Yesterday, I had a chance to visit one of the Museum's new exhibitions, Sparks! The William T. Kemper Collecting Initiative. On my way to the galleries, I picked up and audio guided tour.
I only got through the first part of the exhibition but I really enjoyed the audio tour entries about Marcel Duchamp's Box in a Valise and Man Ray's Object Indestructable.
Both works of art are related to the Dada movement which was an informal movement began in Switzerland during World War I. The movement included artists, poets, musicians and others who were disillusioned with the atrocities of war and the inhumanity of mankind's acts against one another. Many of Dada's followers believed that the world had lost all its reason which they reflected in their art including poems made of nonesensical words and music that had no harmony.
Box in a Valise is simply ingenuis. Duchamp worked for five years on the material for what he called his "portable museum." It combines 68 photographs, miniature replicas and color reproductions of his life's work. It contains versions of Nude Descending a Staircase and his masterpiece, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass). My favorite part is the "readymades" which includes a tiny urinal like the one he purchased from a plumbing store and presented as a work of art called Fountain and signed it "R. Mutt."
I was not as familiar with the piece by Man Ray. Object Indestructable is a common ordinary metronome with the photograph of an eye attached to the pendulum. The pendulum doesn't move but if you look from side to side, the eye winks open and closed. I enjoyed listening to the "tick, tick, tick" on the aduio guide as the narrator described how the work challenges traditional expectations about time and art.
I was interested to learn that the first version of this work was made in 1923 and called Object to Be Destroyed. That one actually was destroyed in 1957. The Museum's is the last version and was made in 1975. As far as I know, we have no plans to destroy it.