ASRL / PERPETUAL 2010
 
Duchamp Still has the Power to Shock
By Scott Martin
posted: 03-12-10
Dee Schaad,
Marcel Duchamp & Bragna Pearlmutter [sic] as Adam & Eve
(after Man Ray)
Image Source
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 tempting proposition for would-be heretics -- but that he wasn't pretty enough. The offended reader argues that Adam must have a "perfect physique" to reflect the image of God; the sculpture's defender counters that in fact Adam is "whimsical and well-modeled."

Nine decades and more on, the retinal clearly retains its primacy in the world of art.

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Design: From Found to Foundry

posted: 03-11-10
Ron Arad, Rover Chair (1981)
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A 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

posted: 03-10-10
Duchamp's covers to S.M.S. #2 (1968)
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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 entire set of SMS is now on display at the California State University-Long Beach Art Museum.

(Through April 18. The CSULB Art Museum has details.)

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The 'Nude' in a Cubist Context

posted: 03-09-10
Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2)
Image Source
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, Duchamp did paint several explicitly "cubist" canvasses -- notably the Portrait of Chess Players and Transition of a Virgin into a Bride -- and it's a shame they're not here in addition or instead.

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Richard Hamilton's 'Modern Moral Matters'

posted: 03-08-10
Unorthodox Rendition, Richard Hamilton (2009)
Image Source
"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 Januszczak

A rare Hamilton show at London's Serpentine Gallery brings together new work with some of his iconic reflections on pop and history. (Through April 25)

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