Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910-1941 (October Books) - Tapa dura

-- Yve-Alain Bois, Joseph Pulitzer, Jr. Professor of Modern Art, Harvard University " Duchamp's oeuvre is a kind of labyrinth through which few art historians have managed to come out with all their sanity: 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 & quot; Duchamp's oeuvre is a kind of labyrinth through which few art historians have managed to come out with all their sanity: 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.& quot; -- Yve-Alain Bois, Joseph Pulitzer, Jr. Professor of Modern Art, Harvard University "Duchamp's oeuvre is a kind of labyrinth through which few art historians have managed to come out with all their sanity: 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

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.