Duchamp, Marcel

Duchamp, Marcel, 1887—1968—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Alchemy—Influence. I. Title. II. Series. 

D Hamoncourt, Anne and Kynaston McShine, eds.Marcel Duchamp. Prestel Pub, 1989. 345p. 

Impossible realities Marcel Duchamp the surrealist tradition, 1991. Pasadena (CA) Pasadena World Art Press, for the Norton Simon Museum of Art, 1991. 

Moffitt, John F. Alchemist of the avante-garde the case of Marcel Duchamp. Albany (NY) State Univ of New York P, 2003. xiii, 468 p ISBN 0-7914-5709-5... 

Moffitt, John F. Marcel Duchamp s Etant donnes. how Walter Arensberg explained its alchemical iconography. Cauda Pavonis 15, no. 2 (Fall 1996) 1-13. 

Lavoisier s laboratory has been reconstructed in the Paris Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers. Marcel Duchamp was apparently quite influenced by his visits to the museum. His godson, Gordon Matta-Clark, who built an alchemist s lab in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, could be seen as another inheritor of Lavoisier. 

In the postmodern age, in which structuralist theory reigns and claims of artistic autonomy are countered with New Historicist assertions of cultural embeddedness, ideology is believed to create the visual manifestations we call style, and the artist is often considered an almost passive instrument, who records the intellectual fashions of his or her time and place. In this context critics usually are more concerned with the interpretation of intrinsic content than with descriptions of its formal, literally superficial manifestations. As postmodernists we are especially driven to reexamine critically the assumptions about social reality through which modernism and modem artists constmcted themselves. A case in point is the legendary career of Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). 

Although the alchemical interpretation may have surfaced verbally as early as the 1930s, it was initially pursued in print by Robert Lebel, who published the first biography of Marcel Duchamp in 1959. Lebel s query about a generalized alchemical orientation in the master s work drew a now... 

Next follows an ethical prescription for the modem neo-Alchemist, and this too seems in complete conformity with admiring eyewitness accounts of the heatific decomm later characterizing the life and works of Marcel Duchamp ... 

However, all is not work and meditation for the modern Alchemist, a reserved and politely tolerant chap like Duchamp. At times, this Initiate will venture forth from his darkened laboratory, and at such times, just as we also know was notoriously the case with Marcel Duchamp, he shall seek out female company, with whom he must also behave with decorous, even emotionally distant, restraint. ... 

And now, with a certain ironic intention, I will again quote the recollections of the Frenchman Francois Jollivet-Castellot, who actually never met Marcel Duchamp (and here Duchamp has heen substituted for the Alchemist ) ... 

But there is more to life in France than irony and dandysme. Unlike the kind now known to would-be American vanguard artists, young Marcel s formal education included a rampantly Cartesian curriculum. French school-children are told Write like Descartes and, more importantly, Think like Descartes Duchamp himself confirmed these effects of his early education I happen to have been bom a Cartesian. The French education is based on a sequence of strict logic. You carry it with you. ° As he also added. 

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