Art after Duchamp: The “Tarted-Up” Readymades of Sherrie Levine and Meret Oppenheim
In this article: I’m a huge fan of Marcel Duchamp, and I’ve always been interested in the concept of his “readymade” works and how they have affected the art world. Here are some Sunday morning thoughts on the works of two 20th century artists, Sherrie Levine and Meret Oppenheim, who were heavily influenced by Duchamp.
In 1917, Marcel Duchamp introduced his now-seminal work, Fountain. With the act of substituting a banal, everyday object — bound to cause offense — as sculpture, Duchamp was unabashedly ushering “low” culture into the privileged space of the gallery and arguably altering future trajectory of the art world. The smooth, curved surface of his repurposed urinal presented an abrasive introduction to the notion of his “unassisted readymades”, while critically posing the question, “what is art?”.
In the act of placing Fountain into the space of the gallery, Duchamp was effectively diverting emphasis from the object’s original utilitarian function to its curved, feminine form. My analysis for this article will focus on the effect of female forms to be found in Duchamp’s readymade and of works subsequently influenced by Duchamp, namely Meret Oppenheim’s Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure) (Fig. 2), Piero Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit (Fig. 3), Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God (Fig. 4), and Sherrie Levine’s Fountain (Madonna) (Fig. 5).
At once shocking and geometric, when one dissociates function from form (which is not easy to do), one is struck by the feminine concavity of the Fountain. Duchamp was conflating and confusing gender, abrasively rotating the phallic receptacle so that it would suggest the female body, and as some historians have gone so far to propose, female genitalia.
Single-handedly, with his unassisted readymades, Duchamp was introducing a notion which immediately recalled the methods of mass production and repetitive advertising which had become prevalent. As Duchamp questioned consumer and artistic values, replication, and modes of production, he was challenging definition of art in the age of the machine, with a machine-made object, and he was reframing this object under a new title and a new frame of thought. And in 1936, Meret Oppenheim took Duchamp’s tradition of readymade art and brought object reframing and repurposing to a new extreme.
Associating herself (though she was often assumed to be a man) with the surrealists, post-dada, Oppenheim furthered the wry wit of Duchamp and brought a startling eroticism and darkness to an everyday teacup. With the sensational — and perhaps disgusting — addition of fur, like a true surrealist Oppenheim used the unexpected to question reason, fascinate, and urge instinct or the subconscious of the viewer. The liquid receptacle object, traditionally associated with “decorum and feminine refinement”, now offers a “surprising mix of messages and associations”: animals and nature, manners and order, animalistic needs, genitalia and eroticism.
Human production and industrial production were linked in different ways with Piero Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit (1961) and, even further, in 2007 when Damien Hirst brought the idea of exploitation of the readymade to a new set of boundaries in 2007 with For the Love of God. Manzoni’s work combined masculine aesthetics and undercurrents with feminine rounded forms, as did Fountain, and maintained further similarities as it was an art-object also with a utilitarian meaning as a literal waste receptacle. Threads of fetishism, animalistic need, consumer production, and human production are embedded in the work. Damien Hirst repurposed the shape of a human skull in 2007, begging the viewer to recall concepts of mortality, birth and death. In this case, the “readymade” is a mass-produced product based on nature, cast in a synthetic, decadent product, encrusted in precious stone. Its artificial surface design draws association with consumer culture and, similar to how Oppenheim suggested the idea of feminine refinement with her object, Hirst emphasizes (an often feminized) attention to personal appearances, the skull like a woman decking herself out in jewels.
Sherrie Levine, an unapologetically female artist, also escorted the idea of the readymade and exploitation of the object, often exploring concepts of the body, gender, and eroticism in her works. Recalling how, in the act of placing the urinal-object into the space of the gallery, Duchamp immediately drew emphasis to its curved, feminine form, Levine turned her attention to Fountain in 1991 as she “re-presented” the work with Fountain (Madonna). Levine took the femininity of Duchamp’s Fountain to a new extreme with Fountain (Madonna), in which she “bronze-cast a series of shiny urinals” and consequently emphasized the femininity of Duchamp’s Fountain “to the point of hyperbole.”[Hopkins, 154] Hopkins describes: “in her hands, [the urinals] became glossy, seductive, curvaceous objects — tarted-up readymades.”[Hopkins, 154] Levine carefully (or, arguably, clumsily) dances between the concepts of desire, commodity, and appeal, this time through the exploitation of “increasingly sophisticated semiotic codings (often sexual in basis) that had become increasingly current in advertising”. [Hopkins, 154] Thus, the concept of desire — and especially masculine desire — hinted at in Fountain is encoded into Levine’s work to a new extreme through a careful repurposing of materials, as we saw with Oppenheim’s Object.
In their editions of readymades, Oppenheim, Levine, and the others preserve Duchamp’s dry humor, yet offer new undercurrents in their works which glossily (in the case of Levine and Hirst) or disturbingly (in the case of Oppenheim and Manzoni) seduce the viewer. Ultimately, Duchamp emphasized the feminine form with his Fountain; Oppenheim used her feline object to bring an absurd eroticism to the readymade; Mezoni brought fetishization of the readymade to a disgusting extreme; Hirst exaggerated connections between natural (human) production, consumer production, and feminine refinement; while Levine hyperbolized feminine forms, bringing a refined sensuality to the readymade tradition with her Fountain (Madonna).
Figures
Damien Hirst, For the Love of God, 2007. Platinum cast of a human skull, diamonds and human teeth. Private collection.
Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917. Readymade glazed sanitary china with black paint. an Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), San Francisco. Artsy.net.
Meret Oppenheim, Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure), 1936. Fur-covered cup. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Piero Manzoni, Artist’s Shit, 1961. Tate, London.
Sherrie Levine, Fountain (Madonna) 1991. Cast bronze. Private collection.
Citations
[1] David Hopkins, “Re-thinking the ‘Duchamp Effect,” A Companion to Contemporary Art Since 1945, Ed. Amelia Jones, (Blackwell Publishing Ltd.: Malden, 2006), 154
