From an eight-part series about my key creative influences between the ages of 14 through 29, arguably the years when the foundation of one’s artistic point of view is established.
One of the most important collections of Duchamp’s works is at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, just down the Expressway from where I was raised.
I was a pre-teen, visiting the museum with my father, when we entered Gallery 182.
I was a kid who at that time had no art education but I knew brilliant iconoclasm when I saw it. I quickly understood the ‘readymades’ and the absurdity and the layers of games.
There was ‘The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)’, there was ‘Object with Hidden Noise’
There was ‘Étant donnés’
Imagine working secretly on an installation for twenty years while telling everyone you retired from art to play chess…
…and please imagine a twelve-year old looking through the peephole immediately after two nuns in full habits had looked, and seeing this:
Later I would read Pierre Cabanne’s ‘Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp’ – it still sits on my bookshelf. Duchamp broke down boundaries between everyday objects and art objects, exposed the absurdity of cultural hegemony, and was the seminal figure of conceptual art.
