M.Z. Some authors like Arthur Danto have made it clear that the artists of the 60s and 70s exposed the limits of the art system, giving way to a new art conception, immersed in the philosophical field. From my consideration, that approach was revealed with “Fountain,” a century ago.
“Fountain” addressed different dimensions that had not been fully addressed in the field of art until its very existence and materiality. These dimensions have to do with the abandonment of the traditional production system and the introduction of capitalist production systems in the territory of art, and the philosophical implications that this brought. Conceptual approaches in terms of these philosophical implications differ, from the evidently aesthetical, to the ethical, or political ones. For you, what are the philosophical considerations that arose and how do they act in the context of artistic production these days?

D.C. I think too many grand claims are made both for Conceptual Art and for Marcel Duchamp, probably because the kinds of art writers that like to make grand claims are really attracted to Duchamp and Conceptualism (and much less attracted to the pictorial arts, for example). These writers like to think in terms of ‘the ends of art’, ‘the limits of art’, ‘new art conceptions’ and so one. It is a teleological view of art and art history that presupposes that all art ever does is respond to the art that came before. That’s only half the story, and maybe not even half, because it doesn’t take into account how art responds to so many other things, notably the world around the maker. I think it’s much richer to think of Duchamp responding to his experience of what was going on around him, rather than thinking of him merely as a dry strategist obsessed with the philosophical and ontological status of art. I feel the same about Conceptual Art. For many reasons – social, political, historical – many people came into the orbit of art in the 1960s that didn’t have traditional craft skills or traditional aesthetic sensibilities. At that time, Europe and North America were exporting their manufacturing to factories oversees, and they shifted to service industries and the image economy. It’s no surprise that this shift is reflected somehow in the art making at that time – the interest in ‘de-skilling’, the reduction of art to language and information, the subversive image/text relations, and the contestation of white male dominance. Thinking about Duchamp or Conceptualism only in terms of art history and the knowing art-historical strategies of the artists is very misleading.

M.Z. So when you think in Duchamp you think into Modern Art or you rather to think it as conceptual art? I could say he almost thought of the art he was interested in as Conceptualism.
He once said “Cubism gave me many ideas to break down shapes. But I thought of art in a broader way.
This is the direction that art should go: to an intellectual expression, rather than an animal expression. I’m sick of the expression “bête comme un peintre” – stupid as a painter”

D.C. I think of the contradictions at the heart of Duchamp. Yes, there is his drive towards ‘intellectual expression’, which was a precedent for certain aspects of Conceptualism’s will to reduce art to language. But there is also Duchamp the maker, Duchamp the craftsman, who worked for so many years on The Large Glass, for so many years on the Boîte-en-valise, for so many years on Étant donnés. Detailed, painstaking work. So in some senses Duchamp reduces art, and in other ways he expands its craft complex enormously. I feel it is important come to terms with both aspects. That’s why he’s such a perplexing figure. If he was one or the other, I suspect he would be almost forgotten by now. Even when I look at Fountain, the urinal, I am split between thinking of Duchamp as an artist refusing to make, instead declaring an industrial object to be art, and thinking of Duchamp staring at that object in wonder at how it was made, contemplating how he might incorporate modern manufacturing techniques into his own art, which is what he went on to do, in so many different ways.

M.Z. Modernity was a very complex period sifted by a diversity of elements, the ones associated to the industrial processes, that we’ve mentioned, but also the dispelling of earlier ideologies as romanticism or the ones associated with religion; and also, the introduction of several new theories in the middle of a world that was evolving permanently in practically every field. What’s your approach to Modernity and Modernism in reference to the understanding of how art evolved into other categories as in conceptual art, as a language?

D.C. That would take me a whole book to answer! To keep things focused I’d say that there’s an important strand of modernism that, in accepting the ends of religion and romanticism, turns towards ‘difficulty’. Duchamp in art. Joyce, Eliot and Beckett in literature. Stravinsky, Cage and others in music. They all reflect back the difficulties of the modern age that cannot be consoled by religion or romanticism. This ‘difficult modernism’ is uncompromising, stubborn, sometimes angry, sometimes sulky, sometimes melancholy.

M.Z. Please write that book!. Do you think those same feelings were present with the emergence of photography? Or that photography obey to a completely different story of a new begining in terms of the representation?

D.C. I think there’s a deep connection between Duchamp’s Readymades and the emergence of photography as a modernist medium in the arts. It is complicated so I will try to explain simply by reference to something that happened exactly a century ago, 1917. That was the year Duchamp submitted his urinal as an artwork, while Paul Strand’s documentary-style street photographs were published in Alfred Steiglitz’s photographic art magazine Camera Work. The urinal (which was soon lost but not before being photographed for posterity, by Stieglitz coincidentally) and documentary-style photography challenged traditional notions of art because they both left so much to choice, chance, generic production and the anonymity of everyday life. Duchamp’s Readymade really could be plumbed in, and pissed in, and a viewer would sense that immediately, with the force of a snapshot, as Duchamp put it. Strand’s photos really could be taken off those high art pages, captioned in a newspaper and made to function as a report. In both cases a strong contextual claim had to be made for their status as art. The works themselves couldn’t make that claim because they didn’t have the ‘look of art’, and that was part of their point.

M.Z. With a glance that covers a hundred years of artistic production, from Fountain to our days, what do you consider to be the current state of art?

D.C. The ‘contemporary’ is not what it was. We have a much more complex awareness of art’s past and as a result what strikes us as contemporary is not necessarily the art that is being made now. The ‘Baudelairean’ injunction that artists must be of their time can no longer be met in any straightforward way.

M.Z. Thank you very much, It has been a pleasure talking to you.