Radical Acts: Alex Da Corte on Marcel Duchamp

Alex Da Corte’s vibrant installations and mesmerizing video works can be found just as readily at major international art ventures, such as the 2019 Venice Biennale exhibition May You Live in Interesting Times, as on an electronic billboard in Times Square, New York. His visually stimulating and intellectually compelling work spans across a variety of media, including video, installation, sculpture, and painting, and takes cues and inspiration from contemporary pop culture. As a self-proclaimed “anthropologist of the immediate past,” he mines everyday objects from consumer culture to transport viewers through otherworldly experiences created with otherwise mundane, familiar images and items. A long-time Philadelphia resident, Da Corte has an extensive, personal history with the Marcel Duchamp galleries at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a connection that becomes clear through the elevated status of the everyday through his work.

As part of an upcoming exhibition in Philadelphia—Invisible City: Philadelphia and the Vernacular Avant-garde, which highlights Philadelphia’s artistic accomplishments during the 1960s and ’70s, Da Corte will reinvent Allan Kaprow’s 1962 Happening, Chicken. Happenings grew out of challenges to the categories of art that were initiated by Duchamp and his contemporaries in the early twentieth century. Invisible City: Philadelphia and the Vernacular Avant-garde is curated by Sid Sachs and Jennie Hirsh. More information can be found at https://www.uarts.edu/invisiblecity.

“Radical Acts” is a program series explores the legacy of Marcel Duchamp through the lens of contemporary artists working today.

Image: Alex Da Corte, Rubber Pencil Devil, 2018, video, color/sound, runtime 2:39:22. Courtesy of the artist