Page 24 - Cyberculture and New Media

Francisco J. Ricardo 15
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Figure 2. Andrew Neumann, Phase Cancellation with Sine Wave. Plywood, LCD screen, camera,
motors, electronics, 32” x 18” x 7”. 2002. Private collection. Courtesy of the artist.
In light of the numerous reciprocities that I have documented here, it
is retrospectively arguable that the scope of possibility implied in Stieglitz’s
letter to Duchamp turns on the acknowledgment of mechanical process as a
new aesthetic and embryonically cybercultural code rather than as embedded
groundwork for something else. This shift toward process is why the same
question could have been asked by Duchamp of Stieglitz. Duchamp’s
departure from conventional art practice, a moment seen as germinating in a
diary entry containing the self-rebuking imperative to stop painting and get a
job, is in many ways a permanent foray into the embrace of technical
materials not only for expressive critique, but for a kind of engineering,
which is to say the capture of functionality, that artistic practice had always
ignored. The near-filmic motion that Duchamp’s early painting had striven to
capture through Nude Descending a Staircase, through the fictive
documentation of gear machinery in The Large Glass, and through the
interrogative paradox on motion of Bicycle Wheel, will all later amplify in his
electrically powered rotorelief work, itself a mechanical kineticisation, a
multi-angle take on expressive perspective, a major disavowal of painting’s
flatness, and collude to frame new conditions of art through an embrace of
the artful media, which is to say conceptual engineering. This line of effort
reveals how genuinely and repeatedly Duchamp’s empirical curiosities
reached into the heart of Stieglitz’s own territory. For it was Stieglitz who
had studied mechanical engineering in Berlin forty years earlier, and it was
he again who had developed unusual expertise in photochemistry and who
harvested a collection of cameras large and small with which to