John James Marshall thesis.pdf - OpenAIR @ RGU - Robert Gordon ...

“…the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator
brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and
interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution to the
creative act”. (Duchamp, 1961)
And he continued to reclaim vast swathes of objects from ‘The History of Art’
into everyday life as readymades:
“Since the tubes of paint used by an artist are manufactured and ready
made products we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are
‘readymades aided’ and also works of assemblage”. (Duchamp, 1961)
This is a characteristic which stands in stark contrast to the definition stemming
from Kant’s ‘purposeless purpose’ as a feature of our engagement with art. Kant
argued that art, unlike design, could not be evaluated and understood based on
its objective purpose. Kant’s intention was to preserve art from the ‘merely
useful’. Wright (2000) claims Duchamp saw this as a way of ‘de-signing’ art, of
removing the artist’s authorial signature by using an artwork to produce a usevalue.
Comparing a readymade to ‘mere real things’ in this way is a method of
exposing art’s ontological privilege. In these instances it is the audience’s
perception of the object and its cultural context that is transformed rather than
the object.
The term ‘multiple’ used to indicate an artwork that is produced as a number of
copies (lacking of uniqueness but not as a series of editioned, unique casts or
prints) was first used in the 1960s. Stephen Bury in discussing artist’s multiples
(Bury, 2001) claims that after industrialisation artists could take on the role of
fabricator and employ the materials and methods of industrial production, or
become the designer of a work of art that would be manufactured by someone
else in the same manner that everyday goods are produced. Bury claims that
artist’s multiples question what has traditionally been acceptable as art. Bury
contends the ‘readymade’ is usually thought of as the opposite of an artist’s
multiple. Readymades import the everyday into art whereas the multiple
exports the art object into everyday life.
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