From fetishism to eroticism (by way of Dadaism and Surrealism), there is but a single step… a step taken with gusto, through provocation, subversion, and puns, by Marcel Duchamp. “Everything is based on an erotic atmosphere,” the master of subversion declared in 1967. From this eroticism, “at the heart of everything”—which all “people understand,” “throughout the world”—he created the glorious successor to “Symbolism, Romanticism,” and other “isms” of the past, to inject tactile sensuality into the visual arts, petrified in the sacredness of imagery.
It is this desacralization of the image that the exhibition at the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, entrusted to one of the great connoisseurs of Duchamp's work, Paul B. Franklin, recounts in detail through the prism of the fetishism so displayed and claimed by the inventor of the readymade.
From the Bottle Rack transformed into a fetish object in 1914 to the fetishization of his own miniaturized works (in the famous Box-in-a-Suitcase), from the Mona Lisa in drag to highly tactile materials (a breast made of foam rubber and velvet, tulle, fur, black vinyl…) sensualized to the extreme, vandalism and puns go hand in hand in this piquant tabula rasa of prudish old art. “Please Touch: Marcel Duchamp and the Fetish” – Gallery
Thaddaeus Ropac
7, rue Debelleyme, Paris 3rd
Until January 29
Stéphanie Dulout
