Duchamp: Passim, A Marcel Duchamp Anthology

by Anthony Hill

G+B Arts International Limited, Sydney, 1994.
187 pp., illus. Cloth
ISBN: 976-8097-78-7

Reviewed by Douglas Kahn

An anthology may serve any number of purposes toward its topic or field. Some create and announce new beginnings, for instance, Jerome Rothenberg's anthologies starting with Technicians of the Sacred (1968) which helped establish the field of ethnopoetics; most report on new developments of an already well established area of investigation. Anthony Hill's anthology Duchamp: Passim inhabits yet another category: it sweeps up the rear. This is not a criticism--one can never judge an anthology by its function--in fact, for anyone with an intermediate level of interest in Duchamp it would be very useful, and it should definitely be in every university and art school library.

The book adds nothing of import to present knowledge about Duchamp: it recaps. I'm not a Duchamp scholar, but the only entries of substance I had not already seen were one by Frederick Kiesler from 1937, one on Kiesler and Duchamp, some material on chess, and an interview with Hans Haacke. The book is nevertheless a labor-saving device, a filing cabinet turned into a new appliance, collecting materials from a time in which knowledge about Duchamp was developed. The timeframe for the book is primarily England during the 1970s, with a number of entries deriving straight from a special Duchamp Supplement in Studio International in 1975. Hill, who is a well-known British constructivist artist and writer, edited this Supplement from two decades ago, a long-held dedication which can be sensed throughout. However, in this case dedication has lead more toward the enthusiasm of the collector over each and every item no matter how disparate, instead of the comprehensive and discriminatory labors of the scholar.

Some of the contributions remain valuable, for instance, the British composer Gavin Bryars' essay on Duchamp's music, which appeared originally in 1976 in a special issue of Studio International on experimental music, whereas others can only be rationalized as a gauge of the reception of Duchamp in the U.K. at a particular point in time, e.g., Jindrich Chalupecky's essay reprinted from the Duchamp Supplement, the longest essay in the collection, has not aged well--through no fault of its own, only through subsequent efforts of other scholars and critics and because attention given to, say, structuralism or the position of Art and Language members is no longer seen as pressing problems on the theoretical agenda. Of course, one could imagine a valuable anthology which looked at the diffusion and reception of Duchamp among artists and others over time; the scope could be systematically focused on the U.K. or extended to other countries. _Duchamp: Passim_, however, is fairly confused about its topic; while having so much specific to the U.K. it tries to open to a more general interest in Duchamp without sufficient resources to do so.

My main criticism of the book is that it is simply overproduced. The stated rationale for its size is the desire to reproduce Duchamp multiples and other documents as near the size of the original as possible. This too could be a worthy project, but it would have to be more than a very small sampling. The needs of a few documents cannot justify catapulting so many magazine articles into coffee table format, especially when there are bona fide coffee table books with better reproductions of a greater range of Duchamp's works. Everyone would like to see the greatest hits from their filing cabinet beautifully bound, but it might overshoot the personal resources of the audience who might most benefit.

As to the relevance of Duchamp for readers of Leonardo who may not have gotten around to investigating his ideas, please resist growing impatient with the hermetic and daffy character of his work, but it would be tantamount to a writer balking at the difficulty of James Joyce or underestimating the power of a good pun. Per the latter, early in the century most clothing, like bread, were articles of domestic production. Duchamp walked the streets of New York when they first started becoming mass produced and noticed an advertisement in a shop window for "ready-mades." Here is one pun that made good. His work is especially relevant to Leonardo readers as it pertains to the relationship between art and science/technology/mathematics since, although I cannot develop this statement here, Duchamp's approach (along with Alfred Jarry, Raymond Roussel, Guillaume Apollinaire) was a defining moment among the possibilities still with us at the end of the century. Duchamp: Passim is not an appreciation of Duchamp on this basis, but would nevertheless be complementary. I would suggest those readers with limited discretionary funds start saving up for Linda Dalrymple Henderson's groundbreaking book on this very topic, forthcoming from Princeton University Press.