Modernism, a literary as well as an art movement that swept the 19th, marks a break with traditional literature and arts. Although rejected by the public at first, cubist-inspired painters and poets, are until today famous for going to great extents for revolutionizing the way people look art. Modernist poetry’s precursor who challenged the established methods of poetic composition, Gertrude Stein, was criticized from taking meaning from her poems that are supposed to be meaningful, while Duchamp’s art seemed to strip beauty from art.
Duchamp was the first artist to theorize the concept of ready made art. He used found works objects to create thoughts, such as installation art. His first ready made object, a mass produced object, became accidentally famous. He attached a bicycle wheel a the bike seat and would invite people to turn it and later realized that it could be presented as an art object. The hedgehog, or the bottle rack, illustrated almost a torture object with its pointies. Duchamp did not want to invent a new revolutionary language but rather an attitude of mind. His motive is to challenge people not only to think of ready made objects as art and, by extension, give a new thought to everyday objects. When dadaist artists started showing appreciation for his work and invited him to present an upside down urinal at a art gallery, signed with the nickname R mutt and presented the ready made object as an anonymous artist. At first, the artwork was perceived as an attack and a “prank” to the world of dadaism art, however when they discovered R mutt’s real identity, they realized that the prank had been reversed. Marcel duchamp had attempted to make the world realize that art doesn’t have to be limited elaborate crafts by artists who have mastered a skill for example, but art can be “a great idea”. In other words, an innovative concept is required to consider one as an artist. He considered the question “how far have you considered art, if you haven’t considered the subject of art”? Duchamp challenged the public to look at an object that is considered to be visually uninteresting and find the beauty in it. The readymade also defied the notion that art must be beautiful. Duchamp claimed to have chosen everyday objects “based on a reaction of visual indifference, with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste….”2In doing so, Duchamp paved the way for Conceptual art—work that was “in the service of the mind,”3 as opposed to a purely “retinal” art, intended only to please the eye. Art was made to only please the eye and if not, people reject it.
Stein, in contrast, thought of herself as “avant garde”, was not so avant garde after all. Gertrude believed that “Cézanne” was so innovative and radical, although he depicted a simple landscape. Stein was not able to view the beauty, or describing in duchamp’s work and considered it to be flat. However she viewed the novelty of her prose partly to explain how novelty and surprise surface from generation to generation, and theorized why the new in art and writing may first be thought as ugly, then later refined as something beautiful.
Both Stein and Duchamp were known for their talent and as one may think, they didn’t call themselves artists by creating a so called art that lack of art in literary texts or crafts skills but rather, they both chose to put aside their art’s skill making for the public to redefine the criterias that is the establishment of art.
we cannot imagine Gertrude Stein without Picasso. Like him, she wanted to invent Cubism — not in oils but in words, where refraction produces not abstraction but subtraction. She worked to subtract plain meaning from English prose. Whether she was a charlatan or a philosopher, it is even now hard to say. Certainly there appears to be more than a little of the subconscious in many of her sentences, but mainly they are mindful, calculated, striven after, arranged. ”Think well of the difference between thinking with what they are thinking?” — is this nonsense, or is it an idea too gossamer to capture? She was deliberately, extravagantly, ferociously extreme, and as concentrated and imperial as Picasso himself, who painted Stein just the way her companion (and likely lover) Alice B. Toklas described her: a woman with the head of a Roman emperor. Picasso was trying to capture perspective whereas duchamp captured motion in a medium that doesn’t move. “For Stein,” Peter Nicholls writes in his important book, “Modernisms: A Literary Guide,” “language is to be grasped not as a means of reference to a world of objects which can be dominated, but as a medium of consciousness.” Stein’s works of consciousness depend on a reader’s consciousness, and unconscious, to engage them. Otherwise, her writing is flat, the rhythms and play of her words lost along with her biting wit and clarity.
Paragraph 3: both criticized for their innovation
Stein’s work has not lent itself to the thematic textual explications that have dominated critical approaches in the twentieth century. Commentary abounds with marginalizing terms such as “hermetic,” “difficult,” “experimental,” and “inaccessible.” Rather than interpret her poetry, critics often simply labeled Stein as a renegade contributing to the innovations of modern poetry through her eccentric style. Reactions to Stein’s poetry were frequently characterized by derision and suggestions that the poems were mere nonsense. After Stein’s prose received critical acclaim and popular acceptance through her publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), attempts were made by critics to explain Tender Buttons, the only book of Stein’s poetry accessible to the public at that time. B.F. Skinner created controversy by asserting that Tender Buttons is an experiment in “automatic writing,” a topic Stein studied during medical school. Stein responded: “Artists do not experiment.”
Paragraph 4: art is an idea rather than object. Radical and never seen concept
Paragraph 5: redefine what the establishment of art considers to be beautiful
Duchamp redefined the establishment of art by challenging it’s definition. His ready made arts
Close reading of tender buttons
Tender Buttons (1914) was the only volume to appear during her life. This book, a presentation of prose poems arranged in three sections, Objects, Food, and Rooms, has been decoded as a set of romantic praises to Toklas. The poems make playful use of words and purposefully reject the restrictions of form that Stein associated with the poetry of a “patriarchal” tradition.
A carafe: message: an experience language reaction to a sight of a carafe. There are certain clues here that says its a metapoem. It teaches us about other poems. An arrangement in a system to pointing. A system of words. Gertrude stein standing between a signifier and signified. Poem is an arrangement of words. How else might it reflect that meaning. All this and not ordinary. It may be language but not ordinary language. not ordered and not resembling: their not unordered at all and are kind of random. The order is more suddle. The words are not resembling the things that she’s trying to describe. The different is spreading. Like the end of Picasso poem about history teaches. The different between the words and the thing its describing is spreading. Picassos different is become evolutional. Clear glass is seeing through language but its a blind glass which isn’t meant to be seen through. Know what a thing is what its not. A comment about womens lives. In general, anything that would be considered gold, would be as if women get this label of the scarlet letter. Scarlet letter: improper sexuality. She’s not necessarily trying to be profound. If we could quit looking for meaning and experience them and see them as material objects, then the poems change. she was trying to realign the way her audience thinks of language. One way of doing something really new, is figure out what everyone else think it isn’t and do it. she’s breaking all the rules in order to show new possibilities. The chicken one is the least meaningful. These poems are inconsistent. Some are meant to be decoded, and others are meant to drift through your mind one time. Every book of poetry contains better and worse poems. She may have been aware of that. Maybe some of them were more a filler than others. They are inconsistent. What makes this poetry and not prose? Because she said it was. There are a prose poem. Ramboud. They have been around for at least 60 years. Other critics would call it prose poems. They are compact and use of sound to create meaning and showing rather than telling. Prose poems are a thing and still retain qualities of imagery. Do each objects have significance to her life? There are descriptions that we have of Stein speaking about poems. The poems were written slowly and fierce and meditative concentration around her household in rue de fleurus. She was very popular. She said about her own poems: poems portray a material world without using the objects. She was trying to live in looking and looking wasn’t to mix itself up with memorying. If I look at the clock I see the time, and she wants to see the clock. Not see through them to their function. You are not paying attention to the objects you are using. She respects valor and bravery. Intertext. She demands we meet her halfway and help her address her poems. It forces you to focus on what she’s reading, and also kept at a pace, and never allows you to relax. This book is considered a classic and its been very influential. Poets have been taken by this and by the language school. They write poems like this and ask what poetry isn’t and figure out what its not. For how its pointed towards new ways of writing. some people regard it as a hoax. One wrote back that she thought she needed mental help because she was mentally challenged. Poets tend to love this book. Its taught in a lot of classes today. Poems that have no beginning and ending. Tender and buttons. Their familiar meaning are subtracted from each other when their synthesized together. title is a lesson on how we should respond to the whole book. Self contradiction inherent in its the way that the word creates an experience. Suggests a series of poems foreign and familiar. She describes it as verbal portraits used as associations and sounds rather than meanings. The ones that have been regarded as the most important: a carafe is a blind glass, milk, end of summer, orange in, salad dressing, and an artichoke. Also when this came out it was the first in a three part book. The final one was room and was meant to be a portrayal of her entire room.
Sources
https://philosophynow.org/issues/108/Marcel_Duchamp_1887-1968
https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/themes/dada/marcel-duchamp-and-the-readymade/
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/books/review/reconsidering-the-genius-of-gertrude-stein.html
https://www.nytimes.com/1996/11/24/magazine/a-prophet-of-modernism-gertrude-stein.html
https://www.enotes.com/topics/gertrude-stein/critical-essays/stein-gertrude-79123