Retinal art  

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Retinal art is a expression generally attributed to the French-American artist Marcel Duchamp, who used it to refer to art whose appeal is mainly or exclusively to the eye rather than to the mind.

It is difficult to trace who exactly coined the phrase retinal art. Its origins can be traced to the 1960s[1].

As Duchamp explained to Pierre Cabanne:

Since Courbet, it's been believed that painting is addressed to the retina. That was everyone's error. The retinal shudder! Before, painting had other functions: it could be religious, philosophical, moral. If I had the chance to take an antiretinal attitude, it unfortunately hasn't changed much; our whole century is completely retinal, except for the Surrealists, who tried to go outside it somewhat. And still, they didn't go so far! (DMD , 43)

The expression "retinal art" was not exactly new, as Thierry De Duve notes in Pictorial Nominalism (2005):

"In fact, we should note that Duchamp demonstrated no originality in marking himself off from "retinal painting," since it was Gleizes and Metzinger, the most orthodox of the Cubists, who had accused Courbet of having " "accepted everything that his retina communicated to him, without intellectual control.""

Unsourced quote:

"Pop Art is a return to "conceptual" painting, virtually abandoned, except by the Surrealists, since [Gustave] Courbet, in favor of retinal painting.... If you take a Campbell soup can and repeat it 50 times, you are not interested in the retinal image. What interests you is the concept that wants to put 50 Campbell soup cans on a canvas."


Praise of conceptual art

The closest match of the concept of his disparagement of "retinal art" (without using the word "retinal") and a eulogy of conceptual art is found in “The Great Trouble with Art in This Country,” an interview with James Johnson Sweeney" in which Duchamp states:

“I was interested in ideas – not merely in visual products, I wanted to put painting once again at the service of the mind.”

The excerpt reads in full:

"Futurism was an impressionism of the mechanical world. It was strictly a continuation of the impressionist movement. I was not interested in that. I wanted to get away from the physical aspect of painting. I was much more interested in recreating ideas in painting. ... I was interested in ideas -not merely in visual products. I wanted to put painting once again at the service of the mind. ... In fact until the last hundred years all painting had been literary or religious: it had all been at the service of the mind. This characteristic was lost little by little during the last century. ... Dada was an extreme protest against the physical side of painting. It was a metaphysical attitude. ... It was a way to get out of a state of mind -to avoid being influenced by one's immediate environment, or by the past: to get away from cliches -to get free. ... Dada was very serviceable as a purgative. ... There was no thought of anything beyond the physical side of painting. No notion of freedom was taught. No philosophical outlook was introduced. ... I thought of art on a broader scale. There were discussions at the time of the fourth dimension and of non-Euclidean geometry. But most views of it were amateurish. ... I felt that as a painter it was much better to be influenced by a writer than by another painter. ... This is the direction in which art should turn: to an intellectual expression, rather than to an animal expression. I'm sick of the expression 'bete comme un peintre' -stupid as a painter."

See also





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