How Long is a Piece of String?
Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Stoppages’ is a set of related artworks that tell the conceptual narrative of a radical creative process…
In 1913, the French artist Marcel Duchamp measured and cut a piece of string into three sections, each one metre long. He took these strings and held them horizontally one metre above a primed canvas, painted a deep dark blue, onto which he dropped each piece of string. He then preserved the curves formed by the strings as they fell by fixing them to the canvas which was mounted as three separate pieces. This was the beginning of a conceptual narrative, developing through several stages and introducing profound new ideas that changed what art was.
Each canvas was now an elegantly simple drawing consisting of a single, embossed line. Although the strings were all cut to a standard length, each had now expressed individual characteristics as the result of just one, minimal action governed by the ‘laws of chance’. Already, Duchamp is calling the concept of standardisation into question, demonstrating that even similar, simple things have subtle differences in the real world.
Even something as ‘sterile’ as a unit of measurement is, indeed, conceptual. As with a common language, the given quantitative unit is necessary as a baseline for…
