Duchamp's bag was suspending notions of rational sense with all manner of contradictions, even going so far as to contradict contraditions. IMHO, the idea was that a person freed of conventional order (especially conventional artistic order) could be delighted and freed up by the aesthetics of a thing, at least that's how I have come to understand him and his DaDaist colleagues. The picture shows us a composition that is wood and metal, about sitting and about moving, carpentered vs. machined, plain vs. ornate, ordinarily oriented (the stool) vs. inverted (the fork), complete (the stool) vs. partial (the fork of a bike), and the inverted placement of one (the fork) prevents the practical function of the other (the stool). You can't do anything functional with this composition, or imagine doing anything functional with this composition, except consider it; and yet its comprised of two very functional things. It is a merger of two useful things so that there can be no practical function in either except experiencing the aesthetics of there conjoined form. He could have used any fork, but he probably liked the idea of the lean curviness of the blades to contradict with the blockiness of the stool. Now the important question: was it a Reynolds 531 fork, or Dural? :-)
Don Wilson
Los Olivos, CA
> Yesterday, I was at the National Ggallery of Art (in
> D.C.) to
> see the DaDa exhibition. The exhibition is
> interesting, even
> if you don't care much for the style.
>
> But one piece that might be of interest to members
> of the CR
> list was Marcel Duchamp's "Bicycle Wheel." This is
> not the
> 1913 original, but a third version he put together
> in 1951.
> Normally, it resides in the Museum Of Modern Art in
> NYC:
>
http://www.moma.org/
>
> Anyway, the fork used in this piece if just lovely.
> The fork
> has a fair amount of rake, which comes from a lovely
> curve near
> the end of the blades. The fork crown is really
> lovely - think
> it's a Nexvex piece.
>
> In fact, I wondered if the fork was chosen for its
> aesthetic
> properties, of if it simply was whatever was
> available at the
> time? (By the way, the wheel uses a nice aluminum
> alloy hub
> and a steel Rigida rim.)
> Cheers,
> Fred Rednor - Arlington, Virginia (USA)
>
>
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