Music for Marcel Duchamp

December 14, 2009

John Cage’s 1947 “Music for Marcel Duchamp” (Sonata XIII) extracted from its original visual context –part of the soundtrack for Hans Richter’s Dreams That Money Can Buy — and set against the urban Chilean nightscape.

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Retro-Appropriating the Photographic Image

December 11, 2009 In what's been called a campaign of "retro-appropriation," Brooklyn artist Dan Fischer minutely reproduces his favorite photographs in pencil, working over a chessboard-like grid that lets him abstract the images from their iconic personal and cultural context. The resulting texture is often described in terms reminiscent of Spanish devotional portraiture -- "velvety," "monkish," and above all "hagiographic" -- subverting the notion that in an era of theoretically infinitely .. read more...

Children of Mutt

December 10, 2009 The recycled provenance of Fountain and other objects associated with Marcel Duchamp exerts considerable theoretical influence over contemporary artists who incorporate found or discarded materials into their work. But is personal authorship the factor that derives art from trash or, as sculptor/curator Pat Buckohr puts it, something from nothing? Duchamp argued that all creative acts are collaborations, and so the true parentage of a work of art is always in some sense compl.. read more...

“Cage & Cunningham” in Wisconsin

December 9, 2009 The long partnership between John Cage (1912-1992) and Merce Cunningham (1919-2009) generated a rich body of work and relationships through endless experimentation, paradox, and chance encounters like Cage's 1942 meeting with Marcel Duchamp. Cage, reportedly, was crying, having had a fight with Peggy Guggenheim. Duchamp was smoking his omnipresent cigar.The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art is now holding a retrospective of Cage and Cunningham's artistic milieu and legacy, b.. read more...

Opening Up The Red Valise

December 8, 2009 As part of a year-long ambit through the Portland Art Museum, Oregon-based bloggers LaValle and Amy are taking an extended look at the 1960 ("red") copy of Boite-en-valise housed there. The process of "unpacking" Duchamp's miniature retrospective has prompted discussion of Rrose Selavy's nebulous co-authorship of two of the works on display, personal reflections on the seductions of chess, and a satisfyingly dense array of portraits, links to audio and video, and, of course, .. read more...

The Art of Chess: Duchamp + Matisse

December 7, 2009 The recent reprise of "Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess" at Art Basel Miami Beach provided another opportunity to reflect on the hand-painted chess sets of Sophie Matisse (b. 1965) in the context of her step-grandfather Duchamp's lifelong pursuit of the game. Most of the attention paid so far to these gameboards (which have also been exhibited separately) has focused on the way they use fields of pure color to liberate the black-and-white grid of the chess player's universe -.. read more...

Spinning His Wheel(s)

December 4, 2009 While Marcel Duchamp was fond of giving the first versions of his Bicycle Wheel a good turn in his studio, "do not touch" policies ensure that reproductions enshrined in the world's public art collections remain at rest. By 1961, the artist himself had to ask a museum attendant for permission to reposition one of these replicas in order to facilitate a photographic record of the exhibit. (The guard reportedly replied, "Don't you know you're not supposed to move things in the .. read more...

Invoking the Readymade: New York abstractionists take modern painting by its roots

December 3, 2009 At least one review of "Besides, With, Against, And Yet: Abstraction and The Ready-Made Gesture" (at New York's The Kitchen through January 16) flirts with the Duchampian pun of the exhibit's subtitle as a comment on both the artist's appropriation of mechanically reproduced ("readymade") objects and imagery and the role of received ("readymade") critical vocabularies in the way any work is conceived and appreciated. As the perceptive critic notes, nearly every work of art co.. read more...

Peepholes and Desire: Two Painters Reflect on Recent Philadelphia Exhibition

December 2, 2009 Painters Matthew Weinstein and Carroll Dunham made a pilgrimage to tour the Philadelphia Museum's anniversary exhibition of source material for Marcel Duchamp’s enigmatic twenty-year project Étant donnés: 1. la chute d'eau / 2. le gaz d' éclairage. Afterward, they played a question-and-answer game of their own, touching on the ambit of desire, the way art focuses the spectator's gaze, and the miraculous appearance of the body as nude in nature. As Carroll Dunham notes, ".. read more...