Duchamp and His Work

Taking a look at Marcel Duchamp's The Large Glass I feel a couple different things. Looking at it and thinking back to when he first unveiled this piece I feel that everyone would have been floored. The material the idea the execution, everything about this particular Duchamp piece made people fall in love with it but also objectify it. In essence make it stand out. When I think about this now I feel that the piece is awesome and artistically innovative, I feel almost the same way as people back then, but not quite. In that particular era when the piece was first shown not alot of artwork being coming out looked like this. Duchamp's usage of space and how he represented space is classic, as well as brilliant. The way he used the materials to illustrate line and create a sense of space is interesting as well. Infact The Large Glass might be the first of its kind as a working sculpture. I do feel though that looking at it now takes away from its flair, and how I preceive it because it has like everything else been done before. Duchamp's usage of space and how he represented space is classic, as well as brilliant. The way he used the materials to illustrate line and create a sense of space is interesting as well.

Duchamp was also an avid designer, one of his most revered creations
were the aptly titled readymades:
Early in his career, Duchamp became intrigued by the Dada movement, which he called "antiart." He explained, "[Dadaism] was principally a matter of questioning the artist's behavior as people envisaged it." This affinity to the absurd would become central to perhaps the most lasting part of Duchamp's legacy—his "readymades."

In 1913, Duchamp brought a bicycle wheel into his Paris studio and placed it on a stool because he enjoyed watching it spin. The following year, he bought a bottle rack. In 1915, he came to America, where he collected a snow shovel, birdcage, and urinal, to name a few items. In a letter to his sister Suzanne, he wrote that these sculptures were "already made." For several years following the initial innovation, Duchamp collected ubiquitous mass-produced commodities, his readymades.

Duchamp wanted the readymades to prove that any object can be a work of art. Some readymades were "assisted"—that is, the artist admitted to manipulating them. But many, such as the bottle rack, snow shovel, and urinal, were unassisted readymades. (Source: http://www.yaleherald.com/archive/xxvii/1999.04.02/opinion/p09mduchamp.html)