What do an artist and a monk have in common? Dada On Marcel Duchamp and François Rabelais

The starting point of this discussion is a comparison (“The life of an artist is like the life of a monk, of an obscene monk, if you like, it’s very Rabelaisian”), which leads from the comment “It’s an ordination” to “Dada is a spirit.” It was in 1959 that this point of transmission, by allusion to Rabelais’s work, and even to Rabelais as an individual, became explicit in the work of Duchamp, who at the time was involved in the Dada movement in the United States and in France. This article pursues the connections made by this discussion.