Perhaps no twentieth-century artist utilized puns and linguistic ambiguity with greater effect—and greater controversy—than Marcel Duchamp. Through a careful "unpacking" of his major works, Dalia Judovitz finds that Duchamp may well have the last laugh. She examines how he interpreted notions of mechanical reproduction in order to redefine the meaning and value of the art object, the artist, and artistic production.

Judovitz begins with Duchamp's supposed abandonment of painting and his subsequent return to material that mimics art without being readily classifiable as such. Her book questions his paradoxical renunciation of pictorial and artistic conventions while continuing to evoke and speculatively draw upon them. She offers insightful analyses of his major works including The Large Glass, Fountain and Given 1) the waterfall, 2) the illuminating gas.

Duchamp, a poser and solver of problems, occupied himself with issues of genre, gender, and representation. His puns, double entendres, and word games become poetic machines, all part of his intellectual quest for the very limits of nature, culture, and perception. Judovitz demonstrates how Duchamp's redefinition of artistic modes of production through reproduction opens up modernism to more speculative explorations, while clearing the ground for the aesthetic of appropriation central to postmodernism.

Dalia Judovitz is Professor and Chair in the Department of French and Italian at Emory University. She is author of Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes: The Origins of Modernity (1988) and coeditor of Dialectic and Narrative (1993).

“In Unpacking Duchamp, Dalia Judovitz claims that Duchamp’s’ originality lies ‘in his recognition of the field of artistic production as a field of ready-mades.’ His work consists of the ‘deliberate staging and reappropriation of previous styles and artistic movements’ in such a way that is makes visible ‘the conditions of possibility of art’. This makes Duchamp the prototypical postmodernist: a man for whom the function of the artist is primarily curatorial--a matter of arranging pre-existent forms. This is reflected in Judovitz’s method, which itself involves extensive quotation, from Duchamp and from Duchamp scholars.”—Times Literary Supplement

"A sustained meditation on the meanings of Duchamp's works and the strange twists on his career. . . . An inventive . . . explication of Duchamp's major works—and a surprising number of his minor ones as well."—Washington City Paper

"The reason that Duchamp continues to be the subject of so many books is that he constructed his life and his work as a puzzle that invites continual reinterpretation. Judovitz is very good at revealing how Duchamp understood his audience not as passive consumers of his work but as active interpreters. . . . Out of this encounter Duchamp emerges from his modernist origins as a postmodernist artist par excellence, concerned with the dismantling and reformation of the conventions determining artistic enterprises."—ARLTS News Sheet

"A highly readable and interesting retake on the meaning(s) of Duchamp's work. . . . A worthy contribution to the ever-growing analysis of this enigmatic innovator."—Art Times

"The enigmatic Marcel Duchamp continues to challenge all who probe his secrets. Judovitz's daunting venture, to 'unpack' their protean implications, is . . . intricate and subtle."—Choice

"Transit, transitional, transition: Dalia Judovitz catches Marcel Duchamp on the run with his art in a suitcase and his thought all boxed and ready to go. . . . She demonstrates how the theme of transition, reappearing from work to work, makes each piece reproduce some other piece, while all continue to exemplify an original which can no longer be found and which has no creator."—Jean-François Lyotard