DRESSCODES 14
Marcel Duchamp’s Queer Dress Code: Life Art as an Art Form
A key figure of the 20th-century artistic avant-garde, known for the disruptive gesture of the ready-made, Marcel Duchamp has too often been read and interpreted as an artist of the end of art. Duchamp would be the one who, in his own words, wanted to “completely liquidate art” or at the very least “make a joke out of art.” And yet, far from this image of the anti-artist flirting with Dadaist rebellion, he embodied, right down to his selective approach to clothing, a far more aristocratic figure of the artist, drawing on the cultural legacy of fin-de-siècle anarchism and symbolism, particularly in his defense of a way of life turned into an artistic form. This presentation will revisit the context of this simultaneously subversive and dandyish project and the role of dress codes in this demystification of art, a process more paradoxical than straightforward in its choice of weapons against artistic conventions.