From Duchamp to Fluxus—from “Art Coefficient” to Everyday Aesthetics
Lecturer: Dr. Ching-yeh Hsu, Associate Professor, Department of Visual Arts, University of Taipei
Time: August 2, 2014, Saturday, 14: 30-17: 00
Venue : TFAM Library
The lecture is conducted in Chinese.
In his 1957 essay “The Creative Act,” the French artist Marcel Duchamp provided a crucial theoretical foundation for his work: “participative art.” He stressed the importance of the viewer’s participation, because “without the audience’s involvement, a work of art is incomplete.” Duchamp gave his works the special name “readymades” – randomly selected prefabricated articles from daily life, such as the urinal he transformed into art in Fountain (1917). The reaction of surprise or curiosity on the part of the viewer became part of the artwork, including the artist himself as a viewer. That is to say, Duchamp liberated the artist from his godlike position of omniscience and omnipotence. Later the musician John Cage, under the influence of Duchamp’s concepts, experimented with a variety of musical dimensions. For instance, he used toothpicks in a Chinese restaurant, and composed a random composition based on concepts from the Book of Changes. In 1962 several artists influenced by Duchamp and Cage formed an international art movement they called “Fluxus.” These post-Duchamp, post-Cage artists incorporated the audience into their works, employed random coincidence and emphasized that daily life itself was a material, further developing the “aesthetics of the everyday.”
HSU Ching-yeh is an art historian and a critic of visual cultures. Hsu was born in 1962 at Taipei. From 1986 to 1996, she studied art history, especially theories of Dada and the avant-garde, for her M.A. and Ph. D. at the University of Iowa, USA. During 2009-2010 she was invited to be a visiting scholar at Taiwan’s Academia Sinica. Currently Hsu teaches at the Visual Arts Department of University of Taipei. She is writing on contemporary art submitted to UNESCO for publishing.