…is the name of of an exhibition on art and its audience currently at the Museum of Contemporary Art here in Chicago. Martin and I happened to go yesterday, which, lucky for us, meant we got to hear a lecture called “On the Creative Act (after Marcel Duchamp)” by Adelheid Mers, a Chicago-based visual artist who creates diagrammatic images about texts, in order to explore how people “attempt to make sense of contexts and scenarios, including through metaphor and other forms of visual and embodied reasoning.” Here are the diagrams she used to propose an alternative to Duchamp’s (and thousands of years of myth and history’s) idea of “Creativity as a Mysterious Process”–which is hierarchical, exclusionary, and frustratingly gendered–in the form of an idea of “Creativity as a Transparent Process”–which is open, generous, and egalitarian:
It rocked our brains. Thanks, Adelheid.