What is Duchamp's READY-MADE

Duchamp's ready-made is a movement of conceptual art that he was betting on taking advantage of an ordinary object and giving it a different and unsightly use. In unProfesor we tell you in detail and we give you examples.

Dadaism drew attention about the need to start from scratch and rethink what art is like and reformulate it. From that moment on, the artists began to create in total freedom and to debate and theorize about what is and is not art. While the world was experiencing great and decisive moments, artists began to make acts of the most iconoclastic and avant-garde. One of them was Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), an artist who revolutionized the world of art with his ready-made.

In this lesson of unPROFESOR.com we tell you what is Duchamp's ready-made and what was its impact on the world of art.

A ready made can be translated into Spanish as "object already made or manufactured", that is, an object created for an already established and popularly known functionality and that the artist "finds" and

It gives a new functionality or takes it out of its usual context. His objective is to shock or surprise the viewer by calling him to participate and leave his passive role.

The common object acquires another meaning and rises to the category of art. A creation of conceptual art, that is, an art in which the idea or intention of the artist is more important than the work itself.

In 1917, and after going through the J.L Mott Iron Works showroom in New York, duchamp decided to buy a Berdfordshire model urinal and stamp a signature on the bottom edge. A rubric that led to look at the work from a different point of view than usual and changed the meaning and original use of the object. Duchamp baptized the work as "Fountain". The work was sent to the organizing committee of the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, society of which Duchamp was a part.

But the work was not accepted by his polemical character and not fall within the canons of traditional western art. That snub made Duchamp resign from the society's board of directors. But already before this controversial episode of the Society of Independent Artists of New York, Duchamp had already made works with objects that had a different use in everyday life. He only introduced small changes and, as he pointed out, they were rather anti-artistic manifestations not made to trade with them, nor to musealize them.

The ready made they are more complex creations than collage since, if he tried to add any object on a canvas with plastic intentions, the ready made he used objects without beauty or personality and, after stripping them of their original meaning, integrated them into the original work.

Duchamp's position was entirely unsightly, thus moving away from the approach with which collages were created. Duchamp, who had started doing oil paintings on canvas in the traditional style, went on to do nihilistic objects and creating works full of irony.

The fountain either the bottle rackthey constitute two works that are nothing without the intervention of Duchamp to give them a new value. In addition, it must be borne in mind that the objects from Duchamp's readymades have been deteriorating and have had to be replicated, without this being important since the main thing was the concept that the artist wanted to convey more than the object itself.

And it is that the industrial and mass reproduction of objects is also behind the idea of ​​Duchamp, he being one of the first artists to capture that idea. His objective was to get out of the system and not enter into the dynamics of the exhibition and sale of the artistic object in the usual channels. He never wanted his works to enter museums.

of those first Duchamp's ready-made We move on to other creations that also intended to surprise the viewer and get them out of their comfort zone. Thus, the surrealists like dali They also made works such as the “Lobster-Telephone” (1936), although their intention was more than anti-system or nihilistic, only trying to provoke the imagination and the subconscious of the viewer.

Other authors like oppenheim either Andy Warhol They also tried to resort to the use of objects that disturbed the viewer, although Pop Art, with Warhol at the head, they turned numerous consumer objects into icons of a certain era historical.