Week 5 Stream 2: Marcel Duchamp-Secret Agent Man

I love this idea, but haven't had the discipline to whittle it down to 10 or 15 images. I imagine that this would prove a very enjoyable riff, keeping to the essential goal of the assignment.

I've collected about 36 Duchamp images.

These include portraits old and young, a couple with the rotoscope pieces, several chess images including with Man Ray and the Eve Babitz (playing nude) in front of the Large Glass. Other excellent images are a mirror play with five Marcels and Man Ray's star tonsure.

Images of major works include:

• Nude Descending a Stair
• The Large Glass
• Fresh Widow
• Various Rrose Selavy images
• Given: 1 The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas
• Bicycle Wheel
• Boite en Valise
• Fountain (R. Mutt)
• L.H.O.O.Q. (Mona Lisa)
• The roulette betting slip
  

Also I found a lovely Muybridge of a nude woman descending a stair.

So many ways to go with these images. It seems a bit hackneyed since Duchamp both invites such scrutiny and seems to shrug it off.

1. Do a series on multiplicity and nudity. This could be fun and funny, though the story is an interesting one...perhaps some kind of morality play with Duchamp as a cult free-spirit/wizard/iconoclast type, but would eventually be "brought to justice," possibly ending with the Babitz image as a kind of cage with Duchamp's own art. This would be something of a procedural whodunnit, and it would be funny to reveal Duchamp's identity over time. Pity that his early work isn't stronger or you could show the landscapes, etc.
   
2. Do a series on Duchamp as international spy. This could be funny, too, and I'd do it as a retrospective documentary with lots of talking heads. You could show newspapers and even overlay old clips to show that he was in a given city when a given event took place, sort of a Kurt and Courtney paranoid vibe, driven to its obvious conclusion.
3. It would be solid to do a reverse chronology with Duchamp, given how strange and reclusive it was. Someone was recently telling me about how Martin Amis tells the story of the holocaust backwards in Time's Arrow (a reverse morality tale) and you could get some nice effects with this.
4. Tell a story just with the art. Or easily with nudity and or nudity and shock. Do as a kind of expose, Reefer Madness, ruining of the youth propaganda piece, playing with conventions of the art world along with conventions of common scare programs.