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Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain

One Hundred Years Later

  • Book
  • © 2018

Overview

Authors:
  1. Robert Kilroy

    1. Université Paris Sorbonn, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

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Table of contents (13 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xiii
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  2. Étant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau/2° le gaz d’éclairage

    • Robert Kilroy
    Pages 1-11

  3. Reopening “The Richard Mutt Case”: Fountain in 2017

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 13-13
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    2. Art History and Psychoanalysis Today

      • Robert Kilroy
      Pages 15-25

    3. Duchamp with Lacan through Žižek

      • Robert Kilroy
      Pages 27-37

  4. Revisiting the Crime Scene: Fountain’s Reception

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 39-39
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    2. Art Historian as Psychoanalyst as Detective

      • Robert Kilroy
      Pages 41-46

    3. The Facts and Curious Features of the Case

      • Robert Kilroy
      Pages 47-75

  5. Retracing the Crime: Fountain Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 77-77
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    2. The Artist

      • Robert Kilroy
      Pages 79-88

    3. The Onlooker

      • Robert Kilroy
      Pages 89-98

    4. The Spectator

      • Robert Kilroy
      Pages 99-108

    5. Tasty Affairs

      • Robert Kilroy
      Pages 109-118

  6. Resolving the Crime: Fountain’s Legacy

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 119-119
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    2. Posterity

      • Robert Kilroy
      Pages 121-129

    3. The Lighthouse

      • Robert Kilroy
      Pages 131-140

    4. The One-Man Show and the Dealer

      • Robert Kilroy
      Pages 141-149

    5. The Art Historian

      • Robert Kilroy
      Pages 151-160

  7. Back Matter

    Pages 161-168
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Keywords

About this book

This book marks the centenary of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain by critically re-examining the established interpretation of the work. It introduces a new methodological approach to art-historical practice rooted in a revised understanding of Lacan, Freud and Slavoj Žižek. In weaving an alternative narrative, Kilroy shows us that not only has Fountain been fundamentally misunderstood but that this very misunderstanding is central to the work’s significance. The author brings together Duchamp’s own statements to argue Fountain’s verdict was strategically stage-managed by the artist in order to expose the underlying logic of its reception, what he terms ‘The Creative Act.’ This book will be of interest to a broad range of readers, including art historians, psychoanalysts, scholars and art enthusiasts interested in visual culture and ideological critique.

Reviews

“Kilroy makes a strong case that ‘Duchamp’s intention with Fountain was to expose the mechanism at work in the reception of his oeuvre’, at least as measured by the artist’s statements. He offers a timely interpretation of Duchamp, who emerges from Kilroy’s analysis as an artist single-mindedly focused on the creation and reception of his own self-image.” (Melissa Venator, H-France Review, Vol. 19 (21), January, 2019)​ “This book, timely in every sense, brilliantly shows how Marcel Duchamp’s creative strategy over the period 1910s to 1960s resulted in an opus that did more than merely meet the eye. For Duchamp’s notorious ready-made Fountain (1917), visually provocative though it was, is but one element in a complex enterprise implicating the object of art in wider temporal and structural relations. Aptly adopting the framework of crime detection, Kilroy’s investigation discovers new clues to Duchamp’s work.” (David Scott, Professor of French, Textual and Visual Studies, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. Author of Pictorialist Poetics: Poetry and the Visual Arts in 19th-Century France, 1988) “Lacan and Duchamp—it's what Slavoj Žižek would call a ‘short circuit’: reading a canonical text through the lens of a minor and hopefully producing some kind of a charge. And this is what Robert Kilroy does here: read Duchamp through the lens of—ahem—Lacan and Žižek. But eventually the tables are turned and he ends up reading Lacan and Žižek through Duchamp. Here is where we really begin to look through the keyhole of the door of Étant donnés.” (Rex Butler, Professor of Art History, Monash University. Author of Slavoj Žižek: Live Theory, 2005)

Authors and Affiliations

  • Université Paris Sorbonn, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

    Robert Kilroy

About the author

Robert Thomas Kilroy is Lecturer of Art History and Applied Foreign Languages at University Paris Sorbonne, Abu Dhabi.

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