The Present Work

Marcel Duchamp once said: “It all started with Gustave Courbet.” Should the avant garde of today pay for the mistakes of its inspirational predecessors? In The Present Work, movement and moment, Marcel Duchamp and Gustave Courbet, crows and poets, progress and chance, all toggle back and forth between each other, contesting history, primacy, ideas of beginning and ending. The continuum is broken, parts become autonomous. The moment is separate from all other moments—it drops out of the line, out of the set, out of the continuum. The Cast of Characters includes a Scrap of Paper, Definition, Back Home, Interjection, Martini, Synopsis, Transcript, unknown soldiers of poetry, and many more.