Readymades of Marcel Duchamp

viewer, giving the work endless interpretations. The viewer is able to participate in the creation and in some ways project upon the image what they want to see. By choosing mundane objects that are part of the everyday vocabulary of the viewer Duchamp reframes its meaning, forcing the viewer to then reinterpret and examine the object in a new way, outside of it physical or aesthetic attributes. Most of these objects are ones that one would normally examine closely, but the context forces the…

divisionism and pointillism is an application of scientific painting technique to the popular subject matter of leisure time of middle class people. Ernst, on the other hand, was a Dada artist, embracing new techniques and art forms, combining the idea of readymade and…

Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), was one of the most controversial artists during the twentieth century. His works relate to modern movements such as Cubism and Dadaism. His creation of the readymades was some of the most memorable and influential works of the time. Duchamp’s art works were produced during the Dada movement; a time that developed as a protest to the War. The war fought between July 28, 1914, and November 11, 1918, was known at the time as the Great War, the War to End War, and (in…

Falling Cigarettes Installation, made by the artist Sydney Kim in 2015, is a unique sculpture made from objects seen as trash to create a masterpiece with an impactful meaning. Kim creates an artwork that is immediately striking to the viewer and causes one to contemplate the message shown from the sculpture. The cascading cigarettes coming from the burnt cigarette case immediately resembled an explosion of some sort taking place; yet it is more than a physical “detonation”, it represents how…

Another writer, Alice Rawsthorn, asks what the true definition of an artist is in this modern world, deciding that it can be anyone. Through her piece, “Can Anybody be a Designer?” Rawsthorn discusses “Unnamed,” an exhibition held in South Korea. This exhibition explores innovation in places that one would normally never look; the code involved in a computer virus can be just as majestic as a rainbow barcode where each color signifies one of the four nucleotides of DNA (adenine, thymine, guanine…

At some given point in history politics, religion and art inter-collide and create new vision for society to engage in. Artist Gianlorenzo Bernini created St. Teresa of Avila in Ecstasy during the Baroque ca. 1600-1700 CE. The sculpture, made with white marble, has gilded bronze rays with illuminating light that descends and brightens the figure from a hidden window above. It depicts a playful with smirky smile angel whom opens Teresa’s robe and aims with an arrow at her breast. It represents…

before they moved on to the next piece. Being that kinetic art incorporated movement and required a bit of a longer time to digest mentally, it quickly became a minor frenzy for artists who wanted to delve into something new and challenging. For Duchamp, art was more than met…

Gonzalez-Torres In 1917, Marcel Duchamp introduced the idea of the readymade by picking the perfect urinal while Andy Warhol followed him by mass producing Brillo boxes in 1964. Both artists turned the path of art world and updated the way people once viewed art. With a heavy influence on the future of art, it is no surprise that artists after them built a foundation off of their ideas. One of these artists include Felix Gonzalez Torres, a Cuban American artist born in 1957 who incorporated…

on the art world due to the history of the time and place in which it was presented. A gallery space allows for little questioning of an artwork’s value as art due to it being accepted by an institution. The same can be said about the works of Marcel Duchamp, whose ready-mades, such as the Bottle Rack (1917/1964), required a gallery to be anything more than a common household item. Similar to Duchamp’s Bottle Rack, which was recreated six times after the first was thrown out by his sister, it…