Unpacking Duchamp

Perhaps no twentieth-century artist utilized puns and linguistic ambiguity with greater effect - and greater controversy - than Marcel Duchamp. Through a careful "unpacking" of his major works, Dalia Judovitz finds that Duchamp may well have the last laugh. She examines how he interpreted notions of mechanical reproduction in order to redefine the meaning and value of the art object, the artist, and artistic production. Judovitz begins with Duchamp's supposed abandonment of painting and his subsequent return to works that mimic art without being readily classifiable as such. Her book questions his paradoxical renouncing of pictorial and artistic conventions while continuing to evoke and speculatively draw upon them. She offers insightful analyses of his major works, including The Large Glass, Fountain, and Given: 1) the waterfall, 2) the illuminating gas.

First sentence: Among Marcel Duchamp's gestures and artistic interventions, few have created as much controversy or been as puzzling as his putative abandonment of painting.

Year

1995

Language

English

Publisher

University of California Press

Editions

3

Pages

310

ISBN

9780520213760

Data source: Wikidata