The Visual Arts Department continues their centennial celebration of Dada in their Alumni-Instructed "Unhappy Readymade Show."

Visual Arts students take direction from Academy alumni for this exhibition!

The Unhappy Readymade is kind of like the Readymade in the manner it questions who is the artist and what is the art. As a present for her wedding, Marcel Duchamp wrote to this sister Suzanne and instructed her to go out and buy a geometry textbook and suspend it from the balcony of her Paris apartment so the book would be subject to change and exposed to the test of wind, sun, and rain. Not only did Suzanne carry out these instructions, she created a painting of the result! Art Collectors Sidney and Harriet Janis stated that the destroyed book with all its postulates and theorems "seriously got the facts of life." Duchamp said it amused him to "bring the idea of happy and unhappy into readymades." So again in 1919 when Duchamp was in Argentina, he wrote another letter to his sister to buy an encyclopedia and cross out all the words that can be crossed out.

Students in the Visual Arts Department will be as dutiful to alumni directives as Suzanne Duchamp!