announcer: this program was made possible in part by the los angeles county department of arts & culture, the city of los angeles department of cultural affairs, the frieda berlinski foundation, and the national endowment for the arts, on the web at arts.gov.

man: pasadena is a quiet place. along its broad boulevards, all is calm and orderly and wealthy. it's also conservative. just two miles away is the national headquarters of the ultra-right-wing john birch society carl cheng: when--in grammar school, we went to see art, we went to forest lawn. that's a cemetery. that was considered art. so, to me it was like a wasteland here. hal glicksman: there was only one museum in los angeles. it's called the county museum of history, natural science, and art. cheng: it was just antiquity, sort of egyptian art, chinese art, blah blah blah.

glicksman: and you went into the museum and you saw-- the main thing they had was-- giant rooms are still there with stuffed animals, you know. [laughter] hunterrohojowska-philp: l.a. was definitely considered the backwater as though it didn't have any kind of art scene whatsoever, but there was a very small galle scene here. it wasn't very expensive to live here. people would open something exciting and teresting and 10 people would show up and they would be the 10 cool people in town who uld all support one another. mirandi babitz: there were maybe about 4 galleries on la cienega, i think at that particular moment. they were just starting to appear. glicksman: the art students, the ones that i met and liked, they said the real openings and the real fun are at the ferus gallery.

drohojowska-philp: ferus gallery was started by an artist and a curator with these really open-minded ideas about what art could be. was immediately attractive to other artists who needed a place to go. it was not an established gallery. it was an art gallery opened by an artist for artists ke billy al bengston and robert irwin and craig kauffman and ken price and eventually ed ruscha so, it really comes to define what subsequently is thought of as the, you know, l.a. look. babitz: we'd all go out and, you know, drink chablis and eat little, tiny crackers and, you know, and look at these art and go, "nice piece." [laughs] try to figure out what was going on. glicksman: ha ha ha! and then we'd go to barney's afterwards, so. [indistinct chatter]

glicksman: that was the life. man: i'll see you at barney's. babitz: it was a lot of, you know, lot of interesting art going on, but it was right at the very beginning of it. drohojowska-philp: ferus was started in part by walter hopps and ed kienholz. walter was very much more in touch with the way artists think than most dealers, or even curators. i mean, he really felt and thought and acted like an artist. so, he could see and feel very much what was happening right in the moment and accept it. larry bell: he was a very charismatic, charming guy. chain smoked. ed ruscha: we called him chico. no one really knew where that name came from, but we always just referred to him as chico. babitz: he was on the track of something in the art world

that was kind of even--was beyond, i think, what ferus was doing. he really knew things about art that nobody else knew. joe goode: that guy could get anything he wanted in the art world and he knew what to do with it when he got it. babitz: whenever he was in the room, you paid attention to him, you know, and you wanted to hear what he had to say. glicksman: he's someone who knows and you st have a feeling thate tapped into this secret truth and just could see into the future. i don't know. drohojowska-philp: hop goes to work for the pasadena art museum, who like him so much they then hire him full-time as a curator. the perception of thatuseum before walter hopps was that it was a sleepy place.

babitz: it was--i think it looked like a chinese restaurant, basically. you know, did not look like a museum. bell: it was mostly chinese and japanese artifacts and antiquities and that kind of stuff, and walter brought the aspect of modern art into their point of view. drohojowska-philp: the pasadena art museum was taking a chance on walter hopps. this is an exciting world, this new art that's coming up, and they want to be a part of it, and he was able to convey the excitement and thrill of supporting art that was entirely new. glicksman: the pasadena ladies, they got 100% behind walter and about being in the avant-garde and they really liked it. [women's voices sped up] drohojowska-philp: the pasadena art museum then became the only contemporary art museum in los angeles.

[distorted voice of duchamp] from all the rooftops shout that he is a genius. he'll have to wait for the verdict of the spectator in order that hideclarations take sociavalue, and that finally pterity includes him in the primers of artist history. cheng: marcel duchamp, he's more li a philosopher. he hits a chord and then anybody that is serious about art has to deal with it. to me, l.a. was the place where there's no history here.

so, as an artist, it's creative in any way. you can develop something here. nobody questions anything. so, that's a great environment for artists. i mean, when you don't have anybody say no, well, then you got a lot of yeses, right? ha ha! we're all living in our time. ha! what can you make out of it? all i saw was empty lots with cars and, you know, just rubble. human waste. but there is also a t of thnology in there, so, the aerospace industry, all that was part of what i considered art materials. and then i would mold around those and made sculptures. it's conceptual, but not just for the purpose of being conceptual. well, i can make a product like an erosion machine.

[machine whirring] now, you just figure out what that means. [machine whirring] there's a part of art you can't teach. you can lead people up to something in art, teach them to do this, think for themselves. they gotta figure it out. there's nothing. there's no answer. so, that to me was what duchamp represents. that urinal thing, just, i remember it just knocked me out. i mean, wait, wait, that's not-- you're not supposed to say that's art. ha ha! it's not so much the item, not the product that i'm looking at in duchamp. i mean, i've learned from his ideas and that goes, that's it, you know. broadly speaking, i don't think half the people that are making art realize that they are influenced by him, you know? [clicking, whirring]

[duchamp speakg french] babitz: we knew who a lot of artists were but we did not know who duchamp was. bell: i knew the name but there were no publications about that person's work and there wasn't that much of it to be viewed in any museums that i had access to. ruscha: i came onto duchamp's work maybe when i was in art school and it was a little strange and unsettling but provocative. duchamp: my family was family of artists. the first painting i remember and that still exists was painted in 1902 when i was 15 years old. picture landscape, very

impressionisc, pseudo- impressionistic because it's not real, but influenced by impressionism that time. ohojowska-philp: duchamp, initially a painte and th a cubist painter and interested in the ideas of tion and interested in t ideas of modn art. when duchamp presented "nude descending staircase" in the 1913 armory show in new york, itreated auge story d looking back, it's almost like youon't know why. martin friedman: was an idea totally his own. it was a painting which was admired and vilified. it was a painting which made him notorioupersonality,amous, and it's a painting that'sad ein the way of designation from explosion in ahingle factory to other terms of a program which we don't have to go into. matthew affron: when he was 25

and just having his first flush of fame or notoriety in the public eye, duchamp made a momentous decision and that was to give up being oil painter he needed to reinvent himself constantly in order to remain fresh, in order to remain relevant. then he came to new york in 1915, partly to escape the first world war in france, and he found a new york dada world, right? dada being the internationalist, very anti-establishment, very cutting-edge art movement of that time. drohojowska-philp: dada is a movement that comes out of world war i and this sense among the artists of the exasperation, of frustration, of the idiocy of that war. they are really questioning what if any kind of art could possibly respond to that chaos and that brutality, and duchamp was captured by the radicalness

of that thking. but mostly, i think he was captured byhe idea of thinking. he was a thinking artist. duchamp: i had to find some way of expressing myself without ing a painter, without being a writer, without takingne of the labels, and yet producing something that would be an inner proct of myself. it was a reaion against of painting.eption retinal art concerns only what the retina receives. the colors and the forms, not much of an anecdote. didn't like it. i never liked it , i tried to do somethin else to avd to do something only appeali to the retina. drohojowska-philp: he had come up with the idea of the readymade, where just an

object in his studio could become a sculpture. duchamp: the first one was a bicycle wheel. man: just an ordinary wheel? duchamp: an ordinary wheel for a bicycle on a stand. i would turn it as i passed by. the movement of it was like a fire in the fireplace, you kno it has that attraction of something moving in the room while you think about something else. affron: so, readymade is a-- is really a strategy for raising in a new way the question "what is art?" duchamp: the idea is the choice of a manufactured object or, i think, a readymade object, but the thing was to choose one that you are not attracted to it

for its shape or anything. you see, it was through a feeling of indifference toward it that i would choose it, you see, and that was difficult, because anything becomes beautiful if you lo at it long enough. drohojowska-philp: he presents a urinal upside down as a fountain signed "r. mutt," not even with his own name, and presents it as a fountain, which is extraordinary. the idea to this day is extraordinary. it's considered one of the most important works of art of the 20th century. glicksman: the r. mutt urinal. this was the toustone for conceptual artists, that if you say it's art, it's art in the readymades. duchamp: the readymade comes in as a sort of irony because it says, "here it is, a thing that i call art. i didn't even make it myself." drohojowska-philp: at some

point, i think that marcel duchamp thought that the art world itself was something of a game, that playing the role of being the artist and dealing with the dealers and dealing with art history, i think all of it felt a bit like a game to him and if he was gonna play that game, he might as well just play the game he wanted to play, which was chess. duchamp intentionally retired from the making of works of art. he always said the conversatio was really about his own inner dialogue, himself having a conversation with himself about what art could or could not be, and that's why he retired from it because he felt like he'd answered all of his own questions. woman: did you ever have any desire to return to painting? duchamp: no, ne. i act like an tist althougugh i am not one. woman: hha!

affron: by the time you get to pasadena, he's also now become a grand old man of modern art, but who still is an enigma because no one has seen a retrospective of his work. so, the appeal is just-- must have been just fantastic. duchamp: millions of artists create. only a few thousan are discussed orccepted by the sctator a many less again are consecrated by posterity. man: were you surprised that hopps wanted to do a show about duchamp? goode: no. never wou have surprised me, huh? it surprised me that he got away with it. [man speaking french [duchamp speaking french]

glicksman: walter was introduced to duchamp and duchamp was very impressed that he knew all about the work and he knew about the period and everything. this kid, you know, this young guy. and i believe the reason that he agreed to do a retrospective in this crazy, little museum made out of a chinese fake department store was that he didn't ask duchamp to make anything, do anything, you know, except to talk to the collectors and, you know, bless the show. and so, duchamp thought that was a good idea, to do this show in a kind of a remote place. [man and duchamp speaking french]

drohojowska-philp: i'm not sure walter hopps himself knew what to do in organizing a retrospective of this nature for marcel duchamp. i'm sure he was not knowledgeable enough about what he would have to ship, how much it would cost. [duchamp speaking french] ruscha: it must have taken immense planning to do that and to go back in this man's fe and see what various things that he created and then following up and finding these works and borrowing these works to bring them together. so, there was a bit of p.t. barnum

in that respect. drohojowska-philp: and it was also put into this institution that was not at all set up for these kinds of exhibitions. it was not set up for large-scale works of art. it was barely a museum at all. it wasn't set up for storage or security or labels or any of the kinds of things that were standard, legitimate, big-city museum, for sure, and it was a huge undertaking and he was very lucky to have someone like hal glicksman help him through the process. glicksman: walter shows up at 11:00 at night. [knocking on door] ha ha! knocknock. he liked to do that and go around and visit artists at night. and he said, "i just got a position authorized for full-time professional eparator and can you come bacwith me tonight?" i says, "walter,

i'll come tomorrow." i started on the champ show and didn't sleep for the next 5 days working on that show and now--ha ha. you can't say no to walter. no, this was a great opportunity. i mean, duchamp and becoming the preparator at pasadena museum? i mean, this was a dream come true for me. joe goode: well, it's hard to explain, but working for walter hopps is a different way of working. glicksman: we would work all night and all day. where's walter? where's walter? where is walter? finally, at 5:30 or 6 in the evening, he would come in and says, "well, let's get to work," you know. then he would stand there like this and say, "i want a wall here." so, the next time he came, there would have to be a wall there all built, finished, painted, ready to go when he came back the next-- 6:00 the next evening. james eller: i used to work at

the museum helping out, making a few extra bucks to maintain myself and my art. when we put together the large glass there, no one seemed to know how to put that thing together. and i just identified with it and i just dove into it and put it all together and i was thrilled just to be involved with the show and just get to know all of his work. it really affected me deeply. drohojowska-philp: what's very interesting about his role in pasadena is that he's so present. he was there for two weeks. [duchamp speaking french]

glicksman: when i met duchamp, we had been up all night building the walls and painting and cleaning up. we had t-shirts that were just big yellow stains under the arms, you know. we were completely tired, sitting there out on the stone benches in the patio, just resting, and we were introduced to duchamp. he was so soft-spoken and tall and thin, and, you know, he just looked like a great artist. i don't know what it was but-- and yet with a sort of a sly wink at the same time. man: dyou have any particular feeling now when you go downstairs in the pasadena museum and look at it? duchamp: no. it was wellainted. i mean, technically speaking. technically speaking, it was well enough painted that it has not been repaired since.

drohojowska-philp: any art exhibition is a story and the curator has to tell the story. and in duchamp's case, because so much of the work is, quote, non-retinal, non-retinal being not having to do with really how something looks, it wasn't so much about this blue painting looks great with that black painting or that brown painting, it was really about here's a cubist painting and then there's a bottle rack and there's a piece of broken glass and then there's something that's got text on it and how to make those have a conversation with one another. glicman: walter says if you remember anything about the installation, that's not a good installation. you should only remember the art and it should be presented to you as if that's all just there, just the art. this is especially true about the pasadena museum because you had to get the people not to

look at the fire extinguisher and the peeling paint and all that stuff. drohojowska-philp: in many ways, the catalog is the kind of readymade of the show. there's an existing book by robert lebel that's the definitive source on duchamp's work, and although he intended to do something with this book, instead what he wound up doing was cutting and pasting parts of it together with rubber cement and mimeograph, taking source material from photography and text that existed elsewhere, and repositioning it. that's pure dada and surrealist technique. so, unintentionally, hopps sort of came up with this kind of a catalog solution, but it was also partly because he was perpetually disorganized, running behind, and the whole project was wildly over budget. glicksman: the catalog was sort of brilliant and was gonna have it typeset and there wasn't time, so, he just put the whole

scratchy thing into the catag. drohojowska-philp: that's how the poster comes about as well, with duchamp's blessing. duchamp presents himself as a wanted poster, knowing full well that that has to do with coming to the wild west where he's [duchamp speaking fren] drohojowska-philp: duchamp got to revisit his own history by coming here. going to ojai, revisiting his old friend beatrice wood and other collectors who were around at the time who were interested in the work. he would go around and visit artists' studios. they would see larry bell's studio. bell: i realized who it was

and i got...petrified. i got total--i was totally un-- just stuck--struck dumb by the fact that this person, this legend that i knew nothing of but kn he was a legend had come into my studio and was interested in what i did, and liked the guy cause i was a cigar smoker and duchamp smoked cigars, too. drohojowska-philp: i think it was just duchamp who was willing to make this one of the last art gestures of his life. i mean, that retrospective in a way is a kind of performative piece in itself in terms of his own involvement. man: i have never worked with any artist, younger or older, living artist who was more intelligent, that should be obvious, but more resourcefully cooperative. no one, no exception.

charles gaines: it's interesting his first major museum show is in pasadena. i think that it revealed the potential of los angeles, for sure. so, for that reason, i think it's--this is the risk of being seminal and i think that people then began to expect to see art in los angeles and art coming out of los angeles. man: it's not surprising to you, when you look at the photographs, that all the artists you're seeing, it's all white guys, basically. gaines: the issue was that the

art world in l.a., in the sixties, it was racist. well, you know, it's just the way it was in those days. you know, there weren't many black artists, you know. there were tons. so, the idea that they weren't there is false. what's interesting to me is that my ability to critique the racism was assisted by duchamp's idea of unpacking institutional strategies. so, in a strange way, even though duchamp didn't think much about black artists, yeah, but his ideas could be employed to even unpack his limitations. he found problems with these ornized and institutional frameworks that art existed in and just got into the habit of rebelling or deconstructing