Marcel Duchamp Research Paper

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During the age of art after World War I, a sense of disillusionment shows up in subject, materials, and the expedition space or location. The Dada movement is a reaction to the horrors of the war, and rejected reason and logic. They despised the intellectual and cultural conformity in art and society. They turned away from the status quo and undermined established authority. It was a new state of mind. The Dadaists collage technique developed during the movement through the pasting of cut pieces of items to portray aspects of life. In photomontages, the Dadaists used scissors and glue rather than paintbrushes to express their views of modern life through images presented by the media. The assemblages were three-dimensional variations of the …show more content…

Bicycle Wheel (Marcel Duchamp, 1913) [8] is a great example. Seeking an alternative to representing objects in paint, Duchamp began presenting objects themselves as art. He selected mass-produced, commercially available, often utilitarian objects, designating them as art and giving them titles. Ready-mades, as he called them, disrupted centuries of thinking about the artist’s role as a skilled creator of original handmade objects. Instead, Duchamp argued, “An ordinary object [could be] elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist” ( … ) [ ]. This took away the power of the art critic because Duchamp believed that the artist hold the power of deciding what is art. By taking ordinary things and turning them into art pieces, Duchamp makes people change their view on the item. As with the government and propaganda, Duchamp is suggesting people should take a second look at what they thought was right. Marcel Duchamp made another famous readymade called Fountain (Marcel Duchamp, 1917) [9]. The most notorious of the ready-mades, Fountain was submitted to the 1917 Society of Independent Artists under the pseudonym R. Mutt. The initial R stood for Richard, French slang for "moneybags" whereas Mutt referred to JL Mott Ironworks, the New York-based company, which manufactured the porcelain urinal. After the work had been rejected by the Society on the grounds that it was immoral. The “fountain” was supposed to make people feel disgusted; an emotion they should have felt about World War 1. Duchamp presents the idea that even though he says this is a fountain, it will never be looked at as more than an upside-down urinal. At the time, it caused a lot of controversy because women had never seen a urinal before. It shocked people that he would take something that was from a dirty men’s bathroom and call it “art”. Challenging the establishment's position on what could be considered

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