Marcel Duchamp Overview

With so much ado about his urinals and wheels, it's easy to forget that Marcel Duchamp was also an exceptional painter. But Duchamp rejected painting. He rejected, that is, his talent. The fact that an exceptional painter rejected painting -- and... [more]

With so much ado about his urinals and wheels, it's easy to forget that Marcel Duchamp was also an exceptional painter. But Duchamp rejected painting. He rejected, that is, his talent. The fact that an exceptional painter rejected painting -- and ultimately may even have rejected art -- is precisely what lends Duchamp's work its disconcerting gravity. Philistines regularly deny the value of Conceptual Art works that come from the hands of those with no talent for making beautiful objects. But what about an artist with exquisite aesthetic sense who nevertheless mocked the cult of aesthetics? Such was the case of Duchamp. Duchamp began his career as a Cubist but was uncomfortable with the genre. His paintings from this period -- "Nude Descending a Staircase" (1912), "The King and Queen Traversed by Swift Nudes" (1912), and "The Passage from Virgin to Bride" (1912) -- are masterful examples of Cubist art. However, Duchamp was deeply suspicious of the movement: he considered it too fixated on dubious formalism, too precious and dear. Cubism was becoming a technique and a movement, and if one thing remained consistent throughout Duchamp's career, it was his hatred of contrived consistency, of art movements turning inwards towards themselves and becoming complacent about their reason for being. Duchamp was always up to more than formal experimentation. Though his paintings brought the human form back into Cubism (which had more or less done away with the body), the re-introduction was arrantly perverse. Duchamp's humans resemble machines; more precisely, they resemble machines with fantastical, completely distorted sexual anatomies. Duchamp named these mechanisms -- geared for lumbering, piston-driven sex -- after the archetypes of chastity and purity: they're called "virgins" and "brides." He brought the human form back into Cubism in order to mock it more thoroughly than ever. These works ended his painting career. He must have sensed that his parody was not complete. In order to succeed, parody would ultimately have to do away with its aspirations toward beauty. No matter how perverse, Duchamp's paintings betrayed too much formal mastery to carry out their ultimate purpose: to mock the humanist conception of art. Hence, the ready-mades. In 1913, Duchamp mounted a bicycle wheel atop a kitchen stool and called it art. He also inscribed the words "in advance of the broken arm" on a snow shovel, and this too he called art. He purchased a cheap reproduction of a landscape painting, applied two conspicuously large and colorful dots -- voilà, more art. But they were also a scandal. One of the world's most prominent artists was rejecting everything that had previously qualified as art. And then, in 1917, Duchamp apotheosized his own perversion: to the New York Society of Independent Artists he submitted a urinal entitled "Fountain." An irreverent act of apocalyptic proportions. Was Duchamp attempting to hasten art's end? Was he ridiculing the entire tradition? Perhaps the act was not wholly negative. Duchamp's goal was to shift emphasis from the final product to the artist's intentions -- that is, to transform art into ideas-about-art. And not simply aesthetic ideas but critical ideas: ideas that interrogated the institution and its narrow definitions. The urinal itself was not interesting, only Duchamp's irreverent gesture. And the fact that such a gesture did indeed qualify as art is precisely what made it momentous. It marked the inception of self-reflexive art. Perhaps this act could only have been made by an artist like Duchamp, an artist cynical and reckless enough to reject his own talent, to shun the institution that nevertheless welcomed him. Conceptual art was born in this gesture, and continues to breathe its purified, puritanical air. [show less]