I produced this piece after visiting the High Line in New York city. There was a view of a building under construction with a beautiful orange netting wrapped around some floors and a purple one on top. In the foreground, there was a low-lying grey structure and a billboard with a sky blue background. In the piece, you’ll notice I didn’t break up the original pattern of colours because their effect was stronger together than apart.
I added drawings of things we saw on the High Line and from the Whitney Museum where our walk ended. I included a reference to Marcel Duchamp’s urinal because I’d been thinking about it on the trip. Duchamp’s statement bothered me. There’s a famous story about Robert Rauschenberg sending a submission to an exhibition in the form of a telegram with the words “This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so.” It was Duchamp’s and Rauschenberg’s particular brand of arrogance, not the democratizing ideal of art, that made me hesitate.
That said, they were making an important political statement that opened a whole new experimental and exciting era in art. One can draw a direct line from Duchamp to Rauschenberg and to Warhol, post-modernism and contemporary art.
