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MODERNISM DECONSTRUCTED
Duchamp
The readymade.
Readymade: Wheel, 1913
(remade, original lost) | Fountain,
1917 (remade, original lost) | Fountain
Exhibition Scandal and Readymades
from:
http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/visualarts/Duchamp-texts.html
The Richard Mutt Case, Beatrice Wood, H.P. Roché and/or
Marcel Duchamp [The Blind Man 2 (May 1917)].
They say any artist paying six dollars may exhibit.
Mr. Richard Mutt sent in a fountain, Without discussion this article disappeared and was never exhibited.
What were the grounds for refusing Mr. Mutt's fountain:-
1. Some contend it was immoral, vulgar.
2. Others, it was plagiarism, a plain piece of plumbing.
Now Mr. Mutt's fountain is not immoral, that is absurd, no more than a bath tub is immoral. It is a fixture that you see every day in plumbers' show windows.
Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under new title and point of view-created a new thought for that object.
As for plumbing, that is absurd. The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges.
Apropos of "Ready-mades", Marcel Duchamp
[talk delivered at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 19, 1961.]
In 1913 I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn. In New York in 1915 I bought at a hardware store a snow shovel on which I wrote: "In advance of the broken arm." It was at that time that the word "ready-made" came to mind to designate this form of manifestation.
A point which I want very much to establish is that the choice of these "ready-mades" was never dictated by esthetic delectation. This choice was based on a reaction of visual indifference with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste ... in fact a complete anesthesia.
One important characteristic was the short sentence which I occasionally inscribed on the "ready-made." That sentence, instead of describing the object like a title, was meant to carry the mind of the spectator towards other regions more verbal.
Sometimes I would add a graphic detail of presentation which, in order to
satisfy my craving for alliterations, would be called "ready-made aided." At
another time, wanting to expose the basic antimony between art and ready-mades
I imagined a "reciprocal ready-made": use a Rembrandt as an ironing
board!
I realized very soon the danger of repeating indiscriminately this form of
expression and decided to limit the production of "ready-mades" to
a small number yearly. I was aware at that time, that for the spectator even
more than for the artist, art is a habit forming drug and I wanted to protect
my "ready-mades" against such contamination.
Another aspect of the "ready-made" it its lack of uniqueness ... the replica of a "ready-made" delivering the same message; in fact nearly every one of the "ready-mades" existing today is not an original in the conventional sense.
A final remark to this egomaniac's discourse: Since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured and ready made products we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are "ready-mades aided" and also works of assemblage.
Magritte
This is Not a Pipe,1929
