Duchamp Looked At (From the Other Side)

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A detailed examinaition of the motivations and precise coordinates of Duchamp's break from painting into the field of the linguistic sign.In this remarkably original study, Éric Alliez and Jean-Claude Bonne set out from what is apparently the most polemical configuration possible: Matisse vs. Duchamp. But it is not enough merely to set Matisse's "perpetual Fauvism" against Duchamp's scorn for painting and his dedication to "mental artifices," so apparently contrary to the Bergsonian energetics of color. As Alliez and Bonne demonstrate, the problematic field from which contemporary art will emerge is not so simple.Through close analyses of numerous works, from the Nudes through the preparatory work and execution of the Large Glass to �tant Donn�s and up to the "erotic objects" and installations of the 1940s-1950s, the authors reconstruct in detail the motivations and precise coordinates of Duchamp's break from painting into the field of the linguistic sign.This intensively researched philosophical interrogation offers us a precise and thorough account of the new articulations Duchamp fabricated between painting and language, art and science, the aesthetic and the conceptual.