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When doing art history one always get Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) projected into your face, likely because it’s designed to be interactive. However, the work of this era I have always favoured and that rather blew my seventeen year old mind was God (1917) by Morton Livingston Schamberg and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. It is an example of readymade art, a term coined by Marcel Duchamp in 1915 to describe his found objects. God is a 10½ inch high cast iron sink u-bend turned upside down and mounted on a wooden mitre box.
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The year is 1913 and Elsa Endell, kaleidoscopic performance artist and poet is on her way to New York’s city hall for her third marriage, this time to a German Baron named Leopold von Freytag-Loringhoven. En route, Elsa spots a rusted iron ring. To Elsa this street trash was a totem of her marriage to be, and in an act marking a new era in the definition of ‘art’ — Elsa called this found object an artwork.
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Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven was not credited with the shattering of artistic tradition. A year later, Elsa’s close friend Marcel Duchamp would showcase Bottle Rack — a found object he claimed as a new category of art, the ‘readymade.’