Marcel Duchamp Analysis

I went to the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena to visit the “Duchamp to Pop” exhibition. The theme of this exhibit was to demonstrate Marcel Duchamp’s influence and sway over the development and emergence of Pop Art and its artists. Besides many pieces by Marcel Duchamp, there was a variety of other artworks on view by artists such as George Herms, Claes Oldenburg, Tom Wesselmann, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jim Dine. This exhibit was displayed in a space of three rooms, where the first room was greatly focused on Marcel Duchamp but also featured a few pieces from local artists from Southern California. The following two rooms featured the pieces by the artists more associated with the Pop Art movement and greatly ranged from smaller
Marcel Duchamp was one of four siblings who contributed to the art of the twentieth century, though none were as significant as Marcel. He asked himself, “Can one make a work of art that is not of work of art?"; then he bought this piece at a bazaar in the Paris Town Hall and did not alter it in anyway, making it the first of the ‘unmodified’ readymades. Many people would view this piece and see it for its obvious functionality, where you hang wet bottles to dry; however, Duchamp saw possibilities of multiple connotations. He claimed that an artist’s act of choice is sufficient to transform any functional object into a functionless sculpture, altering the object conceptually. He also believed that the “discovery” was what made a work of art and not the uniqueness of the object; where he found delight in paradox, the play of visual against verbal, and the penchant for alliteration and double and triple meanings. Bottle Dryer has multiple implications, especially sexual innuendos of empty erect spikes awaiting empty and wet bottles; however, it never actually dried bottles, which some believed reflected on Duchamp himself who was living a bachelor life. It was Duchamp’s readymades that baffled the art world and demonstrated that art could be made out of virtually anything, and that it required little or no
Rauschenberg, who grew up in Texas and attended Black Mountain College, famously said that he wanted his artwork to “operate in the gap between art and life,” so he drew inspiration from the life around him. He also said that, “I don’t want a picture to look like something it isn’t. I want it to look like something it is. And I think a picture is more like the real world when it is made out of the real world.” The series of Cardbirds are replicas of flattened cardboard boxes that Rauschenberg found in alleyway dumpsters off of La Cienega Boulevard, that were meticulously reproduced with all of the torn edges, folds and labels; which operate somewhere “in the gap” since they mimic real-world objects and are often mistaken for actual crushed boxes. Robert Rauschenberg’s Cardbirds was slightly overshadowed by Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, but were appealing since they deceiving looked like cardboard boxes just smashed against the wall. The attention to detail in replicating cardboard boxes was astonishing and had me take several glances up-close to convince myself that they weren’t just pulled from the streets of Los Angeles. His abstract construction of birds were sometimes difficult to grasp, especially in the middle relief, but I did appreciate his choice of pun for a