Dear Rhonda,

Who said, he hated repetition? Exactly — that was the crucial point in staring at Marcel Duchamp’s work for almost one century. The solution does not lie in an agreement of the scholars, but in the deconstruction of this vain palace of interpretations. You are doing the main job. Just looking at the phenomena and describing the context — the context not of the original work, but of our own knowledge. It does not matter what his intentions were, but what we can understand. We all know that Marcel Duchamp will be of importance still in the next decades, much more than all the Picassos. But to realize this, someone had to come and tell us: He did not do the thing as he was declaring and explaining to them. We have to think on our own (Oh, gosh) — that’s the difficult thing. For this reason you are discovering seemingly simple things, such as the “Green Box” surprises and the 3 Stoppages (which really tell us “Stop the pages of art history”). Is it all so obvious, but not for blind men. Our beloved Marcel Duchamp is falling apart — that makes him hateable, but interesting again and again.

Regards,

Prof. Dr. Thomas Zaunschirm
Department of Art History, Essen University, Germany

p.s.- Many congratulations for your online-magazine. One could not wish for more.

Some Duchamp-related postcards from Thomas Zaunschirm:

• Figure 1
• Figure 2
• Figure 3

• Figure 4
• Figure 5
• Figure 6