About the Book
The Blind Man and rongwrong were seminal New York Dada magazines edited and published by Marcel Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roché, and Beatrice Wood in 1917. This facsimile edition, introduced by Sophie Seita, celebrates the 100th anniversary of their publication. The box set also includes a two-color offset reproduction of Beatrice Wood’s poster for The Blind Man’s Ball (1917) and a letterpress facsimile of Man Ray’s The Ridgefield Gazook (1915). Translations of the French texts by Elizabeth Zuba accompany the facsimile reprints.
The Blind Man and rongwrong were part of a network of little magazines that introduced audiences to avant-garde movements in art and literature; they featured contributions of poetry, prose, and visual art by Mina Loy, Louise Norton, Robert Carlton Brown, Erik Satie, Walter Arensberg, Francis Picabia, Alfred Stieglitz, and others. The Blind Man was the first print publication to circulate an image of Duchamp’s “Fountain” (photographed by Stieglitz) after its rejection from the first annual exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, presenting a public challenge to the accepted definition of art during this time.
Author
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was a French (later American) artist, writer, sculptor, best known for his works Nude Descending a Staircase, Fountain, The Large Glass, his contributions to Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism, and his influence on later artists and writers, associated with Conceptual Art, among others. He was also a passionate chess-player, and regarded chess a form of art. In addition to The Blind Man, he edited New York Dada with Man Ray in 1921, and in the 40s, co-edited the surrealist VVV, with David Hare, André Breton, and Max Ernst, and became involved with another surrealist magazine View. He sometimes appeared in drag under his pseudonym ‘Rrose Sélavy’. For a while he collaborated with Katherine Dreier, and Man Ray, on Société Anonyme, Inc., an experimental and pedagogical ‘museum of modern art.’ He has a cameo in René Clair’s short film Entr’acte (1924). In 1962, he joined Oulipo, as an American correspondent.
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Praise
Its second number was still richer and stranger. With an extended roster of agitants contributing a riot of genres, it protested the Indeps’ exclusion of Duchamp’s ‘Buddha of the Bathroom’ as a betrayal of modern art. Almost, even, of modernity itself. The premonition of institutional critique it summons remains provocatively equivocal. Seita’s knowledge of these magazines, and their imbrication in the ecologies of New York’s cultures of the new, is compendious. Her writing is sharp and sets these artefacts vibrating. This box is to be a very exciting thing.