Andre Raffray, "Marcel Duchamp (at the request of the Cubists) departs the Salon of the Independents"

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End Game, 1944

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Nick Schleif,

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While Duchamp's Fountain is often invoked as ancestor of contemporary found art, the comparison here is a bit fraught. Many artists working in this mode add substantial value to their materials, either assembling them in new and fixed relationships, sculpting, inscribing or otherwise transmuting trash into semiotically charged works of art that are then eligible for enshrinement in the museum.

According to myth, Duchamp simply inverted a urinal, signed it (pseudonymously) and proclaimed it art; his more heavily altered readymade assemblages were "assisted." Is this a different gesture from the painstaking work of collating pennies, stitching rags or etching ice? But if those early readymades were actually simulacra crafted by Duchamp from raw materials, invented and not found, what then? The conceptual bicycle wheel spins....

("Reclaimed," through March 27 at Gallery 705.)

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Renaissance/Dada: L.H.O.O.Q.

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Armed with a received notion of what art "should" achieve, the second group liked concrete examples of it less; the first group, which had only its unmediated aesthetic impressions to fall back on, was generally more receptive. For both groups, dada works were less appreciated than representational Renaissance or impressionist paintings and sculpture.

That said, the eye and brain can still be trained, apparently. Professor Bordens also discovered that familiarity with an artistic style or conceptual vocabulary -- a self-created context -- generates a favorable response: “Duchamp’s Nude on a Staircase was rated as more closely matching one’s internal definition of art, and liked more, when presented after the other Dada works than before."

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Alexander Wang's spring 2010 collection

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The theme has broader resonance within fashion. The sheer scope of commercial seasonal lines requires designers to enlist multiple models to demonstrate all the garments that are available, effectively allowing the hypothetical buyer to try on everything at once. The closet [or museum] explodes, and so does the idealized self-image; if the experience of wearing one exquisite dress is good, multiple models give the consumer a sense of how much better it would be to wear multiple dresses simultaneously and, when ordinarily each garment has to be appreciated serially and then replaced in turn, how it would feel to enjoy the entire wardrobe "in the round." As the woman walks down Duchamp's staircase, her image multiplies, time compresses and we see her as a montage of both trajectories and unrealized potential -- the woman she is, the women she was and will be, the possible women in between.

Naturally the eye rests on those possibilities, the transitional states in which one ensemble flickers into the next. It's the illusion of film, in which the retinal stutter between still frames conspires with the mind to generate a sense of motion, of the woman descending or of these clothes liberated from the rarefied runway environment into the offices, streets and ballrooms of life. Within the transitional stutter, even impossible desires may be realized, not to mention more prosaic daydreams of watching the models between outfits.

Duchamp's model, of course, was nude.

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