Tag: Marcel Duchamp

Artist's Notebook

Inside Peter Dudek’s studio

We’re up in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. The floor of Dudek’s studio is covered wall-to-wall with objects. One can ascertain individual sculptures, or perhaps parts of sculptures that might become sculptures one day. I ask if this is how it always is.

Museum Exhibitions

Call it Orphism

Contributed by Adam Simon / At a Four Walls event in Brooklyn in the early 1990s, Erik Oppenheim, at that time a young artist, stood up and said, “I’m starting an art movement. Anyone who wants to join, meet me in the back after the show.” It was a hilarious and audacious gesture, in part because no one joins an art movement on a whim, like a list-serve or an exercise class, but also because there hadn’t been any artist-initiated movements for a very long time. They proliferated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century with the advent of Impressionism, Surrealism, Futurism, and Dada, and enjoyed something of a resurgence in the 1960s with Fluxus in the United States, Supports/Surfaces and Zero in Europe, and the Gutai Group in Japan. Most of what we consider movements were proclaimed by an outside observer, usually a critic or curator, looking to group artists who had similar concerns and made work that fit the designation. For the artists themselves to rally around a specific cause, even an aesthetic one, was not required. 

Solo Shows

Dan Dowd and the folds of memory

Contributed by Mark Wethli / As I viewed Dan Dowd’s intimate and poetic work, now at Magenta Plains, I considered our inclination to cathect feelings and memories onto objects. Clothing in particular echoes the shapes of our bodies; touches them; connotes gender, time, and economic status; and absorbs everything from our scent to our DNA. Dowd creates small, iconic assemblages out of found materials, including fragments of inner tubes, clothing, rags, and home décor.