Charmaine Qiu – LookingOutwards – 06

Marcel Duchamp was a French American artist who enjoyed the creation of conceptual art. He created an artwork in 1913-14 called “3 Standard Stoppages”. The artist dropped three meter long threads from one meter above three canvases, and the threads naturally adhered to the canvases with the random curves upon landing. The canvas was later cut along the threads, and the shapes were being preserved. The artwork was intended as a satire against the metric system that Duchamp described as an “intellectual construct rather than a universal absolute”(moma.org). I found it interesting how Duchamp utilized chance operations to distort the unit of length, creating a breakthrough to conventional measuring systems. The artwork is now displayed in MoMA in Manhattan.