Matt and Andrea begin a new series of reading group podcasts on sculpture. In the first episode we talk about Helen Molesworth’s ‘Duchamp by Hand, Even’ from 2005 where she upends the received narrative of how Duchamp’s readymades from the 1910s led to the dematerialised conceptual practices of the 1960s and beyond. By focusing on the handmade qualities of Duchamp’s later work such as the three erotic objects from the 1950s, Étant donnés (1946-66) and the crafted replicas by which modern audiences know the readymades, Molesworth discovers a ‘wrinkle’ in the received version of art history. Molesworth’s text allows Matt and Andrea to think about contemporary art’s renewed interest in the handmade, the crafted, and the handheld, as well as sculpture’s relationship to touch and desire.
Below are the two texts we looked at for this podcast, with links to download a PDF of each text.
Molesworth, Helen. ‘Duchamp by Hand, Even’. In Part Object Part Sculpture. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005. Download PDF.
Molesworth, Helen. ‘My Funny Valentine: Étant Donnés’. Artforum International, New York, 2010. Download PDF.