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The Secret of Marcel Duchamp [VHS]

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When Marcel Duchamp died in 1968, he hadn't exhibited a new work in over 40 years, having apparently given up creation for chess, art-dealing and installing exhibitions. For the last decades of his life, however, he was working on an installation which, when posthumously exhibited, would become one of the most celebrated, controversial and enigmatic artworks of the 20th century. Many critics felt it denied everything the anti-art Dadaist had striven for. The 'Etant Donnee' consists of a peephole looking onto a partially obscured naked woman lying on a field in a strange landscape. This film gives some of the personal background to the work. An informative introduction to Duchamp's art as a whole, it uses interveiws with friends, fellow artists, historians, relatives and survivors to contextualise the piece in Duchamp's oeuvre (the lamp held in the model's hand, for instance, is one of his earliest ready-mades) and chart its probable source, a passionate affair with the wife of a Brazilian diplomat, herself a sculptor of no mean talent. There is some delightful interview footage of the mischievous poseur, anecdotes about his life-long attempts to wind up the art establishment and insights into his work that show it was much more personal and emotionally driven than his reputation for coneptual waggery might suggest. There is a tendency to redundant literalism in the filming, however: wherever reference is made to Duchamp's contemptuous dismissal of his early figurative work as 'swimming lessons', we get repeated shots of a young man in a pool. Er...