Re-do the Du!

Unlike Grandma's pearls, those that fill the cache of art history can, and regularly should be, replaced. The repeated pawning of seminal gestures perpetuates the value of their originals and the virility of their legacies. Thus the tradition of the readymade transplanted to the internet re-seeds the disjunctive potential of Duchamp's creations, but in projects that are more easily reblogged. For their current online exhibition, 'The New Readymades,' UK net art collective low-fi has selected eight net-based works by some of the masters of creative copy-and-paste, each of which investigates the effects of artistic replacements. Substituting human performers with computers (MTAA's '1 year performance video' and Darrel O'Pry's 'On Kawara Generator'), the appropriate owner of a website with an appropriator of the same website (Vuk Cosic's 'Documenta X'), or authentic net.art technologies with a Blogger.com diary (Abe Linkoln's 'My Boyfriend Came Back from the War'), these projects engage the online manifestation of the readymade as a migration that revitalizes the transformational potential of out of place art. - Kevin McGarry