Special deluxe edition with an original photogravure by Cerith Wyn Evans.
In a remarkable tête-bêche illustrated volume from UK publisher Urbanomic, philosopher Éric Alliez, in collaboration with art historian Jean-Claude Bonne, rethinks Duchamp's legacy in relation to contemporary art and the image, psychoanalysis and gender. Duchamp Looked At (From the Other Side) reconsiders the problems and motivations of "Duchamp-thought" through a close analysis of the artist's entire oeuvre, while Duchamp With (and Against) Lacan simultaneously pursues Duchamp's love of wordplay and tracks his trans-formation into Rrose Sélavy. Revelling in contradiction, unmaking sense and disrupting gender and genre, Alliez's "essay in mutology" gives us a queer Duchamp who defies all (psycho)analysis.
This strictly limited edition of 68+1 features a fine photogravure created for the occasion by Cerith Wyn Evans, the first time the artist has worked in this medium. It has been printed by Paupers Press in London using the traditional hand-pulled method. The signed and numbered photogravure sits atop the book in a bespoke presentation box featuring foil block debossed lettering that spells out a cryptic formula extracted from the book.
Cerith Wyn Evans's beautifully fine-toned image captures an instant of modest resplendency and luminous encryption. An ensemble of glass objects and mirrored surfaces on a mantelpiece produce a dazzling refracted dance of overlapping and intersecting planes of light around a set of photographic portraits documenting an obscure episode in Welsh history.
This unique edition is the fruit of a longstanding complicity between an artist and an author who share a deep immersion in the history of the avant-garde and a delight in wordplay, citation, reference, and untimely conjunctions. The token of a friendship, of a continuing dialogue haunted by the eternally revenant duo Marcel and Rrose…and nourished by Wyn Evans's "queering of the art of the future anterior", as Alliez writes in his 2020 text "Cerith, Even, 'So to Speak': Portrait of the Artist in Neon".
Limited edition of 68+1 copies.
Close to Félix Guattari and
Gilles Deleuze, who directed his doctorate, Éric Alliez is a professor in the
philosophy department of Paris 8. He has led an international career that has taken him to teach in Rio de Janeiro (State University), Vienna (Academy), Karlsruhe (Hoschschule), and London (Middlesex, then Kingston), where he still teaches. He is the author of many major works of philosophy and multiple writings between art and philosophy.
Born 1958 in Llanelli, Wales, Cerith Wyn Evans lives and works in London.
