Marcel Duchamp "made New York gasp"; he remains the ancestral hero of many artists. Outline his views on the art world, the role of the artists and the art object. Do you think his views are still active in recent art and art theory?

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Assignment 1                Melinda Vincent

It is almost 90 years since Marcel Duchamp "made New York gasp"; he remains the ancestral hero of many artists.  Outline his views on the art world, the role of the artists and the art object.  Do you think his views are still active in recent art and art theory?

Marcel Duchamp gained notoriety and fame as an artist during the 20th Century.  His "art" exhausting all previously set boundaries on "what is art" and how it is viewed.  He became infamous for his "ready-mades", which both appalled and intrigued spectators and the art community alike.  Marcel Duchamp was a man that was not easily swayed by public or peer opinion, his art reflecting his attitudes towards his own personal relationships, society and in particular the art world.  His own personal charter was to shatter all pre-conceived notions of what defined "art" and to re-define conventional art boundaries by totally dismissing an art canon that had been applied and referenced for over 500 years.  

Marcel Duchamp was born in 1887, Normandy, France.  From his early adolescence, Marcel had wanted to become an artist.  He attended Lycee Corneille where he undertook a formal education.  In 1904, having completing his schooling Duchamp went to Paris to join his brothers.  Duchamp felt compelled under the new avant-garde movement to sketch and draw the industrial and progressive changes transforming Paris at the time and spent a great deal of time mastering his art.  He enrolled in Academie Julian and later applied to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in which he was unsuccessful in a securing a place.  Following his unsuccessful attempt at joining the elite art school, he started to spend more time with his brother who was a caricaturist.  His brother introduced him to a number of influential caricaturists and humorists.  'The work of this group spanned two key aspects of French culture and society: a philosophical interest in the comic and a fascination with the darker side of life and bad taste' (Ades, Cox, Hopkins 1999, pg 14).

It was from here that he started to work as a commercial illustrator, his first exhibition consisting of five caricature sketches based on the suffragette movement and the exceedingly unavoidable marriage of women and machinery into the workforce.  In 1910, strongly influenced by an exhibition he had attended on the work of Matisse, Duchamp started to paint more and a produced a number of works over the subsequent years.  It was here that he started to experiment with the new cubist style incorporating his fascination with movement, the mechanical and the new scientific discoveries of time, space and mobility.  'Science administered a shock to art at the beginning of the century.  For the painter Franz Marc, the new physics confirmed the world's mystical infrastructure', persuading him that "we can see through matter" and provoking him to claim that "the day is not far off when we shall move through oscillating mass as we now move through the air'. (Conrad 1998, pg 83).

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A new futurist movement was beginning to gain momentum with the advent of these scientific discoveries and we begin to see Duchamp's own interpretations of futurist notions in Dr Dumouchel 1910, in which we can see radioactive haloes around an outstretched hand (Conrad 1998, pg 71).  His cubist piece "Nude Descending a Staircase" also incorporated elements of the new scientific development, in particular the notion of movement.  He had hoped to exhibit this picture at the Salon des Independents in March 1912 but popular commentary at the time was that the painting was ugly and should be removed from ...

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