Duchamp++

Readymades from Southeast Asia have taken Duchamp’s technique a step further by giving it a political or social context.

- Tanya Singh

In 1917, as a member of the Society of Independent Artists, New York, which was then organizing an avant-garde exhibition on the model of the Parisian Salon des Independants, Marcel Duchamp submitted an upside-down porcelain urinal as his entry. Considering the time period, the “bathroom appliance”, as the media referred to it then, was swiftly dismissed and might have actually been thrown out in the trash. Today, exactly a hundred years later, the French-American artist, Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ is considered to be the most important work of conceptual art ever made.

The seminal “readymade” completely redefined the point beyond which a work of art could not go (at the time), both in terms of its materiality as well as aesthetic. Not only was the involvement of a urinal (possibly even a used urinal) troublesome, but the fact that the creation of the proposed artwork incorporated such little artistic interference was also equally disconcerting. Nonetheless, Duchamp continued to “create” readymades and the art world eventually warmed up to the idea. Conceptual art spread far and wide as a mode of expression, and readymades became a popular material.