Lee Miller: More than a Muse

July 5, 2011 The new exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA, titled “Man Ray / Lee Miller, Partners in Surrealism,” showcases the long and complicated relationship between the two avant-garde artists. Bringing together the work of Ray, Miller and others from their close circle in an interesting retelling of their story, it documents the various phases of their interconnected lives: as strangers, as mentor and student, as lovers, and finally as friends. Ultimately, .. read more...

Games, Continued

July 3, 2011 "Games, which as operations are disjunctive, because they produce differentiating events, give rise to spaces where moves are proportional to situations. From the game of chess, an aristocratic form of the "art of war" which came from China and was brought by the Arabs into medieval Western culture where it constituted a very important part of manorial culture, to pinochle, Lotto, and Scrabble, games formulate (and already formalize) rules organizing moves and .. read more...

The Quotable Avant-Garde: On (Duchamp) Games and Pataphysics

July 3, 2011   "The game is the Pataphysical overture to the world. The realisation of such games is the creation of situations. A crisis therefore exists, caused by the crucial problem which each Pataphysical adept must resolve: s/he must either apply the situlogic method and attack the conditions of the reigning society, or else simply refuse to do anything whatsoever about the situation. It is in the latter resolution to this problem that 'Pataphysics becomes the relig.. read more...

How to Buy a Lawrence Weiner

June 30, 2011 If Hannah Weiner wrote a poetics that bore witness to a her schizophrenic environment, a spectacle of linguistic topologies, Lawrence Weiner—member of the Postminimalist Conceptualism movement from the 1960s with others including artists Robert Barry and Sol LeWitt—actively constructs his own peculiar conceptual landscape, by inscribing its signifiers into the real.  Unlike Hannah, Lawrence Weiner dares his audience to do more than read, he dares us to make. .. read more...

An Epitaph for Immortality: Dali on Potsdamer Platz

June 28, 2011 After crumpling up that poster of The Persistence of Memory for post-college interior redecoration, the specter of an anti-Salvador Dali backlash presents itself. It's all too easy to decide that the wax-mustachioed Spanish showman was a commercial, cliched hype-machine and somehow your adolescent self was tricked into buying the Kool-Aid. The error of such a position, in my view, is revealed time and time again. It's refuted as much as anything by the permanent exhibiti.. read more...

The Color of Dreams

June 20, 2011 There is something about surrealism that inspires people to cast off their inhibitions, act out their dreams and fantasies, play with words, and invent bad puns. That is exactly what the organizers of the Vancouver Art Gallery’s major summer show, The Colour of My Dreams: The Surrealist Revolution in Art, were counting on.   On certain Fridays, the Vancouver Art Gallery hosts live performances—FUSE events—and its June 17th evening of dance, caba.. read more...

Duchamp Mix Tape

June 20, 2011 McSweeney's Internet Tendency just published, as is their wont, an entire biography of Marcel Duchamp made only of pop single titles. (I'm listening to it now on Grooveshark.) How many of the references do you get? (By Dorothy Gambrell) Side A “Parisian,” Brent’s TV “Hop With The Jet Set,” Dead Kennedys “Naked Girl Falling Down The Stairs,” The Cramps “Moving,” Sarah Dougher “New York City,” Cub &ldqu.. read more...

Concrete Utopia, and a poem from the Editor

June 11, 2011 Concrete Utopia, a "collaborative project space" in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is emerging as an intriguing site for the examination of the legacy of 19th and 20th Century aesthetic and political discourses; though it is also, of course, squarely forward-looking. Their current show (and print publication), "I'm not a good enough feminist," grapples with the theory, history, and future of the feminist movement. I generally appreciate C.U.'s eagerness to combin.. read more...

Cow Clicker: a Fountain for a New Generation of Online Gaming?

June 8, 2011 Previously on marcelduchamp.net, we posed this question: whether Marx remains inescapable to the formulations of subversion fundamental to the survival of an avant-garde in the present day. Certainly, structuring a leftist mode of critical thought in an era, no longer modern and no longer even post-modern and increasingly defined by the reaches of interconnectivity and globalization, poses numerous difficulties. What, for instance, truly belongs in the scope of the avant-g.. read more...