Duchamp’s descendants

In April 1917, French artist Marcel Duchamp sent in an artwork for inclusion in an exhibition in New York. Titled Fountain, it was a porcelain urinal – a typical one, like those found in sanitary stores all over – which had been mounted on a pedestal and signed ‘R Mutt’, a jokey alias assumed by Duchamp, in bold black ink. The organisers were not amused, however, and decided not to display the work – “…its place is not in an art exhibition and it is, by no definition, a work of art”, they explained.

As it turned out, the joke has been very much on them. For Fountain is today acknowledged to be one of the most iconic works of 20th-century art, a work that has revolutionised the very idea of ‘what is art’ and who is an artist. If the ‘readymade’ and ‘found object’ are today firmly a part of art lexicon, then we have Fountain to thank for it; if artists feel justified in putting their name to an object created in a factory, with or without their involvement, then it is all Duchamp’s doing.

“The ramifications are still reverberating one hundred and one years later,” as the curator’s note to the exhibition, Opaque Emblems, ongoing at Nature Morte in Delhi, puts it. The show displays paintings, photographs and sculptures by six artists – three Indians, one Japanese, two Americans – who use ‘readymade’ in different ways in their practice.

For instance, Subodh Gupta, who has developed a visual vocabulary based on steel utensils found in homes across the country, which he has painted in large-format close-ups, arranged into various shapes, or included in his performances – inviting you to think on the mundane and the precious, art and manufacturing process, painting and sculpture. Then there’re Atul Dodiya’s ‘cabinets’, made of random found objects, facsimiles of famous artworks and photographs of museums across the world. And Dayanita Singh’s photographs of old office files bound in red cloth, faded with time.

Then are three photographs by the very well-known architect-sculptor-furniture designer Isamu Noguchi, taken during his travels in Southeast Asia. Two of them show the interior of mud huts the artist might have seen – walls, doorways, thatch roofs, a few utensils strewn – commonplace sights that carry the impress of a famous artist, and so make it to gallery walls.

More interesting are two specimens from Louise Lawler’s recent ‘traced work’ series – line drawings drawn from some of her own well-known photographs of artworks on display, which have been etched on transparent vinyl and stuck directly on the gallery walls. Lawler, who had a retrospective last year at MoMA, thus reframes her own work, renewing it by making it available to new audiences, and in new contexts. “There is [here],” as Peter Nagy, co-director of the gallery and curator, says, “a sense… of the artists re-using their own, previous, works as the found object or readymade”.

And lastly, a photograph by Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, which takes off from Duchamp – not the Fountain but another work called Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors – in the way it foregrounds machines and machine-like forms. Bride Stripped… is, in many ways, the anti thesis of Fountain – it was made painstakingly over eight years, from 1915 to 1923, is complex and enigmatic. The Sugimoto image, from his Mechanical Forms series is similarly strange-looking, industrial form – an exaggerated, quirky ideal of the mechanical.  

“The use of found objects and ready-mades is extremely common all over the world today,” says Nagy. “But it is about the choices that these artists make in their practices, the specificity of the objects or images they are choosing to work with,” in many cases, “for at least 20 years,” he adds. The ‘readymade’, thus, is but one aspect of their art – it is what they make of it that gives them distinction.