Dipping into Duchamp

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‘A fun publication to dip into’ but that’s not enough, argues Howard Hollands

The Duchamp Dictionary by Thomas Girst

 As Jorge Luis Borges says in the prologue to El otro, el mismo: ‘It is often forgotten that [dictionaries] are artificial repositories, put together well after the languages they define. The roots of language are irrational and of a magical nature.’

Duchamp was endlessly playful and inventive in relation to categorization and definition, and spent much of his life and work avoiding this for himself.

So, how does The Duchamp Dictionary reflect this?

Whilst it can be seen as a fun publication to dip into, and that seems to be the intention, with entries ranging from the specific, such as those on Dada or Rotoreliefs, to the vague and bewildering, such as God or Stupidity or Cheese.  The book does seem to strain at being unorthodox in its selection of some of these alphabetic headings, as well as in the definitions themselves.

In both style and content it comes across as a rather poor pastiche of an old surrealist publication. This is underlined by the strangely psychedelic, 1970s album-cover style illustrations, in duotone, which are intended to ‘capture the irreverent spirit of the artist himself’, yet seem very staid and fixed as images, and totally at odds with the wonderfully slippery creativity of Duchamp. It is difficult to see how these illustrations add anything but an annoying distraction from a text that is already rather confused. It is as if someone has cut up a biography of the artist and pasted the bits under a random list of headings.

With the exception of the frontispiece photograph of Duchamp, there are no other images of the artist or his work.

Having said this, there are many useful references and cross-references within each snap shot ‘definition’. Yet there is an over- reliance on anecdote; and assumptions are being made all along about Duchamp in both his personal and professional life, often without any justification. There is something, too, of the ‘tittle-tattle’, with its chirpy, laid-back writing style.

I imagine the reason for this approach is to make the artist somehow more accessible, but Duchamp really does not need this. One gets the feeling that the concept for this ‘Dictionary’ was not really thought through.

In some ways this version does provide a popular format for an introduction to the artist, against the grain of recent highly academic research publications all finding yet another new angle on Duchamp. Many of these academic works provide references for the alphabetic entries, but are thrown together in a way that sometimes seems to diminish them and making little sense out of their original context.

Some helpful features in this book are the highlighting of quotes from Duchamp, and the use of bold for terms in the text that are themselves alphabetic headings elsewhere in the publication. The book is a sturdy hardback and has a useful bookmark ribbon.

The disappointment is compounded because the concept of a Duchamp Dictionary, or perhaps more so, a Thesaurus, is indeed fascinating, and a worthwhile project. Given the huge interest in Marcel Duchamp across all fields of the arts and sciences, and boosted through the current Richard Hamilton retrospective at Tate Modern, then clearly there is a market for publications about his life and work, but for me, this one misses its mark or perhaps did not have one to start with.

The Duchamp Dictionary  by Thomas Girst, illustrated by Luke Frost and Therese Vandling is published by Thames and Hudson. 224 pp. 65 duotone illus, £16.95. ISBN 978 0 500 239179