Friday, November 16, 2012

A Golden Shower of Art Historical Trivia


The first few free pdf downloads of The LOOP Shows catalog accidentally left out the footnotes of my essay. It's been fixed now, but I wanted to put this up in case anyone missed it - it was a sort of aside to my musings on Duchamp's Fountain. Also wanted to draw attention to Hunter's excellent book, which I actually found time to finish - so you know it must be good!

"1. I’m not sure how this fits in, but as I was writing this, I read this anecdote in Hunter Drohojowska-Philp’s Rebels in Paradise: The Los Angeles Art Scene and the 1960s:
When dealer Julien Levy rented a gallery on Sunset Boulevard in 1941 to exhibit Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, along with pieces by Salvador Dalí and others, the actor John Barrymore got so drunk at the opening, he unzipped his pants and unceremoniously urinated on a work by Surrealist Max Ernst.
Apart from being surprised to learn that The Large Glass has actually made it to tinseltown, I was struck by the strange urinal loop generated by this incident in combination with the more famous case of Jackson Pollock relieving himself in the fireplace of Peggy Guggenheim (AKA Mrs. Max Ernst!) in 1944, during a party to celebrate the installation of a commissioned mural by Pollock. This has been interpreted by some as a gesture of retaliation because the oversized canvas had had 8 inches trimmed off one end in order to make it fit the allotted space… at the suggestion of Marcel Duchamp."

Click here to download the full-color catalog for both the China Adams-curated LOOP Shows!

PS: The only other footnote was citing this article I wrote about China's own artwork.

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