Word: duchamps
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...work went on display in London last week, setting off the usual firestorm of controversy over what constitutes art. (British Culture Minister Kim Howells dismissed the nominations as "conceptual bullshit.") Well, now the French have a prize that's designed to start the same kind of arguments. The Marcel Duchamp Prize, named after the father of Conceptualism, aims to do for French contemporary art what the Turner has done for the British. As this year's winner, Gonzalez-Foerster must be hoping to generate the buzz that Damien Hirst and Rachel Whiteread got from their Turners. The French prize, first...
...fully private initiative, with a short list compiled from the nominations of over 100 individual art collectors and an international jury selecting the final winner, the Marcel Duchamp Prize is a rarity in France's state-dominated cultural landscape. For although the country is home to some of the world's best-known museums, it is often regarded as an also-ran in the contemporary art world. "Contemporary creation in France still isn't getting the international recognition it deserves," says Jennifer Flay, a Paris gallery owner...
...first to recognize his value were the Dadaists. "In Klee's beautiful work," declared one of them, Marcel Janco, "we saw the reflection of all our efforts to interpret the soul of primitive man, to plunge into the unconscious and the instinctive power of creation." Even Marcel Duchamp, the least voluble of artists, admired the "extreme fecundity" of Klee--images begetting other images like horny little microbes in a Petri dish. His inspired doodling was morphed by the Surrealists, especially Max Ernst and Andre Masson, into what they called "automatism." His striped landscapes and magic-square paintings connect to Constructivism...
Gilles Aillaud, Eduardo Arroyo and Antonio Recalcati, members of the Narrative Figuration school, created a sequence of paintings in 1965 by projecting photographs onto canvas. They show the "assassination" of artist Marcel Duchamp, who they considered had sold out by, among other things, moving to the U.S. To Live or Let Die, or The Tragic End of Marcel Duchamp includes faithful copies of his works. His assassins, ordinary fellows in jackets and ties who could be paper-clip salesmen, smoke while the artist slumps unconscious in a chair...
...Duchamp was the joker in the pack. You can see some of his witty and enigmatic works here, including his famous improved version of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa (with added moustache and goatee), on loan from the French Communist Party. A theme that runs through the show is the way artistic and social revolutions were born in smoky bars. The Surrealists and Dadaists made each other laugh with assemblages of popular art and everyday artifacts-their productions often look like in-jokes. That's why the R.A. has mounted them in a model of a Paris public urinal...