From The Guardian Portrait of the Week Series...A good image to continue our conversation about WHEN IS SOMETHING ART?
Who does art belong to? Is what Duchamp did plagiarism? Is it Art or destruction? (his image was created by defacing a postcard, not the real Mona Lisa...)
Artist: Marcel Duchamp (1887- 1968), whose sense of humour first came to attention in 1917, when he submitted, under the name R Mutt, a urinal to a New York art exhibition. Duchamp anonymously defended R Mutt in a magazine, and gave a definition of his new art of the readymade: whether or not Mr Mutt made it with his own hand has no importance. He chose it. He took an everyday article, placed it so that its usual significance disappeared under the new title and point of view - and created a new thought for that object.
Subject: The Mona Lisa, painted in the 16th century by Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), and the most celebrated portrait in the world.
Distinguishing features: The Mona Lisa's deep-set eyes and round face do not conflict with Duchamp's act of violence. The beard and moustache seem a completion. Duchamp said the Mona Lisa becomes a man - not a woman disguised as a man, but a real man. This hints at a different meaning from vandalism, for all the crudeness of those letters, L.H.O.O.Q., which sound out the French sentence: "She has a hot bum." This is not simply an attack on the mass-produced tourist icon the Mona Lisa had become, but rather an interpretation of it. Duchamp's Mona Lisa is a Freudian joke. Duchamp reveals, in a simple gesture, that which the painting conceals. But this is not merely an allusion to Freud. Duchamp uncovers an ambiguity of gender at the heart of Leonardo's aesthetic - that Leonardo sees the male form in the female.
This kind of hidden self-portrait is what Duchamp discovers in his rectified readymade. His Dadaist intervention redeems Leonardo's masterpiece from the banality of reproduction and returns it to the private world of creation.
This kind of hidden self-portrait is what Duchamp discovers in his rectified readymade. His Dadaist intervention redeems Leonardo's masterpiece from the banality of reproduction and returns it to the private world of creation.
Inspirations and influences: Andy Warhol also did several versions of the Mona Lisa.
Where is it? A version can be seen at Tate Modern, London SE1 (020-7887 8008).
