Word: duchamps
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...Marcel Duchamp, who died in 1968 at the age of 81, is universally acknowledged as a founder of modern art. But then, had he died in 1923 at the age of 36 he would also have been universally acknowledged as a founder of modern art. The difference between the oeuvre of the young man and the old is one, and only one, major piece...
What happened in those intervening years? Neglect? Young artists constantly acknowledged their debt to the aging experimentalist. A new career? The master had no other interests save a lifelong fascination with the game of chess. No, it is simply that Marcel Duchamp was secretly working on an indecipherable masterpiece: Marcel Duchamp. That is the only important work missing from the Philadelphia Museum's exhaustive reclamation project, "Marcel Duchamp: A Retrospective Exhibition...
...exhibition forever annihilates the notion of Duchamp as enfant terrible breaking windows in the temple of art. From the beginning, Marcel, the son of an haul bourgeois notary in Rouen, was recognized as a prodigy. At 17 he joined his brothers in Paris to study art; in a 1904 work his technique already reveals a mature painter under the heavy, almost suffocating influence of the past. Even The Chess Players (1911) bears the shadow of Cezanne in its formal palette and in the calculated arrangement of figures. The rebel remains disguised in traditional tones−or in the Fauvists...
...Duchamp's outspoken "since the tubes of paint used by artists are manufactured and ready-made, we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are ready-mades" was informed by a legitimate, felt purpose. He opposed Reality, ready-made, to art, Venus de Milo. And with the same stroke he sought to administer a purgative to a society riddled with lies for which he found a shameful counterpart in the Mona Lisa with a moustache. He generated an atmosphere of uncertainty intended to liberate the relevance of art. What has grown in the gap left by Dada...
DOUBTLESS much of what was featured at the Whitney was undertaken in the spirit of passionate commitment to art and its future. But no one has any way of knowing that for sure. When Duchamp declared nothingness he sought to free art from the conventions and limitations that had burdened it for so long. He sought to dispell altogether the illusion of art. And if Duchamp's nihilistic assertions had been listened to the whole idea of art would long be abandoned. The idea, that is, of art as something separate from life roped off in a realm...