Synopses & Reviews
There is not one Marcel Duchamp, but several. Within his oeuvre Duchamp practiced a variety of modernist idioms and invented an array of contradictory personas: artist and art dealer, conceptualist and craftsman, chess champion and dreamer, dandy and recluse.
In Infinite Regress, David Joselit considers the plurality of identities and practices within Duchamp's life and art between 1910 and 1941, conducting a synthetic reading of his early and middle career. Taking into account underacknowledged works and focusing on the conjunction of the machine and the commodity in Duchamp's art, Joselit notes a consistent opposition between the material world and various forms of measurement, inscription, and quantification. Challenging conventional accounts, he describes the readymade strategy not merely as a rejection of painting, but as a means of producing new models of the modern self.
Review
"Duchamp's oeuvre is a kind of labyrinth through which few art historians have managed to come out with all their sanity: Joselit's work provides a remarkably original guide for it, and demonstrates, with radically new means, the centrality of Duchamp's oeuvre in this century."
—Yve-Alain Bois, Joseph Pulitzer, Jr. Professor of Modern Art, Harvard University
Synopsis
In Infinite Regress, David Joselit considers the plurality of identities and practices within Duchamp's life and art between 1910 and 1941, conducting a synthetic reading of his early and middle career. Taking into account underacknowledged works and focusing on the conjunction of the machine and the commodity in Duchamp's art, Joselit notes a consistent opposition between the material world and various forms of measurement, inscription, and quantification. Challenging conventional accounts, he describes the readymade strategy not merely as a rejection of painting, but as a means of producing new models of the modern self.
Synopsis
There is not one Marcel Duchamp, but several. Within his oeuvre Duchamp practiced a variety of modernist idioms and invented an array of contradictory personas: artist and art dealer, conceptualist and craftsman, chess champion and dreamer, dandy and recluse.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. [199]-242) and index.
About the Author
David Joselit is Professor and Chair of the Department of the History of Art at Yale University and the author of Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910-1941 (MIT Press, 1998) and American Art Since 1945.