Nude Descending a Staircase (1912)
The career of Marcel Duchamp offers a rare instance of chaos theory as applied to the history of art. His concept of the ready-made work of art came out of the blue. It could not have been foreseen and was by no means inevitable. There were no precedents in art for the idea that by taking an ordinary object from the real world and placing it in an art gallery, the artist could completely change its meaning. By detaching art from aesthetics, Duchamp set it spinning on a different course from the one it had followed since the Renaissance - and thereby ensured that almost all significant art made in the US and continental Europe after his death in 1968 would, at some level, be touched by his ideas.
It is Duchamp, in Nude Descending a Staircase, who first uses mechanical imagery to represent the female body; Duchamp who first makes a transparent work of art; and Duchamp who begins to think outside the realms of the visual to make art with language.
As he worked on The Large Glass between 1912 and 1915, Duchamp gradually came to locate the essence of the art work in its appeal to the mind, not the eye. The ready-made was born when he realised that something can change its meaning without changing its form.
To me, it is still incredible that anyone, ever, made the leap of faith and imagination necessary to accept the original as a work of art. But, once you admit the possibility that it is more than a bit of plumbing, its title could easily refer not to the urinal itself but to the man urinating into it, and, if you start to imagine its open, curvaceous form as female, with the man standing unzipped in front of it - well, you can see where this is leading.
Dorment. R. (2008)
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