Just sign your toilet and call it *art*
Artists are grifters that can see beauty hiding everywhere.
The first piece I had the gall to put in front of people and call art was an iPhone photo of my IKEA mirror.
It wasn’t deep. I mostly just liked that the reflection had made a new shape. We learn about triangles and rhombuses, but not this one. It was a new shape and it had been hiding in my mirror.
Over the next few years, I began seeing more new shapes. I took iPhone photos of them too. I did some digital adjustments and cropping, and I called it all art. I even sold prints of them as a series called Totems.
There are at least two interpretations here: beauty is truly hiding all over the place, or…I’m a grifter.
The first interpretation does have some prestige behind it. Marcel Duchamp is one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. And his most famous piece of work is a urinal that he signed and called art.
In the process of “making” Fountain—the name he gave to the urinal he signed—he was trying to find objects that wouldn’t engage him either by their beauty or by their ugliness. He was looking for objects he was indifferent to. But this was difficult because, “anything becomes beautiful if you look at it long enough.”
Duchamp released a series of these objects in the first half of the 20th century. He called them Readymades. He was after a form of expression that was experienced deeper in the audience’s mind, rather than merely with its eyeballs. And his influence lasted for decades. Artists expressing themselves in the context of the conceptual, pop, and found art movements, all owe him at least a head nod.
Duchamp can be said to have brought into stark relief the very nature of artistic expression itself.
But another interpretation…is Duchamp was a grifter.
The Readymades can also easily been seen more as a tacky publicity stunt than genuine expressive output. A minimal effort art product sold by controversy.
My initial reaction to them was roughly in this camp. A teenage Dave could probably be overheard saying, “The only music genre I explicitly don’t like is Country, and the only other art I don’t like is when you sign a toilet and call it art.”
One could say the signed toilet at best mocked the art world rather than contributed to it.
So what’s the correct interpretation?
Here it is: artists are grifters…that can see beauty hiding everywhere.
An art object that successfully packages up a distinct emotion can be produced more or less efficiently. Mocking can be genuine expressive output. One man’s toilet—or segmented Ikea mirror—is truly another man’s medium of expression.
It was only when a combination of market and social forces steered me towards looking for more Totems to photograph and sell, did I start seeing beauty hiding everywhere. It was only when I looked back on the work to find conceptual stories to tell about it, did I see where it might fit into a higherbrow art historical conversation about the nature and utility of figure, abstraction, and representation.1
While grifter is a bit facetious, the takeaway of all this is, I think, to see market-oriented thinking and genuine expression as not (always) at odds. Beauty is truly hiding everywhere if you have the motivation to look for it. So, if you’re so inclined, let your soul relax to see the beauty hiding in your toilet. Or at least your mirror.
A figure in an image has both an individual identity and the categories to which it belongs. My figure in an image would have the individual identity of Dave, and (perhaps) the categories of artist and grifter.
A Totem, on the other hand, is a bounded object suggesting an individual identity. This is distinct from the more paradigmatic abstract color fields that extended to the edge of the canvas—think Pollock or Rothko. Yet, Totems are still entirely abstract and resistant to representational categories (other than "Totem").
Groups of Totems have utility in the interior design of memory palaces. As objects that have persistent distinctive identities viewers can easily imbue them with memories and cocktails of emotions. As objects without inherent categories, there are no conflicts between their inherent meaning and the viewer's imbued meaning.
I think you need to do a bit more research and contextualize this as quite a bit more than a grift... if not only to understand the context of Duchamp and his relation to Picasso, cubism, the armory show etc... but also to learn about an endlessly fascinating artist!