If Marcel Duchamp Had Done It....

Last week, I gave the students in one of my classes a very short piece of writing. Some said it looked like a haiku and, perhaps, it bears a passing resemblance to one.  I asked the students why that particular piece of writing--which doesn't rhyme, at least not in the way of, say, a ballad or sonnet--was published in a poetry magazine.

At first, there was the silence of students afraid of seeming ignorant.  But I reassured them that I wasn't looking for a right answer: I just wanted to know what they thought, and why.

Then, a student pointed out the imagery and figurative language.  Another student said the piece of writing didn't rhyme but had "echoes"--internal rhymes.  Finally, another student mused, "Well, the writer said it's a poem and the people at the magazine thought it was a poem.  So I guess it must be a poem."

I still don't know what to make of that answer.  I told him--and the rest of the class--to take a look at Marcel Duchamp's "Bicycle Wheel"--which, in fact, is a bicycle wheel in a bicycle fork mounted upside-down in a stool--and ask themselves whether or not it's a work of art.

Funny I should give that assignment and, soon afterward, come across this:

Police in Springfield, Missouri are investigating what they are calling a "property situation" at a house that's been vacant for some time.  In addition to the bicycle wheel hanging from a tree, there are bicycles and parts strewn about the property.  Bicycle tires had been thrown through windows.  A large trampoline hung from the chimney and a smaller one, with a bicycle on it, topped the house.

When police officers asked a man at the house next door whether he knew what happened, this was his reply:  "Bicycles."  Other neighbors wouldn't talk to the cops.  An employee at a nearby Domino's pizza said she noticed the bike parts, but not the trampolines, a couple of days earlier.

Since no one seems to know how or those bikes and parts ended up on the property, some folks--including a writer for a local newspaper--wonder whether it was an act of vandalism or an art installation.

Hmm...If Marcel Duchamp had done it...

Bicycle Wheels: Tri-Spokes Came And Went, But Duchamp's Endures

No, the man in the photo is not a French bicycle mechanic. And he's not truing the wheel.  In fact, that wheel has remained in the stand, not having been touched by a spoke tool or cone wrench, for the past hundred years.

The man in the picture is indeed French, as his wheel most likely was.  He is long dead, but the wheel didn't end up in the hands of some rich Japanese collector.

In fact, it's in Philadelphia.  But, one hundred years ago, it was in New York.  I've ridden from New York to Philadelphia, though not on that wheel.

All right:  You may have already figured out (if you didn't already know) that the man in the photo is artist Marcel Duchamp.  And his wheel was indeed a wheel, but it's listed in books and catalogues as a sculpture.

One hundred years ago yesterday, it stood among other sculptures, paintings and other objets d'art in the 69th Regiment Armory, on Lexington Avenue between 25th and 26th Streets in Manhattan.  The building still functions as an armory and hosts various events, and is today surrounded  by some of Baruch College's buildings.

On that date, the Armory Show (as it's commonly known) opened.  Little more than two weeks earlier Grand Central Station began, the first travelers and commuters embarked and disembarked from trains at the new Grand Central Terminal, about a kilometer and a half uptown.  It's an interesting turn of history because GCT is, arguably, the last great monument to the Gilded Age, while the Armory Show did as much as any event to move American notions of art, aesthetics and public space away from Gilded Age, and even classical, notions.  Literally steps away from GCT is the Chrysler Building; between them and the Armory, the Empire State Building went up months after the Chrysler Building was completed.  The Chrysler and ESB could hardly be more different from GSC or, for that matter, the Armory; neither of the latter two buildings could or would have been built in the wake of the Armory Show's influence.

So why, you may ask, am I writing about these events on a bike blog?  Well, before the show, almost no American, artist or otherwise, would have thought to declare a bicycle wheel as a work of art.  In fact, very few Americans would have thought bicycles to be appropriate subjects for art, let alone used bicycles or parts of bicycles as materials for works of art, as Picasso and others would later do.

So, the next time you make, sell, buy or wear a bracelet made from a bicycle chain or earrings made from spokes, remember that the Armory show helped to make them possible!


N.B.:  Picasso's "bull" is in the Paris museum dedicated to his works.  Duchamp's bicycle wheel is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.