NUGGETS

“Anyway, these guys were pals. This guy on the right, Duchamp, who is kind of like arguably the father of conceptual art, was also defacto art dealer to Brâncuși.”

“The thing that's important about Brâncuși is that he was the first artist to make abstract sculpture.”

TRANSCRIPT

00:00:00 Tom Sachs: Hi, can you all hear Me? Um, here we are on 27th St. Um. Hey Fernando can you hear Me? Mr Hamburger. You can hear me OK is it sound good I got a lavaliere mic on. So tell me it sounds good.

00:00:21 Tom Sachs: Alright, so we’re about to go to Paul Kasmin Gallery to check out the Brâncuși and Duchamp’s show. These are two of my favorite artists. They’re kind of the Reece’s Peanut Buttercup of modern art. They kind of together represent the duality of Man in a lot of Ways, and we’re going to start. Um and I. Highly recommend you see the show. It’s up for Christmas.

00:00:49 Tom Sachs: And turn around the camera. How do I flip it around? OK, there we go. Thank you, thanks. So here we are.

00:01:03 Tom Sachs: Brâncuși, Duchamp, the art of dialogue, so on the left, we’ve got Constantin Brâncuși, who was born in Romania in 1876. He died in Paris in 1957. If we’re going to talk about duality of man, he represents the Dionysian. The touch. Feel. He walked from Romania to Paris by foot, traveled by air is sin traveled by foot is Virtue.

00:01:38 Tom Sachs: And then his BFF, Marcel Duchamp, who was born in 1887 in Paris and died in 1968. But he was practically American by the end. He lived in New York City. Anyway, these guys were pals. This guy on the right, Duchamp, who is kind of like arguably the father of conceptual art, was also defacto art dealer to Brâncuși. This guy sold this guy’s art, and he said, I just want to break even plus 10%.

00:02:11 Tom Sachs: Anyway, here they are there also. These two guys who really focused on the cult of personality, like this guy made everything by hand and dressed as a Romanian peasant and this guy said that he quit making art to teach and play chess. So you know it’s all myth-making. I just heard that Joseph Beuys wasn’t even a Luftwaffe pilot after all, but who knows.

00:02:31 Tom Sachs: So this is a Brâncuși sculpture and this is a portrait of Nancy Cunard. Nancy was an amazing who inspired a generation of artists. She was a social activist, in particular with race issues and was really cool, and you can even see her and it kind of looks like a snobby person that puffed out chest.

00:02:53 Tom Sachs: But the thing that’s important about Brâncuși is that he was the first artist to make abstract sculpture. Sculptures that didn’t necessarily like look like anything. I mean here you can see references to a head, but just reference of a head or in this one this super sexualized cock that was really taken a huge step away.

00:03:17 Tom Sachs: He was the he worked for this artist named Rodin and he left his studio after a few months, just saying that. That acorns can’t grow in the shadows of Great Oaks to leave his own his own thing to start his own thing. But Brâncuși also was the guy who made sculptures. He made his own pedestals, and the base is really an important part of his sculptures. He made his own his own things.

00:03:49 Tom Sachs: Now his BFF Duchamp was the guy who first did ready made art, found objects as art. This is a pretty pretty important one. This is a ball of twine and inside the ball of twine you lift up and you shake it. There’s something inside, but is it a stone or a diamond?

00:04:13 Tom Sachs: This tabouret is like a stool that you would kind of sit on.

00:04:19 Tom Sachs: But Duchamp also made sculptures. This is like a pussy mold or an ass crack. This is the inside the negative space. You even saw later, people like Bruce Nauman making negative space sculptures.

00:04:35 Tom Sachs: Here’s some more. Here’s some more pussy crack sculptures and these really great potholders. That’s a boy potholder, and that’s a girl Potholder.

00:04:48 Tom Sachs: This is a famous Duchamp. This is like a print of a nude descending staircase. Kind of like the first you know Proto Cubist Thing. Picasso made that famous, but Duchamp invented it.

00:05:03 Tom Sachs: Duchamp is also a chess player, so he made this first little iPad chess chess set. So you could travel and play chess.

00:05:17 Tom Sachs: Here some more Brâncuși’s. Oh, this is probably a cool thing. This is Duchamp also made a suitcase of all of his favourite valise of all of his most famous and important sculptures. Like you can even say there, that’s the urinal, the fountain that he displayed at the Armory in 1918.

00:05:38 Tom Sachs: Anyway, there’s a lot more to say about Marcel Duchamp and Constantin Brâncuși, but I would encourage you to check ‘em all out at Paul Kasmin Gallery. While you can between now and Christmas, keep your dick on the ice.