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Lessons from Marcel Duchamp
There are few artists who have revolutionised the world of Art as much as Marcel Duchamp. Even if you're not the least bit interested in Art, you probably know it from its famous Source (the popular “signed urinal”). But I wouldn't like to bore you with a post about Art History, what has always fascinated me about Duchamp was his attitude, which as always I will try to justify to bring it to the field of Design, UX, or whatever it is we do.
Intrusiveness
To begin with, Duchamp was an outsider in the art world. He failed the entrance exam for the École des Beaux-Arts, He then enrolled in a private academy, which he left soon after, to devote himself to taking notes on everyday life in the bars of the neighbourhood, earning his living by making humorous drawings.
Intrusiveness and unregulated training has always been an aspect that has defined our countries. community tribes. Many people have been concerned about it for a long time, but it is certainly this factor that has enriched us.
It must be said that it is impossible to understand his work if we approach it seriously. Duchamp liked to say that he employed an «ironism of affirmation», rather than merely negative, reactive irony (there's that).
The aesthetics of indifference
I think that being in the status of indifference is the perfect balance for any design project, if its aim is to be functional, the artefact should not produce any kind of emotion. To provoke emotions and reactions through design is totally licit, and probably very necessary for some types of projects, but it is a path that, at least for me, does not interest me.
Duchamp asserted that the object need not necessarily be beautiful, nor the result of a special aesthetic talent, in order to achieve its purpose. As early as 1912, he predicted that in a future world overpopulated with beautiful images, the aesthetic experience would have to be situated on another plane.
Precision and chance
Another of Duchamp's truly obsessive preoccupations was precision, which was always linked to chance in the process of creating all his works. The clearest exponent of this attitude is The Big Glass, The work consists of two layers of glass between which are combined materials such as lead sheeting, wire and dust, of which he made numerous studies and annotations over a period of eight years. The work was broken in 1926 during a move to the Brooklyn Museum, Duchamp meticulously recomposed it, but left visible the spider web-like marks of the fragmented glass, an aspect that adds another layer of infinite interpretations.
In other words, despite absolute control over the work, he accepts that chance becomes part of it. It's OK for the project to take on a life of its own and go in other directions beyond our control.
Duchamp found this vital attitude in chess, an activity to which he devoted a large part of his life above and beyond art. For Duchamp, chess was an intensely aesthetic activity, as it involved combining intellectual rigour with chance and play.
The selection
Duchamp introduced a novel concept in Art, art could be made simply by selecting an object and giving an intentionality or meaning to that selection, there was no need for the artist to elaborate the piece, the so called “ready-mades” are already made.
In other words, it is not necessary to define everything; by making an appropriate selection of existing elements, we can articulate a project, even though I have spoken about this before.
The alter ego
Although it is a somewhat frivolous reading of his work, Duchamp was the first to create an avatar for himself in order to develop part of his work, embodied under the identity of Rrose Sélavy, her other self as a woman. We are all many things at the same time and according to the occasion.
The justification
Duchamp produced numerous writings about his work, in order to give conceptual substance to his works. From then on, artists were practically forced to structure the guidelines and the meaning of their work, «what they wanted to say» in their works and «how».
It can only be said that the argumentation of design decisions is fundamental to defend any project that is not based on spectacularity or appearance.
I get fed up every time a designer dismisses the world of Art by justifying that it has no value and is a joke.
Art is an articulated form of visual thinking, as valid as philosophy or any discipline that pretends to perform an intellectual activity. Superficial in appearance, as much as the interfaces we design.