Readymades at CCCC
Crossposted with a few email lists…
A colleague and I are putting together a panel on readymades, and we’re looking for a third presenter. Broadly speaking, we’re looking at the re-emergence of the readymade in a variety of forms: web-based templates and assemblages, even textbooks like the recently discussed TS/IS.
If you’re interested, drop me a line. I’ve pasted our opening statement and abstracts below; obviously we’d be willing to revise to accommodate the focus of a third contributor.
Revisiting the readymade
Area cluster 103 (Theory)
The readymade has re-emerged. Contemporary culture is awash in readymade commodities through which people express their identities and sensibilities: an eclectic mix of clothes, cars, home furnishings, and music drawn from many spheres of culture. Scholars like Jean Baudrillard and Lev Manovich have shown this represents a dramatic shift from traditional modes of practice and consumption that defined earlier eras in which one was either born into a fixed social place or “made” a self in the tradition of Cervantes or Alger. Readymades appear in writing, too, such as the templates of Myspace or of Graff & Birkenstein’s They Say/I Say. Given the realities of a digital, commodity-oriented culture, concepts like originality, plagiarism, or even use are changing more quickly than institutions of education, art, and design. This panel presentation investigates the renewed relevance of readymades, arguing that contemporary reliance on readymades is both historically unprecedented and distinct from their role in twentieth-century culture.
Speaker One: The readymade web (which is beyond the web)
Bradley Dilger, Western Illinois University, Macomb IL
Web tools like del.icio.us, Blogger, Facebook, and Twitter encourage the creation of complex web presences: collection, combination, and juxtaposition. This process is driven individually, as the low commitment required to participate in these sites encourages quick adoption, adaptation, and experimentation; culturally, as the use of these tools widely; and technologically, through the widespread use of aggregation and engagement via text . However, the question of use of these readymades is massively complex. On the one hand, web tools are shaped by usability experts and often oriented toward a practical purpose. On the other hand, tweeting or writing on a Facebook wall often has no apparent practical use, and aggregation often remixes the output of web tools in very unpredictable ways. This presentation engages the questions of use and usability, important for both readymades and the web, and demonstrates the complexity of “use” in the creation of these web presences and the contemporary readymade in general.
Speaker Two: From the Work to the Readymade
David Banash, Western Illinois University
Focusing on the late work of Jean Baudrillard, I will argue that the contemporary practices of consumption have profoundly altered our notion of the “work,” be that a work of art, or the work of writing. Indeed, even seminal texts like Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” or Foucault’s “The Author Function” seem rooted in a vastly different, pre-digital era. These larger trends towards endless consumption in the culture demand that we reckon with the readymade again, and that we adapt critically to this new terrain. I will outline what seems liberatory and striking in this new aesthetic of consumption, but also emphasize its most perilous possibilities. For if readymade frees us to make us of anything in striking new arrangements that permutations that hold the possibility of making a revolutionary style, the very force of the style maybe undermined by its very ease and ubiquity. Moving through a series of texts including contemporary novels by Steve Tomasula and Brett Easton Ellis, forms like MySpace and Google, I will provide examples that illustrate the possibilities and the potential horror of our moment. Writing about this Moment in 1996, Baudrillard observes that with the readymade, “all the banality of the world passes into aesthetics, and inversely, all aesthetics become banal,” both a dizzying and frightening observation.
