Duchampian News & Views
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40 Birds
February 4, 2010Celeste Boursier-Mougenot’s recent installation at the Barbican Art Gallery, in which 40 small birds were given musical instruments, has both become a Youtube sensation and been compared to the work of Marcel Duchamp. If the comparison is valid, the primary reference is to the chance operations; perhaps an even better link would be to Duchamp’s chance-driven musical work.
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Infrathin & Infrareal: The Latin Legacy of Marcel Duchamp
February 3, 2010 Taking Chilean writer Roberto Bolano's acclaimed novel 2666 as a starting point, the poet Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle hunts the legacy of Marcel Duchamp from readymade through the large glass in a tactical meditation on a few scattered references to the Duchampian category of the "infra-thin." (Naturally, there are several additional references to the "infra-thin" [infra-mince] lurking in unexpected places, but such is the nature of a quality that exists only by example,.. read more... -
Dancing the Staircase
February 2, 2010With one foot firmly in the realm of dance and the other arched toward the visual arts, 28-year-old choreographer Jonah Bokaer often looks back to Duchamp — spiritual godfather of his more immediate mentor Merce Cunningham — for tactical inspiration. Bokaer has danced with bicycle wheels while the audience threw transit cards at him; other performances have been generated out of chance operations or minutely photographed for publication as flip books.
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The Assembled Artist
February 2, 2010 The dada family resemblance -- never genetic, always a matter of aspiration and intent -- has been invoked to clarify the ways in which both Marcel Duchamp and Theo van Doesburg treated their artistic personas as performances. Duchamp famously had his Rrose and van Doesburg, best known as the founder of the rigorous Stijl, created "I.K. Bonset," dada poet and provocateur, and others in his efforts to "splinter" himself. (Man Ray, meanwhile, always had "Man Ray.")As in any fam.. read more... -
In His Own Words…
February 1, 2010 Late in life Duchamp was better known as a commentator and critic than for his artistic production. In that light, the interviews he recorded in 1968 -- here set to archival footage -- set forth his persistent concerns lucidly and illuminatingly. From the early rejection of "retinal" representative art to the secret installation of his last project, the conversation explores and cements the critic's evaluation of his own career. (The Original Roland Collection has more inform.. read more... -
Duchampian Music in Delaware (and Beyond)
January 29, 2010 Despite objections, Marcel Duchamp's legacy is conventionally interpreted within the context of the visual arts -- the empire of the "mere retinal" -- but he did compose two pieces of music and in them, his favorite work, Three Standard Stoppages, and elsewhere he explored the operation of chance in creation, clearing the way for John Cage and other contemporary composers to do likewise in the musical realm. And of course if music is the art most concerned with organizing uni.. read more... -
Dada Mama on Sale
January 28, 2010 A significant collection of work from Duchamp associate, collaborator and "dada mama" Beatrice Wood (1893-1998) is being sold off on Sunday in a California auction house near the town of Ojai, where she spent the last half-century of her life. Wood met Duchamp in New York during World War I and features in several episodes from his first residence in the city; she was a member of the "Arensberg Circle" and co-edited The Blind Man. Films derived from her adventures include Jul.. read more... -
Few Words, Many Pictures
January 27, 2010 While millions of words have been written about Marcel Duchamp, some of the most compelling demonstrations of admiration for his work are wordless or nearly so, letting the images speak for themselves in their own language. An Australian graphic artist recently put together just such a tribute with illustrations from the fairly rare 1991 Kyoto exhibition catalog Marcel Duchamp Graphics. Those who don't read Japanese would have trouble following the word but all can respond to.. read more... -
The Man Behind the Female Joker, or Where He Gets His Ideas
January 26, 2010 Critical and popular prurience surrounding the career of Leonardo da Vinci has reached the point where art historians have asked permission to exhume the artist's earthly remains and compare the parameters of his skull to the features of his famous Mona Lisa, a somewhat literal-minded attempt to ground the "sources" of a work of art in biography and ultimately genetics. At stake is the supposition that Mona Lisa's famously enigmatic allure derives from the figure's origin as .. read more...