M.Z. I’m interested in reflecting on the nodes that have shaped the notion of Western art over time, and one of those nodes I take as a reference is Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain from 1917. The first question I’d like to ask you is: what do you think are the concepts that converge in Fountain within the broader framework of Modernity in which this artwork emerges?

T.A. One of the concepts that I think—if we were talking about color—it would be fitting to call its complementary, is the emergence of non-linearity and the idea of paradigm shifts in science. Something completely antagonistic to what Duchamp did with Fountain, but equally significant in its own field: arT.A. That, to me, is the complexity of Fountain. I’d say we can’t speak of a paradigmatic shift in art in the strict sense, because the term is used in science to refer to a specific phenomenon in knowledge—it’s not just any change. It’s a change that causes seismic shifts. It speaks of a transformation that doesn’t just destabilize but completely reshapes the idea of a phenomenon—its very foundations. But something very similar happened with Fountain in arT.A. I think as a milestone, as a node, as you rightly call it, it continues to produce a sense of strangeness in us, every time—that’s exactly why it’s a milestone. The context that feels close and yet also antagonistic is this idea of the paradigm shift and of crisis or rupture in knowledge.

M.Z. Earlier you mentioned the paradigm shifts that occurred in science.

T.A. Yes, in the 20th century, many of them happened. Much of what science is today is the result of those radical transformations in thought, which occurred very close in time to Fountain, and that’s the science art interacts with today. The spaces are different (from those in art), the figures involved are different, the forms of agency—often collective. For example, awards often go not to individuals but to teams. There too, the notion of authorship transforms in interesting ways, as thinkers like Bruno Latour have noted. Around Duchamp’s time and shortly after, amazing things were happening in terms of paradigm shifts. In science, such a rupture is so brutal—Heisenberg describes it well when he talks about the scientist (he himself experienced this) who reasons through to a point, and then finds themselves before a hypothesis that seems insane, that if proven would imply a paradigm shifT.A. At that point, they have no choice but to trust their intuition, to leap into the void without logic and hope to grasp something on the other side—like a trapeze artist—because what if the math doesn’t work? Or what if their cognitive tools are wrong? Meanwhile, many other scientists are working to refute theM.Z. That’s why the Nobel Prize in Physics recently awarded to those who confirmed gravitational waves is so significant—because if the experiment hadn’t worked conceptually, it would’ve left something open. And that’s a huge problem for science—they must close things, and they work tirelessly to do so. Duchamp, one hundred years ago, made a completely opposite move with Fountain. But it’s not like someday an artist will come along and prove the Fountain theory and we’ll all be contenT.A. That will never happen, and that’s what I love about Fountain and Duchamp. Those points of incommensurability between science and art—that’s what makes their relationship so wonderfully complex.

M.Z. One subversive aspect within the art of that time was separating from the boundaries of mimesis to begin incorporating new concepts into artistic practices—concepts that weren’t entirely present in art at that momenT.A. What are some other associations you consider fundamental stemming from this piece and moving into the future?

T.A. Duchamp’s idea of boredom related to the art of his time, for example—and the idea of selection in the ready-made. Not just what the interpretations say, but what he said about his own method for selecting a ready-made: the non-attraction to an object—not the opposite of what we usually do. There’s a conceptual approach to perception there that I find fascinating. It relates not necessarily to science, but to a kind of knowledge that has the drive to inquire and create its own riddles. Duchamp played with that to such an extent—just like the association you’re making now—and in that subversive tone or in that very sophisticated intellectual game, he linked boredom to the act of selecting an object that didn’t interest hiM.Z. Yesterday, while thinking about this interview, I started doing that with objects—and it’s a very interesting game. I thought about a piece we once presented at the Laboratorio Arte Alameda by David Tudor, a pianist and composer who collaborated with John Cage. The piece indicated the presence of ready-mades. It was the first time it was done as an installation; originally, it was an electroacoustic piece that used chance and employed ready-mades. But more than chance—which might be considered Duchamp’s “sexiest” aspect—it’s boredom, which isn’t the opposite of chance. That’s the lesson for me: to learn through it, to go through it and come out transformed. It has so much to do with life—that’s something I’ve noticed over the years through my experience with arT.A. As I thought about this interview, I considered how boredom plays a crucial role in our lives—and how not to dismiss it as boredom, or what we do with it, might be a key to existence. That level of sophistication in Duchamp’s mind—those long conceptual games—now we’re talking about Fountain, but there’s also the Large Glass, which he worked on for years and then abandoned. In short: long timeframes, boredom as a method of creation but also of reception—it happens often in today’s music and throughout the 20th century. These states of boredom also connect us with contemplation—it’s not Romantic contemplation; it’s something else entirely, also pleasurable in a different way. That seems very important to me in terms of subversion.

M.Z. You mentioned something very interesting—the idea of randomness in selecting the object that becomes the ready-made. It’s a kind of very complex logic, from the mathematical to the mental. It was a significant underlying concept in the ready-made. Do you think ready-mades are still being made in that sense today, or are we talking about something different than the early 20th-century ready-made?

T.A. To reflect on the complexity of those logics, I was thinking yesterday about that piece by David Tudor, in which the curators (Alan Licht and Eric Namour) asked Abraham Cruz Villegas to select the objects. The piece indicated two rules: 1) they had to be ready-mades, and 2) you had to be able to feel with your body—hear the resilience of the material in the installation. You’d walk through it, touch it with your ear or body—to listen, to perceive the resilience of the material. I wondered what Abraham’s logic was in following those two rules. Going to stores, walking around, making a whole diagramming exercise—I’m doing it right now with my eyes—selecting what was hidden or didn’t catch my attention at all. It’s intellectually fascinating. That need to take chance to a very high degree has something of Mallarmé’s Coup de dés—“A throw of the dice will never abolish chance.” I like to interpret it as saying that the throw itself is tiny next to the possibilities of chance. Today, chance is still widely used in art, but I don’t know how much combinatorics is being explored. That’s what I find important about your question—because conceptual art is often viewed from only one angle or a few of its aspects. Not all of Duchamp is just that—Duchamp is a diamond, and who knows if there are still facets we haven’t seen. I think there are things being missed today—just like with Mallarmé’s poeM.Z. For example, I think of artists a generation after Duchamp like Hanne Darboven, who just had a retrospective at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. She created many pieces based on a variable “k” that she invented, which involved the cross-sum of dates on the calendar, which she used to measure events in time and their epistolary correspondences with friends like On Kawara and Sol LeWitT.A. LeWitt says in the catalog that the artist doesn’t need to feel any responsibility toward what is called mathematical—when words are used and come from an idea of art, they’re not literature, they’re arT.A. Numbers are not just mathematics. That takes me back to Mallarmé and Duchamp as possible genealogies of the use of number, combinatorics, and ciphers—which are very present, for example, in Ulises Carrión and many artists working with chance and selection. I think that can happen in virtual worlds too—I think of Julieta Gil’s worlds—selecting the palette that seems least interesting and then repeating it and finding a surprise. The eye still has surprises to experience.

M.Z. Of course, and all this ties into the mathematical and philosophical modernity that would permeate authors like Duchamp and many others in interesting ways. So, can you visualize some kind of relationship between Fountain and science?

T.A. Yes, in that sense of an antagonistic situation between a critical node and a paradigm shift—just as happens with modernity in science—paradigm shifts that continue to affect us and continue happening with Fountain, which is very rare. I still don’t think we fully understand iT.A. In some way, I think it’s a vanishing point whose endpoint we have yet to grasp.

M.Z. From my point of view, something interesting happens in the period after Modernity—since the 1980s with Lyotard, postmodernism became a fundamental subject of reflection. But as the 20th century concluded, the concept of the postmodern began to generate many problems and discomforts for critics, philosophers, artists, etc. Why do you think that is?

T.A. I think it has a lot to do with your previous question—it’s connected to critique, not only art criticism but contemporary theory, critical theory, and what some called postmodernism or postmodern thought, which I believe was the closest to artistic practices around twenty years ago. In art school, for example, I knew Baudrillard’s The Transparency of Evil by heart, and that’s what I worked with—and it gave me a loT.A. It still does, now that I think of iT.A. But at some point, you realize there was also a rejection of engaging with numbers—which we understand the reasons for in Critical Theory, especially due to necessary critiques of technology—but it didn’t allow those authors to engage with numbers, with calculation, with combinatorics. There’s a joke I make: when you decide to study art or philosophy, you think you won’t run into math—but some authors almost seem to think that way. Then you hear Latour or DeLanda calling someone “technologically ignorant,” and it sounds super offensive—but I do think a philosopher can’t afford that in the 21st century. Maybe, as media theorist Jens Hauser once told me, critique failed to read the mathematical sublime in KanT.A. Gilbert Simondon also critiques the exclusion of machines in cultural thought in On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. I think of authors like Ray Brassier, who says—simplifying greatly—that if we truly grasped the transformations in 20th-century knowledge, something would happen akin to when our ancient hominid ancestors evolved into what we are now—cognitively speaking. I think these authors emerge from that resistance to thinking about numbers and calculation. Brassier argues that Philosophy has been conservative in its critique of reason—only pointing to it as reductive. Simondon puts it beautifully: it’s impossible to free ourselves from machines unless we first free the machines themselves. If we produce slave machines, then that’s what they’ll know how to do. But we haven’t learned how to coexist with the populations of technical beings with whom we inevitably share the world. I think it’s already too late—but that was his cry in his time. He was a very important and very under-read thinker.

M.Z. You’re touching on something important I’d like to ask: a hundred years after Fountain, what do you see as the relationships between, on the one hand, art and technique, and on the other, art and technology?

T.A. Something similar happens with conceptual practices—they’re often viewed through their linguistic dimension, but rarely through what has to do with the technical and even the mathematical. I hadn’t thought about it in relation to Fountain, but in the end, Fountain is matter. And what’s starting to make us think about technology differently is that we’re seeing it not as something ghostly or projected, but as something material—we’re including its apparatus of reproduction as part of it and of the matter that produces iT.A. The photons, etc. That might be where some interesting relationships lie, because what travels through the world as Fountain is matter.

M.Z. Matter and energy, right?

T.A. Yes—matter and energy with a form that tells us something, makes us angry, makes us write, etc.

M.Z. With everything we’ve talked about, what would you say are the aesthetic transformations that arise from Fountain, from the emergence of the ready-made to today?

T.A. Letting go—I think that was a good interpretation or use that John Cage made of Duchamp, which leads toward the spiritual—but again, that’s the sexier parT.A. More importantly, I think it’s about detaching meanings from matter and moving within that—experimenting and calculating within thaT.A. I think that’s aesthetically very interesting. That meanings are arbitrary—that’s another of the findings in contemporary Western thought close to Duchamp—but how to experience it and play within that space? How to play with matter where I don’t understand what it is, where I don’t know everything? That instability is the legacy, I believe.