Hidden content #1: interdicted expression. The ‘unseen’ haunted by the spectre of ‘censorship’ (state, commercial, professional …). An external authority intervenes to prevent an art object or a media text from coming into public view, generating concern and outrage from those committed to freedom of expression … be it artistic, political, or even academic. In that sense, the decision by the Society of Independent Artists (for example) to withdraw Duchamp’s ‘scandalous’ Fountain from its 1917 exhibit would count as just one in a long line of instances of cultural censorship. Certainly, Duchamp himself was sufficiently pissed off at the Society’s decision to hide his work that he resigned in protest from its board—a fact which begs the question (albeit not for the first time; see Gammel, Baroness, 222-6, for a discussion of Fountain’s ‘mysterious authorship’) of whether the work of art known as Duchamp’s Fountain is really Duchamp’s at all, given that, in this inaugural issue of Ctrl-Z at least, its status as a work of art is owed partly to the fact of its having never been exhibited.
Ctrl-Z: New Media Philosophy
ISSN 2200-8616