Futurists of the Past

Coming Around and Going Around

Visiting with a friend brought to mind a painting I did ten or more years ago.

Marcel Duchamp's painting "Nude Descending a Staircase" has long been an icon defining "modern art". Just as many who don't know much about art know about Vincent Vangogh's ill-fated ear, the nude descending that staircase comes to mind for many who couldn't name another "Modern" painting or sculpture.

I've long thought it funny that art still called modern was being done well over 100 years ago.

We live in a disposable age of everything being so 15 minutes ago, so last wednesday, and yet, work by Monet and his buds were being painted and rejected in the 1880s.

Just to give a little background to that stair-descending nude, Duchamp painted it in 1912 and entered it in that year's established outsider artists' big show. By that time being an outsider was gaining some cachet with those salon-going Parisians who loved being shocked.

The Impressionists had done it in the previous generation and the Cubists were taking up le shock treatment for les Parisiennes.

Duchamp had lettered the title of the painting at the bottom left of the canvas and was asked to change the title or take the painting home. Who knows why? Paris was used to nudes, maybe they weren't used to titles.

It's also said that the Cubists had some objection or other to the painting. Duchamp objected to the request and took his painting home. He then entered the same painting in the big "Armory Show" of 1913, which introduced all this modern stuff to America. The "Nude" raised a bunch of sand there, too.

Duchamp eventually tired of people being shocked by pigment on canvas and retired to playing chess for the rest of his life.

During the period that I painted my descending art (that painting at the top, "Dude Descending a Staircase"), I was showing my work in a sweetly funky gallery called Pelican Place. A bare brick wall beyond the parking lot was regularly used by FSU art students to do graffiti wall art. I liked their work and thought about the fuss graffiti was making in cities around the world.

Graffiti art also makes it more interesting to be stopped at a railroad crossing by a passing train. Each freight car is part of a moving exhibit.

I also had scuffed up elbows and knees during a brief fling with boarding, and related to the spirit of street art.

And beyond all that, I can't resist a good pun. So I brought together the elan of 100-year-old outsider art with the decade-old outside-wall art in that modest little painting I did.

And it sold.

My apologies to Marcel Duchamp. It wasn't outside enough to be rejected, as his was.

But I think Marcel would have liked the joke.