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

Art in America, Jan, 2000 by Sheldon Nodelman

If the art work as Duchamp envisioned it is a perpetually unfinished construct, made and remade in its continuing encounter with the spectator, that spectator's admission within the field of the work comes at a price--surrender of the safe and disinterested "objectivity" that his/her presumed situation outside the frame had seemed to confer. Inherent and universal as he believed this process to be, Duchamp nevertheless took care to build purposefully frame-transgressive mechanisms into his oeuvre. The Boite-en-valise, which seems to prescribe in advance an entire summation and critical perspective upon the work, was a device that exploded conventional boundaries and pre-empted the viewpoint of the spectator. The successive volumes of notes were another--indeed all the materials ("documentary" and other) normally regarded as external to, and helping to situate, the oeuvre disconcertingly unmask themselves as parts of it. This extends to the works written by seemingly independent third parties. During his lifetime, Duchamp profoundly influenced from behind the scene what was written about him, to the extent of being--through active collaboration, control of the sources of information and the shrewd planting of ideas--a virtual coauthor. He was himself responsible for the highly inflected selection and layout of visual documentation in the Lebel monograph, and he--or his female alter ego, Rrose Selavy--signed the frontispiece of Schwarz's Complete Works. Through the ingeniously open, endlessly permuting structure of the oeuvre, this process of co-optation continues. Those who write about Duchamp, like those who put on the series of vests and jackets which he designed during the '60s, risk transformation into living readymades. In fact, this risk is a certainty, but the attraction of sitting down at the chessboard to participate in the master's game is irresistible.

(1.) Once More to This Star: The Genesis of Duchamp's Conception of Art, in preparation.

(2.) The much-enlarged third edition of Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, New York, Delano Greenidge Editions, 1997, was reviewed in Art in America, January 1998. Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1998, is reviewed separately in this issue. Mention should also be made of such earlier works, outside the time frame of this review, as Jerrold Siegel, The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995; Jeffrey Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art: Picasso, Duchamp and Avant-Gardism, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1994; and Amelia Jones, Post-modernism and the En-gendering of Marcel Duchamp, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994. Several of the articles in Naomi Sawelson-Gorse, ed., Women in Dada: Essays on Sex, Gender, and Identity, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1999, dealing with various of Duchamp's female associates also contain useful biographical information on the artist.