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Wet: on painting, feminism, and art culture MIRA SCHOR, 1997 Durham & London, Duke University Press 362 pp., 0 8223 1910 1, hb L47.50; 0 8223 1915 2, pb L14.95 'It's all so oedipal, isn't it?' Helen Chadwick groaned into my ear. We were at a conference in the Clore listening to the Chapman Bros. up on the podium discoursing enthusiastically about the theoretical position of their art practice (most recently, `Zygotic Acceleration, Biogenetic, Desublimated Libidinal Model': the child-size plastic mannequins with unusually located genitals). And very knowledgeable they were, too. Their professional sweep from Baudrillard to Deleuze was truly admirable.
Much art of this century is oedipal. Ever since Duchamp, in somewhat Platonic mode, effectively dismissed representation in favour of conceptualisation during the First World War, this big daddy has so firmly occupied the throne of art theory and practice that every aspiring artist, in this Freudian century, has had to take a swipe at out-Duchamping him. The recipe for attempting this is the use of irony and distanciation. This kind of conceptual work has dominated British art schools for the last 15 years, so that skills in negotiating material processes have been vanquished by theoretical skills. At least the...