The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp

Date/Time: 26/10/2007 12:00 am

MIT Press and Orchard are delighted to invite you to celebrate the publication of
THE EXILES OF MARCEL DUCHAMP
By T.J. Demos (Department of History of Art, University College London)
The reception will take place at Orchard in New York
Friday, October 26, 2007
6:00-9:00
47 Orchard Street
NYC, NY 10002
(212) 219–1061
contact@orchard47.org
F train to East Broadway, or B, D to Grand
Gallery Hours: Thurs–Sun 1 to 6
Please save the date!
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11110
On The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp:
‘The work of Marcel Duchamp is obscured by its ever-increasing relevance. Duchamp’s
reception in the United States took off when Robert Lebel’s monograph Sur Marcel
Duchamp was translated into English in 1959, and the 1960s quickly came to dictate
many of the terms by which the oeuvre has since been understood. To encounter
Duchamp’s work in museums today is inevitably to see it severed from the ‘ideal’
context of the artist’s own installations; it is to confront both the objects and
the negation of their referential field. T.J. Demos’s new book, The Exiles of Marcel
Duchamp, addresses this problem, going further than almost any other account to date
in restoring a contemporaneous history and, above all, a politics to Duchamp’s
enigmatic and diverse output. (…)’
Julia E. Robinson, Modern Painters (July 2007)
‘Despite the enthralling nature of the lives of some more dramatically disposed
artists, accounts of what they ate every day for lunch, for example, are likely to
be received with a response of timeworn tedium. There remains a prevailing
insistence among art criticism that tying art work to artist by the umbilical cord
of authorship can only be reductive, ensuring that the commodity status of the
object remains undisturbed. Yet T.J. Demos’ The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp refuses to
perpetuate this foreclosure of the personal and, instead, mobilizes biography as a
critical tool. Demos takes a chapter from Duchamp’s life–his experience of
exile–as a lens through which to examine works he produced at these moments of
dislocation in order to define ‘a spirit of expatriation’. He convincingly contends
this spirit is Duchamp’s socio-politically motivated response to the specific
historical conditions of the early-20th-century rise of nationalism and fascism in
Europe and the US. (…)’
-Belinda Bowring, Frieze (September 2007)
http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/the_exiles_of_marcel_duchamp/