UNPACKING DUCHAMP
Art in Transit

by Dalia Judovitz
University of California Press, Berkeley
pp ed. 1998 (first published 1995) 308pp.

Reviewed by Molly B Hankwitz

Judovitz's book brings this artist into the limelight of a post-modern interpretation which focuses on Duchamp's underlying with, sense of chance and movement as a 'mechanical' metaphor for 20thc. art making. She seems to understand clearly the almost preposterous assumptions which make Duchamp's work so clever and eloquently places his puzzling works within his 'historic' reputation for altering the foundations of modern art--the death of painting, to say the least.

From Duchamp's rejection of painting to Clement Greenberg's writings on the artist, the author offers insightful analysis of the major works including 'The Large Glass', 'Fountain', and 'The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even' and their placement within art history. Her emphasis is on movement, epiphanies, chance, interstices, materiality/non-matieriality, theory and non-art. This effort to recontextualize Duchamps' trajectory within postmodernity is underscored by the book's subtitle: 'art in transit'--transit, transitional, transitory. Non-permanent. Duchamp is portrayed as a witty problem-solver ever preoccupied with issues of genre, gender, and representation.

Incorporated into the discussion are many lesser works and an ample chapter on 'Ready-mades'. From within this context, Duchamp is once again viewed as having opened up modernism to broader categories and the author moves on to show how the activity of redefinition of artistic production helped to create ground for the era of appropriation at the core of postmodernity. What is original and what is not? Her complex arguments offer detail and finely-woven interpretations.

Dalia Judowitz is also the author of 'Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes: The Origins of Modernity' (1988), coeditor of 'Dialectic and Narrative' (1993).

More reproductions, some in color in this new paperback edition would have better illustrated the art and made long texts more compelling. Though a bit linear in terms of approach, 'Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit' is a high-minded read for the dialectically-predisposed. Another text for Duchamp's canon.