What is Collage? (3)

Claude Lévi­Strauss suggested the great mythological axis of culture falls between the poles of the raw and the cooked. Raw materials are those closer to a natural state, while the cooked have been fully worked over and integrated into culture. These are not absolute states but a continuum, with a cook mediating the degree to which something is left raw or fully cooked, even burnt. Surely the blank canvas is closer to the raw then the completed painting, just as the blank page is raw in comparison to the printed and bound book.

In both cases, like the cook, artists must transform these materials, bringing them further and more completely into fully realized relationships of culture. Unlike the raw materials of any art, the readymade comes fully cooked. Lévi­Strauss actually suggested that the symbolic cooking of culture be considered a mediatization (338). Thus cooking not only works over raw materials, but may also serve as a way to think about situating subjects in relation to culture.

While an unmarried sister is put on the stove to “cook” her into the social, “the symbolical demediatization of the bride, which is an anticipation of the wedding night, consists of stealing her garter which is connected with the ‘middle’ world” (338). In folk customs and mythology, the raw and the cooked exist in a balance, and one can remain either too raw or become overcooked.

Surely consumer culture exists almost entirely on the side of the cooked, and the mediation of cooking has been reified, taken out of everyday life, and moved behind the factory walls. Less and less do consumers find themselves in the magically transformative position of the laborer who mediates between the raw and the cooked in any way.

In many families, baking cookies begins as a ritual in childhood, an act in which great pleasure is found in taking the refined but nonetheless raw materials such as sugar, salt, and flour to create something sweet. Each attempt is a test of skills and materials, sometimes with better results than others. Even two people working independently but with the same materials and recipe can ultimately create something that tastes unique to the other.

In any case, the pleasure stems not just from the eating, but as much or more in the making: the process of both baking the cookies and the social interaction. However, these days, cookies need not be made at home; they can be bought directly off the shelves.

“Ready­to­eat” is the term of art in the food business, and millions of packages of ready­to­eat cookies are sold. Fair enough. Store­bought cookies are convenient and often tasty as well. But something is missing there, and that is the labor of making, the test of skills, and the position of mediation between nature and culture, the making not only of things but also of relationships.

Companies now also market mass­produced dough that one can buy, put on a cookie sheet, and bake. The demand for this particular kind of product suggests the profound transformation in our culture, the rhythms of everyday life, and the very notion of labor. Whether it be bought fully complete in a bag (truly “ready­made” food) or refined to such a point that there is no demand for any meaningful exercise of labor (a “ready­made” food we must minimally assist), consumer culture strives to eliminate labor from everyday life, but in doing so there is sensibly a loss of texture, the pleasures of even certain mundane labors, and thus meaning.

It is just this loss of meaning that the manufacturers of pre­made cookie dough are trying to sell by providing a simulacrum of both physical and symbolic labor without the pain of dirty dishes and the risk of burnt, inedible cookies when our materials or attention fail us.

The very word “readymade” used in association with fine art is the invention of artist Marcel Duchamp. Readymades remain a defining gesture and genre of twentieth­century art. Duchamp had both the audacity and the genius to simply pick rather banal objects–a bicycle wheel, a urinal, a snow shovel, a typewriter’s dust cover–and call the art “ready­made.” Almost every theorist of art and a remarkable number of philosophers and critics have talked about them since.

Duchamp’s work is a devastating test to the limits of the identity of art and artists. Duchamp argued that art is simply a matter of institutions; his readymades, by the very fact they were chosen to hang on a gallery wall, were defined as pieces of art. Many may find Duchamp’s choices remarkable and formally beautiful, proof that he had a superior visual sense that allowed him to find striking forms that unintentionally inhabit the world.

Thus, it seems there is something to the privileged magic circle of art after all, even if it is ready­made. This interpretation and the fundamental questions of, “Is it art?” and “What is art?” are not what I will spend much time on here. Indeed, we are now at a moment when the question of the readymade is not a test of art but a test of life.

The readymade is not only hanging on the gallery wall or encased in the museum’s vitrines. In today’s world, readymades surround us to the extent that the problem of the readymade is how to live in a world that we have not made, and more and more often are encouraged not even to complete but only to consume. The layman’s complaint against much of modern art is its ready­made status: the fact that it seemingly requires no technical skill.

Yet that art itself is a mirror of a readymade life that has been similarly deskilled to the point that we must now find ways to live and make a meaningful world when the technical skills to make that world are no longer required or even possessed by most of the people who live in it. To think about the readymade is to think about the life of consumer culture.

If once we were at least a little more like artists who took materials to make meaning through labor, those privileged to live in consumer cultures are much more like Duchamp, simply gesturing with the magical transfiguration at the point­of­purchase. Hegel’s master­slave dialectic, in which the master finds the world meaningless because he cannot know himself through his own labor, could now be rewritten as the producer­consumer dialectic with much the same irony.

The genius of Duchamp is to overturn this in a radical gesture that makes the banal purchase again meaningful, bringing to consciousness the need to invent the world around us rather than merely consuming it. The question I want to ask is not why the readymade is or is not art.

Instead, the real question is one of how the meaning of life changes when consumption has stripped away the need for many labors and simultaneously overwhelmed us with a profusion of things. This, at least directly for many in the Global North, is an unprecedented problem that is only now becoming clear. Indeed, utopian fantasies of total plentitude, automation, and the like were once mostly the stuff of science fiction, and life still demanded enormous labor, but the utopia has come to pass for those with enough security and wealth.

The world of consumer culture is filled with an infinite flow of goods, services, images, narratives, forms, objects, and information of every kind. Indeed, even landscapes and the movement of time itself are packaged, branded, and handed over ready­made

I hope to understand at least some of the consequences of these developments, and to come to some conclusions about the effects of this, and possible responses to it. To get at this problem, I have turned to Duchamp and other artists who work with readymades. However, I do not believe this question of meaning is limited to, or even more intense in, the world of art.