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Now it is safe to say that modernist avant-gard ism could not be typified by its stress on continuity. What characterises its transgressive sensibility is a sense of distinctiveness, of disruption, of not being bound to received values-Duchamp, the so-called anti –aesthetic prophet, continually affirmed this key modernist principle. Nixon lies in the odd position of formulating an adherence to a modernist tradition- and thus to continuity and repetition rather than progress and innovation (key modernist values!). Modernism, which defines itself in terms of its critical departure from tradition, in turn sets up its own legacy- which an artist can now follow and further-and yet to follow modernism as a tradition is simultaneously to distance oneself from its core values.
3. The 'monochrome and the readymade are the two strongest points in the theory' of twentieth century art, Nixon declares, because they mark the transition from 'practice as skill' to 'practice as choice (or nomination)'. 9 What complicates Nixon's ideal trajectory, according to Butler, is that the monochrome can be taken as the emblem of a rigorous, self-referential scrutiny of painting 's formal autonomy- the self-sufficient statement by art of its own means- and, conversely, the readymade is the exemplar of how the extra-artistic inhabits definitions of art. Hence Butler questions how Nixon can run together 'the "aesthetic" of Constructivism and the monochromes with the "anti-aesthetic" of the readymades' _IO Yet, he also follows this up by arguing that Nixon's art is not experimental because 'to put the monochrome and the readymade together' is 'surely de facto the state of all painting since Aleksandr Rodchenko and Duchamp'. This combination thus not only proves feasible, but it has become a... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline