Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • The Paris Review

    Duchamp’s Last Riddle

    by Jillian Steinhauer Oct 18, 2017 5 minutes

    Serkan Ozkaya, We Will Wait, 2017, installation view. Photo: Brett Beyer and Lal Bahcecioglu

    By now, the story has become a legend: in 1917, artist Marcel Duchamp took a urinal, signed it with a pseudonym, and submitted it for an exhibition put on by the Society of Independent Artists—who rejected it. Fountain, as he winkingly titled the urinal, was one of his ready-mades: a manufactured object that he deemed artworks in an effort to throw off the yoke of what he called “retinal art” in favor of a more conceptual and cerebral one.

    Duchamp was good at gestures. Just six years after the controversy, he announced he was quitting the art world and would devote the rest of his life to his other passion, chess. Most people believed he had. But when he died in 1968, at the age of eighty-one, his grandest gesture was revealed: Duchamp had been constructing

    You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

    More from The Paris Review

    The Paris Review2 min read
    Contributors
    GBENGA ADESINA is a poet and essayist. FARAH AL QASIMI is a visual artist. ELIJAH BAILEY is at work on a novel and a short-story collection. SANA R. CHAUDHRY’s Writing Trauma: The Politics of Mute Speech in the Urdu Short Story is forthcoming from Cl
    The Paris Review35 min read
    An Eye In The Throat
    My father answers the phone. He is twenty-three years old, and, as everyone does in the nineties, he picks up the receiver without knowing who is calling. People call all day long, and my parents pick up and say, “Hello?” and then people say, “It’s C
    The Paris Review1 min read
    The People’s History of 1998
    France won the World Cup.Our dark-goggled dictator died from eating a poisoned red applethough everyone knew it was the CIA. We lived miles from the Atlantic.We watched Dr. Dolittle, Titanic, The Mask of Zorro. Our grandfather, purblind and waitingfo

    Related