Postmodernism and the En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp

A critical analysis of postmodernism in the visual arts since the 1960s, this focuses primarily on American texts that reference and construct Marcel Duchamp as the originator of postmodern art.

Amelia Jones (Author)

9780521456548, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 25 August 1995

340 pages, 51 b/w illus.
23.8 x 19 x 1.8 cm, 0.59 kg

'Jones' book serves an important function in demonstrating that even if Marcel Duchamp has entered the art-historical canon, he can never be comfortable there, and more importantly, his art will always subvert it from within.' Art in America

A critical analysis of postmodernism in the visual arts since the 1960s, this book focuses primarily on American texts that reference and construct Marcel Duchamp as the originator of postmodern art. Amelia Jones contends that Duchamp, through his 'readymades', (the standard terms used to describe Duchamp's works) has paradoxically served in a paternal role for post-1960s American artists, critics and art historians, who have attempted to construct a new tradition of artistic practice that counters the masculinist ideologies of Abstract Expressionism and Greenbergian modernism. Adapting feminist, psychoanalytic and Derridean conceptions of interpretation as an exchange of sexual identities, Jones offers highly charged readings that focus on the eroticism of Duchamp's works and on his theories of artistic production. She reconstructs Duchamp as an indeterminably gendered author whose gift to postmodernism might best be viewed in terms of the potential of his readymades to destructure the contradictory notions of sexual difference and subjectivity.

1. Introduction: modernist art history and the en-gendering of (Duchampian) postmodernism
2. Duchamp as generative patriarch of American postmodernists: the anti-masculinist, anti-modernist lineage
3. The living author-function: Duchamp's authority
4. Duchamp's seduction: slippages of the authorial 'I'
5. The ambivalence of Rose Sélavy and the (male) artist as 'only the mother of work'
intertext, re-placing Duchamp's eroticism: seeing étant donnés from a feminist perspective
6. Concluding remarks on the en-gendering of Marcel Duchamp.

Subject Areas: Theory of art [ABA]