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

Art in America, Jan, 2000 by Sheldon Nodelman

In the long run, these various approaches depend on a comprehensive analysis of the oeuvre as a system of signification--a system which is itself the oeuvre's most distinctive characteristic. Dalia Judovitz's Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit and David Joselit's Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910-1941 differ from other works considered here in that they are specifically critical investigations, aiming to assess Duchamp's artistic accomplishment as a substantive whole (despite Joselit's rather arbitrary-seeming cutoff date of 1941) and seeking to define its fundamental rhetorical structures, as well as the beliefs and expectations against which--and upon which--those structures arose.

As its title implies, Judovitz identifies the transactional dimension of the oeuvre as its key identifying feature. Ranging the full length and breadth of Duchamp's oeuvre, she delineates an economy of symbolic exchange whose energy derives from blockage and release across such established categorial distinctions as visual/conceptual, representation/trace, original/replication and artist/work (all seen as masks for the underlying distinction of self/other). Ultimately, she finds the crux of the system in the slash mark itself rather than in the terms to one side of it or the other. Judovitz never loses sight of the underlying constancy of strategic purpose which defines the subject matter, in the largest sense, of Duchamp's art--an art made out of the paradoxes inherent in the making of art. (His chosen terrain is the contradictions, collusions and acts of bad faith by which the identities of artist, art work and art viewer am constituted.) At the same time, Judovitz deftly evokes the particular character of individual works and thematically related groups, even in pursuing these larger themes. Her book is perhaps the most comprehensive and balanced description so far, in contemporary critical terms, of the Duchampian project.

Joselit's volume, more narrowly focused and more concentrated in approach, identifies the "infinite regress" within the work as a propulsive series of inversions of the subject-object relation at progressively deeper levels, so that, in his own words, each "image, object, or self becomes simultaneously a thing to be measured and a standard of measurement." To describe the tensions between bodily incarnation and positionally determined sign-value in Duchamp's Cubist phase of 1911-12, and between visually and verbally mediated conceptualization in the new cycle beginning in 1913--that of the readymades and the Large Glass--the author draws on sources such as Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari, and commodity theory. Rather than serving as window dressing, as is too often the case in current criticism, these interpretive tools are here fluently deployed and functionally appropriate (indeed they develop themes already articulated by Duchamp himself). Between them, then, Judovitz and Joselit provide the best currently available accounts of the internal signifying machinery of the Duchampian project, and their contributions mark real progress in this regard.