Today's Featured Ready reMade

Michael Schippling
version 1.0, 3/23/2016 (from original: 1/18/2015)

"Say it’s not a Duchamp. Turn it over and it is."
Cage (1967)1

Marcel Duchamp's work in the nineteen-teens has formed the basis of postmodern art practice in the twenty-first century. He is the air in which contemporary art swims. "The Large Glass" heralded the hegemony of personal iconography over classically recognized content while his Readymades asserted once and for all that it is the decisions made by the artist that are the things of interest.
"If ever there were a watershed -- some probably think of it more as a trough -- between the artistic past and whatever the present is turning out to be, it was Duchamp's snow shovel..."
Hamilton (1966)2


missing image
Bottle Rack (1914) {unaltered}
missing image
Bucket (2016) {assisted}

"This choice was based on a reaction of visual indifference with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste -- in fact a complete anesthesia."
Duchamp (1961)3

Controversy still surrounds Readymades. Some of them may have been manufactured to Duchamp's specifications, if not by The Man himself, and others he may not have even authored. This would turn many Readymades on their sundry heads, but however unique or mundane they may be, their idea and image has taken on an artistic life of it's own.

"In later years, to maintain this indifference despite their newly acquired fame, Duchamp -- always worried about the unavoidable aesthetics of patina -- thought of swapping them for newer mass-produced objects, replacing, for example, the "Bottle Dryer" with a plastic bucket."
Girst (2003)4
Thus my Ready reMade re-action is to re-chart the rack's course back to unassistedness in the guise of a simple bucket. It will appear to be a glass recycling bin during the course of the exhibition.



References

D'ailleurs, c'est toujours les autres qui meurent
Besides, it's always the others who die
(Duchamp's Epitaph)
  1. Cage (1967) 26 statements Re Duchamp
    in: A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings, John Cage
    Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT, 1967

  2. Hamilton (1966) In Advance of Whose Broken Arm?
    George Heard Hamilton, Art and Artists, Vol 1 no 4 (July 1966)
    in: Marcel Duchamp In Perspective, edited by Joseph Masheck
    on google books or in my purloined copy:
    http://www.etantdonnes.com/ART2015/reMade//whoseArm.html

  3. Duchamp (1961) Apropos of 'Readymades'
    Lecture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 19, 1961
    in: Art and Artists, 1, 4 (July 1966)
    online: Marcel Duchamp: Source-Texts & One-Liners
    also: in the Green Box Notes: "Limit the no. of rdymades yearly (?)."
    radicalart.info/things/readymade/duchamp/text.html

  4. Girst (2003) (Ab)Using Marcel Duchamp
    Thomas Girst, 2003
    in: Aftershock: The Legacy of the Readymade in Post-War and Contemporary American Art,
    Dickinson Roundell, Inc., New York, May-June 2003
    online: toutfait.com/issues/volume2/issue_5/articles/girst2/girst1.html.
    "bucket" quote from: Max Ernst, Werner Spies, 1988, Collagen, Köln: p. 23

  5. Seekamp (2004) Unmaking the Museum
    Kristina Seekamp, 2004
    online: toutfait.com/unmaking_the_museum

Note: in making the this I am greatly indebted to the online thesis Unmaking the Museum, Seekamp (2004)5. Her scholarship tracing the origin and consequence of the many Readymade originals and reproductions is just incredible.
For more on Ready reMades see: http://www.etantdonnes.com/ART2015/reMade/