Exhibitions2007Ready Made

Yvon Lambert Paris hosted the first instalment of the group exhibition Ready-Made in New York. Duchamp’s ready-mades were considered as “antidotes to retinal art,” a challenge to the distinction between art and non-art. By transplanting an ordinary object into an artworld context, declaring the banal to be a work of art, Duchamp destabilized not only traditional aesthetic categories, but also the established processes for legitimizing artists and their work.

This question of the medium and its role in objects’ transition from daily life into to an artistic sphere is central to the work of Gavin Turk, Kaz Oshiro and Michael Brown. With their sustained rapport with classical painting and sculpture, all three play on the divisions between the real and the false Ready-Made. 

Their Ready-Mades are abandoned objects whose intriguing and incongruous presence in the gallery inspires a smile: a taxidermied hamster inhabits a now-useless cage. The increasingly frequent practices of this type provoke significant public response, doubtless as a result of the seeming triviality of the objects on display and the apparently minimal presence of the artist – a strong contrast with the works’ strong ideological, emotional, and conceptual charge.

Featured artists included: Saâdane Afif, Michael Brown, Jimmie Durham, Babak Ghazi, Shilpa Gupta, Sunnifa Hope, Mike Kelley, Koo Jeong-A, Bertrand Lavier, Guillaume Leblon, Helen Mirra, Jonathan Monk, Matt O`Dell, Kaz Oshiro, David Renggli, Sylvain Rousseau, David Shrigley, Shinique Smith, Haim Steinbach, Gavin Turk.