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footnotes

Onanism in the Feminine

Ann Finegan
Eyeline 77
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Video projection one: a pair of decidedly feminine feet rapidly and lightly trill up and down a staircase, the toenails painted a tarty red. What catches your attention are the single letters flashing by, a letter on each foot, spelling out the word, ‘onism’. You cannot miss the Duchamp references—the trilling feet, the spiral staircase, directly recalling his Nude Descending a Staircase in which all you see, in spite of the provocative title, are the legs. In this recent video installation Eugenia Raskopoulos gives you less, only the feet, but offers the toenail polish as a bonus reference to Duchamp in drag, Duchamp, in the feminine, as Rrose Sélavy.

Further, if Raskopoulos skips a direct hit on the sexuality of Duchamp’s chocolate grinders in The Large Glass, she gives you the weak pun of ‘onism’: art in Duchamp’s period of the early twentieth century was a progression through the various ‘isms’ (Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism, Fauvism, Modernism, all the way to Malapropism). She is poking gentle fun at the on-ism (always on, onto the next thing, ‘on’ as a permutation of the ‘in’ thing or the ‘it’ girl) as a form of onanism, the tendency of art to get carried away with itself. Duchamp was the arch prankster, his legacy a series of pranks and gags, pure cheek, like putting that moustache on the Mona Lisa, or exhibiting the form of a urinal by turning it on its side so that it became a sculpture. Then, having garnered all the attention, he retired to play chess. He swapped one rule of play for another. In that gesture he put art in its place, not letting it ever get too serious... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Eugenia Raskopoulos, footnotes, 2011. Still. Courtesy the artist, William Wright // Artists’ Projects, Sydney and Arc One Gallery, Melbourne.

Eugenia Raskopoulos, footnotes, 2011. Still. Courtesy the artist, William Wright // Artists’ Projects, Sydney and Arc One Gallery, Melbourne.

Eugenia Raskopoulos, footnotes, 2011. Still. Courtesy the artist, William Wright // Artists’ Projects, Sydney and Arc One Gallery, Melbourne.

Eugenia Raskopoulos, footnotes, 2011. Still. Courtesy the artist, William Wright // Artists’ Projects, Sydney and Arc One Gallery, Melbourne.