Why does Marcel Duchamp expand my understanding?

Marcel Duchamp provides me with a foundation in conceptual thinking, intellectual engagement, and a deeper understanding of the historical and theoretical aspects of art. How?

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain 1917 (replica 1964), Martine Elliott's own photograph, The Tate Modern (2023)

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain (info) Martine Elliott's own photograph, The Tate Modern (2023)

Studying Duchamp's work and ideas;

• Expands my understanding of different artistic movements and approaches.

• Open my eyes to unconventional notions of art, encouraging me to explore alternative forms of artistic expression and challenge established norms.

• It encourages me to question and examine the underlying assumptions of art, aesthetics, and creative processes.

• It enhances my critical thinking skills. For example, I am beginning to gain inspiration to explore and experiment with other artistic disciplines (textiles, for instance).

• Situates me within the historical and philosophical context of modern and contemporary art.

• Engages me with various fields, including philosophy and sociology.

• Sparks interdisciplinary connections and collaborations, allowing me to draw inspiration and insights from more diverse disciplines like bio art and digital art.

Duchamp's use of the readymade can indeed be viewed as a response to the abstract painters of his time, who aimed to express the purity of colour and form in their works. While painters like Kazimir Malevich sought to compress its essence through abstraction, Duchamp took a different approach.

Kazimir Malevich, White on White (1918) moma.org

I chose White on White because it references 'an aircraft and floating' and is something I can relate to.

Malevich was fascinated with technology and particularly with the airplane. He studied aerial photography and wanted White on White to create a sense of floating and transcendence. White, Malevich believed, was the color of infinity and signified a realm of higher feeling, a utopian world of pure form that was attainable only through nonobjective art. Indeed, he named his theory of art Suprematism to signify “the supremacy of pure feeling or perception in the pictorial arts”; and pure perception, he wrote, demanded that a picture’s forms “have nothing in common with nature.” (The Museum of Modern Art).

Duchamp and Malevich held contrasting views on the concept of purity and the role of form in art. While Malevich sought purity through abstract painting, Duchamp questioned this idea by emphasising the manufactured nature of artistic materials. He recognised that oil paints and pigments were not inherently pure but rather products created through industrial processes, resulting in specific forms.

Using readymades, (non-representational) questioned the traditional understanding of what constitutes art.

Moreover, Duchamp went beyond challenging purity in colour and form by critiquing the illusion of form in monochromatic paintings. He saw them as concealing the labour and materials involved in their creation, veiling the true nature of artistic production. Duchamp believed that art should not hide its materiality but instead acknowledge the labour and industrial processes that contribute to its creation. In this way, he exposed the formlessness that exists behind seemingly pure and structured artistic expressions.

Reflecting on Duchamp's approach, it also questioned the difference between art and non-art, high and low, and refined and ordinary. By embracing formlessness and disrupting established forms, his readymades opened up new possibilities for artistic expression, inviting a reevaluation of the role of the artist and the boundaries of artistic practice.

"Tu m"

I chose this painting because it's such a thought-provoking concept. It has a unique style, which I like.

The painting;

• Depicts the shadows of a bicycle wheel, a hat rack, and a corkscrew.

• Duchamp considered the corkscrew readymade, although it was never displayed as such.

• Includes a series of colour swatches that appear as if they are skewered on an invisible rod running through the canvas.

• Near the bottom, slightly off-centre is a painted hand pointing to the right. Above the hand is an actual tear in the canvas that has been sewn together with safety pins. This 'zigzagging tear' connects the base of the corkscrew's shadow to the bottom of the hat rack's shadow. Emerging from within the tear is a two-foot-long black bottlebrush extending at a 90-degree angle from the canvas.

The title;

• In French, the title, 'Tu m', means 'you me'. Some critics interpret the title as a critique of the painting, suggesting phrases like 'you bore me' or 'you annoy me.'

The hand;

• The painted hand is often understood as pointing towards the artist's future, signalling a shift to a new artistic medium.

• Instead of painting the writing himself, Duchamp chose to have it painted by a professional sign painter, emphasising the trade profession aspect of painting alongside its artistic nature.

Duchamp summarises different ways in which a work of art can suggest reality: as a shadow, imitation, or actual object. "Tu m" emphasises found objects and mass-produced materials, and by presenting a photograph of "Tu m" as an artwork, Duchamp challenged the status of painting and sculpture further. "Tu m'" can be seen as a deliberate engagement with the concept of 'l'informe' because it provokes so many questions within its process.

Jean-François Lyotard:

Lyotard, a French philosopher and theorist, examined Duchamp's ideas in relation to the concept of the 'sublime' and the deconstruction of art's traditional values.

Duchamp is discussed in a Frieze online article- Do philosophers understand contemporary art?

The job of the philosopher, Lyotard believed, rather than trying to make declarative statements about art, is to detect the conditions of possibility for that ‘impossibility’ to occur. Explaining what that could mean in Les TRANSformateurs DUchamp (Duchamp’s Transformers, 1977), Lyotard initially states that Marcel Duchamp’s work was about seeking and realizing contradiction: but then, under the title ‘complaint’, he contradicts his statement by referring to Duchamp’s pedantic exactitude. Lyotard continues to argue with himself throughout the book. He gradually encircles Duchamp’s fractious sense of buffoonery, as if Duchamp’s work is incessantly saying ‘you won’t get me’.

Lyotard’s curatorial answer took the form of the 1985 exhibition ‘Les Immatériaux’ (The Immaterials), at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Rather than simply displaying artefacts, the actual exhibit was a spatial experience. The layout was that of a labyrinth, with one entrance and one exit. In-between were the new ‘immaterials’ – objects that, according to Lyotard, transform and call into question the traditional understanding of humanity mastering nature. An Egyptian relief of a goddess offering the sign of life to a Pharaoh; photos by Eadweard Muybridge; artificial skin; works by Duchamp, Yves Klein and Giovanni Anselmo; Kevlar; a sheet of paper seen through an electron microscope; and much more. Sounds were transmitted throughout the exhibition via radio to wireless headphones. The show was, judging from its catalogue, neither celebrating a brave future nor condemning an apocalypse. Instead it was asking – concretely, in space – what effect developments in art and technology will have on aesthetic experience. For Lyotard the curator, the question of ‘understanding contemporary art’ was first of all that of how its spectators would deal with it. (Heiser, Frieze, 2009)

More about "Tu m"?

• Duchamp comments on illusionism without directly engaging in it.

• Shadows, like paintings, represent two-dimensional renditions of three-dimensional objects.

• The tear in the canvas aims to create a line of sight "through" the picture plane.

• The protruding bottlebrush extends the effect of the painting outwards towards the viewer.

• The hand in the painting points directly at the shadow of the bottlebrush, which in turn falls onto a depiction of a canvas within the canvas before falling off the actual canvas and onto the wall. This interplay between two-dimensional depiction and three-dimensional space draws the viewer into the 'puzzling nature of seeing' and reveals the materiality of actual space within the seemingly two-dimensional painting.

• Can we be impacted by a photograph or two-dimensional copy in comparison to the original?

Duchamp's remarkable pictorialization of the readymade in his valedictory painting, Tum' (1918), whose integration of appropriated objects into the field of the canvas was later profitably taken up by Robert Rauschenberg and, even more systematically, by Jasper Johns, not to mention a host of figures in Europe ranging from Yves Klein to Arman. In other words, if the initial deploy-ment of the readymade suggested that the generic object of art had superseded the specific medium of painting, Duchamp completed a circuit by returning the ready-made to painting: in Tum' an actual bottle brush, a ready-made brushstroke, points out directly at the viewer, allegorically poking her in the eye. (Ammer, Manuela, Hochdörfer, Achim, Joselit, DavidPainting 2.0).

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References.

[Ammer, Manuela, Hochdörfer, Achim, Joselit, David, Museum Brandhorst (Munich, Germany), Museum Moderner Kunst (Austria). Painting 2.0 : expression in the information age : gesture and spectacle, eccentric figuration, social networks]

Heiser, J. (no date) Do philosophers understand contemporary art? Available at: https://www.frieze.com/article/sight-reading (Accessed: 10 July 2023).

Malevich. K. Suprematist Composition: White on White. 1918 (no date) The Museum of Modern Art. Available at: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/80385 (Accessed: 10 July 2023).