Français Avancé
15:52 min
2013

Français avancé tar for seg Duchamps innføring av ready-mades. Gjennom et fiktivt franskkurs får betrakteren en forklaring på fenomenet ready-mades. I verket gis denne retningen en språklig forklaringsmodell, hvor de ulike ready-made-verkene til Duchamp er en egen gruppe innenfor de franske substantiv. Gjennom en slik sammenligning og klassifisering prøver Français avancé på en humoristisk måte å definere og forklare hvorfor og hvordan enkelte objekt kan forstås eller sees på som kunst.

Français Avancé or Advanced French is a video work that examines a special happening in the art world  - Duchamp’s introduction of the ready-made. Through a fictional language course in French the phenomenon is explained in a linguistic way. 
Duchamp is not mention, but his ready-mades are treated as a separate group within the French nouns. Through such a classification Français Avancé tries in a humours way to define and explain how the ready-made objects can be seen or understood as art.  

For many people a urinal will always be a reference to Duchamp’s work La Fontaine, while for others this link to art is incomprehensible. The title of the video plays with how difficult it can be to understand the artistic value in some seemingly random objects.   

Unlike Duchamp, who didn’t have any aesthetic preferences towards his objects, this video emphasises the aesthetic value in the objects. This value becomes the main explanation, and in the end the humorous point – what’s the aesthetic value of a comb or a shovel? 
For everyone that has tried to learn a new language, the explanation is a part of a series of rules and alien ways of thinking that one encounters in other languages. Not all feels logical and it’s this parallel to the art world and in this case the ready-made movement the video work reflects upon.