The Beaubourg Centre encourages animosity. In theory this creates a fluidity of space so that, if need be, even the floor-levels could be altered. The guiding principle seems to have been little else than the englobing accommodation of a supermarket.
This is particularly annoying in that much of the work in the permanent collection has the power to create its own silence, only to have it broken into by conversations that float over from the other side of the partition. Duchamp would have revelled in the contradictions, the ironies of coin and kind, of mass and money. It spans his various personalities and leaves us in no doubt as to how just how influential his work has been over the past 50 years.
By Duchamp had already given up painting in the traditional manner, after experimenting with both Fauvist- and Cubist-influenced works. I prefer to see my pictures without that muddying. Art is simply what your mind comes across. The Large Glass constructs a universe that depends on abstract thought, chance, and humour. File mass-produced object that has symbolised both industrial and technological societies has given Duchamp his essential aesthetic language, providing him with a counterweight to the excesses of the imagination.
The Readymades throw up a series of aesthetic propositions concerning the nature of the creative act and these same issues of choice, meaning and context were taken up again by Conceptual artists in the late 60s. Duchamp insists that, between β21, he adopted a principle of complete indifference in the choice of his readymades, although the Bottle-Rack and the Snow-Shovel make this a difficult contention to sustain.
His contribution to The International Surrealist Erotic Exhibition in was two pot-holders that lie found in a New York novelty shop; the first when unzipped reveals a peeping penis, and the second when unflapped a wild fuzz. His puns pick on the sexual undercurrents that are so much a part of the tensions and energies of conversation. The hot-arsed Mona Lisa of LH00Q elle a chaud au cul makes short shrift of the mysterious enigma behind that smile!
