Of course Duchamp's lessons in art can never be done with, but we might at least have had a sense that these lessons were of a known quantity: the removal of manual skill from questions of art via the readymade, the critique of modernism, the focus outwards towards the institution of art, and its mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion... the list goes on. They have, after all, been a primary focus of internal wrangling amongst conceptual artists, art historians and critics for more than forty years now, a history that has itself been mapped in numerous places, not least in a 1994 edition of the journal October, titled 'The Duchamp Effect'.
Still, it seems the old master had one further trick up his sleeve, prefiguring our present age of the itinerant, globe-trotting, biennale-hopping artist, and reflecting, throughout his oeuvre, on themes of geographical and cultural displacement and dislocation. In his new book, 'The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp', the London-based art historian TJ Demos finds that what Duchamp referred to as a 'spirit of expatriation' was really a profound ambivalence toward his condition as a wanderer and European in America, as well as towards the exiled situation of the surrealists, as the artist found himself caught between ' the anguish of displacement' and 'the freedom of geopolitical homelessness'.
Demos argues that the artist's anti-nationalist outlook figured as a form of resistance to European Fascism, while today his example can point the way towards an ethical negotiation both of advanced capitalism's commodification of art, and of its fragmented, cosmopolitan modes of experience. Perhaps epitomising such concerns, Duchamp's boite-en-valise, assembled between 1935 and 1941, was a suitcase holding miniature reproductions of the artist's earlier works. Here was the nomadic artist-for-hire, not only 25 years before conceptual artists started mailing in their submissions to group shows from far away, but also long before the international curators and the Tiravanijas and Orozcos of this world started spending the bulk of their lives in first class.
Bill Roberts
'The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp' by T J Demos
MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London
July 2007
5 3/8 x 8, 320 pp., 52 illus.
$24.95/£15.00 |
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Bill Roberts is a writer based in London, and a PhD candidate at the Courtauld Institute of Art.
