Garden of Wandering and the Exodus

"In any case, everything is replanted and grafted." -- NB

In the final section of The Radicant, French curator and art critic Nicolas Bourriaud makes the point that recycling the vast storehouse of forms is what we are left with, that Duchamp's invention of the "readymade" (1913) was a "tipping point in the history of art." Quoting Duchamp he writes:

"When you make an ordinary painting," he explains, "there is always a choice: you choose your colors, you choose your canvas, you choose your subject, you choose everything. There isn't any art: it is a choice, essentially. There [with the readymade],  it's the same thing.It is a choice of object."

Duchamp pointed toward art as rearranging and transporting what already exists. Not to make more.  And Bourriaud envisions an exodus urging the collective to consider "inventing a common world, of realizing, practically and theoretically, a global space of exchange." Whether this exchange will give birth to a monster, a new master narrative or paradise, we can not imagine. Thus chanted The Residents: We are simple, you are simple, life is simple too.