LET US TRAVEL BACK IN TIME, let us travel back to 1917, one hundred years ago, our destination New York, a city already enroute to being the perfect fusion of crude, rude, American can-do capitalism and European savoir-faire.  Electric lights, automobiles, skyscrapers all compete for novelty and excitement in the public mind, while the atavistic drumbeat of an overseas war quickens the pulse.  New York is becoming the prototypical modern city, it is in the act of replacing the old world as the pre-eminent face of Modernity, in all of its native vitality and vulgarity.  The Jazz Age beckons, a few short years hence.

New York in 1917 is also home to one of the curiouser off-shoots of one of the most curious of art movements, to whit, New York Dada, so much more sophisticated and humorous than its European counterparts.  This has everything to do with the sophisticated and humorous figure at its epicenter, Marcel Duchamp.  Duchamp, formerly a minor Cubist who caused a splash at the 1913 Armory Show by exhibiting, “Nude Descending a Staircase,” now offers for our consideration “Fountain,” a monumentally enigmatic object; decades in the future, “Fountain” will begin to appear on lists as the most influential artwork of the 20th Century.

In celebration of the 100th anniversary of “Fountain,” the Branner Spangenberg Gallery is organizing “Found Object/Readymade.”  All works made with minimal intervention by the exhibiting artist will be shown, subject to available space.  Photographs of found objects are welcome as well.  Four artists from this show will be chosen for a 4-person exhibition in 2018.

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