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| DUCHAMP |
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Marcel Duchamp
"The individual, man as a man, man as a brain, if you like, interests me more than what he makes, because I've noticed that most artists only repeat themselves."
"Use 'delay' instead of picture or painting; picture on glass becomes delay in glass- but delay in glass does not mean picture on glass-
It's merely a way of succeeding in no longer thinking that the thing in question is a picture- to make a delay of it in the most general way possible, not so much in the different meanings in which delay can be taken, but rather in their indecisive reunion 'delay'- /a delay in glass as you would say a poem in prose or a spittoon in silver…"
"I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste."
"Dada was an extreme protest against the physical side of painting. It was a metaphysical attitude. It was intimately and consciously involved with 'literature.' It was a sort of nihilism to which I am still very sympathetic. It was a way to get out of a state of mind- to avoid being influenced by one's immediate environment, or by the past….Dada was very serviceable as a purgative. And I think I was thoroughly conscious of this at the time and of a desire to effect a purgation in myself."
"I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art- and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position."
"Painting's washed up. Who'll do anything better than that propeller? Tell me, can you do that?" - Duchamp to Brancusi during a visit to the Paris Aviation Show
"During the other war life among the artists in New York was quite different- much more congenial than it has been during these last few years. Among the artists there was much more cohesion- much closer fellowship, much less opportunism. The whole spirit was much different. There was quite a bit of activity, but it was limited to a relatively small group and nothing was done very publicly. Publicity always takes something away. And the great advantage in that earlier period was that the art of the time was laboratory work; now it is diluted for public consumption."
"Establish a society in which the individual has to pay for the air he breathes (air meters; imprisonment and rarefied air, in case of non-payment simple asphyxiation if necessary (cut off the air)…"
"Against compulsory military service: a 'deferment' of each limb, of the heart and the other anatomical parts; each soldier being already unable to put his uniform on again, his heart feeding telephonically, a deferred arm, etc."
"The bridge of volumes
above or beneath the volumes.
in order to watch the bateau-mouche go by…"
"Sounds lasting and leaving from different places and forming a sounding sculpture which lasts."
"The filament substance might lengthen or shorten itself in response to an atmospheric pressure organized by the wasp."
"The figuration of a possible.
(not as the opposite of impossible
nor as related to probable
nor as subordinated to likely)
the possible is only
a physical 'caustic'
burning up all aesthetics or callistics…"
"Virtuality as 4th dimension. Not the Reality in its sensorial appearance, but the virtual representation of a volume (analogous to the reflection in a mirror)."
"Many a time the mirror imprisons them and holds them firmly. Fascinated they stand in front. They are absorbed, separated from reality and alone with their dearest vice, vanity. However readily they spread out all other vices for all, they keep this one secret and disown it even before their most intimate friends."
"It was a new form of expression for me. Instead of painting something the idea was to reproduce the paintings that I loved so much in miniature. I didn't know how to do it. I thought of a book, but I didn't like that idea. Then I thought of the idea of the box in which all my works would be mounted like in a small museum, a portable museum; so to speak, and here it is in this valise."
"Among our articles of lazy hardware we recommend a faucet which stops dripping when nobody is listening to it."
"The chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chess-board, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem. . . . I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists."
"The search for 'prime words' ('divisible' only by themselves and by unity)."
"The danger is in pleasing an immediate public; the immediate public that comes around you and takes you in and accepts you and gives you success and everything. Instead of that, you should wait for fifty years or a hundred years for your true public. That is the only public that interests me."
"Rrose Selavy finds that an insecticide must sleep with his mother before killing her; bed bugs are de rigueur."
"All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act."
"Can one make works which are not works of 'art'?"
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