Can artists create art by doing sod all? That’s the question raised in my latest piece for the Guardian‘s website:

“…Jouannais believes that the attempt at an art-life merger, which so preoccupied the avant garde of the 20th century, originated with Walter Pater‘s contention that experience, not “the fruit of experience”, was an end in itself. Oscar Wilde’s nephew, the fabled pugilist poet Arthur Cravan, who kick-started the dada revolution with Francis Picabia before disappearing off the coast of Mexico – embodied (along with Jacques Vaché or Neal Cassady) this mutation. Turning one’s existence into poetry was now where it was at. ‘I like living, breathing better than working,’ Marcel Duchamp famously declared. ‘My art is that of living. Each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral; it’s a sort of constant euphoria.'”

More here.