However, in their remaking, these pieces ask even more profound questions about originality: can we still say that this is the same work as originally displayed? What does it do to the value of art if we can simply remake a lost work? Humor and play were regular themes in readymades, and artists often included jokes or visual puns into their work. As with Dadaism, Duchamp's work sought to subvert cultural norms and play with sense and meaning.
His work L. Q combines a visual and verbal pun: the title when read aloud in French reads "elle a chaud au cul" meaning "she has a hot ass" and the image reflects a moustache and goatee, pencil-drawn onto a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. The work is a playful take on one of the Renaissance's most revered works and articulates a new artistic intention to excavate new meanings from old objects, be they everyday articles or works of great import.
Humor is central in this approach, as it seeks to find new ways to think about expression and art-making. Readymades also play with the idea of aesthetic taste and choice. We traditionally view art in the context of a gallery as a purchasable item to be bought and displayed. Readymades challenge the idea of art as decorative by incorporating or using objects that are not identified as beautiful in any immediate sense.
In doing this, the readymade implies that a work of art is not merely an aesthetic object. Duchamp suggested that in order to create a readymade one had to have an "indifferent taste," in which one could put aside their normal criteria for beauty and try to engage with the object in a radically new way. By divorcing art from personal or subjective taste, Duchamp paved the way for Conceptual Art, in which ideas took precedence over the final aesthetic of the piece.
In seeking to select mass-produced objects, Duchamp and other artists considered the relationship between art and technology and industry. The 20 th century saw a radical shift in the way that objects were made through increased mechanization and the roll out of factories across the world. Mass production encourages the population to consider objects in terms of their function as opposed to beauty. Yet via readymades, artists could encourage their viewers to rethink these objects and consider them for their aesthetic beauty rather than their pre-defined purpose.
The readymade was used often in the late 20 th century by artists whose work engaged with postmodernism , aiming to critique mass cultural production.
Many young artists in America embraced the theories and ideas espoused by Duchamp. Robert Rauschenberg in particular was very influenced by Dadaism and tended to use found objects in his collages as a means of dissolving the boundary between high and low culture.
His First Landing Jump , riffed on Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel with its inclusion of a tire, while also speaking to the car-obsessed culture of s America. He, along with others, became known as Neo-Dadaists through their adoption of humor, play, and critique of popular culture and aesthetic taste. Other Neo-Dadaists such as Joseph Beuys and Jasper Johns responded to the ideas of Duchamp through their creations of work that disrupted or challenged the relationship between art object and gallery space.
Johns' sculptures Lightbulb and Flashlight both hearken back to Duchamp's disruptive aims, while also looking backwards to artistic craft and process. Johns bought both objects, and then sculpted them into a base using metal. The works became composite readymade sculptures, further problematizing the idea of creation, taste, and originality.
Readymades would lay important ground for Conceptual Art in that they allowed artists to consider and refine the presentation of an idea in itself as a work of art. They would also go on to influence contemporary artists, most dramatically seen both in the Pop Art that emerged in the s, which appropriated everyday images from popular culture and elevated them into the annals of visual art, and the Neo Geo movement which turned its spotlight on everyday objects of mass production and consumerism.
In the late 80s and early 90s, the readymade took new form through a group of artists who became known as the Young British Artists YBAs. These artists, such as Damien Hirst , Tracey Emin , and Rachel Whiteread , were infamous for shocking work that sold for very high prices. They also often looked toward mass-produced items from popular culture, or ubiquitous objects from everyday life, and experimented with placing them in new contexts.
They were inspired by Duchamp's idea of "selection" and "taste," in which an object only becomes art through the artist's coining it art. The most famous readymade from this era is probably Tracey Emin's My Bed , which was shortlisted for the Turner Prize.
Emin received much criticism because people thought the work her actual bed and the mess around it was lazy and did not show any artistic skill. In response to claims that anyone could make this work, Emin responded, "Well, they didn't, did they? No one had ever done that before.
Content compiled and written by Katie Da Cunha Lewin. Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Kimberly Nichols.
The Art Story. Upon first glance, this piece appears as a bull's head mounted to the wall - a universally familiar symbol of a hunter's trophy from a kill.
But upon closer inspection its true identity, that of a simple bicycle seat and handles, emerges clear. Picasso noted that for the sculpture to truly work, the viewer had to be able to see the bicycle parts and the bull's head at the same time.
This meant that the work existed as a duality. Perhaps Picasso sought to show the malleability of shape and design in our day-to-day lives, revealing to viewers, like a magic trick, the way that we might "re-see" objects around us. Moreover, the piece also reminds us of our proximity to nature and animals: by finding an animal within a human object, he disrupts the boundary between our apparent sophistication as humans and reminds us of our previous reliance on beasts.
Picasso had explored the possibility of found objects in his earlier collages, but this work is more in line with the techniques of readymade. When the work was displayed in at a Salon in Paris, visitors were shocked by the sheer audacity of such a simple object placed into the context of high art and the piece was removed.
Picasso did not make many other readymades, though he sometimes added found objects into his assemblage sculptures. His Glass of Absinthe from , for example, incorporated a real silver absinthe spoon balanced on the top of his bronze abstracted glass. His Head from is fashioned from a wooden box with buttons for eyes, creating an oddly charming human face from this simple combination. It seems that rather than the pure Readymade, Picasso was more interested in tricking the eye, taking advantage of the audience's constant search for sense and meaning in the world around them.
In this piece, American artist Rauschenberg puts together various objects including glass, bottles, a wood newel cap, and iron wings into an eye-catching column. Rauschenberg also incorporates the ubiquitous Coca-Cola bottle, referencing our societal familiarity with the infiltration of branded objects. The wings on either side of the piece suggest its elevation beyond simple objects and the earthly realm. This is furthered by the wood newel cap, which looks almost like a globe mounted on a plinth, so that bottles rise far above the human world.
Rauschenberg seems to be commenting not only on the "worship" of brands, but also on the creation of artworks in general, perhaps poking fun at our lofty ideals. Rauschenberg made several similar works, what he coined "combines," throughout his career, including earlier pieces such as Charlene and Collection , both from , which include a range of different materials and textures fixed to board or canvas, in evocative displays of the detritus of human life.
The materials for these combines were often collected trash from the streets of New York City, suggesting the contingency and chance implicit within art making. Rauschenberg experimented across media during his career, working in collage, photography, and performance as well as painting.
He is considered a Neo-Dadaist and part of the informal group that includes Jasper Johns, John Cage, and Edward Kienholtz because of the influence Duchamp had on his work, not only through his use and innovation of readymade artworks, but because of his desire to interrogate the relationship between artist, viewer, and the production of meaning. This piece is a sled on to which German artist Joseph Beuys attached a flashlight, a ball of lard, and a blanket of felt. Beuys said that the Tartars used such a sled when they rescued him in Beuys, who was a rear-gunner for a time in the Second World War, claimed that this "survival kit" kept him alive after he crashed on the Crimean front.
Though this story may well be apocryphal, the kit still seems to exude a sense of hope and comfort; the combination of the blanket and flashlight seem to suggest the possibility of a pathway somewhere safer or better, and that this is only a transitory state.
Like the earlier readymades, Beuys selected normal everyday objects and elevated them in the gallery setting. However, through the addition of his inspirational story, he makes this collection of objects theatrical, as if setting the scene for the beginning of a play. In this way Beuys asks questions about what story objects can tell, and how each of us gives objects purposes that go beyond their original function.
As a Conceptual artist, Beuys used the readymade as part of his wider artistic practice. As critic Valery Oisteanu comments "For Beuys, the readymade became part of a larger effort to reinvest artistic activity with metaphorical, ritual, political, and even spiritual significance". He saw the readymade as a means through which he could reimagine the role of the artist entirely, attempting to reject the commodification of all artworks, and break down the barrier between art and real life.
Beuys worked in many different forms, including sculpture, performance art, installation art, and theory throughout his career. His work was in deep conversation with politics and he sought to question the constructions and ideas of society.
Wooden sled, flashlight, cloth straps, cord, wax - Harvard Art Museum, Boston. American artist Jeff Koons produces provocative and challenging work that looks to the relationship between high and low culture.
His work is often comprised of banal, everyday objects that he places in new contexts to elevate them to the status of an art object. Like Duchamp before him, he sought to show the arbitrary line between objects of varying value, and perhaps exposing the underlining cynicism of the art world. This early piece is made from four different Hoover vacuums sealed in a Perspex case. Each brand-name vacuum is lit with a fluorescent light as if presented in a showroom for purchase.
This is furthered by the word "convertibles" as the title reminds audiences of America's very particular obsession with car culture, transporting spectators from the gallery space to the car showroom floor. Koons himself commented that '"if one of my works was to be turned on, it would be destroyed", echoing the ideas of Duchamp.
In abstracting these objects from their normal contexts, they are no longer useful objects; this means that this piece only exists as an artwork because it has rendered these objects completely useless. As a person eats the candy and throws the wrapper away, the pile decreases in size, representing how society ignored the existence of this epidemic, which then led to deaths of many gay people. Through these works Hirst makes uncompromising statements about the transience of life.
In this room installation, replicating a pharmacy, he recreates the clinical atmosphere one expects from such a premises. He views medicine as a powerful belief system: we are seduced by drugs, believing they will cure all ills and preserve life, though rarely questioning their side-effects. It was conceived as a site-specific installation and initially shown at the Cohen Gallery, New York, in Hirst had been making glass-fronted cabinets of the type found in a laboratory or hospital, stacked with pharmaceutical drugs as well as other objects, since In these works but not in the case of Pharmacy he arranged the drugs on the shelves so that they implied a model of the body: those at the top are medicines for the head; in the middle medications for the stomach; and those at the bottom to treat ailments of the feet.
Four glass apothecary bottles filled with coloured liquids stand in a row on a counter and represent the four elements: earth, air, fire, water. At the centre is an insect-o-cutor, an electrical element that lures flies to a brutal death. Having recently broken up a relationship she remained ensconced in her room, in both a disconsolate state and stupor. When she looked at the repulsive state she had left and the vile mess that had accumulated in her room, she suddenly realised what she had created.
The bed was presented exactly in the state that Emin claimed it had been after languishing in it for several days was over. My Bed was exhibited at the Tate Gallery in as one of the shortlisted works for the Turner Prize.
Although it did not win the prize, losing out to Steve McQueen, its notoriety has persisted. In the work Forever both the title and form of the piece suggest the notion of eternity. Ai arranges Forever-brand bicycles in a closed circular column. It is also a common tactic of the artist to retain the essential structure of a readymade element in his work, whilst at the same time reconstituting or reformulating it into an entirely new form.
The monumental sculpture of bicycles interlinked in a circle elicits questions of harmony, eternity and equality in a rapidly changing society. Articles and Features.
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