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Who invented the readymade?
What is a readymade art?
When did artists use a readymade?
Why is a bicycle wheel called a ready-made object?
Marcel Duchamp was a pioneer of Dada, a movement that questioned long-held assumptions about what art should be, and how it should be made. In the years immediately preceding World War I, Duchamp found success as a painter in Paris.
Ready-made, everyday object selected and designated as art; the name was coined by the French artist Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp created the first ready-made, Bicycle Wheel (1913), which consisted of a wheel mounted on a stool, as a protest against the excessive importance attached to works of art.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
The readymades of Marcel Duchamp are ordinary manufactured objects that the artist selected and modified, as an antidote to what he called "retinal art". [1] By simply choosing the object (or objects) and repositioning or joining, titling and signing it, the found object became art.
Although the term readymade was invented by Duchamp to describe his own art, it has since been applied more generally to artworks made from manufactured objects. For example works by YBA artists Damien Hirst, Michael Landy and Tracey Emin, (such as Emin’s My Bed 1998) can be described as readymades.
- Beginnings
- Concepts and Styles
- Later Developments
Dada
After the horrors of the First World War, many artists, writers, and intellectuals started to question every aspect of their culture that had allowed it to occur. Artists started to think about how technology, consumerism, art, and politics were all interrelated. Romanian-French poet Tristan Tzara noted, "The beginnings of Dada were not the beginnings of art, but of disgust." Artists and writers such as Tzara, Hugo Ball, Man Ray, Hannah Höch and Max Ernst decided that the only way to respond...
The Found Object
The phrase "found object" is a direct translation from the French "objets trouves," meaning everyday objects inserted into an art context thus transformed from non-art to art. Though found objects had been associated with the art world pre-1900s, they were mostly included as pieces of overall collections such as in Victorian taxonomy, or in cabinets of "curiosities." It wasn't until the beginning of the 20th century that artists started incorporating them into their work. Pablo Picasso is wid...
Marcel Duchamp
However, it was French-American artist Marcel Duchamp who took the found object to new heights in his theorizing of the readymade. Duchamp is understood to be the initiator of the readymade, though the term was already in use much earlier to denote objects made through manufacturing processes. He had been painting since 1904 and studied at the Academie Julien in Paris between 1904-5. His early works show the influence of Cubism and looked forward to the work of Futurists: his Nude Descending...
Originality
While repurposing existing objects into new artistic contexts, one of the most vexing issues readymade artists face is the question of originality. What is an original piece of art? How much effort does an artist have to put into a work for us to say it is a unique work of art? Can an artist truly claim ownership of a work of art if it already existed outside of his or her co-option of the object? These are just some of the questions readymades provoke. They also engage with questions about o...
Humor and Visual Puns
Humor and play were regular themes in readymades, and artists often included jokes or visual puns into their work. As with Dadaism, Duchamp's work sought to subvert cultural norms and play with sense and meaning. His work L.H.O.O.Q (1919) combines a visual and verbal pun: the title when read aloud in French reads "elle a chaud au cul" meaning "she has a hot ass" and the image reflects a moustache and goatee, pencil-drawn onto a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. The work is a play...
Aesthetics and Taste
Readymades also play with the idea of aesthetic taste and choice. We traditionally view art in the context of a gallery as a purchasable item to be bought and displayed. Readymades challenge the idea of art as decorative by incorporating or using objects that are not identified as beautiful in any immediate sense. In doing this, the readymade implies that a work of art is not merely an aesthetic object. Duchamp suggested that in order to create a readymade one had to have an "indifferent tast...
The Readymade and Neo-Dada
The readymade was used often in the late 20th century by artists whose work engaged with postmodernism, aiming to critique mass cultural production. Many young artists in America embraced the theories and ideas espoused by Duchamp. Robert Rauschenberg in particular was very influenced by Dadaism and tended to use found objects in his collages as a means of dissolving the boundary between high and low culture. His First Landing Jump (1961), riffed on Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel with its inclusion...
Young British Artists
In the late 80s and early 90s, the readymade took new form through a group of artists who became known as the Young British Artists (YBAs). These artists, such as Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, and Rachel Whiteread, were infamous for shocking work that sold for very high prices. They also often looked toward mass-produced items from popular culture, or ubiquitous objects from everyday life, and experimented with placing them in new contexts. They were inspired by Duchamp's idea of "selection" and...
Sep 18, 2018 · Most importantly, she invented the readymade—a sculpture pulled directly from the materials of daily life, radical in its implications that art can be anything. The Baroness’s sculptures were more than banal objects—they indicated the artist as an invigorating force of otherwise overlooked material.
Jun 17, 2024 · Marcel Duchamp is one of the most iconic artists of the 20th century. He revolutionized painting and sculpture in multiple ways. Although his first readymade dates from 1913, only in 1915 did he attribute a name to his idea.
