Day 5: RESPONSE TO INTO IN READER

In the introduction to The Bride and the Bachelors, Calvin Tomkins gives an overview of the art movement highlighted in the works of the five, varying, focus artists; Duchamp, Cage, Tinguely, Rauschenberg, and Cunningham. The movement, or, rather, the “revolt” as Tomkins calls it, centers itself around a separation from the “established traditions” of art, and the increased focus on breaking apart the barriers between art and life. This shift involved the recognition of art as “not an end in itself, but simply a ‘means to function thoroughly and passionately in a world that has a lot more to it than paint” (p. 2). With this new outlook on art, and its goals of perforating habitual barriers, comes an inherent inclusion of humor, with its roots in the artists recognition that breaking all of the barriers is an absurd task, humor acting as the means of addressing this impossibility. Tomkins goes into brief explanations of how each of these artists demonstrated their interpretation of the movement, emphasizing that the movement was not necessarily an “anti-art movement”, but an “anti-seriousness” one (p.4). This notion of art as an incorporated part of life, with a lack of seriousness, really hits home with me. My whole family has been involved in the arts, from my grandfather Danny, a gallery owner in New York, to my brother Sam, a working artists in New York, to my parents, both independent film makers, I have always been exposed to varying forms of art, and often times, would become frustrated with myself for not understanding the art’s meaning, feeling belittled intellectually and artistically. The question always remained in my mind, “why should I have to try to understand the piece and pick it apart?”, when sometimes I simply wanted to just enjoy the work for what it was. That seems to be a portion of what the movement described in the introduction was, a movement to not taking art, as a separate entity from daily life, so seriously, with momentous, and “correct” interpretations, but rather something to incorporate into daily life, as a constant way of thinking creatively, and openly.