It’s almost a century since Marcel Duchamp designated a urinal as sculpture. Whither the readymade now? That’s the question implicitly asked by ‘Objet Dada’, a compact analysis of current manoeuvres vis-à-vis found or everyday objects.
At its furthest stretch, one answer lies in Robert Lazzarini’s wall-mounted dial telephone: an antique object subjected to the artist’s signature computer-aided distension, collapsing past and present. The most modest move – launched in the 1960s by Dan Flavin’s own engagement with Duchamp – is George Henry Longly’s pair of crosses made from strip lights. In Longly’s hands, the readymade morphs, half-evading categorisation.
Livia Marin’s 23 porcelain reliefs are more tweaked surrealism than dada: each suggests a piece of tableware (cups, jugs, etc) that has melted, its pattern spreading into an amorphous pool. Michael DeLucia’s Racecar (2009) tops a blood-red wheelbarrow with its inverted identical twin, creating a clam-like form whose handles, angled together, look aerodynamic: the slowest and fastest of vehicles mapped on to each other.
Elsewhere a leitmotif of light flickers between Longly’s work, Darren Harvey-Regan’s photographs of lightbulbs and glows accompanied by real lightbulbs (Ceal Floyer meets Joseph Kosuth) and Benedetto Pietromarchi’s oversized bulbs housing intricate architectures of filament. It’s a slightly arbitrary spine, though: no real distraction from the impression that, here, the readymade feels both ineradicable and somewhat spent, and that these artworks might burn brighter if their conceptual heritage weren’t emphasised.