Duchampian News & Views

  • Cage: Sound and Sculpture

    The current show at BALTIC features a response from eight contemporary artists to a piece of work developed while Cage was at the New School of Social Research. And 60 years on, artists are still drawing inspiration from the avant garde composer’s life and work.(Through September 19.)

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  • God Save … Tu m’?

    Punk is theater, argues Stefany Anne Golberg, and dada was theater. How much does the iconic poster for the Sex Pistols’ "God Save the Queen" single owe to Duchamp’s pioneering use of safety pins to hold Tu m’ together? The pin pierces and intrudes on the picture plane, unifying the composition by subverting its surface integrity.

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  • Fountain to Fountain

    London’s Whitechapel Gallery is exhibiting two versions of Duchamp’s "Fountain" — one of the porcelain replica "originals" and Sherrie Levine’s cast-in-bronze tribute — through September 5. The focus is on materials, corporeal reality, the body and its limitations.

     
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  • Remembering Duchamp’s Meal

    Daniel Spoerri’s work with food and its remains has recently returned to the public’s attention as the now-80-year-old artist excavates a banquet he buried in 1983. The project has also reminded some critics of his noted "readymade" exhibition of the detritus of a meal served to Marcel Duchamp, with whom Spoerri associated in the 1950s.

     

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  • Rrose’s Shoe (Large)

    A bicycle wheel bisects Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Selavy in William Schinsky’s shoe-based work "Duchamp/Selavy," on display in Palm Desert, California for much of this summer. As Schinsky points out, Duchamp was indeed a courageous gentleman who "did things out of the mainstream.

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  • Treating Kitchen Tools Like Readymade Treasure

    The Duchampian idea of readymade as household tool abstracted from its useful context receives new nuances in Indian artist Subodh Gupta’s "Chimta" series, which assembles thousands of steel bread tongs into monumental aggregates. One such piece, from 2003, will be auctioned off at Christie’s in London next week. Estimated sales price is in the $250,000 to $350,000 range.

     

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  • The Magic of Beatrice Wood

    Notorious Duchamp collaborator Beatrice Wood recently won favorable notice in the New York Times for her "whimsical and playful" ceramic universe. The subversive and often erotic figural work apparently passed without notice but Duchamp scholars will likely find plenty of earthy humor frozen in clay.

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  • Louise Bourgeois, 1911-2010

    Louise Bourgeois, the noted sculptor who knew and worked with many of the seminal members of the surrealist group (including Marcel Duchamp), died Monday in New York. She was 98 years old and had been producing horrors, marvels and enigmas for seven decades.

     

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  • Making a House Less Like Home

    The Barbican gallery’s "Surreal House" exhibit has opened and is drawing insightful reviews, most recently from the Financial Times. If the act of building and maintaining a home reflects the process of being in the world, then the surrealist project subverts that process by making "home" un-homelike.

     

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