Duchamp and the Aesthetics of Chance

Marcel Duchamp is often viewed as an "artist-engineer-scientist," a kind of rationalist who relied heavily on the ideas of the French mathematician and philosopher Henri Poincaré. Yet in drawing a complete map of Duchamp and his multiple influences, a different portrait takes shape. In his 3 Standard Stoppages(1913-1914), a work that uses chance as an artistic medium, we see how far Duchamp subverted scientism in favor of a radical aesthetic and experimental vision.Unlike the Dadaists, Duchamp did more than dismiss or negate the authority of science. He pushed scientific rationalism to the point where its claims broke down and alternative truths were allowed to emerge. With humor and irony, Duchamp undertook a method of artistic research, reflection, and visual thought that focused less on beauty than the notion of the "possible." He became a passionate advocate of the power of invention and thinking things that had never been thought before. 3 Standard Stoppagesis the ultimate realization of the play between chance and dimension, visibility and invisibility, high and low art, and art and anti-art. Situating Duchamp firmly within the literature and philosophy of his time, Herbert Molderings recaptures the spirit of a frequently misread artist and his thrilling aesthetic of chance.

Herbert Molderings is a freelance scholar and professor of art history at the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. The author of eleven books he specializes in the history of modern and contemporary art, European photography of the twentieth century, and the workds of Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Umbo. Moderings is a former fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin and a former director of a research program at the Centre allemand d'histoire de l'art in Paris. He divides his time between Cologne and Paris.