The essential Duchamp

An oversize bottle rack, Spyrogyra makes a playful reference to Marcel Duchamp’s famous readymade, Bottlerack (on display in The essential Duchamp). The structure of Cragg’s sculpture is, however, far more open and intuitive than Duchamp’s original. Its sprial shape is suggestive of a DNA strand or other symmetrical forms found in nature. Each rod attached to the spiral can accommodate certain types of bottles and, as a result, with each new installation it changes in the particular but maintains its essential form.

Richard Hamilton was a close and trusted associate of Marcel Duchamp. They first met in 1958 when Hamilton proposed making a typographical version of Duchamp’s Green box (on display in The essential Duchamp), a work which elaborated on the ideas and techniques behind Duchamp’s groundbreaking artwork The bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even of 1915–23, known as The large glass.

An extraordinarily complex art work, The large glass, has puzzled art viewers and art historians for almost a century. Hamilton’s print functions as a guide to its interpretation and is the culmination of his research on Duchamp.

Rebecca Horn was born in Michelstadt, Germany in the last years of World War II. She was deeply influenced by her mentor, artist Joseph Beuys, but it is Marcel Duchamp who seems to be most present in her machines and fabulous erotic objects and installations.

Love thermometer is a functioning thermometer. At room temperature the red fluid stays in the globe but when held it responds to the viewer’s body warmth and the fluid runs up the stem. The enormous globe and stem of the thermometer nestle in a beautifully constructed case, like that designed for a musical instrument, while the lining is padded silk, reminding us of Duchamp’s love of the mould and its cast, positive and negative, and the inevitable sexual allusion to male and female genitalia.

In 1980 Richard Tipping was invited to create a work for The security show at Melbourne University’s Paton Gallery. Artbank, the government-funded art leasing organisation, had just been established. Tipping asked the CMI Safe Co in Sydney to engrave the words ‘Safe Art’ into a ‘thief, fire and explosive resistant’ safe. The contents and combination were not recorded. CMI (Craftsmanship Means Immunity) kindly donated the finished artwork for posterity. When Safe art arrived at the Paton Gallery it was rejected by the curators. It was subsequently included in significant exhibitions in Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney between 1980 and 1983.

In 1989 Safe art was donated by the artist to the Art Gallery of New South Wales where it was strangely mislaid. Safe art now exists only as photographs taken by the artist in the early 1980s.

Unsafe art was commissioned from the artist in 2015. Unsafe art is identical to Safe art, except for the change from ‘safe’ to ‘unsafe’, and the addition of a mint 20-cent coin, reflecting the work’s history and status.

Richard Tipping’s ‘artsigns’ evolved out of a series of so called ‘interventions’ on the streets of Adelaide and Sydney during the late 1970s and early 1980s. An ‘intervention’ entailed Tipping temporarily changing or obscuring text on traffic signs with tape in order to find or create new words with alternative meanings. In doing so, he undermined signage designed to instruct and inhibit people in their day-to-day routines. This irreverent and somewhat profound brand of guerrilla visual poetry prompted viewers to momentarily stop and consider where they are going and why.

Michael Landy’s artworks often examine consumerism and human labour, prompting reflection on how we make decisions about the things we value and those we discard.

The works belong to the artist’s No frills series in which he reduced artworks to self-descriptive consumer units. They are both deadpan conceptual artworks and – in a manner that evokes Marcel Duchamp’s critique of the art world – a witty response to the notion of artist as a ‘brand’ and the opaque mechanisms through which artworks acquire value.

Carole Roberts’ early work was influenced by 1960s conceptual art, especially that of French artist Daniel Buren and American Joseph Kosuth whose art, in different ways, explored the relationship between the physical world and the realm of ideas.

The present art work addresses the wall (like a painting) but stands on the floor (like a sculpture or a viewer in the space). Its rational, machine-made appearance draws on the language of minimalism but its form alludes to items of furniture. The vertical elements add an ambiguous figurative element, suggesting trees or hat racks.

This art work was first exhibited at the Gallery in 1991 as part of Australian Perspecta, a biannual exhibition series that was a forerunner to The National: new Australian art.

‘At art school,’ Michael Parekowhai once remarked, ‘Duchamp was the portal that allowed us to start understanding contemporary art.’

This installation is comprised of alternating figures resembling Maori security guards and René Magritte’s signature ‘everyman’. Used together by Parekowhai in several installations, they present us with two instantly recogniseable figures: one a ubquitous presence in many Australian and New Zealand cities and the other an icon of modern European painting.

Produced in multiple using industrial techniques, they function as readymade sculptures that can be reconfigured for a wide variety of contexts.

Rosalie Gascoigne began her sculpting career late in life, first exhibiting in her 50s. She was introduced to the work of Marcel Duchamp in 1974 by James Mollison, a friend and then acting director of the National Gallery of Australia, during a visit to the gallery’s collection storage. There she was shown ‘cage of marble sugar lumps’, Why not sneeze Rose Selavy, and ‘bicycle wheel on stool’, Bicycle wheel – both on display in The essential Duchamp. This visit had a lasting influence on her work.

Inspired by the harsh Australian landscape and an interest in horticulture and Japanese ikebana, Gascoigne worked mainly with found objects she sourced on scavenging expeditions. Her method was characterised by judicious and inspired juxtapositions of these found objects, the serendipity of her materials always conditioned by conceptual clarity. Metropolis, a key work by Gascoigne, operates within a rich field of conceptual intersections revolving around the nexus of art, nature and language.

In 1920, Marcel Duchamp had a carpenter construct a miniature French window. Confounding the viewer’s expectation of a view through the glass he replaced each pane with a square panel of black leather and insisted that they be ‘shined every day like shoes’. He titled the work Fresh widow a wordplay but also a reference to the recent abundance of World War I war widows.

Ugo Rondinone also enjoys destabilising our perceptions and unsettling our certainties. His works have a melancholy undertone and meditate on the passing of time. The present work, whose form references Duchamp’s Fresh Window, is comprised of 52 windows, corresponding to the number of weeks in the year. The newspaper covering the wall marks the date the work was installed, while the mirrored surfaces reflect the present moment in different hues.