Duchamp’s Metacriticism: Restoring the Post-Perspective Vision through Anti-Retinalism and Optical Experiments I

This paper attempts to approach Duchamp’s practice, which can be evaluated as the most radical and subversive attempt even within the modernist tradition, from the perspective of his metacriticism of modern perspective. Duchamp, who had an interest in movement that began with chess and a anti-retinal attitude, attempted to practice the imagination of actions by the brain, and had an attitude of metacriticizing modern perspective with an interest in anamorphic perspective of the Renaissance and Baroque and multidimensional mathematics. With an artistic methodology influenced by Raymond Roussel, he went beyond the denial of retinal art to question even the representation of ideas, and in the process, he moved beyond painting and abandoned all forms of artistic expression up to that point through the use of ‘organs’, rotating optical devices, ‘precision painting’, and glass media. This paper analyzes Duchamp’s experiments, which he had approached with a meta-critical attitude toward modern perspective in his early artistic practice, through his works from 1911 to 1915 in order to examine what aesthetic thoughts he used to critically review them, and argues that this became the foundation of his aesthetic thoughts on the “eye as a desiring body” that later developed into his “Oculism” and “Precision Optics” series, and that it was a practice that awakened both the concept and potential of new cinema to artists after the 1950s, when Duchamp was rediscovered.