Contemporary Communication - Essay Example

? Duchamp & Semiotics ALC101 - CONTEMPORARY COMMUNICATION: Making Sense of Text, Image and Meaning Submitted by: 05/17 Duchamp, Marcel Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. [French: Nu descendant un escalier n° 2] (1912) oil on canvas, 147 cm ? 89.2 cm (57 ft 7/8 in ? 35 ft 1/8 in) Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia Essay 2: Duchamp & Semiotics In Marcel Duchamp’s paintings The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even [The Large Glass] (1915-23) and Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), the manner in which the artist creates meaning in the works through the combination of visual and conceptual aspects can be seen as an example of the importance of critical methodology in social semiotics. The way Duchamp transfers the meanings of his own personal philosophy of art to the audience is characteristic of an approach to social semiotics that views art as a communication between subjectivities, with the object as a focal point for the transference to occur. By first deconstructing perception and the perspective of the traditional artist through cubism, Duchamp then further deconstructs the fundamentals of the artist-viewer exchange in order to become a master of symbolic communication in the exchange of meaning. The artist Duchamp acts as a psychologist in practicing semiotics as a way of interpreting the integration of science, art, philosophy, mysticism, and technology into the self-awareness of the modern individual. Art in Duchamp’s expression must first represent the subjectivity inherent in the artists’ vision which may be done stylistically or conceptually. In representing two types of vision, he also represented two types of thinking, the analytical and the romantic. In this primal duality, he could also posit the masculine and feminine symbolically. Thus, social semiotics is constructed through the artist’s own motivations to communicate a personal mythology, giving cause to subjective style and distinctive articulation. The artistic method was a means to bridge this duality for the artist, but to communicate ideas effectively the audience’s perspective also must enter art in concept, and with this semiotic interpretation is created. Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp's biographer, in 1996 writes: “Duchamp had always maintained that his Glass was not just something to be looked at but ‘an accumulation of ideas,’ in which verbal elements were at least as important as visual ones, perhaps even more so... As Duchamp would say in a 1959 interview, he had ‘tried in that big Glass to find a completely personal and new means of expression; the final product was to be a wedding of mental and visual reactions; in other words, the ideas in the Glass were more important than the actual visual realization.’” (Gerrard, 2000) In the context of social semiotics, Duchamp creates the conceptual in art as his message and his theme lies inherent in the art object, furthering his experiments with form. From this and developments in dada, the entire Western art world is transformed philosophically and methodologically by these advances in semiotic interpretation. This transformation also takes place in Cubism with relation to the artist’s own relation to his own subjectivity. The mind of the artist and his/her perception is most personally shared in cubist painting. Yet, in comparison to dada, Cubism has not fully explored the relationship between the artist and audience inherent in semiotic interpretation. The distinction between the privacy of the artist and what he or she makes public through the art object also relates to the duality of the analytical and the romantic. The analytical is taken to be objective in expression, where the romantic is inherently personal, as in the relationship between humans privately. As Andrew Stafford writes in Making Sense of Duchamp: “The Large Glass is a picture of the unseen forces that shape human erotic activity — the realm of ego, desire, and other mysteries. To represent these psychological and existential abstractions, Duchamp created a world occupied by enigmatic but suggestive symbolic objects. The Large Glass is a pictorial diagram of interactions among unseen, abstract forces, as represented by these objects. ‘The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even’ depicts, in diagrammatic form, a chain of impulses and responses that occur when female desire stimulates male desire.” (Stafford, 2008) In social semiotics this romanticism relates to the provocative nature of commercial advertising and its use of sexuality in imagery. Baudrillard views the analysis of sensuality in advertising in comparison to consumption related to need, and social semiotics is required to construct a theory that accurately explains post-modern marketplace identities as they intersect with the political milieu, the State, and other group institutions in advertising images. Baudrillard shows how the late-capitalist economies based upon systems of surplus, advertising campaigns, mass-marketing, mass-production, multi-nationalism, and the objectification of people all form a reinforcing system of worker management and social control. Another issue he highlights is the way that this system of production is not focused on actually fulfilling the needs of society, but actually hyper-inflating or making hysterical its aspects of desire. (Baudrillard, 1970, pp.47-49) Baudrillard recognizes that desire as a fundamental human instinct cannot be fulfilled, but also that a desire-driven economy is very different than a needs-driven economy. This is expressed in creative form in art, but transformed in the process of commoditisation. Bias can be found represented in the ego, the concepts, the fundamentals, the teacher, the language, the structures of reason, grammar, anthropocentricity, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, politics, philosophy, education, and media as just some examples, what we express as individuality in many ways is nothing other than personal bias. In understanding how art, technology, and science combine in the practice of social semiotics, the Frankfurt School, Foucault, Barthes, Lacan, Deleuze, Guattari, and other post-modern theorists point to the synthesizing aspect of mind and knowledge in interpretation that manifest as both ignorance and wisdom. The greater problem for the psychology of social semiotics is the totalitarian interpretation of a solely monolithic interpretation of world history through the Self as machine. Social semiotics can be considered part science, part art, and part technology in representation of the different methodologies that are used in combination when making mass-marketing advertising, media, or communications. Some semioticians will prefer a psychoanalytical approach, others Jungian, humanistic, existential, or innumerable other theoretical approaches to interpretation. What makes this process an art is the need to develop a style of expression in the interpretation that reflects the unique knowledge, training, and background of the sociologist as he or she has personally realized it. While practicing social semiotics in this method, however, the sociologist should also be familiar with critical approaches such as those coming from Foucault, Barthes, Lacan, Guattari, and Deleuze in France, for they represent a new school in post-modernism that challenges the institutional bias of traditional psychology as it is found in other schools. Similarly, Critical Theory, the Frankfurt School, Paul Feyerabend, Thomas Kuhn, and other philosophers who write on the history of science and its methodology should be studied in order to keep a critical self-methodology in practice that is consistent with professional ethics. The Renaissance man remains the ideal for the social semiotician in interpretation, yet basing practice on any one method or style, one must inherently or simultaneously guard against bias. The critique of Platonism in Western thought may also point to the bias in the practice of social semiotics. In using semiotics as a way to refine sociology and psychology, the artistic element of the media interpretation may be developed. In all of these instances, the critical analysis of methodology is vital for the conduct of professional ethics in social semiotics. Duchamp is a master of creating complex symbols in his artworks that express multi-layered concepts that unfold the dualities inherent within them. One frequent theme of the artist is cycles within cycles, as was shown in his paintings on phonograph plates that spun on an early record player, or in his mounting of a wheel on a stool. The cycle within a cycle is also shown in the symbol of the chocolate grinder in The Large Glass and other works on that theme. Duchamp, Marcel Chocolate Grinder No.2. [French: Broyeuse de chocolat no 2.] (1914) Oil and thread on canvas. 65 x 54 cm Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia As Linda Dalrymple Henderson writes in ‘Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works’: “Between 1915 and 1923, Marcel Duchamp created one of the most mystifying art works of the early twentieth century: ‘The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even’ (also known as the ‘Large Glass’). The work is over nine feet tall, and on its glass surface Duchamp used such unorthodox materials as lead wire, lead foil, mirror silver, and dust, in addition to more conventional oil paint and varnish. Duchamp's declared subject is the relation between the sexes, but his protagonists are biomechanical creatures: a ‘Bride’ in the upper panel hovers over a ‘Bachelor Apparatus’ in the panel below, stimulating the ‘Bachelors’ with ‘love gasoline’ for an ‘electrical stripping.’" (Henderson , 2005) In comparing the shape of the cycle, the gear, and the wheel to the angular nature of the cubist vision, one can see in Duchamp how the form is related to the concept. Imagining the Nude Descending a Staircase, one can see the relation of analytical vision to Cubism in Duchamp’s later installation, Mile of String. Mile of String shows the three-dimensional aspects of analytical vision as they are reduced to a two-dimensional plane (the canvas) by the artist. The way Duchamp installs the string makes it clear the way tangents and relations between all dynamic points in an environment combine to fragment the perception as if taken as a snapshot of mind in a fraction of a second. The key aspect of Cubism following this illustration is that it focuses on representing the analytical mind of the artist. This would differentiate Cubism from Surrealism, for example, which focused on representing the subconscious mind in art. In that context, dada is an expression of the irrational, or non-logical in art conceptually as a recognition of and reaction against the analytical as dominating Cubist vision. In doing this, dada also shifts the balance between the artist’s expression of personal subjectivity, and the artist questioning objective reality, as in Fountain, which asks – what is art? The effect of Duchamp’s vision has been to fundamentally radicalize modern art in the way it expresses the duality of subjectivity through the artist and in the way objects are perceived by the viewer simultaneously, crating conceptual art ex nihilo through the eyes of the spectator anywhere and at any time. In placing the mass-produced, ill-regarded and ignored on a pedestal, Duchamp expressed a political view in Fountain. In the context of Western art history governed by the limitations of the frame, Duchamp’s work has opened up important new forms of expression in installation, found-object re-contextualization, and abstract art of the conceptual. “Marcel Duchamp's Fountain came top of a poll of 500 art experts in the run-up to this year's Turner Prize which takes place on Monday. Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) was second, with Andy Warhol's Marilyn Diptych from 1962 coming third. Duchamp shocked the art establishment when he took the urinal, signed it and put it on display in 1917.” "’The choice of Duchamp's Fountain as the most influential work of modern art ahead of works by Picasso and Matisse comes as a bit of a shock,’ said art expert Simon Wilson.” (BBC, 2004) By first deconstructing the canvas in Cubism, expressing the unique, analytical subjectivity of the artists own mind in Nude Descending a Staircase, Duchamp approaches spectatorship through the symbol of the woman on display as he enters a crowded room. In The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even [The Large Glass], Duchamp builds upon this theme but reverses the inquiry, as he had first in Fountain, to make communication through symbols fundamental to conceptual art. This opened the artistic horizon for creativity in modern art, reflecting spectatorship in the mutuality of shared subjectivities that was simultaneously intimate and erotic. Duchamp builds personal cosmologies through these symbols that express his fundamental views of primal dualities, and modes of perception. Thus, in following Marcel Duchamp, dada, cubism, and what would become European Modernism, the student of social semiotics can also see where in theory the practice of psychology, epistemology, sociology, and other disciplines is important when creating an interpretation of a media image. The Frankfurt School teaches the student to be wary of the totalizing aspects of meaning and interpretation as occurring in Freudian theory of psychoanalysis, but this can also be seen in Marxism, Behaviorism, or any system of thought that is driven by an inflexible interpretation model. Therefore, while idealizing the aesthetic of truth in theory as it operates in Duchamp’s artwork, one can see the importance of applying this critical methodology in the construction of meaning in art. This may require also open-mindedness, evaluating many theories of mind, schools of psychology, or philosophy critically, and testing them in application, avoiding a totalitarianism in interpretation that believes there is only one solution to a problem. The imagery of Marcel Duchamp’s paintings The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even [The Large Glass] (1915-23) and Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912) show the same structure and design as interpretation in social semiotics through the use of epistemology and psychology in the construction and deconstruction of meaning. Appendix A: Stieglitz, Alfred Fountain, photograph of sculpture by Marcel Duchamp, 1917. (1917) Photograph, web reprint: About Art History © Succession Marcel Duchamp, Villiers-sous-Grez, France Appendix B: Duchamp, Marcel Mile of String (1942) Installation: Room/furniture/string. First Papers of Surrealism, New York (Photo: Andre Breton) List of figures & illustrations: Duchamp, Marcel. Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. [French: Nu descendant un escalier n° 2] (1912) oil on canvas, 147 cm ? 89.2 cm (57 ft 7/8 in ? 35 ft 1/8 in) Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elljwp/contemporaryfigs2&3_files/image001.jpg Duchamp, Marcel. The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass). [French: La mariee mise a nu par ses celibataires, meme] (1915-23) mixed media on glass, 109 1/4" x 69 1/4" Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia http://www.mnstate.edu/gracyk/images/Duchamp_Bride.jpg Duchamp, Marcel. Chocolate Grinder No.2. [French: Broyeuse de chocolat no 2.] (1914) Oil and thread on canvas. 65 x 54 cm Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia http://www.abcgallery.com/D/duchamp/duchamp17.html Duchamp, Marcel. Mile of String (1942) Installation: Room/furniture/string. First Papers of Surrealism, New York (Photo: Andre Breton) http://www.abdn.ac.uk/french/duchamp.shtml Stieglitz, Alfred. Fountain, photograph of sculpture by Marcel Duchamp, 1917. (1917) photograph, web reprint: About Art History © Succession Marcel Duchamp, Villiers-sous-Grez, France http://arthistory.about.com/od/dada/ig/DadaatMoMANewYork/dada_newyork_07.htm Bibliography BBC (2004), ‘Duchamp's urinal tops art survey’ BBC News, 1 December, 2004. [accessed 17/05/11] Baudrillard, J. (1970). The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures, Sage Publications Ltd, 1998, London. Gerrard, Steven B. (2000). ‘A Pun Among Friends’ Tout-fait, Vol I, Issue 3 Notes, 12/2000. [accessed 17/05/11] Henderson, Linda Dalrymple (2005). ‘Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works’ Princeton University Press, 2005. < https://pup.princeton.edu/titles/6290.html > [accessed 17/05/11] Nesbit, Molly (1986). ‘Ready-Made Originals: The Duchamp Model’ The MIT Press October Vol. 37, Summer 1986, pp. 53-64. [accessed 17/05/11] Stafford, Andrew (2008). ‘Making Sense of Marcel Duchamp’ Understanding Duchamp, 2008. [accessed 12/14/10] Read More