Vanguard Windows
Through collection, Duchamp attempts to understand the female form and challenges the relationship between the body and how we identify something as familiar.
Duchamp’s art is meant to be an active engagement that seeks to engage not only the eyes, but also the imagination and intellect of the mind. He embraces humor as a valid aesthetic component and strives to portray invisible worlds instead of just visible ones.
What is gathered in Duchamp’s Lazy Hardware Storefront, is a collection of his collections. Three networks feed into this storefront that help to make it legible. One being the interest in female form, the second addressing the perception of everyday objects, and the third network being his ways of organizing and guidance through works.
KEY WORKS
The storefront involves running water and, like L.H. O. O. Q. and Rrose Sélavy, can be taken in terms of a male-female transformation. To the thigh of the mannequin used in the display, Duchamp attached a faucet, which is a variation of his previous readymade, the Fountain, and functions as an analogue for the “Waterfall” in the Large Glass and his final work Etant donnés. His placement of objects is taken from his Box in Valise mini portfolios and his ideas of networking, explored in his 16 Miles of String installment, and his network of stoppages painting he did in 1914. What makes networking so interesting to Duchamp are the possibilities that can stem from one point. He reveals in a documentary titled Marcel Duchamp: A Game on Chess, that chess is interesting not because of the pieces, as they have no visual or aesthetic appeal, but the possible movements that the pieces can acquire. In other words, it is not the passive act of sitting on the board that is fascinating about chess, but rather the active act of moving. As Duchamp has played chess for most his life, the juxtaposition and relation between motion and stasis has inspired most his works, such as the king and queen surrounded by swift nudes and one of his first readymades, the bicycle wheel. These mental connections that Duchamp makes and guides through the reconfiguration of materials and objects relates back to the idea that his art is an active engagement that involves the mind to understand.
