Duchamp and Warhol Walk into a Bar and Wink at One Another: Faces of Irony

Irony and Anti-Art

I have seen a viral tweet floating around lately that tries to paint Duchamp’s The Fountain as a degeneration of aesthetic beauty. Leaving aside the Nazi overtones of this assertion, as well as the simplistic “RETVRN TO TRADITION” arguments, let us contextualize the artwork and understand what role irony plays in the development of the work of two of the most famous anti-artists of all time: Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol.

When I call these two anti-artists, I mean that they push against the ingrained notion of the artist as a misunderstood genius, as a superman with an uncanny ability to express hidden truths about reality, beauty, goodness, love, and life. As an example, Benedict O’Donohoe identifies in Jackson Pollock the archetype of this type of troubled genius artist, the creative who is a recluse, macho-man, anti-social hermit who speaks his own idiom. O’Donohoe equates this type of artist with the Sartrean, existentialist conception of authenticity. In existentialism, existence precedes essence, meaning that we humans have no essential qualities, no external guidance (for example, God) through which we can shape our lives concerning questions of ethics and value.

For the existentialist, what matters is that we take life by the neck and impose our own authentic values in it. Pollock and other Abstract Expressionists embody this ideal of authenticity, of the person who creates their own path amidst the landscape of void. But what if artists embraced the opposite; if instead of embracing imposition, depth, and the unity of the ego, they embraced inauthenticity, fakeness, surface-level jokes, and masked personas? What if they used this attitude to rewrite the rules of the game with irony and wit? The two artists from today’s post embraced this role of the sincere “faker” more than any other in art history.

A Pollock painting, considered by many the pinnacle of Abstract Expressionism, is always authentic and contains the unmistakeable hand of the artist. The painting is also interpreted as conveying important truths about the human condition and existence.

Irony is an elusive concept. We know what it is, we can all perform sarcasm impressively well, but it is hard, without doing much research on the topic, to try to give a fitting definition of irony that encapsulates what it does. Provisionally, we can characterize irony as the ability to mean something different than what is superficially inferred from what one says, usually to a humorous or disconcerting effect. It is a form of veiled mockery, or self-aware chuckle. In this sense, irony is an instance of what the philosopher of language H.P. Grice called implicature. Implicature separates statements into ‘what we say’ and ‘what we mean.’ When uttering irony, we do not mean what we say on the surface.

The idea of surface is supremely important for the interpretation of irony, as well as understanding the two artists analyzed in this post. Irony is a performance of modifying the surface, shining new light on it. Irony possesses an aura around it, it can poison, enliven, or cheer whatever sentence we utter or art we create. It can also detach the artist and audience from the need to reveal “deep” things about human nature, making the artwork just about what is in front of our noses and nothing else. The ironist in the artworld is the detached subject who is bored with moral seriousness, with pretense of being “deep”, with conventionality. The ironist is dying of boredom, especially as an effect of the stiffness and self-seriousness of art, so they might as well try to make things interesting, to provoke and piss people off.

Duchamp Takes a Piss on the Artworld

Let’s turn now to the world’s most famous urinal—oops—I mean, fountain. Marcel Duchamp was an artist at the turn of the century who is closely associated with the Dadaist movement. It is hard to explain what Dada represents, since one of its creators said it means “nothing”. In many ways, Dadaism is an anti-movement. Unlike most novel art styles of the turn of the 20th Century (Impressionism, Futurism, Cubism, Expressionism, etc), Dada did not identify itself with positive prescriptions of what to do in art, but with negative pleads to avoid all the bullshit. The manifesto, instead of trying to delineate the formal features of Dada which make it the superior candidate for unveiling the ontology of art (answering the question “What is art?”), Dada poses itself as a challenge to this very notion that art has an essence. Tristan Tzara, the author of the manifesto proclaims that “beauty is dead.”

Dadaism is essentially a reactive movement, one that despises everything that reeks of bourgeois sensibilities and morality. This way, Dada is an attempt to destroy any notion of “logic of art” or “reason in art,” or anything that might indicate the artistic power of being deep, of expressing essential truths about human nature. Dada celebrates chaos, irrationality. With this hint of context in mind we are better able to understand what is so revolutionary about putting a urinal in a museum exhibition.

Duchamp first exhibited Fountain in 1917. The artwork consists of a ready-made, a medium that Duchamp pioneered. A ready-made is any object that is found in our routine activities, but altered slightly and put in a new context, the context of an art exhibition. Duchamp took a regular urinal, inverted it, signed it “R. Mutt” and submitted it to the art show. Initially, organizers tried to hide the work, but it became a bombastic, revolutionary symbol about shifting notions of what people considered art and how they approached it, even prognosticating the rise of postmodernism that came a couple decades later. But what does it mean? It’s a joke! It is a joke indeed, Duchamp is quite literally claiming that art is not this or that style, or this or that way of expressing truth; rather, art is what I can use to take a piss on (literally and figuratively). It’s a very literal joke, but one that works extremely well in a holier-than-thou, hoity-toity artworld that had no patience for pranksters.

This revolutionary artwork already indicates the immense power that irony has in making us reevaluate definitions of art, of beauty, of aesthetic value. Duchamp was able to make one of the most famous and important statements in art history by making a very literal joke. This is remarkable. Fountain inspires laughter in those in the audience that share some of the chaotic Dadaist spirit, who—like Alfred said about the Joker—just want to watch the world burn. On the other hand, this anarchic work also makes us take a harder look at what we consider art, what we direct aesthetic value to, and whether art needs to be beautiful. The work has a dual purpose, that of being interpreted as a blasé, ironic joke, and that of shifting art from the idea of craft and of a special access to expressive truths about the human experience, to making us think about the ideas that art embody.

Therefore, while Dada may be characterized as anti-artistic, and irrational, I hardly think it can be characterized as anti-intellectual. Instead of believing intellectuality conforms to a certain notion of artistic practice, Duchamp forces us to expand this definition, expand our artistic sensibility, expand our definitions of art and interpretation.

Duchamp himself recognized how indebted his work was to the concept of irony, however he put a twist on it. He said: “Irony is a playful way of accepting something. Mine is the irony of indifference. It is ‘Meta-Irony.’” It is no secret that the author of this blog likes the prefix meta- a lot, but so far I have not explained what it means. ‘Meta’ in greek means ‘after, beyond, or about’, but it can also mean ‘self-referential.’ Anything that carries the ‘meta-‘ prefix will usually take the form of reflecting on itself, going beyond the surface activity to bring forth information surrounding it or governing it.

Let’s take an example from philosophy. ‘Metaphysics’ was first coined by Aristotle’s editor, who chose the prefix because Metaphysics was the book that came after the Physics book in the order of Aristotle’s writings. From this trivial coincidence, metaphysics became in our time a way to reflect ‘beyond’ physics and also to reflect on physics itself to investigate the nature of reality going further from what we can know from science exclusively.

So what does “meta-irony” mean in the context? I think that with this quote we can see Duchamp planting the seeds of what would become post-irony, developed more fully by Warhol and other pop artists. Though Duchamp explicitly characterizes his brand of irony as “meta-irony” I think that all forms of irony show a degree of self-reflection. Whereas we can utter a variety of statements when we go on about our days without having to reflect on what we just said (that may be a command or a plead), when uttering an ironic statement, very often we will be reflecting more attentively on the context of the sentence and the effect it may have on the interlocutor. In this sense, irony is always a self-aware and self-reflective transaction. Irony modifies a statement, bounces on itself and shines light on the meaning of both the original statement and the new, implicated statement (what we say and what we mean). I think a great example of this irony of indifference, of reflecting back both on the old context and bouncing to the new one is another of Duchamp’s explosive works: L.H.O.O.Q.

The title of this work sounds like a riddle, a convoluted abbreviation of nonsense. It is a bit of that, and many people have tried to decode the many different ways in which one can interpret this. However, when one reads it phonetically letter by letter in French we get the sentence: “elle a chaud au cul.” This can be roughly translated into “She is hot in the ass.” Yikes. Now what is this mysterious, clearly jokey work about? Simply the most revered painting of all time: Mona fucking Lisa.

Why is the Mona Lisa, or Gioconda for the intimate, so well regarded? It has gained the title of most well-known painting of all time and inspires millions of laypeople to pose with the portrait every year, even recently becoming a site for activists to enact their protests. Mona Lisa has gained a transcendent status, going beyond a mere relic of European, Renaissance greatness to become a sacred symbol of art in the entire world. If you asked me, I would say that the painting is vastly overrated and excessively regarded; I would say that this fame is all coincidental, or at least tied specifically to the veneration of Da Vinci as representing the apotheosis of human achievement. However, the painting has a lot to be praised, technically especially. I will not get into the boring details here, but we have to believe art historians that the painting is a landmark of human culture. Now, what if someone printed the Mona Lisa in cheap print and squiggled a mustache over the world’s most famous and enigmatic smile? Is that just a big “fuck you” to everyone that has elevated this piece of canvas to the status of a divine manifestation through the hands of an artist? Yes. Duchamp did just that.

Dadaists in general loved puns, and Duchamp, who adopted the drag alter-ego Rrose Sélavy (get it? Rose c’est la vie), was no stranger to this ironic way to entertain oneself through language and symbols. So, apart from the cheap pun that gives this piece its title, Duchamp committed what in the eyes of many could be considered a heresy. He is using his irony of indifference to claim that nothing, no Leonardo and no Raphael, are exempt from being mocked, from being victim to a chaotic prank. No idol is sacred. This is very different from the effect that Warhol puts into his art, in which anything can become sacred. Duchamp is challenging notions of aesthetic beauty and is desecrating a sacred article of human greatness with no-fucks-given irony. Yes, that is exactly what he is doing, and he has no problem with it. You stuffy critics should try to relax sometime, seems like your asses are on fire.

Deadpan and Dead Outside: Warhol’s Post-Ironic Aesthetic of Surface

In a past post, I claimed that Balenciaga masterfully incorporates the post-ironic mood of the internet into its clothing and repackagings of other brands. As a start, we can describe post-irony as the condition in which we are unable to interpret if an assertion or a symbol is shared with an honest or sarcastic intention, or rather, this symbol oscillates between earnest sincerity and detached irony. Balenciaga is a good example of this, because at first glance many of its clothes are clearly jokes about consumerism and fashion status, yet Demna, who is the orchestrator behind it, always states in interviews that they are intended as “simply clothes” (his solemn, deadpan tone reminds me of Warhol sometimes). One can never tell if Demna or Warhol are playing the most elaborate joke, putting on the most “average” façade possible just for the sake of performance or whether they are being 100% genuine about their intentions. The uneasy feeling we get when trying to interpret and categorize this type of art is a direct effect of post-irony. There would be no Demna without Andy. And there might not have been post-irony in art if it wasn’t for Warhol.

Example of Warhol's work, in which seriality and distortion are important features. This is his series on celebrity portraits, and it is hard to tell whether he fully embraces and praises celebrity culture or whether he is a bit skeptical and critical of it. Maybe both.

The notion of dialectic is super important for artists like Duchamp and Warhol. Without going over the complicated Hegelian system, dialectic means dialogue, which is to say that Marcel and Andy are always in conversation with other works, art movements and culture. They are not creators, they are reactive artists. Both in the sense that they challenge prevailing notions of the ontology of art (the answer to “what is art?”) as well as copying, borrowing, forging and appropriating other artist’s work or found objects to provide metacommentary. The rise of modernism saw a wild proliferation of how people thought art should be practiced (Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, Impressionism, Pointillism, etc), and the sense in which these two pranksters are anti-artists is that they are defusing, deflating and sabotaging these attempts at defining the essence of art. In other words, their works are not primarily productive, allowing meaning to spring and manifest from the work itself, revealing some deeper reality.

Their work only gains meaning as a commentary about other works, or aesthetics, or popular culture. If a person from a remote tribe encountered Raphael’s School of Athens, they will likely find beauty in it even without any context. Warhol’s and Duchamp’s art defies this. It is not aesthetic art (art based on beauty): it is meta-art (art about art) and anti-art (art against a restricted notion of art). However, since this happens in a dialectical process, they both expand the definition of art to include their own form of anti-art, driving home the point that art has no ontology, art has no essence, no quiddity (the essential properties of a thing, what makes an apple an apple), but only relational properties which allow us to interpret one work using another using another using another using another…

All artists are reactive in one sense, either approving, rejecting, or modifying aspects of past art. However, conventional artists differ from anti-artists in that they are mostly attempting to create a new avenue of expression, often considered to be the “true” or “real” way of practicing art, or at least carving up an authentic way of expressing themselves. Warhol and Duchamp are more purely reactive, because they are not challenging a deep structure by replacing it with another deep structure (by deep structure I mean an approach to art that believes in a “true” way of practicing it and revealing reality). They are both showing that there is no deep structure, that all is surface, hence the title anti-artists. This distrust in the metanarrative of art, or its power of revealing true reality, is what allows us to call both artists postmodernists. Other factors that grant this title is the farcical and ironic way they approach the mighty seriousness of high art. This way, both artists blur the distinction between intellectual and anti-intellectual art. One can read Dadaism and Pop Art both as celebrations of (non)sense, (ir)rationality, (a)morality (in the case of Dadaism), and surface, consumerism, celebrity culture (Pop Art) as well as metacommentaries on these topics. One can never be certain whether Warhol is unabashedly praising consumerism or whether beneath the glossy surface there is an ironic, wry criticism about the freaks we are.

These artists clash all these distinctions and, like deconstructionists, destabilize the hierarchy in these binaries (praise/criticism, surface/depth), bringing low closer to high and high closer to low. Duchamp even characterized his work as “decomposition.” Instead of putting materials together to make a sculpture, Duchamp finds an object, recontextualizes it by modifying some aspects and shining new light on it, and calls it a ready-made. Instead of composing, creating, he is decomposing the object. Irony is fundamentally at play here, in the way we are unable to tell when Duchamp or Warhol are being serious or not, whether they are offering a deep questioning, or simply a dumb joke, if it is both; or if the deep question was the dumb joke all along. What they say and what they mean is almost never clear, while at the same time being in our face. This is what was called Warhol’s Aesthetic of Surface. I know, it’s complicated.

Warhol playing with a frequent theme in art history: memento mori. Is he serious, is he joking? Impossible to tell.

This will most likely not be my last post about Andy Warhol (yes, he is one of my favorite artists), so for the sake of brevity I will concentrate only in one aspect of Andy’s work in which irony plays a huge role: the way Andy portrayed himself and made his life and behavior an artform. Warhol was dubbed the “pope of pop.” I think this characterization perfectly captures what is so interesting about the mystique, the aura surrounding this enigmatic figure. Warhol is the pope of pop because he is able to turn the ordinary, the everyday, the mundane (soup cans, soap boxes, movie stars) into sacred objections of consumerist adoration; he transforms what any family has in abundance in their pantry into an artistic statement (I said in the Balenciaga post that Demna performed a similar function with his choice of signifiers). Whereas Duchamp mocks the rising bourgeois, with their milquetoast morals, Warhol makes consumption itself an art, as in the video where he appears eating a hamburger. Through irony, both these artists blur the line between high and low, sacred and profane, the difference being that Duchamp usually brings the high closer to the low whereas Warhol usually brings the low closer to the high. Duchamp's performance is a transaction of disenchantment, where both sacred and profane objects are turned into absurd, logic-defying statements. Warhol, on the other hand, performs the transaction of enchantment, taking ordinary things and adding an aura of sheen and layer of glitz to them.

The mystique surrounding Andy's persona was such that even the mundane act of eating a burger became performance art in his hands.

Pop Art is a style that was also called Neo-Dada, so one can quickly see the genealogical roots between the movements. However, while Dada was reactive to the proliferation of Modernist manifestos of the time, Pop Art was a reaction against the dominant scene of Abstract Expressionism (especially in New York City) as well as the boom of mass culture and mass production of the 50s. In this way, a big difference exists between the two: the context of Dadaism made it a countercultural movement against all that was bourgeois, while in Pop Art, the artist embraced mass culture and taste. Dada was a bitter, indigestible liquid thrown into the mouth of stuffy art players, whereas Pop Art was sweet as Coca-Cola, rejoicing in the lifestyle of the everyday consumer, or so it goes.

Warhol started his career as an advertisement artist. This biographical fact could not be more suitable to what was to come in his complete reevaluation of artistic value. From the start, Warhol would see no boundaries between mass media and high art, and this had immense repercussions in the artworld, inaugurating postmodern art. I talked about this a bit in my Balenciaga post, so I won’t repeat myself. What is worth saying is that Warhol made his own life and gestures art as well. Take Warhol’s art studio for example: “The Factory.” The name shows how Warhol embraced the commercial, commodified nature of art. While his work can be a metacommentary on the fetishism of commodities, and it obviously is, Warhol is very far from the days of old Modernist Marx, who saw this phenomenon as a calamity. Warhol embraces the fetishism of commodities: he has no problem with swimming in money and being proud of it. He brings no moralizing touches to his performances. Can we condemn hyper-sincere artists like Jeff Koons and Alec Monopoly for embracing the commerciality of art if their master, the elusive and post-ironic Andy Warhol did the same?

Warhol's exhausting repetition of soup cans. Third-criticism, Third-joke, Third-childlike sincerity? Hard to tell...

I think one of the best examples of Warhol’s ability to blur the lines between sincerity and irony, between intellectual and anti-intellectual, mysterious and straightforward is his book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. The title alone is a massive joke. Any all-too-serious philosopher who goes into this work expecting some revelations on the nature of art will fall flat on their face. The book is composed of seemingly impromptu dialogue between Warhol and his editor. The dialogue is mundane, idiosyncratic, straightforward, wry. The other part of the book is composed of aphorisms such as “The symptom of love is when some of the chemicals inside you go bad. So there must be something in love because your chemicals do tell you something.” After reading this I would be surprised if anyone’s initial reaction wasn’t “Are you fucking kidding me right now Andy?”

On the surface, the statement is innocuous, and, uttered with the self-seriousness of a conventional philosopher, it would be considered a ridiculous generalization lacking in style and substance. However, Andy is not a conventional philosopher. He is an anti-philosopher. He is trying to reveal nothing but the surface, the masked persona that he has meticulously cultivated yet looks like a spontaneous everyday Joe. However, in revealing this surface I think Andy is able to make us critically reflect and have a good laugh at ourselves at the same time, things that only happen rarely, and all thanks to irony. It is mesmerizingly genius.

The impossibility of categorizing Warhol as taking on any one of the attitudes in the binaries (either resistance or immersion, either critique or celebration) is exactly what I mean by post-irony. This is something that was mastered by Warhol, a figure that presents a very straightforward and deadpan persona, telling us not to probe deeper into the surface as there is none. At the same time, it is impossible not to see a lot of Warhol’s art as coming from the other side, from the side of interpreting deeply and intellectually what his multifaceted and varied corpus presents. As Simon Leung writes: “the Warholian surface is never just one thing.” Warhol resists any one interpretation, any one Modernist definition of art that encapsulates the entire mechanism of his technique interacting with the themes he approaches. Warhol presents a thorny challenge for interpreters, making identity and quiddity (a thing’s essence, what makes an apple an apple) as elusive as the myriad definitions of “pop.”

For Andy, all is sheen, gleam, green and gild. There is nothing beneath the surface. The surface is all there is, even though we might be a little distrustful that the surface is just one thing. Warhol mastered the art of flattening paintings, of making them two-dimensional. One of Andy’s most famous quotes is: “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it.” This is a classic Warhol quote, it is detached, defusing and a bit impenetrable. Like Warhol’s work, it also means something totally different on the surface than what it means when one probes it. I am deeply skeptical of Warhol saying that he was always being sincere, and that his performance of deadpan averageness was not performance. In some ways, all is a performance for the faker, the jokester. That is why authenticity is mocked by them, because they embrace being “fake” as a compliment. This makes people like Andy and Marcel move beyond the boring binary of authenticity/fakeness.

Example of style of Andy's work that is called "traumatic realism." This series, along with that of car crashes, makes it more difficult to see Andy as a purely "surface-level guy", as a 100% sincere persona. This is a darker twist on irony than usual.

Nonetheless, while they may be distrustful of depth, it does not mean that the interpreter cannot use their work to critically engage with the many themes they present. Even though Warhol fully embraced the role of commercial artist, it does not mean that his work does not have some uncanny overtones, one in which the surface reflects the ugliness of consumerism, of celebrity-worship culture, of the “traumatic realism” he developed in prints of electric chairs and car accidents. There is no one true way to interpret or moralize his art, which is what gives it a timeless status while being deeply rooted in its own time. All is surface, but the surface is pregnant with meaning.