Listening to Art

01.02: Marcel Duchamp, In Advance of the Broken Arm


Download (MP3).


Listening to Art, by William Denton.

Volume one, number two: In Advance of the Broken Arm by Marcel Duchamp.

Hello, and welcome to Listening to Art. I’m William Denton.

For the second issue of Listening to Art there is no better choice than a work by Marcel Duchamp, the greatest artist of the twentieth century.

In issue number one we listened to In Advance of the Broken Arm (1964, fourth version) at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. Please refer to that issue for some biographical background on Duchamp.

This is another In Advance of the Broken Arm, also dated 1964 and described as the “fourth version,” but it is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. It will be interesting to compare the two works.

This is a sculpture, made of wood and galvanized steel, fitting into a volume roughly 35 cm wide, 135 cm high and 12 cm deep.

Now let’s listen to In Advance of the Broken Arm by Marcel Duchamp, recorded at the Museum of Modern Art, in New York City, on 16 May 2017.

Waveform of the field recording.

That was In Advance of the Broken Arm by Marcel Duchamp. I hope you enjoyed listening to it as much as I did.

For more information and links to things I’ve mentioned, please visit listeningtoart.org.

Listening to Art is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Bibliography

All web sites accessed as of date of publication.

Denton, William. “Marcel Duchamp, In Advance of the Broken Arm.” Listening to Art 01, no. 01 (15 May 2017). https://listeningtoart.org/01.01/.

Museum of Modern Art. “Marcel Duchamp, In Advance of the Broken Arm, August 1964 (fourth version, after lost original of November 1915).” Museum of Modern Art. https://www.moma.org/collection/works/105050.

National Gallery of Canada. “In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915, 4th version 1964).” National Gallery of Canada. https://www.gallery.ca/collection/artwork/in-advance-of-the-broken-arm.

Tomkins, Calvin. Duchamp: A Biography. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014.

Wikipedia, s.v. “Marcel Duchamp,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Duchamp.