Book Launch – Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés by Julian Jason Haladyn / Art Metropole
Please join us to celebrate the launch of the latest title from the One Work series Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés by Julian Jason Haladyn.
788 King Street
West 2nd Floor
Toronto
Canada
M5V 1N6
Following Marcel Duchamp’s death in 1968, the Philadelphia Museum of Art unveiled an installation on which he had been working secretly for twenty years. Étant donnés – known in English as Given, or, literally, ‘being given’ – consists of a small room with a locked wooden door; through a peephole in this door one can see a landscape within which a naked female figure reclines, her arm outstretched, holding a lamp.
In this book, Julian Jason Haladyn argues that Duchamp’s intention in his final artwork was not, as many have maintained, to provide a neat summation of his career, but the opposite: to question and even undermine definitive readings of his own previous work. Duchamp’s engagement with his legacy 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, among others, Michael Asher, Marcel Broodthaers and Andrea Fraser.