The manifesto is to the avant-garde what moss is to stone. It comes attached; There is almost no one without the other. In general, both artistic renewal movements of the early and middle last century are its originators. These texts were statements of principle, ars poetica, fundamental, authoritative, unique. These were collective statements, youth murderers and parricides. The father had to be “killed” from an aesthetic point of view.
Vivre et laisser mourir ou la fin tragique, by Marcel Duchamp (Live and let die or the tragic end of Marcel Duchamp), by Eduardo Arroyo (Spain, 1937-2018), Gilles Aillaud (France, 1928-2005) and Antonio Recalcati (Italy, 1938), the over 8 meter high polyptych in the Reina Sofía Museum participates in this type of reaction. It was created in 1965 and represents the death of Marcel Duchamp as a statement of principles of this group, which embodied a figurative alternative and the rejection of the paradigms of the historical avant-garde, already transformed into canonical languages.
They carry the cajon of the late father of the modern avant-garde Rauschenberg, Oldenburg, Martial Raysse, Warhol, Restany and Arman. In addition, several of the author’s works are represented in other pieces of this type of comics: The Great Glass, La Fontaine (the famous urinal) and Nude Descending a Staircase.
Authoritarians don’t like that
The practice of professional and critical journalism is a mainstay of democracy. That is why it bothers those who believe that they are the owners of the truth.
This “death” of Duchamp triggered a real scandal in French intellectual life in the 1960s: the Surrealist group signed a manifesto against the three authors of the painting. A paradox considering they did the same thing when it was time for them to kill to live (in art).
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