Postmodernism and the En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge Studies in New Art History and Criticism)
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Illustrated, 10/12/1995
EAN 9780521456548, ISBN10: 0521456541
Paperback, 340 pages, 23.5 x 19 x 1.8 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
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.