Duchamp’s Telegram

In this non-linear, retrospective study, Duve addresses the postmodernist pronouncement of the end of modernity, using the trope that Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (a porcelain urinal), created in 1917, was a telegram to the art world and that, as a message, it has received a warm reception since the 1960s. Duve complicates the sender-receiver model by rejecting the author-function and tracing the impact of the work so far in the future. Duve challenges the opinion the urinal, which garnered increasing fame after it was submitted unsuccessfully to an open exhibition, meant anything can be art. He notes that the controversy surrounding the readymade brought to the fore contrary notions about the universality and nonuniversality of art. With the latter, one is asked to distinguish between ideas: Anything can be art; anti-art; and art as embodied in the “art-in-general” system, a term which Duve coins for what seems prescient. The rigorous explication of the historical context for the Fountain and its later critical reception prefaces a nuanced discussion of the careers of Bernar Venet, Nahum Tevet, and Marcel Broodthaer – and other artists. Duve is successful in showing that these artists' work achieved effects complementary to those achieved by the Fountain. Recommended.

* Choice *
With impressive historical breadth and pinpoint precision, Thierry de Duve makes the case for Duchamp’s Telegram. His book revisits the modern condition of art to which we’ve become inured, illuminating aspects to which we’ve remained blind. An exhilarating stream of intellectual insights exposes the limitations of our current form of institutional critique. By de Duve’s reasoning, the delayed transit from Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain to Marcel Broodthaers’s museology brought one cultural era to a close and opened another. The characters and concepts are familiar but not their unrealized significance. De Duve gives modern Western art a new history – culturally more comprehensive than the old ones. * Richard Shiff, Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art, The University of Texas at Austin *
This stunning book has all the precision and force of the artwork at its center. De Duve recovers Duchamp’s 1917 Fountain as an extraordinary signal, previously lost in a sea of noise, that forever changed art – overturning myths of artistic intention, anthropocentrism, and symbolic and expressive “content” and ushering in a different world in which art has no limits. It is a clarion call to reassess modernity and periodization itself in order to better understand the present. * Michelle Kuo, Marlene Hess Curator of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA *
Thierry de Duve’s new book, Duchamp’s Telegram, is the latest brilliant installment in the author’s lifelong project of reinterpreting Duchamp for contemporary thought. It would be impossible to summarize in a few lines de Duve’s arguments on behalf of Duchamp’s epochal significance, but suffice it to say that the freshness and originality of his claims about what he calls the Art-in-General system are massively in evidence throughout his text. And as always de Duve’s writing is marked by a sense of his delight in the play of his ideas, a quality that makes reading him a rare pleasure. * Michael Fried, J. R. Herbert Boone Emeritus Professor of Humanities and the History of Art, Johns Hopkins University, and author of French Suite: A Book of Essa