Drawing on Art: Duchamp and Company (review)

In her seminal essay ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America’ (October, 3 (spring 1977), 68–81), Rosalind Krauss observed that ‘the seemingly endless stream of essays on Duchamp that have appeared over the last several years certainly does discourage one from wanting to add yet another word to the accumulating mass of literature on the artist’ (p. 71). Since that time, though, scholarship on Duchamp has burgeoned, stimulated not least by the theoretical work of Krauss and others at October magazine, and Dalia Judovitz’s latest book would suggest that Duchamp’s influence on contemporary art and writing remains remarkably vibrant. Judovitz takes the central idea of ‘drawing on art’ to analyse how Duchamp uses art both as a resource and as a concept in order to ‘challenge its definition and thus the sphere of its meanings’ (p. xvi). She develops that theme over five chapters: Duchamp’s critique of the ocular, focused on works deploying windows and mirrors; Dada film; strategies drawn from chess; Dalí’s homage to Duchamp; and the issue of spectatorship in the work of Duchamp, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Richard Wilson. Duchamp’s resistance to the commercialization of art and its reduction to the status of commodity is a recurring theme, evidenced in particular in the artist’s crucial shift from the perceptual to the conceptual with his designation of the ‘readymades’. Judovitz defines Duchamp’s stance not as simply the ‘antiart’ position of Picabia and of Dada — the ‘abandonment of painting’ — but rather as, in a more complex and dynamic way, ‘coupling art and antiart as a mechanism activated through dynamic play’, oscillating as a ‘back-and-forth movement’ between those two poles (p. xix). The problem in merely accepting the ‘antiart’ position is that, as Duchamp observes, ‘it’s a little bit like “atheist” as compared to “believer”. And an atheist is just as much of a religious man as the believer is’ (quoted on p. xxii) — essentially, the same critique that Klossowski makes of Sade’s atheism in Sade mon prochain (1947). Duchamp’s questioning of authorship constitutes the other main conceptual thrust of the book, explored in terms of how artists ‘draw on’ each other’s work through strategies of borrowing, collaboration, homage, and appropriation. Duchamp’s principal collaborator in the completion of the work is surely the spectator, analysed here in terms of the artist’s critique of institutions and of the conditions of viewing the art work, such that immediate visual ‘consumption’ of the work is continually obstructed and delayed, as the viewer is required to engage actively with the work’s constitutive concept and thus to effect its completion. The book is at its best in the many nuanced and sophisticated readings of Duchamp’s works and writings. Less convincing, perhaps, are some of the claims for Duchamp as a collaborative artist; and I would have welcomed the inclusion of more recent examples of Duchamp’s continuing influence, as with Christian Marclay’s The Bell and the Glass (2003). Such caveats aside, Judovitz’s book makes an incisive contribution to our understanding of exactly why Duchamp continues to shape our conception of art.