Hinge Pictures

Book excerpt: In 1960 George Heard Hamilton published the first complete typographic translation of Duchamp's Green Box in English. This landmark publication translated Duchamp's notes and conceptual ambitions for his masterwork, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. And as a book, designed to hinge at its binding, the work fulfilled Duchamp's conceptual proposal for art that would move from two- into three-dimensional space. Hinge Pictures is an artist's book in eight parts--a gorgeous, palimpsestual publication that layers the practices of Sarah Crowner, Julia Dault, Leslie Hewitt, Tomashi Jackson, Erin Shirreff, Ulla von Brandenburg, Adriana Varejão and Claudia Wieser over the pages of Duchamp's imagination. It is also a companion publication to an exhibition in eight parts, a confrontation with the patrimony of European modernism. A literal reading of Duchamp positions the Bride, a nude woman, suspended above a host of ogling bachelors. In his writing, Duchamp narrates both social and physical constraint ("The Bride accepts this stripping...") and formal liberation ("discover true form...develop the principle of the hinge."). The artists of Hinge Pictures use formal constraint--a commitment to abstraction--in a demonstration of social liberation. With a Swiss binding that unveils the spine of the book and multiple vellum overlays that create layered interlocutions, the book's physical qualities mirror its conceptual occupations.