Marcel Duchamp: a Work That Is Not a Work «Of Art»
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F u n d a c i ó n P R O A Marcel duchamp: a work that is not a work «of art» M a r c e l D u c h a m p R o u e d e b i c y c l e t t e (Bicycle Wheel), 1913/1964 © Sucesión M D , 2 0 0 8 , A D A G P/ P a r i s , PROA AUTVIS/Sao Paulo Exhibition General Directors Abbreviations Marcel Duchamp: a work that Jorge Helft BK Bibliothèque Kandinsky Centre de Documentacion et de Recherche du MNAM-CCI is not a work “of art” Adriana Rosenberg C.DF D a v i d F l e i s s C o l l e c t i o n , P a r i s Fundación Proa, Curator C.FK F r e d e r i c k a n d L i l i a n K i e s l e r P r i v a t e Buenos Aires. Elena Filipovic Foundation Collection, Viena 22.11.08 - 01.02.09 General Coordinator C.JMM J a c q u e l i n e M a t i s s e M o n n i e r C o l l e c t i o n C.LZ Luizella Zignone Collection - Cintia Mezza C. M M Moderna Museet Collection, Stockholm TENARIS - TERNIUM Production D B L e s F i l m s d e l ´e q u i n o x e . F o n d s ORGANIZACIÓN TECHINT Iara Freiberg p h o t o g r a p h i q u e D e n i s e B e l l o n - Exhibition Design IUAM I n d i a n a U n i v e r s i t y A r t M u s e u m , B l o o m i n g t o n . P a r t i a l g i f t o f W i l l i a m H . C o n r o y ’s w i f e Secretaría de Cultura de la Caruso-Torricella M D M a r c e l D u c h a m p Presidencia de la Nación architetti, Milan-Paris MMVP M u s é e d ´A r t M o d e r n e d e l a V i l l e d e P a r i s - Preparators M N C P M u s é e N a t i o n a l d ´A r t M o d e r n e Ministerio de Cultura del Sergio Avello 1990 C e n t r e P o m p i d o u , P a r i s - C e n t r e d e C r é a t i o n Industrielle - Achat 1990 Gobierno de la Ciudad Gisela Korth M N C P M u s é e N a t i o n a l d ´A r t M o d e r n e Autónoma de Buenos Aires Lighting 2005 C e n t r e P o m p i d o u , P a r i s - C e n t r e d e C r é a t i o n - Matteo Fiore Industrielle Dépôt du Siège national du Embajada de Francia en Didactics P a r t i C o m u n i s t e f r a n ç a i s , 2 0 0 5 P.c P r i v a t e C o l l e c t i o n la Argentina Rodrigo Alonso P M A P h i l a d e l p h i a M u s e u m o f A r t Cintia Mezza RS R o g e r S c h a l l , P a r i s Graphic Design S.MD S u c c e s s i o n M a r c e l D u c h a m p V i l l i e r s Guillermo Goldschmidt s o u s G r e z , F r a n c e ZB C o r t e s í a Z a b r i s k i e G a l l e r y Jorge Lewis Laura Escobar Assistants Malvina Bali Andrea Cavalletti Andrea Rocchi F u n d a ció n P r o a Av. Pe d r o d e M e n do z a 1929 [C1169AAD] Buenos Aires Argentina [54-11] 4104-1000 www.proa.org i n fo@ proa.org The exhibition original pieces of carefully crafted painting and their challenge to the very foundations Elena Filipovic, Curator or sculpture to be looked at. The invention of of art, then and still to this day. the readymade was not, however, Duchamp’s Marcel Duchamp: A work that is not a Marcel Duchamp: A work that is not a only groundbreaking gesture in this same work “of art” brings to Latin America many work “of art” takes its title from a question period: among other activities, he invented rare and exceptional works for an historic that Marcel Duchamp wrote down one day a new system of measurement, declaring the event possible thanks to loans from major in 1913: “Can one make works that are not experiment “art,” he created multiple photo- museums and Private collections, including ‘of art’?” The question announced a radical graphic copies of his notes, he used chance to the Philadelphia Art Museum, the Moderna shift in the practice of the Frenchman, who make music, and he first used photography Museet in Stockholm, and the Duchamp had mostly been a painter until that time: and perspective to redefine painting—all Estate in France. it signaled the beginning of his defiance between 1913 and 1914. And over the years, of traditional ideas of what counts as an Duchamp continued his diverse experi- artwork and it laid the foundations for what ments, many represented in this exhibition would make him the most influential artist (in some cases through studies, replicas, or of twentieth and twenty-first centuries. reconstructions). His insistent rethinking of the work “of The presentation of the selected art- art” is the focus of this first-ever major solo works on display structures made up of jag- presentation of Duchamp in Latin America, ged, irregular lines and offering no singular, featuring 123 pieces of each form of media fixed, or chronological path, underlines the artist worked in from 1913 to the end of the way in which traditional notions like his life. continuity and aesthetic “progress” make The exhibition begins with the moment little sense in relation to Duchamp’s oeuvre. when Duchamp wrote his famous question, Instead the pieces are organized in group- which coincides with the period in which he ings that reveal the connections between began to conceive of mass-produced “ready- and the persistent return of such seem- made” objects as potential artworks by sim- ingly diverse preoccupations in Duchamp’s ply being selected by the artist (an ordinary work as readymades, optics, perspective, bottle-drying rack he bought at a local hard- transparency, chance, humor, reproduction, ware store, for example). The gesture marked performativity, erotics, and display. In so do- a revolution in art history by refusing the ing, the exhibition points to the complexity idea that art could only be unique and of a set of central ideas in Duchamp’s oeuvre, Readymades questioned the definitions of the work of art In 1913, Duchamp attached a bicycle wheel and the role of the institutions that judge to a stool and watched it spin in his studio. them. The history of art would be changed Room Two years later, he gave it and objects like it forever by the gesture. (a bottle dryer, a snow shovel, among others) None of the “original” readymades exist a name: “readymade.” Those industrially today as all were lost, thrown away, or 2 produced items became artworks by being broken in their early years of existence; only chosen by the artist and extracted from replicas that Duchamp made and authorized their function as useful things. Their during his lifetime are shown in museums selection was not supposed to be subjective and exhibitions around the world. On view and was instead guided by the “beauty of here are various replicas of the readymades indifference,” thus taking art out of the that the artist made in 1964. aesthetic realm and out of a question of either good or bad taste. By being mass- produced and able to be duplicated, they could avoid what the artist called “the cult of uniqueness, of art with a capital ‘A’.” With the readymade, Duchamp proposed that the creative act did not lie anymore in the crafting of an object or in that object’s singular originality, but rather in its selection and in its transfer from everyday life to the art world—through the signature of the artist, its title, and its display in an art institution. Fountain, the name he gave to the porcelain urinal that he signed with the pseudonym R. Mutt and attempted to exhibit at the Society of Independent Artists Exhibition of 1917, was rejected for not being art. It went on to become, in time, the most famous example of the way Duchamp 1 Fountain, 1 9 1 7 / 1 9 6 4.