i love dadaism.
The Box in a Valise"... and, really, what he's saying is that anything can be art. As long as he chooses it and as long as the audience are looking at it, he doesn't really care about anything else. Completely rebellious. It's very kind of radical, but it's also, really, it's very free and... it means that the audience are allowed to make their own decisions about things rather than being told, 'Well, this looks like this,' or 'You must think this,' because it's not a sum. Looking at a piece of work isn't a sum, like one plus one equals two. Sometimes it's five, sometimes it's ten, sometimes it is two.
I suppose another really important thing about Marcel Duchamp is that he's a real trickster, very playful. This piece is authored by himself, but also authored by a woman, in inverted commas, called, 'Rrose Sélavy,' and that was his female alter ego. 'Rrose Sélavy,' the literal translation of it means eros, it's life1, so really what he's saying is that all there is to life is love.
He dressed up as Rrose Sélavy and he had a perfume, which was called Rrose Sélavy, which had a picture of him on the front looking like a large man dressed in women's clothing... but he didn't really care about what people thought of him. What he was interested in doing was challenging the perception of his audience about who he was, what his role as an artist was, and again, to return to this idea that anything can be art.
If he chooses to dress up as a woman, then he is a woman for that period of time... He's saying, 'Well, I can do whatever I want with this. I can take the Mona Lisa, that's a really famous painting, and I can draw a mustache and a beard on it, and by doing that, I gain ownership over it.'
So, as an artist, you can't say that Marcel Duchamp is a painter or Marcel Duchamp is a sculptor, or he's a performance artist. He did everything and that's what makes him so important as a model for contemporary art."
- Writer and senior lecturer Maria Fusco on Marcel Duchamp, cross-dressing and why he's the big daddy of conceptual art2
(audio mp3 from Young Tate)
L.H.O.O.Q.
When read quickly in French,
the title translates to,
"She has a hot bum/ass."
The Fountain
(But really, a urinal. But really, art.)
DUCHAMP IS SO CUTE. :3
In an old man kind of way,
if you know what I mean.
Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy.
The photograph was taken by Man Ray.
LOL.
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1 Actually, she means the literal translation of the phonetical (if there is such a term) "meaning" of the name/phrase.
2 That is what it actually says in the description. And yes, she does say it in the podcast. LOL.