The
Armory Show of 1913
by
Rhonda Roland Shearer
"CUBIST
ART IS HERE AS CLEAR AS MUD," the Chicago Herald-Tribune blasted
in 1913. Chicagoans did not understand the new, European modernist art
any more than New Yorkers did when the famous Armory Show arrived that
same year. It is easy to forget that futurist, cubist and post-impressionist
art once provoked a reaction similar to the recent Brooklyn "Sensation
Exhibition" sensation. Rudy Giuliani is only a mayor creating a fuss after
all. When the Armory Show hit the Big Apple, former President Teddy Roosevelt
weighed in by writing that Duchamp's Nude Descending looked to
him like a Navajo Indian rug. See Choi and Shearer's Animation #4 which
attempts to visualize for the Tout-Fait reader this "bully for you" former
president's intrepretation of Duchamp's work. Choi and Shearer hope that
the three newspaper cartoons when transformed into animations will give
spectators (Duchamp's word) a more enlivened sense of the public's reaction
and commentary than what is normally rendered by static, historical images.
For
example, in Animation 1,2 and 3, spectators will find, respectively, the
moving confusion of a crowded subway escalator filled with rude New Yorkers;
the prototype of bad boy cubists (which is a quilt making Grandma); and
a frustrated New York gent literally flipping his "lid" and standing on
his head but still not "getting" it. Finally, Alverez and Shearer's
development of Animation 5 -- using the classic Armory still photo showing
old cars and horse carriages waiting for patrons to return from seeing
the scandal -- takes advantage of the latest in animation technology and
after-effects to emphasize what we most forget when we now look at modernist
works: it was a much different "high button shoe/top hat world"
in 1913 when Duchamp`s works first came to town..."Hey watch the horse
shit."
click each image to see animation
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Animation
1.
Junghee Choi and
Rhonda R Shearer
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Animation
2.
Junghee Choi and
Rhonda R Shearer
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Animation
3.
Junghee Choi and
Rhonda R Shearer
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Animation
4.
Alvarez Greg and
Rhonda R Shearer
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Animation
5.
Junghee Choi and
Rhonda R Shearer
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