THE COLLECTION
Marcel Duchamp (American, born France. 1887–1968)
3 Standard Stoppages
- Date:
- Paris 1913-14
- Medium:
- Wood box 11 1/8 x 50 7/8 x 9" (28.2 x 129.2 x 22.7 cm), with three threads 39 3/8" (100 cm), glued to three painted canvas strips 5 1/4 x 47 1/4" (13.3 x 120 cm), each mounted on a glass panel 7 1/4 x 49 3/8 x 1/4" (18.4 x 125.4 x 0.6 cm), three wood slats 2 1/2 x 43 x 1/8" (6.2 x 109.2 x 0.2 cm), shaped along one edge to match the curves of the threads
- Credit Line:
- Katherine S. Dreier Bequest
- MoMA Number:
- 149.1953.a-i
- Copyright:
- © 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / Estate of Marcel Duchamp
Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925
December 23, 2012–April 15, 2013
Duchamp seemed to intuit immediately that the emergence of abstraction spelled the demise of painting as a craft and its rebirth as an idea. He called 3 Standard Stoppages, for example, "a joke about the meter," and the work exposes the metric system, an originally French set of standards now used throughout the world, as an intellectual construct rather than a universal absolute. Duchamp made the work through the use of chance, dropping three threads, each one meter long, from a height of one meter onto three stretched canvases. He then adhered the threads to the canvases, preserving the curves they had assumed upon landing, and cut the canvases along the threads’ profiles, creating new units of measure, each in some sense a meter long yet all different and all with an element of the random.
The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p. 91
A working note of Duchamp's describes his idea for this enigmatic work: "A straight horizontal thread one meter long falls from a height of one meter onto a horizontal plane twisting as it pleases and creates a new image of the unit of length." Here, three such threads, each fixed to its own canvas with varnish, and each canvas glued to its own glass panel, are enclosed in a box, along with three lengths of wood (draftsman's straightedges) cut into the shapes drawn by the three threads.
Duchamp later said that 3 Standard Stoppages opened the way "to escape from those traditional methods of expression long associated with art," such as what Duchamp called "retinal painting," art designed for the luxuriance of the eye. This required formal intelligence and a skillful hand on the part of the artist. The Stoppages, on the other hand, depended on chance—which, paradoxically, they at the same time fixed and "standardized." (Duchamp used the phrase "canned chance.") Subordinating art both to accident and to something approximating the scientific method (which they simultaneously parodied), 3 Standard Stoppages advanced a conceptual approach, an absurdist strain, and a way of commenting on both art and the broader culture that inspired countless later artists of many different kinds.
2006
It is "a joke about the meter," Duchamp glibly noted about this piece, but his premise for it reads like a theorem: "If a straight horizontal thread one meter long falls from a height of one meter onto a horizontal plane twisting as it pleases[it] creates a new image of the unit of length." Duchamp dropped three threads one meter long from the height of one meter onto three stretched canvases. The threads were then adhered to the canvases to preserve the random curves they assumed upon landing. The canvases were cut along the threads' profiles, creating a template of their curves creating new units of measure that retain the length of the meter but undermine its rational basis.
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