Unpacking Duchamp

by Dalia Judovitz

Perhaps no twentieth-century artist utilized puns and linguistic ambiguity with greater effect - and greater controversy - than Marcel Duchamp. Through a careful "unpacking" of his major works, Dalia Judovitz finds that Duchamp may well have the last laugh. She examines how he interpreted notions of mechanical reproduction in order to redefine the meaning and value of the art object, the artist, and artistic production. Judovitz begins with Duchamp's supposed abandonment of painting and his subsequent return to works that mimic art without being readily classifiable as such. Her book questions his paradoxical renouncing of pictorial and artistic conventions while continuing to evoke and speculatively draw upon them. She offers insightful analyses of his major works, including The Large Glass, Fountain, and Given: 1) the waterfall, 2) the illuminating gas.