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From 1915 to 1923, self-styled “artist-engineer-scientist” Marcel Duchamp
constructed Large Glass, a humorous biomechanical palimpsest of contemporary
science, technology and sexuality. Post-Einstein, in a world whose physics is
profoundly nonvisual, Duchamp’s project smacks of arrogance. But, as Linda
Henderson demonstrates superbly in Duchamp in Context, Large Glass and its
accompanying notes are a working testament to the vitality of an earlier
physics—its rays and ethers, its rare geometries and invisible worlds.
Published by Princeton University Press, £60/$85, ISBN
0691055513.