Art and economics: Duchamp’s postmodern returns
Marcel Duchamp – Post-ing Modernism

January 19, 2009 "Marcel Duchamp's most radical departure from painting is embodied in his discovery and exploration of the ready-mades (1913-1927), works which usurp the notion of reproduction by highlighting the redundancy of a work of art as a commonplace object. According to Octavio Paz, the ready-made defies a dialectical interpretation of value, since it implies neither its negation nor its affirmation. Conceived as the 'plastic equivalent of a pun,' the ready-made is a mechanism t.. read more...

In the Manner of Duchamp, 1942-47:
the years of the “mirrorical return”

January 19, 2009 "In the Manner of Delvaux may seem too slight a work to inaugurate so substantial a reversal in artistic practices and style. After all, the photographic collage did not attract much attention at the time of its creation.  But Duchamp was a magician in the economy of small gestures. One of the delights that drew him to the world of chess was the way in which the simple movement of a pawn by one square could rearrange the dynamics of the entire board. In the Manner o.. read more...

Etant donnes

January 19, 2009 In his article Private Lives, Public Gestures Jörg Heiser  draws a surprising conection between Marcel Duchamp's Étant donnés: 1. La chute d’eau, 2. Le gaz d’éclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas)(1946-66) and the movie  Rocky (1976).  Heiser argues that the lamp in Étant donnés  is a reference to the Statue of Liberty, a connection farther established by the phrase "Le gaz d&rs.. read more...

Rrose Selavy, Man Ray 1921

January 19, 2009

"In choosing Man Ray to take a portrait of Rrose Sélavy, Duchamp co-opted the most adept photographer of glamour on behalf of the 20th century’s most celebrated conceptual art. Man Ray gives Rrose the lighting, the sultry look, that made him so in demand in magazines such as Vogue. In a series of photographs in 1921 and later in the mid-1920s, his camera searches for Rrose in Marcel Duchamp, and eventually finds her."

read more...

Marcel Duchamp

January 19, 2009 "Embodying the intellect of his literary contemporaries Marcel Proust and James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) has been aptly described by the painter Willem de Kooning as a one-man movement. Jasper Johns has written of his work as the 'field where language, thought and vision act on one another.' Duchamp has had a huge impact on twentieth-century art. By World War I, he had rejected the work of many of his fellow artists as 'retinal' art, intended only to pleas.. read more...

Art and Synesthesia:
in search of the synesthetic experience

January 19, 2009 " Questioning identity. Marcel Duchamp had taken a mesmerizing photograph of himself, gathered around a table —a co-presence with his additional selves. This multiple-self-portret represents five images of the artist, a mise-en-scène of a brainstorming session with himself. We see a manifestation of introspection, a reflective moment of pause in a circular tango of thoughts. Marcel Duchamp said: 'The individual, man as a man, man as a brain, i.. read more...

Debating American Modernism
Stieglitz, Duchamp, and the New York Avant-Garde

January 19, 2009 "A rich dialogue between the circles of artists associated with American photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) and French artist Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) spurred the development of modern art in the United States between 1915 and 1929. During World War I many European artists, including Duchamp, left their homelands bound for New York, a metropolis thriving with industrial and technological advanceme.. read more...

Mona Lisa Images for a Modern World

January 19, 2009 "Using the Mona Lisa to mediate between high and low culture is not new. Soon after the turn of the 20th century, the Dada movement revolted against the "high cultural" content of the visual arts. In doing this, in some cases the Dadaists elevated the mundane into the world of the "aesthetic" by forcing observers to look at everyday objects in surprisingly new contexts. At other times cherished objects and symbols were ridiculed. The most well known a.. read more...

A romp with the rat pack

January 19, 2009

"This is a very large exhibition, with more than 300 works: paintings, photographs, sculptures, readymades, films, chess sets, and a wealth of documentary material. There is much here I was previously unaware of. The show takes us from the early years of the 20th century to 1976, when the last of the trio, Man Ray, died. In between, there are shocks and surprises, dirty pictures and beautiful enigmas."

read more...