Celine Browning : Graduate Art Seminar: Artists Mentioned in The Radicant

Marcel Duchamp

Bicycle Wheel, 1951

" "I was quite happy to feel like (an uprooted person)," Marcel Duchamp confessed at the end of his life, "precisely because I was afraid of being influenced by my roots. I wanted to get away from that. When I was in the USA I had no roots at all because I was born in Europe. So it was easy, I was bathing in a calm sea where I could swim free. You can't swim freely when you get tangled up in roots." " (p.50)

--------------------------

Nathan Coley, The Lamp of Sacrifice, 286 Places of Worship, 2004

Mentioned on page 59. Here he harnasses the power of these specific church's histories by recreating them in detail and placing them in the same space.

-------------

Gerard Byrne, Case Study: Loch Ness (Some possibilities and problems), 2001-2008

"...brings fragments of our history back to life by embodying them" (p.59)

-----------------------

Paul Gauguin, Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?, (1897-98).

Bourriaud claims that Gauguin "did not exploit the cultural context in which he settled." (p.64). This is highly debatable, and I personally disagree with this statement intensely. Gaugin was searching for the 'other,' and though he did indeed speak out for native sovereignty, he was still an orientalist. He was searching for a purer, simpler culture where he could get away from French society.

--------------

Eugene Delacroix (p.64)

In Darcy Grimaldo-Girgsby's book, Extremities. Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France, exoticism in colonial France is examined at length. Through her discerning gaze, the work of Delacroix and his contemporaries is passed through the lens of subliminal desire. French society enthusiastically embraced north African culture as 'the other' so that their liminal desires could be infused into a culture they knew little about. The specifics of 'the other' were unimportant; North African cultures were used as a mirror through which the French could begin to understand their own fears and desires. In this way, they could experience that which they simultaneously feared and desired without claiming it as their own. Delacroix's monumental painting, The Death of Sardanapalus, done in 1827 illustrates this point to perfection.