The Mass-Produced

At the time where industrial objects were growing and becoming recognizable to many around the globe, the Dadaists were at their prime.  They were questioning technique, medium, support, and other parameters that set the aesthetic walls.   Museums were beginning to call themselves radical, and bragging about their collections involving what is considered the anti-art compositions.  Readymade sculpture is he example of how far the boundaries were pushed by Dada artists.  A readymade is an everyday object that is then minutely altered, in most cases, then presented as an object of art.  

Marcel Duchamp, a French/cross-over New York Dadaist, would collect these mass produced items in his studio.  It began as fun.  They were items he knew he wanted to use, but was unsure exactly how to integrate them in to his production.  In 1913, he took a kitchen bar stool he had and placed a bicycle wheel upside down on top of it.  The wheel could spin, which he sat and played with.  To Duchamp, the point was the interactive quality this piece held.  The act of spinning combined the viewer to the object.  This is the first example of readymade, but he technically did not perfect this ideal until 1915, when he had gone to New York as a tourist, and met the New York Dadaists.  He went on to produce The Fountain (1917) to submit to the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York City.  In this case of readymade technique, Duchamp chose to present a urinal, which was flipped and signed with the signature “R.Mutt”.  This society of artists were putting on an exhibition they referred to as extremely radical, challenging artists to submit such actions that encouraged this. Despite their radical claims, the board turned away this piece, naming it rubbish in their eyes.  It was almost guaranteed admission in to the exhibition is the fee was paid and the art was presented, which Duchamp knew.  His actions were simple; to challenge what art was.  

Another example of Duchamp, coming in a different medium is L.H.O.O.Q. (1919).  Duchamp took a mass produced photograph, one that remains one of the most commonly recognized images today, the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci.  Duchamp took the reproduction, added a mustache and a beard, in essence finalizing the piece, and presented it as an aesthetic object.  This is an action everyone commonly carries on today.  Mustaches get drawn on the faces of people we dislike, or just for fun in magazines and on newspapers.  They are meant to make one giggle a the "genius" they had in making that person look absolutely hideous through the simple additions to their face.  In Duchamp's case, he just was playing with the ambiguous sexuality that the Mona Lisa emitted originially.  

Other artists produced readymades after the founder had.  One of those being Man Ray, who is mostly known for his photography, but did work in many various techniques throughout his career.  One of the most known of his readymades was The Gift (1921).  Coming from a family who owned a tailoring shop in the U.S., it comes as no surprise that Man Ray used a flatiron.  His change was not as minute as the urinal being rotated and signed, for he glued 14 tacks to the bottom, and presented it as a gift to a gallery owner who held his first exhibition.  

The issue with the readymades is that most of the originals have been lost.  Some have fallen victim to the rubbish, while others were just lost in the mixup of moving around the time of the wars, and similarly from gallery to gallery (which could seem like a war-zone with all the different objects floating around to be shown).