BOOK REVIEWS
Museum, 1988. These are only representative 16
examples for each of their categories.
3 See D. Antin, 'Biography', Representations, vol.
16, Fall 1986, PI'. 42-9 and J.R.R. Christie
and F. Orton, 'Writing on a Text of the Life',
Art History, vol. 11, no. 4, December 1988,
PI'. 545-64.
4 If obviously not as many as Richard Morphet
discerned in his notorious accommodation of
Warhol to Greenbergian Modernism for the
1971 Tate Gallery exhibition.
5 K. Varnedoe and A. Gopnik, High and Low.
Modern Art and Popular Culture, The Museum of
Modern Art, 1990.
6 Buchloh, 'Andy Warhol's One-Dimensional Art'
in McShinc, 01'. cit., PI'. 39-61; Buchloh, the
Andy Warhol Line' in Garrels, 01'. cir.,
PI'. 52-69; Charles F. Stuckey, 'Warhol in
Context', ibid., PI'. 3-33; Rainer Crone,
'Form and Ideology: Warhol's Techniques from
Blotted Line to Film', ibid., PI'. 70-92.
Buchloh, 'Form and Ideology', p. 66; Crone,
01'. cir., p. 90; Trevor Fairbrother, 'Skulls',
ibid., 1'1'.93-114.
8 P. Fuller, 'Ivon Hitchens: A Time for
Decision', Modern Painters, vol. 2, no. 3,
Autumn 1989.
9 Smith, PI'. 184, 188.
10 'Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in
Early Warhol', Art in America, May 1987,
p. 133.
11 Although unacknowledged, the sources are for
example Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology,
Baltimore, 1976, p. 70, and Derrida, 'Freud
and the Science of Writing' in Writing and
Difference, Chicago, 1978, p. 230.
12 See figs. 37-40 and 42-60 in the MoMA
catalogue. At this early stage the choice of gold
for sex idols (male, rather than transferred
inauthentically to Marilyn Monroe in the 1960s)
looks less knowing than spontaneous and
fetishistic.
13 01'. cit., p. 10.
14 ibid., p. 102.
15 Crone, op_ cit., charts the successive stages in
Warhol's manipulation of manual versus
mechanical techniques. Marco Livingstone
expands this in the essay 'Do It Yourself: Notes
on Warhol's Techniques' in McShine, 01" cit.,
PI'. 63-87.
DE-ESSENTIALIZING DUCHAMP/OR .,. RROSE SELAVY: DADA'S
MUTTER STRIPPED BARE
David Hopkins
Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century edited by Rudulf E. Kuenzli and Francis M. Neumann,
Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: M.LT. Press, 1989,267 pp., £17.95
In a catalogue introduction for a Picabia exhibition held in 1988 Richard Calvocoressi noted that
274
Bourdon, p. 134.
17 ibid., 1'1'.9 and 7.
18 McShine, p. 39.
19 From La Transparence du Mal, Paris, 1990,
excerpted in translation in Art International, no.
12, Autumn 1990, p. 54.
20 Michel Foucault's term for a site where subjects
without propinquity coexist, see The Order of
Things: An Archaeology ~f the Human Sciences,
London, 1970, p. xvi.
21 In McShine, PI'. 56, 57 particularly; in Garrels,
01'. cit., p. 5 and passim.
22 McShine , PI'. 53, 57.
23 Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality:
Paintin,l! and Beholder in the Age of Diderot,
Berkeley, 1980.
24 ibid., see especially the derogatory views of 'Ie
theatral', p. 100 and chapter 2, note 132,
1'1'.218-19.
25 'The Artist in Business', Times Literary
Supplement, September 22-28, 1989.
26 'The Warhol Effect', PI'. 115-23.
27 'Tomorrow's Man' in D.M. de Salvo (ed).,
'Success is a Job in New York " Grey Art
Gallery and Study Center, New York
University, 1989.
2S Bourdon, p. 51.
29 de Salvo (ed.), 01'. cir., p. 73.
:;0 Bourdon, figs. 291, 292.
31 As Barthes observed, the 'natural' is an
artilicial concept and I am not postulating some
essential, biologically-based gay vocabulary.
Quite the reverse, insofar as gay 'languages'
seem to crystallize partly in opposition to, and
also as an intensification of, whatever constitutes
the dominant culture. The characteristics cited
above are therefore often evident in works by,
or for, gays (encompassing a list that might
include such otherwise diverse figures as
Capote, Genet, Cadmus, Rechy , Bacon and
Mapplethorpe, and Derek Jarman's films) but
not unique to them.
32 e.g., J. Saslow, Ganymede in the Renaissance, New
Haven, 1986.
33 One specific and neglected leitmotif would be
the pictorial coding procedures that run from
Hartley's First World War 'abstract' portraits,
through Demuth and the erotic allegories of
Cadmus, French and Tooker, to the metonymy
of Johns and Rauschenberg.
 BOOK REVIEWS

'The Centenary of Duchamp's birth last year went virtually unnoticed in Europe and the U.S.A.', 1
concluding that, 'with the renewed interest in painting over the past decade, it is Picabia who seems
to have more to teach us today"." Calvocoressi's assessment is absolutely correct in one respect; overt
interest in Duchamp has certainly declined since the 1960s and early 1970s; witness the relative
trickle of books and articles in recent years, compared with the preceding flood of interpretations
by Schwarz, Calvesi, Golding et at which inspired Lucy Lippard's spendidly satirical essay,
'Allreadymadesomuchoff, of 1973. 3 However, we can be certain that, for Duchamp, with his oft-
proclaimed disdain for the fetishization of all-things-painterly, any linkage with a 'return to painting'
would have been deeply repugnant. He would have rejoiced in being out of fashion in such
circumstances. After all the exposure of the 60s and 70s, the 1980s seems to have ushered in a period
in which his influence, like the work of future artists according to his own prophecy, would inevitably
go underground. Oddly enough, though, there are signs of an imminent re-surfacing. Even while
the 'return to painting' was in full swing in the early 1980s, it was clear that a large group of artists
- many of them women - were manifesting a Duchampian disdain for Neo-Expressionist painting
with its empty rhetoric and connotations of Mastery." Revitalizing such Duchamp-inspired 60s
manifestations as Pop, Minimalism and Conceptual Art, American and British artists such as Cindy
Sherman, Sherry Levine, Barbara Kruger, Mary Kelly and Helen Chadwick have produced elaborate
multi-media artworks involving installation, photography and text. Their concerns with issues of
identity (Sherman) and authenticity of authorship (Levine) clearly have something in common with
Duchamp, although I am by no means arguing for direct 'influence'. Their concerns are also ones
which critics like Hal Foster have linked to notions of Postmodernity." All of this places Duchamp
once more under scrutiny.
Given these subterranean stirrings, the University of Iowa-based journal' Dada/Surrealism' quietly
published a centennial volume of essays on Duchamp in 1987. In 1989 this reappeared in book form
as Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century, a title which seems almost farcically inappropriate given
Duchamp's links with Dada. Title notwithstanding, the book's co-editor, Rudolf E. Kuenzli, sensed
the need to align the volume with a new climate of opinion by calling for a re-assessment of Duchamp.
Arguing that attempts to establish thematic and iconographic continuities or a coherent overall
structure in the maestro's productions seem 'less and less convincing in the light of the contradictory,
polyvalent works of Duchamp', (p. 4) he claims that:
His works and texts can be seen as machines that de-essentialize essentialist concepts of
art, sexual identity, the self, meaning in language and iconography. His chief strategy
consists in multiplying identities in order to undo any kind of fixity (p. 5).
The kind of 'monolithic' theories that Kuenzli is casting doubt on, predicated on a single all-
embracing interpretative key, be it Alchemy (Schwarz, Calvesi), N-dimensional geometry (Adcock)
or perspective/optics (Clair), do admittedly seem rather single-minded, often lacking the clement
of humour and self-reflexivity that characterizes Duchamp's output. Kuenzli is surely correct in
quoting Duchamp himself on his distaste for essentializing theories: 'The idea of being is a human
invention ... It's an essential concept, which doesn't exist at all in reality, and which I don't believe
in'." However, it has to be borne in mind that such statements by the artist were made in the I960s,
long after the works were produced; he himself may have absorbed Levi-Strauss, Lacan et al by
this time. Perhaps the most successful attempt to read Duchamp in a 'deconstructive' light was made
in the 1970s by Lyotard who interpreted the artist's enterprise in terms of calculated duplicity:
If we analyse the work of Duchamp, we clearly see that the problem is none other than
this: to take elements which are material, or sometimes linguistic, and subject them to
transformations by means of very precise operants; and to give the result of this operation
without revealing the nature of the operant. The audience ... laugh, or they protest,
because the messages are incomprehensible."
His approach squares well with an historically plausible Duchamp who included three 'Oculist
Witnesses' and an 'Inspector of Space' in the Large Glass, and planned to embed a magnifying glass
in the plate glass next to the 'Witnesses";" this is 'evidence' which suggests Duchamp mockingly
incorporated a regime of policing and detection within his oeuvre as though to acknowledge the
underlying falsity or instability of its elements (one should also mention in this context Philippe Duboy's
'. eminently Postmodern art historical 'detective novel' on the eighteenth century 'visionary' architect

275
 BOOK REVIEWS

Lequeu, in which Duchamp himself functions as an 'operant' in a reciprocal 'stripping bare' of

historical identity; Lequeu as L.H.O.O.Q.?9) How well, then, do the set of 'detectives' assembled
by Kuenzli (and Neumann, his co-editor) actually succeed in stripping Duchamp down to non-essence
(non-sense)?
The answer, on the whole, is none too well. Craig Adcock's essay on mathematics and eroticism
simply adds to his 'monolithic' theory, already alluded to, and, although highly successful in its
own terms - particularly when he relates Duchamp's adoption of a transvestite 'alter-ego', Rrose
Selavy, to his possible interest in geometrical rotations and reversals through the Fourth dimension
(a kind of 'transsexual geometry') - it does not propose a radically new reading of the artist. Kuenzli's
co-editor, Francis Neumann, possibly under some (self-imposed?) pressure to come up with a new
approach, produces a remarkably mixed analysis. He begins his essay by echoing Kuenzli: 'Any
attempt to establish a formula ... by which to assess ... the artistic productions of Marcel Duchamp
would be ... an entirely futile endeavor' (p. 20), but ends up toying with the idea that, given the
artist's apparent fascination with the reconciliation of opposed principles, be they linked to gender
or chess, he may well have had a neo-Jungian interest in 'reconcil(ing) the conflicting dualities of
life' (p. 36).
Three essays by Peter Read, Carol P. James and George H. Bauer foreground, to varying degrees,
the linguistic aspects of Duchamps work - his interest in multiple puns, deriving from his professed
interest in Brisset and Roussel - and seem to respond more uncompromisingly to Kuenzli's brief.
Yet at times it is debatable whether these amount to anything more than exercises in intellectual
gymnastics. It would be tempting to parody the kind of critical procedure adopted, for instance,
by Bauer, who out-Duchamps Duchamp on occasions:
The right foot of TORTURE-MORTE is seen through capital letters of white paint at its
bottom left as a printed footnote. The imprint as empreinte (a print, an impression) echoes
the French emprunt and the notion of debt or borrowing and the emprunte of constraint and
gaucheness. His references are both artistic and linguistic, both to his own art and that of
others. This rigor mortis of painted plaster and flies seen as faux pas against the
background of faux bois is an Italic impression cropped from Mantegna' s 'Dead Christ' as
a footnote in the writing of art history (p. 127).
With such passages in mind, I could, for instance, argue for an esoteric chain of association
linking the two 'assisted readymades', Fresh Widow (1920) and Why Not Sneeze? (1921). In the former
case, enunciating the title forces the spectator to mimic the speech of a widow, recently bereaved,
and unable to say 'French Window' through her tears. Alternatively, is she suffering from a
'code'P!" Whichever the case may be, nasal constriction results in the straightforward designation
of an object (French Window) being undermined by a terrible unconscious realisation (Fresh Widow);
a Freudian 'blockage' overcome in an upsurge of Surrealist 'humour noir'. In the second case, a
direct solution is offered; Why not Sneeze? Blockages are the main features of the objects themselves;
in the first case, freshly polished black leather squares 'veiling' the light, filling out the wi(n)dow's
'pain'; in the second, lumps of marble (with thermometer thoughtfully inserted) denying cage-space
to an occupant whose feathers might at least induce the spectator's cathartic nasal spasm ... O.K.
All very amusing and self-congratulatory (and surely Duchamp would have loved it) but is this
tinkering at all helpful in saying anything about Duchamp's project or is it colluding in it? One senses
that, however much these writers might wish to de-essentialize, they are still very much in the thrall
of an 'essential' Duchamp; not as Alchemist admittedly, but as master-trickster or transformer: Rrose
Selavy. Around such a fascinating 'presence' their erudite word-play often succeeds in looking like
a piling-up of non-essentials. Perhaps the most convincing of these writers, Peter Read, seems fully
aware of the labyrinthine trap laid by Duchamp and at the end of his ingenious account of the Tzanck
check (itself, of course, a brilliant parody on artistic authenticity) points out that 'the longer one
contemplates a simple selection of his apparently disparate artifacts ... the clearer it becomes that
a complicated web of cross-references ... binds these works into a singular conceptual coherence
and continuity' (p. 103). Such an admission, of course, frankly undercuts Kuenzli's aims for the
collection.
The most successful essay, in Kuenzli's terms, stressing the interplay of the discursive and the
visual in Duchamp, and effectively mobilizing a Post modern vocabulary ('hyperreality' and so on)
in DaliaJudovitz's on Etant donnes. She is very persuasive in demonstrating that the scene at which

276
 BOOK REVIEWS

the spectator peeps in this installation (the work consists of a locked door, with peepholes, through
which a disturbing 'tableau' of a nude sprawled in a landscape can be seen) is one of 'excessive
realism' in which eroticism becomes a ' "too" obvious spectacle' (p. 187). In her terms, 'The scene
problematizes one of the major givens of the Western pictorial and philosophical tradition; the equation
of light and reason, since light here functions as a sign of doubt' (pp. 187-8), and she moves from
this position to argue that the various aspects of the installation, such as the obviously 'ready-made'
(moulded) character of the mannequin and the use of real twigs and photographic illusionism in
the landscape surrounding it, problematize not only the possibility of 'fixing' (a photographic
metaphor) a coherent relationship between the work of art and reality, but also the lack of priority
amongst the indexical signs (moulds, photography, 'ready made' objects) invoked by the artist; this
impression being compounded by Duchamp's obvious avoidance of any authorial 'expressive'
intervention in the work via the brush or hand. All in all, the installation thus takes on a blatantly
'staged' or constructed quality, which its 'hyper-visibility' only serves to underline.
So far so good, it seems to me. However, given this interpretative framework, it becomes possible
for Judovitz to argue that the work posits a radical view of sexuality as 'constructed,'l and, in the
course of so doing, to assert that 'sexual difference ... emerges not as an anatomical fact but rather
as the projection of the gaze of the spectator which attempts to 'fix' and thus put to rest the androgynous
appearance of the nude' (p. 194), the nude constituting 'merely a "hinge", an assembled context
of visual and literary puns' (p. 195), just as the work as a whole 'presents an assemblage ... of
visual, literary and institutional 'givens' (p. 195). Despite the inexorable logic of her argument, and
some rather beguiling word play, it seems to me that her thesis has one fundamental difficulty;
uncritically following Lyotard and his notion of the 'last nude', she considers the figure to be
unproblematically 'androgynous', yet the only evidence of this she can actually provide is the 'deictical
gesture of the raised arm with the gas lamp' (p. 189). I have argued elsewhere that the mannequin
may well have a rather misogynistic source. Both its pose and artificial hair relate to the anatomical
dummies of females manufactured in Florence at the end of the eighteenth century for teaching
purposes, which were often arranged in sexually inviting postures and given elevated iconographic
status as 'Venuses' (the nude in Etant donnes also has a considerable iconographic lineage, derived
as it is from the' Bride' in the Large Glass). 12 Certainly, female observers of the work often find its
connotations of violation acutely worrying, despite its ironic overtones, and it seems to me that the
misogynistic aura of the installation has somehow to be accounted for, and not virtually ignored.
Such a reading would also involve positing a gendered spectator for the work; a (voyeuristic) male,
which is entirely in keeping with the interaction between Etant donnes and the Large Glass, the Bachelors,
in the latter work, peeking from their 'domain' at the Bride in hers. In making these points I am
not denying the validity of Judovitz's claim that the work is 'constructed' through a framework of
linguistic conventions and usages, nor am I contesting the related idea that the work problematizes
the spectator's 'point of view' . I would, however, argue that a strong suggestion of sexual difference
or, more precisely, the culturally-determined perception of females by males as mysteriously' other' ,
functions as an ideological determinant of the 'given' premises of the installation. As in the earlier
La Mariee (1912), which dealt, on one level, with the male desire to probe the enigma of femininity,
Duchamp was concerned here to face up to the more disturbing aspects of masculine sexuality. It
is surely the urgency of such an enterprise that really throws up questions about the depersonalized
'hyperreality' of the work.
If Judovitz's eloquent account of Duchamp's Postmodernity errs on account of its failure to
acknowledge the problematical nature of male sexuality, an issue which, for me, is bound up with
a failure in the essay to balance interpretative zeal and historical perspective (a problem which I
find in most of the essays which obviously respond to Kuenzli's brief), two essays on the 'readymades'
by Thierry de Duve and William Camfield finally stand out in the collection as determinedly
'historicist' in method. Perhaps because they are more deliberately restricted in scope, less self-
consciously 'revisionist', they seem to me to be the most successful in the book. They offer two
contrasting interpretations. De Duve places the concept of the 'readymade' firmly in the artistic
and social context of Munich in 1912, arguing that the complex relationship between the Kunstgewerbe
tradition and Functionalism in that city, a 'transfer of power from the former artist-artisan to the
new conceiver-projector', (p. 57) provided precisely the conditions in with the notion of the
'readymade ", with its apparent conflation of these positions, could be formulated, although Duchamp
would not put such ideas into practice until slightly later.

277
 BOOK REVIEWS

By contrast, Willian Camfield eschews a broad socio-cultural viewpoint for what I take to be
a studiedly unfashionable reconstruction of artistic intentions. Very briefly, he asserts that the choice
of the most infamous of all of Duchamp's 'readymades', the urinal entitled Fountain of 1917, was
based on aesthetic criteria and iconographic associations. This argues against an entire debate in
60s and 70s aesthetics which saw the 'readymade' as exemplifying a philosophic challenge, t:J against
Kuenzli, for whom beauty of form would presumably represent an 'essential' concept, and against
Duchamp himself who, on one occasion, famously declared: 'When I discovered readymades I thought
to discourage aesthetics . . . I threw the bottlerack and the urinal in their faces as a challenge and
now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty. 14 The latter objection is, however, dealt with by
Camfield in a recent book, in which the essay under consideration reappears in a lengthier form. 15
He establishes that, in the 1960s, Duchamp deliberately confused the issue out of exasperation at
the sudden critical attention accorded to him (this, of course, ties in with previous points made
about Duchamp's strategic duplicity). Given various eye-witness accounts of the period, claims
Camfield, we can be sure that, in 1917, Fountain was intended to allude, both formally and
iconographically, to Buddha and Madonna forms, such associations being borne out in Alfred
Stieglitz's carefully 'posed' photograph of the 'original', complete with shadowy 'veil' .16
This is a convincing argument. It should be pushed much further, though, in order to reclaim
the sense of the work as a sophisticated Dada joke at the expense of religion, not merely a
spiritualized/aestheticized item of hardware. Taking account of the clear Madonna allusion, what
should be made of the mock-signature, R. Mutt, applied graffiti-style to the urinal? In the past
Duchamp scholars have speculated as to whether he would have known of Freud's Leonardo analysis,
translated into English in 1916 by A.A. Brill; a likely hypothesis in view of the later L. H. O.O. Q
(1919) which seems to allude knowingly to Freud's account of Leonardo's latent homosexuality. 17
Whilst certain interpretations of 'Mutt' have already been forwarded.!" I am intrigued by the fact
that, in the course of his Leonardo case, Freud, over-ingeniously it turns out, linked the mystic
impregnation of the Virgin Mary in the Christian tradition with the impregnation, by the wind,
of an androgynously-formed vulture-headed goddess in Egyptian mythology; the name of thc goddess
being Mutt (linked by Freud to the German word for mother, Mutter). I" If, as seems plausible,
'Mutt' on Fountain partly derived from this source, the full extent of the blasphemy involved can
be gauged by pointing to a feature of Fountain that Camfield, in all modesty, appears to repress
(another 'blockage' perhaps); namely the hole at the base of this anthropomorphized Holy Mutter.
When we note that, in Stieglitz's photographic record of the work, the urinal was deliberately rotated
90 0 and placed on a plinth at about waist height, it should not be necessary to spell out the associations
further. We should, however, take account of the imagery of 'sexual plumbing' in Duchamp's earlier
works such as La Mariee. No doubt Duchamp would have relished the blasphemous possibilities for
psycho-sexual humour set up by Freud's convoluted erudition, to arrive, ironically, at the ultimate
Oedipal scenario. But for all the sophisticated blasphemy, to say nothing of the aesthetic dilemmas
posed by this 'ready maid', the urinal remains a supremely defiant example of the smutty, lavatorial
joke; the Name of the Mother scrawled in mock-teenage bravado; another example of Duchamp's
self reflexive examination of male sexuality.
Camfield thus stands accused of not pushing his ideas far enough, although this seems a less
heinous crime than the unfocused a-historicity of certain other essays which lose the sense of Dadaist
subversion in their rhetorical excess. This amounts to saying, I suppose, that 'good solid' art-historical
groundwork is still necessary. There are in fact a number of areas in Duchamp studies that still
need to be systematically covered; the early paintings, the Paul Matisse notes published in 1983
and the Boltes-en-ualisel" for instance. This book is somewhat disappointing in this respect, although
Hellmut Wohl's essay on the late etchings, Carol James's account of Duchamp's 'Music for the
Deaf' and Peter Read's essay on the Tzanck check are helpful for their insights into relatively unexplored
areas. The documents gathered at the end of the book, including letters exchanged between Duchamp
and the Arensbergs between 1917 and 1921 and an account of a piece of Duchamp ephemera, Des
Delices de Kermoune, are also fascinating. What is now badly needed, however, is a full length study
of Duchamp which convincingly contextualizes his de-essentializing project, rather than blithely using
it as a pretext for exercising contemporary critical strategies.
David Hopkins
University of Edinburgh

278
 BOOK REVIEWS
NOTES
I would like to express my thanks to my colleague, Elizabeth Cowling, for making a number of helpful
observations relating to this review.
R. Calvocoressi, Introduction to Picabia
187.9-1953, ex. cat., Scottish National Gallery
of Modern Art, Edinburgh, 1988. 12
2 ibid.
3 Lucy Lippard's 'Allreadymadesomuchoff
appeared in Marcel Duchamp, A. d'Harnoncourt
and K. McShine (ed.), New York and London, 13
1973. The other interpretations referred to are
A. Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel
Duchamp, London, 1969; M. Calvesi, Duchamp 14
Invisible, Rome, 1975; J. Golding, Duchamp: The
Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even, London, 15
1973. 16
4 For a critique of Nco-Expressionism in these
terms see H. Foster, 'The Expressive Fallacy' in
Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics, Port
Townsend, 1985. 17
5 See H. Foster (ed.), The Anti-aesthetic: Essays on
Postmodem Culture, Port Townsend, 1983.
6 The source for Duchamp's comment is
P. Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp ,
London, 1971, PI'. 89-90.
7 .I-F. Lyotard, 'Regles et paradoxes"; notes, trans. 18
P. Duboy, in P. Duboy, Lequeu: An Architectural
Enigma, London, 1986, p. 349 (originally 19
published in Babylone, no. 1, Paris, 1983).
Lyotard's fullest exposition of his views on
Duchamp occurs in Les Transformateurs Duchamp ;
Paris, 1977.
8 This information derives from .I. Golding,
Duchamp: The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors,
Even, 01'. cit., p. 76.
9 P. Duboy, Lequeu: An Architectural Enigma, 01'. 20
cit.
10 This is Ulf Linde's view. See his 'MARiee
CELibataire' in Hopps, Linde and Schwarz,
Marcel Duchamp: Readymades, Paris, 1964.
11 Presumably this aligns her reading with
Rosalind Krauss's much debated account of
'femininity under construction' in male
surrealist photography. See R. Krauss, 'Corpus
THE MORAL ORDERS
Richard Schofield
Bearers of Meaning. The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance
by John Onions, Princeton University Press: Princeton, New Jersey, 1988,351 1'1'., 203 b. & w. iIlus.,
£75
The theme of this book is of central importance in the history of western architecture and one that
has demanded from the author immense knowledge of material dating from about 650BC to the
279
delicti' in L 'Amour Fou: Photography and
Surrealism, Washington, 1985.
D. Hopkins, Hermeticism, Catholicism and Gender
as' Structure: A Comparative Study of Themes in the
Work of Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst, Ph.D.,
University of Essex, 1989, PI'. 29-30.
For an account of this debate see W. Camfield,
Marcel Duchamp/Fountain, Houston, 1989,
PI'. 119-26.
M. Duchamp, quoted by Hans Richter, Dada:
Art and Anti-Art, New York, 1965, PI'. 207-08.
W. Camfield, Marcel Duchamp/Fountain, 01'. cit.
W. Camfield, 'Marcel Duchamp's Fountain: Its
History and Aesthetics in the Context of 1917',
in Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century, 01'. cit.,
PI'. 74-9.
Sec T. Reff, 'Duchamp and Leonardo:
L.H.O.O.Q. - Alikcs', Art in America, vol. 65,
no. 1, Jan-Feb. 1977, PI'. 83-93. Sec also, J.
Spector's earlier 'Freud and Duehamp: The
Mona Lisa "Exposed" " Artforum, April 1968,
p. 55.
See W. Camfield, Marcel Duchamp/Fountain, 01'.
cit., PI'. 22-4.
Sec S. Freud, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of
his Childhood (1910), Standard Edition, Strachey
(ed.), vol. 11, reprinted in Pelican Freud
Library, vol. 14: Art and Literature,
Harmondsworth, 1985, Pl'. 178-81. This point
was originally suggested to me, in the course of
a seminar on Duchamp, by Paul Cordwell, a
student at Staffordshire Polytechnic.
Ecke Bonk has recently published a volume on
the Boites-en Valise: Marcel Duchamp: The Portable
Museum, London, 1989. The documentation in
this volume is extremely valuable, but very little
interpretative work is carried out. Dawn Adcs '
Marcel Duchamp 's Traoelling Box, London, 1982,
has SCHne interesting suggestions. despite its
limited format.