If you hate modern conceptual art, where artists essentially exhibit an idea, be warned about this exhibition.

The show, which opened at the weekend and is simply entitled “Marcel Duchamp”, shows how strongly almost all contemporary conceptual artists relate to the artist who was born near Rouen in 1887.

In almost every one of the halls and for almost every one of the colossal seven hundred objects, the current, but mostly almost a hundred years younger remakes are immediately apparent - and as so often not to the advantage of those born later.

Ai Weiwei's material gimmicks based on Duchamp's blueprints - e.g. imitating millions of sunflower seeds in ceramic or worthless things in marble - clearly lack the French esprit, not to mention the mirror,

who, for example, opens the birdcage full of marble sugar cubes "Why Not Sneeze Rose Sélavy?" into a sophisticated French-voyeuristic hall of mirrors and into the fourth dimension.

Not least for fluid gender assignments, because since the 1920s Duchamp acted and signed in women's clothing as "R(r)ose Sélavy".

Stefan Trinks

Editor in the Feuilleton.

  • Follow I follow

How much the staged artist himself becomes the object of the exhibition in Duchamp's “Eros c'est la vie” and how all of his pictures are in flux becomes noticeable through the hanging and position in the MMK.

The most famous ready-mades such as the bicycle wheel "Roue de Bicyclette" or the "Fountain" return again and again in the themed rooms in different phases of life, because he created several editions of them, among other things, in the sixties.

On the one hand, this makes the question of the original obsolete, on the other hand, it proves at the same time that each of these reproduced edition pieces in no way loses its aura through the Duchamp effect of placing it on a pedestal in the museum.

The Metamorphoses of Marcel Ovid

But the ready-mades also change their shape and their “gender” in different media and states of aggregation.

The urinal of the fountain fountain, conceived in 1917 and signed ambiguously with “R.

Mutt" (both the Bedfordshire plumbing model used by JL "Mott" Iron Works of New York's Fifth Avenue and a well-known American comic book as well as the English word for mud are echoed in it), can be associated with its cylindrical spout as a masculine form .

If it is viewed from a different perspective or even laid on its side, the female form predominates, which is evident, for example, in an early drawing of the urinal in a slightly oblique view.

A similar picture puzzle effect occurs with the "bottle dryer",

Above all, however, many of the postmodern “after” images that can be associated when looking at the truly avant-garde readymades lack the depth of thought that is present in the clever mind Duchamp because he thought about visualizing certain problems for decades.

Because not a few of the seven hundred exhibits depict the interim phases of the long mental circling with reflective letters to former friends like Friedrich Kiesler, drawings of intermediate states and private photographs.