Readymade

Readymade - Due January 24th 2018

Duchamp created the first ready-made, Bicycle Wheel (1913), which consisted of a wheel mounted on a stool, as a protest against the excessive importance attached to works of art. This work was technically a “ready-made assisted,” because the artist intervened by combining two objects. Duchamp subsequently made “pure ready-mades,” each of which consisted of a single item, such asBottle Rack (1914), and the best-known ready-made, the porcelain urinal entitled Fountain (1917). By selecting mass-produced, commonplace objects, Duchamp attempted to destroy the notion of the uniqueness of the art object. The result was a new, controversial definition of art as an intellectual rather than a material process.

Duchamp and his ready-mades were embraced by the artists who formed the nihilistic Dada movement from 1916 to the 1920s; Duchamp became Dada’s main proponent in the United States. The ready-made continued to be an influential concept in Western art for much of the 20th century. It provided a major basis for the Pop art movement of the 1950s and ’60s, which took as its subject matter commonplace objects from popular culture. The intellectual emphasis of ready-mades also influenced the conceptual art movement that emerged in the 1960s, which considers the artist’s idea more important than the final product.

You will bring in an object changing its context from a mass produced everyday object into a art piece. Using methods such as adding a title that changes the way we think about the object or creating a new way of displaying are acceptable ways of elevating an object into art. 

In addition to bringing in your object, please read this essay: Rosalind Kraus Forms of the Readymade in the Dropbox folder and answer these questions: https://goo.gl/forms/i8OQqgjMRk56UKvK2

Marcel Duchamp Fountain 1917