Philadelphia 1: Duchamp

When I first went to Philadelphia several years ago, I discovered how impressive the Philadelphia Museum of Art's Duchamp collection was. They have not only the famous Large Glass (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even):

(a shard of the glass)

but also Etant donnes: 1.la chute d'eau/2. le gaz d'eclairage, the enigmatic and disturbing work he created secretly over the last twenty years of his life. I didn't take any pictures of that one because you really have to experience it as intended, by looking through the barely visible eyeholes in the heavy wooden doors in the alcove at the very back of the galleries. I spent so much time at the museum this visit that I was practically a docent; I saw one young couple glance in and assume that there was nothing there. I don't know if they were grateful that I told them to go back and look through the eyeholes. Incidentally, the piece needs some restoration work - the woman is starting to crack. I did buy a "lenticular" postcard of the piece in the gift shop: one of those 3-D-type things that shows the door if you hold it one way and the interior view if you shift the angle. The gift shop was full of those, for all sorts of pieces likely and unlikely, and I bought a few different ones because they were so odd.

Before my recent trip, I read Calvin Tomkins's biography of the artist, which is apparently out of print but which I recommend very highly if you have any interest in Duchamp and his vast influence on contemporary art.

I'm still trying to get used to my new camera, but this was a deliberate picture:

(Self-portrait with large glass: La Mariee mise a nu par ses celibataires, moi-meme)

Philadelphia also has a selection of the famous readymades, which seem like forerunners of minimalism, Pop art, conceptual art, and probably a number of other fertile schools. You can also see one of his chocolate-grinder paintings on the wall, an image that recurs in the Large Glass.

Whether or not you like those schools of art (or perhaps more precisely, schools of thought), the readymade concept can change the way you look not only at art but at the man-made world around you.

For instance, sometimes neon is art:

(Bruce Nauman)

and sometimes it's lighting:

and it can be difficult to tell them apart.

By the end of the trip, when we came across a metal strip stamped with the words Space Within These Lines Not Dedicated set in the sidewalk near the University of Pennsylvania, we had an unresolved debate over whether this was a piece of conceptual art or some sort of legal marker for commercial real estate.