MONALISA/ L.H.O.O.Q.

March 16, 2010

A recent installation of Ida Applebroog’s drawings everted the voyeuristic structure of Etant donnes by putting the naked ladies on the outside of the box; visitors were invited to peer inside the doorless “little sanctuary” — a room of one’s own — at more of the art, which depicts Applebroog’s own female anatomy in various degrees of abstraction.

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A Glimpse into Montreal’s New Dzama Show

March 15, 2010 A significant retrospective look at the diorama-driven career of Marcel Dzama offers some of the thrills of the wax museum along with more enduring grist for thought. Dzama's one-time signature installation Even the Ghost of the Past updates Etant Donnes in ways that both expand and circle back on the Duchampian original. While Duchamp's work still appears eternally pregnant, the addition of new figures seems to both personalize the scene and fix it more clearly at a specific.. read more...

Duchamp Still has the Power to Shock

March 12, 2010 Nearly nine decades after Marcel Duchamp and Bronia Perlmutter posed nude as Adam and Eve, the image is still causing trouble. Readers of the Lubbock, TX Avalanche-Journal are debating whether an earthenware interpretation of Man Ray's original photograph is "offensive." Interestingly, the controversy does not revolve around the potentially radical suggestion that the quintessentially modern Duchamp could impersonate the fundamentally archaic progenitor of humanity -- a tempt.. read more...

Design: From Found to Foundry

March 11, 2010

A new London exhibition of Ron Arad’s readymade-inspired designs segments his work into the “scavenged” or found, the “rolled” or fabricated, and “tinkered” objects in between. This continuum of approaches to raw materials demonstrates his wit and, as the title of the show underlines, the artist’s fundamental restlessness.

(At the Barbican through May 16.)

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Duchamp and Mail Art: SMS

March 10, 2010 In the 1960s, artists affiliated with the Fluxus movement bypassed the gallery system by mailing each other portfolios as boxed "exhibitions." Collector William Copley set up SMS, one of the more famous of these exchanges, which brought together an assortment of surrealists and younger artists: Oppenheim, Ono, Cage ... Duchamp, who designed the covers and table of contents of one of the six "issues" in an echo of the "rotoreliefs" he'd created four decades previously.An enti.. read more...

The ‘Nude’ in a Cubist Context

March 9, 2010 The Philadelphia Museum of Art's current Picasso show reimagines a 1912-era Parisian cubist salon to include allied works like Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase. While the gesture may necessitate some license (the painting was neither exhibited with the cubists nor deeply "cubist" in its concerns), it is still interesting to see cubism as a continuum of practice and a community of thought intimately connected to Picasso, but not yet entirely dependent on him. That said, D.. read more...

Richard Hamilton’s ‘Modern Moral Matters’

March 8, 2010 "As Duchamp's chief British cheerleader, Richard Hamilton influenced not one, not two, but three generations of creatives. Pop art we have noted already. The best British art of the 1970s, from Richard Long to Gilbert & George, was infected, too, by Duchampian logic. As for Brit Art, with its passion for jokes and its obsession with the conceptual denouement, the line of descent that passes from Duchamp to it, via Hamilton, runs straight as a Roman road." -- Waldemar Januszcz.. read more...

Red Grooms: Old Masters & Modern Muses

March 5, 2010 American artist Red Grooms, best known for his large-format and "jokey" multimedia installations of crowds, is receiving a retrospective show at Bryn Mawr College's Canaday Library. The exhibit focuses on Grooms' portraits of his fellow artists: Matisse, Picasso, Dali, Goya, Rembrandt, Titian ... Duchamp. Other works on display are of friends and collaborators, the "muses" who inhabit the living artist's life and days. And a selection of self-portraits blur the mirrored line .. read more...

In Defense of the Fountain

March 4, 2010 Confronted with vaguely Kelmscottian complaints that factory methods are somehow less "honest" than the work artists produce by hand, Cambridge student critic Eliot D'Silva recently launched a counter-argument that the smooth and shining planed surfaces of industrial manufacture generate readymade pleasures of their own. While the dance appears somewhat improvisational in its apparent digressions, its overall shape rehearses the old interplay between craft and concept, symbol.. read more...