Infinite Regress

There is not one Marcel Duchamp but several. Within his oeuvre Duchamp practiced a variety of modernist idioms and invented an array of contradictory personas: artist and art dealer conceptualist and craftsman chess champion and dreamer dandy and recluse.. In Infinite Regress David Joselit considers the plurality of identities and practices within Duchamp''s life and art between 1910 and 1941 conducting a synthetic reading of his early and middle career. Taking into account underacknowledged works and focusing on the conjunction of the machine and the commodity in Duchamp''s art Joselit notes a consistent opposition between the material world and various forms of measurement inscription and quantification. Challenging conventional accounts he describes the readymade strategy not merely as a rejection of painting but as a means of producing new models of the modern self.