Behold two art revolutions on a staircase:
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| Marcel Duchamp (1912) Walt Disney Studios (1936) |
Marcel Duchamp painted his revolutionary Nude Descending a Staircase to convey motion in a still picture. 24 years later, Disney transformed still pictures of Snow White ascending a staircase into images that moved.
Duchamp explained the era: "The whole idea of movement, of speed, was in the air" and the old static pictures seemed inadequate.
In previous years, a picture stood still while the viewer's mind moved. For example, James Avati's figures on the stairs (below) didn't move, yet viewers mentally moved up the stairs and envisioned what was about to take place in the room above the bar:
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| James Avati (1959) |
Duchamp, like Muybridge before him and the Futurists after him, was an early, stuttering response to the way the world was changing. Disney was equally revolutionary but more commercially successful.
Neither Duchamp nor Disney could fully appreciate how their world was unraveling. The old Newtonian universe was coming apart like wet tissue paper in the wake of relativity and quantum physics; longstanding political empires were imploding and geopolitical alliances were fraying; the first World War developed horrific new weapons which were only a stepping stone to worse weapons. The sun was setting on the Age of Reason, and the arts stepped up to try to make sense of the new order.
In times of disintegration, artists have to decide which paths offer new promise and which paths have become obsolete. An era of experimentation and confusion was perfectly suited for Dada artist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. The Baroness performed for audiences by rubbing a photograph of Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase over her naked body while reciting a love poem to Duchamp: “Marcel, Marcel, I love you like hell, Marcel.”
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The baroness was born Elsa Plotz in Germany in 1874. Before coming to America she studied art in Dachau, future home of the infamous Nazi death camp. She became an artist, poet, actress and model. Elsa and her husband had many colorful adventures before they faked her husband's suicide to escape creditors and fled to the United States in 1909.
Throwing off the chains of the old world, Elsa aggressively pushed sexual and artistic boundaries, rejecting traditional male and female gender norms. Several affairs and marriages later, after an unsuccessful effort at becoming a farmer in Kentucky, she married Baron von Freytag-Loringhoven in New York where she worked making sculptures out of discarded objects and writing poetry.
She became the star of a Dada film, "Elsa, Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven Shaving Her Pubic Hair." She invented new words such as "phalluspistol" to replace the old world vocabulary. Critics agree that one of her greatest contributions to the arts was her use of the em dash (a punctuation mark longer than either the "en dash" or the minus sign) in her poetry.
The example of the Baroness raises an important question for artists working in times, like now, of great social change: How do we remain meaningful by embracing the new, while at the same time not looking like a nitwit?
The example of the Baroness raises an important question for artists working in times, like now, of great social change: How do we remain meaningful by embracing the new, while at the same time not looking like a nitwit?
Today we find ourselves in another period of disintegration, this time driven by world-ending AI cognitive power. Centuries ago we sharpened our focus on objective reality by the invention of the magnetic compass and the mechanical clock, which gave us a more concrete sense of space and time. Photographs and videos became arbiters of objective, verifiable reality. They encouraged the rise of science and rationality. But now our grip is loosening once again as "objective truth" has become the plaything of algorithms, deepfakes and bots.
Some of art's greatest moments, the ones that delivered the reward of enhanced perceptions, arose when society seemed to be spinning out of control. Art helped to work out an era's conflicts and grapple for values. But can it still serve that role? For millennia art has been a source of excitement but today it can barely compete with algorithms that have been fine tuned to keep viewers in a constant state of excitement and agitation.
Wherever the eye looks in the desert of fine art, one sees little more than puerile responses to this emerging world-- certainly nothing to rival the great artistic responses of the past. Can illustration, because of its more direct nexus to the engines of change and its economic restraints on silliness, possibly do any better?