Marcel Duchamp: Pissing on Tradition as a Source of Innovation
Marcel Duchamp was one of the most important artists of the 20th century. His irreverence of tradition blurred the boundaries between art and non-art, and his work called the definitions of each term into question.
Duchamp’s early work aligned with Post-Impressionist styles, but he soon developed a mania for change. His first controversial piece, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, incorporated Cubist and Futurist qualities. The Cubists rejected it, and many viewed its radical departure from convention as derisive.
He soon lost interest in painting and other forms of visual art, which he described as "retinal art". What fascinated him most was the mind – the cerebral activities and responses of the creator and spectator, rather than the primarily aesthetic ones. The relationship between artist and spectator was key to his idea of creativity. He explained in 1958:
“The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.”
Around 1913, he began to make “readymades” – mass-produced goods he’d found in obscure stores or rubbish heaps and, with some modification or repositioning, declared to be art. In André Breton and Paul Éluard's Abridged Dictionary of Surrealism, a readymade is defined as "an ordinary object elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist".
Duchamp claimed visual indifference as one of his principles in selecting readymades:
“My idea was to choose an object that wouldn't attract me, either by its beauty or by its ugliness. To find a point of indifference in my looking at it, you see.”
His art championed concepts and ideas, and aimed to deliberately subvert conventional definitions:
“...it was always the idea that came first, not the visual example ... a form of denying the possibility of defining art."
Readymades challenged traditional notions of what was and wasn’t art. They included things like:
Fountain: A urinal he submitted for an exhibition in 1917 – the most famous readymade, Duchamp's urinal was named the most influential modern artwork of all time in a 2004 poll of 500 art experts
Hat Rack: A wooden hat rack suspended from his studio ceiling
In Advance of the Broken Arm: A snow shovel on which Duchamp painted its title
Convention draws a line between mass-produced goods you’d find in a hardware shop and the world of art. The binary of art and non-art is the tradition that determines they remain apart.
Duchamp’s art is the development of a state of mind where things that habit has kept apart collide. He is the crossroads where distinct or contradictory categories and ideas meet – the prime condition for new connections.
He described his readymades as “a kind of rendezvous”, where objects changed their destination. Confined to one world of value and meaning in the hardware shops where he discovered them, Duchamp enabled them to meet with another world. This displacement, or rendezvous, leads to something new, as is bound to happen. The practice provides an interesting framework for landing on novel connections in your own work.
When two things kept apart collide, the results are disruptive. In the case of art and non-art, the nature of both terms is called into question. If non-art can suddenly be declared art, it suggests a need to reevaluate the essential elements or features that define each group.
The same can be applied to all other binary systems. Man and woman, beautiful and ugly, right and wrong; once something from one group appears in the space of its opposite, new possibilities appear, and opportunities to play with terms and reshape the world will arise.
A mind that’s light, unburdened by rigid structures, will delight in this play. Language and habit create an artificial reality where all portions of life have their “givens”. For Duchamp’s contemporaries, it was a given that a urinal was not art.
His practice was to try and escape the prevailing logic of the time, and the artistic world has never been the same since.