222THIS IS NOT A HORSEAESTHETIC INDIFFERENCE AND ANIMAL SKINIn The Return of the Real, Hal Foster contextualizes the influence of the
Duchampian readymade through the second postwar period as a new
contestation of bourgeois principles and values.^1 This anticonformist spirit
drove artists to conceive new materialities as political agents. It is in this
context that Jasper Johns’s two bronze Ballantine Ale cans titled Painted
Bronze (1960) and Rauschenberg’s Monogram (1959), in different ways,
paved the way for the emergence of animal bodies in the art of the time.
In fact, these examples can be adopted as representatives of the two main
strands of “commodity-based-sculpture” produced in the postwar period
in the west.^2 Painted Bronze and Monogram problematize Duchamp’s
paradigm of the readymade through an incorporation of a surrealist-
object-assemblage aesthetic. Johns’s Painted Bronze ostensibly relies on
the polished and painted metal surface for the purpose of ontologically
derailing the high art/commodity dichotomy already questioned by the
Duchampian readymade. The other, Monogram, incorporates rough ma-
terialities that deliberately blur the boundaries between natural, man-made,
and machine-made, thus embedding a critique of realism through the
economies of the assemblage. Both categories, in different ways, refused
the minimalist level of intervention typically performed by Duchamp. And
in both cases they transcended the paradigm of aesthetic indifference that
Duchamp championed. Practicing the “beauty of indifference” was Duch-
amp’s essential form of restraint in the production of readymades.^3 Ta s te
constituted the root of the bourgeois aesthetic that Duchamp discredited—
hence his predilection for the mechanical, cold, enigmatic, irreverent, and
minimalist presence of the seemingly culturally irrelevant, mass-produced
object of the modern age.
Duchamp’s disinterestedness essentially derived from the Kantian no-
tion of aesthetic disinterest as a preponderant attitude toward the object
for the purpose of refining the task of aesthetic analysis. Kantian disin-
terestedness was grounded in indifference toward the physical, material
existence of the object. Thus, popular aesthetics represented a form of
barbarism because of the centrality played in judgment by ethical stan-
dards or by the senses.^4 Duchamp’s aim was, therefore, to challenge the
beholder to exercise the disinterested contemplation of pure aesthetics.