In the new Modern Painters, sitting the same size as Duchamp’s “Fountain” is an image of the space that was occupied by a statue of Buddha for 2000 years. The article is about Duchamp’s reputation as an anti-artist and an iconoclast – the article is defending a stance that this is false. The article is fine, however the image of where the buddha was – is amazingly powerful. It’s effectively a picture of a hole in a wall. It has a serious amount of emotional baggage, for a hole.
Clearly this is a image that without knowledge of what I was seeing it would have made no difference – knowing what I was seeing carried the emotional punch that the unknown image would not have delivered.
But isn’t that punch what we are all looking for in images that really matter?
Photo from Modern Painters – Photograph by Paula Bronstein/GettyImages