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] Hunter Drohojowska-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 gallery scene here.

It wasn't very expensive to live here.

People would open something exciting and interesting and 10 people would show up and they would be the 10 cool people in town who would 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 like Billy Al Bengston and Robert Irwin and Craig Kauffman and Ken Price and eventually Ed Ruscha and Larry Bell.

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 just have a feeling that he tapped into this secret truth and just could see into the future.

I don't know.

Drohojowska-Philp: Hopps 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 that museum 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] Duchamp: The artist may shout from all the rooftops that he is a genius.

He'll have to wait for the verdict of the spectator in order that his declarations take social value, and that finally posterity includes him in the primers of artist history.

Cheng: Marcel Duchamp, he's more like 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 lot of technology 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 speaking 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 impressionistic, pseudo- impressionistic because it's not real, but influenced by impressionism that time.

Drohojowska-Philp: Duchamp, initially a painter and then a Cubist painter and interested in the ideas of motion and interested in the ideas of modern art.

When Duchamp presented "Nude Descending Staircase" in the 1913 Armory show in New York, it created a huge story and looking back, it's almost like you don'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 overnight a rather famous, notorious personality, and it's a painting that's had everything apply to it in the way of designation from explosion in a shingle 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 an oil painter because he believed that 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 thinking.

But mostly, I think he was captured by the idea of thinking.

He was a thinking artist.

Duchamp: I had to find some way of expressing myself without being a painter, without being a writer, without taking one of these labels, and yet producing something that would be an inner project of myself.

It was a reaction against a retinal conception of painting.

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.

So, I tried to do something else to avoid to do something only appealing 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 know.

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 look 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 touchstone 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 conversation 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, none.

I act like an artist although I am not one.

Woman: Ha ha!

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 thousands are discussed or accepted by the spectator and many less again are consecrated by posterity.

Man: Were you surprised that Hopps wanted to do a show about Duchamp?

Goode: No.

Never would 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 life 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!

Knock knock.

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 preparator and can you come back with me tonight?"

I says, "Walter, I'll come tomorrow."

I started in on the Duchamp 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: Do you have any particular feeling now when you go downstairs in the Pasadena Museum and look at it?

Duchamp: No.

It was well-painted.

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.

Glicksman: 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 catalog.

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 having his show.

[Duchamp speaking French] 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 knew he was a legend had come into my studio and was interested in what I did, and I liked the guy because 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 organized and institutional frameworks that art existed in and just got into the habit of rebelling or deconstructing them or trying to think outside of this, outside the box.

Duchamp's ideas of the avant-garde and his radical ideas about art gave me this idea that the most important thing to do as an artist was to think about and create new ideas of art.

He gave me permission to think about art as an ideological practice.

My strategy is to use rules.

And so, my work uses a lot of color, and I use a system of coding.

And the [indistinct] part of my work is that I'm not doing anything.

I'm not overcoming anything.

I'm not trying to make anything beautiful.

I'm just using the system.

And the fact that it produces visual pleasure is a function of the system.

It's not a function of my imagination.

And I think that was a direct line from Duchamp thinking about how could I rethink the idea of art practice?

And in my case, rethink the idea of visuality.

What that might mean.

Duchamp: The creative act is not performed by the artist alone.

The spectator brings the work into--in contact with the external World by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification.

And thus adds his contribution to the creative act.

Babitz: At that point, you know, there was never a opening where it was private, you know, where it was by invitation only.

This was the first time that that ever happened and it was gonna be like the hippest party in town.

Bell: There was a big event and I was excited in the sense that I knew there was gonna be a big party and an opening and all that kind of stuff.

Ruscha: And a lot of people that came to this opening, I think, maybe didn't know that much about Marcel Duchamp, but some did and some were ready for every little angle of his work.

I took Patty Callahan, my girlfriend at the time, and I believe Julian was the official photographer for the event.

Julian Wasser: Yeah, "Time" assigned me to shoot Duchamp.

I don't remember when.

It was so long ago.

How many years ago was that?

A lot.

Babitz: Julian Wasser got to take a plus one to the opening and that became me.

Wasser: It was a big event.

Everybody wanted to see Duchamp.

When a guy is that age, you want to catch up with him.

You know, he may not be there that much longer.

Babitz: The artists, I think they all went to Goodwill to get suits, ha ha ha, to wear to the opening so that they could, you know, make Duchamp comfortable 'cause they saw all his pictures in suits and they never wore suits.

Bell: There wasn't 25 cents between us and if we had 25 cents, we were going to the Salvation Army and buying a fancy jacket with it.

Ruscha: We all dressed up and it wasn't short on theatrics.

Larry Bell came dressed as Groucho Marx.

Bell: I thought I should come in disguise.

And to me, the whole thing had to do with a laugh, having fun.

Drohojowska-Philp: Andy Warhol's show was a couple days before that at Ferus, and a whole coterie of people come from New York and Europe for that show, and then they stay over for the Pasadena Art Museum show of Duchamp.

Babitz: I was impressed with Andy Warhol and he brought a little posse of New York people with him.

Ha ha!

Have somebody to talk to just in case we were too primitive was the impression I got.

Bell: The only thing I remember Andy ever saying when I spoke to him or somebody explaining something to him was him saying, "Oh, really?"

Drohojowska-Philp: Ed Ruscha, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Ken Price, and, of course, Dennis Hopper was sort of a glue between all of them because he'd been photographing all of them.

They're excited to meet Duchamp, but they're also excited to meet Andy Warhol, who's also excited to meet them.

So, it really is a situation where there is a huge chain reaction of love.

Babitz: Felt like a moment, I think.

Yeah, it did.

Felt like, you know, L.A. was coming of age and stepping out onto the world stage, you know, as an art scene.

Drohojowska-Philp: I think the artists were blown away to actually see the work for the first time and just see how it all hung together not just as an idea but as a series of ideas and inquiries and questions and answers that took place within the context of a certain exhibition.

Ruscha: It was a beautiful show and I don't think there was any way you could have made that into a bad show because it--the qualities in it, and all these various works, had their own language, they had their own backstory, and so, they came together in the weirdest way, you know, these things balancing off against one another, and I think people were genuinely moved by everything that was in that show.

Bell: What didn't escape me was the obvious humor in Duchamp's stuff, and my gang of artist friends, including Billy Al Bengston and Ed Moses and Bob Irwin and all that, the power of humor was the glue that connected us.

Babitz: I just remember saying, "Do you like the bicycle wheel?"

Ha ha!

"I think I like it better than the urinal."

[Laughs] Yeah, it was very different, you know.

So, an eye-opener.

Hopps: Bunch of Art Alliance women see "Fountain," the urinal sitting there, and they go nattering to Harold Jurgensen and he points out, he says, "I want to know your statement.

Is that art?

Yes or no?"

I said, "Mr. Jurgensen, that is art."

He said, "Fine, that's settled.

Leave him alone."

Drohojowska-Philp: Marcel Duchamp even played chess with Walter Hopps, so, the gamesmanship they've been undertaking in the process of creating this exhibition was finalized in the playing of this game of chess actually at the exhibition.

Became the continuation of his art.

Affron: I think that if you walked through those galleries and confronted the unfolding of Duchamp's life's work for the first time anywhere, you would have been left with as many questions as answers.

And then you'd really want to go and have that cocktail with Duchamp and see if you can ask him a question, but he wouldn't give you a straight answer, but you would be charmed because it's not a straight answer.

Duchamp: It's always pleasant to seek compliments, but that's not the point here.

I really have no thought about that very much.

I don't care where I am or not.

Drohojowska-Philp: And, of course, the party afterward at the hotel was, you know, quite fabulous with people drinking too much and carousing.

Pink champagne was served.

Andy Warhol drank too much of it and, you know, famously said in California, in the cool night air, you even felt healthy when you puked.

Ruscha: It's like a moth to a flame.

There's so much activity and pizzazz to it that you can't not go to it and yeah, the free drinks, the free food, but all of it, it mattered at the time, and it's like diving into a swimming pool.

It was great.

Drohojowska-Philp: This is so exciting to see this real thing in person.

The readymade theme really burbles along throughout this entire exhibition and the post-exhibition party.

Goode: I remember thinking, "I gotta remember this."

And I got this tablecloth and I went around and I got every artist to sign this tablecloth.

And then I gave it to Walter Hopps' wife, because I was living at their house.

I got 6 months' rent out of it.

[Chuckles] Dennis Hopper: I stole a sign.

They had a black tie party here and I was coming in with my wife Brooke Hayward at that time.

I got some wire cutters and I cut the sign off and took it and put it in my car.

Then later, the next day, I gave Walter Hopps the sign to give to Duchamp, and Duchamp signed it "Marcel Duchamp Pasadena 1963" on the finger, on the pointing finger.

It's been a very important piece to me--it was actually his last readymade.

Glicksman: Where is that now?

It sold for a lot of money to someone.

Man: I know.

I have to look.

Glicksman: Ha ha ha!

Man: The case with that, the same thing with Man Ray in those days.

But that was a whole... [Phone chiming] Hopper: Excuse me.

I know that our audience will understand but I have to, like, answer this.

[Man laughs] Hopper: Hello?

Wrong number.

[Man laughs] Ruscha: It all went by like a locomotive.

The whole party, the whole dinner.

It was kind of amazing and it, you know, it blew your hair back.

Bell: If I'm not mistaken, I still have a hangover from that party.

Everybody got real happy.

Babitz: Yeah, it was exciting, and that's the night I got picked up by Joe Goode.

[Chuckles] Yeah.

Was my first artist encounter.

[Chuckles] Man: Do you have other memories from that party or from the opening?

Goode: Yeah, but some of them we can't talk about.

[Indistinct chatter] Eve Babitz: I didn't get invited to a big party at the Green Hotel, because Walter Hopps was mad at me.

Man: Why was that?

Eve Babitz: Because his wife was in town.

Ha ha!

Basically.

So, he didn't invite me and he wouldn't call me back.

Man: So, what were you?

Walter's girlfriend or something?

Eve Babitz: That's right.

I was 20 years old.

And so, I decided that if I could create any vengeance, I would.

Wasser: Well, it was my idea, not Eve's.

She always says it was her idea.

Eve Babitz: Julian came up to me and he said he had this idea that I should play chess naked with Marcel Duchamp, and it seemed to be such a great idea that it was just like the best idea I'd ever heard in my life.

I mean, it was--not only was it vengeance, it was art, and it was like a great idea, you know, be sort of immortalized.

I would be the nude in the Pasadena Art Museum.

Man: So, how did you come up with that idea?

Wasser: Well, I wanted to see her naked first.

I thought Duchamp would like it.

Why not?

[Chuckles] Mirandi Babitz: And then she came and talked to the family about it over the dinner table, all of us, and, you know, my father said, "Well, it's--you're gonna be completely naked?"

And she said, "Yes, yes, yes."

And he said, "Well, I guess it's definitely not porno [laughs] on account of it's art, all right," so, we all agreed it was art and she could do it.

Eve Babitz: It happened in the morning.

Julian sets up lights for a million years and I'm sitting there, like, nothing to do, smoking cigarettes.

Like 8:30, Duchamp shows up with this beautiful, like, you know, suit.

We started playing chess.

Julian said, "OK, Eve, take that shirt off."

Julian kicks that shirt, like, 30 feet away, so, I have nothing on.

[Laughs] Wasser: I was concerned with the scene right in front of me, setting my camera up and shooting.

You're at a loss for words.

Eve Babitz: I thought Duchamp only spoke French.

I had no idea he spoke English.

So, I was trying to speak French to him.

I just was basically, like, sweaty and wishing it was over.

I wanted my cigarettes.

I wanted my glasses.

I wanted to, you know, I want my clothes.

Man: And so, Marcel just took it in stride.

Eve Babitz: Yeah, he beat me 3 times [indistinct].

Wasser: I shot that in color and it was actually a better shot but, you know, it's never been used anywhere.

Eve Babitz: And also, I wanted that hair in my face.

I didn't want my face to show up but Julian kept saying, "Your face, your face, your face."

I'd just had my hair cut the day before so it would fall over my face for this occasion.

Mirandi Babitz: I'm glad she covered her face in the--and her choice, you know, because then it-- you know, it isn't her.

Man: So, Walter actually came in to see how it was going and he didn't even know you were there.

Eve Babitz: No.

Man: Wow.

Eve Babitz: I said, "Hello, Walter."

He dropped his film.

Man: Literally?

Eve Babitz: Yeah.

He always shoots [indistinct] film.

Man: So, you won.

Eve Babitz: Yeah.

Man: You didn't win at chess.

Eve Babitz: No.

Man: But you won in terms of taking control of the situation.

Eve Babitz: Right.

Wasser: I just went there with Eve and we shot.

That was it.

Eve Babitz: Julian stayed up all night making proofs, and the next day, Duchamp was leaving, so, we got them before he left and we showed him these pictures, and I showed him which one was the one I was gonna allow out, in case he had cared about my opinion.

And I showed Duchamp which one I wanted.

He let me choose.

Wasser: Well, I like the color one better, but this is the famous one, the black and white.

Everybody in the world knows that shot.

Mirandi Babitz: I think of it as a kind of a great piece of art.

Yeah.

It's a great piece of art.

But I love that she, you know, did that to Chico, got back at him.

Man: But there must have been a higher-- Wasser: No, nothing higher about it.

It was sort of real low.

Man: Isn't it interesting... Eve Babitz: That's--ha ha!

Man: This famous--this is actually one of the most famous photographs... Eve Babitz: I know, I know, and the reasons are so bad.

So bad.

I had thrown my body in for art.

Rachel Lachowicz: You could draw 3 lines with pretty much everything I've made back to Duchamp in one way or another.

Eve's image irritated me so much.

I think if the only image that I had been exposed to was Duchamp playing with Walter Hopps, I don't know if I would have been as sort of affected.

Eve Babitz's image was provocative to me in a way that irritated me towards making work, let's say.

There's a whole world out there, right, that's problematic.

Ha!

And that was just emblematic.

I made a series of multiple lipstick urinals on the wall which, when you see it installed, the location you're in becomes a men's room, and they kind of also sort of look like mouths.

There's, like, a glitch in our society because men have historically been privileged and that privilege has resulted in a male-dominated art world.

And my work is sort of an update to that glitch, which allows inclusion for feminists, non-binary, other voices.

I'm not trying to police anything, right?

I'm trying to ask questions about where we are and try to move forward in a more sort of interesting way.

I don't copy other people's artwork.

I translate it in--and I move it into a different area.

I'm not indicting Duchamp in any way.

I'm celebrating him.

In that time, he was operating within a sphere of acceptability.

But I think that Duchamp influence has seeped into everything.

It's just permeated everything.

Like a micro goo or something.

Duchamp: My real feeling is that a work of art is only a work of art for a very short period.

There is a life in a work of art which is short, even shorter than man's lifetime.

Contemporaries are making works of art.

They are works of art at the time you live, but once you're dead, they die, too!

Drohojowska-Philp: I think that 1963 Duchamp show was a legendary moment in L.A. and it definitely sparked part of what's going on today and has continued to go on ever since 1963.

Mirandi Babitz: There was a lot of really great art that came out right then, just sprang out of these people that gathered here.

Goode: Duchamp is part of a whole generation of artists that expanded outside the world of pop art.

Is conceptual art, everything like that.

Drohojowska-Philp: I think that artists saw the Duchamp show and they saw something they literally could never have seen before, and they didn't want to replicate what Duchamp was doing, but they wanted to be able to take that idea, that permission, that sense of doing something that--try to go in another direction and use that.

Mirandi Babitz: They could see themselves in the chain from Duchamp to them.

It was kind of like the first time they ever put suits on, you know, ha ha, and then-- in more ways than one, you know.

They kind of grew up into their image as "No, no, we're really doing something.

This is, you know, this is good."

Hoppe: Duchamp affected me.

I mean, the idea of the found object and the readymade and all these things.

I owe a tremendous amount to Duchamp.

Goode: He was like a hero, you know.

He was kind of everything.

I often think that, well, I don't often think, but when I think of Duchamp, I think if there weren't a Duchamp, I don't think we would be doing what we're doing right now.

I mean, I still get ideas from him, you know, when I'm doing my work.

You know?

Yeah.

I think I do, anyway.

Yeah.

Man: And do you think that other artists here in Los Angeles were also influenced by his work, by his ideas?

Goode: All the good ones were.

Ruscha: Well, that exhibit, it truly added to what this art world and the city is all about.

Man: It was amazing and it really did legitimize the L.A. art world for sure.

Mirandi Babitz: Legitimacy is good word.

Yeah.

Because it isn't just that Duchamp came here for the retrospective.

It's that we met him in our glory, you know, and said, "Look, here's what's happening," you know?

Drohojowska-Philp: After the Duchamp show, there is this efflorescence of the contemporary art interests and galleries on La Cienega and all's glorious, and then the L.A. County Museum of Art opens in 1965 and they do show modern and contemporary artists.

Mirandi Babitz: This art that was blossoming up on La Cienega, you know, in all these galleries was an outgrowth of the work that Duchamp had done, you know, because he'd kind of broken through conceptually.

And it was really an interesting way to understand the movement and the moment of what was happening in L.A. Drohojowska-Philp: And, of course, at this point, there's a feminist movement, there's a Chicano art movement, there's interest in Black art.

It's really become-- whole experience of being in L.A. is much more complex and multi-dimensional, as it should be.

The story of Duchamp in L.A. is important because it really leads to the entire creation of the culture here in some level.

It's kind of like a folklore, but folklore of very important nature in L.A. Mirandi Babitz: People carry pieces of Duchamp with them, I think for the rest of their lives.

You know, I certainly did.

You know, so.

[Man speaking French] [Duchamp speaking French] 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.