Duchamp

To the reader: Please note, I removed this paper because I cover the same material greatly expanded in my book, published February 25, 2020, titled Duchamp's Pipe: A Chess Romance between Marcel Duchamp and George Koltanowski.
Published by North Atlantic Press, Berkeley, California and Penguin Random House NY, February 25, 2020.
The book may be purchased here:
https://www.amazon.com/Duchamps-Pipe-Romance-Between-Koltanowski-ebook/dp/B07JYTP2NJ/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Duchamp%27s+Pipe&qid=1588472856&s=books&sr=1-1

or here:
https://www.northatlanticbooks.com/shop/duchamps-pipe/
or here:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/605086/duchamps-pipe-by-celia-rabinovitch/9781623173562

Thanks for your patience, please email me with any questions you have about the book's content.

About Duchamp’s Pipe

Art, chess, and an $87,000 pipe frame an inside look at the relationship between Dadaist artist Marcel Duchamp and chess Grandmaster George Koltanowski

Spanning three decades, two continents, two world wars, and the international art and chess scenes of the mid twentieth century, Duchamp’s Pipe explores the remarkable friendship between art world enfant terrible Marcel Duchamp and blindfold chess champion George Koltanowski. Artist and cultural historian Celia Rabinovitch describes each man’s rise to prominence, the chess matches that sparked their relationship, and the recently discovered pipe that Duchamp gave to Koltanowski. This tale of genius and resilience offers fresh insights into the essence of the gift in the bohemian underground. Rabinovitch invites us to discover the chess wizard and a Duchamp slightly off pedestal–and ultimately more human.

Note to readers that this article was employed by Christie's New York as the primary research for the Marcel Duchamp Pipe in its online auction catalog:
My article is cited on the Christie’s online website under the lot notes for the Marcel Duchamp Pipe, and may have been used by other writers without permission or citation.
//www.christies.com/lotfinder/Sculptures-Statues-Figures/marcel-duchamp-pipe-5993805-details.aspx?lid=1
“As Celia Rabinovitch has related in her exhaustive study on the present pipe, Duchamp and Koltanowski first met in 1923 at the Belgian Chess tournament and later again in Duchamp’s famous defeat of the chess master at the Chess Olympiad in Paris in 1929. They would come together in New York in 1942 (both had left Europe due to the outbreak of the Second World War) and founded the Greenwich Village Chess Club (see C. Rabinovitch, Duchamp a Smoking Pipe, From Marcel Duchamp to George Koltanowski, March 2015).”

This article deals with the fundamental question of movement in the work of Marcel Duchamp. It attempts to show that far from being a passing phase, it was present throughout his career, adopting different perspectives and explanations. Taking into account the actual words, notes and comments of the artist, it sets to establish a continuum, a link from one work to another. This helps to affirm that however revolutionary Duchamp might have been, his research about movement, optics and cinema lies solidly on painting.
Keywords: retinal art, precision painting, crono¬photography, optics, ready made, fourth dimension, image, movement.

Este artículo aborda el tema del movi¬miento, crucial en la obra de Marcel Duchamp. Inten¬ta mostrar que lejos de ser una fase temporal, estuvo presente a lo largo de su carrera, ya que empleó dife¬rentes perspectivas y explicaciones para investigarlo. Tomando en cuenta las declaraciones, notas, apun¬tes y comentarios propios del artista, se busca en este texto establecer un hilo conductor, una suerte de enlace entre una obra y otra, lo cual ayuda a afir¬mar que por muy revolucionario que Duchamp haya sido, su investigación sobre el movimiento, la óptica y el cine se asienta de manera sólida en la pintura.
Palabras clave: arte retiniano, cronofotografía, pin¬tura de precisión, óptica, ready made, cuarta dimen¬sión, imagen y movimiento.

What follows here is not a definition of art by decree. Nor is this some kind of art manifesto. We are not saying this is how art should be, or could be, but how it is, if you let go of the prison of aesthetics, and follow an infinitely more interesting conceptual trail. This is about uncovering and identifying an approach to art which avoids the triviality of sensory-based aesthetic theory and moves instead towards exploring the experiential worlds that art presents us with. And this approach is not about diminishing the sensory enjoyment of artworks, but about placing them in a much richer context, where they can work a far greater magic.

Parts of this have since appeared in publications elsewhere. Posting the file because it contains additional detail/ ideas/ correspondence on various topics. Discussion of Lennon, McCartney, Duchamp & Stockhausen is unique to this, though selections from sections on 'Norwegian Wood' appear in the articles 'Where You Once Belonged' & 'The Beatles' Uses of Literacy'. Discussion on Hoggart & Melly appear in my review of Hoggart (1957/2009). The rest is fresh.

Resumen
En el arte conceptual la idea o concepto prima sobre la realización material de la obra y el mismo proceso —notas, bocetos, maquetas, diálogos— al tener a menudo más importancia que el objeto terminado puede ser expuesto para mostrar el origen y desarrollo de la idea inicial. La verdadera obra de arte es la idea.
El arte conceptual es un arte crítico y corrosivo, pone énfasis en lo mental, en la ideación de las obras, relegando en importancia su realización material o sensible. Junto a este reduccionismo de lo manual, existe en las obras de arte conceptual una hipervaloración del trabajo de arte, como una actividad reflexiva, tanto mental como experiencial.
Los artistas conceptuales abogan por un decidido rechazo de los aspectos mercantiles del consumo de arte y, al mismo tiempo, muchos de ellos intentaban imbricar su actividad artística en un contexto más amplio de preocupaciones sociales, ecológicas e intelectuales, por oposición a la producción de objetos diseñados según criterios utilitaristas y funcionales al establishment cultural.
Dr. Adolfo Vásquez Rocca

Analyser la place de l’humour en art contemporain grâce aux interprétations des différentes tendances artistiques formelles, c’est mettre en exergue les postures critiques et les réflexions sur les identités individuelles et collectives. Tous les mouvements artistiques
contemporains ont inclus, d’une manière plus ou moins explicite, des approches utilisant l’esprit et l’humour qui de manière incongrue ou de façon inattendue abordent la question de la complexité de notre société. Cet article revisite les productions de Duchamp, Ferrer, Aláez, Aizpitarte, Nychos, Banksy, Kosolapov, Bermejo, Cattelan, Dicharry,
Serrano en faisant de l’humour une voie d’accès pour mieux appréhender l’art dans ses caractéristiques propres.

This article will examine the evolving function of critique in the work of artist, activist and dissident Ai Weiwei since the mid-1990s. It will do so by first considering Ai's manipulated and transformed furniture in relation to the inundation of Ming and Qing Dynasty antiques on the market during the 1980s and 1990s to demonstrate how his art uses ambiguity to critique western market expectations. Throughout his artistic career from 1996 to the present, Ai has repurposed antique furniture, doors and temple beams as sculptures and installations. If this under-researched yet important group of works by him is considered through a socioeconomic framework and a Duchampian sense of irony, as this article intends to do, these pieces will be able to be understood as sardonic assisted readymades, with a specific set of different meanings for people in China and the West. Differing from prevailing views of Ai's repurposed antiques that have regarded them as objects moving away from their Chinese sources, i.e. their 'Chinese-ness', this article will look at his sculptures and installations, which incorporate while dramatically altering these historical objects, as satirizing western consumption of Chinese culture and history. It will also situate the works as critical of a consequence of China's rapid transition to global stage: consumers' and government's tendency to erode cultural heritage, sites, and artefacts in exchange for economic growth and the new. Ultimately, this article will suggest that these works source their political thrust from a type of 'radical ambiguity' that Ai has now expunged from his practice in favour of more determinate means of critique.

The creation of the artificial creature is a well-established myth in the history of Western culture. Related to this myth, we can find its female version, the myth of the creation of the arti¬ficial woman (which includes statues, dolls, automatons, and robots). This myth can be widely traced along the European avant-gardes, as avant-garde authors are obsessively attracted to dolls, mannequins, or female robots. Thus, this work deals with the understanding and adap¬tation of the myth of the artificial woman in the artistic avant-gardes, where it will function as a metaphor for avant-garde author’s ideological and aesthetic interests, particularly those related to the relationship between the sexes and to the author’s identity construction.
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Uno de los mitos que más arraigo ha tenido a lo largo del desarrollo de la cultura occi¬dental es el mito de la criatura artificial creada por el hombre y, dentro de este, el de la creación de la criatura femenina (estatua, muñeca, autómata o robot). Las vanguardias europeas son un momento en el que este mito de la mujer artificial resurge con fuerza, siendo numerosos en este periodo los casos de artistas fascinados por muñecas, maniquíes o robots femeninos. Evo-lucionado el mito y adaptado a las necesidades de cada época, como veremos, la mujer artificial en las vanguardias será reflejo de las inquietudes ideológicas de sus creadores, en particular en lo tocante a las relaciones entre los sexos y a la reflexión sobre la identidad del sujeto creador.

In the metaphysical world of Marcel Duchamp, seeing the unseen took center stage. Many art objects from the Duchampian dream factory were subliminal sexual provocations. The theater of Duchamp was a virtual striptease. There would be no orgasm, no climax, and least of all, sentiment–only artifacts of desire. Wordplay was an aphrodisiac. Duchamp turned the museum into a house of the rising sun, a place where goods were not socially acceptable.

"The French contemporary artist Pierre Huyghe enjoys international acclaim, witness the many one-person and group exhibitions in which his work has been featured, and the prizes he has been awarded. His workplace in New York City, where this interview was conducted on January 20th, 2017, is an office where research and thinking take place and not a studio where things are made. The work Huyghe and/or others produce following his directives seems based upon raising questions, but what these are is unclear. Therefore, what the answers are is equally so".

https://www.theartsection.com/pierre-huyghe

Surveying the literature on Duchamp's notorious "Fountain" of 1917, the essay highlights the contrast between Duchamp's later insistence on the randomness and meaningless of his ready-mades and his earlier openness to allegorical interpretation.  Duchamp's early diaries suggest that he may have intended the viewer to find sexual associations in the sensual curves of the white porcelain.  Duchamp's decision to exhibit the urinal in a horizontal rather than vertical position is analyzed as a strategy for defamiliarization traceable to Impressionism.

Throughout the twentieth century, critical art history often chose to ally itself with a restrictive brand of formalism. As a result, representation-and ideology-critical analyses regularly reduced the artwork to the bare " bones " (Hegel) of the material signifier in its social use. By contrast, in the texts assembled here, elements of a critical materialism are combined with an effort to reevaluate the metaphysical implications of modern abstraction and art since the 1960s. Taking Gilles Deleuze's readings of Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson as his starting point, the author delineates a topic in which the artwork's capacity for resistance is grounded in its relationship to an imma-nent infinity: the Spinozian substance, Nietzsche's Becoming, Bergson's durée. Against the backdrop of a critical rereading of Heidegger, this infinite dimension is interpreted in temporal and ontological terms as the vertical past of production, which can only be grasped in broken and technically encrypted form in the present shape and materiality of the artwork. Hence the notion of an aesthetics of production does not imply a nostalgia for the artisanal or for the artwork's singularity. The concept of production developed in this book aims at a realm that lies beyond finite representation but is still understood in materialist terms, and that threatens the circulation of positive, conceptually standardized knowledge. In case studies on Piet Mondrian, Marcel Duchamp, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Michael Asher and in framing essays on Kant and Nietzsche as well as Heidegger and Spinoza, this book articulates a concept of the artwork in the " long " modern era which takes account of the twentieth century's critique of metaphysics but without surrendering the truth claim of art and philosophy in favor of a culturalist and sociological relativism.

In an era when identity politics is being co-opted into wider nationalist agendas and diversity increasingly embroiled in ethnic division and separatism, how have artists engaged with cultural translation to open up the act of interpretation?

Ao investigar o que aconteceu com as quatro condições para que qualquer coisa seja arte - autor, objeto, espectador e sistema - Manata traça um panorama de seus interesses e apresenta a condição contemporânea de ser artista, através de um "diálogo" com Duchamp, Lygia, Hélio, Cildo e G. Brecht.

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By investigating what happened to the four conditions for anything to be art - author, object, spectator and system - Manata traces an overview of his interests and presents the contemporary condition of being an artist, through a "dialogue" with Duchamp, Lygia , Hélio, Cildo and G. Brecht.

This paper examines three exhibitions at the Stedelijk
Museum in Amsterdam that are related through their ludic
art and exhibition tactics: Die Welt als Labyrinth (1960,
canceled before it opened), Bewogen Beweging (1961), and
Dylaby (1962). Despite never having been realized, Die Welt
als Labyrinth provided a basis for experimental exhibition
strategies that focused on artistic intervention in the
Stedelijk’s galleries; subsequent ludic exhibitions built upon
their predecessor’s innovations. By narrowing the focus on
one institution over a short period of time, we can survey the
development of playful exhibition strategies, as well as
reveal a glimpse of the social, historical, and political
conditions of Amsterdam in the early 1960s. In this article, I
will turn my attention to audiences’ responses to the
exhibitions, largely drawing upon contemporary reviews. My
aim is to understand how ludic exhibitions operated at the
Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, exploring the meaning and
resonance of this practice. The exhibitions demonstrate the
limitations of play: viewers and critics can misread them as
mere amusement lacking any value as social commentary. I
argue that the ludic exhibition is paradoxical in that it
presents critique indirectly, making it palatable, but its
implicit critique risks misinterpretation.

Portals: Windows, doors, black holes, white holes and worm holes serve as nodes for transport between different systems of  organization in the works and writings of Marcel Duchamp, and in Thomas Pynchon's novels _Gravity's Rainbow_ and _Vineland_.  These portals enable pivoting between different forms of cognition, in the realm of the social and political with respect to subject positions, and in the realm of the individual with respect to subject formation.  Drawing on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and on the cognitive science of Francisco Varela and Edwin Hutchins, a connection is made between an avant-garde modernist, and a post-modern novelist, in their attention to a war between top-down and bottom-up processes in society and self.  This investigation becomes a way to rethink the terms modernism and postmodernism.

Note: the published version of this article in _Pynchon Notes_ from 1994 with graphics is also available on my academia page.

At a time when the gay community -to which Gober belongs- was losing more and more people to AIDS, Johns, Cage and Warhol almost certainly registered in special ways with Gober as both outstanding and prominent gay American artists who, like him, had come to New York City, where one could -more or less- be oneself, and test out one’s ideas before an audience open to experimentation -more so perhaps than almost anywhere else in these united states...

Infra-mince je neologizmus Marcela Duchampa, enigmatická kategória, ktorá sa zdá byť organizačným princípom ako aj cieľom jeho tvorby. Napriek tomu, že termín navonok pôsobí ako drobný detail v celku väčšej myšlienkovej kompozície, kumuluje v sebe energiu autorského konceptu. Definujúcou súčasťou tohto konceptu je, že sa vyhýba svojmu uchopeniu a ako fenomén uniká vizuálnemu znázorneniu.
Slovo infra-mince je z francúzštiny. Jeho prvá časť vyjadruje najnižšie miesto na vertikálnej osi. Slovo mince znamená "tenký", čiže spojenie dvoch slov má vyjadrovať minimálnu, priam limitne nízku hrúbku.
Nasledovná štúdia nadväzuje na doktorandský výskum, ktorý sa venoval interpretácii Duchampových textových záznamov. Na základe Duchampových poznámok sme sa vtedy pokúsili zostaviť slovník pojmov určujúci pre autorovo uvažovanie o výstavbe obraznosti. Zistili sme, že Duchamp, vo svojom racionálnom prístupe k poznaniu skutočnosti, bol naraz maliarom aj vedcom, teda umelcom, ktorý výstavbu obraznosti odôvodňoval zákonmi fyziky (čiastočne matematicko-geometricky, čiastočne filozoficky). Duchamp si prisvojil nový matematický výklad priestoru (neeuklidovských geometrií), svet poňal ako viacrozmerný a cieľom jeho tvorby sa stala štvrtá dimenzia. Práve v tomto momente, keď sa výklad aktuálneho sveta stal zároveň výkladom pre svet umenia, sa zdá, že obe oblasti sa prelínajú a jedna v druhej splýva. Kategória infra-mince sa nám ukazuje byť zásadná pre pochopenie Duchampovho diela, pretože vzájomne prepája jeho zložité myšlienky o umení a stáva sa metodologickým nástrojom jeho tvorby.

El presente artículo pretende estudiar y discernir sobre la función comunicativa de los ready-made. Existen varias posturas que explican el fenómeno contemporáneo artístico a partir de una presunta función comunicativa, pretensión que se inserta en la semiótica estructuralista de gran parte del siglo XX. Un ejemplo representativo de tal tradición lo encontramos en el semiólogo Omar Calabrese para quien la función comunicativa "…no tratará de explicar «lo que quería decir el artista», sino, más bien, «cómo la obra dice aquello que dice»." 1 ; es decir que las intenciones del artista no son importantes sino que lo realmente significativo es el mensaje (la obra). Lo anterior nos demuestra que la interpretación del artista sobre su obra no es ni la única ni la más acertada sino que solo se trata de una definición más, como afirma Luciano Nanni "… ningún ensayo crítico es capaz de agotar la realidad de la obra." 2 Por otra parte, dentro de la tradición semiótica también podemos encontrar quienes no creen que la obra de arte contemporánea "comunique". Luciano Nanni afirma que la comunicación en sí (communicare, "poner en común") resulta casi imposible ya que el mensaje codificado y transmitido por el emisor es recibido por el receptor quien lo recodifica según sus propias experiencias, las cuales no son necesariamente las mismas que las del transmisor, antes de la ocurrencia de la obra. "Rigurosamente hablando, un discurso funciona, "comunica", si evoca algo que ya es común…" 3 Entonces podríamos hablar más que de comunicación de auto-evocación en la relación entre la obra y su intérprete. 1 Omar Calabrese, Lenguaje del arte. (España: Paidós Ibérica, 1991), 15. 2 Luciano Nanni, Della Poetica. Come nasce e vive un'opera d'arte. (Italia: Book Editore, 1999) 3 Luciano Nanni, De lo que sería deseable convertir antes y durante todo discurso sobre arte + un regaño, decidido, a un joven estudioso de estos temas, acceso el 1 de mayo de 2015,

The many permutations of modern art can be viewed as strategies to cope with the threat of obsolescence. The threat from the industrialisation of method and materials challenged painting’s claim to social utility as constructor of resemblances. Consequently, painting changed its "regulations", and was followed by a challenge to the definition of “art”. The readymade was one such strategy. It copes with these threats by completely upturning any ordinarily intuitive idea of aesthetic judgement. This is the challenge to the “retinal” or “physical” aspects of art. Whilst this has great intellectual significance, Duchamp, as its flagbearer, still owes much to the “retinal” in his conceptual steps. This amounts to a crossover with Kantian aesthetics. A history of the readymade will be given, with mention to Dada's two primary schools. It will be argued that a Kantian or "objective" aesthetics is able to accommodate the readymade without the need for Thierry de Duve's "Duchampian substitution". It is suggested that the substantive leap from readymade to “art” is unnecessary and this does not harm the importance of Duchamp's work. This will be investigated with respect to two of Duchamp’s works: In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915) and Trébuchet (1917).

Com base na tese de Walter Benjamin, Origens do drama barroco alemão e no texto Luto e Melancolia de Freud, o presente trabalho caracteriza a melancolia como o humor que permeia a modernidade. Para analisar formas de enfrentar o espírito melancólico próprio da modernidade, três personagens são caracterizados: o príncipe do drama do Barroco, sendo Hamlet o paradigma do príncipe barroco, o dândi analisado por Baudelaire e d’Aurevilly e Duchamp, o artista que inaugurou a arte moderna pós-vanguardista. Enquanto o príncipe sucumbe ao estado melancólico, o dândi e Duchamp resistem ao tédio que paira sobre as sociedades modernas, mas de formas também diferentes. O dândi apela para seu narcisismo como forma de manter seu apego à vida, enquanto Duchamp usa o humor, a brincadeira e o jogo para lidar com as incongruências da existência humana.

This text aims to analyse a specific aspect of the idea of "convention" in the work of Robert Venturi: the inclusion of the everyday object into architecture, in the context of Pop culture, which would seem to re-establish the dialectics of the Duchampian ready-made, albeit transformed. A dual analysis exercise is undertaken. The proposed approach points at, firstly, those interventions by means of objects that may be understood as pertaining to the ready-made, together with a study of possible variants of use of said objects as a resource. In the second instance, different cases are studied in which the item ceases to be distinguishable element within the work, to become a full-blown formal motive on its own: ready-made architecture. This methodology led to the study, as analysed in the last section, of obvious conceptual paradoxes.

In this review, the author introduces Thomas Zaunschirm’s book Faux Vagin: Marcel Duchamp’s Last Readymade, published in 2014 as an activity of the Duchamp Research Centre in the Staatliches Museum Schwerin. The book gives an interpretation of the little-known work by Marcel Duchamp titled Faux Vagin, purportedly his final readymade, created in the 1964 – 1965 period. The work
is a gift in the form of a license plate removed from a Volkswagen car, numbered 49 36 TT 75 in white on a red background, dedicated to the family friend Grati Baroni. Zaunschirm exhaustively maps out the work’s life, putting it in the period’s contexts, and thus retrospectively attempts to use it to reveal a biography of the era. The review is a critical take on Zaunschirm’s study, in part because Zaunschirm failed to problematize the status of the object (or the gift) as a readymade.

Key words: Thomas Zaunschirm – Marcel Duchamp – Faux Vagin – readymade – gift – Volkswagen

This second article on Surrealism (in Dutch language) discusses René Char and his contribution to surrealist art featuring his poem cycle "Le Marteau sans Maître".

Dit artikel bespreekt de figuur René Char en zijn bijdrage aan het surrealisme met in het bijzonder zijn dichtbundel "Le Marteau sans Maître".