COURTESY OF PARALLEL FORM
COPYRIGHT © THE ARTIST
Back in 1917, when a relatively anonymous artist presented a urinal that he had signed with a marker ‘R. Mutt, 1917’ to the Society of Independent Artists’ salon in New York under the title ‘Fountain’, it marked a relatively momentous moment in modern art.
Although Marcel Duchamp’s work was duly rejected to be exhibited, it probed a question you hear a lot nowadays: ‘is that really art?’ Duchamp called his signed urinal a ‘readymade’, a sculpture that was already made. He claimed art could be anything, as long as you say so – The Fountain was the first artwork that bracketed art as an idea, rather than an object. Duchamp called this anti-retinal art.
Similar in intentions, it is this revolutionary idea -- a fundamental question of what art really is -- that marks Blank Studio’s point of departure. Using Duchamp’s Fountain as a point of inspiration we have partnered with Studio Acacia for our first series of prints as we attempt to redefine how we appreciate and understand art in the same way that Duchamp did with his Fountain.
METHOD: Screen-printing is a time consuming process with each layer needing to be drawn, designed, exposed to chemicals, coated, screened and then executed. With little margin for error, as a method of producing art, it is also one that goes against another modern problem faced by art: the slow deligitimisation of art as a craft. While we marvel at the frightening capacity of AI; our hyper-technology culture and the generative AI revolution mean that a lifetimes oeuvre can be created in the space of an evening. Screen-printing stands against this, a true hand-crafted picture.
Studio Acacia
The Fountain, 2024Screenprint
500mm x 707mm
Edition of 15
Numbered and signed
Unframed
£110