ONE SECOND NMK CLIP -15.10.05- music

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" The Artist should be alone...Everyone for himself, as in a shipwreck." Marcel Duchamp Hailed by an ever-growing number of critics as the century's most important and influential artist, Marcel Duchamp hated the idea of art exhibitions, once declaring that they made him ill. His ambivalent relationship with the gallery was fuelled as much by mischief as artistic ambition and yet his work quietly undermined 500 years of Western culture and eventually transformed the landscape of 20th Century art. Duchamp has inspired artists as diverse as Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns, Cindy Sherman and Peter Blake and continues to inform the work of contemporary artists, including the exciting new circle of British artists like Damien Hirst and Gavin Turk, who have been taking the world by storm in shows from London and Paris to Minneapolis. He was one of the first in a line of artists who consciously blur the boundary between art and life. He stubbornly refused to compromise his iconoclastic vision for either personal relationships or the demands of the art establishment. Yet this commitment was matched by a detachment which devastated many of the women, and a couple of men, who fell in love with him and frustrated those Dadaist and Surrealist colleagues who wanted him to represent their cause. Andre Breton described Duchamp as "the artist from whom I would be most inclined to expect something, if he wasn't so distant and deep down so desperate." One of his lovers, Beatrice Wood, reflected that: "He had the objectivity of a guru. Yet with his understanding went a certain deadness. Many have observed it. The upper part of his face was alive, the lowest part lifeless. It was as if he had suffered an unspeakable trauma in his youth." His (illegitimate) daughter, who he only met as an adult, reported: "There was an immense barrier between us, impossible to cross...He was a very mysterious person." Duchamp himself once observed: "The Artist should be alone...Everyone for himself, as in a shipwreck." The Works goes in search of the real Marcel Duchamp: the revolutionary thinker who transformed Western Art, the dedicated bachelor who became a devoted husband at the age of 67, the artist who thrilled the New York art scene of the 1920s and then disappeared to become a chess champion in Belgium and France, the enemy of repetition who has inspired generations of imitators, the handsome and cultured flirt who shunned intimate relationships and invented a vulgar female alter ego to outrage the art market and ward off unwanted suitors. The film will draw on the testimony of Duchamp's friend, Calvin Tomkins, whose defintive biography of Duchamp is published in Britain in April. Duchamp's Career In the early years of his career, Duchamp experimented successfully in painting styles from Fauvism to Cubism. He referred to this as the period of his 'swimming lessons'. At the age of 25, he gave up painting with a flourish when his notorious canvas, Nude Descending A Staircase, was violently rejected by the cubists. He went on to produce The Large Glass: The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, a huge etching in glass on the theme of frustrated desire, on which he worked for many years and which he never completed. In 1919, with a few strokes of his pen, he scandalised Paris and the international art world by appending a goatee and moustache to a reproduction of the Mona Lisa. In the same period he unveiled a series of 'ready-mades', everyday objects such as a snow shovel, a bicycle wheel or a urinal which he signed and provocatively introduced into the art gallery as works of art. One of his most sustained works was the creation of a female alter ego (which he called his ready-maid), Rrose Selavy, who posed for Man Ray in 1921, had a camera of her own and wrote salacious poetry and puns. She was even listed as the copyright-holder of some of his works in another attempt to send-up the art market. His ambivalent attitude to the art establishment was further emphasised when he withdrew completely from art circles and dedicated himself to becoming a national chess champion in Belgium and France. Only after his death in 1968 was it revealed that he had been secretly working on another project right up to his death, Etant Donnees, (Given) a disturbing kind of peep show involving a tableau of a headless nude in a country landscape hidden behind a rural arch and gate-way. The film will focus upon this final enigmatic statement and reveal its significance in the context of the recurring themes, obsessions and relationships that structured his extraordinary life. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Credits