BICYCLE WHEEL (THIRD VERSION, AFTER LOST ORIGINAL OF 1913)
MARCEL DUCHAMP, 1951
So, originally, he didn't make this as a work of art. He made it because he liked watching the wheel spin. The story goes, Duchamp takes a bicycle wheel, turns it upside down, fastens it to a kitchen stool, and keeps it in his studio. Not for a museum. Not for a pedestal. Just to have around. He said it was like watching a fire in a fireplace. He'd give it a spin as he walked by. Nice thing to have in the room. Sure. Now look at what he actually built. A wheel that can't roll, because it's stuck on a stool. A stool you can't sit on, because there's a wheel in the way. Two completely useful things, joined together into one completely useless thing. And that uselessness, somehow, becomes enormous. People call this the first readymade. Or at least the first thing that later gets called a readymade. It's four years older than the famous urinal. So the most radical idea in twentieth-century art spends its first few years in a studio corner. Being a thing he liked. He hadn't noticed it was an idea yet. Then it gets better. He didn't protect it. Didn't preserve it. At some point, the studio gets cleared out, and the thing is gone. Lost. What you're looking at was made in 1951. Almost forty years later. The third version, after the original disappeared. And now it sits here, one of the most important objects in the building, with a guard a few feet away. A remade copy of a thing he tossed off for fun, under watch. And yes, he meant for the wheel to spin. You just can't touch it now. Which, honestly, feels about right.