open road’ in Britain, just congested highways and country lanes that were fit for horses and carriages, not Land Rovers and BMWs. Driving in modern Britain means going from your box apartment to your box office, all facilitated by your box car. What do you get for the privilege of this freedom? More paperwork, bills, and another thing to look after. These are just the personal costs, the social costs are much greater. Huge swathes of land have to be taken up to facilitate cars. Roads are just the beginning, parking, driveways, motorways and car-related services such as petrol stations and garages all take up space that could otherwise be allocated for residential use. Cities such as Rome enchant those who visit because they were structured around the human and not the car. The streets of Rome have natural, organic arcs to them which obscure the street ahead. Cars don’t do well with too many turns, and so roads become long stretches that give the eyes nothing to feast upon but the gruelling monotonous journey ahead, often accompanied by ‘humorous’ bumper stickers or, God forbid, billboard emblazoned with advertisements – turning your commute into an advertisement break between your diminishing private life, and your gruelling work life.
So what should replace the roads? Surely we still need all of the creature comforts of the modern world, and if we don’t have roads between towns or within them, we can’t have any trade. First and foremost, people will not simply sit in their homes and starve because the A419 has been ripped up and they cannot reach a Tesco. Where there’s mouths to feed, there’s money to be made, and a new wave of farm-to-table markets would be incentivised to emerge locally. Now that walking is the main way of navigating towns and cities, commerce has to spread out to accommodate. No longer will there be massive central hubs of consumption, but small decentralised centres catering to the bespoke needs of communities on the most elemental level. For transport between these centres, the newfound cash not spent on road maintenance can be used to build trams to move people between these different centres allowing cross-pollination of consumers without the homogenisation of products that comes with shoving those products in vans and moving them across towns.
Of course, there are those goods which simply cannot be manufactured locally, and certain goods like fish are quite obviously not easy to come by if you’re not on the coast. To this end, a massive expansion and upgrade to the railways is needed. Expansion to offset the now-defunct road freight industry, and upgrades to ensure timely delivery of goods. This would mean moving away from much of the Victorian-era railway, but returning In full force to the Victorian-era spirit of industrialisation and progress. Rail freight is often cheaper per-mile than road freight, and allows for quick loading and unloading of containers, rather than manual loading and unloading from the back of lorries.
In order for rail to dominate the British landscape, the failures of the British state can no longer be tolerated. It shouldn’t take a decade to open a railway for public consultation, only to downscale it before any serious construction has taken place. Instead, a reactive and dynamic centralised infrastructure is required that clears out the dead weight who would stand in the way of a new vision of Britain – one in which the countryside is reclaimed from the concrete mess of roads, and the rewilded landscape tears past the window of your maglev as you travel from Plymouth to Edinburgh in four hours, rather than ten.
However, the removal of roads doesn’t require the end of private travel. Instead, we can simply take paramotors to the skies and fly to any number of open fields. Paramotors are statistically safer than cars, and can go at around 60mph. Private travel in Neo-Britain would mean the removal of box cars to open skies, overlooking a renewed landscape. For those who prefer to remain grounded, the reclaimed land doesn’t need to be privatised, it can be kept public and traversed by anyone who rents a quad bike and decides to drive through the wilderness to visit their friend a town over, or anyone who just wants to to ramp around the countryside for the day.
Roads are an ugly blight on Britain, they turn a once green and beautiful isle into a grey, dead landmass full of grey, dead people. They facilitate a society built around machinery and not around the character of the people who compose it. There are those who want to end the growth of technology where it stands. These people will lose out to those who wield the weapon of tech. There are also those who wish to simply allow tech to override their humanity. Indeed, we see this in the fact most of our cultural events (including Project 22) are experienced through a screen. Instead, I propose a third way: that technology is a tool in the hands of those who wield it, and through a great strength of will, we can adapt it to the world we live in. We ought not to see technology as an escape from nature, nor as a means to become stewards of nature. We are a part of nature, and must shape ourselves and our societies to work in tandem with it. To that end, we must rip up the roads.
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Conservatives can learn from modern art
You’re probably already baulking at the idea that there could be anything to learn from modern art. You’re not wrong that art and architecture today are often hideous, lazy, cheap, unconsidered, and, well, artless. It won’t help that I myself am still not completely concluded on what there is to learn. Alinskyite tactics of making the enemy live up to their own rules? Did Duchamp just encourage the wrong kind of person and end up making things worse? More on this later.
But there is something in modern art worth considering, it’s not a total waste, you must take wisdom wherever you can find it. There is so little wisdom going. You can’t afford to waste any. Your opponents in the progressives are powerful, rich, and vicious, in all senses of that word. Many, many, many are also group-thinking chasers of convention, out of touch, fearful, vain, and insecure. They don’t believe in the truth, something eternal, irrespective of them, they believe in their truth, as if it emanates from themselves. A pretentious way of saying they want to express their feelings? Perhaps. But truth for them is decided by consensus and fitting in. Yup, that’s
the art sceneprogressives for you.That’s good, that’s a massive weakness. How do you exploit it? How do you handle these people? It’s risky, but people who stand out, do not follow the crowd, have the self-confidence to go their own way, and the actual knowledge and mastery to do it competently, are cool. A big part of what
the art sceneprogressives want to do is fit in and be cool. The risk is that what’s cool, or even just true, for them is decided by consensus, not reality.Art, religion, politics, Rob Henderson’s luxury beliefs. What’s the overlap and what can you learn from one to the other? Dismiss all of modern art, if you like, but at least keep one artist. So much which comes after him is basically derivative and misses the point. Let’s follow a master, see what he did and why, and draw out the lessons. You too will make progressives clutch their pearls and faint, or pop their monocles, and exclaim “harumph, why, that is most unorthodox!”
Marcel Duchamp. He is exactly the right kind of figure to look at. Where to start exactly?
Marcel Duchamp is a tricky sort. You could say he was a total troll and he would often go out of his way to obfuscate history by making things up when asked about his work. He was a bit of a prankster, and he liked tinkering with all the new mediums of his day. He was unpredictable.
And modern art. Where to start exactly with that? Not all contemporary art is synonymous with modern art. If that’s not quite difficult enough, it’s not fair to describe all modern art as crap. At least you might concede it’s not all crap in precisely the same way. It’s a low standard, but a place for you to start.
It’s kind of like memes. They’re often highly context dependent, assume some level of preceding knowledge, are trying to say something to the person who sees them, and some memes are better than others.
Similarly, Duchamp is a man of his time. He was clearly interested in technology, and why wouldn’t he be? He’s around at the time of the wireless, new elements and other discoveries coming out of Marie Curie’s laboratory, the invention of cinema, and x-rays. New materials, new mediums, new ways of getting a different insight into the world around you. New ways of thinking. In physics and mathematics Einstein displaces Newton, non-Euclidean geometry bursts forward, the first thoughts about different dimensions. And it’s all happening around WWI, the ends of empires, the international rise of America, and the replacement of Europe’s monarchies.
What is analogous to any of this today? The internet, AI, social media, NFTs, space? New possibilities, new technology, new materials, new politics, it forces people to question things.
Nude Descending a Staircase, No.2
Duchamp’s first important piece: Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, an example of cubism, with caveats, because it upset some people.
Some context. Let’s quickly look at the Italian futurists in the 1910s, which started with Marinetti.
The futurists were pretty hard core right wingers (Marinetti co-wrote Il manifesto dei fasci italiani di combattimento), who were obsessed with technology and machinery. They wanted to scrap museums, libraries, forget the past, in favour of a world dedicated to speed, and strength, and the future. Is this what made the trains run on time? Anyway, artistically, they were interested in capturing energy and motion in two dimensions. And it was looking to have something to say. What a lot of people don’t fully appreciate about modern art (you were warned this would get pretentious), is that it involves audience participation. If you’re saying “WTF am I looking at here?”, you are saying a response to the piece.
Before modern art, you have realistic art. Actually, realism, which is what it sounds like. Technology by the 1910s keeps getting more and more advanced, and you have more cameras, and photos, and films, at the time artists were beginning to question the point of a realistic painting. Modern artists were rising to that challenge.
Whether it’s futurists, or dadaists, or surrealists, which all emerge around this time, they’re trying to deal with the paradigm shifts of their day. What are the artists of today up to? How many of them are energised and engaged with the paradigm shifts of our day?
The point is, a lot of art, especially modern art, is contextual, just like a lot of culture, whether it’s stories or music, movies, etc. to fully appreciate its impact you really have to be there and part of it. This goes beyond art, well into politics. How do you explain the world pre and post 9/11 to those who weren’t there? The New Atheism movement made more sense in the face of religious extremism, whether that was muslims like bin Laden or evangelicals like Bush.
Modern art emerges amid two world wars, and the blossoming of progressive democracy and its three fruits; communism, facism, and liberalism.
The futurists believed that war is the world’s only moral hygiene, a chance to start anew, that art gets shifted into the new world it brings forth. And then rather a lot of them died in WWI and that was more or less that.
Now, here comes a particularly important thing. A bunch of these art movements would come with manifestos. That is, instructions for how art is and isn’t supposed to be. Rules for what you could and couldn’t express and in what way. The simultaneous scrapping of the past, obsession with what’s new, a certain reverence for violence and domination, and replacement with a new hierarchy. No rules, and also rules, and lots of angry people. Does that sound familiar to you at all, duckies? Have progressives been the same for a hundred years, maybe more?
Well, when art comes with rules, and particularly about what it is supposed to say to people, that is almost certainly propaganda. Oscar Wilde might have had something to say against this (The Picture of Dorian Gray), or Kim Il Sung in favour, as Juche art is supposed to carry a moral, political element to it.
Can we forgive the futurists? They were working before the full, crushing horror of the progressive 20th Century.
Anyway, Duchamp’s Nude changes the art movement of his time, challenges it, mocks it. The full saga of the Nude takes place over a couple of years. He presents it at the pretentiously named (the progressives are all very self-congratulatory aren’t they?) Salon des Indépendants where the cubists reject it. Remember that art is supposed to be full of rules? Cubism is supposed to be about multiple dimensions portrayed simultaneously. Futurism is supposed to be about motion. The Nude is both. Oh no, what a disaster! Most unorthodox!
So, in 1912 some exhibits were supposed to happen at the Salon des Indépendants. The futurists came first, that was all lovely, and the cubists were supposed to come after. Some of the smaller cubists came together to do their own thing and have an “art movement”. Duchamp was having none of it.
The first thing the cubists had a problem with was the title, but Duchamp puts the title right in the painting, so it can’t be hidden, removed, changed, disguised. Total troll. He’s also trying to play with language. It was originally titled “Nu descendant l’escalier” in the literature, and “Nu” is ambiguously male. Worse still, nudes are supposed to be painted lying down, like one of your French girls. Nudes aren’t supposed to be descending stairs. What’s more, the only place naked women were likely to be descending stairs in Paris was at brothels or Mallard Chairman Jake Scott’s mum’s house.
All round, the hanging committee (not as ominous as it sounds) for the exhibit were totally scandalised. Have a look at the painting again. Yup. Duchamp was told to change it, the title was wrong, the painting was too futurist, too Italian, just no good, so he left and removed himself from the show. Something similar then gets repeated in 1913 at the Armory Show in New York.
So much for artists being open-minded or intellectual. Then again, are you surprised that there’s a lot of snobby arseholes in the art world who get bitchy?
Still, Duchamp had the last laugh. Who else out of the cubists exhibited at the Salon is remembered as well today? In Duchamp’s own time, at the Armory, the next year, he was peer level with Picasso as a cubist, and other artists such as Matisse, Delauney, Kandinsky, Rodin, Renoir, and others.
The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even
Alright, so where can Duchamp go from here? His next piece, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, is an even further descent into top notch trolling.
Duchamp really wanted to get into the idea of the fourth dimension with Bride, in the geometric, not temporal sense.
In three dimensions, you can imagine a point within a three dimensional cube and create a coordinate for it along width, height, and depth. A fourth dimensional point would sit in relation to all three of those – it might be like if you could see all sides of the cube and its inside at the same time. And if this four dimensional shape could cast a shadow, it would be a three dimensional shadow, just like a three dimensional object casts a two dimensional shadow on a wall, for example.
The idea was that if you could put three dimensional reality into two dimensions in a painting, what is a three dimensional piece a step down from? You can’t seem to make it real, exactly, so you have to sort of imagine it instead. Can you imagine a tesseract, the fourth dimensional equivalent of a cube? Here’s a representation of the concept.
For a two dimensional painting, it should come very naturally to you to understand what three dimensional object or scene it represents. For any of you duckies who have spent time thinking about non-Euclidean geometry, perhaps Bride might come a bit easier to you.
Or not. But it’s a commendable attempt at trying something new from Duchamp.
So, yes, you will definitely look at it and think WTF is this, but this is very much by design. Though he started the piece in 1915, and it would go on exhibit 12 years later in 1927, he would later publish notes in 1934 as an accompaniment. He did not want a purely visual response.
How did this take him so long to complete, you ask? His patrons said they’d pay his rent until he finished.
Now, at this point you’re probably asking a very justified question. How much is Duchamp really just a bullshit artist? Well, that’s a kind of art too. He’s at least a little funny, a little clever, and a little daring. Can the same be said for progressives?
Duchamp at this point is experimenting. He’s playing with chance. Art is usually done very deliberately, but is it possible to create something through other methods? Are you limited in your materials? Is it possible to use abstract concepts themselves to make something? Is it sometimes more interesting to achieve something that you didn’t exactly set out to do?
There are a few replicas of Bride. The original in Philadelphia is broken, it broke on its way to the original exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. The ones in Sweden and Tokyo are not broken, and are a different experience. They’re also all getting a bit worse for wear. Duchamp didn’t necessarily make things to last. That wasn’t important. His personality itself is perhaps more the figure, more the legacy, than any of his works.
Disposability and personality? He would have been perfect in today’s world of memes, social media, and reality TV. Self-belief, showmanship, fake it til you make it, bullshit artistry. Politicians are memed into success these days. This kind of chaos, flexibility, fun, unpredictability, is not open to the progressives. They have a hegemony to conserve. You have a hegemony to subvert.
You could do worse than to learn from Duchamp.
Fountain
Oh boy. Duckies, if I haven’t lost you already, this one might do it.
Duchamp is in America at this point. America, unlike Europe, has no real history at this time. Plus ça change. (French. You were warned this would get pretentious). Are there lessons to learn here about the internet and the internet generations? Not sure, perhaps you can think about that one.
Anyway, a lot of artists go to America because of the war and Duchamp is asked to run a show. The New York art scene wants to replicate the show Duchamp’s Nude was kicked out of. The Americans want to have a go at their own Independence. How derivative. So, two of the conditions for the show was that there was to be no jury and no prize. It’s like the Oscars. There are no winners. “And the award goes to…”. You can’t have winners. That would imply some people are better than others. No, jury, no prize, nothing is better than anyone else, but it’s still a selective hoighty toighty art show. All the artists who kicked Duchamp out of the 1912 exhibit will be there. Duchamp detects an opportunity.
He takes a urinal, signs it R Mutt and, sure enough, it is kicked out of the show. But it gets photographed.
Duchamp is making another mockery, running another test here. Why can’t a nude descend a staircase? Who made these rules? Who makes art rules? A lot of the audience had never even seen a urinal before, which makes it even funnier.
Duchamp is working with context. Everyone sees a toilet every day. Even prissy art snobs. You can’t look at one in an art exhibit? Why exactly? It’s extreme, sure, and you wouldn’t be impressed with it, duckies, but you’re not pretending to be progressive and egalitarian and open and free or whatever. Duchamp puts a toilet right in the middle of a fancy shmancy art show for all the people who are up themselves for reasons they don’t understand and they lose their minds.
And to this day, people are still debating whether it’s art. In today’s digital economy, when so much is abstracted – social interaction, work from home, shopping, entertainment, etc, – this debate is as relevant as ever.
Really this is about the governing classes, who today are the progressives. If you don’t understand three things by now, you really ought to. First, the ruling class don’t care about the rules in the same way many of the governed do, because they make them, know why they’re there, and what they’re trying to do with them, for power. Second, a lot of the governed really don’t know why their rules are there, but follow them anyway, for many reasons, and only care about the rules at the surface level. Third, a big chunk of the middle class gets up itself precisely because they’re not in the ruling class, are close enough to sniff it, can see it, want it, but aren’t truly in it, and don’t fully understand it.
The most important thing about Fountain is that Duchamp has a sense of humour. It’s even funnier that there was only one photo at the time, the Fountain now is just a replica, and nobody has even seen the original for 50 years. We don’t actually know if Duchamp was making everything up.
Duchamp used to make stuff up in TV interviews. Performance artist? Certainly an early iteration of it. It’s not just enough to subvert the progressives in your work.
You must live it.
Readymades
Well, one in particular. L.H.O.O.Q., which is basically a meme.
The readymades were more or less mass manufactured products which Duchamp sort of took, made a few alterations to, and declared pieces. Yup, that’s a meme. Fair use!
L.H.O.O.Q. is a picture of the Mona Lisa with a moustache and goatee drawn on. Factory produced graffiti? This is 40 years before Warhol, and how long before Banksy? L.H.O.O.Q. was only possible because of advances in technology.
The readymades are a tension between art and not art (pretentiousness continued) – you can go to a museum, look at an exhibit with a urinal set with a sign saying “do not touch” then go into the bathroom and do rather a lot more than touch. The question for you is why is one thing there and not the other? The Mona Lisa (the real one) is there because it obviously should be there?
The answer is “yes”, btw.
Duchamp here is mocking style, taste, and aesthetics, he’s asking questions about reverence, perhaps even worship, but Duckies, don’t rankle. Duchamp is forcing the protection of what’s valuable, of what’s genuinely accomplished and beautiful. There is something to defend in the rules set around beauty conventions. Just not the progressive ones where the rule is that there are no rules, but there are rules, and they’re the ones who control them. If there’s one thing you should recognise about progressives it’s that they don’t exactly care what they’re telling you to do as much as they care that they are the ones telling you to do it.
Duckies, don’t rankle at Duchamp attacking hierarchies in art. This is good when the hierarchy is intolerably corrupt. Duckies, you are against the status quo.
Duchamp basically agrees with the audience that trash is not really art.
What’s next?
If the 20th Century was about the great democratisation of technology, and all the chaos and opportunity that it brought (Twitter?), perhaps the 21st Century can be about the great ordering of technology with stable command. (Twitter + Elon?).
The last piece Duchamp does is Étant donnés. It’s a great big installation piece now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. You could be forgiven for missing the most important part. It’s only visible through two peepholes in a door. And what you see looks like this. A nude, reclined against a landscape backdrop, what you might call a “real painting”, a real life piece, not readymade crap.
Duchamp kept this a secret between two girlfriends and his wife, only revealing the work after his death, and 25 years after he had apparently retired from art to play competitive chess.
Is this what Duchamp believed about art all along?
Duckies, relax, keep yourself in check, and stay cool. Let people enjoy themselves. There’s no real need to get snobby about other people’s tastes.
But also know your own. Do your thing. Let the progressives get on with theirs. They have all sorts of rules and ideas and it’s all built on sand. #Walkway? Disengage, do your own thing. They can do their thing. You’re going to do something cool that doesn’t care about their rules. In turn, your thing will show up theirs, passively. Show, don’t tell. Let them be ridiculous by comparison. Let it come naturally and not because you’ve driven them there.
Or maybe it’s all a load of rubbish? Duchamp used elements of luck as his materials in creating Bride. Jackson Pollock still came along as if he was doing something new with his drip period 20 years after. Andy Warhol still came along 40 years later with his prints as if the readymades hadn’t basically done the same thing before. And contemporary art keeps going.
Duchamp didn’t make anyone realise how ridiculous they were.
Did you just read this entire piece for nothing?
