Ursula Panhans-Bühler

Gegeben sei: die Gabe
Duchamps Flaschentrockner in der vierten Dimension
VOLUME 176

Humor as a Strategy of Assertion in the Art of Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp’s (1887–1968) Bottle Rack has long been canonized as a central work in the history of art. It is the point of departure for Ursula Panhans-Bühler’s reconstruction of Duchamp’s tireless search for places where our world abuts the four-dimensional continuum. In some ways a very precise undertaking, this quest also evinces humoristic and pataphysical features. Duchamp’s oeuvre defies conventional categories. Panhans-Bühler demonstrates that humor is a necessary artistic strategy of assertion allowing him to build bridges between the dimensions in a witty in-between mode. Tying together aphorisms, wordplay, and the air of the spoken word in surprising conjunctions, she reports from the abysses charted by the work and observations of an artist who, more than any other, changed the paradigms of creative practice.

Ursula Panhans-Bühler (b. 1944) is an art critic and professor emerita of the history of modern art at Kunsthochschule Kassel. She is a founding member of the Society of Shadow Accelerators and partnership advisor of the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing, China.