Duchampian News & Views
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Readymade Tools for Rebuilding Haiti
February 23, 2010Curators from top museums, galleries and art spaces are banding together to raise money for Haiti through auctioning off readymade objects from nearly a hundred artists, including Jeff Koons, Terence Koh and musician Michael Stipe. Working in the Duchampian mode and organized in a grassroots style by Diana Campbell and Julie Ragolia, the “Tools for Thought” sale will take place on March 15.
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Duchamp, Game Theory and the Frame of Being
February 22, 2010 Glosses on Duchamp have become popular in game design circles, but the multi-dimensional relationship between the Duchampian career and game theory itself has not enjoyed such high-profile scrutiny. Nonetheless, a recent brief but insightful essay by blogger Stanley Wrzyszczynski pulls together some of the salient questions of how Duchamp conflates the creation of art with the act of framing an aspect of the world -- questions that reflect the inner rules of engagement betwee.. read more... -
Dorothea Tanning: Beyond “Birthday and Beyond”
February 19, 2010August will mark the centenary of Dorothea Tanning’s birth. Max Ernst knew early on that she was a deep dreamer, a heterodox surrealist and a chess player; she became his fourth and last wife. Barry Schwabsky at The Nation has anticipated the looming 100-year milestone to muse thoughtfully on her long career (she still writes) and sometimes puzzling reticence around the spotlight.
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Recycling the Readymade
February 18, 2010 In the tradition of the first readymades, Gallery 705 in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania is showing a collection of assemblages, photos of assemblages and wall sculptures created from "recycled" or discarded objects and other "found" materials. Highlights include Minnesota artist Nick Schleif's monumental portraits of Abraham Lincoln and cigarette mascot Joe Camel, assembled from thousands of pennies and butts, respectively.While Duchamp's Fountain is often invoked as ancestor of c.. read more... -
Dada Against Context
February 17, 2010 According to a new study, we like art better when it has not been interpreted for us -- and that goes for both representational styles and more "difficult" or conceptual work. Kenneth Bordens, a psychology professor of Indiana University - Purdue University Fort Wayne, split 172 students into two groups, neither of which had much formal art background before the experiment began. Members of the first group were simply asked to rate their response to a wide range of art (Renai.. read more... -
Fashion Descending the Runway
February 16, 2010 An especially insightful review of Alexander Wang's recent New York Fashion Week runway show compared the designer's deconstruction of his fall line to "Art 101," and the Nude Descending a Staircase in particular. Like Duchamp's nude, the new season's wardrobe becomes visually fragmented on the runway, distributed across the show in a way that invites the audience to not only mentally remix the clothes into new ensembles but to apprehend all the possible combinations and the .. read more... -
Richard Hamilton Remembers Duchamp
February 14, 2010Now 88, Richard Hamilton, father of pop art and transcriber of the notes contained in Duchamp’s Green Box, is still active and profoundly influential if not famous. In a recent in-depth interview, he looks fondly back to his encounters with Duchamp (“the most charming person imaginable”) while blasting his “ignorant” descendants in the world of conceptual art.
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En Plein Air
February 12, 2010 A longtime associate of John Cage, painter Ray Kass has explored the reverberations of the retinal for decades through abstraction, chance operations, nature studies and critical work. A recently opened show in New York gallery IR77 Contemporary Art brings together examples of his recent output along with several of the "readymade" paintings of the "28 Trays" series. The "Trays" are especially resonant in a Duchamp-Cage context; while they superficially resemble abstract expr.. read more... -
Daughter of Dust
February 11, 2010 Images like "A cause de l'elevage de poussiere" ("Because of Dust Breeding") and the 71-part Fait/Fact series have won Sophie Riselhueber (1949-) a nomination for the 2010 Deutsche Boerse Prize. One of four photographers so honored, Riselhueber began her career as a journalist. After a 1991 insight into the parallels between the dust accumulating on the back of Marcel Duchamp's now-perpetually-damaged Bride Stripped Bare and the wreckage of Gulf War Kuwait, her initially docu.. read more...