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Marcel Duchamp

by Dawn Ades, Neil Cox and David Hopkins.
Thames and Hudson, New York and London, 1999.
224 pages, 164 illustrations, 42 colour, $14.95 (paper)
ISBN: 0-500-20322-9.
Reviewed by Sean Cubitt, Professor of Screen and Media Studies, The University of Waikato, Private Bag 3105, Hamilton, New Zealand. E-mail: s.cubitt@waikato.ac.nz


It is a sad truth that Marcel Duchamp is one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century and one of the least understood. The 1917 work *Fountain*, a urinal laid on its back, mounted on a pedestal and signed 'R Mutt', demanded to know the boundaries of art, a question that has remained central to all subsequent artworks with any claim to seriousness. So far so good, except that this eighty-year-old question is increasingly redundant. Duchamp himself turned from the *Fountain* to the *Large Glass* ('The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even'), demonstrating that the *Fountain* was not the end of art but the beginning of something else. The question, as the authors of this wise and useful introduction point out, was neither the possibility of art nor the pursuit of anti-art but the necessity of not-art.

Ades, Cox and Hopkins give the *Fountain* serious attention as a Dadaist moment of anti-aesthetics, but they likewise move on, situating the readymades as a group alongside the major artworks and the more obscure art actions, and prying into the positive conceptions of seriality and identity, accident, anonymity and the commodity aesthetic. Of most concern to _Leonardo_ readers is the recognition of Duchamp as technologist. While Duchamp has been characterised, accurately enough, by other critics (such as Thierry de Duve) as a conceptualist and father of conceptualism, he was also one of the first technologically literate artists of the modern period, as witness the *Large Glass* itself.

2.75 metres tall, looking distinctively modern in its curved aluminium stand, the *Glass* is a cryptic, jokey, only half-visible thing. Above, the Bride, below, the Bachelors. Powered by a waterfall and illuminating gas (both of course as transparent as the glass itself), a machinery of desire creaks and gurgles into perpetually frustrated action ('A bachelor grinds his own chocolate' -- geddit?). The work uses almost every kind of glass technology: mirroring, drilling, engraving, leading and of course glass-plate photography. The three loose squares that punctuate the Bride's cloudy emanation, for example, derive from three photographs of a gauze veil wafted by the wind through the open window of Duchamp's Paris apartment. Other quasi-photographic techniques abound, especially in the role of chance, through which Duchamp sought to free himself and the work of intention, just as realists had been arguing of photography for sixty years by the time Duchamp set to work. Whatever else it is, and it is many things, the *Large Glass* is a major work of media theory.

Like the *Rotoreliefs* and other optical toys that issued from his studio, the *Large Glass* is a technological work. After his demolition of art's pretensions to autonomy, value, permanence and the sublime, Duchamp turned to a slow, secretive technical investigation of the machinery that inhabits the human. The characters of the *Large Glass* are cyborgs, or more precisely mechanical organisms, just as, by submitting himself to mechanisms designed to minimise his opportunities for selfish expression, Duchamp made of himself a technology. Duchamp is rarely destructive, or rarely merely so: his *Standard Stoppages* become real (if pataphysical) tools for measurement and the establishment of perspective. The proliferating plaster casts and projections of the mid and late period works draw over and again on the importance of a world to the making of art, and the importance of a spectator to its existence as meaningful.

The authors cite a saying of Duchamp's: a work of art has a life of about forty years, after which it becomes art history. This seems sadly true of the streams of neo-Duchampian drolleries that stream from the art schools into our more fashionable collections, those same collections that so disdain technological media. It took more or less thirty years for video to become an acceptable art medium: after forty it is still difficult to find digital artworks in national galleries. There is some Duchampian arithmetic to do here: by now, the experiments of the Whitneys and Jordan Belson are no longer art, therefore they qualify for the museum. Of course Duchamp is himself an art historical figure now, which explains the rather post-mortem flavour of some of the valuable scholarship here, for example the reminders of the importance of theosophy and anthroposophy to the founding figures of twentieth century modernism.

This is the best introduction to Duchamp: complete, exceptionally well-researched, clearing up a lot of confusions and adding a considerable amount of new scholarship. Better still, it points forward: after art after Duchamp, cultural creativity must be technological.

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Updated 6 March 2001.




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