At 232 pages and with 230 illustrations, this impressive catalogue is a seminal publication…
Jennifer Reeves
by Valery Oisteanu
This is an important contribution to Duchamp scholarship, featuring hundreds of rarely seen images and illustrations. As the artist himself put it, "Unless a picture shocks, it is nothing; the individual, man as a brain, if you like, interest me more than what he makes, because I have noticed that most artists only repeat themselves."
This monograph was put together under the curatorial eye of Harald Szeeman and covers just about every period of Duchamp’s art, focused mainly on those aspects that have influenced other artists especially Jean Tinguely. Additionally, the publication contains numerous quotes by the artist and essays by renowned Duchamp scholars on such topics as the emergence and development of the readymade concept and its impact on the art of the 1960s.
Duchamp saw himself as a craftsman working for God, a guiding principle that was primarily spiritual and not aesthetic. His radical break with art occurred when he invented the ready-mades, when he brought into discourse that art is first and foremost a mental activity and not a matter of depiction. After 1913, he was not interested in creating aesthetic objects but rather in expressing ideas in a pragmatic way. As he wrote in 1915, "The figuration of a possible not as the opposite of impossible/nor as related to probable/nor as subordinated to likely. The possible is only a physical/caustic (vitriol type)/burning up all aesthetics."
Instead of the enchanting effect of beauty, Duchamp’s aesthetics were based on shock, surprise and discovery. He gave priority to the intellectual gift of invention, to the pleasure of thinking things that had never been thought before, a game in which he could play with chance, with words and images, with personal and sexual identities.
The essays "The Gallantry of Radicalism" by Szeemann and "What’s at Play in the Word Play: A Rendezvous Not to be Missed" by Mark Decimo are the most interesting new insights on Duchamp’s work. The first piece places Duchamp as the forbearer of Joseph Beuys; both artists selected their objects on the basis of their uselessness and randomness. It’s no coincidence that at the same time other artists were creating love machines that made a separation between procreation and erotic enjoyment. In the second essay, we revisit Duchamp’s verbal puns the damage is in the mouth. Duchamp leaves it up to whoever might come across it to lift the veil of his sexual fantasies.
"A guest plus a host equals a ghost." Those are the words inscribed on one of Duchamp’s discs. Another essay called "Infra-Thin Encounters of an Erotic Kind: Duchamp’s Game with Gender Difference," by Elizabeth Bronfen, discusses the photographs depicting him as a woman, Rrose Selavy ("Eros is Life"). The spectator makes contact with the work by deciphering and interpreting its inner meaning, and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. Duchamp’s autoerotic cross-dressing shows another side of fetishism, yet the artist’s performance as Rrose Selavy also alludes to the minimal differences between the sexes. He places both identities in equilibrium. This catalogue is one of the most daring commentaries on Duchamp’scontroversial work and is highly recommended for students of surrealism.
