The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp

by T.J. Demos

Marcel Duchamp was a famous expatriate, a wanderer, living and working in Paris, NewYork, and Buenos Aires and escaping from each in turn. But exile, argues T. J. Demos in thisinnovative reading, is more than a fact in Duchamp's biography. Exile--in the artist's own words, a"spirit of expatriation"--infuses Duchamp's entire artistic practice.. Duchamp's readymadeconstructions, his installations for surrealist exhibitions in Paris and New York, and his"portable museum" (the suggestively named La boîte-en-valise ), Demoswrites, all manifest, define, and exploit the terms of exile in multiple ways. Created while theartist was living variously in New York, Buenos Aires, and occupied France during the globalcatastrophes of war and fascism, these works express the anguish of displacement and celebrate thefreedom of geopolitical homelessness. The "portable museum," a suitcase containingminiature reproductions of Duchamp's works, for example, represented a complex meditation--bothcritical and joyful--on modern art's tendency toward itinerancy, whereas Duchamp's 1942 installationdesign entangling a New York gallery in a mile of string announced the dislocated status that manyexiled surrealists wished to forget. Duchamp's exile, writes Demos, defines a new ethics ofindependent life in the modern age of nationalism and advanced capitalism, offering a precursor toour own globalized world of nomadic subjects and dispersed experience.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction

303 pages, Hardcover

First published July 31, 2007

About the author

T. J. Demos is an award-winning writer on contemporary art, global politics, and ecology. He is Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture, at University of California, Santa Cruz, and Founder and Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. He writes widely on the intersection of contemporary art, global politics, and ecology, and his essays have appeared in magazines, journals, and catalogues worldwide. His published work centers broadly on the conjunction of art and politics, examining the ability of artistic practice to invent innovative and experimental strategies that challenge dominant social, political, and economic conventions.