Infinite Regress Marcel Duchamp 1910-1941

by Joselit, David

• ISBN13: 9780262600385
• ISBN10: 0262600382
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-02-23
• Publisher: The MIT Press

Summary

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.

Author Biography

David Joselit is Professor of Art, Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910–1941, Feedback: Television against Democracy (both published by the MIT Press), American Art Since 1945, and After Art.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	3	(6)
Mensuration en Abyme: Marcel Duchamp's Cubism	9	(62)
Between Reification and Regression: Readymades and Words	71	(40)
Modern Machines: From the Virgin to the Widow	111	(46)
The Self Readymade	157	(38)
Conclusion	195	(4)
Notes	199	(44)
Index	243