Professional Documents
Culture Documents
• Cubism
• Dada
• Readymade
• Iconoclast
Nude Descending
Staircase, Cubism,
1912
• Influenced by
Picasso’s Cubism
• With Picasso the
subject is seen from
different points of
view.
• Here the subject is
depicted in motion.
• He was influenced by
the photographs of
Muybridge.
• Muybridge was
interested in using
photography to show
the figure in motion.
Muybridge
• Here is a strobe light
photo of Duchamp
descending a staircase.
• It was made years after
the painting to illustrate
his intention.
• The painting was
rejected by Cubists
because it used
cubism for a different
purpose.
• Duchamp then
rejected cubism.
• He would soon reject
all established styles.
• This work was shown at
the famous Armory show
of 1913 in New York.
• The show showcased
modern art to America.
• The press had a field-day
criticizing the work.
• They called it an
“explosion in a shingle
factory.”
Dada
• Dada is a movement, not a style.
• It began as a reaction to middle-class
values, and the insanity of WWI.
• It began as a literary movement, but soon
included the other arts.
• It is meant to shock, and resulted in works
that are irrational, confrontational, and
even absurd.
Dada
• Dada is based on chance, and not reason
or emotion like the art styles that came
before it.
• Dada is anti-art, anti-beauty, anti-form, and
anti-traditional.
• Duchamp became the unofficial leader of
Dada in the visual arts.
• His work provokes the viewer to ask the
question: “what is art?”.
Dada
• In Duchamp’s work the idea is more
important than the product, or even the
process.
Bicycle Wheel, Dada,
1913
Readymade
• An industrial,
mass produced
object that is
exhibited as art.
• It is not a new
object but on for
which a new
idea has been
created.
• According to
Duchamp’s
theory an artist
needed to do
two things to
an object in
order to make
art.
1. Change its
context.
2. Displace its
function.
• Duchamp said he
created it for his own
amusement.
• It is art that moves.
• It is also
interactive.
• It is similar to objects
used to demonstrate
laws of physics:
1. angular momentum
2. Centrifugal force
• Duchamp
studied physics
as a hobby
while working
in a library.
Bottle Rack, 1914
• This was an ordinary rack
(mass produced) for
drying bottles.
• It became art when he
Bottle
chose it.Rack, 1914
• He put it in his studio then
in a gallery (changed its
context).
• He didn’t use it to dry
bottles (displaced its
function).
• This is a ready-made.
• By choosing it,
imagining it as art,
and showing
Bottle Rack, it1914
in an
exhibition, it became
art.
• He even chose it
randomly (Dada).
In advance of Broken Arm, 1915
Duchamp
1911
Three Standard Stoppages
1913-14
• Duchamp dropped three threads, each a meter
long, on to the same number of Prussian blue
pieces of canvas.
• Then they were stuck to the surfaces without any
adjustments to the curves that were determined by
chance.
• He then cut up the cloth and stuck it to glass
plates, finally encasing them in a wooden box.
• Three wooden "rulers," cut following the same
curves, were then added.
(Ramirez 35)
• The objects were meant to mock standards.
• His work pokes fun at the standard meter, an
actual object, kept in the International Office of
Measurements and Weights in Paris.
• Duchamp said that 3 Standard Stoppages
opened the way "to escape from those
traditional methods of expression long
associated with art.”
• Duchamp called most art “retinal painting" -
art designed for the luxuriance of the eye.
• Retinal painting required formal intelligence
and a skillful hand on the part of the artist.
• The Stoppages depended on chance which,
paradoxically, they "standardized."
Network of Stoppages, 1914
• The work is created with chance and random
acts.
• The Fauvist painting Young Man and Girl in
Spring, 1911 is cropped with black paint.
• The artist then uses the tracings of Three
Standard Stoppages to create a network of
lines.
• He numbers the lines.
• In doing so he creates a new work by
incorporating two old ones.
• This work was also used to plan a future
work.
• It contains a scale plan for Large Glass.
The Large Glass,1915-23