Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare

by Octavio Paz, Donald Gardner (translator), Rachael Phillips

The esteemed Nobel Prize-winning poet offers a portrait of Marcel Duchamp as a great cautionary figure in public culture, citing the philosopher's influential beliefs about spiritual freedom and the encroachment of criticism, science, and art in today's world. Reprint.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Art History, Biography, France, Poetry, Criticism

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

Octavio Paz Lozano was a Mexican writer, poet, and diplomat, and the winner of the 1982 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature ("for impassioned writing with wide horizons, characterized by sensuous intelligence and humanistic integrity.")

Reviews

[Priscila Jordão · Rating 5 out of 5]

Octavio Paz reviews here wonderfully the work of Marcel Duchamp, focusing his analysis on "The Large Glass", which is a painting in glass that's considered Duchamp's masterpiece.

In my view, Duchamp's works are so complex and deep - although they may look senseless and simple at first sight - that the job of a good critic like Paz is essential to our fully understanding of them.

Paz proves himself to be an artist as great as Duchamp as he enters the artist's universe and illuminates Duchamp's mysteries.

[Namrirru · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're looking for entertaining light reading material, this is not the book for you. "Appearance stripped bare" is mainly about one work of art, the whole book, an analysis of one work. It's dense and convoluted. Gombrich, this is not. This is Octavio Paz on Marcel Duchamp.

But if you are an art enthusiast, this will forever change your view of art. It will warp your mind and give you some of that "pink floating substance" for fodder and fuel.

[Moira Cohn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This work is something between a meditation and a fever dream about a society where the artist philosopher is indeed king.

[Özge Günaydın · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nefis bir kitap herkese tavsiye ederim
Sadece sanat ve sanatçı değil basitlik sadelik derin düşünme üzerine detaylı analizler içeriyor. Özellikle 1920 Li yıllar ve sonrasında sanat üzerinden düşünsel eleştirileri ele alıyor.

[Germaine · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5*

[Kirti Upreti · Rating 4 out of 5]

Find someone who understands you the way Octavio Paz understands Marcel Duchamp.

Duchamp, we all know, is the epitome of enigma and incredibility - the more you try to know him, the more you find yourself astounded. The last choice you have is to become a devotee and concede by attributing Duchamp's brilliance to some preternatural phenomenon.

But Paz isn't like the rest. Instead of being a devotee, he is Duchamp's equal - a soulmate in essence. He writes with an overtly dispassionate objectivity and yet the depth he fathoms to touch the most intimate details of Duchamp's mind evokes eroticism. To see two minds meld together in such a passionate embrace is far too rare an occurence in the world we live in.

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

i am currently on a streak of reading books by poets about visual artists...john yau's in the realm of appearances on the art of andy warhol is also recommended.

[Neil Howe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hilarious. Paz channels Duchamp's irony effortlessly. Reveals an approachable take on Duchamp, one of the most difficult artists and thinkers to reconcile.

[Phillip]

Surprise pick up in a used bookstore, really curious to read Paz on Duchamp.

[Randy Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Critics who loved Duchamp’s ‘Large Glass’ laughed and scoffed when they saw ‘Given’ unveiled after his death in 1969. The ‘Large Glass’ was esoteric and encoded while ‘Given’ was like a carny freak show equipped with a peephole, a naked female body and fake edenic backdrop.

Here Paz collects and develops two previously published essays about Duchamp and intriguingly ties together these works into a single vision.

The quest for love is closely intertwined with the quest for knowledge. The pursuit of both is glorious, multifaceted and ridiculous in the best possible way. The ‘Large Glass’ is the artists’ design of this pursuit and the hinge or pivot upon which all Duchamp’s artistic ideas come together. The posthumous work, ‘Given’ takes these ideas and presents the results as a fever dream viewable only by one spectator through the peephole at a time. The spectator gasps at what ‘he’ sees and asks, ‘what am I looking at?’ Duchamp answers by saying that is for the spectator to figure out.

[Kenton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Duchamp creates a Body with no Organs in 1915, decides it’s definitely unfinished in 1923. Paz expresses the concept of the Bride as a desiring machine and its cyclical processes. It seems Duchamp was more interested in the ‘hinge principle’ where Observation produces an illusion of reality, when he’s simply highlighting the breaks (the piece was literally broken in transit!) and flows of a society that he can see happening in his own community of artists. Duchamp was an interpreter, not simply a painter or surrealist, and this piece defines that as it is accompanied by his additional boxes of writing and instructions.

[Muthee BM · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marcel Duchamp remains one of the most important artists of any time and Paz does a brilliant job of reading Duchamp’s monumental painting, The Large Glass. His translation, because that’s what the essay is, looks at Duchamp’s meta-irony and humour as a critique of criticism.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

A critical guide to the elusive, and often tangled, strata beneath Duchamp’s acclaimed painting-in-glass. Part thinking man with a hand on his chin, part blissed-out stream of conscious.

[Andrea Samorini]

___________________________________
FROM BOOK: Artisti si diventa (Angela Vettese)

[Cris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un libro interesante, pero no lo que tenia en mente. Paz habla sobre la covalencia temática en el Arte de Duchamp, y aunque esto es significativo, su libro se limita al simbolismo que también se puede hayar en Letras (poesía, principalmente). No desarrolla el significado covalente especifico a ninguna obra.

Interesting, but not what I was hoping for. He doesn't expand on the double meaning of The Bride but merely limits himself to comparing that duality in the art of writing.

[Ryan Watkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book on Duchampian meta-irony.

[Heidi]

Toivun.