It is hard to bring up Marcel Duchamp in conversation without eliciting a series of groans from a crowd of MMSt friends. I recently made this mistake at a bar after attending the You Are Here gallery opening with some colleagues.
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| Dust Breeding at the RIC | Photograph courtesy of Erika Serodio |
“You all need to see the exhibition on right now at the Ryerson Image Centre,” I told them. “It’s about dust and photography… And it’s all built around this one photograph of dust by Marcel Duchamp.”
I am met with a few polite nods.
“Oh yes, I’ll check it out.”
“Sounds abstract.”
And finally,
“it’s just that I really hate Marcel Duchamp.”
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| Bicycle Wheel by Marcel Duchamp | Source |
My knowledge of art history is rudimentary; I was first introduced to Marcel Duchamp in Abbi Jacobson’s highly relatable podcast, A Piece of Work. Jacobson brings up Duchamp at the start of her first episode, where she explains that his sculpture titled Bicycle Wheel, is one of the starting places for modern art. Bicycle Wheel is an example of art made with common, everyday objects which the artist has selected and designated as art – an artistic movement or style called “Readymades.” People get skeptical when they walk into New York’s MoMA, and come across a bicycle wheel amidst the abundance of masters that adorn the museum’s walls. How can this be art?
Throughout my first year in the Museum Studies program, I have wrestled with the question of what a museum can and should be. There is an inherent institutional rigidity to museums that deters some people from ever entering, regardless of what’s on view inside. I think of how exhibitions or art pieces in alternative spaces might reach people who do not feel like “art” is for them. Coming back to Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel at this point in the semester felt necessary. Jacobson explains in her podcast how Duchamp was trying to make a point about the way that art has been historically viewed as rare and elite. The inclusion of his readymade bicycle wheel in a gallery defied that idea, and instead claimed that anything could be art, and anyone could be an artist. For Duchamp, the ideas behind the art were more important than the physical realization of that art.
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| 128 Photographs of a Painting by Gerhard Richter | Photograph courtesy of Erika Serodio |
This idea is especially relevant when thinking about photography as art today. The impressive quality of the cameras embedded in our everyday cellphones has made it so that photographs are ubiquitous and everyone can be a photographer. How then, does an exhibition space that focuses on photography maintain its prestige? The answer might be that it doesn't. The photographs in the Ryerson Image Centre's current exhibition, A Handful of Dust, "highlight quotidian details of life." Everyday elements take on new meaning with the accumulation of and deterioration by tiny, unimportant specks of dust. This exhibition feels like something that anyone could be a part of and there is something undeniably beautiful about that idea.
A Handful of Dust: From the Cosmic to the Domestic runs from January 22nd to April 5, 2020, and is free to attend.
