Duchamp and the Aesthetics of Chance: Art as Experiment

by Herbert Molderings, John Brogden (Translator)

Overview

Marcel Duchamp is often viewed as an "artist-engineer-scientist," a kind of rationalist who relied heavily on the ideas of the French mathematician and philosopher Henri Poincaré. Yet a complete portrait of Duchamp and his multiple influences draws a different picture. In his 3 Standard Stoppages (1913-1914), a work that uses chance as an artistic medium, we see how far Duchamp subverted scientism in favor of a radical individualistic aesthetic and experimental vision.

Unlike the Dadaists, Duchamp did more than dismiss or negate the authority of science. He pushed scientific rationalism to the point where its claims broke down and alternative truths were allowed to emerge. With humor and irony, Duchamp undertook a method of artistic research, reflection, and visual thought that focused less on beauty than on the notion of the "possible." He became a passionate advocate of the power of invention and thinking things that had never been thought before.

The 3 Standard Stoppages is the ultimate realization of the play between chance and dimension, visibility and invisibility, high and low art, and art and anti-art. Situating Duchamp firmly within the literature and philosophy of his time, Herbert Molderings recaptures the spirit of a frequently misread artist-and his thrilling aesthetic of chance.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231147620
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	05/31/2010
Series:	Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Herbert Molderings is a freelance scholar and professor of art history at the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. The author of eleven books, he specializes in the history of modern and contemporary art, European photography of the twentieth century, and the works of Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Lászlo Moholy-Nagy, and Umbo. Molderings is a former fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin and a former director of a research program at the Centre allemand d'histoire de l'art in Paris. He divides his time beween Cologne and Paris.

John Brogden lives in Dortmund, Germany, and specializes in the translation of art historical subjects.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Introduction
1. The Idea of the Fabrication
2. The 3 Standard Stoppages in the Context of the Large Glass
3. The 3 Standard Stoppages as Paintings
4. 1936: Duchamp Transforms the Painting Into an Experimental Setup
5. Humorous Application of Non-Euclidean Geometry
6. The Crisis of the Scientific Concept of Truth
7. Pataphysics, Chance, and the Aesthetics of the Possible
8. Radical Individualism
Notes
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

Molly Nesbit

The net result of Herbert Molderings's analysis—subtle, thorough, careful in its sources, and beautifully measured-is a reading of Marcel Duchamp's work that gives it historical terms and endless complexity. Duchamp and the Aesthetics of Chance is model art-historical work.

— Molly Nesbit, Vassar College

Ulrich Keller

Duchamp and the Aesthetics of Chance is one of those rare studies which, by exhaustively treating one key work, puts into new perspective an artist's entire oeuvre. More than that, in a period when art-historical discussions are highly theory-oriented, though often at the expense of basic research, Herbert Molderings has undertaken an exceptionally well balanced investigation through which a new and painstakingly accurate evaluation of the material and historical evidence translates into a brilliant exposition of the philosophical ramifications of this evidence.

— Ulrich Keller, University of California, Santa Barbara

Editorial Reviews

...charming, erudite, and academically thorough volume...

Cerise Press