readymade
marcel duchamp, identified his creations as a
category of art itself, giving the name ‘readymades’ -
any object purchased ‘as a sculpture already made’.
when he modified the objects, for example by mounting
a bicycle wheel on a kitchen stool, he called them
‘assisted readymades’ and by putting an reversed
and signed urinal on display in a museum i(1917),
he did precisely this: he forced the viewer to consider
under what conditions we call something ‘art’.

as if in reply to duchamp’s question, the ‘useful
object’ has been of compelling interest to many
artists since then.

usefulness - function - new effectiveness
our attitude towards function is not neutral.
most objects occupy a ‘psychological temperate
zone’ - they make few emotional demands on us.
to the designer, the most relevant issues are those
pertaining to performance characteristics and the
consequent choice of appropriate forms, but certain
kinds of objects elude esthetic criteria simply by
being what they are (chairs for example).
these undemanding objects often have a friendly
appeal but are not impinging on our connsciousness
by being explicitly beautiful.

the emotional content we associate with them
depends on more than the object alone.
hidden associations may be revealed when one
object is related to another, or otherwise taken out
of its familiar context, or when even a single detail is
removed or altered.
usually the transformation of these objects is brought
by
- the change of scale
- addition, covering them with an extraneous material
which destroys their usefulness but presumably
preserves the object themself.
- outright destruction.
- movement (kinetic sculptures).
- portait / the caricature of the original.
- neither addition, subtraction, nor obliteration,
but merely deformation, which suggest an ephemeral
use, while at the same time making such use
impossible.
- the title may act as a catalyst, producing a ‘third reality’.

the effectiveness of these transformed objects depends
to some extent on our recognizing the originals within
the transformation - knowing that they are, or were,
authentic chairs (... for example) is often necessary to
a just appreciation of their new effectiveness.
the resulting visual metaphor is sufficiently powerful -
even the most ubiquious artifact may be transformed
into an object of emotional rather than practical utility
(a work of art).

‘everyone is an artist’ according to joseph beuys,
but this becomes muddied by conformity, social
norms and conventions.
‘fat chair’ (1964) is much more about the physicality
of the human body. to beuys, fat as a material could
be considered before form was considered.
fat, like felt, was a material that appealed to him
because it was a composite with no internal structure.
he placed fat with its ‘chaotic organic energy’,
symbolising warmth, in the cold, rigid, man-made
form of a right-angle. this form, which represented
the coexistence of instinct and intellect was placed
in the right-angle of a chair between seat and back.
the fat occupies space on the chair that would be
filled with our digestive and excretive organs if we
were sitting on it. beuys has reduced the body to a
symbolic presence within the work.

joseph kosuth states that art exists in the artist's
ideas rather than in the object itself.
however, kosuth does address the paradox:
as an artist, he is consigned to produce objects,
and yet he develops objects that cast off their identities
as things and become pure ideas.
in ‘one and three chairs’ (1965), he displayed a
photograph of a chair, an actual chair, and a dictionary
definition of the word ‘chair’. the piece distinguishes
between the three aspects involved in the perception
of a work of art: the visual representation of a thing
(the photograph of the chair), its real referent
(the actual chair), and its intellectual concept
(the dictionary definition).
reality, image, and concept: the three ‘sides’ of a
perceived thing.

see also:
transformed books