www.quondam.com/77/7605.htm

The Idea of History, etc.

7/10

To disengage ourselves from these two complementary errors, we must attack the false dilemma from which they both spring. That dilemma rests on the disjunction that thought is either pure immediacy, in which case it is inextricably involved in the flow of consciousness, or pure mediation, in which case it is utterly detached from that flow. Actually it is both immediacy and mediation. Every act of thought, as it actually happens, happens in a context out of which it arises and in which it lives, like any other experience, as an organic part of the thinker's life. Its relations with its context are not those of an item in a collection, but those of a special function in the total activity of an organism. So far, not only is the doctrine of the so-called idealist correct, but even that of the pragmatists who have developed that side of it to an extreme. But an act of thought, in addition to actually happening, is capable of sustaining itself and being revived or repeated without loss of its identity. So far, those who have opposed the 'idealists' are in the right, when they maintain that what we think is not altered by alterations of the context in which we think it. But it cannot repeat itself in vacuo, as the disembodied ghost of a past experience. However often it happens, it must always happen in some context, and the new context must be just as appropriate to it as the old. Thus, the mere fact that someone has expressed his thoughts in writing, and that we possess his works, does not enable us to understand his thoughts. In order that we may be able to do so, we must come to the reading of them prepared with an experience sufficiently like his own to make those thoughts organic to it.
R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 300.

Re: urinal in a gallery
2000.03.16 21:21

Marcus wrote:

Hugh [Pearman] asks:
But what if (oh God) these reproduction urinals are not in fact true "readymades" but in fact carefully crafted reproductions of the original readymade that was, one imagines, long out of production since design in sanitary ware had moved on?

Where does that leave us? With something purporting to be a readymade that is actually a hand-made work of art?

which makes Steve ask:
Could it simply be that Duchamp and even his unique "art" cannot escape the varying degrees of separation that always come with reenactments, even crafty and/or dexterous reenactments?

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, c.1967 reenactment of the lost 1917 original, Philadelphia Museum of Art.

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