ABSTRACT
Like many B-effect theorists, the Italian semiotician and novelist Umberto Eco identifies the avant-garde tradition with the modernist era and suggests that both come to a standstill in the postmodern period. More specifically, Eco’s Reflections on “The Name of the Rose” (1983) argues that the modernist/avantgarde impulse reaches a point where it produces “a metalanguage that speaks of impossible texts (conceptual art)” and therefore “can go no further.”1 It is certainly the case that the masterpieces of postmodern conceptual art, such as Piero Manzoni’s signed lines, signed living sculptures and signed tins of Artist’s Shit extend the definition of art so democratically and so dramatically that any further progress-or regress-seems impossible.2 But it is equally evident that the same entropic conceptual impulse erupts within the modernist era, particularly in the notorious “silence of Marcel Duchamp.”
