Marcel Duchamp is often viewed as an "artist-engineer-scientist," a kind of rationalist who relied heavily on the ideas of the French mathematician and philosopher Henri Poincaré. Yet a complete portrait of Duchamp and his multiple influences draws a different picture. In his 3 Standard Stoppages (1913-1914), a work that uses chance as an artistic medium, we see how far Duchamp subverted scientism in favor of a radical individualistic aesthetic and experimental vision. Unlike the Dadaists, Duchamp did more than dismiss or negate the authority of science. He pushed scientific rationalism to the point where its claims broke down and alternative truths were allowed to emerge. With humor and irony, Duchamp undertook a method of artistic research, reflection, and visual thought that focused less on beauty than on the notion of the "possible." He became a passionate advocate of the power of invention and thinking things that had never been thought before. The 3 Standard Stoppages is the ultimate realization of the play between chance and dimension, visibility and invisibility, high and low art, and art and anti-art. Situating Duchamp firmly within the literature and philosophy of his time, Herbert Molderings recaptures the spirit of a frequently misread artist-and his thrilling aesthetic of chance.

Duchamp and the Aesthetics of Chance: Art as Experiment (Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts)

Arts & Photography

Molderings, Herbert

History & Criticism

Columbia University Press

Edited by Kornelia von Berswordt-Wallrabe. Essays by Gerhard Graulich, Herbert Molderings.

Marcel Duchamp: Respirateur

DUCHAMP, MARCEL

Graulich, Gerhard

Graulich

Individual Artists

Hatje Cantz Publishers

Marcel Duchamp.

Daniels, Dieter

Hatje Cantz Verlag

Urinals, vacuum cleaners, basketballs, glass sheets… livestock? This study of key moments in the history of ready-made and object-based art features Damien Hirst (London), Gerhard Merz (Munich), Jeff Koons (New York) and their shared historical point of reference, Marcel Duchamp (Paris and New York, 1887-1968). Recently a poll of 500 British critics called Duchamp's 1917 Fountain the most influential Modern artwork ever created. Even more recently, a man assaulted it with a hammer at the Centre Pompidou, confirming that, nearly a century later, emotions are still running high. Object-based art, which grew into a major twentieth-century trend and continues today, took its cue from the ready-made, and Re-Object explores the continuation and transformation of both lines in contemporary artistic practice, via large-format photographs and analytical essays on the artists.

Re-Object

GRAY,JOHN

Egenhofer, Sebastian

Kunsthaus Bregenz

Extensive bibliography of Bauhaus photographer Otto Umbehr. text in German

Umbo: Otto Umbehr 1902-1980

Distributed Art Pub Inc

Raimund Kummer: On Sculpture

Holzwarth Publications

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