Unpacking Duchamp

Perhaps no 20th-century artist utilized puns and linguistic ambiguity with greater effect – and greater controversy – than Marcel Duchamp. Through a careful “unpacking” of his major works, the author 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. The book 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 analyses of his major works including “The Large Glass”, “Fountain”, and “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even”. Duchamp, a poser and solver of problems, was occupied by 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 thro

Author Biography

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).