NZZ Art & Literature Saturday, November 20, 1999

 
Late Greetings from Marcel Duchamp; 
The Readymade Under Inspection 
by Thomas Zaunschirm 
excerpt translated by Thomas Girst 
 
 

 

Duchamp's 'Fountain' photographed in 1917 by Alfred Stiegleitz. Copyright Pro Litteris. CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE With the rebuilding of Readymades and computer animation, she attempts to prove that Duchamp never left a mass produced object unaltered and then declared it as object. She even goes as far as to prove that the different objects were altered in an absurd way, or made up entirely in the first place. The results of her research will be published in the form of a new online journal www.ToutFait.com.

THE READYMADE: IS IT FICTION?
Art history will learn to acknowledge that the central idea of art in the Twentieth Century, without which the art of the object would not be thinkable, was nothing but fiction. Whether the Readymades were done in 1913 or later, whether they were machine made or not, whether Duchamp fundamentally changed them or had them made himself, all those questions cannot be answered at the moment. CONTINUED>>


 
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