Duchampian News & Views
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Remembering Duchamp’s Meal
June 7, 2010Daniel Spoerri’s work with food and its remains has recently returned to the public’s attention as the now-80-year-old artist excavates a banquet he buried in 1983. The project has also reminded some critics of his noted "readymade" exhibition of the detritus of a meal served to Marcel Duchamp, with whom Spoerri associated in the 1950s.
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Rrose’s Shoe (Large)
June 4, 2010A bicycle wheel bisects Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Selavy in William Schinsky’s shoe-based work "Duchamp/Selavy," on display in Palm Desert, California for much of this summer. As Schinsky points out, Duchamp was indeed a courageous gentleman who "did things out of the mainstream.
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Treating Kitchen Tools Like Readymade Treasure
June 3, 2010The Duchampian idea of readymade as household tool abstracted from its useful context receives new nuances in Indian artist Subodh Gupta’s "Chimta" series, which assembles thousands of steel bread tongs into monumental aggregates. One such piece, from 2003, will be auctioned off at Christie’s in London next week. Estimated sales price is in the $250,000 to $350,000 range.
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The Magic of Beatrice Wood
June 2, 2010Notorious Duchamp collaborator Beatrice Wood recently won favorable notice in the New York Times for her "whimsical and playful" ceramic universe. The subversive and often erotic figural work apparently passed without notice but Duchamp scholars will likely find plenty of earthy humor frozen in clay.
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Louise Bourgeois, 1911-2010
June 1, 2010Louise Bourgeois, the noted sculptor who knew and worked with many of the seminal members of the surrealist group (including Marcel Duchamp), died Monday in New York. She was 98 years old and had been producing horrors, marvels and enigmas for seven decades.
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Making a House Less Like Home
May 28, 2010The Barbican gallery’s "Surreal House" exhibit has opened and is drawing insightful reviews, most recently from the Financial Times. If the act of building and maintaining a home reflects the process of being in the world, then the surrealist project subverts that process by making "home" un-homelike.
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Reinventing the Wheels
May 27, 2010 As the curator of a new show at Princeton's Paul Robeson Center of Art points out, sometimes progress is really a matter of circling back around to the origin, only to see the place for the first time. In other words, history can be all about reinventing the wheel. The show, which runs through July 2, takes a new spin on Marcel Duchamp's "assisted readymades" by placing the iconic mounted Bicycle Wheel in a new and mobile context. Can it be spun, and if so, will it.. read more... -
Readymade or Relic: The Economics of Fine Art
May 26, 2010When collectors pay $10 million, $100 million or more for a numinous Picasso, Giacometti or Van Gogh, what are they buying? What value does the artist add through labor, vision, experience and, ultimately, signature? Why do objects with a peripheral or disputed association with a bankable body of work take on something of the aura of medieval relics?
Who was R. Mutt?
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Christian Boltanski and the Persistence of Duchamp
May 25, 2010 Recent critical reception of conceptual artist Christian Boltanski's work (such as No Man's Land, in which menswear is sifted endlessly) has struggled to invoke the legacy of Marcel Duchamp as patron of the "big questions" about the function of art, or at very least the instigator of the little gestures of art-as-provocation. Boltanski himself appears more conflicted in his relationship to the readymade master, having deliberately erased the portions of his collect.. read more...