Duchamp's Work Research Articles

R(r)ose Sélavy as Man Ray: Reconsidering the Alter Ego of Marcel Duchamp

R(r)ose Sélavy may be the most provocative art production assigned to Marcel Duchamp, himself among the most challenging artists of the modern and postmodern periods. She tells us much about Duchamp's work, psychology, and collaborations, as well as his, and wider, cultural attitudes toward gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity. The so-called alter ego of Duchamp, Sélavy was designated by him as “born” in New York in 1920, and she served him for the rest of his life as the repository of his most daring works, acts, and ideas.

“Betwixt and Between”: Duchamp and Williams on Words and Things

Took the Lead THE relationship of the sister (painting and poetry, literature and art) in the twentieth century is complex and variable. are influenced by literature; writers are inspired by the visual arts; single artists produce hybrid works; generic and disciplinary categories merge, blur, and combine in unique and provocative ways. What follows is an attempt to trace out one thread of these interconnecting and interwoven relations between the verbal and visual arts of the modern period. We begin with William Carlos Williams's reaction to the art of Marcel Duchamp, and the poet's sense that in this case, painting took the The profound influence of Duchamp upon Williams surfaces in the famous passage from the poet's autobiography. In the chapter titled Painters and Parties, Williams describes the impact of two innovative works by the already famous artist: New York was seething with it. Painting took the lead. came to a head for us in the famous Armory Show of 1913. I went to it and gaped along with the rest [ . . . ] at Duchamp's sculpture (by Mott and Co.), a magnificent cast-iron urinal, glistening of its white enamel. The story then current of this extraordinary and popular young man was that he walked daily into whatever store struck his fancy and purchased whatever pleased him - something - something American. Whatever it might be, that was his construction for the day. The threw out the urinal, asses that they were. The Nude Descending a Staircase is too hackneyed for me to remember anything clearly about it now. But I do remember how I laughed out loud when I first saw it, happily, with relief. (A 134) A number of different issues and ideas underlie this description, expressing as much about Williams's aesthetic as Duchamp's. First there is the sense of revolution and rebellion at the heart of Duchamp's work, which the silly committee does not recognize but which Williams admires so much. Second, Williams laughs out loud, responding to an art in which humor is central and important. Further, Williams notes the Americanness of the Readymades, linking Duchamp's work to themes central to Williams's own, namely the sense of the local and the uniquely American experience and idiom. Finally, according to Williams, the Readymades were and demanded a comparable creativity and newness on the part of modern poets. In a conversation with Walter Arensberg, Williams comments on man's creative potential for making it new (to borrow a phrase from Pound), which was certainly a pervasive modernist theme: Once when I was taking lunch with Walter Arensberg [ . . . ] I asked him if he could state what the more modern painters were about, those roughly classified at that time as cubists: Cleizes, Man Ray, Demuth, Duchamp - all of whom were then in the city. He replied by saying that the only way man differed from every other creature was in his ability to improvise novelty and, since the pictorial artist was under discussion, anything in paint that is truly new, truly a fresh creation, is good art. (I 8) Elsewhere Williams also discussed the importance of the new: It is the NEW! [ . . . ] the NEW, the everlasting NEW, the everlasting defiance (Belly Music 25). Yet there are even more connections between this artist and this writer. The movement of Dada in general, in addition to celebrating playfulness and chance procedures, also extolled the irrational and the alogical. Thus Duchamp famously chose the Readymades through chance procedures, employed chance as a creative process for works such as Three Standard Stoppages, and embraced the chance event that cracked but did not destroy The Large Glass. The nonlinear and alogical aspect of the visual arts found expression in Williams's playful irrationality in Spring and All (1923), which mixed prose and poetry in a seemingly irrational way, and in which chapter headings are nonchronological and sometimes even upside down and backward. …

Fat and failure: Marcel Duchamp's military imagination

Marcel Duchamp's preoccupation with the French army can be seen in a note he included in the Box of 1914. The note is known as loignement, and with it he declares his opposition to military conscription and then speculates that the army might telephonically reconnect the limbs and organs of its soldiers that have been left scattered across the battlefield. Duchamp wrote this note before field telephones were issued to French troops but his grotesque proposition can be seen in light of his experience as an army corporal. In 1912, before making these caustic suggestions Duchamp had taken a motor journey and written an account of it where he describes the aggressive invasion of territory by an alien force. This invasion travelled from France's liminal frontiers to its metropolitan centre. His text is known as the Jura-Paris Road and again Duchamp reveals his military concerns. He formulates territory that proceeds from topographical amplitude to the delimitation of a straight line. In spite of its sophisticated morphology, it is threatened by alien forces aimed at testing boundaries. Duchamp published his text as a facsimile of his handwritten original, which displays the amendments and uncertainties of a man of military age attempting to evade the imperatives of military service. The essay continues with an analysis of Duchamp's influences in writing this text and suggests a link with the philosopher Edmund Husserl in the context of the profoundly anti-German atmosphere in the French military build-up to war between 1912 and 1914. The argument closes with a survey of a military thematic in Duchamp's work after he left France for America in 1915.

Marcel Duchamp: On the fruitful use of narcissism and destructiveness in contemporary art

Considering Marcel Duchamp's work, this paper raises the question as to the nature of the subjective experience proposed by contemporary art to today's audience. Approaching art through the concept of sublimation, Freud maintains a fundamentally optimistic and positive view, putting forward its libidinal and sexual aspects, the pursuit of pleasure, beauty, and omnipotence. Following the path opened by Freud through the concept of the ‘uncanny’, most post‐Freudian authors have proposed a ‘blacker’ image of artistic endeavour, allowing the expression of aggression. From a perspective which is neither that of an art historian nor a moralist, the author proposes the idea that certain propositions of contemporary art may allow the viewer to live narcissistic and destructive fantasies, via culturally sanctioned and socially acceptable means. The recognition of the fertile use of destruction as a condition of the emergence of the new, on the one hand, as well as the legitimacy of the expression through art of the most primitive fantasies and the right to non‐communication, on the other, are postulated as constructs for a non‐normative, non‐judgemental psychoanalytic approach to the cultural world.

Signs and Designs: Art and Architecture in the Work of Michel Butor (review)

Reviewed by: Signs and Designs: Art and Architecture in the Work of Michel Butor Andrea Goulet Jean H. Duffy . Signs and Designs: Art and Architecture in the Work of Michel Butor. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003. Pp. 302, 21 illustrations. Having explored Claude Simon's artistic intertexts in Reading Between the Lines (1998), Jean Duffy now turns her erudite attentions to another author obsessed with the visual/textual relation: Michel Butor. The result is a must-read resource for all Butor scholars, for it provides not only sustained analyses of the author's major works, but also a thorough overview of relevent criticism from the 1960s to today. Indeed, the book's introduction serves as a critical guide to Butor scholarship, with succinct "mini-reviews" detailing general trends as well as particular critics's theses. The introduction becomes an essential reference when paired with the book's careful and thorough bibliography. Butor's prolific production spans half a century and includes not only books, but over 200 collaborative works with such artists as Baltazar, Joly, and Masurovsky, all of which Duffy has meticulously catalogued. The synthetic skill and pedagogical generosity of such work should not be overlooked. But of course it is the book's central (and clearly-stated) aim to study Butor's many textual references to architecture and the visual or plastic arts. Though other critics have mentioned Gaudì's role in L'Emploi du temps or the Roman trio (Cavallini/Pannini/Bernini) in La Modification, none has gone as "broad and deep" as does Duffy here. Broad, in that she extends intertextual analyses to the less-studied Butor corpus (including Boomerang, Les Mots dans la peinture, and Le Génie du lieu). And deep, in that she brings extensive art history and criticism to bear on her analyses. When relating the novel Degrés, for example, to Massys's 1514 The Money-Lender and his Wife, Duffy invokes the genre painting's iconographic symbolism as a moral gloss that underwrites Butor's broader critique of capitalist imperialism. She similarly goes beyond the mere enumeration of common themes between Butor's Passage de Milan and Duchamp's glass installation La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (Le Grand Verre). Yes, Duchamp's work acts as "narrative generator," providing Butor with the motifs of bride and bachelors, sexual desire and untimely death. But it also must be understood as part of a larger meditation—and Duffy invokes Duchamp's own notes on the project's "sex cylinders," "spangles," and "malic moulds" to re-cast it as a "symbolic meditation on [...] non-fulfilment, failure, abortive communication, sterility, and [...] the mechanistic dimension of modern man." She thus gives due to the discursivity of art and art criticism, rather than relegate pictures to the status of inert muse for the cultured writer. Signs and Designs is organized into 5 central chapters, the first four focussing on Butor's better-known works. The sustained Duchamp/Passage de Milan chapter ends with a reading of De Vere's artistic project as a mise en abyme of the novel's own spatial composition. The next chapter, on "high and low culture" in L'Emploi du temps, similarly emphasizes Butor's compositional strategies—this time as mirrored in novelistic references to cathedral architecture, museum images, and tapestry series. Here, Duffy begins to build one of her book's larger arguments about Butor's ambivalence toward the cultural endeavors of human civilization: the Old Cathedral [End Page 118] embodies a synthetic European cultural history both impressive and obsolescent, while the New Cathedral aligns with town fairs and cheap cinemas to challenge the modern town's blatant commercialism. The reading is, as always, thorough, well-researched, and clear-eyed vis-à-vis its critical predecessors, though one might not fully agree with Duffy's assessment of L'Emploi du temps as a fundamentally optimistic novel. The third chapter extends work Duffy has previously done on Michelangelo and La Modification; here, she applies her impressive breadth of art historical knowledge to a reading of Western Christian culture (in the art and architecture of Italy and France) as backdrop to the protagonist's personal spiritual quest. In...

Different and yet alike.

Despite a history of different attitudes and approaches, art and science are engaging more often in collaborations of mutual benefit

The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp: Desire, Liberation, and the Self in Modern Culture.

Marcel Duchamp is a founding figure of twentieth-century art and culture, the common source to which many contemporary movements trace their roots. His career has often been celebrated for its contradictions and discontinuities, its disparate parts unified only by their assault on the traditions of art. Jerrold Seigel offers a wholly different view, revealing a web of interrelated themes that unify Duchamp's work and tie it to his life. At the book's center is a reinterpretation of the famous readymades, of which the urinal Fountain and the defaced Mona Lisa were the most shocking. By recovering their history, Seigel shows that their playful and rebellious surface veiled the meanings that linked them to Duchamp's pictures (especially the famous Large Glass, here illuminated by a comprehensive new reading) and to his experiments with language.The result gives the artist's career the unity of a colorful and intricate puzzle. Behind that puzzle were the great modernist themes of isolation, perpetuated desire, and the imagined dissolution of the self. These themes entered Duchamp's mind both from his social and cultural environment and from the shaping experience of his family; around them were woven the patterns of working and loving that Seigel uncovers in his life. Duchamp emerges not just as a coherent, understandable personality, but as an exemplary one, his very eccentricities reflecting essential dimensions of modern experience. A mythic presence in modern culture, a hero whose story we tell for the sake of its valuable lessons, Duchamp opened the floodgates to a sea of questions about the nature and meaning of art. Seigel demands that we think again about these questions, and about the answers that Duchamp's heirs and followers have tried to give to them.

Thoroughly Modern Marcel

Given the tremendous resonance that Duchamp's work has had for artistic and critical practices since the 1950s, it has often been asked why he received so much less attention in the first half of the century. Perhaps a better question would be: What was there to receive? To what extent was any delay in the reception of the work, and particularly of the readymades, a function of delays in the construction of their meaning? And to what extent was the gesture of the readymade only retroactively solidified? While the increasing importance of Duchamp's work can be attributed in part to changes in the artistic context since the 1950s, an examination of the record reveals a precariousness in the existence of the readymades at times, as well as the extent of Duchamp's efforts both to organize their presentation and to minimize his own behind-the-scenes work in the formation of his oeuvre.

Interviews with Ed Ruscha and Bruce Conner

Armstrong: How did you first know about Duchamp? Was it through art school? Ruscha: I think it was in a book, a reproduction of the Nude Descending a Staircase. It was as if there were an asterisk on that picture; his Nude Descending a Staircase was such a spectacle at the time that you remembered it for that. That was part of its value. Then, there were my teachers in school [Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles], who were more along the line of Abstract Expressionists. These people admired Duchamp, but probably didn't like his work; they couldn't see it for its true value. So he was only marginally mentioned, but all the students knew about Armstrong: You have said that your teachers were often disparaging in their remarks about Duchamp. Did that have a certain appeal to students then? Ruscha: Yes, it did. And it probably had precisely the effect that Duchamp would have liked to have had on students, and that is to be a rebel. He was against a kind of academic slavery that artists went through who followed a traditional path; he was for the spirit of revolt. Armstrong: Did his rejection of painting, and especially of the retinal in painting, cause you to reevaluate your approach to art early in your career? Ruscha: It just made me aware that there was another way to think about things. Finally, the ultimate mystery of his work is its value. It's hard to be taught how to look at Duchamp's work; it has to be felt somehow. Armstrong: You once said that your books were the most Duchampian of your work. Ruscha: I feel that the spirit of his work is stronger in my books than in anything else. But I don't use him as a reference; he's just so much a part of my history and my art--as he is for so many artists. Armstrong: You were once quoted as saying: If Marcel Duchamp hadn't come along, we would have needed to invent him. Could you elaborate?

Three Conversations in 1985: Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Robert Morris

Buchloh: Did you know Duchamp? Did you have any exchange with him at all? Oldenburg: I had some interesting encounters with him, but not long talks or anything. In Pasadena, in 1963, was really the first time I saw the work, I mean really saw the work, except for rumors, and it was a very exciting show. Then he made himself available after the show to talk to people and sign things and so on. And he used to come, before that, to performances. Buchloh: Yes, he does actually mention this, that he sometimes went to Happenings. Oldenburg: He came to at least three performances that I had done. I remember one performance in 1965 which took place in a movie theater where the performance was in the seats and the audience had to stand. Duchamp asked if he could sit down because he was too tired to stand, so he became the only person in the audience sitting in the performance. Another performance, in 1962 in The Store, ended with performers in burlap bags, crawling out of the bags, expiring at the feet of the audience. Buchloh: That was one of your performances? Oldenburg: Yes. I found that I was expiring at his feet. So there were contacts, but never anything more than a cordial hello if I met him at a party, and so forth. I never played chess with him. Buchloh: Also, if, as you say, in the early sixties the major points of departure in your own work were already clearly defined ... Oldenburg: Yes, he was a historical figure. Buchloh: What about iconography? That is obviously an art-historical problem; you are, as I see it, the first sculptor after Duchamp who uses a kind of iconography that is completely alien to all preceding sculpture, which is the industrially produced, ready-made object. Oldenburg: Well, I saw some of Duchamp's work at Yale when I was an undergradu-

Marcel Duchamp, the Artist, and the Social Expectations of Aging

French artist Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) is considered by many art professionals to be the greatest artist of this century. During his long career, Duchamp developed a set of radical theories that literally redefined art as a contemporary praxis. Indeed, much of Duchamp's work anticipates what today is called postmodern theory. The Duchamp career speaks to issues of aging because over the span of an entire lifetime of 81 years there was no diminution of quality of innovation, theory, or power.

Concerning Power, Nuclear and Otherwise: A Response to Ellen Messer-Davidow

The guest speaker, an administrator at the university where I teach now, talks about his days working on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. Bliss was it in that nuclear dawn to be alive, and to be a grad student working with Oppie and the others, he admits, was very heaven, though he also calls our attention to the ironies inherent in his tale of youthful adventure. I watch energy play across his face as he remembers, and I think I understand how vital that time must have been for him, for all of them. In his years since Los Alamos, the speaker has prided himself on being a humanist as well as a physicist. I have seen him act the senex in a Roman comedy, and explain how Marcel Duchamp's work uses principles of optics; I have heard him argue strategy for attracting more minority and women students and faculty. We are seated at dinner together but probably not for sympathies we might be thought to share about nukes or interdisciplinary studies or university politics. I think maybe it's because we are both-heh, heh-graduates of Yale, two old boys from the other institution. A Navajo high school senior shares our table. He and I get talking a little about the Reservation and his family, and, after a while, he tells me quietly about some Navajo witches-skinwalkers-he had a brush with last summer up in the Chuska Mountains, near his uncle's sheep camp. It's a frightening story even amid the mirrors and chrome of the Hilton Inn.

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even

Oil, varnish, lead foil, lead wire, and dust on glass plate mounted between two glass panels Surely one of the most enigmatic works of art in any museum, The Large Glass dominates a gallery devoted to Marcel Duchamp's work from the exact location in which he placed it in 1954. Painstakingly executed on two planes of glass with unconventional materials such as lead foil, fuse wire, and dust, the appearance of the Glass is the result of an extraordinary combination of chance procedures, carefully plotted perspective studies, and laborious craftsmanship. As for its metaphysical aspect, Duchamp's voluminous preparatory notes, published in 1934, reveal that his hilarious picture is intended to diagram the erratic progress of an encounter between the Bride, in the upper panel, and her nine Bachelors gathered timidly below amidst a wealth of mysterious mechanical apparatus. Exhibited only once (in 1926 at the Brooklyn Museum) before it was accidentally broken and laboriously repaired by the artist, the Glass joined the Museum's collection in 1953 and has gradually become the subject of a vast scholarly literature and the object of pilgrimages for countless visitors drawn to its witty, intelligent, and vastly liberating redefinition of what a work of art can be. from PMA website accessed 7/8/2004 http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/modern_contemporary/1952-98-1.shtml