The Public World of Marcel Duchamp
The Public World of Marcel Duchamp
Shelley Lake
Artists Writing (APG-5330-OL): Social Art History
September 29, 2019
Simulation of Marcel Duchamp’s Chocolate Grinder, Shelley Lake, 2019
Marcel Duchamp was a child of the industrial revolution, a movement that informed his design sensibility and thinking. The world had undergone a socio-economic transformation and Duchamp–the maverick individualist–paid close attention to a new commodity culture. While the first industrial revolution opened the floodgates for the machine, it would be the second industrial revolution that created the system for its manufacture.
The period 1815 to 1914 marks a distinct epoch in human history—an age dominated by the spirit of industry and commerce, the rise of democracy, the triumph of science, and the emergence of an almost religious faith in the idea of progress.
––Timothy B. Smith, Historian
Explosive population growth led to new migration patterns. Settlers in rural communities moved to urban centers seeking employment. Young Marcel would follow his two older brothers from a small French village to one of the finest art schools in Paris. Duchamp quickly discovered that his French provincial homeland would not embrace his rebellious spirit, and that he would find common ground in America. The New York City vanguard would prove a good fit for the unconventional artist.
Manufacturing technology introduced the assembly line, interchangeable parts and the division of labor. Automation forged its way into textiles, firearms, clocks, trains, carriages and bicycles. Globalization began with the telegraph, steamship and free trade. Duchamp understood the relationship between ideas, word play and commerce. He began as a conventional painter, but soon learned that the art system was a game to be played.
In creating Bicycle Wheel, his first readymade, Duchamp stripped the wheel of its function. By turning the wheel upside down and spinning it on top of a stool, the wheel would no longer serve its original purpose as a form of transportation. The wheel served a new objective–art. In deconstructing and appropriating consumer commodities, Duchamp drew us into the theatre of the absurd.
No idea was more important in his work than the idea of motion; in 1913, when he put the wheel in his studio, Duchamp had recently abandoned the interest in linear motion and the "dissolution of form" evidenced in Sad Young Man on a Train, Nude Descending a Staircase , and the various images of "speedy" or "swift" nudes, in favor of a type of movement that remains suspended in a space it never traverses—a "delay." The Large Glass contained two objects whose action of turning on an axis while going nowhere is echoed by the mounted wheel—the chocolate grinder and the waterwheel. The bicycle wheel, altered so that its circular movement no longer produced linear progression, precisely captured Duchamp's shift of interest from the first form of motion to the second, a reminder of the turn his career had taken and of the Glass that was now his major project. In addition, mounting the wheel—roue —on a stool—sel —created an eminently Rousselian tribute to the writer whose "delirium of imagination" he found so remarkable.
––Jerrold Seigel, The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp
Dada made a mockery of the material world, society and the role of the artist. Meaninglessness of life, incongruous juxtaposition and irrationality were hallmarks of Dada and later the Surrealist movements. The insanity and immensity of an impending World War ignited the imagination of artists worldwide.
Psychology gained separation from philosophy to become a therapeutic modality, deepening our understanding of the inner workings of the mind. Freud planted the seeds for Surrealism by interpreting dreams and exploring human sexuality. The psychology of art crossed the rubicon inside the virtual Pandora’s box of Marcel Duchamp.
Bibliography
Seigel, Jerrold. The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp: Desire, Liberation, and the Self in Modern Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft9h4nb688/.