Elena Filipovic - Böcker

A new understanding of Marcel Duchamp and his significance as an artist through an investigation of his non-art activities archiving, art-dealing, and, most persistently, curating. This groundbreaking and richly illustrated book tells a new story of the twentieth century's most influential artist, recounted not so much through his artwork as through his non-art work. Marcel Duchamp is largely understood in critical and popular discourse in terms of the objects he produced, whether readymade or meticulously fabricated. Elena Filipovic asks us instead to understand Duchamp's art through activities not normally seen as artistic from exhibition making and art dealing to administrating and publicizing. These were no occasional pursuits; Filipovic argues that for Duchamp, these fugitive tasks were a veritable lifework. Drawing on many rarely seen images, Filipovic traces a variety of practices and projects undertaken by Duchamp from 1913 to 1969, from his invention of the readymade to the release of his last, posthumous work. She examines Duchamp's note writing, archiving, and quasi-photographic activities, which resulted in the Box of 1914 and the Green Box; his art dealing, marketing, and curating that culminated in experimental exhibitions for the Surrealists and his miniature museum, The Boite-en-valise; and his administrative efforts and clandestine maneuvering in order to posthumously embed his Etant donnes into a museum. Demonstrating how those activities reflect the artist's questioning of reproduction and originality, as well as photography and the exhibition, Filipovic proposes that Duchamp's non-art labor, and in particular his curatorial strategies, more than merely accompanied his more famous artworks; in a certain sense, they made them. Through Duchamp's elusive but vital activities he revised the idea of what a modern artist could be. With this fascinating book, Filipovic in turn revises the very idea of Duchamp.

This book is a journey into the cosmos of the Brazilian-Swiss artist Pedro Wirz, in which humans and animals, but also legendary creatures coexist. His artistic investigation of the systemic devastation of diversity witnessed across biological, cultural, and ethnic fronts today is based on scientific explorations, but also on his very own experiences within a particularly threatened ecosystem. The child of an agronomist and a biologist, Wirz spent most of his youth in the tropical Vale do Paraíba in Brazil. To this day, his fascination with science as much as with indigenous mythologies continues to inform his work. He creates his sculptures and installations from a mixture of organic materials like wax, earth, wood, clay and straw as well as artifacts of the consumer world such as toy cars, dolls, textile remnants, Lego, old clothes and electronic devices. However, Wirz is also interested in new, promising materials such as mushroom threads, bamboo or nanomaterials. With his combination of paradoxical elements from the remotest past and the foreseeable future, from technological reality and poetic imagination, Pedro Wirz brings back the original familiarity that used to exist between science and mythology.