[This is the third in a series of three guest posts from the artist Brenda Schweder. Please visit Brenda at https://brenda-schweder-found.myshopify.com or drop her a note to b@brendaschweder.com

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So Little Progress in a Century’s Time

by Brenda Schweder

Two weeks ago, I blogged about an amazing thing to come out of one of my Instagram Reels posts gone viral [btw, it’s still growing at 9.4 million views! Mind blowing!].

Quick synopsis: The initial video post showed me sweeping-up dirt and adding it to a clear-windowed envelope as a pendant necklace. People were crazed! Even though I knew with such a huge algorithm push, I’d be beating off haters with a cyber stick, I also was met with people who embraced my art and followed my account. The real surprise, though, was the best: a small percentage of readers who were genuinely curious about this left-of-center art jewelry form! And I was delighted by their curiosity and earnest interest in learning more.

But then, the haters’ voices were still so loud in my head!

As a fashion major [Mount Mary College, Class of ‘84], my only art history requirement was a single semester, which happened to be Art History I: Ancient World through the Renaissance. This meant I missed-out on all the uber-interesting contemporary movements and artists including Non-Art—as coined by Marcel Duchamp himself—an art definition Wikipedia tells me is the pre-cursor to Dadaism.

I bring-up Duchamp because of his rebellious and secret submittal of an overturned urinal [which he titled Fountain and signed with an alias of R. Mutt] to the inaugural exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, as THE prime example of Anti-art/Conceptual Art to ever be.

The society claimed that they would never deny submissions from artists who paid a fee, however the ready-made never made it to the show floor, and the act of omission caused Duchamp’s resignation from the society.

That work has come to be signified as the most influential artwork of the 20th century by a group of 500 British art professionals; and Jerry Saltz [The Village Voice, 2006] said of Fountain and of all of Duchamp’s ready-mades, “… provide a way around inflexible either-or aesthetic propositions. … A work of art that transcends a form but that is also intelligible, an object that strikes down an idea while allowing it to spring up stronger.”

Fountain was submitted to its failed exhibition in 1917.

And THAT was 107 years ago.

I’m sure there are a ba-zillion other examples of such works since, with perhaps the most recent example to have occurred not so long ago.

In 2019, Italian artist, Maurizio Cattelan became infamous for Comedian, the duct-taped-to-the-gallery-wall banana that sold for $120K [followed by a second banana just hours later doubling the artist and gallery’s joint take for the day, and a third, eaten by an art student who reported being hungry].

Cattelan also created a solid-gold toilet he dubbed America that drew two-hour-long lines at the Guggenheim. [Side note: Do we both see the double potty reference here?]

To me, the funniest thing about these [I’m just going to say it] closed-minded opposers, is that they are so vehemently angry about these ready-mades and Anti-art pieces. They cling to their traditional ideas of what art is like they’re hanging from a helicopter blade while hoovering over the Grand Canyon, James Bond style! And from the looks of their accounts [I’ve spent way too much time down the rabbit-hole on this one], they don’t appear to even look at, or buy art, much less practice art themselves.

So why the fervor?

And why, when it’s been over ten decades since that first crazy submission was made, are people so, SO opposed to this new, perhaps broadened, art definition?

All I can offer—as I shake my head in dismay—are these questions to be posed. And a sadness that we’re not much further along than we were as a society in the turn of the century before the last turn of the century! [Sigh!]

 

 

 

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