Series

Art Editions

Sep 2022

ISBN 978-1-913029-67-8

Publication

Duchamp Looked At (From the Other Side) / Duchamp With (and Against) Lacan

Undoing the Image 3

Original Edition

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£38 / $45
  • Paperback
  • 250×180mm
  • 576pp
  • 64 colour reproductions, 45 monochrome reproductions. Also available as a Deluxe Limited Boxed Edition with original photogravure by Cerith Wyn Evans. For further information contact editions@urbanomic.com
  • Edition supported by Centre National du Livre,  Institut Français du Royaume-Uni
  • Cover Design: Leaky Studio Urbanomic
  • Type: Norm


Translated by

  • Robin Mackay
  • Maya B. Kronic

Two landmark works rethink Duchamp’s legacy in relation to contemporary art and the image, psychoanalysis and gender.

Duchamp Looked At (From the Other Side) is a meticulous archaeological survey that reconsiders the problems and motivations of ‘Duchamp-thought’ through a close analysis of the artist’s entire oeuvre, examining its many passages: from the Nudes in which the problem of representing movement is gradually displaced onto the virtual plane of the diagram, to the emergence of the readymade from the Standard Stoppages’ pataphysical critique of science, to the arrested ‘eroticism’ of the Large Glass and Étant donnés—and beyond, as the artist carbonizes the white cube with 1200 Coal Sacks and ties up the gallery with Miles of String, before shaping a series of ‘erotic things’ that turn sex inside-out.

And then, in a startling deconstruction of the cisgender binary seemingly as integral to Duchampian ‘eroticism’ (the Large Glass) as to Lacanian phallocentrism (‘there is no sexual relation’), Alliez’s delirious ‘supplement’ takes Duchamp-thought to new heights—via the gutter. Because when it comes to sex, following the trail of vulgar double entendres, spoonerisms, and strained puns that course through Duchamp’s work reveals to us a vexed relation of non-relation between the anartist and the grand master of analysis. In advance of her trans-formation into Rrose Sélavy, Duchamp’s lalinguistic mutations were already disrupting the Freudian field, evading the nets of the Symbolic, and desublimating the phallus. Revelling in contradiction, unmaking sense, disrupting gender and genre, this is a queer Duchamp who defies all analysis, already on the other side of ‘ab-sex sense’—a Duchamp With (and Against) Lacan, even.

Undoing the Image

1. Body Without Organs, Body without Image: Ernesto Neto’s Anti-Leviathan
2. Becoming-Matisse: Between Painting and Architecture
3. Duchamp Looked at (From the Other Side)
i. Descending Painting
ii. Picking up the Thread
iii. Given Readymades
4. Three Entries in the Form of Escape Diagrams
i. DB Entry [Daniel Buren]
ii. GMC Entry [Gordon Matta-Clark]
iii. GB Entry [Günter Brus]
5. Boîte HO [Hélio Oiticica]

  • DUCHAMP LOOKED AT (FROM THE OTHER SIDE)
  • 1. Descending Painting
  • 2. Picking up the Thread
  • 3. Given Readymades
  • Index of Names
  • Index of Subjects
  • Bibliography
  • DUCHAMP WITH (AND AGAINST) LACAN
  • Post
  • 1. Duchamp in the Field (of the Sign) of Sex
  • Madame Rosa the Clairvoyant
  • 2. No Entry: Passage Inter-Dicted
  • 3. The Sex-Ratio of Wordplay
  • Oh! Calcutta
  • 4. 3 Standard Stoppages, Là-Quand
  • 5. Factory of Eroticism
  • 6. (In Delay of) Rrose Sélavy, or The Trans-Formation
  • 7. Endgame Strategy
  • Postponement
  • Closet
  • Bibliography
  • List of Figures
  • Index
  • Translators’ Interface
  • Glossolalanguister(a)ie