Marcel Duchamp, Zabriskie Gallery, New York - Optics, Exhibition Installations, Portable Museums

Marcel Duchamp on Display: Optics, Exhibition Installations, Portable Museums
Zabriskie Gallery, New York
March 22 - May 5, 2001

Zabriskie Gallery presents Marcel Duchamp on Display: Optics, Exhibition Installations, Portable Museums, an installation of objects, texts, photographs, and drawings from the 1920s to the 1960s that trace Marcel Duchamp's preoccupation with how we look at art, its display, collection, and exhibition. Working as a "generator-arbitrator," he was instrumental in curating the International Surrealist Exhibitions of 1938, 1942, 1947, and 1959. Epitomized in works such as his miniature museum - the Box in a Valise -, Marcel Duchamp's ideas of how perception is effected through display continue to show their panoramic influence on contemporary art making, viewing, and showing.

Purveyor of optical illusions, collector, draughtsman, curator: one is hardly used to these categories to describe Marcel Duchamp, one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. Zabriskie Gallery explores some of Marcel Duchamp's more curious personae through a less examined optic: his sustained preoccupation with the art exhibition and questions of display. The French-born, American-by-adoption artist is perhaps best known for his enigmatic opus on glass, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (also known as the Large Glass), or his elevation of ordinary "readymade" objects to works of art (urinal, snow shovel, bottle drier, typewriter cover...). But less known is the Duchamp that spent the 1920s and some of the 1930s constructing swirling, pulsating optical devices, and then went on to challenge ways of experiencing the art exhibition when he curated and conceptualized idiosyncratic, chaotic exhibitions for the Surrealist movement beginning in the late 1930s. And, during this same period, he began a project that would keep him busy throughout the Second World War and into his exile in the United States: making painstakingly detailed, miniaturized copies of "approximately all the things" he had produced and boxing them up into more than 300 Lilliputian retrospectives (each Box in a Valise was, as the artist admitted, a kind of "portable museum"). These various works are not as unrelated as they might seem, concerned as they all are with the dialectics of seeing and displaying, the viewer and perception, and ultimately, the museum and how and what it makes us see. The exhibition at Zabriskie Gallery turns on these various pieces - showing sketches, photographs of exhibition installations, miniature museums, miniaturized objects, boxes of carefully reproduced notes, optical contraptions, catalogue designs...works from the 1920s to the 1960s that are at once ironic and incisive, humorous and far-reaching, meticulously crafted and serially reproduced. Together, these objects put Duchamp's concern with display on display.

A catalogue is published on the occasion of this exhibition, containing reproductions with an accompanying essay by the exhibition's guest curator, Elena Filipovic.

ZABRISKIE GALLERY
41 East 57 Street, New York, NY 10022
www.zabriskiegallery.com