Marcel Duchamp (1887 - 1968)
Related: conceptual art - modern art - found art - retinal art - Surrealism - Dada
Quote on the relationship between author and audience:
"All in all, 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 qualification and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. This becomes even more obvious when posterity gives a final verdict and sometimes rehabilitates forgotten artists." --(From Session on the Creative Act, Convention of the American Federation of Arts, Houston, Texas, April 1957)Rrose Sélavy, female persona of Marcel Duchamp [image link]
Rrose Sélavy, or Rose Sélavy, was one of the pseudonyms of artist Marcel Duchamp. The name, a pun, sounds like the French phrase "Eros, c'est la vie", which translates to English as "eros, that's life".
Sélavy emerged in 1921 in a series of photographs by Man Ray of Duchamp dressed as a woman. Through the 1920s Man Ray and Duchamp collaborated on more photos of Sélavy. Duchamp later used the name as the byline on written material and signed several creations with it.Fountain (1917) [Image link]
Fountain is a 1917 work of art by Marcel Duchamp. It is one of the pieces which he called readymades (also known as found art), because he made use of an already existing object—in this case a urinal, which he titled Fountain and signed R. Mutt. In 2004, Fountain was named the world's most influential piece of modern art in a survey of 500 artists, curators, critics and dealers. (source: Guardian)Key works: Bicycle Wheel Ready-made (1913) - Fountain (1917) - Paysage Fautif (Wayward Landscape) (1946)
Biography
Marcel Duchamp (July 28, 1887 – October 2, 1968) was a French/American artist. His work has had a considerable influence on the development of post-war art in Europe and North America, in particular Pop Art and Conceptual Art. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Duchamp [Apr 2005]Found objects
Duchamp was one of the first artists to use found objects as the basis for his artworks. His work "Fountain" consisted mostly of a ceramic urinal. His work "In advance of a broken arm" consisted of an old snow shovel. Another displayed a bicycle wheel. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Duchamp
Anémic cinéma (1926) - Marcel Duchamp
Film as film
Apart from being a good illustration of Dada sensibility in film, Duchamp's little film looks forward in some ways to the structuralist or materialist cinema of the 1960s and 70s created by such artists as Ernie Gehr, Peter Kubelka, and Michael Snow. Duchamp is not unique in anticipating these filmmaking tropes; one can also cite such people as Oskar Fischinger and Viking Eggeling as important antecedents. Indeed, in some ways the earlier filmmakers are arguably more materialist in their strategies, and certainly their films strike one as being more abstract. Collectively, all these filmmakers and a relative handful of others represent some of the most radical approaches to the cinematic medium ever attempted: an effort to discover the quintessence of the form and to broaden its aesthetic parameters. In this, Anémic cinéma is as curious and witty an example as any other I can think of. --Barry Scott Moore via http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0123380 [Sept 2004]