Richard Hamilton’s ‘Modern Moral Matters’

March 8, 2010 "As Duchamp's chief British cheerleader, Richard Hamilton influenced not one, not two, but three generations of creatives. Pop art we have noted already. The best British art of the 1970s, from Richard Long to Gilbert & George, was infected, too, by Duchampian logic. As for Brit Art, with its passion for jokes and its obsession with the conceptual denouement, the line of descent that passes from Duchamp to it, via Hamilton, runs straight as a Roman road." -- Waldemar Januszcz.. read more...

Red Grooms: Old Masters & Modern Muses

March 5, 2010 American artist Red Grooms, best known for his large-format and "jokey" multimedia installations of crowds, is receiving a retrospective show at Bryn Mawr College's Canaday Library. The exhibit focuses on Grooms' portraits of his fellow artists: Matisse, Picasso, Dali, Goya, Rembrandt, Titian ... Duchamp. Other works on display are of friends and collaborators, the "muses" who inhabit the living artist's life and days. And a selection of self-portraits blur the mirrored line .. read more...

In Defense of the Fountain

March 4, 2010 Confronted with vaguely Kelmscottian complaints that factory methods are somehow less "honest" than the work artists produce by hand, Cambridge student critic Eliot D'Silva recently launched a counter-argument that the smooth and shining planed surfaces of industrial manufacture generate readymade pleasures of their own. While the dance appears somewhat improvisational in its apparent digressions, its overall shape rehearses the old interplay between craft and concept, symbol.. read more...

An Invitation to the 1913 Armory Show

March 3, 2010 An intimate exhibition of artists' lists at the Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture in Washington, DC captures a moment of poignant trivia for Duchamp scholars. One of the lists is by Picasso and contains his hand-scribbled list of artists worthy of inclusion in the 1913 Armory Show. Much has been made of the fact that Duchamp's name is misspelled, but the context is somewhat less risible: At the time, Ducham(p) was a somewhat promising but insular and most of al.. read more...

Satie-Duchamp-Cage: Anarchic Happenings

March 2, 2010 The reverberations of Erik Satie's 1917 ballet Parade continued to sound well into the 1950s and beyond, thanks to John Cage's efforts to keep the anarchic experimentation of Satie and his collaborators vibrant. Whether such musical circuses are "modern," postmodern or hark as Duchamp in Willem de Kooning's estimation "back to Mesopotamia" is perhaps a question of relative perspective -- a conceptual illusion of sorts.A recent essay by Sheila Christofides celebrates the elega.. read more...

Living out of the Suitcase in Miami

March 1, 2010 The Miami Art Museum will be highlighting works from its permanent collection, including a hard-won edition of Marcel Duchamp's Box in a Suitcase (Boite-en-valise), in its main gallery until it relocates to its new facilities in 2013. By doing so, the museum frees up institutional resources to prepare for the move while reinforcing its reputation as a premier artistic center for Florida and beyond.The otherwise low-profile inclusion of the Duchamp suitcase -- itself a portabl.. read more...

Peter Liversidge’s Duchampian Propositions

February 26, 2010 Artist Peter Liversidge works by composing a series of "proposals" to create objects (facsimile dice, neon signage, mobile sculpture) and document situations (visits, encounters, meals); his current exhibition, at Edinburgh's Ingleby Gallery, collects 160 such proposals and their realizations to commemorate "the thrill of it all."While Liversidge's conceptual methodology is obviously in the tradition of Duchamp, Richard Ingleby, who's hosting the current show, is equally int.. read more...

Warhol, from Dylan to Duchamp

February 25, 2010

The Eric Firestone Gallery in Tucson will be exhibiting photographs by Nat Finkelstein, Carl Fischer, Michael Tighe, Santi Visalli and others associated with Andy Warhol. Some of the images have never been shown before in a public venue.

(Through April 11. ericfirestonegallery.com has details.)

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The Maori Readymade

February 24, 2010 New Zealand artist Michael Parekowhai has been invited to exhibit his work at next year's Venice Biennale. Much of his work has explored the New Zealand cultural identity (simultaneously imported and traditional) through the recontextualization of images and objects; an early breakthrough was After Dunlop (1989), which reproduced Duchamp's iconic bicycle wheel -- itself either a found object or a painstaking imitation -- in hand-carved wood. Another early work recast a lat.. read more...