I have lost track of how many books I have read on Marcel Duchamp but it is approaching double digits. To say that I am obsessed with him is an understatement. He has changed my life by providing a channel, a groove, a way of experiencing that is beyond reality and beyond the human. He once said that his life is art and I think that is a good way of viewing life.
This particular book was interesting and helpful but too intellectual for an artist who while very intellectual needs to be appreciated with all ones senses. His basic premise is that all Duchamp’s ideas first culminate in the, ‘large glass’ and then are extended and further developed with Etant Donnes, the work he had unveiled to the world after his death.
He has lots of interesting ideas about the large glass tracing the various sources that made up the components and reflects several phases of his thought about art from cubism to dadaism to surrealism. Given Duchamp’s iconoclastic tendencies and the fact that he kicked off the large glass project after rejecting retinal art (painting), I’m not convinced that HE thought in terms of art movements. Perhaps it is usual to categorize his ideas and thinking along these lines because this was the air he breathed but I wouldn’t reduce his thinking to these movements.
Ramirez then decides to bring Duchamp’s ideas forward to culminate with Etant Donnes. While thematically, the work incorporates much of his thinking about love, death, the viewer, realism and perspective, I’m not convinced that this work is greater than the large glass. Personally, I withhold judgement about the work because of its many parts which aren’t meant to be experience via photographs. One must experience the piece by seeing it in person as he intended. I have a hunch, it maybe completely wrong, that in fact Etant Donnes is a complete rejection of the large glass and the entire notion of diagrammatic art or maybe it is simply ‘AND.’
