Exhibition
Idea and Project:
Adriana Rosenberg y Jorge Helft
Curator: Elena Filipovic
Production: Fundación Proa
General Coordinator:
Cintia Mezza
Assistant and producer:
Iara Freiberg
Exhibition Design:
Caruso - Torricela, Architteti
Catalogue Coordinator:
Debbie Grimberg
Sponsor: Tenaris - O. Techint


email: duchamp@proa.org

Marcel Duchamp. Elena Filipovic's (Curator) interview (I/II)


Elena Filipovic, curator of the exhibition, visited us in Buenos Aires last November 2007 to continue working in the project and catalog. During her stay we started thinking about disseminating the exhibition concepts and contents to the press and general public. For this aim, Fundación Proa is publishing from March on, a series of interviews to the directors and other agents in this production.

Please find below the first interview to our guest curator.

How did this project for the first major Marcel Duchamp exhibition in Latin America begin?

The story begins years ago, with Buenos-Aires based art collector Jorge Helft. His passion for Marcel Duchamp’s artwork sparked his hopes to help his hometown have the chance to view a large body of Duchamp’s works in a major exhibition. The fact that Buenos Aires is the only other city besides Paris and New York that Duchamp actually lived, in additionally fueled his interest to see the artist’s work come to the city. As I understand it, he approached several institutions to encourage them to organize the exhibition, but it was Adriana Rosenberg, director of Proa, who took the courageous leap to believe in and support the project. You have to imagine that organizing such an exhibition is a huge responsibility for any institution and bringing such historically valuable pieces to a continent for the first time is an ambitious task. But together they were convinced of the historic importance of the project and I never saw them waver from this belief once they started. Proa thus came on board as the organizing institution and they involved Helft, as a kind of godfather of the project, in the task of seeking out a curator for the exhibition. That’s the point in which I came in. Helft learned of my writing and curatorial work on Duchamp while speaking to Duchamp’s stepdaughter, Jacqueline Matisse Monnier. I am honored that she thought that I might be a good candidate to conceive of such an exhibition and that subsequently Proa did as well. As part of process that followed, I first met with Jorge Helft in Brussels, where I was living at the time, and then some months later, I flew to Buenos Aires to meet Adriana Rosenberg and present some preliminary ideas for what that exhibition could be. There began our partnership in this exciting project. It was clear to us all from the start that this exhibition should demark itself by being quite focused and special, so it was understood that it would not be a simple retrospective per se, even if it might involve borrowing works from a wide expanse of Duchamp’s life. But what the ‘story’ or argument of the exhibition should be was not at all evident or given. So my task in this was to conceptualize an exhibition that could reveal some very particular aspects of Duchamp’s life and work in a way that would make it interesting and informative both for people coming to Duchamp for the first time and for others who might have the luck to know his work very well. In that task, both Jorge Helft and Adriana Rosenberg have been incredibly supportive of my ideas for this exhibition, not to mention the incredibly crucial encouragement and support that Jackie Matisse Monnier has had for this project from the start and every step of the way.


What does imply for a curator to do research on Duchamp?

I think that with an artist like Marcel Duchamp, it is difficult to ever feel like one is a specialist or “expert” since that implies infinite knowledge or complete understanding, and Duchamp’s oeuvre is so rich and contradictory and puzzling that it gets in the way of any kind of complete understanding, but if I have managed to focus on any one subject in my life, it has been Duchamp. I have been studying Duchamp’s life and work and writing about it for the last decade. In particular, I have focused on Duchamp’s design of exhibition displays and the way he presented artworks to the public since I think his pioneering work as a curator and exhibition designer reveals a lot about his conceptions of the work of art. And this is a part of Duchamp’s practice that has not been as much a focus of attention as it deserves. I took time out from completing my doctorate on Duchamp in order to work on this exhibition, but as soon as the show opens, I plan to put the final touches on my Ph.D and continue work on a book about Duchamp.


What are the advantages and the difficulties of presenting Duchamp for the very first time in Latin America?

The advantage, I would say, is the enormous curiosity and excitement that I have felt from everyone I have spoken to in Argentina and Brazil about the project. That excitement and enthusiasm is incredibly inspiring! The difficulty, undoubtedly, is the huge sense of responsibility that one cannot ignore in presenting Duchamp’s works. I see his oeuvre as being like a great chess match: sly, complex, and intelligent, but also something that keeps you guessing and wanting to constantly look so as not to miss something. So as a curator it is important to respect the richness and complexity of his oeuvre by looking constantly at his objects and studying as well how Duchamp himself chose to display them, but also to find sometimes unconventional ways of showing these artworks so that as visitors we start to look at them anew. The goal is to allow visitors to enjoy looking and to form their own opinions about Duchamp and why he still remains so relevant and influential today.


Given the fact that Duchamp had connections to Brazil and Argentina, will these aspects be brought during both venues?

It was in Buenos Aires where Duchamp lived for about 9 months from 1918-1919 and where he made several pivotal studies for his Large Glass. It is also where he spent his time being a self-professed “chess maniac,” playing chess nearly everyday of his stay. This connection that Duchamp had with Buenos Aires will not be the focal point of the exhibition but it will be visible here and there. For instance, he made his only set of handmade wood chess pieces in Buenos Aires and these will come back to the city for the first time and be shown.
Interestingly enough, Duchamp also has a connection with Brazil and in particular with the Museo de Arte Moderna (MAM) of Sao Paulo where the show will open. When the museum was just beginning in the late 1940s, Duchamp proposed to curate an exhibition there with New York art dealer Sidney Janis. The show, alas, never happened. Given this fact, Fundación Proa has selected MAM as a venue for the show. They have accepted the challenge immediately and it is possible to continue the historical dialogue this way.


What are the highlights of the exhibition?

The exhibition has a number of highlights, including La Mariée mise au nu par ses célibataires, même (also known as the Large Glass), an important optical machine, the Rotative Demi-sphere, as well as L.H.O.O.Q. otherwise known as La Gioconde. It will also include Duchamp’s first experimentations with photography for the Box of 1914, a number of Duchamp’s readymades, and the artist’s own miniature portable museum of his works in La Boîte-en-valise. But in general I would say that Duchamp taught us that we shouldn’t imagine that even a scrap of paper is meaningless, thus the exhibition will show a range of pieces beginning from the turning point of 1913 and carried through Duchamp’s final work, concentrating on pieces emblematic of the exhibition’s central theme of artistic rupture and aesthetic interrogation and all that function like pieces of a puzzle, but not all that look like they are bonafide “works of art.”


Which major museums and collections with Duchamp’s works are involved in this project?

This exhibition would not be possible without the generosity and confidence of a number of private and public collections, and the first among them is the Duchamp Estate in France, which supported this project from the start and encouraged us every step of the way. Many crucial pieces for the exhibition are being lent from the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Indiana University Art Museum. Private lenders have also been extremely supportive, lenders such as Luisella Zignone in Italy, Jean-Jacques Lebel in France, and others have opened their extraordinary collections to us.



Elena Filipovic is an art historian and independent curator. She is currently completing a doctorate in art history at Princeton University about Marcel Duchamp and is guest tutor of theory/exhibition history at De Appel postgraduate curatorial training program in Amsterdam. She was co-curator, with Adam Szymczyk, of the 5th Berlin Biennial of contemporary art She was co-editor of The Manifesta Decade: Debates on Contemporary Art Exhibitions and Biennials in Post-Wall Europe (Roomade and MIT Press, 2005), and curated, most recently, Let Everything Be Temporary, or When is the Exhibition? for Apex Art in New York and Anachronism at Argos Center for Art and Media in Brussels.