Random Acts of Art

There’s a reason Marcel Duchamp was a door opener of the first order and continues influencing creative types a century after he first left his imprint on art history. Consider his 3 Standard Stoppages (1913-1914), which helped usher in the end of painting as a craft and its revival as an idea for many artists. In the work, Duchamp reconsidered the notion of the metric system as an intellectual construct rather than a universal absolute. He created his seminal piece by dropping three threads, each a meter long, from the height of one meter on three separate canvases, preserving the fallen string’s curved profiles upon landing to suggest new units of measure. Since then, the conceptual titan’s random gesture has been an inspiration to the avant-garde, many of whom continue to employ elements of the random in their work today. “I welcome the possibility of chance, knowing [that] atoms, without their collision, nature would never have created anything,” says Miami’s Sinisa Kukec, who often employs the ineffable quality of the random in his practice. This Tuesday from 7 to 8:30 p.m., Kukec will be joined by the Bass Museum of Art’s Bryan Granger for “As It Pleases: A Century of Chance and Indeterminacy in Art,” part of Locus Projects’ series of roundtable art talks discussing the nature of contemporary art and its complexities. “I react to her [nature] as a translator of the human mythos… through the reverie of materials and poetics,” adds Kukec, who will help decipher Duchamp’s enduring legacy.
Tue., Sept. 3, 7 p.m., 2013