EXCERPT ‘This is not a painting. The three narrow strips are called 3 Standard Stoppages’, declares Duchamp in a lengthy note on the subject of his ‘favorite work’. Originally penned for a 1964–1965 lecture tour of various American institutions, the note was to be accompanied by slides of some of his works. 3 Standard Stoppages, the ‘idea’ for the first version of which dates back to 1913–1914, is presented here as an absolute hinge moment, following a series of works that are all paintings. If Duchamp makes sure to state that the 3 Standard Stoppages are no longer a ‘painting’, but that their title describes what they are and what they do, which the title itself performs by saying it—they are ‘standards’—it is because their peculiar status as ‘Stoppages’ was totally unclassifiable: the fixing upon three strips of canvas of the random serpentine curves of three threads resulting from three successive experiments, (un)measured (re)measurings of the standard metre. And yet originally this status had been rather ambiguous, since these ‘three narrow strips’ were indeed presented in the form of a painting: more specifically, they were wider and were stretched on frames. During his 1964 lecture, Duchamp would no doubt have shown a later version, reformatted in 1936, even as he described it as an ‘experiment […] done in 1913’. In 1913, Duchamp had already begun to plan the Large Glass, his reflections upon which are recorded in a proliferation of notes, schemas, sketches, and scientific readings, but also took the shape of unprecedented experiments with, on, and against the painting: ‘I wanted to make things that would come down by themselves onto a surface, onto a canvas, and I knew that everything made by hand was liable to constitute a physical experiment [, something] which all the Fauves had realised better than anyone.’…