Marcel Duchamp and the Ready-Made

Works by Marcel Duchamp discussed:
Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), oil on canvas, 1912 (Philadelphia Museum of Art)
Bicycle Wheel, Metal wheel on wood stool, 1913, (replica after lost original, 1951), (MoMA)
In Advance of a Broken Arm, galvanized-iron snow shovel, 1915 (replica after lost original, 1964), (MoMA)
Fountain, porcelain urinal, 1917 (replica after lost original, 1951), (Philadelphia Museum of Art)

Speakers: Dr. Steven Zucker, Dr. Beth Harris

(lively music)

Voiceover: We wanted to talk about Marcel Duchamp

and we're looking at a really famous painting

of his that caused a huge scandal.

It's called "Nude Descending a Staircase 2," and it dates to 1912.

It was shown, if I remember correctly,

in the Armory exhibition in New York,

and the press just made wild fun of it.

Of course, what we're seeing is this kind of funny Cubism

that's linked to the way in which the Futurists thought of Cubism,

that is really about the issue of motion itself -

the movement of the planes of space as the figure is moving down.

It has a wonderful mechanical quality.

Some art historians have looked at it

and said that this was involved with strobe photography

and influenced by some of those ideas.

Nevertheless, it's still a painting.

Voiceover: It still fits within that tradition of painting

that really begins in the Renaissance,

and continues pretty much unabated for 500 years.

That's right!, and we would call this avant-garde, but it's still oil paint.

It's on canvas.

It's made by hand.

It's made by the artist.

It's rendered and so, you're right.

It's still very firmly embedded in this very old tradition.

How radical is that?

That's 1912; let's see what happens just a year later.

It's two objects made into one.

It's an assisted ready-made, as Duchamp will later call them.

It's called "Bicycle Wheel," and it's a bicycle wheel

and [headset] and fork that's been stuck into a hole

that's been drilled into the top of a stool.

Duchamp has taken these two ready-made objects in 1913,

stuck them together and asked us to look at them

at them in a very different way than we would have looked

at them before he had done this.

Voiceover: I'm going to say what I think

a lot of people feel when they look at this,

which is -

Voiceover: How is this art?

Voiceover: Yes.

Voiceover: I think in a funny way, we're going

to come back to your question, "How is this art?"

And we're going to find the answer

in the very question you're asking.

What I mean to say is Duchamp is asking us

to think about how we define what a work of art is.

The very act of questioning becomes a part of the content.

But, there's more here.

One of the things that I think Duchamp wants us

to think about is what it is that we want from a work of art.

Voiceover: Why is that an important question?

Voiceover: I think it's a question

that's been asked throughout the avant-garde.

Let's go back to Manet for a moment.

Manet's rejecting the clarity, the precision

of the academic tradition of the salon, right?

He's forcing us to be aware of the roughness

and the physicality of his paint,

even as he's rendering something,

as opposed to creating something that's more transparent.

Even Manet is starting to ask us,

"Is art simply a kind of highly-proficient,

"technically perfect act of rendering?"

if it's simply skill, or must art also encompass,

and of course, all great art does,

a conceptual element, and what do we actually privilege?

now, in the 20th century, when our culture - and this is, I think, a really critical point -

our culture is not a culture of the hand-made.

Our culture is now a culture of the mass-produced.

Painting, although it's beautiful and remains vital,

is in some ways really anachronistic.

We live in a society now where everything -

virtually everything - is mass-produced.

Voiceover: And things that are unique and hand-produced are very, very rare.

Voiceover: Those are the exceptions,

and we privilege them because they are.

Voiceover: But shouldn't art be special like that?

Voiceover: Can art be special, but speak to our age -

our age of mass-production, our age of factory-made object?

During the 18th century, during the 17th century,

making a painting by hand is making a painting

the way we made virtually everything else.

Garments were made by hand.

Furniture was made by hand.

We live now in a culture where almost everything

is made by some sort of mechanical production.

Doesn't art have a responsibility, in order

to be legitimate, to actually reflect the reality of our moment,

even if it means that we're giving up something

that we have a kind of nostalgic love for?

When Duchamp takes this bicycle wheel,

which he didn't make, when he takes this stool

that was made in a factory,

and he puts them together, forcing us,

through almost a kind of alchemical process,

to transform these simple objects that we never really notice

into something that is for the contemplative.

Voiceover: Does that mean that one of the definitions

of art now is to make a [unintelligible] that were all around us anew?

Voiceover: Matisse was once asked -

and this is a pretty famous quote -

he was once asked, "What makes a great artist?"

Matisse's answer was, "A great artist

"is someone who allows us to see the world

"in a way that we had never seen it before."

So, is art actually then the product

of somebody's technical skill?

Is it a product of somebody's ability

to render, and how legitimate is that now

in the age of photography?

Or, is art really embedded in the conceptual?

On the other hand, at the same time,

this is absurd, and Duchamp loved that it was absurd.

This is Dada.

It's a kind of anti-art.

It's in some ways a very aggressive stance against art.

Let's just go forward for a moment.

I want to show you something that's even more pure.

This is, I think, fabulous.

This is two years later.

This is 1915.

Duchamp has gone to a hardware store,

purchased a snow shovel, brought it back

to this studio, and decided that he would give it a name,

which will conjure up a whole sort of narrative.

It's called, "In Advance of a Broken Arm."

He's taken this ready-made -

Voiceover: You know, as soon as you said that,

I had this vision of someone shoveling snow,

out on the front stoop of their house.

Voiceover: I continue that narrative.

I see that person slipping on the ice,

and then breaking their arm.

What Duchamp has done is he said,

"This is not for use.

"This is now a narrative tool.

"We're constructing something that is

"to be thought of and looked at,

"as opposed to used."

But, it's such an absurd object.

Voiceover: We have some idea in our culture

that art is different from things that we use.

Art is not utilitarian, which is an odd thing to say

because to me, if we just go back

to medieval art, artists in the Renaissance -

Voiceover: It's always utilitarian.

Voiceover: It's always incredibly -

It only becomes not utilitarian in the 19th or 18th century.

Voiceover: Let's say that this snow shovel,

which is very famous, this sculpture,

"In Advance of a Broken Arm," let's say

it went up for auction at one of the big auction houses -

a Christie's, a Sotheby's, or something, right?

I'm guessing but let's say the opening bid

was one point five million dollars.

Then, let's say this was taking place in New York,

and you walk out of the showroom while the bidding was starting.

You walk over to Lexington Avenue and you buy yourself a snow shovel,

which is, on the upper East Side, forty dollars.

Somehow, you get it past the guards

and you walk back into the showroom,

and you've got the very same snow shovel

that's being auctioned off for one point five million dollars up on the stage.

Is there a difference?

It's a really interesting issue and, actually,

that scenario that I just offered suggests

that Duchamp failed, and let me explain.

Dada itself is embedded in the artist's reaction

against the violence of the First World War, to some extent.

Voiceover: And against the bourgeois culture.

Voiceover: One of the indictments that the artist made

is that art had been one of the props

by which bourgeois culture had maintained itself.

Now, remember the First World War was not fought

for ideological reasons.

It was really fought largely for grief,

national grief, personal grief, et cetera.

It was unprecedented violence of the First World War.

We have the Dada artists thinking about

how they can create an art that completely undermines

that notion of art helping to establish hierarchical status.

Voiceover: Uh oh, but then it's being sold at Christie's.

Voiceover: That's why I said, in a sense that would suggest

that Duchamp failed, but what Duchamp is

trying to do is subvert capitalism, to some extent,

as it relates to art here.

That is to say Duchamp is saying,

"I'm going to make art out of something

"that is absolutely ordinary."

Can that be done?

Must art be singular and precious?

You know, you walk into somebody's house,

and if they have an original painting

by Picasso hanging on the wall,

that says a lot about their status in our society.

But if somebody has a snow shovel, maybe not.

This is two years later again; this is 1917.

Another ready-made and, of course, it's a urinal -

Voiceover: An upside-down urinal.

Voiceover: Well, he takes it, he shifts it 90 degrees.

Duchamp actually submits it to an exhibition that was an unjuried show,

and you have to remember that in the 19th and early 20 centures,

many art exhibitions were juried and were relatively conservative.

Here was what was supposed to be a radical organization

that was going to show anything and not have a juried exhibition.

Duchamp submits this and it's rejected.

Voiceover: It looks like there's a signature on it.

Voiceover: Well, he signed it, "R. Mutt,"

and there's some theories about why he signs it, "R. Mutt."

Voiceover: He seems like a very silly man.

Voiceover: I think that there was a kind of ludicrousness to it,

and I think he took a certain joy in the absurd.

There's no question, and I think that that's pretty clear

in the way he would present himself to the public,

often in drag, representing his alter ego, Rrose Selavy.

Voiceover: This is Duchamp himself.

Voiceover: This is the artist himself.

Voiceover: He's really just interested in play.

Voiceover: He's interested in -

Voiceover: In taking categories and subverting categories.

Voiceover: In all kinds of play, visual play,

and also word play, which is embedded in a lot of his work,

and a more literal kind of play.

Later in his life, he would reject art,

in fact, as an occupation, and said

that he wanted to spend the rest of his life simply playing chess.

He would be lying, though, when he said he wouldn't make art any longer.

He made art, actually, until the end of his life, in secret.

Voiceover: When you say, "making art,"

you don't actually mean making art.

Voiceover: Well, not painting, that's true.

(lively music)