Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910-1941

(Paperback)

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Description

There is not one Marcel Duchamp, but several. Within this 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. This book 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, the author 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.

Reviews

"Especially fresh and elucidating.... Joselit's work belongs in all art and academic libraries." - Douglas McClemont, Library Journal; "Duchamp's oeuvre is a kind of labyrinth in which one can easily get lost. 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"

Author Bio

David Joselit is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of California, Irvine.