| Artist: | Duchamp, Marcel |
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|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | L.H.O.O.Q.(Mona Lisa with a Moustache) | |
| Date of Work: | 1919 | |
| Nationality: | French-American | |
| Context: | Post WWI | |
| Movement: | French/American Dada | |
| Medium: | Photo-reproduction with drawing (a readymade aided) | |
| Subject: Mona Lisa with a moustache and goatee. Using a photo reproduction of arguably the most famous painting in the history of art as a readymade, Duchamp adds some graffiti to alter her gender, and he places some cryptic letters at the bottom, "L.H.O.O.Q." At first, they seem merely nonsensical, but when read phonetically (out loud, as a sound "pun"), they suggest the French sentence: "Elle a chaud au cul," meaning roughly, "she has a hot ass" or "she's hot down below." Duchamp's Dada assault on bourgeois taste and its assumption that only the unique, one-of-a-kind masterpiece has value is played out here in his assault on a reproduction of Leonardo's Mona. "I had the idea that a painting cannot, must not be looked at too much. It becomes desecrated by the very act of being seen too much. It reaches a point of exhaustion. In 1919, when Dada was in full blast, and we were demolishing many things, the 'Mona Lisa' became a prime victim. I put a moustache and a goatee on her face simply with the idea of desecrating it." But the result was not so simple. Duchamp posed an important question that later the writer/critic, Walter Benjamin, would phrase this way: "What happens to the work of art in an age of mechanical reproduction?" Duchamp's readymades all questioned the idea of the unique, one-of-a-kind original since a replica or simulacra would do just as well; it was the idea that counted, after all, not the precious, material object. Here he gives the Old Master painting a new frame of reference, and perhaps we end up seeing it freshly for the first time, instead of merely seeing what we've been taught to see: a work of art reproduced and praised so often that it has become a cliche. Perhaps, too, by changing Mona's gender, Duchamp was making a cloaked form of homage to Leonardo da Vinci, who truly is the thinking person's artist. Duchamp's stated goal, after all, was "to put painting once again at the service of the mind;" Leonardo, the Renaissance man, had already achieved that goal. Duchamp, coming along much later in history, pays his respects in that way peculiar to the 20th c., through parody. Style: uses the photo reproduction as a readymade that he "aids" with the addition of that drawn-in moustache, goatee, and cryptic code down below. The readymade is Duchamp's way of creating Dada anti-art. He wishes to counter the pre-conceived notion that art must have personal expression ("I wanted to get away from the stink of artist's egos") by removing all traces of the artist's hand. He thereby challenges bourgeois assumptions of originality, authorship, craft and skill, taste, precious materials, uniqueness, and even gender certainty, since he suspends Mona between male and female here. Duchamp puts value on the idea or concept rather than execution and aesthetic considerations. The readymade, thus, bypasses materiality and the marketplace by shifting the work of art to the mind. (It is important to add that Duchamp did not sell the readymades, but either gave them away as gifts or just kept them around the studio.) "I wanted to get away from the physical aspect of painting. I was much more interested in recreating ideas in painting. For me the title was very important . . . I was interested in ideas--not merely in visual products. I wanted to put painting once again at the service of the mind." His style, if he can be said to have one, is irony. Context: created one year after WWI was over. The Dadaists are as disgusted with the end results of the war as they were with the war itself, which had left 8 million dead, and for what? "We were very pacifist," Duchamp said of the Dadaists. "We saw the stupidity of the war. We were in a position to judge the results, which were no results at all. Our movement was another form of pacifist demonstration." "She's hot down below," does not just refer to Mona; all of Europe was still hot down below, filled with anxieties and psychic as well as physical wounds that would not heal, but instead were still festering, eventually erupting into WWII some fifteen years later. For Duchamp, the absurdity of the war validated Dada's use of destruction or desecration as creative acts in their own right. He should also be seen as the "father" of conceptual art. | ||
