Readymades
(Order up!)
It's a boy!
(I think...)
Marcel Duchamp, French-American conceptual artist, is associated most often with Dadaism, an experimental art movement of the early 20th century. Born out of the negativity associated with World War I, Dadaism erupted with its values centered in the rejection of logic, irrationality, and general nonsense while involving mostly visual art, literature, theory, and theatre. One theory is that Dadaism’s roots gripped the earth in 1916 in Zurich, Switzerland in a nightclub known as the Cabaret Voltaire when patrons like Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings expressed their distaste with the war and associated interests. Much like Zurich in Europe, New York became the American equivalent and developed as a refuge for writers and artists from World War I. Conferencing with other artists in the Big-Apple, Duchamp and other artists issued challenges to art and culture, but unlike the romanticized and disillusioned European Dadaism, American Dadaism was driven instead by a more ironic humor.
Duchamp, one of the most well known names associated with not only the American Dadaism, but also with Dada in general, began to make “ready-mades” which are objects we see everyday found or purchased and claimed as art. In 1917 he unveiled the most iconic Duchamp piece: Fountain. Submitted first to the Society of Independent Artists exhibition, the piece was rejected and became an object of scorn among other artists. Since then it has become the most well known piece of modern sculpture and is the mascot for Dadaism.
The movement was widespread, however it was unstable. In the mid 1920s Dadaism melted into the surrealism movement and the artists once associated with Dadaism moved on to other movements like modernism. Dadaism would later be called the beginning of postmodern art. Around the start of World War II, many European Dadaists had move to the United States. Degenerate art, as Hitler called it, was among the targets for the Nazi party thus many of the artists of the European movement were killed in death camps during the war. As a nod to the culture at the time, there was extensive distrust and uncertainty associated with the post WWI society. There was a need and desire to find something in the post war world that made sense in a nonsensical way and it was from that idea that Dadaism emerged and became so influential.
Dadaism developed its specific techniques. Imitating the cubist techniques of cutting and pasting, but instead of using paper items like cubists did, Dadaist’s materials included items such as wrappers, maps, tickets, programs, books, and other assorted objects. Rather than these items being associated with still life, Dadaists used them to represent aspects of life. Three of the most prominent forms of art in the Dadaism movement were photomontage, assemblage, and ready-mades. For a photomontage, the monteurs, or mechanics, used glue, scissors, and photographs to express what they believed were the images presented in media at the time. Using a collage technique, Dadaists created the photomontages by utilizing actual photographs from the press to illustrate messages of the apparent destruction of World War I. Assemblage, while also a variation of the collage, was a three-dimensional one that involved the assembly of everyday objects to produce meaningful pieces of art, or in some cases meaningless as a nod to the meaninglessness in the war. Ready-mades, as mentioned before were objects made for a purpose other than art and were taken by Dadaists and presented as such.
--Loryn Patterson
Ich Liebe Dada
(But Hitler did not...)
Assemblages!
(Where is the glue?)
DUCHAMP, DADA, & DECEPTION
A MAN, A MOVEMENT, A URINAL.
Text & Photos: Rosenthal, Nan. "Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968)". In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/duch/hd_duch.htm (October 2004)