Marcel Duchamp

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This past January, Alex Ducorte debuted a performance at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where he gave a slide presentation as Marcel Duchamp.

Facial prosthetics included.

at a podium.

I just thought about it as something I wanted to do.

But kind of sort of in the years after I left making animation, I returned to this thing about layers and skins and realized that so much of my interests are rooted in how about animation, but also about the advent of photography and how we see the world through photography.

And, you know, I grew up in Philadelphia and would go to the Philadelphia Museum where there is the great Marcel Duchamp, famous last work at Tontonet, and that, is very much related to skin and also photography and looking because you look through a peephole or some kind of hole in a door and you see this scene that is kind of surreal of a body and some grass and a candle and et cetera, et cetera.

And this sort of wall that you look through is an important layer in how you experience the work because oftentimes the documentation of the work is either this very opaque banal door or it is this lush kind of surreal image of a body laying in a field.

The women are blue, the bodies are geometric, the colors are wrong, the perspective is broken.

And Marcel Duchamp has sent a nude down a staircase.

Although no one can find the nude.

And frankly, the staircase isn't doing much better either.

Because somewhere nearby, Marcel had a staircase.

And here she is, the celebrity scandal of the Armory Show.

Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2.

If you're looking at it thinking, James, I don't see a nude.

Magritte has some bangers.

Duchamp is another one who is like Especially the ready-mades are a wonderful celebration of the phenomenology as art of normal objects.

But this not surrealist, this is a kind of modern art that is shit on a lot.

on like the internet especially by younger people um or even some older people it's a it's a very like oh my kid could make that or like oh i can make that um which i get fucking go try go go make a color field painting see how it comes out go try a motherfucker it's not as easy as it looks but this is another thing that i think If there's a museum near you that's showing off some Rothko, go see them.

And there have been plenty of other artists who've played with the boundaries of originality by centering the idea rather than the art itself.

Like French artist Marcel Duchamp, who in 1917 took a porcelain urinal, tipped it on its side, and declared it a sculpture titled Fountain.

He even signed a fake artist's name on it, prompting us to imagine that someone named R. Mutt had constructed it.

Duchamp submitted the work to a show put on by the Society of Independent Artists.

Well, like, so a ready-made work is an object that I think is most best expressed through fountains.

So Marcel Duchamp, he was a multidisciplinary artist in the...

From the 1910s forward, let's just say.

But his most popular work...