Marcel Duchamp / Rrose Selavy - DADA movement

"Marcel Duchamp was a pioneer of Dada, a movement that questioned long-held assumptions about what art should be, and how it should be made. In the years immediately preceding World War I, Duchamp found success as a painter in Paris. But he soon gave up painting almost entirely, explaining, “I was interested in ideas—not merely in visual products.”
Seeking an alternative to representing objects in paint, Duchamp began presenting objects themselves as art. He selected mass-produced, commercially available, often utilitarian objects, designating them as art and giving them titles. “Readymades,” as he called them, disrupted centuries of thinking about the artist’s role as a skilled creator of original handmade objects. Instead, Duchamp argued, “An ordinary object [could be] elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist.”
http://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/themes/dada/marcel-duchamp-and-the-readymade

Duchamp had a female alter ego, Rrose Selavy! This alter ego was rather different from Duchamp in the way she worked, but they followed the same movement - DADA. He created work in her name as well as his own, which I find very clever! He obviously wanted to blur the lines of gender roles, and he was probably more than a little bit crazy, but I like it!

"Her name, a pun, sounds like the French phrase "Eros, c'est la vie", which translates to English as "Eros, that's life". Sélavy emerged in 1921 in a series of photographs by Man Ray of Duchamp dressed as a woman. Through the 1920s, Man Ray and Duchamp collaborated on more photos of Sélavy. Duchamp later used the name as the byline on written material and signed several creations with it." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rrose_S%C3%A9lavy