Today's Featured Ready reMade
 Michael Schippling
version 1.1, 10/10/2018 (from original: 1/18/2015)

"Say it’s not a Duchamp. Turn it over and it is."
Cage (1967)1

Marcel Duchamp's work in the nineteen-teens has formed the basis of postmodern art practice in the twenty-first century. He is the air in which contemporary art swims. "The Large Glass" heralded the hegemony of personal iconography over classically recognized content while his Readymades asserted once and for all that it is the decisions made by the artist that are the things of interest.
"If ever there were a watershed -- some probably think of it more as a trough -- between the artistic past and whatever the present is turning out to be, it was Duchamp's snow shovel..."
Hamilton (1966)2

In 2010 it began to dawn on me that I was recreating the canonical Readymades in my own image. Fork (2017) {assisted} is my response to Duchamp's Comb (1916) {unaltered} and belongs to a set of proposed Ready reMades -- Schippling (2015)3 -- which form the nexus of my agon.


missing image
toutfait.com
missing image
Schippling 2017

The original, "Comb", is inscribed along the back edge:

3 ou 4 gouttes de hauteur n'ont rien a faire avec la sauvagerie; M.D. Feb. 17 1916 11 a.m.
(translated as)
Three or Four Drops of Height [Haughtiness] Have Nothing to Do with Savagery

"Fork" is hung by a thread and slowly lowered into the space. It is subtitled -- with a tip of the hat to the Small Glass, (aka: "To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour"):

Being Dropped Once or Twice from a Great Height with One Eye Closed for Over an Hour
It achieves artistic status by virtue of being suspended from the ceiling, just as Katherine Dreier insisted for "Snow Shovel" in 1945 -- Hamilton (1966)2.
"After Duchamp everyone thinks that all one needs is an idea.
But, of course, one also needs to hang that idea from the ceiling."
Schippling (2015)3

Technical details:
The fork descends 6.6 feet from the ceiling over a period of about 4.5 hours, with a speed of about .3 inches per minute. It then retracts in about 2 minutes and starts over. When it is first powered on it retracts fully before descending.


References

D'ailleurs, c'est toujours les autres qui meurent
Besides, it's always the others who die
(Duchamp's Epitaph)
  1. Cage (1967) 26 statements Re Duchamp (back)
    in: A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings, John Cage
    Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT, 1967

  2. Hamilton (1966) In Advance of Whose Broken Arm? (back)
    George Heard Hamilton, Art and Artists, Vol 1 no 4 (July 1966)
    in: Marcel Duchamp In Perspective, edited by Joseph Masheck
    on google books or in my purloined copy:
    etantdonnes.com/ART2015/reMade/whoseArm.html

  3. Schippling (2015) Ready reMades (back)
    The original proposal: etantdonnes.com/ART2015/reMade

  4. Seekamp (2004) Unmaking the Museum (back)
    Kristina Seekamp, 2004
    online: toutfait.com/unmaking_the_museum

Note: in making the Ready reMades I am greatly indebted to the online thesis Unmaking the Museum, Seekamp (2004)4.
Her scholarship tracing the origin and consequence of the many Readymade originals and reproductions is just incredible.