Original subtitles

[soft piano music playing]

[Jeff Koons] It's hard to think of art

in the 21st century without Marcel Duchamp.

He laid, really, a groundwork

for major dialogue of the 20th century.

[Michael R. Taylor] He was someone who was bringing

ideas into the art world,

who was valuing something different other than

a kind of academic way of thinking about art.

[Bradley Bailey] What Duchamp did is something

that you can't see in the object.

You can only see it in the gesture,

you can only see it in the idea or the concept.

[Francis M. Naumann] What Duchamp has left for all of us

is this ability to think about art conceptually.

[Hannah B. Higgins] The idea that an idea is art

is implicit and inherent in everything anybody does now.

[Paul B. Franklin] He was so revolutionary in the possibilities

that he offered to younger generations of artists

that without him, imagine where we would be.

We'd be painting in the style

of Matisse or Picasso.

That's what modern art would be without Duchamp.

[Michael] He really got people to think about art

as an endeavor that was as important as science,

that could change the world.

[Bradley] He represents this idea

of questioning definitions

and not just simply accepting someone's definition

because that's how things have always been done.

[Hannah] And he made us rethink

how we view our place in the world.

It changed everything.

Nothing's been the same since.

[Bradley] These are changes

that have altered our lives so fundamentally

that we can't imagine going back.

[Paul] The reason that so many different kinds of people

adore Duchamp is because he gave you permission

to be who you are.

[Bradley] That's why he can be an inspiration to anyone.

You don't have to get "The Large Glass"

to get what Duchamp's trying to do.

[Francis] Duchamp told you that what art could be

is something that you could think--

and every single young art student can think,

they know they can do that.

They may not know how well they can draw an apple

that looks like an apple, but they know they can think.

And that's what they go home with.

That's never going to end.

[pencil scribbling]

[soft piano music playing]

[Michael] Marcel Duchamp was born

in Blainville, it's a very small village

in Normandy, France in 1887.

He was the son of a notary.

I believe that Duchamp might not have been

the artist he became were it not

for the family that he came out of.

It starts with his maternal grandfather,

a man named Emile Nicolle, who was a printmaker primarily

but a painter as well.

And all of the Duchamp children

grew up with his paintings and engravings

hanging on the wall of the family home.

And that inspired them to become artists.

[Michael R. Taylor] His father, he's got

this large brood of kids.

You know, who's gonna come into the family business?

Who am I gonna train to be a notary?

Three sons, all become artists.

Kind of the worst possible outcome.

What did this man do wrong

where all of his kids decide to be artists,

and no one wants to go into the notary business?

[Francis] And they all said it was a result

of seeing these pictures hanging in the family home.

[Michael] Duchamp wasn't going to stay in Blainville.

He's got ideas that are gonna challenge the world.

And not just the world of art,

he wants to take on everything.

Science and technology are equally important to him.

He had two older brothers who had moved to Paris

and became pretty serious artists

in the early years of the 20th century,

and he followed them.

[Michael] The oldest brother, Gaston,

changes his name to Jacques Villon.

Raymond keeps the name Duchamp

but adds Villon, as well.

It's Marcel who says

"I'm comfortable in my own skin,

I'm Marcel Duchamp, nice to meet you."

Born, as I was, in an artistic family

and having before me the example of my two brothers

ten or more years older than me.

It was natural I should be attracted by

an artistic career.

[Paul] Duchamp comes to Paris,

lives with his brother.

Starts copying his brother

and doing humoristic drawings

to be published to the local press.

That's where he earns his first money as an artist.

He starts showing art for the first time in 1907.

A lot of his early work is

exploring different modes of painting.

At one point he's looking at Bonar,

at another point he's looking at Matisse.

Eventually, he comes to cubism

with Picasso and Braque.

[Linda Dalrymple Henderson] It's a period in which there's

a great deal of interest in perception of space.

And the fourth dimension of space is an idea

that grew out of geometry in the 19th century.

And the notion that there might be

additional dimensions beyond three

catches the attention of certain mathematicians

and then really moves into popular culture.

For art in particular, this idea that space

might have more than three dimensions

meant that three-dimensional Renaissance perspective,

traditional modeling techniques, could be rejected

in favor of a new kind of painting that would try

to envision a higher, complex

four-dimensional space.

We certainly see the impact of the fourth dimension

on... Picasso and Braque

along with the x-ray.

Sees through, picks up on transparency,

and creates a more complex kind of figure.

And that certainly responds

to the discovery of radioactivity,

which challenges everyone's conception

of solid matter

as something stable and bounded.

So, cubism is a wonderful reflection

of the newest ideas about the nature of reality.

[Marcel] ...Cubism, 1910, 11, 12,

Cubism was in its childhood.

And the approach was so different

from the previous movements

that I was very much attracted to it.

And I began being a Futurist painter.

[Linda] Photography does play a key role

in this period as a revealer

of an invisible reality beyond human vision.

And chronophotography is a perfect example of that,

that one could in fact have a photographic plate

that's capturing stages of movement

that the human eye cannot see.

It serves as a really important inspiration for him, as well,

in terms of inventing a new kind of painting

on the model, initially, of cubism,

but then injects the movement

that's inspired him from chronophotography.

[Francis] Duchamp's painting of a coffee mill

came as a result of a commission from his brother,

Raymond Duchamp-Villon.

Shows the coffee mill in a diagrammatic fashion,

which cuts it open and actually shows

an arrow of movement.

And this was the first time someone had

indicated movement

in a very direct way in a painting.

[Marcel] Attracted by the problem of motion in painting,

I made several sketches on that theme.

That gave me the real idea for the nude--

"Nude Descending a Staircase."

It was a convergence in my mind

of various interests.

I discarded completely

the naturalistic appearance of the nude,

keeping only the abstract lines

of some 20 different positions

in successive action of descending.

[Linda] This intersection of interest

in the fourth dimension with contemporary science,

that's happening in tandem for him,

and it's happening in tandem for culture

in terms of the popularity

of the fourth dimension, as well.

[Michael] How can a painting be rejected

if there's no jury?

That was the kind of contradiction

that Duchamp was dealing with

in the spring of 1912

when his brothers informed him

that his painting,

the "Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2,"

had been rejected.

The Salon des Indépendants was,

as its name suggests, an independent salon.

And the great kind of slogan was,

"No jury, no prizes."

[Paul] Duchamp decides that he's gonna submit

the second version of the "Nude Descending a Staircase"

to this annual exhibition,

in which there's going to be a room

specifically dedicated to cubist painting.

[Michael] Picasso and Braque,

who had after all invented cubism,

were forbidden from showing at any salon by their dealer,

a man called Kahnweiler.

And what Kahnweiler believed,

and what history proved to be true,

was the public wasn't ready for cubism,

and it would lead to shrieks of laughter

and the butt of jokes and jingles.

And Kahnweiler said, "My artists are great artists,

I'm not gonna subject them to that,"

and he pulled them out.

So, what it left was the so-called Salon-Cubists.

So, here, we're talking about people like

Fernand Léger, Jacques Villon,

Gaston Duchamp-Villon,

Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes.

These artists were banding together,

and they wanted to show a united front.

But they too were worried

about this issue of not being taken seriously.

They were desperately trying to connect their work,

as avant-garde as it was,

with the French tradition, for example.

[Thierry de Duve] So here we have Duchamp,

25 years old,

looking in awe at his older brothers,

submitting the "Nude Descending a Staircase."

And it's not submitting,

presenting, because there is no jury.

The rule of the Société des Artistes Indépendants

is no jury, no prize.

So anything that an artist presents

is automatically accepted, you see?

[Paul] He receives murmurings

of a problem with the painting from his two brothers,

who are enlisted by Metzinger and Gleizes

to try and convince Duchamp to change the title.

[Michael] Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase"

was perceived by these artists as a deliberate provocation.

A nude does not descend the stairs,

a nude reclines.

[Francis] The nude can do what a nude did

since she did in ancient times.

She can lie down

and get fed grapes by the gods, you know?

She can't walk down the stairs,

because the minute she walks down the stairs,

the stairs are a modern setting.

Who says a nude reclines?

Where is that written in an avant-garde movement?

[Francis] It's too provocative.

And Gleizes especially didn't want

that kind of provocation to be part of cubism

because he thought people, if they saw that,

they wouldn't take his cubism seriously.

[Paul] Ultimately,

the biggest slap in the face

to Metzinger and Gleizes is the fact that Duchamp

writes in pronounced letters

"Nude Descending a Staircase."

It wouldn't have been enough to change the title,

he would've had to repaint part of the canvas.

And that's what he took as a total affront,

and that's why he withdrew the painting

from the exhibition.

[Herbert Molderings] What he learned was that

you should never trust groups.

You should never get involved

in group activities.

You just count on yourself.

[Michael] He figured out, from that moment,

"I'm never gonna let this happen again."

And indeed, he didn't.

[Herbert] After the nude was rejected,

he was very hurt.

He left Paris, he went to Munich.

[Marcel] I spent the summer of 1912 in Germany.

In Munich, where I stayed a month,

I painted "Bride."

It was a defining moment for Duchamp

because he was able to do with painting

things that he had not been able to do before.

And that allowed him to move forward

to another dimension truly.

But he carried the "Bride" to that dimension.

And it marks the beginning of something new,

because she's one of the elements

of a larger composition that he starts

ambitioning at that time, which is "The Large Glass."

[Marcel] And having exhausted

my interest in kinetic painting,

my research was in that direction

to find some way of expressing myself

without being a painter, without being a writer,

without taking one of these labels.

[Paul] And that's where his life as an artist really begins.

He says that Munich was the scene

of his complete liberation.

Duchamp realized that he had to find a third path.

He couldn't be a painter,

and he couldn't be a sculptor.

So, in fact, he decided he had to find

a new way to make art.

And that way of making art for him

was, in fact, this extremely cerebral,

intellectual process

which began by jotting notes

and inventing projects and deforming science

and reinventing the universe around him.

[speaking French]

[Paul] Poetry takes you somewhere else.

Poetry is about creating images,

it's about evoking things.

That's what Duchamp liked about language,

is that language, in fact, could transport you,

intellectually, to another world.

[Linda] Wherever he can draw inspiration,

he's synthesizing this into a new kind of art-making

that's very directed toward critiquing past art

but also opening up this whole new field

that will draw on technology, on science.

[Michael] He might visit a science museum

and see engines there.

And he starts to incorporate them in his work.

[Marcel speaking French]

That Munich experience, I think,

has a decisive impact on what comes next.

[Marcel speaking French]

[Paul] Duchamp writes this very important note in 1913.

It comes on the cusp of his visit to Munich.

He says, "Can one make works

that are not works 'of art'?"

And he puts "of art" in quotation marks.

And he starts exploring those possibilities.

[Michael] He felt that art

had become rooted in the past,

had become stuck.

And it had to be rethought and taken apart

to take on the 20th century

with all of its advances in science and technology.

[Herbert] There was a tendency

in philosophy of science

between 1900-1914 in Paris

that declared all scientific principles

based on conventions are relative,

and there was no absolute truth at all.

[Linda] Recognition of the relativity of knowledge is something

that's talked about a lot in the late 19th century.

And the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry

is one of the things that contributes to that.

Non-Euclidean geometry was the discovery, in fact,

by geometrists that you could create

totally consistent systems of geometry

that reversed one of Euclid's postulates.

So the sense that Euclid's geometry

was some kind of sign of absolute truth--

when this happens, really undercuts

that sense of Euclid's dominance.

Duchamp is the one who really understands, I think,

the deeper meaning of all of this

and that it does indeed suggest

that there is no such thing

as absolute beauty, absolute taste.

All of those things are themselves relative.

These non-Euclidean geometries seem revolutionary,

and they offer this possibility,

in the case of the "3 Standard Stoppages,"

of really playing with traditional Euclidian geometry.

[Herbert] Duchamp thought

the "3 Standard Stoppages"

to be the most important work in his career

because that was the time when he came across chance

as a medium of creating forms.

"3 Standard Stoppages" was intended

as three canvases painted Prussian blue

over which Duchamp took three pieces of string,

more or less one meter in length,

but slightly more.

He dropped those strings from a height of one meter,

and where the strings fell on the canvas,

he in fact fixed the position using varnish.

[Herbert] The "3 Standard Stoppages"

is the first work of art in the history of modern art

which transforms the practice and the form

of scientific experiment

into an art activity.

It's a complete para-scientific operation,

because, in mathematics, you don't do experiments

because mathematics is not an experimental science.

But Duchamp is doing an experiment

on a mathematic principle,

which is the so-called postulate of Euclid

that the shortest distance between two points

is a straight line.

That is one of the basic principles

of Euclidian geometry and of perspective.

Because, without that unquestionable principle,

there is no perspective painting.

[Linda] He's commenting both on

standards and the history of geometry, essentially,

but also on the system of metrology

in France in this period, which is held up

as such an absolute sign of French power in the world.

"How many countries are adopting the meter?"

Plato's ideas of beauty are

bound very much with ideas of measure.

So, when you're undercutting the notion of absolute measure,

you're also undercutting ideas of beauty and taste.

And at the same time, he's also experimenting

with a new way of making a work of art.

Making a line that is "an impersonal,

non-arty line," as he says,

that is free of the touch of one's hand.

And this idea of dropping thread

is one of those ways to do that.

[Herbert] And this idea of

chance-created forms

will never leave Duchamp for his whole life,

because the traditional aesthetics is based

on intentionalism and for group

who agree on certain conventions--

what is beautiful and non-beautiful--

and this is based on taste.

But if you use chance to create forms,

subjective taste is not involved.

[Michael] Taste, for him, was the great enemy of art

because taste was subjective, and it changed all the time.

And I think what he wanted to replace it with was freedom.

The idea that beauty could be defined

was for each generation to decide.

That meant he had a voice too,

and he could throw aside

all of that baggage of the past,

the tradition, and do something new.

[Herbert] Duchamp is on the path

of conceptualism.

The idea of the fourth-dimensional space

in non-Euclidean geometry is a conceptual thing.

You cannot see it.

You cannot make it visible.

It's impossible.

You can only... think it.

[Dalia Judovitz] What interested him

was that, throughout the 19th century,

people believed that art was

something that transcended time,

that it involved sort of the highest ideals, and so on.

These ideas are ideas that he put into question.

For him, art is something that's much more relative.

It is made in different ways

in different kinds of historical periods.

What Duchamp was in fact challenging

was the idea that there could be

one definition of art

that would sort of transcend time.

[Calvin Tomkins] He didn't believe in absolutes.

He didn't believe in theories

that would withstand the ages.

He thought you just should keep our eyes and our minds open

to new ideas

and to new interpretations

and to new ways of looking at the world.

[Dalia] I think that what's beautiful in Duchamp

is that intention is always limited.

Creativity is much more interesting

and much richer as an experience.

Because if we could only realize our intentions,

it would be very hard to create anything new.

The newness comes out from the experimentation.

[Herbert] So, there is no formal principle

which can guarantee what modern painting is

or what modern art is.

So, art can only be an open, experimental activity

which always changes instruments, forms, and content,

but never a finished set.

[Michael] One of the great ironies of Duchamp's life

is that the "Nude Descending,"

which had created such a scandal

and a rupture in his life--

it had broken his ties with his family

and lead him to leave the country--

is then selected

for the 1913 Armory Show in New York.

[Paul] The Armory Show,

which opens in New York in February of 1913,

is the largest manifestation of modern art

to ever have been displayed in America up until that point.

[Michael] It was really meant to bring over

the finest examples of modern art from Europe

and show these works to what was then

a disbelieving American public.

Matisse's work was poorly received.

We know there were effigies of Matisse burned

and reproductions of his paintings burned.

But, really, the painting that

caused the most consternation

was the "Nude Descending," by far.

[Paul] And I think that has to do with its title.

People couldn't see that there was

a nude descending a staircase,

and they thought Duchamp was playing a joke on them.

There were crowds that showed up daily,

paid their 25 cents to come into the Armory Show,

and huddled around the "Nude Descending a Staircase,"

trying to figure it out.

[Carlos] People couldn't make sense of it,

there were cartoons about it.

Overnight, it made Duchamp a celebrity.

So, I believe that he found himself

in a completely different atmosphere in United States.

It encouraged him to move to America.

I mean, I think a lesser artist would've said,

"My God, no one gets my work, why would I move there?"

You know? "What a bunch of philistines."

Duchamp has the opposite.

He says, "Maybe there's a chance for me there."

[Dalia] By 1915, he arrives in New York

in the wake of the huge success

that "Nude Descending a Staircase" had had.

He comes to New York, it's World War I.

[Paul] And it's there that he really hits his stride,

and he basks in the glory of being a sort of celebrity

in New York in 1915.

He has a close friend named Walter Pach,

who is an American painter.

He introduces Duchamp to Walter and Louise Arensberg,

who very quickly become his close friends

and his major patrons.

He lived in an apartment that the Arensbergs paid for

above their apartment in the same building

at 33 West 67th Street.

And they paid his rent in exchange

for ownership of "The Large Glass."

He starts physically creating "The Large Glass" in 1915.

He buys the plate glass, and he starts in fact

trying to realize all these ideas.

But he's profoundly lazy, he doesn't have to go fast.

I've always said if Picasso had painted "The Large Glass,"

he would've painted it in three hours.

Duchamp takes about 12 years,

and the reason is

Duchamp wants to put these ideas in.

And the ideas clearly are coming thick and fast.

[Paul] And it's an artwork that you can only understand

by having access to all the notes

that Duchamp methodically wrote, catalogued, and kept

over the years about how that artwork

was supposed to function in its entirety.

[Michael] Some of the notes are written on menus

and hotel stationary.

And what that tells me is

he's having a coffee, and he's like,

"Wait a minute, uh..."

and he's writing.

[Paul] He understood that

you had to put text next to image

and to see how they interacted with each other.

And in fact, the space between text and image

is the space of creation.

[Marcel] "The Large Glass," also called

"The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even."

Nine feet high, the painting is made

of two large pieces of plate glass.

Once you've seen and recognized

that the material is so unusual, you read the title:

"The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even."

And what's going on, basically,

is it's a giant lovemaking machine.

Eventually, you realize that the bride

is the upper register of the glass,

and the bachelors are the lower domain.

[Paul] There are nine bachelors

who try through all sorts of different mechanisms

to consummate their love for the bride,

who hovers at the top of the glass

and keeps them at bay.

The presence of the bride in the upper half of the glass

stands as a remnant of this discovery he makes

in Munich in the summer of 1912.

She hangs free of gravity

in the upper part of the glass

in a realm that is intended

to suggest the fourth dimension.

And he will go on and make many, many notes

about how one might represent the fourth dimension.

[Francis] Now, what is the fourth dimension?

He explained it in very simple terms.

He said, if you hold up your hand to the wall

and put light on it from one side,

you will see that it casts

a two-dimensional shadow on the wall.

But your hand is three dimensions,

so what is that?

It is the shadow of a fourth dimensional being.

So that is a way of metaphorically arriving

at this idea of the fourth dimension.

So, the fourth dimension has to take place in this space

that's outside of the body, outside of our reality

on another level.

Basically, Duchamp is telling you

that, no matter what these bachelors do,

they don't ultimately attain union with this bride.

[Linda] The notes themselves are

filled with interesting ideas.

And he always said there's nothing to talk about

in the "Glass," he says, if you don't read the notes.

So there's a great deal of information in the notes

that in the end doesn't come to be in "The Large Glass."

[Francis] And what didn't he complete?

He didn't complete the union

between the bachelors and the bride.

We know that that's the ultimate goal

of "The Large Glass," but he wanted that

to take place on a higher level.

[Marcel] But I got tired of it

after eight years of this stupid work,

of copying myself all the time

having conceived it, you see?

Uh, and then you have to execute it.

The execution was a boring, boring affair.

[Linda] It's pretty clear that the note making

is the most exciting thing.

He's just inventing all these ideas.

And then when it comes down to this multiple-year execution,

I think that he does get bored.

[Marcel] I never finished it.

It's society that forces you to finish it.

Because, from a society angle,

you must do everything correctly,

and I was against anything "correct" at that time.

[Francis] In the end, the Arensbergs did acquire it.

And then, rather than transport it to California--

because it was made on glass, they thought it would break--

they sold it to Katherine Dreier,

who lent it to an exhibition

where, coming back in a truck, in fact, it did break.

Here's this piece he worked with for years,

and it meant so much to him.

And it was shattered.

And he just decided to put it back

the way it was,

between two big pieces of glass,

and then, when you stood it up,

it would all have nowhere to go but be right there.

You didn't have to glue anything together.

He told people that he liked it better that way.

He declares it definitively unfinished in 1923.

And it's while the Arensbergs are there

and while Katherine Dreier's there

that the fountain incident happens in 1917.

The "Nude Descending" had been

the great event of his life.

He had been so shocked and disappointed

and betrayed by the fact that an exhibition that says

"no jury, no prizes"

had actually decided to censor his work.

So, here we go again, 1917,

you have a group of American artists who say,

"You know what we need?

"We need an independents exhibition.

"You know what our slogan's gonna be?

No jury, no prizes."

[Francis] This is an exhibition called

the Society of Independent Artists

because anyone who paid the nominal entrance fee

could show two works in the annual exhibition,

and this was going to be the first one, in 1917.

[Thierry] Given that reputation of a European avant-gardist,

he was consulted

by a group of realists/ impressionists, painters,

and he was not the only European to be consulted.

Picabia was also there,

and Albert Gleizes, the Cubist painter,

was also in New York, because all these people

had fled in the war.

This is a red rag to a bull to Duchamp.

He's like, you want to have no jurors?

You're gonna bring that on me?

[Thierry] Duchamp had been censored by Gleizes

and his buddy Metzinger five years before,

when he presented

the "Nude Descending a Staircase"

at the Salon de Indépendants in 1912 in Paris.

This is where the most anecdotal personal history

mingles with...

art history at large.

Where an individual like Duchamp

is profoundly hurt

by the fact that he has been kicked out of a society,

the statutes of which claim that they cannot

kick out a work from their exhibition,

and so he knew, by the time he arrived in New York,

that the Indépendants had

already betrayed their principle.

[Marcel speaking French]

[Michael] He didn't just submit

a urinal to an exhibition.

He signed it under a pseudonym, R. Mutt.

[Francis] The hanging committee convened

in an emergency meeting

and decided that it was too indecent

to be shown in a public venue.

[Michael] He doesn't want this piece accepted.

He wants to have it rejected,

and in rejecting it, he shows what a fallacy it is

to say "we're the most liberal-minded people,

we'll say 'no jury, no prizes.'"

Really, he knows that these people are very conservative.

[speaking French]

[Thierry] The Society of Independent Artists

did not realize that,

when they opened the doors of the society

to anybody and everybody,

the logical conclusion was that anything could be art.

Nobody's asking you to produce a work

and test you on the basis of that work.

Nobody is asking you to show a degree

or a diploma or anything

to be a member of the society.

When anybody can be an artist,

then the logical conclusion to draw

is that anything can be art.

And Duchamp simply reminded them of that.

That's...

a pretty strong stroke of genius, I should say.

And this rejected urinal

made a bigger splash than it probably ever would have

had it been accepted into the exhibition.

You can easily imagine how people who,

in 1917, are presented something like this,

they have to ask that question: why is this art?

[Marcel] While working on "The Large Glass,"

I also played with an idea,

which crystallized later into the word

"readymade."

I coined that word for readymade objects,

which I designated as works of art

by simply signing them.

[Thierry] In a readymade, the act of creating--

making a work of art

is condensed in--

in one and only one judgment...

"This is art."

[Jeff Koons] You know, when you think about the readymade,

you have to think about authorship

and how that has confused people or confronted them,

and how is this person, the creator, the author of that.

But it has to do with contextualization

and how something is placed within a framework

of how to be viewed and how its context can be different

than what the normal context would be.

[Thierry] In Duchamp's case,

he has not made the readymade.

A readymade object, as its name indicates,

is an object that somebody else had made,

and Duchamp is content with choosing it.

So, he replaces the making

with the choosing.

And he said,

"Well, take the painter.

"He hasn't ground his own color.

"He has bought a readymade tube of paint

"at the artists' supply store.

"And then he opens the tube

"and he chooses what color he's going to put on the canvas,

"and he chooses what place on the canvas

"he's going to put the color in, and so on.

So making is choosing and choosing and choosing."

That is his tongue-in-cheek explanation of the readymade.

[Dove Bradshaw] He said that the titling

of a work was just as important as the work itself.

There's a definition right there of conceptual art

because he's redirecting something that's utilitarian,

and simply by

its context and a title,

it's now, uh, altogether different.

[Thierry] And finally, the object

has to bear a signature.

Better to show you how the causal chains become

in Duchamp's case.

He's going to push those conditions

to the point where they are mere conditions,

but they are not determining conditions.

For example, the work of art needs to be signed

for it to have an author,

but any name would do.

I am not gonna sign the object Thierry de Duve.

I can take any pseudonym.

Duchamp took a pseudonym of Rrose Sélavy,

and others-- Richard Mutt, of course, for the urinal.

[Michael] Duchamp doubted the validity of art.

Many people have these beliefs about art,

that somehow it's good for you, it's uplifting.

There might even be ethical and moral positions about art.

And Duchamp debunked all that, and he said,

"Look, it's a urinal. Let's put that in a gallery

and see what people think about these lofty ideals around art."

[Debbie Millman] It was a very purposeful

human question--

the nature of what we make,

the nature of how we deem things,

the importance that we put into things or onto things,

and was challenging our way of doing that,

our way of thinking about that, our way of rewarding that.

[Duchamp] The readymade comes in

as a sort of irony.

Because it says, here it is, a thing that I call art.

I didn't even make it."

[Michael] He's not challenging art

because he hates art.

He's bored with the narrow definitions

of what art can be at that time,

and he wants to expand those definitions,

and he wants to basically begin a philosophical debate

around what is a work of art.

And we're still in that debate.

The problem is not that they are art or they're anti-art,

but rather the readymades are about, as he later said,

about the impossibility of defining art.

They're switches that move between art and non-art,

and what they awaken in the viewer is a critical impulse

to begin asking, "Well, what exactly is art,

"and how come something is art

when something that looks exactly like it is not?"

Once you've seen the bicycle wheel for the first time,

everyone has to ask themselves a question instantaneously.

Why is it there? Why is it a work of art?

That in the end is at the core of everything Duchamp ever did

because every other work of art that you looked at

is a problem of a game that goes on

between your eye and the surface of that work.

Well, now you're looking at a bicycle wheel,

and that line of sight goes the bicycle wheel

not to your eye but four inches back further into your brain,

because now you have to ask yourself

all kinds of questions about why is that bicycle wheel there.

He wanted to catch you unawares,

and in fact his favorite readymade was the comb.

[Marcel] It's an ordinary metal dog comb.

On which... I inscribe a nonsensical phrase.

Three or four drops of height

have nothing to do with savageness.

[Michael] And he used to say the comb was never stolen.

All of the other works he loses--

they're either stolen or broken,

or he lends them to an exhibition,

they don't come back.

No one ever asks for the comb.

It was a simple dog comb.

What it meant was that was the one.

That was the one that succeeded.

That's the greatest readymade,

because someone would look at it...

"Is that a work of art?

Is that a Duchamp? Ah, I don't think so."

And they would leave it alone.

So, "Tu m'" is the last painting that Duchamp makes.

And it was a commission for Katherine Dreier,

one of his great patrons.

And he couldn't say no.

But the last thing he wanted to do

was make another oil painting.

[Linda] This last painting

is a chance for him to recapitulate

a lot of his thinking about dimensionality

and dimensional relations.

So we see these shadows of readymades,

and then that wonderful bottle brush

sticking out of that canvas surface,

and here he makes a really clever embodiment

of this idea of a three-dimensional object

as a shadow of a four-dimensional object.

(Michael) He actually has a sign painter

sign it A. Klang.

That was Duchamp's way of saying,

"I don't care. This bores me.

Painting bores me."

So after "Tu m'," Duchamp enters a sort of

fallow period in terms of making artworks

in the traditional sense.

When he goes back to Paris in 1919, the war is over.

He's reunited with some of his old friends--

Andre Bréton, Tristan Tzara,

who comes from Zurich and lives there,

and the Dada Movement is going hot in Paris,

but he is aloof from it and doesn't want to be part

of any movement of any kind.

(Linda) He's so completely engaged

with the spatial fourth dimension,

which is the dominant cultural hot idea

in the early 20th century.

Along comes Einstein in 1919, and suddenly that whole paradigm

is displaced.

It is for him, I think,

like having the rug pulled out from under you.

He was the expert on the fourth dimension,

on ether physics,

and suddenly he doesn't have an audience for this.

[Paul] As Duchamp is sort of growing

increasingly bored and frustrated

with the progress on "The Large Glass"

in the early '20s,

he starts doing other things.

And this is the same moment that rumors start circulating

that he has stopped making art to play chess.

Total myth, that Duchamp himself perpetuates.

What he's doing is not considered traditional art.

He's making optical machines.

He's making this film, "Anémic Cinéma,"

which is not even really a film.

He's having himself photographed in drag

as Rrose Sélavy.

And basically, the entire 1930s

is spent making all the elements for the "Box in a Valise,"

where he basically systematically decides

to catalog his own artistic production

in the form of a miniature reproductions and replicas.

[Linda] He has facsimiles made

or the original "Large Glass" notes in 1934,

boxes of notes called "The Green Box."

So in "The Green Box," you have 93 notes

and photographs of works.

He leaves out all the fourth-dimension- related notes.

So then, for the next several decades,

the only thing people know about "The Large Glass"

is what's in "The Green Box."

But of course, this very central idea

of the fourth dimension is left out.

So, by the '60s, a new Plexiglas box is designed

that will hold 79 of these notes about the fourth dimension.

And they come in "The White Box" as housed in different folders

on different themes.

[Paul] He's so diligent

in questioning his every motivation

that he comes back over and over again,

tries to articulate them differently,

whether in textual form or visual form.

But they're all part of a similar project

to go somewhere else,

to try and make works of art which are not works of art.

[air raid siren blaring]

[newscaster] But the bombs were dropped.

On the oil refineries, the aircraft factories,

the ball bearing plants,

on Schweinfurt, Bremen, Kiel, Wilhemshaven,

on the German production centers in France,

beating Nazi war industry to its knees

with a merciless arithmetic of bomb tonnage.

[Francis] When the Second World War happens,

Duchamp eventually settles in the United States.

Duchamp never really went back to France.

He remained in New York for the remaining years of his life,

with intermittent trips back and forth,

but this was his new home

and this is where he would remain.

[Michael] America was this young country,

it was brutish and industrial and raw and uncooked.

And he loved that, because he saw

that it was wanting to become something else,

and he could take American artists on that journey.

He didn't have the hang-ups that most people do

or did at that time of saying Europe was where the--

the tradition was,

and America was this backwater.

Duchamp truly believed

that innovation happened at the periphery,

not in the center.

And that it was actually in America

that the great moments of art were gonna come in the future.

Before World War II, his great friendships were with artists.

After World War II, he starts to become friendly with writers,

with gallery owners like Sidney Janis.

[Francis] In 1950, Sidney Janis

asked Duchamp if he could borrow a readymade.

Well, one didn't exist, so Duchamp authorized him

to go ahead and make his own.

And on a trip to Paris,

Sidney Janis found a urinal

that he brought back to New York,

and Duchamp willingly signed it for him.

[Carlos Basualdo] He marries Teeny in 1954.

I think that changes his life completely.

Makes it much nicer.

[Michael] It's also the year that his work

is first installed at the Philadelphia Museum.

So artists can now go to the Philadelphia Museum

and see the Duchamp gallery

and experience that work firsthand.

[Marcel] Let us consider two important factors,

the two poles of the creation of art--

the artist, on the one hand, and on the other, the spectator,

who later becomes the posterity.

[Francis] Duchamp was invited to give a talk on the creative arts,

and he came up with this idea of the creative act,

which basically underscored the fact

that a work of art was in fact made by an artist,

but it didn't achieve its final purpose

until viewed by a spectator.

[Thierry] Art thrives on spectatorship.

The danger of institutional theories

is not that spectators are eliminated,

but they are disempowered.

They are, in fact, deprived of the right of saying,

"This is not art."

If anything is art, provided it is shown

in a museum or in an art gallery,

then the viewer has nothing to say anymore.

[Michael] He empowered the spectator.

If someone thought that they saw a Navajo rug,

as Roosevelt did, in the "Nude Descending,"

Duchamp felt that was absolutely

Roosevelt's right as a spectator,

that he completed the picture with that interpretation.

It wasn't Duchamp's, but Duchamp, remember,

has absolved himself.

He said, "I only make the work.

I don't finish it. You're gonna finish it."

Duchamp is unique in his generation...

for letting other artists make his work.

Part of what's going on is there's a proliferation

of replicas in the '50s and '60s.

Many of the readymades were lost,

so these replicas played a role

in disseminating Duchamp's ideas

to a very wide audience.

Without people like Richard Hamilton

and Ulf Linde and Arturo Schwarz,

issuing these replicas and making these replicas,

I don't think Duchamp would be as well known today.

The replicas kept the ideas alive

and in many respects extended them.

[Francis] The British artist Richard Hamilton

and George Heard Hamilton worked together to produce

the first typographic version of notes for "The Large Glass."

Richard Hamilton made a full-scale reconstruction

of Duchamp's "Large Glass,"

and when Duchamp saw it, he loved the results

and willingly signed it

as a conforming copy to "The Large Glass."

[Michael] The postwar reception of Duchamp

comes out of these critical texts

that appear in the 1950s and 1960s.

[Francis] In 1959, Michel Sanouillet

collaborated with Marcel Duchamp

on the publication of "Marchand du sel,"

the first publication of Marcel Duchamp's writings.

And it was around that time Duchamp's first monograph

was scheduled to appear in Paris,

and the author was Robert Lebel.

[Michael] It was a beautiful book

and a very important one.

It suddenly became what artists were reading at that time

and gave them an in with Duchamp.

Prior to that, it's all legend and storytelling.

And suddenly, there were all the facts

and all the figures and all the images

in one place, in one book.

[Gianfranco Baruchello] The book of Lebel

comes the book of Marcel,

which was where I started really reading Marcel.

Duchamp's work changes my life.

My first motivation has been you must meet this man

and understand this fantastic legend,

understand his story.

Looking and reading at the book of Lebel

has been the beginning of a sort of changement of my life

and an enthusiasm for that adventure.

One young artist from Sweden saw that exhibition

and proposed to his friend in Stockholm, Ulf Linde,

who was a curator and critic at the time,

along with Pontu Hultén,

that they have a similar exhibition there.

And what he looks at and-- and sees in--

in the Lebel monograph

is that Duchamp is making replicas of his work.

They can't afford to bring the works from Philadelphia,

so, lo and behold, Linde makes them.

He remakes "The Large Glass," he remakes the readymades,

and they've got an exhibition readymade, as it were.

[Paul] Duchamp systematically integrating into

the artistic realm of the 20th century

the idea of replicating your work and seeing

that the reproduction of your work

and the presentation of your work,

whether it's an original or a copy or a replica

is an artwork in its own right.

And that's what gives birth to things like installation art,

to happenings, to performance art, to body art,

all of these things that we take so for granted today.

Duchamp is really a wellspring,

the kernel for a lot of these artistic activities.

[Francis] So he was always occupied

and always part of the art world,

but people were always shocked when they met him,

because the first question they would ask him is,

"Why did you quit?"

[Thierry] If you had asked some...

well-informed person in the art world,

in let us say 1959,

"Who is the greatest artist in the 20th century,

or who is the most influential,"

you would have received Picasso for an answer.

If you came back ten years later,

you would have received Duchamp for an answer.

[Michael] You really had a moment

in the mid-20th century

where, if you were to say,

"I think the most important artist today is Duchamp,"

you would have probably been laughed at.

It was so clearly Picasso, Matisse.

If you were in the United States,

it was Pollock, De Kooning.

Duchamp was seen as, "Who's that guy?

The guy who did the "Nude Descending"

and upset people in 1913.

You know, that was sort of history.

[Bibbe Hansen] Abstract expressionism

hit New York City really big.

It evolved out of American culture,

and it was the first really big art movement

that happened in America.

It, for the first time, shifted the focus and attention

of the art world from Paris to New York City.

[Calvin Tomkins] The art of the '50s

was hugely serious.

The abstract expressionists

took themselves as being more than artists.

They were priesthood of a society

that they disapproved of.

They really believed that they were dealing with

essential, ultimate questions,

questions of doom and existence, existential questions.

All of a sudden, this came to seem rather ridiculous.

But the artists who emerged in the '60s turned against that,

partly because it was...

a question of taking yourself so seriously.

[Hannah B. Higgins] What happens in New York

is you begin to see a kind of generational playing out

between the older abex guys showing in the Midtown galleries

and the sort of experimental scene,

which is happening in the informal spaces

of Soho, for example.

So, uh...

Duchamp kind of lives right in the middle of it

there in the West Village.

[Paul] Thanks to people like John Cage,

Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns,

Merce Cunningham,

and a little later, Andy Warhol,

they see Duchamp as a vehicle

as as a means of trusting themselves.

[Robert Rauschenberg] I've always found it difficult

to talk about Marcel Duchamp's work, specifically.

His recognition of the lack of art in art,

and the artfulness of... everything...

I think is probably

his most important contribution.

[Jasper Johns] Bob and I went down to...

the Arensberg collection in Philadelphia to look at--

to look at primarily the Duchamps.

And I didn't know Duchamp's work,

though Bob did to some extent.

I found it very interesting.

[laughing]

And, uh...

Over the years, I found it more and more interesting.

[Ed Ruscha] He came around at the same time

that these abstract expressionists,

and the school of New York was thundering along,

and here's a man that's doing something entirely different.

And I think that attached itself to lots of artists

who were wondering about the origins of art

and where to go with it.

[Thierry] This younger generation encounters his work,

and they see in his work

many of the things that they were trying to do.

Duchamp for me was, um, the, uh, the great historical alternative

within the early modernist period

that was somewhat trying to establish his own language.

And Duchamp was there always an alternative

to heavy-duty, testosterone-fueled painting

of the American variety.

[Linda] In many ways, what's happening

with Rauschenberg and Johns and--

and a younger generations of artists

vis-à-vis abstract expressionism

is much like what happened in Duchamp own revolution

against painterly painting or tasteful painting

or touch in the context of Cubism and Fauvism.

So the intellect of the artist,

the idea comes to be valued once again.

It's a replaying, in a sense, of that.

And here he is with this body of notes and works of art

and not surprisingly becomes

such an important role model at this point.

[Bradley] John Cage is teaching a course on avant-garde composition

at The New School for Social Research.

And the people in the class are the people who will ultimately

become the major figures in the Fluxus movement.

[Hannah] That class is absolutely critical

to understanding the legacy of Duchamp,

because we have Duchamp's idea of chance,

or permutational thinking, coming through with Cage

and then moving from the class into poetry,

uh, sound poetry, visual poetry,

happenings, and Fluxus.

[Bradley Bailey] Allan Kaprow,

just a year or two later,

is going to start doing these happenings

that are going to change the way that people think about

what an artist's role in society is.

Dick Higgins is going to come up with his Theory of Intermedia,

based a great deal on Cage and Duchamp.

George Brecht is going to write "Chance-Imagery,"

which is going to take

elements of Duchamp's interest in chance

with abstract expressionist gestural painting

and bring those together.

[Paul] They see this man,

who is so profoundly comfortable in his own skin,

that they are in fact able to tell themselves,

"Why shouldn't I believe in my own ideas?

"Why shouldn't I believe

in the originality of my own artistic trajectory?"

[William Anastasi] Sounds objects were all objects that made sounds

that I turned into sculpture.

Without Duchamp giving me and every other artist

the right to use found objects,

I probably never would have thought of it.

I don't think I would have thought of it without Duchamp.

[Julie Martin] This whole idea of permission

is what you get.

Duchamp did this, so now I have permission,

in your own mind, to do it.

He's not saying it, but this is what you take away from it.

The emphasis for Duchamp was on the creator,

and that the artist made art,

and whatever the artist did, whatever gesture,

whatever choice, that was art.

So he really expanded the possibilities for--

for the artist.

[Paul] And this is why we see Duchamp

having such an impact on things like contemporary music,

ways of artistic expression like happenings or body art

or performance art.

Things that Duchamp himself, I think,

was actually surprised about.

Duchamp went to happenings in the 1950s, for instance.

He saw Allan Kaprow,

he saw Carolee Schneemann, people like that.

And he was amazed that these people

could do what they were doing and get away with it.

[Carolee Schneemann] I met him after I presented "Meat Joy."

I read later in an interview with Marcel

that he had been in Paris and had seen something

completely annoying and disgusting

at the Festival of Jean-Jacques Lebel.

It was half-clad people smearing fish and chickens on themselves.

Duchamp has such a huge impact on art history

because he was an intellectual and a naughty boy,

so we regard him as a volatile and charming

and available influence,

and the way he integrates unexpected materials

and unexpected values begins to shape

a huge body of aesthetic thinking.

So he maintains his significance.

It doesn't, uh... deplete.

Marcel... and Teeny invited me up for tea.

I asked him what he was doing.

He says he was working on a show,

of work that'd never been seen.

I just assumed it was new work.

Yeah, I said, "Oh, really? When did you do this work?"

He says, "Oh, when I was six and seven."

That's when it came clear to me how silly funny he was.

[Alison Knowles] I met him because John Cage

was a close friend of his.

He was very welcoming... with someone,

especially maybe because I was trying to be an artist.

I had the good fortune to do the print with him.

So I went back with color swatches for him to look at,

so I had a little more time with him.

I remember him asking me what I was doing.

[chuckling]

"What are you doing?" You know.

Just the opportunity to meet him and work with him

was beyond any judgment of any kind.

And a more gentle and gracious man there wasn't, so...

He was there, luckily he was still alive,

and he was there to, uh, appreciate the attention

he was getting from these younger artists

who were around him.

[Gerard] Well, Andy had an opening

at the Ferus Gallery.

And it also happened to be, about week after Andy's opening,

Marcel Duchamp was having his very first

museum retrospective in America.

At that point, I had heard of Marcel Duchamp,

but Andy already knew about Marcel Duchamp.

So we met Duchamp for the first time, uh,

at a restaurant, uh, cafe up the street

from the Pasadena Museum...

where Duchamp was having his op-- was gonna have his opening,

and, uh, we were like two little kids,

giddy kids running around Marcel Duchamp.

And he was-- you know, we were very enthusiastic

about the whole thing, but...

And Duchamp was, you know,

just a sheer gentleman about the whole thing.

[Paul] First and most important manifestation

of Duchamp's resurgence

on the artistic landscape in America

doesn't happen in New York,

it happens in Pasadena, California, in 1963.

Walter Hopps pulled together

this incredible show.

And for all those who attended,

it really became a moment.

[Paul] And that event is a major tipping point

in the public reception of Duchamp,

specifically in America.

Because we have for the first time

an overview of Duchamp' work, and it's an exhibition

that is visited by numerous young artists.

[Robert Berman] All of the Venice artists--

Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Robert Irwin--

they were all there in celebration of this artist.

[Paul] Andy Warhol comes out to California

to visit the exhibition.

Dennis Hopper is at the opening with Duchamp.

Richard Hamilton takes the plane with Duchamp

from New York to Pasadena to attend the opening.

All these young California artists

are totally blown away by seeing Duchamp's work

in one place for the first time.

[Ed Ruscha] And it was very impressive

to be around this man and just be surrounded by his work.

It was like a total involvement.

Most exhibits were original oil paintings on walls

or sculptures standing inside.

His was oddities in curiosity boxes

and vitrines and encasements of glass

that had strange objects in them,

and each one of them seemed to somehow go back

to this history that he had

of unconventional approach to art

and a sort of a waking up to the idea

that there are all kinds of things to look at in the world

that you could nominate to be art.

[Thierry] When Duchamp has his first retrospective,

lots of artists but also critics and others

noticed the existence of the readymade,

acknowledged their art status.

In the 1960s, Arturo Schwarz made a--

made an edition of them.

[Arturo Schwarz] Duchamp never had in mind

to keep these things.

He just shows them, use them for some time,

and then they were lost.

So we had to work on the basis of the photographs

of the original.

We went to a castman, gave him the photographs,

and they recreated them,

which was signed and numbered by Duchamp

in eight copies, plus two to be given to two museums.

And two which were one for him and one for me.

[Bradley] So, Duchamp really very quickly goes

from being this very obscure figure

that people remember but aren't really, you know, that familiar,

probably, with what he did to all of a sudden being

the father of all of these movements.

[Thierry] If a snow shovel is a work of art,

then anything can become a work of art.

This is the awareness that crystalizes the '60s,

and that logic is really at work

in the art of the '60s and '70s.

Whether it's in Fluxus,

whether it's in Joseph Beuys's practice, it's there.

The freedom that the artists felt

because of Duchamp's own freedom

in choosing a common object

and elevating it to the rank of a work of art

I think influenced the whole century.

Modern art would have been completely different

without his momentous, uh, adventure

with the common object.

[Joseph Kosuth] The Readymade was really singularly important,

because it showed within modernism

the escape from modernism.

That, by taking the object that Duchamp did,

and what is implied is really any object,

that it could be art

without really being based

on the form, on the color,

on the history of form, on the history of color

used in artworks, right?

So, it was really on the architecture

of artistic thinking that this was framed,

and once you open that up as a theoretical possibility

to introduce as an artwork,

then the floodgates open to a lot of thinking.

[Thierry] With the advent of conceptual art,

it seems that everything that is visual,

everything that is attractive to the eye,

that feeds the eye,

seems to be eliminated from the work of art,

and you seem to have a new definition of art.

So, some people have hailed Duchamp

and congratulated him for that sea charge,

because they thought he all of a sudden liberated

the younger generation of artists,

who could now have access to anything and everything

and call it art.

And other people, of course, have criticized Duchamp

for the same thing,

accusing him of having ushered in

an epoch of "anything goes."

And, of course, if anything goes,

then nothing has any meaning anymore.

[Peter] Later in life, of course,

he must've found it incredibly amusing

to hear people latch on to his theories

as though they were universal truths

when, actually, that's-- his whole life was about

bucking those very conventions and defying them.

So, I'd like to suggest

that his form of so-called conceptual art

was a much more playful exchange.

I'm not so sure how even serious he was about it himself.

He only throws these things out as suggestions for thought.

Others perhaps more needy than himself

would make those rules

be therefore solely applicable.

I don't care about the word "art"

because it's been so, uh...

You know, discredited in a simple way.

[Joan Bakewell] But you in fact contributed

to the discrediting, didn't you, quite deliberately?

Yeah, I did, deliberately, yes.

So I really want to get rid of it.

[Joan] Hmm.

Because the way many people today

have done away with religion.

This sort of unnecessary

adoration of art today,

which I find unnecessary.

[Francis] He was accommodating.

He accepted his own success, I think,

at the end of this life,

but never used it to make himself more famous,

which is seemingly what every young artist wants.

Look, every young artist wants only two things.

They want fame and fortune.

It seems that he didn't want either,

but in the end, I suppose you could say

both came to him.

[soft piano music playing]

[distant bell clanging]

[Paul Matisse] At the very end...

in the chapel where he was cremated,

the coffin was pushed in

to a place,

and then the door was shut,

and then the fire was going.

And we all sat there...

interminably.

And then everything had to cool down,

and they took the ashes

and they put the ashes in a box.

And somebody was supposed to look at the ashes

to see, um, that they were there, I suppose,

and that turned out to be me.

And I looked in the box.

I'd never seen ashes of anybody before.

And what was on the top of the ashes,

if you can believe it,

were his keys.

I thought, "God."

"That's just so... beautiful."

But I did love the fact that all those secrets,

or the unknowns of his work and his life,

represented by a set of keys,

as if you could just unlock them,

if you, uh, had the keys.

But the keys are not there.

They're... [clears throat]

with his ashes.

I did not know that Marcel had been spending

all that time working on

yet another piece.

I thought he was just playing chess,

just as he called it just being a breather

and not doing anything.

When we found out that the--

Philadelphia was going to accept the piece,

I think it was my mother who asked me,

"Well, how do you think it should be moved?"

And I wrote her a letter

saying what I thought should be done,

and so then the Philadelphia said,

"Well, would you help us do it?"

Marcel really couldn't have known

or thought ahead of time

all the little issues that would come up

in the course of the move

that would have to be each and every one of them solved

and laid to rest

so that the move could continue.

It was a total mess of-- of electrical stuff,

and the only thing that you could see was his artwork.

And the rest was all conjured up to work.

I enjoyed the job a lot.

And it was a nice, um...

Would've been more fun to do it with him, but...

[chuckles]

[Francis] The "Etant donnés" was the last major work

that Duchamp made before he died.

He worked on it intermittently

from 1946 to 1966.

And it was not shown before the public

until after his death, according to his own wishes.

[Michael] In terms of "Etant donnés,"

you're dealing with a work

that took him 20 years to make.

In the 1940s, Duchamp had a very passionate,

deeply felt, involved experience,

which was his love affair with Maria Martins.

She was the wife of the Brazilian ambassador

to the United States.

Maria was married with children.

She was not going to leave her husband, Carlos,

and the affair comes to an end

when he retires and they move back to Brazil.

[Paul Matisse] He had probably the most

intense relationship of his life with Maria Martins.

[Michael] We know that the figure in "Etant donnés"

is made by casts of her body,

and so what you see in Philadelphia

is actually a sort of hollow core

of what was once

a sort of body cast of her.

[Paul Matisse] I was amazed that

he could continue with

whatever he had been through

with Maria Martins,

who did not come to him

when he wanted her to.

Marcel, I think,

suffered more from that breakup

than, um...

than was natural for him.

[gentle piano music playing]

[Carlos] "Etant donnés" is a mystery.

When you walk into the Duchamp gallery,

you are confronted with the "Glass,"

and then you see samples of many of his works,

and then if you're careful enough

to look at the room itself,

you will notice that there is a little room

connected to the main room.

A lot of people never get into that room.

People walk into that room and see a door,

but for many, many people, they don't know

that there's something, you know, beyond that door,

so they just look at the door.

But if you care to get closer to the door,

you see that it has two holes, and you look into the holes

and you see this very strange scene.

[Paul] That work is,

as many scholars have subsequently realized,

intimately linked to "The Large Glass."

In fact, the title comes from a note

that was written at the time of "The Large Glass."

[Francis] The "Etant donnés" has a subtitle.

"La chute d'eau," The Waterfall.

"Le gaz d'éclairage," The Illuminating Gas.

If you look at "The Large Glass,"

which is right in the next room

at the Philadelphia Museum,

it, too, was composed of those two components,

but you don't see them.

The Illuminating Gas and The Waterfall

become suddenly visible in the "Etant donnés"

because if you look carefully at it,

she's holding in one hand a gas lantern,

and right behind that is a waterfall.

So, you get the two physical components

that are missing in "The Large Glass,"

but you get something else.

You get the bride, and that's a bride

that you can't attain any more than those bachelors

in "The Large Glass" could attain their bride,

because she's behind a door,

and you can only see through these two little peepholes.

[Dalia] So the whole question for people was,

what on earth is he up to?

Here's the guy who invented the readymade.

I mean, why is he going figurative?

[Paul] A number of Duchamp's friends

were extremely disheartened, even angered,

by the existence of that work.

It seemed to be a betrayal of all that he had been

preaching against since the 1910s

related to retinal painting,

painting that pleased the eye rather than the mind.

I think he left the meaning open-ended,

and I think what he wanted you to do

was to just approach it head on,

to look at it through the peepholes,

and to bring your own understanding,

your own desires, fears to the table.

[David Bowie] It's going to crush our ideas

of what mediums are all about.

But it's happening in every form.

It's happening in visual art.

The breakthroughs at the early part of the century

with people like Duchamp, who were so prescient

in what they doing and putting down.

The idea that the piece of work

is not finished until the audience come to it

and add their own interpretation,

and what the piece of art is about

is the gray space in the middle.

That gray space in the middle

is what the 21st century is gonna be about.

[Bradley] The age that we live in,

the Information Age, is defined by the intangible.

It's defined by concept.

[Hiroshi Sugimoto] Art is one of a kind,

but now he starts questioning about the originality of art.

He was the first person to start thinking about

the relationship between copy and original,

to a found object readymade.

Industrial products can be as interesting

as original art.

In Duchamp, art is no longer simply about making objects

or producing something.

Only God made something out of nothing.

Creatio ex nihilo.

After that, we are in world where things are already made.

Things already have a name.

There's something liberating about Duchamp

that to create is actually not a matter

of actually making something out of nothing,

but making new things

out of some things that are already there,

reconfiguring them strategically,

or thinking about their conditions in such a way

as to recreate them or find an entirely new way

of thinking or looking at them.

[Bradley] With "L.H.O.O.Q.,"

he essentially did what anyone today

is doing with the meme.

He's taking something,

he's slightly altering it

in order to alter the context,

so one not only understands it

for what the image represents,

but now also what that person has attached to it.

When Francis Picabia wanted to reproduce "L.H.O.O.Q."

in his journal, "391,"

Duchamp couldn't get it to him in time,

and so he says, "You're just gonna have to make your own."

And so Picabia takes a reproduction

of the "Mona Lisa,"

he paints the mustache.

He forgets to paint the beard.

So, between Duchamp and Picabia,

it's changed in some way.

What made Picabia able to do that

was the availability of reproductions

of the "Mona Lisa."

This idea of appropriating

is something that is really specific to the 20th century,

and with the advent of photomechanical reproduction.

It was immediately recognizable as the "Mona Lisa,"

and so therefore it carried with it

everything that the "Mona Lisa" represents,

the pinnacle of Western achievement in art.

And so for him to have defiled it

was a broad statement at the art world

saying that, "I see nothing from the past,

"I see nothing from tradition that I need to bow down to.

"Everything is available to me to use,

to alter, to change in my own way."

Well, today, that's appropriation.

You're taking someone else's creative material

and you're doing something to it

to alter the message in order to

apply your own statement to it.

This is something that we all experience now

on a daily basis.

Duchamp, you can say that he was

the father of conceptual art completely,

you know, because the-- in conceptual art

the idea was that-- the idea was actually everything.

It becomes so immaterial that just saying things

without doing them, it was already enough.

It was to create space in your mind

and in your imagination

to start existing without being materialized.

And conceptual art was so wonderful

and gives a space to performance later on.

[Linda] With new artistic tools, beginning with video,

but now in terms of digital technologies,

the possibility of experimenting with some of those ideas

Duchamp was musing on seem endless.

Duchamp was... enormously influential

on digital artists,

and many of them would cite him

as a major influence.

Duchamp's work emphasized concept,

and that the concept very often supersedes

the art object itself.

His interests in instruction-based art,

his emphasis on social practice, on interaction,

on the participatory,

so the questions of dematerialization,

conceptualization of the ephemeral act behind art

are enormously influential here.

A lot of Internet art, for example,

and digital art in general, again being a meta medium,

and particularly art that relies on live input,

that takes its material from the web

and changes with that material,

it represents existing media and plays with them.

And I think Duchamp really created a foundation

for thinking through or playing with these ideas.

[Hannah] With the digital revolution,

something fundamental happens to the way

we think about information,

because what happens when you move into the Digital Age

is that information becomes the thing

that is the module that an artist uses.

And it may be material,

as in a word on a printed page,

but it may not be.

It may be a gesture that gets played out.

What translates from Duchamp's

in some ways material idea of concept

that you have in the "3 Standard Stoppages,"

the meter's that's dropped, or you have "The Green Box"

with different notes and ideas in fragmented form in it,

how does that suggest in nascent form

a kind of threshold across which

these artists would pass?

And I think this shift

in the concept of information is crucial,

and it comes from Duchamp as an art source,

but it's also coming through emerging ideas

about, say, cybernetics.

And these ideas are not isolated from one another.

Duchamp was taking scientific ideas

and somehow impl-- bringing them into his art.

What I like is really this crossover between

science and... and art,

because in science there is no affectation.

You really want to go forward.

You don't want to imitate anyone.

You want to go further or discover something

that's not been seen before.

Marcel Duchamp was inspired by the scientific machine,

and then because of that

the scientific machine becomes art.

What's genius about people like that

is they inform the future.

And it's not like you're imagining the future.

You really make the future happen.

It's very, very freeing,

and it's freeing outside the realm of art.

It's not even really dealing with the parameters

or the type of structure that art is normally using.

It's just opening everything up to the individual.

It's about the expansion of parameters

and what one can experience.

Duchamp was who he was and didn't, uh--

didn't fit the usual pattern of an artist

with a vocation.

You know, his vocation was, like, just being himself

throughout his life.

[Bradley] He's the ultimate nonconformist.

And more than that, he can't even conform to himself.

As he said, "I contradict myself

to avoid conforming to my own taste."

He even feels like you have to rebel against yourself

to remain creative.

[Michael] Because to follow in his footsteps

is to question everything, including what he did,

and I think the artists who do extend his legacy get that.

They get that this isn't about a kind of deification

of Duchamp, putting him on a pedestal.

That's the last thing he wanted.

He wanted pedestals out of here.

[Joseph] These things are not fixed.

They're in process.

Our idea of art is in process

just as our society is in process.

Art is made for the living,

and young artists don't have to follow the past.

They don't have to be traditional artists.

They have to make the art that is relevant,

that asks the right kind of questions of their own time.

[Michael] When Duchamp was a young artist,

there was a tradition of the rupture.

Modern art had been a sequence of avant-garde movements

and group activities

to the point where being avant-garde

had become a tradition-- they'd become the academy.

And I think with Duchamp, the tradition of the rupture

turns into the rupture of the tradition.

There's no doubt about it.

There was art before Duchamp,

and there is art after Duchamp,

and they are two different things.

The fact that somebody could have inspired modern dance,

modern music, contemporary art,

architecture even, poetry, literature.

It's almost endless.

[Jeff] Duchamp's breaking down hierarchies.

He's empowering the individual.

He's removing any form of segregation,

because he's equalizing everything.

He's bringing everything into play.

[Bibbe] He really opened the door

for almost everything that the artists I grew up with

and who came from them and whom I work with today,

he just opened the door for all of that.

And we all got to come to the party.

[Linda] This is the one artist

whose work remained so open-ended

and suggested possibility and possible elaborations

that could then come to be

with developing technologies

not available to him,

but in a way that artists and thinkers

could pick up on his ideas and now work with them

in new kinds of ways.

The currency of cyberspace,

of-- of just the idea of the fourth dimension,

Duchamp would so have loved this.

This is about real life.

This is about possibility that might be realized.

[Marina] We are discovering more and more depths

of Marcel Duchamp's work,

so that means that his legacy is never dying

with so many things that we can still discover.

The good idea always stays.

[Jeff] Duchamp is really about what we can be,

what we can experience, how can we make our life

completely anew tomorrow.

We can experience things that we can't even

think could happen, but, of course,

we can make it happen.

[Hiroshi] The meaning for the 21st century

is growing even more important than ever before.

It's guaranteed the freedom of thinking for the artist.

Anything can be possible for the art.

We will see artists of the future

taking on that mantle

and always breaking through the barriers

that are set up by society,

because if you can't destroy society in your art,

you can't change it or make it better.

In a Duchampian world, anyone can become Duchamp,

and anyone can create,

because everybody has ideas.

[soft piano music playing]