“Duchamp is one of the great iconoclasts of the 20th century,” says Nicholas Chambers, coordinating curator of The Essential Duchamp. “He’s somebody who has shifted what we mean when we use the words ‘art’ and ‘artist’.” From bicycle wheels to nudes descending staircases, few artists can lay claim to the vast influence and career of Marcel Duchamp, which is now being traced at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Aiming to give a well-rounded introduction, The Essential Duchamp stems from Philadelphia Museum of Art’s collection and features 150 works alongside archival materials. Including famous pieces such as Fountain (1950), a replica of 1917 original, and Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 (1912), the retrospective is the largest seen in Australia, surveying Duchamp’s art and life.
Working chronologically, the show voyages into Duchamp’s early experiments in painting before he stopped to pose the question: “Can works be made which are not ‘of art’?” Here lies the conceptual turn, including the production of the infamous readymades. As Chambers explains of this period, “It’s looking at this very important shift in Duchamp’s practice where he turns away from what he calls ‘retinal art’ – art that’s there to please the eye – and instead sets about creating art that, as he puts it, ‘is at the service of the mind’.”
The show further considers Duchamp’s feminine alter-ego Rrose Selávy, his move from art to chess, a digital reproduction of his final work Étant donnés (1946-66), and his celebrated position as both artist and public intellectual. Yet as Chambers points out, what persists throughout The Essential Duchamp isn’t only that the artist questioned conventions of art making, “but that his works have often served to dramatically expand the possibilities for art.”
The Essential Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp
Art Gallery of New South Wales
27 April—11 August
65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art is an extraordinary account of the unique art of this continent, published alongside a landmark exhibition at the Potter Museum of Art. Necessary and urgent, it tells the story of Indigenous Australian art; a new art history unlike anything we’ve seen. For Jane O’Sullivan, it’s a remarkable and must-read book.
In a new series of illustrated postcards available as a free gift with purchase only at the Art Guide Bookstore, Oslo Davis takes on classic and contemporary art terms and genres and reimagines what they could be referring to.
With so much to choose from, we’ve rounded up the major summer exhibitions in each capital city, open all summer long. Spanning Yayoi Kusama, Magritte, the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, and many more.
Ahead of the National Gallery of Victoria’s major retrospective on singular Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, we invited four artists to respond to the influence of Kusama on their own practice—and meditate on what her work means to them.
The growing cultural interest in art books reflects the enduring power of the printed word. Jane O’Sullivan takes a closer look.
bagan bariwariganyan: echoes of country, curated by Jonathan Jones and now showing at Bundanon, highlights a long history of Indigenous art on the New South Wales south coast, with works and installations from Jones, Aunty Julie Freeman, Aunty Cheryl Davison, and Mickey of Ulladulla.
