A century of blurred lines in contemporary art
Marcel Duchamp enjoys an appropriate homage at this year’s Nuit Blanche
While it’s going to be hard to tell with all the flashing lights and screaming throngs, a good chunk of this year’s Nuit Blanche serves as homage to the guy who pulled art off the walls for the first time and gave licence to the idea that art could be anything, anywhere, as long as it was smart enough.
That guy would be Marcel Duchamp, the irreverent Frenchman who, in1913, mounted a bicycle wheel to a stool and declared it a “readymade” artwork. It was a cheeky notion, taking the idea of art as precious, singular and the product of an individual vision and thrusting it abruptly into the realm of the massproduced.
Predictably, it caused a stir — though it was Duchamp’s display of a urinal as an artwork in 1917, signed “R. Mutt,” that really raised hackles — but it also built the foundation of many of the ephemeral oddities you’re likely to see Saturday night.
That being the case, curator Ami Barak assembled his zone partly as homage to Duchamp — and its centerpiece, Ai Weiwei’s Forever Bicycles, is at least in part an outsize tribute.
Duchamp was a huge influence on a young Ai while he was studying in New York, but the work is a typical hybrid of the western conceptualism Duchamp helped seed and Ai’s very Chinese concerns.
The bicycles, a state-made brand literally called “Forever,” were the principle form of transportation in an agrarian China left behind by the automotive age in the aftermath of communism. As China’s economic miracle has progressed, bikes have
Marcel Duchamp was a huge influence on a young Ai Weiwei while he was studying in New York
been eschewed for cars; as their practical worth diminished, though, in a Duchampian gesture, Ai elevates them to the priceless realm of art. Ai’s not alone in his tribute. Look at Montreal-based Michel de Broin, whose Tortoise, a sky-high stack of picnic tables, is as readymade as they come. Or Toronto’s Faith La Roque, whose scent installation, l’air du temps, is a direct descendant of Du- champ’s Air of Paris, a sealed perfume bottle empty but for the air of post-First World War Paris trapped inside. There are others — Sherri Hay references his last painting (yes, he did that, before bicycle wheels and urinals) with her project of drifting plastic bags in the basement of city hall, called Hysteria Coordinating — but I like to think of almost everything here as Duchampian, whether intentional or not.
Still, the happiest accidental tribute has to be the giant chess set installed at Wychwood Barns. Some may know that Duchamp at one point quit art to become a chess champion. Whether or not he did that earnestly, or as another deflection of his playful destabilizing of the lines between art and life remains delightfully unclear. More than anything, that’s his lasting legacy: opening the field wide and leaving us to figure it out.