DLC Blog

DADA part two: Marcel Duchamp

Corbis Image of Marcel Duchamp

Everyone who hates art, or what art has come to symbolize in ‘modern society’ today and in history can look to Marcel Duchamp. This of course, is a contradictory statement that Duchamp would not approve of. His questions and art—from his submission of a bicycle wheel as an art piece (which is currently at the MOMA in New York), to his Mona Lisa with a moustache, and the cubist, “Nude Descending a Staircase,” Duchamp’s works are varied, layered, complicated, touching yet humorous. Though he was considered a successful artist, he continually dismissed the creations of artworks, and the glory that they received as being ‘retinal arts,’ or art for the eye, for aesthetic pleasure. He instead focused on ‘ready-made’ objects—Objects, such as the urinal or the bicycle wheel that were declared works of art because the artist has said so. Do you believe this?

Corbis Image of Marcel Duchamp

His theories on art are some of the most important yet mysterious aspects of modern art. In December 2004, BBC reported that a poll of 500 art experts declared Duchamp’s “Fountain,” to be the most influential modern art work of all time. One of Picasso’s pieces came in second, with Warhol at third. The gesture confused and angered a lot of critics and citizens, and perhaps contradicts the ‘non-aesthetic’ aesthetic that Duchamp was working with. At the same time, it does say something about modern (and contemporary) art and what it has come to represent—confusing, conceptual, and at a lot of times, pretty ugly to look at.

Duchamp associated himself with the art movement Dada in New York. However, as fun and absurd as the Dadaist art and artists like Marcel Duchamp were, they were also asking some difficult questions. What makes the artists, the name of the artists or the work? How did ‘art’ become so heavily controlled by the ‘upper’ classes of society, strung to walls and galleries? Who is controlling the art? Who is the artist? How is art to function in a world filled with war and violence (as they were experiencing at the time)? These questions are not light, and they do not exist to validate Duchamp’s bicycle wheel or chess obsession. It seems to add layers and mirrors to the artist, the movement, and the works.

Fountain
1917, 1964
Image courtesy of the Tate Museum

Bicycle Wheel
1913 and 1951,
Image courtesy of Museum of Modern Art

Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 1)
Image courtesy of Philadelphia Museum of Art

Posted by Angela at October 19, 2006 05:28 PM in Humanities.