Duchampian News & Views
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The Shock of the New (Again)
March 19, 2010The 1982 BBC series Shock of the New is often considered the greatest televised art program of all time, but its observations about post-impressionist artists and their concerns are unavailable on home video. However, out of Robert Hughes’ sprawling five-hour epic, fragments — like the eight-minute Duchamp segment — have been extracted and are available online.
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Last Tour for Cunningham Dancers
March 18, 2010 When Merce Cunningham, sometime collaborator with Marcel Duchamp, died last year, his will instructed that his eponymous dance company embark on one last tour and then, possibly, dissolve. That tour is going on now and will conclude on December 31 2011 -- at New York's Park Avenue Armory. After that point, some of his works will be archived; the fate of the rest is as yet unknown.While two explicitly Duchampian dances (Walkaround Time and An Occasion Piece) may not figure on .. read more... -
Three-Minute Wonder: The ‘Fountain’ Returns
March 17, 2010Film director Mike Figgis recently had the chance to install a copy of the notorious Fountain in a Liverpool restroom and recorded reactions from members of the public. The results were suggestive of generations of received critical response and, surprisingly, revealed often ignored aspects of the work’s gendered and functional nature. The video, produced on behalf of the Tate Modern Liverpool, is now available.
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MONALISA/ L.H.O.O.Q.
March 16, 2010A recent installation of Ida Applebroog’s drawings everted the voyeuristic structure of Etant donnes by putting the naked ladies on the outside of the box; visitors were invited to peer inside the doorless “little sanctuary” — a room of one’s own — at more of the art, which depicts Applebroog’s own female anatomy in various degrees of abstraction.
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A Glimpse into Montreal’s New Dzama Show
March 15, 2010 A significant retrospective look at the diorama-driven career of Marcel Dzama offers some of the thrills of the wax museum along with more enduring grist for thought. Dzama's one-time signature installation Even the Ghost of the Past updates Etant Donnes in ways that both expand and circle back on the Duchampian original. While Duchamp's work still appears eternally pregnant, the addition of new figures seems to both personalize the scene and fix it more clearly at a specific.. read more... -
Duchamp Still has the Power to Shock
March 12, 2010 Nearly nine decades after Marcel Duchamp and Bronia Perlmutter posed nude as Adam and Eve, the image is still causing trouble. Readers of the Lubbock, TX Avalanche-Journal are debating whether an earthenware interpretation of Man Ray's original photograph is "offensive." Interestingly, the controversy does not revolve around the potentially radical suggestion that the quintessentially modern Duchamp could impersonate the fundamentally archaic progenitor of humanity -- a tempt.. read more... -
Design: From Found to Foundry
March 11, 2010A new London exhibition of Ron Arad’s readymade-inspired designs segments his work into the “scavenged” or found, the “rolled” or fabricated, and “tinkered” objects in between. This continuum of approaches to raw materials demonstrates his wit and, as the title of the show underlines, the artist’s fundamental restlessness.
(At the Barbican through May 16.)
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Duchamp and Mail Art: SMS
March 10, 2010 In the 1960s, artists affiliated with the Fluxus movement bypassed the gallery system by mailing each other portfolios as boxed "exhibitions." Collector William Copley set up SMS, one of the more famous of these exchanges, which brought together an assortment of surrealists and younger artists: Oppenheim, Ono, Cage ... Duchamp, who designed the covers and table of contents of one of the six "issues" in an echo of the "rotoreliefs" he'd created four decades previously.An enti.. read more... -
The ‘Nude’ in a Cubist Context
March 9, 2010 The Philadelphia Museum of Art's current Picasso show reimagines a 1912-era Parisian cubist salon to include allied works like Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase. While the gesture may necessitate some license (the painting was neither exhibited with the cubists nor deeply "cubist" in its concerns), it is still interesting to see cubism as a continuum of practice and a community of thought intimately connected to Picasso, but not yet entirely dependent on him. That said, D.. read more...