The website I was looking at explained the following:
Above: "Mile of String" - 1942. In 1942, Andre Breton organised a retrospective exhibition of Surrealist art in New York: First Papers of Surrealism. Duchamp created this installation for it – a gigantic web called the Mile of String. He and Breton furthermore arranged for a number of children to play ball in the room thereby making it very difficult for the guests to see the paintings.
I really loved the idea of "contributing" to an exhibition of painting by making it impossible to navigate around the gallery and actually see the work! Though it seems like a negative contribution, seeing as the exhibition was one of Surrealist art, it was in fact highly appropriate, creating an extremely surreal atmosphere!
I think I would like to try and re-create the Mile of String idea in a different context...
I researched the Mile of String in more depth and discovered that the idea was re-done for an installation in Selfridges in March to coincide with the Surrealism exhibition at the V&A this year. Here are the images I found:
The website (dezeen.com - a design magazine website) included the following text on the installation:
March 30th, 2007
Fashion Architecture Taste (FAT) have sent us images of 1.51 Miles of String, a temporary shop within Selfridges department store in London.
The “pop-up” project is part of a series of installations at Selfridges to coincide with the exhibition Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design, which opened at the V&A museum earlier this week.
Sam Jacob of FAT explains the project: “This is not a shop, or rather it’s not quite a shop. It reworks Marcel Duchamps ‘Mile of String’ exhibition design for the 1942 ‘First Papers of Surrealism’ exhibition in New York.
“Here, the length of string is determined by the distance between Selfridges and the V&A, respectively the Museum and partner for the Surrealism and design exhibition. This as-the-crow-flies measurement has been threaded around the space to create a web like installation.
“The 1.51 miles have been tangled, hooped and slung to form a very different kind of space, a grotto of geography.”
The significance of 1.51 miles being the distance between Selfridges and the V&A is a neat and effective idea, I think...
I've been considering what I would like to express with my re-creation of the Mile of String... will it be a mile, for one thing?
I decided I would like to install the string somewhere in my flat, and started to consider my washing machine, and the love/hate relationship I've had with it over the passed year with its intermittent soaking of my clothes when it was meant to be drying them and such... My washing machine lives in a tiny utility room and has, in fact finally been fixed as of Monday this week, and I have been thinking that installing the string in the utility room (making it impossible to open and use the now in-perfect-working-order machine) might be an amusing and suitably surreal idea... I have been experimenting rigging up the string and will be photographing it to create a series of surreal photographs!
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