Brushing my teeth with Duchamp.

This morning, I was standing brushing my teeth, looking at two sliding, frosted-pane windows, a gap between them showing a verdant scene of ferns and redwoods beyond. And I thought how nice that would be as a painting, the whole thing: the glass windows and the small sliver of the natural world. In my imagination, I entered the world of the figurative painters, who find ways to narrate and to depict. What happened? What was Duchamp's purpose of art? The oft-repeated story is that Duchamp came along and radically re-oriented the art world (over the course of the century) from viewing/experiencing pleasure to intellectual rigor and questioning, which led to our contemporary interest in conceptual art. Sometimes, the two go together, which only confuses things. After all, his signed urinal was a pleasant, smooth form, especially by today's standards. But then: he did end up quitting art entirely and playing chess in his old age, turning himself into the statement of denial, his everydayness his artwork. Or perhaps he was just escaping the gravitational pull of the famous artist myth, escaping the pressure to do one thing better always until the world burns down.

The latest work to get my attention.

I admit: I'm spending more of this blog talking about the work of others rather than my own. That's fine. I'm not making much lately, and there is much to be celebrated out there. The most recent piece I've come across that gets me excited is Walter DeMaria's "The Vertical Earth Kilometer." (1977, Kassel Germany). See it in the photo? No, not the statue, or the landscaping. It's that square of sandstone in the middle. The 2x2m block has a visible 5cm diameter end of a brass rod . . . The rod is one kilometer long.

The magnitude of the effort involved in this work borders on the absurd. Yet, it is more than simply conceptual: it is an actual reality, a mostly invisible, extremely ambitious undertaking than calls into question what is beneath the surface. Just what does it mean to go that far into the earth? A friend of mine suggested that the work is "almost a violation of the planet, intrusive." Of course, this is one of many: think of the hundreds of thousands of such cores drilled all over the planet. This is just the only one that has been filled back in as if in an acupuncture of the Earth's crust.

I can only imagine that to stand on this platform and reach down to touch the end of this rod is to feel something deep, in the stomach, a kind of encounter with the awesome magnitude of our planet's dimensions and the almost insignificant scale that we occupy.

The link with more info about this work: http://www.diacenter.org/sites/page/57/1378