Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst: The Bride Shared. - Review - book review

Art in America, Jan, 2000 by Sheldon Nodelman

Another Duchampian device was the planting of "time bombs" for posthumous detonation after delays of various lengths. To the already-mentioned case of Etant donnes should be added the Manual of Instructions(9) associated with it, mandated for public release 15 years after the revelation of the installation itself, as well as the carefully preserved ensemble of notes--invaluable supplements to those previously made known in the three boxes of 1914, 1934 and 1967--which Duchamp left behind at his death, and which were published in 1980 by his stepson, Paul Matisse.(10)

The limits and consistency of the field had further to be subverted by methods calling authorial agency and identity into question. Much of Duchamp's activity between the wars and up to the 19508 was collaborative in nature: publication projects, exhibition installations, catalogue designs and the like. Duchamp usually contrived to remain discreetly in the background of these ventures, understating the degree of his involvement and often acting through surrogates, so that the full extent of his role in many of them remains uncertain. Yet his inspiration was often decisive; this was surely the case for the two great International Surrealist Exhibitions of 1938 and 1947 (though neither has yet received the full-dress study it deserves) and a series of shopwindow installations mounted during the war years in New York. Many other such collaborations remain to be examined before the nature and importance of Duchamp's interventions can be appraised. Once isolated, his gestures invariably assume functional significance within the overall context of the oeuvre. A virtuoso in the exercise of the authorial function-- in its generative and authenticating aspects alike--Duchamp could employ it with equal effect through apparent abstinence, as in the situations just cited, or through seemingly promiscuous bestowal, as in his reported willingness to sign "anything" presented to him or which took his fancy. By the latter means, he conscripted many additional objects as readymades--including, on one occasion, a preexistent painting done by someone else and, on another, a pair of blue jeans owned by Niki de St. Phalle. We may be confident that such "random" items were in fact chosen or accepted with meticulous discrimination.

The oeuvre created through devices such as these is a phenomenon unique in the history of art, a meaning-generating machine of baffling complexity, proliferating components and indeterminate boundaries. In the current crop of Duchamp studies, it is approached in a variety of ways. Newly discovered or previously unrecognized materials are introduced into the corpus. Backgrounds, contexts and sources of varying importance are plumbed. The vast network of Duchamp's relationships with his contemporaries is explored and the pattern of his continuing effect upon younger artists traced. The structure of his project, its internal dynamics and its motives are analyzed, often from standpoints afforded by recent critical theory.