marcel duchamp

There were a few members of the avant-garde very early in the century who challenged the accepted notion of art as a specifically sacred romantic endeavor . Seeing art as a decidedly social construction and recognizing how seemingly arbitrary our foundations of quality have often been , one particularly innovative and skeptical individual used his art as a form of modernist critique - and his name was Marcel Duchamp , Duchamp was widely acknowledged as one of the most important and influential avant-garde theorists of the first half of the 20th century

Duchamp was born

in 1887 in France but in 1955 he became an American citizen . He was trained as a painter , and during the early 1910s produced a series of Futuro-Cubist paintings like Nude Descending a Staircase No . 1 which depicted a stylized , semi-abstract figure walking down a spiral staircase , movement being suggested by the use of overlapping images , in the manner of rapid-fire multiple-exposure photography . The series culminated in his Nude Descending a Staircase No . 2 of 1912 in which the figure was more machine-like and the movement more dynamic . This was shown in Barcelona and Paris in 1912 , but it was in New York the following year that it first made a great impact becoming the most discussed work in the Armory Show . The attention it received was mainly negative , but there were also more appreciative remarks , and the publicity made Duchamp suddenly much better known in the USA than he had ever been in France . This first conspicuous success as a painter was also Duchamp 's last , for in 1913 he made his first ready-made and from this point virtually abandoned conventional media

Duchamp 's invention , ready-made , consisted of the objects in and of this world reassembled or recontextualized to alter their meaning . His inclination towards the anti-rational and deliberate contradiction of convention not only pre-empted Dadaism but also heavily influenced it His publication of an art devoted to the idea , which eschewed craftsmanship and any concern with aesthetics , led to the origination of the ready-made . An example may help clarify the idea . Duchamp 's Bicycle Wheel consists of a bicycle wheel positioned upright on a simple stool Both items are accepted as viable art materials by the artist without the typical alterations which might have made them appear more personal or idiosyncratic - more art-like . Instead we are simply given an assemblage of parts put together in an orthodox manner . As a consequence of its peculiarity , the Bicycle Wheel presents the viewer with a number of puzzling suggestions . Is it art ? What constitutes the designation of art ? How does the context in which this piece functions (a gallery or other art space ) change or effect its meaning ? And to what extent are the subjective experience of the artist and his use of materials important parts of the idea of art ? Such work stretches the traditional boundaries of art by implicating the viewer in the process of the piece 's construction and meaning . Bicycle Wheel , like other Duchamp 's ready-mades...