>What did Buren say ? In relation to Duchamp.
>
from an interview:
B.M. According to you Duchamp's path leads to a cul-de-sac. In a way he
wanted to be the last artist. Is this what you criticize?
D.B. In its time this position was interesting. But subsequently, Duchamp's
radical criticism of art has becomes the opposite of what Duchamp himself
criticized. Duchamp was able to decontextualize an ordinary object -- thanks
to the gallery, where the context contradicts the object -- but the context
itself was not thought about in any critical way. It didn't take long for
the effect; the banal object is fetishized. The context and place exerted
their influence. The object placed there to destabilize painting became like
a painting, a work of art with the rest. And, in this case, obsolete.
Duchamp thereby introduced a form of production which is no more, and no
less, than the mirror image of what he criticized. For the last twenty years
I have been against Duchamp in my work, I never took an 'anti-art' position,
even if some people would have loved to find this so. One of the fundamental
and serious questions I ask myself is: "What is art?" Of, if you will, what
are the processes which operate so that a work becomes -- or does not
become -- a work of art? And if one finds these rules, or, if not, how do
they fluctuate? And under what pressures? Duchamp gave a deliberately
comfortable answer to these questions. For myself, they are still unresolved
even if a solution appears from time to time in my work.
