16 May 2026
Saw the Duchamp show at MoMA while I was in New York. Master puppeteer, seems like he operated with such an unfathomably wide top-down view of his context that he transcended it entirely. A pretty amazing feeling to walk chronologically through the unmatchably rigorous, curious, and poetic path he charted. I got the sense that his constant iterating on the forms he obsessed over was his way of rotating them around a kind of internalized examination axis to spatially project and then destabilize their measurable characteristics. Which generated a metaphysical language that allowed him to endlessly probe how objects relate to each other and to us as seeing and sensing bodies. In space, in time, in the imagination. And that language, seen in its entirety, felt surprisingly generous. I think because it was always pointed inward. Used to satisfy something that may have manifested as a disruption because of how original it was, but was meant to expand rather than sabotage. That's a long way of saying he was ahead of his time and was graceful in proving/sharing that.
Some personal favorite moments: one of his small Rotoreliefs—cerulean blue/white/a kind of tangerine orange, the central form a hook-shaped line-drawn half light bulb with dashes shooting off of it as implied light rays. Delicate, alive, absent of the thing it represents yet conjuring it all the same. And a 1956 small ink drawing of a jacket on two pieces of what looked like transparent tracing paper, his tiny handwritten name on the topmost piece floating over the space representing where the name tag would be on the bottom piece. The inner lining of the jacket represented by grids drawn on to that same bottom layer—simple suspension, non-duality in one choice. To say nothing of the Swift Nudes (escaping, illuminating, darting, receding). The dynamism exceeded my expectations, and they were lofty.