In the hands of Marcel Duchamp, a bicycle wheel, snow shovel and urinal became famous.
The French artist invented the idea of the “readymade:” taking an everyday object and, with few or no modifications, presenting it as a new artistic discovery.
Duchamp started in 1913 by affixing a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and amusing himself by watching it spin.
His snow shovel appeared at an exhibit in 1915 after Duchamp picked it up at a hardware store and wrote on it “In advance of the broken arm.” Duchamp’s most famous readymade is 1971’s “Fountain,” a detached urinal upon which he painted one of his pseudonyms, “R. Mutt.”
What does it all mean? The pieces, isolated from their function, can be amusing, troubling or completely bewildering. But according to Duchamp himself, we’re not supposed to feel anything in particular.
“The choice [to use certain objects as readymades] was based on a reaction of visual indifference with … a total absence of good or bad taste … in fact a complete anaesthesia,” Duchamp wrote in 1961.
Placed in an art context, Duchamp’s items could become saturated with irony, or completely meaningless. Critics often interpreted the lax nature of the art as exemplary of Duchamp’s alleged cultural nihilism and detachment from the world in general.
Regardless of what the works mean, Duchamp slowed down with his creation of readymades after only ten years.
“Art can be a habit forming drug,” he said, “and I wanted to save my readymades from such a contamination.”
Duchamp moved on to other mediums with a focus on painting. However, his name continues to be associated with readymades and the movements and artists it inspired, including Man Ray and the heavily ironic and nihilistic Dada movement of World War I.
–With files from the Washington Post
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