Reading Fountain: A Lecture Performance in Two Parts
Lecture performance
This work was commissioned for the RA Lates: Rrose Sélavy’s Dada Extravaganza at the Royal Academy in London. Taking as its starting point the centenary of Duchamp’s rejected Independents Show submission Fountain, the piece asked how we ‘read’ Fountain differently when we consider that it originally appeared as a photograph by Alfred Stieglitz in the magazine The Blind Man in 1917 and was only exhibited decades later. The lecture performance meditated on fountains and fountain pens, portraits and replicas, women and heart-shaped soap, sequences and consequences. The persona adopted in performance responded to the image of the ‘reading woman’ (in a dressing gown, draped over a sofa)—a common trope in the history of painting and also an obsession for philosophers and writers as an epitome for ‘attention’. The set consisted of a sofa, an arm chair, an empty picture frame, and a pedestal on which the artist placed a heart-shaped bar of soap in reference to Duchamp’s co-editor Beatrice Wood, who also exhibited a ready-made including a bar of soap in 1917.
Initially asked to perform the same piece twice, but—not wanting to be the replica addressed in the performance—the artist decided instead to make seriality, copying, and re-reading an integral element of the script, to create two parts that worked independently and in conjunction. The script included material from my piece 3,4 (2013), copied to serve a new function, and the performance concluded with me blindfolding myself, not-seeing my video Objects I Cannot Touch (2014) play in the background.
Performance:
Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2017
Center for Experimental Humanities, New York, 2018
Publication:
Emergency Index (2018)