In the eighty years since Marcel Duchamp drew a moustache on a copy of
the Mona Lisa, the dissolving of cultural forms has intensified to the
point that there is no longer an absolute, a proper form, anywhere. This
generalized breakdown is evident in social and moral codes, in gender
distinctions and personal relationships, in politics and economics, in
literature, music, dance, painting, and architecture, in our concepts of
reality itself.
Is there any sense to be made of this seeming chaos? And if so, can any
single theory adequately account for all aspects of the phenomenon?
Physicists and mathematicians have informed us that reality is
irreducibly complex and plural, unable to be exhausted by any one system
of description. Following their lead, Mary Settegast has explored
several different ways of looking at the reality of dissolving forms,
seeing it as the result of global consumer capitalism/ environmental
deterioration/ the end of a cycle of time/ the beginning of a new cycle/
a shift in the evolution of human consciousness/ and finally, seeing the
dissolution of form as a cause for celebration.
Each of these six perspectives is theoretically correct in its ability
to explain the breakdown, and each can be supported by the work of
twentiethcentury artists. Readers are asked to forego the impulse to
choose which view they believe to be true and encouraged instead to
practice the simultaneous holding of multiple perspectives: Like the
Cubist painters of the early twentieth century, who were among the first
to recognize the error in a single point of view, we will be trying in
these pages to portray our subject from all sides in hopes of capturing
it whole.
