Living With Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp remains arguably the most important voice in visual art of the last century. His ideas about what art can be and how art can function in the world continue to revolutionize contemporary art, and his influence has reached artists in a variety of disciplines, including makers and thinkers alike. Among his many radical positions, Duchamp was the first to take an object from its everyday use and transform it into an artwork solely by changing its context. Known as “readymades,” these works located the artistic act in the moment of engagement, not in the act of making, and redefined the nominative power of the artist. Over one hundred artworks by more than fifty artists inspired or influenced by Duchamp were brought together in an imaginative installation whose design took its cues from the trickster mentality of the artist’s own curatorial practice. Several of the artists included turned the notion of the readymade inside-out, handcrafting objects that are usually mass-produced. Others expounded on Duchamp’s play with sexuality and gender, while still more produced exact copies of his works in a full embrace of his concept of appropriation, a mimicry that the artist himself considered complimentary.