This project stages an improbable encounter between two seemingly incompatible worlds: the rarefied canon of 20th-century avant-garde and the pragmatic, tool-scarred hands of Gabriola Island welders and handymen. In their inventive and irreverent assemblages, these local makers reimagine seminal works—Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase or The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, using the humble detritus of rural life: worn fence posts, salvaged plywood, rusted hinges, bent screws, chainsaws that no longer cut, pulleys, washers, fishing line, belt sanders, and bolts.

These are not imitations, nor are they parodies. They are acts of radical appropriation—rural counter-readings of an art history long thought to belong elsewhere. In repurposing the gestures and geometries of Cubism, Futurism, and Dada through the materials of the workshop, shed, and scrapyard, these works force a revaluation of both art and labor. They pose a provocative question: What does it mean to reconstruct the avant-garde, not in the salon, the studio loft, or the museum, but in the backyard, the woodshed, or under a tarp next to a partially dismantled carburetor? 

Interestingly, these are also collective artworks rather than the labour of a single artist, artisan or, to follow the implied hierarchy to its bottom rung,  handyman. As such, they are anonymous works, the labour of a group of friends, a club, a secret cabal. The only known attribution, to the six extant ‘versions’, ( if such a term can be meaningfully applied ) of ‘The Bride Stripped bare by her Bachelors, Even’, made by a neighbour, claims authorship by the ‘Southern End Welder’s Group’; an entity documented nowhere else. Is it a ruse, a private jest, a silent protest? 

Historically, the avant-garde positioned itself as a break with bourgeois decorum, a leap into the unknown. Yet its legacy became institutionalized, ossified into theory-laden exhibitions and elite markets. By contrast, the Gabriola handymen reclaim that spirit of rupture not by quoting the avant-garde but by physically rebuilding it—cutting, welding, fastening it into their world, on their terms. Their works are clunky, sturdy, improvised; they are beautiful not in spite of but because of their idiosyncratic fidelity to making-do.

This practice cannot be divorced from place. Rurality is not a backdrop—it is a logic. The materials themselves carry the embedded narratives of the island: broken tools used to mend fences, scrap wood from collapsed docks, coils of wire once used to hold together the practical fictions of day-to-day living. Assembled into abstract figures and philosophical machines, these objects enter into a new economy of meaning. They become speculative devices: what Deleuze might call machines désirantes, or what Manuel De Landa terms part of the machinic phylum—a non-organic life of matter and form in continuous recombination. Here, tools and fragments assert their own material histories; they evolve not only as art, but as nodes in a larger flow of forces—thermodynamic, territorial, affective.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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But a work like Duchamp's 'The Bride stripped bare by her Bachelors, Even' is the result of a decades-long, painstaking development of both psychological and material hermeneutics, likely either out of reach or out of grasp for the ‘Southern End Welder’s Group’. What, then, are these devices a [re]construction of? A mere misunderstanding, a crude approximation based on a handful of formal cues?  Their sheer physical authority seems to suggest otherwise — these are not replicas, nor mere quotes; they dissolve the solipsistic aspect of then ‘original’ work by distributing it, both formally and thus hermeneutically. ‘We’, they seems to say, ‘are all bachelors’ — a speculative statement not without resonance in the conditions of single males in a rural environment.

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In this way, The [Re]assembled Avant-Garde is not a nostalgic exercise or a quirky footnote. It is a genuine act of cultural reinvention. It affirms that the avant-garde is not the property of cities or capital, but a mobile language—one that can be spoken even in the most unassuming of places and dissolve the bourgeois 'uniqueness' of the original into the ontological shimmer of a multiple, both undermining and exaggerating its authority.

What these Gabriola makers offer is not just homage but a kind of quiet insurrection: a declaration that art can be made from what’s at hand, that modernism is not over, and that every bolt screwed into a cracked two-by-four may carry with it a refusal—not of history, but of exclusion. In that refusal lives what Agamben calls the messianic remnant—a fragment of time suspended, neither redeemed nor lost, but insistently alive. These works speak from that suspended space, bearing witness to a form of life and art that remains ungoverned, unfinished, and, most importantly, even now, still to come.