Becoming a Graphic Designer: A Guide to Careers in Design by Steven Heller and Teresa Fernandes (review)

330 Leonardo Reviews being situated on a higher level. Krauss has described the body without organs as analogous to the idea of the pictureplane as a homogenous totality, a vertical and abstracted reflection of the spectator’s self. By contrast, the art that Krauss relates to the concept of informe often involves a multitude of dispersed organs, or “part-objects.” The part-objects, explicitly related to sexual desires, replace the abstract, homogenous totality. In Bachelors, the concepts of part-objects and informe prove to be helpful as means of defining and analyzing the work of artists as dissimilar as Cindy Sherman, Agnes Martin, Louise Bourgeois and Sherrie Levine. But I think that the problems of Krauss’s structuralist (or poststructuralist) approach become apparent when she neglects certain topics which, from her point of view, may seem irrelevant. I would argue that her critique of formalism’s reductionism involves a certain blindness when it comes to the reductionism of her own textual model. In this context I would like to discuss her text, in Bachelors , about Sherrie Levine’s three-dimensional version of the bachelors in Duchamp’s Large Glass. In Levine’s work (from 1989), the nine three-dimensional bachelors are cast in glass and displayed in nine showcases. The proportions of the showcases are similar to those of the Large Glass (the base being approximately three-fifths the height), and so the cases could be regarded as three-dimensional versions of the Large Glass. Now, Krauss readily accepts that the sections of Levine’s bachelors are circular (or nearly circular), because she does not even mention this fact. But why? Where, in the Large Glass, do we find the visual and geometrical evidence that the bachelors are representations of three-dimensional forms with circular sections? According to the Swedish curator and essayist Ulf Linde, an analysis of the linear perspective in the lower part of the Large Glass shows that the bachelors’ sections are in fact narrow ellipses (see his Marcel Duchamp, Stockholm, 1986). One may object that this kind of analysis , necessarily involving the Albertian unity of pictorial space, represents exactly the dominant, symbolic order that which Duchamp apparently sought to subvert in his work. However, the crucial point here is the choice between the circular and the elliptical. The circle as a plastic signifier has certain connotations. For instance, let us think about the circle as a symbol of the self, the universe, the totality that Rudolf Arnheim writes about in his Visual Thinking, in which he makes reference to Galileo Galilei’s cosmology. Galilei, stuck with traditional thinking, was not able to accept Kepler’s finding that the planets move in ellipses. According to everyday visual perception, “my self” is always the center of a circular world. Reductionism makes things symmetric and easy to grasp, turning the ellipse into a circle. In the Large Glass, the structural opposition of partobjects (i.e. the bachelors) versus picture -plane (the Large Glass) implies the plastic opposition between organic roundness (bachelors) and inorganic angularity (glass). In semiotic terms, the general opposition of roundness versus angularity is a form, while the various variants of roundness (interpreted as circles or ellipses) form a substance . By making the bachelors circular or nearly circular, Levine emphasizes the generality of the form. What she really shows is the circular, self-contained autism (and eroticism?) of nine partobjects that are also bodies without organs . But when Krauss writes, in her text about Levine, that “to cast the bachelors in glass, and then to frost the glass, is therefore to add nothing, to create nothing” (p. 182), this is obviously not true. Levine has added and chosen a certain plastic content. By comparison: what would elliptical Bachelors have looked like? Levine’s work surely belongs to the realm of appropriative art—art that negates the modernist notion of creative individuality by being largely confined to the reproduction and re-creation of pre-existing images and forms as ready-mades. But the example of Levine’s Bachelors may demonstrate that an act of appropriation could also be an act of interpretation —to turn something into one’s own. By merely confirming Levine’s interpretation of Duchamp’s...