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

Art in America, Jan, 2000 by Sheldon Nodelman

Duchamp conceived of art as process rather than object, and hence as existing continuously beyond itself in perpetual relation and change. Reception and reaction am thus integral to it. These am such major themes of Moira Roth's Difference/Indifference: Musings on Postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage. The core of the book is provided by her two very influential and much-cited essays of the '70s, "Marcel Duchamp in America: A Self Ready-Made" and "The Aesthetic of Indifference," amplified by a series of interviews Roth conducted--she is a virtuoso of the interview form--with such figures as John Cage, Robert Smithson, Vito Acconci and George Segal. These talks both nuance our picture of Duchamp himself and trace the ripple effect of his work and persona upon American art in the third quarter of the 20th century. They am followed by a more personal section in which Roth in effect interviews herself, reflecting--from the distance of the present--upon her own bittersweet tale of engagement/disengagement with the Duchamp phenomenon.

Marcel Duchamp by Dawn Ades, Neil Cox and David Hopkins, a volume in Thames and Hudson's popular World of Art series, does not identify the contributions of its various authors. Unfortunately, the publisher's blurb on the back cover makes rather excessive claims for the text as "one of the most original and important" books on the artist--a work which "challenges received ideas, misunderstanding and misinformation." In fact, the study provides a compact, up-to-date and well-balanced overview with many valuable observations of detail, including thought-provoking new material on the Symbolist background of the work (contributed by Hopkins?). It is at present the best and fullest short introduction to Duchamp's art.

Not the least paradoxical aspect of Duchamp's art is its strange, even appalling, combination of extraordinary intimacy--the sense of having been fabricated out of the very essence of its author's inward and outward being--with an icy distance and objectivity. Normal curiosity about extraordinary lives--the desire to peer behind the curtain to see the wizard who has been engineering the display--is compounded in this case by the sense that the work conceals/reveals a daunting mystery which the life can perhaps explain, and which has led more than one commentator to perilous hypotheses. With Calvin Tomkins's highly regarded Duchamp: A Biography we have the second full-length biographical study, following on that of Alice Goldfarb Marquis from 1981.(16) Tomkins's writings of the '60s helped feed the fast-growing revival of Duchamp's fame and influence, sparked by the artist's "rediscovery" some years before by a new generation of young avant-garde artists.(17) He has written a lively and well-presented biography and has discovered considerable new detail (adding to that compiled in Jennifer Gough-Cooper and Jacques Caumont's daunting but sometimes invaluable "Ephemerides"(18)), most notably concerning his subject's very active love life. Little new is unearthed which bears directly on Duchamp's works or causes us to see them in a different light. (The main exception concerns Etant donnes and the role played in it by Maria Martins, sculptor and wife of the Brazilian ambassador to the United States, with whom Duchamp had an extended liaison during the '40s and who served as the model for the female figure upon which the installation centers.) Nor do we learn any great secret or uncover any psychic mechanism to motivate or otherwise elucidate Duchamp's achievement. In the end (as Tomkins himself acknowledges), peering behind the curtain does little to solve the mystery of the dazzling illusion presented on the stage. Duchamp, who made the transgression of the boundaries between art and life into the very substance of his art, has nevertheless contrived to maintain an impenetrable and enigmatic separation between them.