Duchampian News & Views
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Varian Fry: Savior of Thousands (Including Duchamp)
August 19, 2010 New evidence reveals that American journalist Varian Fry, who went to Marseille in 1940 with "a checkbook and a list of 200 names," ended up saving some 4,000 people -- including the leading lights of the then-banned surrealist movement -- from the Nazi regime. Fry helped smuggle Chagall, Ernst, Breton and Duchamp as well as Franz Werfel, Hannah Arendt, Claude Levi-Strauss and thousands of others out of France and into New York, where the surrealists notoriously re.. read more... -
‘Twisted Pair’ Show Ending With a Flourish
August 17, 2010The highly lauded "Twisted Pair" Duchamp-Warhol retrospective at Pittsburgh’s Warhol Museum will end on September 11-12 with a gala symposium of thoughts from scholars like Francis Naumann and Hal Foster and a recital of the music of Duchamp associate John Cage. Not to be missed.
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Rijksmuseum Celebrates Jacques Villon
August 16, 2010Marcel Duchamp’s brother Gaston, who painted under the name Jacques Villon, will be the subject of a special exhibition co-curated by the Amsterdamn Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum. Villon is best known as a neo-impressionist, but the exposure should put his work into a larger context. (Opening in September.)
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The Duchampian Rebus
August 12, 2010Letter and word play is omnipresent in the Duchampian universe. From Rose Selavy and her noteworthy failure to sneeze to L.H.O.O.Q. and the Fresh Widow, Duchamp’s titles occupy absurd, almost self-canceling linguistic spaces of their own. In the company of images and objects, they take on an even less scrutable dimension. And the more the audience opens itself to the free play of language, the deeper the puns and puzzles go.
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Another Look at VVV
August 11, 2010The 1943 "VVV" portfolio of surrealist art and ideas, co-edited by Marcel Duchamp, is rightfully considered one of the highlights of the movement’s New York period. An exhibition of images from that era — currently at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art — opens up the extremely limited edition (20 copies were printed and personalized) to perhaps its biggest public ever. Duchamp. Breton. Ernst. Tanguy. Carrington. Masson. Calder. Chagall. Matta and more….
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Uncomfortably Reverential?
August 9, 2010 The Boston-area DeCordova Sculpture Park has created an iPhone app that allows visitors to eavesdrop on pre-recorded auto-commentary on the pieces on display. Notably, the recorded critics found Ilan Averbuch's "Skirt and Pants (after Duchamp)" to be "uncomfortably reverential," although there appears to be some cryptic debate in the database about the work. Such auto-commentary may resemble the silent discourse between the artist as mediator of the w.. read more... -
The Patron Saint of Readymades Strikes Again
August 5, 2010 Duchamp is invoked in reviews of Paris artist Claire Fontaine's new show in Miami's Museum of Contemporary Art. Like Duchamp, Fontaine enjoys the juxtaposition (and subtle manipulation) of everyday objects to create unique assemblies: stuffed tennis balls, bricks concealed in book jackets, coins with hidden blades. The secret violence lurking the mundane is an omnipresent theme for Fontaine. By contrast, Duchamp's premonition of a broken arm in the form of a snow shovel seem.. read more... -
Francesca Woodman and Marcel Duchamp
August 2, 2010The Duchampian ghost hangs heavy over the work of photographer Francesca Woodman, who is often described as the visual arts’ answer to Sylvia Plath. But if Plath needed an answer, then the persistence of mystery — the infrathin sense that resolution is on the tip of the tongue or eye — in Woodman’s heavily conceptual images may only open up new questions.
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More from Christian Marclay
July 30, 2010The New Republic notes that the work of "dilettante of near genius" Christian Marclay (currently at the Whitney Museum) is characterized by lightness deriving from the artist’s admiration for Marcel Duchamp as both conceptual thinker and gamesman.
Video demonstrates the similarities better than still photographs.
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