All you need is love

 “A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.” – John Lennon

In the beginning there was Marcel Duchamp. And Duchamp said, “Let there be a readymade.” And so he assisted the readymade on its journey to becoming an artwork. He took something from “real life” and he placed it into the “plastic arts” by simply choosing and naming it. Along came a young Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg and the readymade assisted their projects and activity of incorporating and “combining” life and art. Andy Warhol made seamless and visibly invisible the perfect blend of the mechanized inartistic readymade and the authentic plastic gesture in his artfully sloppy silkscreen paintings and intentionally flawed films and screen tests.

A man thought for some duration and then went for a walk. Prophets did it. Wise men and not so wise men did it. Writers of philosophy, poetry and haiku went for a stroll. A politician or two presumably took a few steps. And artists from Vito Acconci to Francis Alÿs performed walking as an action to subvert with measured intervention. Many found that it was the “searching” itself instead of the “finding” that was most significant as in “the journey is the destination.” “I must go forth, out there and find and face the meaning of things,” and in so doing, meaning is created in the path of such a righteous exercise and pilgrimage.

Gene Schmidt is on a journey and he has a readymade to assist him on his path. I admire the conversational style and tone of his practice and I like the honesty and clarity that comes through in describing and performing the thin line that we walk in our work and in our life. I also respect the proletariat aspect of fulfilling the artwork as we do in life every day through the accomplishment of necessary and unnecessary tasks and responsibilities. Artists and laypeople alike make culture out of the mundane every day. Making sense out of what appears meaningless. Connecting the unseen dots of what lay waiting, previously unnoticed before our very eyes. This is the mantra of our lives.

Above this is the game of chance and interaction we perform “in the world” while we play the meaning of our work and life over and over in our head. What happens is what we find during the process of working and living The artwork as we discover and define it must have a life of its own. This is what happens when the artist does his or her job. Art becomes a part of life as living culture. If our work and life elevates beyond the specific and topical to the universal in all truths, then we are truly engaged in something significant and worthy. We have walked far enough to create a new pathway and to stumble on truth as an assisted readymade.

--Eric Magnuson is an artist who lives and works in Brooklyn.