PLAY IT AGAIN
Nobutaka Aozaki, Children of Duchamp, ongoing project beginning 2009
Readymades: various wheels and stools, Instruction video
Although my work is full of quotations and appropriations, it does not criticize original appropriated materials rather is positioned on natural progressions of the concepts that appropriated materials originally have. I appropriate historical artworks or cliched images to discuss more about them, not to make them objects of the past.
Children of Duchamp is one of my on-going projects in which I make variations of
Duchamp’s first Readymade Bicycle Wheel with simple combinations of various premanufactured wheels and stools. The idea of this project draws from the well-known expression of calling some artists, mostly conceptual artists, who are heavily influenced by Marcel Duchamp ‘Children of Duchamp’. In this project I pay attention to technical aspects of Readymade such as artistic labor versus productive labor, educational instructable art making, and displacement of artist’s identity. These aspects of readymade is emphasized by making a Readymade piece with readymade/ pre-manufactured products, such as IKEA furniture, Playmobile toy, Barbie doll, packaging like mass produced products, and making instructions of manual ‘how to make (assemble) Duchamp’.