Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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 material that mimics art without being readily classifiable as such. Her book questions his paradoxical renunciation 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.

Duchamp, a poser and solver of problems, occupied himself with issues of genre, gender, and representation. His puns, double entendres, and word games become poetic machines, all part of his intellectual quest for the very limits of nature, culture, and perception. Judovitz demonstrates how Duchamp's redefinition of artistic modes of production through reproduction opens up modernism to more speculative explorations, while clearing the ground for the aesthetic of appropriation central to postmodernism.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

The enigmatic Marcel Duchamp continues to challenge all who probe his secrets. Judovitz's daunting venture, to "unpack" their protean implications, is too intricate and subtle to summarize briefly, so the barest outline of her topics in this densely argued treatise must suffice. In the first of five chapters, Judovitz (French and Italian, Emory Univ.) traces his early efforts as a painter, climaxed in the infamous Nude Descending ... No 2 (1912) and his other Cubist-related works. Soon abandoning even such scantly traditional gestures toward pictorial imagery, Duchamp then turned to cartoons, photos, and other alternative mediums, before undertaking yet more radical departures in The Large Glass (1915-23), which the author sees as a "compendium of all his previous efforts." Next, she discusses Duchamp's visual and linguistic puns and his readymades, as personal "critiques" of the classic notions of art. She then ponders his challenges to accepted notions of artistic and economic "value," in subsequent forays into novel realms of expression that remarkably anticipated postmodernism. Duchamp's ingrained delight in contradiction and paradox was ultimately memorialized in the large assemblage that he and his wife Teeny secretly prepared over the years 1956-66, when he was presumed to be no longer active as an artist. Perhaps the author's most engaging discussion of all is her postscript, an epitaphic summation of her subject's lifetime of mercurial activity. Recommended for upper-division undergraduate through professional collections. F. A. Trapp; emeritus, Amherst College

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Dalia Judovitz is Professor and Chair in the Department of French and Italian at Emory University. She is author of Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes: The Origins of Modernity (1988) and coeditor of Dialectic and Narrative (1993).