At the end of my first Elegantly Dressed Wednesday post (see EWD: Georgia O’Keeffe) I considered the possibility of adding  the feature, Half-Naked Thursday, using art and artists as my consortium.  This feature is inspired by yet  not to be confused with Half-Nekkid Thursday, a practice of exposure which has been going on at other sites for years.  The rules there request that  subject be of the participants themselves or someone known to them.  Since my purposes here are to highlight art and artists, I’m going to borrow the theme and do just that.

Since I chose Marcel Duchamp as my subject for yesterday’s Elegantly Dressed Wednesday article I thought I would follow it with this example which includes Duchamp for my first installment. 

The photograph’s subject is a fully clothed Marcel Duchamp and a naked Eve Babitz sitting at a table playing chess in a gallery filled with Duchamp’s artwork.  The room is a gallery at the Pasadena Museum of Art in 1963. 

The concept is attributed to the photographer Julian Wasser, although it seems inspired by the Dada  playfulness and incongruity of Marcel Duchamp’s own work.  As the title states, the subjects were posed.  This means it was not presented as a performance, nor was the photography session open to the public.  So, in line with many of Duchamp’s pieces, what seems to be documentation is actually fiction.  As a photograph, the juxtaposition of fully-clothed and nude figures still shocks even today,  as did Édouard Manet’s composition Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass), painted one hundred years prior in 1863.

A little bit on Eve Babitz:  She is an author, artist, and former model.  She has several book titles to her credit-  Eve’s Hollywood, Slow days, fast company: The world, the flesh, and L.A. : tales and Fiorucci, the book. 

In an interview conducted in the year 2000 with Paul Karlstrom, Babitz seems intent on making the claim that the set-up was her idea.  You can judge that for yourself.  Here is a link to the transcript of that interview:  Oral history interview with Eve Babitz, 2000 Jun 14, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Kathleen Benton

(Click on images to enlarge and read details.  Click again to return to page.)

Julian Wasser (American), Marcel Duchamp and Eve Babitz posing for the photographer Julian Wasser during the Duchamp Retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum, 1963, © 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris

It has occurred to me that by considering artists born prior to the 1920s  (as I’ve done so far) the subjects  for Elegantly Dressed Wednesdays will look elegant simply because people did not appear in public as casually dressed as we do today.  It is a great deal of fun to look back, but  not much of a challenge to always be digging up the elegant past.  I promise in future to find some elegantly dressed contemporary models to feature. 

Duchamp did not spend his entire career making art.  While in his thirties Duchamp decided to become a chess player.  The reason he gave was:

 “Chess creates such beautiful problems”. 

I don’t think there’s a big shift from art to chess.  Compostion is quite similar to chess.  One asks, “ What’s going on here?” and “If I do this what will happen?”  Duchamp is quoted as understanding the similarities in life:  

“If Bobby Fischer came to me for advice, I certainly would not discourage him – as if anyone could – but I would try to make it positively clear that he will never have any money from chess, live a monk-like existence and know more rejection than any artist ever has, struggling to be known and accepted.” 

Duchamp’s innovative art - paintings, collages, ready-mades, sculptures and performances - were all completed early on in his life.   If considered in progression, one can see the shift from visual thought to the intellectual game-playing  that would herald Duchamp’s absorption into chess. 

Despite having given up making artwork, Duchamp continued to associate with artists and collectors often influencing and advising them.  The photo of Duchamp playing chess with a nude Eve Babitz (to be featured tomorrow in my first Half-Naked Thursday post), was the idea of Julian Wasser, the photographer.  It was taken at the Pasadena Art Museum where a retrospective of Duchamps’ work was exhibited in 1963.  It was not a performance piece nor was the event open to public scrutiny.  But the photo was very much à la Duchamp in staging, similar to Rrose Selavy or his “Wanted” poster.    

Duchamp’s final artwork, Etant donnés, was worked on for twenty years in secret, long after even his closest friends had thought he had abandoned the creation of art.  It was completed in 1966, two years before his death.

Kathleen Benton

(Click on images to enlarge and read details.  Click again to return to page.)

For an additional consideration on the life and work of Marcel Duchamp don’t miss this post:  Half-Naked Thursday: Eve Babitz with Marcel Duchamp

Image titles and credits:

Marcel Duchamp at wall-mounted chess board, Photograph  (I have followed all search results and found no credit for this photograph.) 

Marcel Duchamp aboard the Paris, February 26, 1927, Photograph (Likewise I have found no credits for this photo.)

Eliot Elisofon (American, 1911-1973) Duchamp descending a staircase, 1952, Photograph, © Time, Inc.

Marcel Duchamp (American, born France, 1887-1968), Wanted: $ 2000 Reward, 1923, Lithograph, 1961 (replica of 1923 original), Frances Beatty and Allen Adler, © 2009 Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris / Succession Marcel Duchamp

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976) and Marcel Duchamp (American, born France, 1887-1968), Rrose Sélavy (Marcel Duchamp), 1921, Gelatin silver print, hand-retouched by Duchamp in black ink and pencil, 5 7/8 x 3 7/8 in., Philadelphia Museum of Art   

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976), Photograph for Marcel Duchamp’s Monte Carlo Bond (No. 12), 1924, Photograph 

Marcel Duchamp (American, born France, 1887-1968), Monte Carlo Bond (No. 12), Cut-and-paste gelatin silver print on lithograph with letterpress, 12¼ x 7½ in., Museum of Modern Art

Julian Wasser (American), Marcel Duchamp with his Ready-made, 1963, gelatin silver print, 19.8 x 15.9 in.

Marcel Duchamp (American, 1887-1968),  Etant donné (exterior view), 1946-1966, installed at the Philadelphia Musuem of Art.

I won’t go into a lengthy analysis of what Oscar Wilde meant.  Writers much more capable than I have already done so.  But Wilde wasn’t making a dismissive statement about art.  Far from it.  Essentially Wilde was responding to a philosophical debate which preoccupied most the 19th century.  The idea which embodies the discourse had been evolving slowly ever since the time of the Renaissance.  That is the notion of “art for art’s sake”.  The Realists, Romanticists, and Impressionists of Wilde’s day wanted to rid art and artists from the requirement of having any other ambition, purpose, or responsibility to anything other than the artist’s own expression.  The idea of “art for art’s sake” was used to protest the power of established social groups and institutions which would impose their standards or censorship on art and artists.  These groups often decried or banned any art which was perceived to represent ideas they found particularly threatening to their own conventions.

Artists are now rarely influenced by their historical sponsors, the monarchs, popes, institutions, or wealthy patrons who supervised their activity and content.  Now most people think of artists as a fringe group of specialists working to express themselves.  Often artists are imagined like a caricature of Van Gogh, quite removed from conventional life, a bohemian toiling away in seclusion, and very poor.  Today’s fine artists do work for themselves and to their own beat, putting the results out for public scrutiny in various venues to see if their work produces enthusiasm and success.  If they are lucky, they become very rich and their work becomes very sought-after.

This idea of artistic independence has become quite accepted now.  But even today the debate is sparked anew when artists and institutions collide.  Museums supported by tax money mount an exhibition that sometimes citizens find unsuitable.  Films are boycotted when a social group finds content offensive.  Books are still banned in some places.  The idea of “art for art’s sake” still makes for lively discussion, but for the most part, artists now make what they want with nobody stopping them.  But even though artists are now free to make art as they please, they still must try to integrate their activity and products into society in order for it to have meaning to anyone else. 

This description fits the artist creating “fine art”.  On the other hand, there is also the activity of commercial artists.  These artists are usually employed by manufacturers like Hallmark or the Danbury Mint, design and advertising companies, or retail suppliers.  Commercial artists make products for mass consumption.  They focus their creativity on things which will have universal appeal.  In some ways, they still follow the traditional role of the artist.  They answer to a company board of directors.  We assume that commercial artists are different from fine artists and that each has their own groups of consumers.

As a result of the changes in the role of the artist, most people seem to find the notion of hiring an artist for their own purposes, fine art or commercial, to be completely beyond their imagination and means.  But now we have entered the age of the Internet.  Here the ideas of communication, commerce, business services, specialists, and accessibility are now all tossed into the World-wide Web to be reconsidered and made new again.  Through the Internet everyone has the possibility of expressing themselves to the world.  Anyone can be engaged in the sale of that expression as well.  Through the Internet consumers also have the ability to hire the services and/or buy the products of anyone in the entire world.  People are no longer dependent on what is stocked at their nearby store or provided by local business.

So it is with this understanding of possibilities of the Internet that here I submit my artwork for your evaluation.  I have named my site optimistically, You Can Hire an Artist.  In the site I have incorporated all the various aspects of my artistic activity, in both fine and commercial art.  I invite you to find in my artwork a piece that speaks to you, knowing it is made more affordable by being offered directly from me rather than through a gallery.  I hope that you will consider using my artistic skills to realize personal commissions.  You have the opportunity here to celebrate your life and the lives of those that are important to you with the creation of one-of-a-kind objects that express personal milestones, relationships, and interests.  I encourage the business owner to think of your establishment as extraordinary enough to require the use of distinctive, custom-made visual campaigns and accessories.  In doing so you can make your place of business a profitable and inviting experience, to be considered by your customers as in a class by itself.

Together we can take the initiative to produce artwork that will result in your own pride and joy at being part of the creative process.  I think this is a way of making art quite useful, don’t you?

Kathleen Benton

(Click on images to enlarge and read details.  Click again to return to page.)

Oscar Wilde photograph by Napoleon Sarony,  c 1882.  Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

Jimmy Carter and Andy Warhol, 1977.  White House Staff Photographers,  National Archives and Records Administration

Marcel Duchamp. Fountain, 1917.  Philadelphia Museum of Art.  Image Source: www.beatmuseum.org

© 2008 All rights reserved Kathleen Benton | You Can Hire an Artist

All comments are moderated.   Only comments expressed in English will be considered.  Please allow twenty-four hours for your comment to appear.