The Three Standard Stoppages

I was speaking to Ruth about learning new things: I learn stuff all the time. I know it's hard to believe, but I do. My trick is that I pay attention. I really do. When you say something, you had better be aware that I am paying very close attention, so that 5 years later, when you say something a bit different, I may blurt out chapter and verse of what you had said 'way back when...as it is recorded in the archives!

Anyway, I wandered into Marcel Duchamp's Three Standard Stoppages, or Trois Stoppages Etalon. I have sort of considered these a paradigm of creativeness.

Marcel Duchamp - who is really one of the ones of our age - around the time of the Armory Show, where he exhibited his painting Nude Descending A Staircase, had taken 3 lengths of a heavy thread, and measured them to an exact meter.
He held them out, at absolute rest, and let them fall, twisting and turning in their descent, until they landed on a large piece of paper or cardboard. He thereupon copied their exact outline, and made up wooden templates of these chaotic curves.
He created a new meter - or 3 - for himself. Taking the Standard Meter, which by itself was pretty revolutionary back at the time of the French Revolution when it was intro'd, he created the new ones: the 3 standard stoppages.

All conscious beings have the potential to build upon their History. In doing so, they have the potential to Create Anew.
To not do so is to live in Lyonesse - the city of the dead-in-life, the drowned city of the tales of Arthur and the Round Table - or Tristan & Iseult - can't remember.

Take what is there and create anew, according to the best advice from God.

Our Cult of Celebrity is what happens when we do not do so: manufactured cravings for mass produced paper cut-outs.
We need the genius of Paradox, Heracleitus, today, in order to tell us:
Fools! What you mistakenly take for life (bios - life) is the life-taker (bios - an arrow).


pix: http://artslearninginteractive.blogspot.com/