Snail Time

In this conversation about Marcel Duchamp, held in 2018 at the City University of New York, Mary Ann Caws takes her cue from the impressions she received a year earlier by visiting Pablo Echaurren Du champ magnetique exhibition at the Scala Contarini del Bovolo, in Venice, where the public was invited to climb up and down a dizzying spiral staircase, in homage to the work that made the author of Nu descendant un escalier. According to this exhibition concept, the nude ( nu in French) became by assonance we ( nous in French), alluding to the fact that the visitors involved in the route had to be not just spectators but protagonists of the event. By evoking this experience, Mary Ann Caws triggers a series of mental short circuits, analogies, quotes, flashbacks between imagined and lived, which attest to the vitality of the Duchampian legacy.In appendix we find Duchamperie, aphorisms, observations and puns written and illustrated by Pablo Echaurren since 1977, when he temporarily stopped being a painter to become an activist as part of the Metropolitan Indians (Italian far-left protest movement during 1976 and 1977) using Duchamp’s thought as an active and desecrating political intervention tool.