Marcel Duchamp, one of this century’s pioneer artists, moved
his work through the retinal boundaries which had been established
with impressionism into t field with impressionism into t field
where language, thought and vision act upon one another, There it
changed form through a complex interplay of new mental and physical
materials, heralding many of the technical, mental and visual
details to be found in more recent art...In the 1920s Duchamp gave
up, quit painting. He allowed, perhaps encouraged, the attendant
mythology. One thought of his decision, his willing this stopping.
Yet on one occasion, he said it was not like that. He spoke of
breaking a leg. ’You don’t mean to do it,’ he said.The Large Glass.
A greenhouse for his intuition. Erotic machinery, the Bride, held
in a see-through cage—’a Hilarious Picture.’ Its cross references
of sight and thought, the changing focus of the eyes and mind, give
fresh sense to the time and space we occupy, negate any concern
with art as transportation. No end is in view in this fragment of a
new perspective. ’In the end you lose interest, so I didn’t feel
the necessity to finish it.’He declared that he wanted to kill art
’for myself’ but his persistent attempts to destroy frames of
reference altered our thinking, established new units of thought,
’a new thought for that object.’The art community feels Duchamp’s
presence and his absence. He has changed the condition of being
here.”--Jasper Johns, from Marcel Duchamp: An
Appreciation