About

The name for my blog comes from Marcel Duchamp’s Three Standard Stoppages. This work intrigues me for his attempt to upend the conventional way of looking at fixed measure. The irony of it both amuses and provokes. I am reminded to take an item and look at it in a new way, multiple times. Or as Jasper Johns put it “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it. Do something else to it.”

“In itself it was not an important work of art,” he [Duchamp] said, “but for me it opened the way — the way to escape from those traditional methods of expression long associated with art. I didn’t realize at the time what I had stumbled on. When you tap something, you don’t always recognize the sound. That’s apt to come later. For me the Three Standard Stoppages was a first gesture liberating me from the past.”