(applause)
- So, thanks very much, we'll start today
hearing from Duchamp
himself being interviewed by
Joan Bakewell, May of 1968.
And he's gonna talk about chance,
which I'm sort of gonna touch
on throughout this talk today.
So I thought it'd be good to hear from
straight for the horses
mouth, so to speak.
It's interesting in that
he rarely gave interviews
and Joan Bakewell had done her research,
so she was very eloquent,
and I would recommend,
if you get a chance
after this presentation
to have a look 'cause it's half an hour
and a really good insight
into his thinking.
So here he is, talking about
the Large Glass to begin with,
but also, specifically, about chance.
So thanks for coming along today.
I have just with the beginning of this,
I thought I'd start with a question.
So how many people play chess?
Well, raise your hands if you play chess,
or have played chess, familiar with chess.
Okay, I think we've got a majority.
So, this presentation will cover
why chess is important in art and life,
Marcel Duchamp's thinking
on how chess relates to art,
computing, including infinite
loops, infinite delays,
artificial intelligence, social media,
the large glass, Plato's cave,
and Marcel Duchamp's
thinking about the machine.
We'll also look at the
influence of Jare Pureau,
Raymond Rousseau, and Max
Hedrine or Max Sterner
on Duchamp himself,
and his collaboration
with Dada, Andre Breton,
the surrealists, and his friendships,
including Monique Fong
And the Matisse family connection.
So the benefits of chess.
Fashion model and former president
of the Estonian Chess
Federation, Carmen Kass,
who you can see here,
describes how playing chess
has guided her life decisions.
In life, we make decisions
and we have choices.
Chess trains you to see through the head.
You can make better choices,
you can analyze good and bad,
and you can see further.
Life is a chain of command.
Basically, one thing leads to another,
and you can make the wrong move,
and when you make the wrong
move, there are consequences.
So chess can be compared to life.
The pieces on the board
are the elements of matter,
energy, space, and time.
In order to play chess
well, a player must develop
and utilize the brain's left hemisphere,
which deals with object recognition,
and right hemisphere, which
deals with pattern recognition.
So it's a chain of command, a causality.
And here we have a 1959 work
showing the famous Large Glass,
with the addition of two things.
The mountains in the
background and the telegraph,
so it's a joke on the French
for Bedridden Mountains,
which sounds like causality
when sound it out,
and it's like the communication
via the telegraph pole and wires.
It's also the photo of myself,
which we tried to emulate,
and my daughter, Jess,
taken in Queenstown,
with a game of chess underway,
posing as Man Ray and Duchamp.
Note I've lost my queen and
have made the wrong move,
and there will be consequences.
And sure enough, eventually,
I don't know if you can
read the black writing,
but I just wanted to
share that I've playing
almost every day for two months,
and I've finally beaten my dad.
So, in chess, there are some...
And this is a quote
from Duchamp from 1966.
In chess there some
extremely beautiful things
in the domain of movement,
but not in the visual domain.
It's in the imagining of
the movement or the gesture
that makes the beauty.
In this case, it's completely
in one's gray matter.
And then again, in August, 1952,
in an address to the New
York Chess Federation,
he would say beauty in chess is closer
to beauty in poetry.
The chess pieces are the block alphabet
which shapes thoughts, and these thoughts,
although making a visual
design on the chess board,
express their beauty
abstractly, like a poem.
Actually, I believe
that every chess player
experiences a mixture of
two aesthetic pleasures.
First, the abstract image
akin to the poetic idea of writing.
Secondly, the centrist pleasure
of the ideographic execution of that image
on the chess board.
From our close contact with
artists and chess players,
I've come to the personal conclusion
that while all artists
are not chess players,
all chess players are artists.
And then again in 1960s, he would say
and why isn't my chess
playing like an art activity?
A chess game is very plastic.
You construct it.
It's mechanical sculpture, and with chess,
one creates beautiful problems,
and that beauty is made
with the head and hands.
Octavio Paz suggested that futurists
wanted to suggest movement by
means of a dynamic painting.
Duchamp applies the notion
of delay, or rather analysis,
to the movement, what may happen next.
So if you've got a chess board,
you've got the queen, and the
queen can go in all directions
because it's all powerful.
You've got the king, and they can only
go in all directions,
but one move at a time.
And the bishops can go on the diagonals,
and the rook can go
either side or forward,
and the knight, which is special
in that it's the only
piece that can jump over
can actually go two
forward, either side, back,
and to the either side.
And then the pawns can
go two at the start,
one and dually one again
until, perhaps, hopefully,
metamorphising into a queen,
bishop, knight, or rook,
although most people choose a
queen at the end of the board.
So it's that anticipation of
what goes through the mind,
and the combination of mass,
time, space, and energy
that was important
and the possible outcomes
of it to Duchamp.
That scene in an exhibition in 1945,
when he had the Chess
Grandmaster George Koltanowski
I hope I got that pronunciation right.
He gave a blindfolded
demonstration with seven
simultaneous games as seen in the picture
you can see Max Sterner in the far right
and his wife Dorothy standing next to him.
And so what would happen during
this blindfold demonstration
Duchamp would act as
referee, and you can see him
there with his back turned to the camera.
He was not physically engaged
with any of the matches,
but announced the move played
by the player on the table
using the alpha-numeric chess notation
Kotalnowski would then
respond in the same language
with a move, leaving the
player to process and
strategize on the next
move, and then they'd
move to the next table.
So they basically went around
And so this guy had seven
chess games in his head
and apparently he had a
match where he took on 37
chess games all from blindfold memory
which is just incredible. So
I suppose this is strongly
related to Duchamp's
conception that the chess board
and pieces are unnecessary
but imperfect ... between the
mind and the game. His
idea was that the physical
elements of chess should
interfere as little as possible
with the mental elements. So
that's very important with
understanding his approach to art as well.
And of course, whenever
his friends or his groups
were gathered together, Monique Fong
observed his friend, everybody played
chess at the drop of a hat.
It was just commonplace to be
with or involved with chess
in some way or another.
To such an extent that Joan Bakewell
recalled this year in an
interview that what he really
wanted to talk about was chess.
He invited her to play a game and was
very disappointed when
she said she was a very
poor player, so it's
basically something that
he was very, very passionate about.
And so, that sort of
passion influenced his work.
We've got some photos here,
I don't know if you can
see them, but they're
from 1917 in New York
his studio on 33 West 7th
Street, New York City.
And the photos are taken
by Henry Pierre-Roche
and Beatrice Wood.
You can just make out those
big sheets of the large glass
stacked together against the wall
with a chess board
leaning up against them.
And what I'll quote for you
now is from Roche's novel
called "Victor", it's
written about Marcel Duchamp.
Victor asks them to stay
for 24 hours in his enormous
studio room to take receipt of a delivery.
Coat hooks were nailed to the floor.
And you can see the coat
hook what was called trap
which is also a chess move,
which tempts an opponent
into making a losing move.
Roche continues, a bicycle
wheel and its fork and
a large snow shovel served as artworks.
There were gigantic
sheets of glass supported
on trestles, this was the bride stripped
bare by her bachelors.
Some parts were clear, others coated
in layers of dust of varying thickness
a label said, dust breathing, be careful
on the walls were large,
vertical chess boards
on which he was playing
correspondents games
with masters in far-off places.
So you can see the
large influence of chess
in this scene.
With my background in
computing, Marcel Duchamp's
work has always been of interest.
Such things as the from 1915 with the
as you see on the left-hand side
is a good example of a
computer program with
variable-like creation
invented before computers
even existed. Also, chess
is a lot like computing
with the structure and
rules that clearly define
process for the game.
Chess is an area where people
and computers can compete,
and there are many learnings
from this interaction.
As my mathematician cousin
James Picton-Warlow exclaims,
chess is a sufficiently
complex computation
that we have no hope of
a mechanical solution.
We discover fruitful paths
and useful heuristics,
which is true of mathematics as well.
You cannot formulate a new
notion of truth algorithmically
there in lies the beauty.
The number of variations
of chess is virtually
incalculable, estimated to be ten to the
hundred and twentieth power of variations.
Which is one followed by 120 zeroes.
It's beyond comprehension.
As Monique Fong says in her
Duchamp text, which is found in this book,
with the same pieces the game endlessly
renews itself and I think
that points to why Marcel
Duchamp says there is no
solution as there is no problem.
In chess, there are nine million different
possible positions after
just three moves each.
There are over 288-billion
different possible
positions after four moves each.
The number of distinct
40 move games is greater
than the number of electrons
in the known universe.
In fact, the number of
possible moves is so vast
that no one has ever been
able to calculate it exactly
which is why we have the
Shannon number, which is
one to the power of 120.
In late 1967, Jasper Jones
and his role as artistic
director of the Merce-Cunningham
Dance, told Marcel Duchamp
of his desire to create a
stage decor for Cunningham's
newest work based on the
famous Bride Stripped Bare
Duchamp's now well known well certainly,
but who's going to do all the work?
Marcel Duchamp attended the premiere on
March 19th, 1968.
The title Walkaround Time was of interest
from a computing perspective, as dancer
Caroline Brown tells us,
it's computing jargon
it refers to Walkaround time when computer
programmers walked about,
waiting for the computer
to compile. Anyone who's
done much computing will
know the experience of walkaround time.
The Large Glass that I
mentioned all the components
worked together like a machine
space, time, matter and energy.
Declarations, instantiations,
and real-time processing.
In computing terms, the Large Glass
can be represented as an
infinite loop, a machine
that's process seemingly has no end.
An infinite delay, an x-ray
light captures something
that cannot just be visually represented.
As Joan Jacques said, the
machine only runs on words
the words are in the notes.
And so what we have with the
nights is a number of additions
or versions correlating to the Large Glass
the first was in 1914,
which actually pre-dates
the Large Glass but it
contains a number of key
elements that then appeared
in the Large Glass work itself
which you see at the bottom there.
Then in 1934, the most
important of the notes is the
Green Box, which is actually translated by
Richard Hamilton in 1960
into English from the French.
And that's the one that
he then used to build
a replica of the Large Glass and he claims
he used just the notes to
build a complete replica
of the Large Glass and nothing else.
I think he said one additional
question of Duchamp for
clarification, but the
rest of it he claims
is all in the notes.
So the later one is the White Box in 1967
which contains further
material, but really
the Green Box is the one
that relates closest to
the Large Glass itself.
So as Monique Fong says,
with the same pieces
the game endlessly renews itself.
The notes are unordered,
loose and un-numbered
in all of the boxes that Duchamp produced
as Calvin Thompkins said
again and again in Duchamp's
notes there is a joyous
sense of a mind that is
broken free of all
restraints, a mind that plays
a game of its devising, whose resolution
is infinitely delayed.
The notes established the rules of
the game for the Large
Glass, and just like chess,
having read them the viewer
can imagine the endless
ideographic possibilities
when viewing the work,
which is a lot like the chess analogy.
Both the Large Glass
and Duchamp's final work
Étant donnés, reworked
Plato's cave allegory.
The allegory of the cave
is a theory put forward
by Plato concerning human perception.
Plato claimed that knowledge
gained through the senses
is no more than opinion, and
in order to have real knowledge
we must gain it through
philosophical reasoning.
The theory of forms or theory of ideas
is a viewpoint attributed
to Plato which holds
non-physical but substantial
forms or ideas represent
the most accurate reality.
In the allegory, Plato
likens people in the theory
of forms to prisoners chained in the cave.
You can see a picture of it
up on the right-hand side.
All they can see is the wall of the cave
behind them burns a fire.
Between them, the fire and the prisoners
there is a parapet along
which puppeteers can walk.
The puppeteers who were
behind the prisoners
hold up puppets that cast
shadows on wall of the cave
the prisoners are unable
to see these puppets
the real objects, the past behind them.
The prisoners see and
hear shadows and echoes
cast by objects they do not see.
In Plato's cave, Socrates explains how the
philosopher or artist is like a prisoner
who is free or escapes from the cave
and comes to understand that the shadows
on the wall are not reality at all,
but he can perceive a true
form of reality rather
than the manufactured reality that is
the shadows seen by the prisoners.
The artist goes back to
the cave to tell those
still enslaved that
there is another reality
and the reality they have
is compromised and poorer.
Similarly, the Large Glass
shows the fourth dimension
as a projection of a delay
in glass, which looks
to exit the cave of three and
two-dimensional representation
as Duchamp explains, the
bride is sort of an invention
a bride of mine, only half
human being, half robot,
half fourth-dimensional anything that has
a three-dimensional form is
the projection of our world
in a fourth-dimensional
world, and my bride
for example would be a
three-dimensional projection
of a fourth-dimensional bride.
And of course we have in this day and age,
a similar photo cave-like
experiences with them
our dear friend in the top center there.
We're going to win so much,
you'll be tired of winning.
So like the Truman show in
our own world is now dominated
by social media, reality
TV, artificial intelligence,
artificial reality and fake
news, it's mixed in with
at times a quiet frightening
and predictable mirror
playback of your interests and
beliefs; a modern Plato Cave
There's also a great
temptation on social media
to act as a puppeteer yourself
to carefully curate an
image for the world to see.
So you can apply Plato's
allegory of the cave to the
present day and the way we perceive things
and the way we lead and present our lives
and the information we
provided is actually
not necessarily the truth.
There's a good episode in Black Mirror
called Nosedive, in which Lacey, who you
can see in the top right-hand corner there
is basically living her
life rating and being rated
ordering a cup of
coffee, and puts her rate
on there, and rates the
person that gave her
the cup of coffee and
it's just endless daily
interaction of rating and being rated.
So your reality is you're rating.
In Westworld, you have
Millay, the robot character
like the escaped philosopher that realized
she has been exploited
and decides to go back
to warn the other robots.
So the Large Glass proposes an escape plan
by suggesting to question
what is around you,
and in doing so, check
and rate your reality
and criticize it.
Marcel Duchamp saw the machine as having
a dehumanizing element, and used it
to manufacture his own obscurity,
called the Ready-Made Manufactured Object.
His work displays and underlying
mistrust of the machine,
and suggests that's not the master to put
humanity's trust in.
In the 1965 paper, speculations concerning
the first ultra-intelligent machine
Irving Good described the
artificial intelligence
as a technological singularity.
Let an ultra-intelligent
machine that can be
far surpass all intellectual
activities of anyone
however clever, since
the design of machines
is one of these intellectual activities
an ultra-intelligent machine
could design better machines
that would then be unquestionably
an intelligent-sunk explosion, and the
intelligence of humans
would be left far behind
Thus, the first ultra-intelligent
machine is the last
invention that humans need
ever make, and provided
that the machine is
docile enough to tell us
how to keep it under control.
And so you have people
such as Johnathan Nolan,
who's the co-writer of
the West World Series,
having extreme reservations
at times with companies
like Facebook and Google who really
he really sees as barreling towards AI
without any accountability.
So look around you, and
question the status quo
and you can see here
there's some lovely comment
by Diane Jones who's ... from ...
Look here on the far left,
and here's Clive Palmer
making the Mona Lisa great again,
in the center bottom.
And in 2016, what Irving Good
predicted started to appear,
there was a five-go game match.
And I'm not sure if anyone's
heard of Go, or where of Go
wasn't familiar with,
but it's very popular
in China, Korea and Japan.
And it's actually more
complicated than chess.
So it was seen as a bit of a
bastion for man versus machine
as far as the match-up
so in 2016, Lee Sedol, who
is the 18-time world champion
he came up against AlphaGo,
which was a Go program
developed by Google DeepMind
and they played in Seoul,
between the 9th and the 15th of March.
So AlphaGo uses deep learning and new
networks to teach itself to play Go
AlphaGo initially learned
from thousands of games played
by professional human players.
It decides on the next
moves based on probability
to win, associated with
each of the possible moves
using Monte Carlo simulations
(Monte Carlo Tree Search)
AlphaGo improves by playing against itself
using reinforcement learning.
However, the game of Go
is so complex and the
array of moves is so
wide that AlphaGo cannot
concede at all the different
possible game situations.
When AlphaGo started to
play against Lee Sedol
there were game situations
where it had not experienced
it couldn't make one of several decisions.
Thus the importance, I've
got it over there, in
Game 4 of White 78, it's the move that
Lee made against AlphaGo,
and it completely
threw the computer because
it was a daring move
out of the blue, pure inspiration
and he won that game
But whenever Lee played a
conservative game he lost.
So it's worth mentioning
that the AlphaGo encounter
improved Lee Sedol's subsequent games,
so he became very intrigued
and learned a lot and
certainly when you see
the film you can see
that the AlphaGo creators have no idea
what move the computer
will nominate to move.
And often what seems to them to be
not the brightest of
moves, actually turned
out to be quite astute, given what
it's instructed to do.
So, as you see the film
AlphaGo, you can see Lee Sedol
having to adjust of the
elimination of the opposing player
lack of rationale or visual context.
There are no hints or
responses that he's used to,
so he's just looking and
there's nothing there.
He's usually familiar with
looking someone in the eyes,
and trying to suss out their next move
or if they're nervous, so those indicators
aren't there.
And so the situation with this move
away from the rationality
reminds me of Duchamp with
his ideographic execution
and to highlight the beauty of the
intellectual process of chess.
The discovery of a way
to play chess without
seeing the player,
eliminating the rationale
by correspondence games,
and the blindfolded chess
event of course of 1945.
In both instances, Duchamp's objective was
to heighten the sense of
invisibility between players,
in one way to remove
the physical presence,
and in the other to remove the solvent.
And as Duchamp said, the artist
of tomorrow will go underground.
In the 1960s, Monique
Fong remembers telling
Marcel Duchamp about a
conference on computers.
She told him that the first question
Americans and Soviets asked each other was
how does yours play chess?
To which Duchamp remarked,
those were the days.
In 1985, Garry Kasparov
became world chess champion
in the Siamea, he describes,
I played what is called
simultaneous exhibitions
against 32 of the world's
best chess-playing
machines in Hamburg.
I won all the games and then it was not
considered much of a surprise I could beat
32 computers at the same time.
But by 1997, Garry was defeated
by a single machine called
Deep Blue, the 1997 match was the first
defeat of a reigning world
chess champion by computer
under the tournament conditions.
Initially he was not very happy.
However, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em,
Garry now says don't fear
intelligent machines,
go with them, a machine has finally come
for the white-collared college graduates,
the decision makers and
it's about time in his view.
But how best to manage this
is there an acceptable synthesis?
As always, there needs to be galvanized
checks and balances and accountability
in order to provide a
controllable outcome.
Exponential speed of development
will be a real issue.
Stephen Hawking in his final book
Brief answers to the
big questions suggests
a culture of risk
assessment, an awareness of
societal implications of
artificial intelligence.
So as Kasparov faced 21
years ago with chess,
and Lee Sedol two years ago with Go,
we're all facing the same
situation today in what we do,
even in if you're the best
you'll need to adapt and I would suggest
with a degree of healthy
Duchampian skepticism.
Duchamp submitted the nude
descending the staircase
with a cube at the 28th exhibition of
the Society of Independence in early 1912.
However, Duchamp's brother Jacques Villon
and Raymond Duchamp-Villon, we sent
by the hanging committee
to ask him to voluntarily
withdraw the painting or paint over
the title and re-name it something else.
This Duchamp recalled, I
said nothing to my brothers,
but I then immediately went to the show,
took my painting home in a taxi.
It was really a turning point in my life
I can assure you.
I saw that I would not
be very much interested
in groups after that.
Soon after, Marcel Duchamp would travel to
Munich and would begin work on
the Bride Stripped Bare with
a determination to break free
from the constraints
opposed upon him in Paris.
Later that year, he would
train as a librarian and read
a number of authors and books
that would have a significant
influence on his thinking.
All of this fueled I think
by his need for independence
after what he saw as a betrayal.
He was determined to forge his own path
from this point onwards.
So there's Max Stirner or Max Headroom
who fiercely promoted the
sanctity of the individual
which is something that Duchamp
identified with strongly
in 1912 and beyond.
And Duchamp is first
likely to read Stirner
in Munich in 1912, soon
after the rejection
by the Independence.
Stirner's philosophy was all
about questioning, proposing,
joking, suggesting, using
tongue and cheek and irony.
Duchamp's work stood at stoppages in 1915
directly influenced by Stirner's thinking,
a unique system of
measurement that is determined
by the individual, which is to be utilized
exclusively within the
framework of his own
personal requirements.
No one else's, just the individual's.
The three standard stockages reflects
the philosopher Hegel's dialectal method
of three divisions:
the thesis or the thing,
the antithesis, that's opposite,
and the synthesis, the
process of the unification
Marcel Duchamp actually
wrote a book on the chess
end-game called Opposition
and Sister Squares Reconciled
in 1932.
The use of the dialectal
method can seen in a 1925
chess poster, which you can
see on the far-left side there.
That Duchamp produced with
black and white cube sides
and a third ready brown
color synthesis side.
His work, 'door 11 rue
larrey', on the right,
can be both opened and
closed at the same time,
the door is a synthesis
of open and closed.
In create your own meaning,
Duchamp was very influenced
by the Ancient Greek skeptic Pyrrho,
who rejected absolutes
and said that things
are indistinguishable and not measurable.
Pyrrho believed that objective knowledge
is impossible to achieve and that one
should free one's self from opinions.
Duchamp read him about 1912.
Duchamp was also influenced
by the French iconicist
Alfred Jarry, the inventor of pataphysics,
which is the science of the
laws that govern exceptions
Jarry claims the laws of science
are not really laws at all,
but merely inceptions that
occurred more frequently.
Pataphysics rejects all scientific
explanations of any kind,
and argued that anything could
just as well be its opposite.
One of Jarry's best axioms,
God is a tangential point
between zero and infinity.
Duchamp also mentions Raymond Rousseaux,
whose impressions of Africa
was seen by him in 1912.
But the large glass we sell
aim at creating a world
by scratch, in which
imagination is everything.
And one of my favorites, he's
actually in the show here
is the Monte Carlo bond
from 1938, the lithograph.
So I worked in investment
baking for about eight years,
and one of my favorite
Duchamp's, is this lithograph.
Duchamp had said he had
figured out a system
to break the Monte Carlo Casino.
The bond was issued by Duchamp
to raise money, to make money
and to be provided 20%
without fail to investors
he claimed he had a system.
Duchamp is photographed on
the right-hand side here,
as Mercury, God of
commerce, who is also God
of vagabonds and thieves, which summed up
a lot of investment
baking in the late 1920's
and the turn of last century and beyond.
It has a child alike
formal financial document,
as I've discovered in investment banking,
anything can be packaged into a bond,
junk bonds and so on.
And so I think Marcel Duchamp
was on the money here.
And as Duchamp was questioning, attacking,
challenging, proposing, and
joking tongue and cheek,
it didn't stop with his own art,
it went on with many collaborations.
It was important to get his message out
in the capacity as curator, an artist, and
particular, if it could relate to chess.
He generally had complete
power in the execution
of the events he was involved in
but he would never suggest he was ever
part of any group as such.
Which is interesting,
which I suppose relates
back to his experience in 1912.
Monique Fong told me that in 1949,
Jean Jacques, who belonged
to the Paris surrealist
group with Monique, was
asked my Andre Britton
to investigate the large
glass by Marcel Duchamp
who was seen as both
essential, distant commerce
for the surrealists.
Duchamp did as collaborator
and curator for a significant
amount of surrealist shows,
in the late 1930s in
through the late 1960s.
The first papers of surrealism of 1942,
which is on display here
as part of the exhibition,
has a Swiss cheese on the
front and five bullet holes
in the bandore on the back
which I think may be a star constellation
but I've never been able to prove it.
This was the show with the Mile of String,
which you can see on the
bottom left-hand corner there.
Which made the paintings
hard to see and obscured
and Carol Janice who can be seen here,
that's a photo of him in front of
the Large Glass last year.
Was given a very important role
at the opening of the show.
A group of children lead by
the then 11 year old Carol,
consisted of six boys dressed
in baseball, basketball,
and football attire, they
threw balls amongst themselves,
and six girls who played skipping
games, jacks and hopscotch
They were on strict orders from
Duchamp to carry on playing
throughout the event and
to explain if questioned
that they were playing on
Mr. Duchamp's instructions.
Mr. Duchamp told us we could play here.
This was the second surrealist
show with Duchamp as curator,
the first was in Paris in
1938, when he used coal sacks
hanging from the ceiling,
which was a major fire risk
but they got it through,
you could only see
the words using a torch, and
that can be seen in the top
left-hand corner there.
Both shows were intended
to frustrate, disrupt
and make you think.
There's a couple of other
excellent publications
that were made during
the 40's, of which two
are also on show here as apart of the
Here and Now 18 exhibition.
View magazine from 1945 and VVV from 1943,
with the twin-touch twist. There's also
a 1953 Sydney Janis show, which featured
a catalog as screwed up, paper stored
in a wastepaper basket.
So at the start you pick
up the screwed up paper,
that's the catalog you open it up,
and then screw it up and put it back.
So it's very much I suppose a Dada-view
on the treatment of catalogs.
Monique Fong recalls, I
remember help crumpling up
the newspaper page that
was used as a program
for the Dada show.
They were put in a large
wastepaper basket before
the opening.
It's also with Duchamp very
important to understand his
connection with the Matisse Family.
So he married Alexina Matisse, when
she became Alexina Duchamp in 1954.
So from that point on,
it really I think was
very important in his life.
He had Paul Matisse that
was very closely involved,
and his work he actually
published a complete
set of his notes in 1980.
And Jacqueline Matisse,
who actually helped build
a lot of Duchamp's works
within the 1950s and 60s.
So they really are
guardians of his legacy,
even now today.
Jacqueline's son Antoin,
runs the association Marcel Duchamp
and they actually will clarify
and verify works actively.
They're authenticators.
Sophie Matisse, the
daughter of Paul Matisse, is
an artist in her own
right, you can perhaps
see the Matisse Duchamp
collaboration or connection
with the chess pieces she
produced as an artist.
And that's some of her work
called Back in 5 Minutes,
which I find kind of funny, the Mona Lisa
off for a cup of tea.
Over the last two years I
had the privilege to get
to know Monique Fong, and actually arrange
for her to translate one
of her pieces into English
from French, last year.
In this publication, it's
been really good to I suppose
speak to someone first
hand that was a friend
and just ask some questions.
What was this like
or what was that?
So it's been quite an
honor really, and a treat
to be able to get the sort of insights.
So she says here, my book
is still with the person
and of my good fortune to have known him,
when not so many people did.
He was 50 years ahead of
his time, and also he was
of great simplicity, I believe
he knew exactly how important he was,
so did Picasso, upon
learning of his death said
he was wrong.
So there's that great sort
of personal insight that
comes through there that I
found really interesting.
And so talking to her,
asking her questions has been
really a lot of fun.
And also I suppose
things that you can read,
might as well read about
Duchamp, that extremely
esoteric stuff there,
it's good to have someone
that's more interesting to
read about someone who's more
of a friend than anything
else, not necessarily
understanding the large glass,
that having pretty good
idea is rather insightful.
But she certainly doesn't
claim to be an expert,
which I find refreshing.
So, it's been very interesting.
So in conclusion, we've
covered the parts of chess
and understanding what
Marcel Duchamp was on about,
when he set out he should be
at the surface of the line.
The questioning using the large glass
notes and using Ready Made
like three stand stockages
as a philosophy to tackle
the complexities of
social media and artificial
intelligence, with its
coming volatility that holds
both opportunity and danger.
Marcel Duchamp did not work in isolation,
he had collaborative
friendships and family
throughout his life.
To this day, they remain very loyal
and supportive to his legacy.
Now, more than ever,
it's going to be the idea
that the interaction, the
ideographic, the dream,
the imagination that will
be the most important
thing to question, disrupt and prove.
But this presentation has
attempted to answer the question
how is Marcel Duchamp relevant
now and in the future.
I hope you have enjoyed it, thank you.
(applause)
