Unpacking Duchamp is a highly innovative and breakthrough investigation into Duchamp's transformations of the conditions and status of twentieth-century art, art making, and art viewing. Judovitz approaches Duchamp's "oeuvre" from many interrelated angles, offering detailed and illuminating analyses of individual works, all the while contextualizing her discussions through considerable research and erudition. Her mode of inquiry is at once historical and philosophical -- perfect for the study of Duchamp. Intellectually refined, the book is clear, well-written, with many dashes of humor.

Unpacking Duchamp will appeal to culture critics, historians, and theoreticians, as well as to artists and writers. It is a must read for anyone interested in the contemporary conditions of art.

Dalia Judovitz has written a challenging, stimulating and exhaustively researched book on Duchamp. Her take on many aspects of Duchamp's career is fresh and imaginative, as for example in her close reading of his word play and ready-mades. After the comprehensive studies of Duchamp's ready-mades by Antin, Bauer, Caws, Compton, de Duve, James et al this is very impressive.

A key chapter on Art and Economics, cultural and economic value, as one Duchamp scholar observes, "opens up a whole new area of investigation. Her discussion of the Monte-Carlo Bond and the less well known Drain Stopper which she cleverly compares to Renaissance Art Medals will intrigue all those who are seriously interested in Duchamp.

This is a book to be read and re-read.

With so much of the literature available on Marcel Duchamp offering accounts that neither seem to fully resonate with the evidence of the work or with the spirit of the artist himself, I find Unpacking Duchamp to be a refreshing exception. Not only does this book live up to its title's promise of showing us how to "unpack" the master's enigmatic thinking, it does so with such wit and grace that I suspect even he would tip his hat to its author. Taking a body of his work that often appears overly difficult and elusive to enter into, Ms. Judovitz does the nearly impossible, gently prying it open in ways that are beautifully lucid, accessible, and free of jargon, yet, entirely up to the challenge of her ever-moving subject. She constructs readings of the work that go beyond analysis and interpretation to become aesthetic acts in their own right --- reciprocating one that generously enable her readers to enter into and perform their own Duchampian thinking, in ways that genuinely illuminate and bring it to life. This is potentially Duchamp's most important legacy to us but an aspect of his work that often seems poorly understood by many specialists.

In short, I'm extremely glad to finally have a book like this, and I look forward to rereading it in the future. If you are considering it, I would say that it's a challenging read, but one I would strongly recommend if you are at all interested in Duchamp or just interested in exploring an extraordinary mode of thought and creativity. While I do have some knowledge of twentieth-century art, this was not really essential to my appreciation of the book. Its interest and appeal should be broad-based and not limited to either an art audience or one of largely academic interests.

This collection gathers selected correspondence of artist Marcel Duchamp, selecting carefully from a huge volume of letters to provide correspondence to many of his notable friends. The art historian author spent twenty years assembling, translating and annotating these letters; add historical context and background and you have a very accessible, comprehensive collection.

Impeccibly researched, designed, and presented, these selected letters retain their original type, language, and format, so you feel like Duchamp's personality is laid bare. This book has been invaluable for me in understanding the person behind some of the 20th century's most amazing artistic practices. If you're interested in modern art, buy this book!

I have never read like the book about Marcel Duchamp, because the book focuses on the side of the curator of Duchamp. The book is about the Surrealist exihibitions in 1930's and 1940's. And the backgrounds of the exhibitions are very detailed and lively. I recommend the book to those who like, of course, Duchamp and are interested in installation.

Written with keen perception and humor, Lewis Kachur's latest book is likely to become a classic both in the fields of surrealism and of installations. It is scholarly and highly readable.

What's missing in this marvelous book is a discussion of Kant's Lutheran religious aspect. Most philosophers treat him as a secular philosopher, but he wasn't. The assault on Christianity by the entire left has seemingly eclipsed the fact that all of the great 19th century thinkers were Lutherans: Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, of course, but also Nietzsche (who was raised as a Lutheran and whose seventeen prior generations of father, grandfather, etc., had been Lutheran pastors), Marx raised in a Lutheran household, and so on.

What Duchamp does is knock out the otherworldly purposiveness that Kant claimed for art. Thierry de Duve aborts the seriousness of his discussion by neglecting the theological dimension of Kant's inquiry.

However, this is still a great book albeit a limited one, as he could have gone further to the heart of the culture wars by contrasting the Sadean nature of the surrealist enterprise with the Christian nature of the Kantian.

A difficult question posed and a difficult answer given. In struggling with two of the most influential personnas in our culture, De Duve does himself, and aesthetics good. Long and convoluted (to the extreme of working out a symbolic logic of Duchamp?) this is nonetheless a great book

The more you read, the more you can enter into Duchamp's world! This one must definitly be one in your Duchamp's collection. Make yourself "READY MADE"

Marcel Duchamp, the Puck of modern art, left copious notes on the 'Large Glass', which he left 'definively unfinished' in 1923 after seven years' work. The complexity and mischief in this piece, and in Duchamp's wider approach to art, has traditionally been subjected to analysis that places teleological art history ahead of the confusion of cultural history. Linda Henderson's approach places Duchamp in the context of the scientific understanding of the time, and her comprehensive research has cut through to the core questions with which Duchamp engaged.

Looking at the 1920s from our time, we are afflicted by a cultural blindness to ideas that have fallen from favour. Henderson looks beyond the prejudices of orthodoxy, and considers Duchamp's own writings and the popular understanding of science and technology that held sway eighty years ago. This clarifies aspects of the 'Large Glass' on which other writers have been silent; the significance of early wireless technology, the lingering concept of the 'ether', and early cathode-tube researches.

Despite the density and unfamiliarity of the ideas presented, and the inherent difficulty of explaining Duchamp's conceptual barrage, Henderson lively and clear approach is an exemplary and honest engagement with the conditions of art production. In no sense does she engineer the evidence so that a streamlined art-historical position can purr smoothly; she presents the material that informed Duchamp's ideas, shows how he processed this material, and argues persuasively for a Duchamp who responded to his setting rather than a deified modernist who worked in the vacuum of his own genius. Good art history enhances our understanding of art, history, and society. Henderson's honesty, and her sense of scholarly security, make for an invaluable contribution to the literature on a crucial and cunning giant of modern art.

This book is highly recommended. The information available within the covers is something that I could not find in my art history book. The reader will gain insight into Duchamp's views and his thoughts leading up to his decisions to take the road, artistically, that he did. Wonderfully written, glorious color photos and beautiful insights, I would recommend this book to anyone looking to add to a library.

15/02/97

DUCHAMP'S NEW LEAP by jj. gurrolaiturriaga

Now that in the visual arts scene it is the artist who has become the human "ready-made", it would be nobler to the mind to give credit to the creative forces hidden in a visible object or an alternative art installation which refuses to comply with the creative needs of its arty producer.

In this direction I would concentrate in M. Duchamp's ¨Étant Donnés... 1º La chute d'eau / 2º Le gaz d'eclairage. In English: "Given: 1st. the waterfall, 2nd. the illuminating gas"- the work he manufactured in concealment between 1946 and 1966 in his 14th Street studio in New York - for it allows me to offer a hypothetical interpretation of the almost subliminal plateau of M. Duchamp's thought. Also, his profound consideration could come as a heavenly out-haul that could clean some of the adulterated waters of the current cartel of art manipulation.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art, which accommodates most of M. Duchamp's work, printed an excellent facsimile of a manual of instructions (I had the luck to purchase ten years ago at the MOMA), which is a sort of non-retinal about 20 pages leaflet with photos and notations in M. Duchamp's handwriting, extremely dissociative, both in the visible as in the literary sense, although precise in the instructive steps to be taken to assemble this construction. It fits in a 5 x 4 m. room enclosure. The sub-title of the piece by Duchamp is an "approximation that can be taken apart, or disassembled ('approximation' intends to convey a margin of ad libitum in the assembly and disassembly of the construction).

In the introductory text of this reproduction of the looseleaf binder dated 1966 by M. Duchamp -with an almost merciless quantity of rulings, explanatory notes and photographs to follow the "ORDRE DES 15 opérations de montage général" as how, where and at what precise distance every element should be pieced together - points out in a paragraph that "those who scrutinize this volume will find that the position of the cotton clouds in the sky is ad lib and that the degree of brilliance of the waterfall can be adjusted by slight shifts in the position of the wooden bar that supports a biscuit box containing a round fluorescent light."

"Such niceties", continues the text, "lend characteristic charm and an air of enigma to his matter-of-fact guide, which makes no attempt to explain or elaborate upon the meaning of êtant DonnÇs... but simply leads step by step through the process of putting the assemblage together."

There have been many approaches to the work. Most of them valid, like the preceding one; others question the prompting of M. Duchamp's own will, its erotic connections with Courbet, Rodin, Man Ray, the voyeurism in the spectator's peekaboo situation; some try to "reconcile his extreme rationalism with the cruel fantasy of the piece."

It is my belief that it is precisely inside these "niceties" and the subtlety of the sub-title, "an approximation... etc.), where one can decode and understand the underlying continent that this work signifies in the world of modern art: to isolate the infra second of an individual's creative consideration when it leaps into an aesthetic judgement.

"Fond blue sur lequel sont accrochés le nuages en cotton (changeables a volonté) wrote M. Duchamp on a simple cardboard . Just as huge accelerators and scientific machines are put to use to isolate a photon or any other subatomic particle, M. Duchamp in a twenty-year long creative maneuver, manufactures the unbelievable feat, Hamlet's mouse-trap, wherein, by a slip of the mind, he catches the transfixed conscience of the artisan as he transposes his simple soul to one of an artist, if only for a short time period, without regrets, a king of the illusory world for a day.

Of course, this is not the only feature that this primal Étant Donnés... offers the spectator - primal for we made an exact replica in Mexico in 1995. The visitor is presented with a real wooden door (brought from Cadaqués, Spain), and through a tiny hole in it, the eye can see an aperture of a brick wall and the figure of a woman, nude, with her legs spread apart, surrounded by a pile of twigs and a lamp with a green light in her hand. A waterfall fills the background under a cloudy sky. We do not see her face.

There are also important implications in the position of the figure for it appears to me as performing a "lingua-service" in the height of seductive persuasion to accumulate battery power for "le bec Auer" (the gas lamp that she is holding in her left arm). But all this I will skip to concentrate on the central theme of this article.

The quest of M. Duchamp to achieve the utmost transparency and impeccability of his actions in the realm of art went as far as to create a contraption made of bricks, wood pieces, checkered linoleum, heap of twigs and a figure of an outstretched woman with a gas light in her hand in front of a flowing waterfall, etc., to isolate the infra-finesse of the instant of creative impulse, the second where the artisan has to decide the placing of the cotton clouds, the moment of multiple decisions in the illusory world of fantasy, the personal choice, the place where the ego tumbles into the desire to express oneself in art.

It is my firm belief that one of the reasons that made this dignified and incredible artist construct this piece - representing a known pattern or model of associative thought (almost as interactive art) - was to isolate the mini-second of artistic hesitancy, the overwhelming moment when art takes hold of the subconscious and suspends reality in its normal flow for a variable in the magical world. The instant the assembler-constructor of êtant DonnÇs becomes the creator, for it is he and only he who will decide how high or how low those clouds (bulky cotton) should be attached to the "fond bleu", which is a simple sheet of carton coated with blue paint.

This artisan will be world famous for a short period of time, maybe less than the fifteen minutes of Warhol's parody - and for the most simple and unbecoming reasons. This is why only after his death this work, constructed in secrecy in his 14th street apartment, was revealed to the world through the Cassandra Foundation and later presented to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

One may say with Gloria Mouré's text in the introduction to the Spanish edition of Notas / Marcel Duchamp (compiled as established by Paul Matisse in its first edition, 1980, Centre George Pompidou), about the boåtes (boxes) that follow The Grand Verre (la Boîte Vert, la Blanche and the 1914th one, and the instruction manual of "Given...") that they are "..a plastic place for this "abstract co-intelligence", that must be an open interval (without finite limits) of the impossible boundary, but a separation that reunites exactly where the collusions and non-collusions occur - a pluri-dimentional modules of non-existent structure, without space, time or measurable movements, but present - refectory to whatever analysis and accessible in its unity only through intuition"

One can even conclude that the roots of Étant Donnés' paradigm could be traced as far backas the complementary book that followed The Large Glass: the Green Box. Also a self-purpose consensus with what happens in the mind connecting the elements that hold this intimate package. A package with no direct meaning, but that to serve as a link of the observer's inner thoughts. One can read in one section: "we will determine the conditions of instantaneous motionlessness of diverse acts that seem to need themselves one of the other through laws to isolate the sign of concordance between, on one part, that motionlessness (capable of innumerable eccentricities) and on the other an election of possibilities legitimized by those laws and also making them happen." Isn't this also the strategy of Étant Donnés...?

THE INFRA - FINE

Infra mince or infra-fine, was a recurring concept that Marcel Duchamp held in front of his eyes every time the most simple and unobtrusive set of things presented themselves in front of him from the beginning of this century. Much of it in the company of Francis Picabia, who has a lot to do with all Duchamp's zeal. I have the hunch that the trip Jura-Paris with Appolinaire and Picabia holds many secrets.

The book Notes / Marcel Duchamp compiled by Paul Matisse dedicates the first chapter to the infra mince notes written by the artist. M. Duchamp jotted down thoughts that appeared to him as the epitome of levity, of the almost unsubstantial, of the lightest consideration... like the sound of corduroy pants while walking, or painting with mother-of-pearl on glass, the heat of the seat of a chair from where someone has just gotten up, the infinitesimal line that separates an object from its name, a slight difference in two identical or the symmetrical elements, etc. All in the mind.

"The slightest result is enormous in its humblest infinitude, tr

The fantastic New Yorker art critic turns his eye towards one of his favorite artists. This book balances both a traditional historical biography of Duchamp along with a critique and examination of his art. A good read of an artist with an interesting (and pleasantly surprisingly un-tortured) life.

I wholeheartedly recommend this wonderful book to everyone who knows how to read English. Marcel Duchamp was perhaps the premier iconclast of the twentieth century, and the runners up might be Buckminster Fuller & Le Corbusier. The book is NOT a boring monograph; it is a lot of fun to read. Tompkins is a Duchamp enthusiast but manages to wade through the mythology and bull to present the reader with the rosetta stone of Duchamp's life and art. Whether you took a twentieth century art survey in college and only know Duchamp as the guy who wrote R. Mutt on an upside-down urinal or you have read any number of books about the artist you should read this book! Tompkins sucks the reader right into the mind of Duchamp on the first page with a discussion and analysis of The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even, one the the greatest and most misunderstood and unappreciated works of the last century. I was an Art History major in college and hence suffered through so many authoritative, pretentious, dry, bland, misinformed, prejudiced and yawn-inducing books that it was such a pleasure to stumble onto Tompkin's Duchamp, which is a reader's book, totally apt since Duchamp was a man's man, a genius, not a theorizing weasal. This book is important because it inspires everyone to question everything you take for granted, and enjoy puns and jokes and the lighter side of life, and that art is there for everyone, not for patrons and the elite, for you and me, and that the contrary notion is absurd.

DUCHAMP: A BIOGRAPHY is a wonderful biography of the artist whom, Tompkins argues persuasively, is the most influential of our almost-completed century. That the art work must be a mental act (a 'cosa mentale,' Leonardo da Vinci had argued many years before); that to be truly creative we need to work AGAINST our esthetic expectations; that art should aspire to be 'non-retinal': these are only some of Duchamp's major perceptions included in this book. What is particularly enjoyable is the way in which Tompkins meshes DuChamps' remarkable life -- one of the most sexually attractive of men, a chess player at the highest levels, an extraordinarily charming and easy person (yet a man who, not matter how much he tried to avoid the repetitive patterns involved in 'art,' was always the consummate artist)with the works of art and 'readymades' which emerged in and from that life. Duchamp's life makes for wonderful reading. What I most recommend about the book is that it stimulates one's own thinking, challenging so much of our conventional beliefs -- in art, in convention, in the concepts of both accomplishment and genius.

Most people can name at least a couple famous artists and cite some examples of their best-known works. But have you ever wondered what's really behind all that painting, sculpting, and drawing? Kathleen Krull's book Lives of the Artists: Masterpieces, Messes (and What the Neighbors Thought) gives an in-depth view into the humor, tragedy, and mystery in twenty artists' lives, as well as the gossip inspired by their peculiar lifestyles. Carefully researched, this humorous biography travels throughout the centuries, offering basic facts along with interesting tidbits and anecdotes about artists from Leonardo Da Vinci to Georgia O'Keeffe and beyond. It also includes interesting backround information behind each one's artistic works as well as creative and eye-catching illustrations by Kathryn Hewitt. This entertaining book allows readers to get to know the world's greatest artists and their artworks through each one's unique and engaging story.
The book is well organized into chapters each focusing on the life of one individual artist. The author skillfully and humorously connects information about artists' personalities, preferences, and lifestyles with how they affected their most well known artworks. It recreates each one's position in history, telling how the artists were seen by the general population in their day, or even their reputation among curious or superstitious neighbors. Readers will be able to see for themselves that famous artists were real people who did mess up once in a while. The author explains a time when Leonardo Da Vinci decided to try out a new painting method, saying, "The technique resulted in disaster...(he hadn't read all the way through to the part that said "don't try this on walls")."
The author's voice helps compliment the content in several ways. Kathleen Krull's words strike a tone that is warm, chatty, and friendly, making you feel as if she were talking with you in the same room. Her gossip extends not only to the basic facts but also to many specific details abou the artists' lives. Showing the passion and tragedy in his life, she remarks about the artist Vincent van Gogh,"Van Gogh imposed a condition of near starvation on himself and would go for days without food so he could afford to buy art supplies." In addition, every sarcastic or humorous comment made on the part on the author helps readers to feel they are getting to know an actual person rather than a cold, vague historical figure.
The author also ensured that the book would appeal to an audience of both children and adults. The words and explanations are engaging and humorous and immediately capture your interest, yet the vocabularly is not too difficult for children. The full-page color illustrations are vivid, clever, and bring to life each artist for the young and old alike. Because the book gives more information about each artist than is generally known, it is sure to benefit and interest a wide range of audiences.
Readers of all ages will definitely become hooked on this fact-filled and entertaining biography. Lives of the Artists: Masterpieces, Messes (and What the Neighbors Thought) retells the one of a kind stories of each of the world's most famous artists, blending historical facts with humor and captivating details. Most importantly it allows readers to recognize each individual artist through an attractive mix of their achievements, lives, and unique personalities.

Reading a chapter from this book has become a bedtime ritual for my daughter and me. My daughter happens to be very interested in art and this book gives her an idea of what it's like to actually be an artist. Both the illustrations and text bring these artists to life more than any other childrens or adult book I have ever seen. This is one of the few books that we both enjoy reading over and over again. I wish the authors would do another volume of artists. Meanwhile I'm ordering another book by this author/illustrator combination.

This book would make an outstanding addition to the reading list of any art lover. If you love finding out the gossipy trivia about some well-known and should-be-well-known artists, that this is the book you MUST buy. Really gorgeous illustrations by a fantastically talented artist herself, Kathryn Hewitt