Hide/Seek, Rrose Selavy?

November 5, 2010 A new exhibition at Washington's National Portrait Gallery, "Hide/Seek," surveys homoerotic art and, by extension, the signs of transgressive sexuality hidden in apparently heteronormative portraiture. As such, the inclusion of a transvestite portrait of Marcel Duchamp by lifelong friend Man Ray reopens provocative questions about the artist's female persona. Who was "Rrose Selavy," really? Did she satisfy Duchamp's insatiable desire to subvert all assumpt.. read more...

Erwin Wurm, Meet Mr. Mutt

November 4, 2010 While arguably not "retinal" art in a conventional sense, the abstractly absurdist sculpture of Austrian artist Erwin Wurm has few explicit points of contact with the rarefied concepts and anti-reification of much contemporary Duchamp scholarship. Wurm's appropriation of the famous Fountain, for example, and his fusion of the urinal with a fanciful representation of its mythical creator, "R. Mutt" himself, is not so much profound as funny. Duchamp also lau.. read more...

Duchamp: First of the Napster Generation?

November 3, 2010 The Web makes nearly all of us digital pirates whether we try to avoid appropriating copy-protected material or not. Every Youtube video that makes use of pre-existing footage, every snippet of pre-recorded sound, every famous image clipped and copied into a blog is fraught with both legal and metaphysical implications. Where is the original? Who owns it? How much revision is permitted -- or necessary -- before the "found" work of art becomes something to which we c.. read more...

Back to the Chess Game . . . Down Under

October 28, 2010 The Bendigo Art Gallery, located near suburban Melbourne, is hosting both the global Art of Chess exhibition and a special Australia-oriented show spotlighting local artists' interactions with the game that famously distracted Marcel Duchamp from the art world . . . and drove him to cross the world in search of a good match. While the Australian boards on display have an overtly figural quality and dubious playability, their humor may well have endeared them to the master. (T.. read more...

Melancholia and the Bachelors Even

September 20, 2010

Critic Gabriel Josipovici is making a few waves by drawing what some call a "bravura" link between Dürer’s Melancholia and Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even. But how? For the answers, as yet, one must read his latest book, but the shared presence of so-called "bachelor machines" in both works may have something to do with their apparent kinship . . . and enduring appeal.

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Sculpture for Traveling

September 15, 2010 The Sculpture for Traveling, Duchamp's 1918 camera-composed "sculpture," has received new attention recently thanks to the New York Museum of Modern Art's "The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture" retrospective. Over and above the Duchampian questions of what constitutes the "original" copy of a signed readymade or other "assisted' reproduction, the topic introduces nuances about the portability of sculpture. Is the sculptural in itself .. read more...

Duchamp at El Bulli

September 9, 2010

Marcel and Teeny Duchamp were privileged — or maybe the balance of honor swings the other way around — to eat the "deconstructed cuisine" at noted restaurant El Bulli. If Duchamp pioneered an art that lurks beyond the "retinal," then Ferran Adria arguably explores a cuisine that goes beyond the gustatory. On the other hand, perhaps his flavored foams and other decoctions marry the mind back to the mouth.

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Duchamp and the Mandarins

September 8, 2010

A special exhibition at the Israel Museum juxtaposes Duchamp’s "Waistcoat for Benjamin Peret" with embroidered Chinese mandarin robes as part of an interrogation of the cultural determination of art. If a "readymade" garment is art, then does that aura translate?

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Saying the Least about Marcel Duchamp

September 7, 2010

One of the most extraordinary online essays on the subject of Duchamp — in or outside the precincts of ToutFait.com — is Yakov Rabinovich’s "Duchamp: To Say the Least." From silent comedy to the arch negations of Voltaire (and wheeling back again), this study of how Duchamp’s career intersects with all our ancien regimes is both exquisitely playful and essential all at once.

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