R Mutt & its offspring

Architectural Review, The, August, 2004 by Sutherland Lyall

Quite apart from his pervasive influence on the world of gallery art, for a lot of architects of a certain generation, Marcel Duchamp is the significant figure of the modern era. He is not so much a form-giver as the Great Exemplar of how to create symbolic and 'artistic' richness from mundane and mostly unlikely physical components. If you think of architecture as the assemblage of lots of not inherently very interesting elements (no, please don't write in) it's easy to understand his status. OK so there's the Levi Strauss bricoleur--ingenieur thing in here too and for a lot of people it's simply because he stuck two fingers firmly and conclusively up the art establishment. San Franciscan, Andrew Stafford, deviser of the digital Aspen archive, has created a terrific Duchamp site at www.understandingduchamp.com. Part of the attractions here are the disassembling of paintings and assemblages such as Nude Descending a Staircase and the Large Glass aka The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even. The Tate Gallery version of the latter is a replica created in 1965-66 by Pop artist, Richard Hamilton, with Duchamp's help. Stafford, taking literally Duchamp's assertion that the objects depicted are suspended in time, proceeds to animate them on screen. Proper art historians will probably have heart attacks but it's great fun and you ask whether taking the piss wasn't one of DaDa's intrinsic attractions. One of the things they didn't tell you back in the old days in third year Fine Art 0034, and Stafford does here, is that the title of the moustachioed Mona Lisa, L.H.O.O.Q., when spoken sounds like 'elle a chaud au cul' or 'she has a hot ass'.

Sutherland Lyall takes a rollercoaster ride through the thrills and spills of the electronic fairground.