Exhibition Reflection

Barbican Centre

The Bride and The Bachelors: Marcel Duchamp

The Bride and The Bachelors Exhibition, set up within the art gallery at the Barbican Centre, is a function to celebrate and house some of his most inspirational and famous artwork of one of the most significant characters in the history of contemporary art.  Marcel Duchamp was widely considered the ‘father’ of conceptual art and the most influential artist of the 20^th Century. 

This was one of Duchamp’s first exhibitions to explore the huge impact his work had on four additional great modern artists, including composer John Cage, dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham and visual artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

Duchamp's work, including Bicycle Wheel from 1913 and an autographed upturned urinal entitled Fountain 1917, drastically altered what we think of as art today by distorting the division between art and life. He used objects that are used on a day to day basis to create what he calls ready-mades and titled it art.  This alone made some people find his art pieces provocative and sometimes controversial. 

The exhibition featured an assortment of paintings, sculptures, stage sets and musical notations, composed by leading contemporary artist Philippe Parreno.

My initial interpretation of the space was that it created a very noticeably calming and relaxing atmosphere and on entering I immediately thought that the exhibition was very simplistic and basic.  However when inspecting each of Duchamp’s pieces of art, I spent a long time trying to understand what some of his work actually meant and at times was baffled by some of his creations.  I do believe that Duchamp had purposeful meanings behind why he made some of his creations, but this wasn’t blatantly apparent or easy to interpret.  I believe Marcel Duchamp’s work to be a statement of intent that demonstrated he wanted to provide a different means for people to perceive art.

When walking around the exhibition I was especially drawn to the ‘Bicycle Wheel’ and wondered what use it actually had, I came to the conclusion that it could have just been out of boredom or lack of inspiration, that caused him to put two already useful objects together to create a single un-useful object but this is just my own opinion. I struggle to relate to his work, as I myself, just see them as ordinary everyday objects. However I do find his work inspiring, mainly because it is unlike any art that I have seen before and isn’t the type that usually interests me.  This could in some ways be a good thing as it gave me the chance to take into account different reasons for why artists produce certain work.

Although I do enjoy the combination of music and art together, I found that the random and yet spontaneous music being played in the background within the space, for me, didn’t really interlink with the art work that I could see before me.  Sometimes I felt it worked and sometimes I didn’t, but this depended on the piece I was viewing.

The exhibition also entailed work from two modern artists, who were strongly influenced by Marcel Duchamp’s work; Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. I enjoyed their art much more as I have learnt a lot about their work in the past and also understand and relate to their style of artwork considerably more.