Abstract

Was it a Madonna, a “cross between a Buddha and a veiled woman,” an erect penis, or nothing more than an autographed upside-down urinal? And what was it trying to say? Regardless of whether the artist was a baroness whose identity was concealed because she was a woman or because the French-American painter, R. Mutt, whose name it bears was relatively unknown, Duchamp’s “Fountain”—bizarre or brilliant depending on your point of view—has profoundly impacted the evolution of art. This seminal expression of what Duchamp coined “readymade” art paved the way for the use of everyday objects, and in turn, unusable and discarded material in artworks. This article focuses on art created from the two latter forms: those artefacts and materials that fell out of use through redundancy or retirement, or those that were willfully or accidentally discarded. It argues that rhetoric can be non-verbal and that visual texts and art objects have the same rhetorical components of ethos, logos and pathos to make a statement, argument, or call to action in the same way verbal rhetoric does. It speaks of art that revivifies and returns objects to the systemic record and injects beauty where none existed before. It also tells of other art that lacks aesthetic value, like the “anti-retinal” art spoken of by Gleizes and Metzinger, and in turn Marcel Duchamp. It is the art that is rhetorical, art that in itself has something to say of society and to society: anti-retinal art that unambiguously and unapologetically carries messages, meaning, exclamations and commands.