Duchamp and Co

I have only one image by Marcel Duchamp in my scrapbook. It is the painting The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes, related to the more famous Nude Descending a Staircase. It shows Duchamp as a better painter than any of the Italian Futurists, though he  is much more famous for Fountain, the ‘readymade’ of a urinal signed R. Mutt, and The Large Glass.

Cornelia Parker chose Marcel Duchamp for Radio Four’s series Great Lives. She mentioned in the programme Duchamp’s hostility to what he called the retinal, which I take to mean appealing to the eye rather than to the mind, visual rather than conceptual.

Parker is famous for the work she achieved by blowing up a garden shed, and I happen to have a photograph of it in my scrapbook. The fragments of the shed are hung on wires, and it is lit so that they create shadows on walls, ceiling and floor.

Nothing could be more retinal. Perhaps it could be reassembled, though, like so many current works attracting attention, it would be a conservationist’s nightmare.The ghost of Marcel Duchamp must be thanking his lucky stars for the permanency of porcelain.

Some points about Marcel Duchamp’s work.

1. The urinal was not a breakthrough work. He had exhibited several readymade works before.

2. Some time ago, there was something in the press about acquiring one of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s bonnets for a Scottish museum. A member of the public pointed out that a similar  headpiece could be purchased much more cheaply. This provoked an angry reaction. The Scottish people were not going to be served with something that was not the real thing. We should be aware that if we see a urinal in an art gallery signed R Mutt, we are not getting a real Bonnie-Prince-Charlie-bonnet experience: Duchamp did not keep the original. It was a dealer’s idea to produce several more.

3. In an in aeroplane museum in the company of Leger and Brancusi,  a propellor exhibit led Duchamp to exclaim ‘Painting is dead’. Yet the technology that appears in The Large Glass - watermill, coffee grinder, etc. - was all pretty ancient when Duchamp produced the work.

4. The Fountain (the urinal) was probably not a simple prank like his putting a moustache on The Mona Lisa: in a letter published in a magazine, The Blind Man, Duchamp argued that the only works produced by American are its plumbing fixtures and its bridges.