The Bride and the Bachelors: The Heretical Courtship in Modern Art

Tomkins, Calvin. The Bride and the Bachelors: The Heretical Courtship in Modern Art. New York: Viking, 1965.

CT asserts that what the four artists profiled (Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Jean Tinguely, Walter Rauschenberg) have in common is their focus on accepting the external world of the commonplace as it is rather than, as tradition would have it, organizing and interpreting the external world by presenting its objects as images or symbols in a work of art. The effect of removing the artist's control over media and reducing the imposition of self-expression on it is to obliterate the boundary between art and life. All four artists are fond of "the mundane objects of modern industrial society . . . and in Cage's case the 'found sounds' of an urban, electronic environment . . . " (3). The chapter on Tinguely discusses the ways in which the machines he builds from junk most often fail to work as planned, much to Tinguely's delight in their "freedom."

RDE, Title, 27Aug19