Gallery 01:2

SMILE!

  French artist Marcel Duchamp reset the terms of art history at the beginning of the 20th century, as he took mundane, commercially produced objects and labeled them as art by signing them with his autograph. It was both a celebration of art – art can be everything you imagine it to be – and a critique of the institutions that produce art. Duchamp understood the power of the stage, which, in art, manifests as the pedestal, the museum, or simply the artist’s autograph. His “ready-made” is the ultimate performance piece and nothing short of a revolution, as it begs the question: is the shovel art or is art the shovel?

Rashid Johnson brings in a different history of the ready-made through a photograph by Elliot Erwitt. Erwitt shot the image in 1950 in the Hill District in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The Hill, as it was known colloquially, was considered the “crossroads of the world”, offering black residents an economic and cultural sanctuary. City developers, meanwhile, highlighted the area as a prime location for redevelopment. Citing poverty and crime in the district – problems that seemed to evade the authorities in decades prior – developers and city agencies eventually moved more than eight thousand residents off the hill and into surrounding suburbs. The photograph shows a smiling young man standing by a tree, holding a gun to his head.