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Art Metropole is pleased to launch Marcel
Duchamp: Étant donnés,
Julian Jason
Haladyn's illustrated study of Marcel Duchamp's final
work.
Following Marcel Duchamp's death in 1968, the Philadelphia Museum of Art
stunned the art world by unveiling a project on which he had been working
secretly for twenty years, long after he had supposedly given up art for
chess. Installed by the museum curators with the assistance of Duchamp's
widow Teeny and stepson Paul Matisse, Étant
donnés (known in English as Given,
or, literally, "being given") consists of a small room with a
locked wooden door; through a peephole can be seen a landscape of trees, with
a naked female figure at the front, her arm outstretched, holding a lamp.
In this illustrated study, Julian Haladyn argues that Duchamp's intention in
this final piece was similar to Raymond Roussel's in How I Wrote Certain of My Books:
not, as many have maintained, to provide a neat summation of his career, but
the opposite-to open his artwork (which he had made sure was fully
represented in the Philadelphia Museum of Art's collection) to endless
interpretation and reinterpretation. Duchamp's engagement with his legacy (by
orchestrating first the purchase of his work and then the donation of those
purchases to the museum) is a significant historical development in the
critical relationship between artists and the institution of art-a
relationship that would later be further explored by such artists as Andrea
Fraser and Michael Asher. Additionally, Haladyn sees that the staging of Étant donnés-especially
the way that Duchamp forces viewers to become aware of the act of looking and
their bodily presence in the gallery space-foreshadowed strategies used by
Minimalism as well as installation, spectatorship, and institutional
critique.
Please join us on Saturday
May 8th, from 1-3 p.m.
Julian Jason Haladyn is a Canadian writer and artist currently living in
London, Ontario.
He has contributed articles, as solo author and collaboratively with Miriam
Jordan, to such publications as The Burlington Magazine, Drain: Journal of
Contemporary Art and Culture, Entertext, Parachute, C Magazine, On Site
Review and the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, as well as a
chapter to Stanley Kubrick: Essays on His Films and Legacy (McFarland and
Company, 2007). Haladyn's solo and collaborative work has been exhibited
internationally, including in the traveling exhibitions 'Oh, So Iroquois'
curated by Ryan Rice and 'Titles' curated by Yam Lau. He presently teaches
courses in Visual Arts at The University of Western Ontario, where he is
completing a PhD in Theory and Criticism.
For more information contact (416) 703 4400 or [log in to unmask]
Art Metropole is a non-profit artist-run
centre incorporated in 1974. We'd like to thank the Canada Council for the
Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the City of Toronto through the Toronto Arts
Council, as well as private donors for their support.
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