Duchampian News & Views
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Alert: Duchamp CD Available on Bandcamp
September 20, 2011 It's all in the title. For those who would like to listen to Duchamp read The Creative Act or by interviewed by the recently deceased Richard Hamilton, Duchamp's 2007 CD, The Creative Act, is now available for streaming on Rhapsody.com. Of course, it's only free for a seven day trial, but we recommend you use those seven days those seven days up by listening to that one CD over and over again. You won't regret it. Click here for link: .. read more... -
Harold Bloom vs. the Avant-Garde
September 4, 2011 "now marjorie [perloff] was giving a talk based on the last chapter of her most recent book the poetics of indeterminacy the last chapter of which happens to deal with john cage and with me .. read more... -
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Automatism B: It Was a Failsafe Mechanism for Spandex
August 30, 2011 It was a failsafe mechanism for spandex. All along, if spandex went awry something would be there to rein it in, or so they thought. But it wasn't true, except now it was. People came from Red Hook, Brooklyn to Fish-hook, Brooklyn, to Red Fish Brooklyn, and over to Scared-ville Queens, just to see it. It was a tour-de-force that made no sense at all. Somewhere in the deep store of images that structure a composite of the urban landscape, spandex researchers and bike-spoke eng.. read more... -
Picabia Was Also a Post-Impressionist
August 28, 2011 Francis Picabia, a good friend of Marcel Duchamp who would have been the cold-veined hitman if Dada had been an organized crime organization, is best known for his allusively erotic faux-machinic diagrams. He once splattered an inkblot on a piece of paper and called it a portrait of the Virgin Mary. But as the blog "Adventures in the Print Trade" points out, he also had a reasonable career etching fuzzy naturalistic prints of boats, people and landscapes, in t.. read more... -
Bicycle the Last Artistic Transportation?
August 27, 2011 "No other icon in sport or transport has retained such constant or potent significance [as the bike]. The car, once all open road and opportunity, now evokes the dystopia of Jeremy Clarkson and carmageddon. The train has surrendered its Brief Encounter romance to the absurdity of leaves on the line, and the misery of the sweaty commute." -Matthew Wright, in the Guardian Meanwhile: "The centrality of flight to culture and ‘social drama’ .. read more... -
“This is the Apocalyptic Nature of Our Modernity”
August 25, 2011 Part of our challenge here at marcelduchamp.net is figuring out where to draw the boundaries for what is pertinent to the subjects of “modernism” and “avant-garde.” Personally, I have always found the effort to narrow the historical or general “avant-garde” into a single definition confounding. For anyone who may be experiencing a similar problem, I’d like to propose taking a close look at the following passage. B.. read more... -
Bolano’s Literary Prophecies: Breton Shall Return Through Mirrors
August 22, 2011 "Vladimir Mayakovksy shall come back into fashion around the year 2150. James Joyce shall be reincarnated as a Chinese boy in the year 2124. Thomas Mann shall become an Ecuadorian pharmacist in the year 2101. For Marcel Proust, a desperate and prolonged period of oblivion shall begin in the year 2033. Ezra Pound shall disappear from certain libraries in the year 2089. Vachel Lindsay shall appeal to the masses in the year 2101. César Vallejo.. read more... -
Quay Brothers’ New Film Opens
August 21, 2011 The Quay Brothers, the experimental animators (of Street of Crocodiles fame) who sinisterly blur the line between animation and animism, are coming out with an eagerly awaited new production. It's to be based on swoon-inducingly grotesque Mutter Museum exhibition of alternative anatomy (which includes ballooning esophagi, cadavers with horns, skeletons of conjoined twins, Jibaro shrunken heads, and a screaming woman, somehow, soapified) at the College of Physicians in Philad.. read more...