Preamble
(p. 185)
The six essays that have been collected here were written between 2013
and 2017. Half of them deal with important though hitherto ignored
or only rudimentarily discussed aspects of the connection between
Joseph Beuys, Max Bill,
Fischli | Weiss, and
Ai Weiwei and the various
artistic concepts of
Marcel
Duchamp. The essay “Joseph Beuys—The
Silence Of Marcel Duchamp Is Overrated: A Misunderstanding,” written
as early as 2013, describes, for example, how Beuys's most famous
performance on German television (ZDF) in 1964 came about and goes
on to explain why its direct reference to the then suddenly prevailing
myth—namely that Duchamp had long since given up the production
of art, adopting silence as his ultimate artistic concept—was based on
a calamitous misunderstanding. The text “Max Bill, Fischli | Weiss, and
Marcel Duchamp” tells us why it was not Walter
Hopps who mounted
Duchamp's first solo exhibition in a public institution but Max Bill,
and also how familiar Peter Fischli and David Weiss had actually been
with this now forgotten exhibition, and that, in 1984, they appropriated
Duchamp's unrealized idea for a work that was to be titled
Équilibre
and used it for their own artistic purposes. “Hanging Man In Porcelain:
Ai Weiwei's ‘Homages' to Marcel Duchamp” examines why this
famous Chinese artist and dissident cites Marcel Duchamp in almost
all his major works. The fourth essay—“The Green Ray”—is the first to
examine the influence of Jules Verne's same-titled novel on Duchamp's
major idea of the Bride and the Bachelors in
The Large Glass (fig. 21).
The fifth essay—“Fischli | Weiss: Suddenly This Overview”—analyzes
the important substantive components of two clay sculptures from
this early major work of the famous Swiss artist duo, while the sixth
essay—“Always Double And
Infrathin”—deals concisely and pointedly
with the theme of duplication and the idea of
inframince in Duchamp's
great legacy, the diorama
Étant donnés (figs. 19a and 19b), a work that
has for years played an important role in Stefan Banz's theoretical and artistic explorations.
