ABSTRACT
As Duchamp claimed, in his own practice, he typically chose on the basis of “visual indierence” to designate common, mass-produced industrial objects, such as shovels and urinals, as readymades. Bicycle Wheel (1913) was Duchamp’s rst “assisted” readymade-the wheel was overturned and mounted on a kitchen stool; hence, “altered,” or “assisted” by the artist. Bottle Rack (1914) followed as his rst “unassisted”—found and unalteredreadymade. ereaer, Duchamp chose his readymade items and created their conceptual multivalence by “assisting” them with suggestive titles, slight physical or graphical alterations, and the relocation from mundane to artistic contexts (e.g. Fountain, 1917). e readymade allowed Duchamp to transgress the conventional criteria for art as a visually beautiful object, physically craed by an artist who has masterful control over the artwork. His approach to art expanded art’s established institutional boundaries and provided the conceptual wellspring for much of the twentieth-century avant-garde.
