In the Outlaw Area

Back in January 1966, the New Yorker published this extended conversation with Bucky Fuller, written by Calvin Tomkins.   It avoids that sensation of difficulty/complexity that arises from some of Bucky's own writing, and gives an affectionate and lucid description of spending time in Bucky's company, and his endlessly intriguing and amusing conversation on a wide range of subjects (or rather, of inter-related aspects of Universe).

Talking of teaching himself maths:

“Later on, we came to geometry. The teacher made a point on the blackboard, then erased it and said, ‘That doesn’t exist.’ She made a row of points, and said, ‘That’s a line, and it doesn’t exist, either.’ She made a number of parallel lines and put them together to form a plane, and said it didn’t exist. And then she stacked the planes one on top of the other, so that they made a cube, and she said that existed. I wondered how you could get existence out of nonexistence to the third power. It seemed unreasonable. So I asked her, ‘How old is it?’ The teacher said I was just being facetious. I asked her what it weighed and I asked how hot it was, and she got angry. The cube just didn’t have anything that I thought was existence, but I thought I was probably being unfriendly, and so I shut up. I got A’s in all my science work, and when I got to Harvard I didn’t go on with mathematics, because it was so easy—just a sort of game you played. I thought I’d take something really difficult, like government or English."

Hat tip to Bobby Campbell for this image

"There is no doubt whatever in Fuller’s mind that the whole development of modern science and technology has resulted from a willingness on the part of a very few men to sail into the wind of tradition, to trust in their own intellect, and to take advantage of their natural mobility. According to Fuller, the influence of this tiny minority, the navigator-priests of pre-history who ventured into the outlaw area and returned with the new wealth that was knowledge, was always far greater than that of the kings or other rulers to whom they were officially subject, and the situation is no different today; it is modern technology, rather than political leadership, that directs the real movement of contemporary history. “Take away the energy-distributing networks and the industrial machinery from America, Russia, and all the world’s industrialized countries, and within six months over two billion swiftly and painfully deteriorating people will starve to death,” he has written. “Take away the politicians, all the ideologies and their professional protagonists from those same countries and leave them their present energy networks, industrial machinery, routine production, and distribution personnel, and no more humans will starve nor be afflicted in health than at present.”

NB: Calvin Tomkins also wrote an excellent biography of Marcel Duchamp.       Try this podcast.

Much earlier, he wrote a collection of pieces, worth tracking down if you can find a copy, called "The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde" - with insightful descriptions of Duchamp, Tinguely, Cage, Rauschenberg and Cunningham.

You can find a free PDF of The Afternoon Interviews here.

Dreams that money can buy...

Watch Dreams That Money Can Buy, a Surrealist Film by Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, Fernand Léger & Hans Richter (others involved, Paul Bowles, John Cage, etc)

Dancing Around Duchamp

A series of events and exhibitions celebrating the life and influence of Marcel Duchamp will take place in London, England - at The Barbican Centre.

You can find a summary of the project here.

"This spring the Barbican embraces chance, provocation and humour in an international season celebrating Marcel Duchamp, widely considered the father of conceptual art and the most influential artist of the 20th century. We invite you to explore work by his precursors, collaborators and the generations of artists he has influenced across art, music, dance, theatre and film."

There will be an exhibition - The Bride and the Bachelors: Duchamp with Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg and Johns - of painting, sculpture, stage sets and musical notations...

You will be able to see/hear a programme of Cage music and Cunningham dance.

The theatre will present pieces by Jarry, Ionesco and Beckett, etc.

The cinema will show films by  Hans Richter, Man Ray, John Cage and Jean-Luc Godard, plus silent comedy and movies from the American underground.

-0-                                                       

You can find an excellent animated website called Making Sense of Marcel Duchamp online...

#duchamp2013 for Twitter updates.

Sounds Like...

This blog, as a spin-off to the Maybe Quarterly magazine, tends to present finished pieces, like articles, so we spend a lot less time chatting through it.  We don't use the word "I" [the bogus magus] that much around here.

We [the multiple editors and contributors] don't necessarily co-ordinate articles, because that way we can remain pleasantly surprised by each other's contributions.

It sounds as though Bobby Campbell intends to re-publish his comic @Gnosis here, serialized, which I can only recommend as I love his stuff. 
(What do people say?  Add this to your favorites, or subscribe to this page?  Watch this Space!)  

Whatever.  Coming soon!

For The Birds
” … he asked me … whether my title was merely a joke. I said: No. I am for the birds, not for the cages in which people sometimes place them.”  John Cage.

I have found myself celebrating John Cage (100 years since his birthday, and his piece "As Slow As Possible" may take 639 years and end in 2640).

The new book about him "Where the Heart Beats" (John Cage, Zen Buddhism and the Inner Life of Artists) [New York Review here] has landed on my desk and may consume the next few days.  However, it does seem a trifle esoteric for general Facebook Friends...

By spontaneous links in FB, however, I found myself on the wonderful UbuWeb, who had recordings of The Nova Convention from 1978 (which I only had as an old, pirate, cassette). So, returning to the theme of acoustic contributions (rather than the written word) you can listen to John Cage there, (14 minutes) reading the opening pages of Finnegans Wake, and then his own mesostic cut-up of the same opening passage.

Even better, I now found on Vimeo a 60 minute video of his

Writing for the Second Time Through Finnegans Wake by John Cage

Oh, and also on Nova Convention at UbuWeb, you will find conversations involving Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary (being heckled). William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, etc.  You can also hear Frank Zappa reading The Talking Asshole section from Burroughs' "Naked Lunch"; a great vocoder piece from Laurie Anderson; Patti Smith, Terry Southern, Philip Glass, John Giorno, Allen Ginsburg and so much stuff I don't want to make separate links.

Just visit UbuWeb - The Nova Convention - and choose yer own samples.

I also found the Zappa piece on Dangerous Minds, where it says he stood in for Keith Richards, who had visa problems getting into the USA.

Roaratorio, An Irish Circus On Finnegans Wake

"Roaratorio, John Cage's 1979 composition, is a work of staggering complexity. To put it simply, it involves several elements all working together at once to create a soundscape of Finnegans Wake." (Read More)

"Tomorrow is our permanent address"

One of the things I most regretted about not having the complete Tale of The Tribe course with Bob - we never really got to discuss Marshall McLuhan.

He seems well out of fashion. For all his analysis of media, he probably appears difficult. Partly because of his teasing approach - trying to make you think!

Bobby has offered the complete version of McLuhan's Wake (with Laurie Anderson doing narrator). [but note Glandmaster's technical comment below, about the site].

I choose to watch/listen to it right now as I write. I'll probably go and buy it, so I can show it on friends' DVD players (you see! We do end up buying things, even when we can look at it online). Oh, yeah - you have to set 90 minutes aside, like a docu-movie.

In the 60s he amused me greatly. He seemed as good as Dylan at winding up journalists. He gave great soundbyte...he got slogans. He apparently gave Leary "Turn on, tune in, Drop out" (or the idea for it).

English teachers often seem to have done far more than teach one simple subject (mine did, for sure - he even understood why I had to drop out, and even wished me luck - unlike all the other teachers). I didn't know he came from a Roman Catholic position (I have my own prejudices - most of my heroes seem like lapsed Catholics - Leary, RAW, Lilly, Joyce, etc). I can't read Lord of the Rings for just that subtext from Tolkien. I didn't know it when I tried to first read it in 1972. I just felt mysteriously ill, and queasy, as I do with the Harry Potter books (which seem curiously old-fashioned with their boarding schools and 'magic powers' - but, as so often, I feel quite out-of-synch with many people. Apparently UK citizens have turned religious again, just to get their kids into the best schools. (sigh)

-There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew.
Marshall McLuhan

“How can we make the world work for 100 percent of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage or disadvantage to anyone?” — R. Buckminster Fuller

Check out John Cage talking about both of them.

McLuhan seemed curiously old-fashioned and straight, and also 'hip' at the same time. A great teacher. Whether he really 'stole' a lot of it from Bucky and Korzybski still seems an open question - perhaps we might call him a populariser.

The Phantom Captain
(click to read whole article quoted below)

But there is some evidence that this idea of the extension of man, identified by many as the core concept of McLuhan's philosophical stance, may have come from the transcendentalist Bucky. From 1960 to 1970, Constantin Dioxides, an engineer, architect, and urban planner and the founder of the Athens Technological Institute in Greece, organized summer cruises complete with cutting edge guests such as Margaret Mead, and Jonas Salk.

Many, including McLuhan, were guests more than once, but only Fuller was invited on every single trip for twelve years in a row. In The Synergetics Dictionary, under McLuhan, notes such as these were made by Fuller: "Marshall McLuhan told me the first day he met me - on one of the early Dioxide cruises - 'I am your disciple.' He held up copies of No More Secondhand God and Nine Chains to the Moon and said to me 'I've joined your conspiracy!"'

In his notes, he writes: "McLuhan has never made any bones about his indebtedness to me as the original source of most of his ideas. The 'Global Village' was indeed my concept. I don't think he has an original idea. Not one McLuhan says so himself. He's really a great enthusiast, a marvelous populariser and teacher. He has an irrepressible sense of the histrionic, like no one I've known since Frank Lloyd Wright."

Indeed, in Nine Chains to the Moon, a passage reads: "Through the leverage gained by his inanimate instrument extensions of self, he has attained an extended mechanical ability far in excess of his own integral mechanical energy content ability." He goes on to claim that the idea of "man backing up into his future" appears in his books and that Fuller's concept of the "Mechanical Extensions of Man" is the basis for McLuhan's talk of the "Electrical Extensions" of man.

Open source - interesting and relevant post...

At that time, I was cavorting with known anarchists like the composers John Cage and Udo Kasemets. I had been a fan of Cage, Bucky Fuller, Marshal McLuhan and William S. Burroughs since my teens; in retrospect, I was probably a powderkeg in search of a terrorist. As an unabashed advocate of free and unfettered information sharing, free software appealed to my young mind, it held an almost Kabbalistic hope: "You may pay for knowledge, but you should never charge for it.". Community currencies would prevail over the economics of scarcity; I devoted myself to learning, promoting and participating in the Free Software Revolution.

Visit the Remains and Help Yourself to the Leftovers

[text remains unfinalised]

For new visitors, from whichever direction you arrived, just a little explanation about how I see this 'place'. RAW's wonderful (if hardly unique) creation of an interactive online forum for learning brought together an interesting group of people, with some core members emerging, and a glittering cast of guest stars, walk-ons, extras (who we might call lurkers), has-beens, wannabes, provocateurs, people hidden behind make-up and/or masks and people who strip everything off and run naked through the marketplace.


And the Academy has many more resources than a mere forum - it has a rather fine library of RAW material and work from people that he liked, I'll offer a relevant sample:

The values that Taoism sees in woman and water are their harmony with the Tao. I have not translated this key term, and I do not intend to; but Ezra Pound's translation - "the process" - seems to me more adequate than "the Way," "the Path" and most of the other attempts. Students of General Semantics might understand if I say that the "Tao" comes very close to meaning what they mean when they say "the process-world." The Tao is the flux, the constant change, amid which we live and in the nature of which we partake; or it is the "law" of this change. (But, of course, the "law" and the "change" itself are not different in reality, only in our grammar and philosophy.) A Zen master asked how to get in harmony with the Tao, replied, "Walk on!" Water and woman represent adjustment to the Law of Change, which "man, proud man, dressed in his little brief authority," and his abstract dogmas, tries to resist.

Anna Livia Plurabelle, the water woman, represents the values of the Tao in Finnegans Wake . The very first word of the book, "riverrun" - not the river and the running of the river, but "riverrun" - places us firmly in the "process-world" of modern physics, which is the world of the Tao.

Joyce and Tao By Robert Anton Wilson
From The James Joyce Review, vol. 3, 1959, pp. 8-16

Because of the ephemeral nature of a forum (a rather linear kind of transaction) we planned a quarterly magazine to capture 'the good bits'. Not only did that (through a McLuhan lens) appear based on an old-fashioned print cuture, but it seemed sluggish and unresponsive in a hi-speed modern environment - and, inevitably (or at least predictably) a few enthusiasts provided nearly all of the content, and when they lapsed the editor had to write most of it, and then the group complained it had become unrepresentative.

A few of us decided to start this blog as a more flexible alternative - hovering between chat and finished pieces. Here and Now we find ourselves on a 200th post, and a similar monoculture has appeared in terms of linear contributions by an ever-diminishing group of contributors. Perhaps just following a natural life-cycle?

I would feel disappointed if people only came to see 'the latest post' and not do a bit of detective work, rummage in the archives, ask about the odd items in the apothecary jars, or the strange preserves in the old-style delicatessen section, or visit the back rooms (access via Vico's Bar).

I have started indexing, labelling and linking precisely to encourage exploration - just as RAW encouraged us to do a little archaeology (or mining) of the Twentieth Century - combined with early-uptake and adventurous responses (brain machines, online forums, Futurist approaches to the Singularity, etc).

I think of this site more as a process that a publication. I feel free to return to, and edit, posts. After all, you don't want to find dead links, do you? Why would you want to lock down the words and images? OK, you might like to see the Director's Cut, or sample the raw source material (the first take, or even outtakes) but it seems obvious to me that we should allow ourselves the freedom to tweak, sample, cut-up, hide, reveal and edit the material. Not all contributors have Admin rights (but they could), and any contributor could start a peripheral blog and link back here (and many of us have, as you will find in the links on the right).

If I appear to state the obvious you have to understand that I recently visited another forum and got severely told off for going back and editing or deleting posts of my own. Apparently it made communication difficult for them, and more particularly could get used to make others appear stupid or incoherent, or myself look clever. Apparently, once something gets said (written) in their world, it goes into the electronic akashic records and you have to live with the karma of your own stupidity (or something). I find that impossibly conservative and restrictive! So, I can't correct typos, factual errors or uninformed (or badly phrased) opinions - nothing ever gets forgiven and forgotten! Ludicrous! The Wayback machine and cached Google pages suffice for me, and if people quote the parts of my posts to which they are responding, where can confusion arise? Unless I deny I ever said such a thing!

As a lover of Burroughs, Cage and other anarchists and process-based types, I couldn't believe how oppressive that felt (not to mention the flaming). After all, you can only mess with your own contributions to a dialogue, and further feedback from others remains possible. Of course, if you acquire admin rights (so you can interfere with other people's material) then you do incur some responsibilities, too - and need to act with good intent.

However, you can always sample the source and re-mix. I liked John Cage's distinction between communication (with intent to affect the other) and conversation (idling along together in parallel).

Whether this blog can remain a process, and can resist turning into an object, remains to be seen. I like the idea that we continue to develop what Bob initiated, and these recent posts simply form my attempt to devise some Brief MLA courses, in the tradition of self-directed learning.

Meanwhile, I will work on making the blog denser, but not longer - feel free to do what you want with it. You can always check out further opinions of mine on my own blog. Be Seeing You!

NB: the next Maybe Quarterly falls due on the Autumnal Equinox, 23 September 2007 - that leaves you a month to consider making a contribution.

Happy New Ears!

When RAW died at the age of 74, it seemed to me that I found myself next in line (at the age of 61). The Forum and the Academy seemed generally a space for younger folk. Not that I thought it made me any wiser (or put me at the front of the line for dying!) but it does (inevitably) make my frame of reference different, just because of having started earlier in the Twentieth Century.

Now that I (along with an unknown group of others)have begun working on the self-directed course of The Tale of The Tribe (which doesn't have a discussion zone) I seem to have leaked a lot of my 'thinking aloud' to this blog...and with Comments we can at least have brief exchanges, as we would in the forum.

The monologue aspect of a blog post suits me, too (no interruptions and sidetracks - heh heh).

One of the reasons I started talking about Duchamp and Cage, etc, arises from wanting to create a context. It seems so easy to think of creative people working in isolation.

Even now, I get a little shock when (say) Bob Dylan mentions Neil Young, in Highlands as though I somehow assumed he doesn't live in the same soundscape world as me...or might have read the same books, seen the same films, etc.

I'm listening to Neil Young, I gotta turn up the sound
Someone's always yelling turn it down

So, to put Joyce and Pound and Korzybski and Fuller in context (when what they worked on still really was 'modern' - as in contemporary) I have studied around them, I want to know if they knew (or knew of) each other...and find it amusing that Joseph Campbell ended up the way he was because of total poverty in The Thirties (and just giving up and retreating into books) - so I also find it intriguing that Cage (from sheer poverty) started playing Furniture Music (finding sounds in all the objects around him) - and then got into electronics and experimental music (early uptaker in The Forties) and began the 'Happenings' in The Fifties that mosbunall people associate with The Sixties (if they don't think of Cabaret Voltaire in The Twenties). And yes, I have deliberately used those decades (inaccurate though I find them) to show how we cut up a century. We even believe something 'new' happened in 2000, but many people in 1900 felt the same...they felt really trendy and new...

Anyway - I am working my way around John Cage again. I have access to a couple of his books through the library - Silence, and For The Birds ("I am for the birds, not the cages that people put them in"). The library also has various pieces of his 'music', but I feel more interested in his cross-over work. I really enjoyed Roaratorio (a soundscape - or Irish Circus -he made for Finnegans Wake) and just got a copy of his highly amusing 'radio play' Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, Erik Satie: An Alphabet.

I already have, in my collection, the rather wonderful Indeterminacy, a series of 90 one minute stories he tells on one channel, while David Tudor adds random sounds on the other stereo channel.

Plenty of mushroom stories for our Phly. You can find the stories online here...and while reading them on screen just listen to the sounds of the environment you find yourself sitting in (it'll do just as well, and I feel sure he would approve).

I feel like I want to make a timeline, and put all these people onto it - maybe focused on 1932 (when Bob arrived on the planet, and Cage arrived back from a trip to Europe, aged 20, to study with Schoenberg), from William Burroughs (studying with Korzybski) to Joyce refusing psychoanalysis from Jung, from Joe Campbell in his cabin, to Crowley on his island...to Hitler and Korzybski and Wilhelm Reich, and on and on and so on.

Ahem. You can see what I mean about my tendency to monologue (or even, to get Shakespearean, soliloquy). Musing. Brooding. Thinking. Meditating.

Strictly speaking, I feel I should take all this over to my own blog, but so long as it seems fairly relevant I will stay and clutter up the blog. OMMMM. AUMMMM.

The Trip (a trap)

I have no idea how many visitors we get ("LOOK OUT! Mind that thing on the floor!") and/or how many return, and/or how many simply pass through. This blog doesn’t represent the Admin side of the Maybe Logic Academy but belongs to a bunch of ‘students’ who like to spread the word of a fun place to hang out, and share their (sometimes) obscure and esoteric interests.

As you can see from this post last October, among the people who ‘study’ at MLA you will find all sorts of creatives (writers, musicians, artists, etc) as well as philosophical folk, people into magick, or gardening, or Reichian work, etc.

As the Maybe Logic Academy originally started so that people could attend seminars and courses with Robert Anton Wilson without him (or them) having to travel around the world, that original flavour pervades throughout – but new tutors have come on board, and RAW has left the planet, so changes seem inevitable.

The MLA quarterly magazine may give a more balanced view of the range of our group interests, but this blog reflects a rather narrow cross-section of the student body…and in particular my own little reality-tunnel containing Zenarchy, Duchamp and conjuring, etc, which may display my ageing brainmind, and might well leave the other contributors quite cold.

To misquote the Principia:

"Everybody understands Mickey Mouse. Few understand Herman Hesse. Only a handful understood Albert Einstein. And nobody understood Marcel Duchamp."

[side trip]
With apologies to Emperor Norton - and if you haven’t heard of him, or The Discordians, try this site.

Here’s someone following the trail

I first heard of him [Emperor Norton] from reading the Principia Discordia, written by the Joshua Norton Cabal of the Discordian Society. Their motto is: "Everybody understands Mickey Mouse. Few understand Herman Hesse. Only a handful understood Albert Einstein. And nobody understood Emperor Norton." The Discordian Society is sometimes called "nonsense disguised as religion or vice versa."
[ahem]

About Marcel Duchamp:
from A CRITICAL HISTORY OF 20TH-CENTURY ART
by Donald Kuspit
Chapter 2, Part 3 Spiritualism and Nihilism: The Second Decade

In 1917 he made Fountain, a urinal purchased from "Mott Works," a New York plumbing company, and signed "R. Mutt" (not only an ironical misspelling, suggesting that the artist is a mongrel dog or stupid person, but, as has also been thought, a play on the German word "Armut," meaning poverty). That same year he made Trébuchet (Trap), in chess a term for a pawn placed to 'trip' an opponent's piece. (Duchamp supposedly retired from art making in 1923 to devote himself entirely to chess, becoming a champion.) The work was a coat hanger which Duchamp nailed to the floor of his New York studio, where visitors could trip over it.

Actually, and more interestingly to Lasagna flingers, 'Trebuchet' can also describe one of those medaeval catapults...whether we should consider this piece of 'art' as the equivalent to a rotting cow thrown over the battlements of the art establishment, I don't know (but I am not the only one to notice the ambiguity/pun):

Duchamp had constructed other ready mades before Fountain. Bicycle Wheel, Bottle Rack, and Comb, for example. The title of each piece is the name of the object. He seems to diverge from this pattern with Trebuchet, which is generally translated as trap, but is also the name of a medieval catapult. Trebuchet is a coat rack affixed to the floor. Were you to trap your foot in one of the hangers, you would no doubt catapult yourself into a wall.
SCHOOL OF VISUAL ARTS 17TH ANNUAL NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LIBERAL ARTS AND THE EDUCATION OF ARTISTS. THE EDUCATED ARTIST
PROCEEDINGS 2003 CONTENTS PAGE 10
KEYNOTE ADDRESS by David Rhodes "Educating Artists"

However, my interest in Duchamp does not arise from his Trickster/prankster aspect (amusing though I find it) but from the fact that he escapes easy labelling as an 'artist'. He seems well informed on the science of the day, and in fact invented several items which you could see as contributions to the sciences of the day:

But Duchamp, as a disciple of Henri Poincaré, also understood the mathematics of non-Euclidean geometry and higher dimensionality in a far more serious and technical way than any other artist of his time. He maintained a passionate interest in science throughout his life, and he made several innovations, in optics, mathematics and perception, that we have not understood both because Duchamp himself chose to be maddeningly cryptic about his intentions and achievements, and because we have not been open to the possibility that an acknowledged genius, once categorized as an "artist," could also be innovative in science.
from OF TWO MINDS AND ONE NATURE
by Rhonda Roland Shearer & Stephen Jay Gould

The reference to Poincaré seems appropriate, as he often gets described as a polymath and the last universalist of mathematics (before the field became so immense that no one brain could grasp it all) - and I think of Robert Anton Wilson (RAW) as a polymath (of a different kind). With reference to Duchamp's 'art' I find it interesting that among Poincaré's many interests we find chaos theory, dynamic systems, the theory of relativity, quantum theory and (especially) Topology.

Like Joyce, Duchamp seems to have built in quite a few jokes and timebombs for future critics to puzzle over, or discover belatedly.
An Artist's Timely Riddles
Deploying scientific methods to understand a Dada artist's provocative creations
Ivars Peterson



Marcel Duchamp site
Understanding Marcel Duchamp Truly excellent animated timeline of Duchamp's work
tout-fait (online magazine of Duchamp studies)
Jarry, Joyce, Duchamp and Cage a piece from tout-fait
Art Science Research Laboratory (Includes animations of the Rotoreliefs, etc)
Duchamp plus music
Anémic Cinéma film by Duchamp

RAW renewed our interest in the 'Moderns', even though they worked many decades ago, now (and Duchamp didn't come up in conversation) - in particular Joyce and Pound - but (enjoying my ear) I also like the work of John Cage - and he seemed particularly inspired by Duchamp's use of chance in creativity - something also explored by William Burroughs and Laurie Anderson (amongst others). I don't think all these ideas have become dated, yet, or explorations completed! I find particularly intriguing the cross-over inspirations and collaborative work, like Cage's "Roratorio, an Irish Circus on Finnegan's Wake" (1979), and Somewhere between Dream and Reality: Shigeko Kubota’s Reunion with Duchamp and Cage - a wired-up chess set changed the sound scape of the space depending on the moves made by the chess pieces.

"In the nature of the use of chance operations is the belief that all answers answer all questions."
John Cage.

"At a Dada exhibition in Dusseldorf, I was impressed that though Schwitters and Picabia and the others had all become artists with the passing of time, Duchamp's work remained unacceptable as art."
John Cage, Interview, 1973

The Original Trap "A real coat hanger that I wanted sometime to put on the wall and hang my things on but I never did come to that - so it was on the floor and I would kick it every minute, every time I went out - I got crazy about it and I said the Hell with it, if it wants to stay there and bore me, I'll nail it down… and then the association with the Readymade came and it was that" - Marchand du Sel
Some Other Readymades.

NB: I'd feel stupid discussing 'moderns' from 70 odd years ago, if they hadn't drawn on so-called '19th Century work' like Etienne-Jules Marey, Étude chromo photographique de la locomotion humaine, 1886
I got these simply from development pages of Understanding Duchamp - a true work of love...from Andrew Stafford...although most of us may feel more familiar with the work of Muybridge.


Just found this site - it looks useful: An Encounter with Marcel Duchamp