Radical playfulness: The abstract music compositions of Marcel Duchamp
What else is there to do when you’ve already fucked with just about every art tradition going? The mission to disrupt the art world never ends. Abstractism demands no surrender; a rule-breaker could never just return to making pretty pictures and fitting in with the crowd; they must keep marching forward into new, weirder, wilder places. Marcel Duchamp marched right around the typical parameters of what art is and wandered right into the neighbouring realm of music.
But really, to him and his class of radical creatives, the words ‘art’, ‘music’ or any other categorisation meant nothing. They were on a mission to destroy those lines and smash through any and all borders so that all that was left was a kind of vague yet huge question of “What does all this mean?”
That’s the question that motivates Duchamps most famous piece. Right as he began to feel like the avant-garde world was getting lazy and limp and slowly morphing in with the establishment they claimed to be about disrupting, he made a statement that is still bold today. As part of the inaugural exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, which was due to be held at the high-brow Grand Central Palace in New York, the artist submitted a urinal.
But the crucial detail of ‘The Fountain’ is that he signed it. Not in his own name, however, but in the name of R. Mutt as a nod to Mott Works, the name of a large sanitary equipment manufacturer. With that simple statement of intention, mimicking the artist’s signature on classic works, Duchamp was saying yes, this is art. Why? Because he declared it to be.
When explaining the piece, the artist said it was a statement on “everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist’s act of choice.” In short, he was saying anything can be art if you decide it is art.
So with that ethos in mind, Duchamps entire career is read as an expression of the limitless scope of what art can be. He left no medium untouched, seeing nothing as out of bounds for his creativity. This included, between 1912 and 1915, the world of music.
The overlap between radical artists and music is nothing new. Yoko Ono is perhaps the most famous example of a musical performance artist, with her peer John Cage being another deeply influential name. But back in the 1910s, Duchamp was a daring originator that generations of performance artists have cited since.
As expected, his compositions are strange. With zero musical training, he applied the same rebellious spirit to his tracks that he did to his art, making two works of music and a conceptual piece that’s described as “a note suggesting a musical happening,” whatever that means.
Overwhelmingly, though, the pieces were playful. Just like the silly nature of ‘The Fountain’, his music was rooted in the idea that things don’t have to be so serious. For one piece, he wrote a bunch of musical notes on cards, put them in the hat and made a piece from the luck of the draw in whatever order he picked them out. For the others, the instructions were vague and messy, sometimes written with numbers instead of traditional notes or in scraps with no instruction. The performance of the piece was then utterly left to however it was interpreted by whoever decided to give it a go.
To the type of people who walk around galleries and say things like “My seven-year-old could’ve done that”, all of this will sound ridiculous and beg the irritated question of “What’s the point?” But as with all of Duchamp’s work and to those who enjoy it, that question leaves space for the freedom, exploration and even just the fun that the artist thought should always be present in the art world, defying its stuffy, elitist nature by doing something radically playful.
