Author Description

"Fortunate Objects" places the well-worn Duchampian readymade within a fresh international context. Published to coincide with the eponymous early-2008 exhibition at Miami's Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, which was founded in 2002 to support challenging emerging and mid-career contemporary artists from Latin America, it includes works in many media by artists from around the globe--as long as their work illustrates one of three themes: the Appropriated Object, the Surrogate Object or the Object Utilized. One "appropriated object" is Ai Weiwei's 2003 "Forever Bicycles," a mass of bikes, each attached to its neighbor's wheel, that form a near-perfect circle, serving as an update of Duchamp's groundbreaking "Bicycle Wheel" of 1913. "Fortunate Objects" showcases works by artists less known in the U.S., like Argentinean Marcela Astorga, Venezuelan Jose Antonio-Hernandez-Diez and Panama-based Donna Conlon, alongside international figures like Olafur Elliason, Gabriel Orozco, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Mona Hatoum and Damien Hirst, demonstrating that "readymade" translates differently, depending on the language in which it's said.