‘Peripheral Relations: Marcel Duchamp and New Zealand Art 1960–2011’ is something of a milestone for the Adam Art Gallery. Firstly, it is a marker of our maturing as an institution, proving our ability to meet the challenges of gathering together a substantial range of works from public and private sources, an exercise that has entailed complex loan negotiations and close collaborations with artists and institutions. And secondly, it is the first substantial exhibition to draw on the scholarship of one of Victoria University’s doctoral students. In successfully delivering his thesis in March 2012, Marcus Moore brings to a new stage the definition and historicisation of New Zealand’s broadly conceptual art history. He treats Marcel Duchamp as a pivotal figure around which this history has unfolded, from the 1960s with the first focused absorption of Duchamp’s life and work; to the 1970s, the era of ‘post-object art’; through to the present, as conceptualism’s terms and conditions have been revitalised and expanded.

Tracking Duchamp’s impact on artists in New Zealand over three generations, and documenting specific occasions when his works were seen in or entered New Zealand museums, Moore’s aim has been to dislodge perceptions that the local scene was belated in its response to or engagement with this seminal figure. He argues instead that Duchamp’s impact only went ‘global’ in the 1960s and that New Zealand was a player in his delayed reception. Further, he has identified aspects of Duchamp’s practice that resonate with the concerns of local artists, to inflect his reading of Duchamp and New Zealand art with a perspective that is distinctive of our ‘peripheral’ condition. Such an aim and an approach add uniquely to scholarship, on Duchamp and complicate our understanding of art history as it has unfolded here.

He argues instead that Duchamp’s impact only went ‘global’ in the 1960s and that New Zealand was a player in his delayed reception. Further, he has identified aspects of Duchamp’s practice that resonate with the concerns of local artists, to inflect his reading of Duchamp and New Zealand art with a perspective that is distinctive of our ‘peripheral’ condition. Such an aim and an approach add uniquely to scholarship on Duchamp and complicate our understanding of art history as it has unfolded here.

Marcel Duchamp’s (1887–1968) formidable influence on art of the 20th century is undeniable. What was or is his effect here in New Zealand? ‘Peripheral Relations: Marcel Duchamp and New Zealand Art 1960–2011’ offers various responses to this question. One is strictly historical. It brings to light the little- known fact that Duchamp’s works are held in New Zealand collections and a major exhibition of his works—one of the very earliest to survey his output—was presented here in 1967, and it explores actual instances when artists in New Zealand encountered Duchamp’s works or quoted him directly. Another is interpretive. It postulates relationships between Duchamp and selected New Zealand artists that are based on allusive readings of key themes in Duchamp’s practice. And finally, this exhibition speculates that New Zealand’s peripherality to the traditional centres of modern art can be used as a tool to understand Duchamp differently and specifically, and thus defines our own Duchampian ‘tradition’. Bringing together works by 30 artists produced since 1960, ‘Peripheral Relations’ explores a rich trajectory of practice that has turned away from what Duchamp called the “retinal”, to emphasise art is a mental act that in myriad ways evades the realm of pure aesthetics. As such it aims to both contribute to the formulation of New Zealand’s post-nationalist art history and to add to the sum of scholarship that tracks Duchamp’s impact worldwide. Bringing together works by 30 artists produced since 1960, ‘Peripheral Relations’ explores a rich trajectory of practice that has turned away from what Duchamp called the “retinal”, to emphasise art is a mental act that in myriad ways evades the realm of pure aesthetics. As such it aims to both contribute to the formulation of New Zealand’s post-nationalist art history and to add to the sum of scholarship that tracks Duchamp’s impact worldwide.

Interest in Duchamp was, from the early 1960s, quickly galvanized by three key means: the circulation of exhibitions of his work; the reproduction of his readymades and new editions of his Boîte-en-valise; and publications of books on the artist (Robert Lebel’s monograph published in 1959 was a vital tool for the dissemination of such knowledge). All three of these means were to directly impinge upon New Zealand—a country at some remove from the putative centres of culture—exactly because we could access these newly available editions, reproductions and publications, and because international travel became easier and quicker. Remarkably, in 1967, New Zealand was only the third country to host a major exhibition of Duchamp’s work: ‘78 works. The Mary Sisler Collection’. This show originated in the U.S. and consisted of works that were shown in NewYork in 1965 (Duchamp’s first solo show in NewYork), constituting a significant component of the subsequent Tate retrospective ‘The Almost Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp’ in 1966.The collection went on to be shown in the Duchamp retrospective in NewYork in 1973, before entering the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Books on the artist began to appear and were acquired by artists and institutions in New Zealand (a copy of Lebel’s book, for example, was acquired for the Elam School of Fine Arts Library in 1964), granting access to the full panoply of Duchamp’s practice, but even more importantly to his writing and esoteric thinking. And in 1981, unexpectedly, the National Art Gallery inWellington was gifted (along with other items) a 1961 edition of the Boîte-en-valise, meaning that his key pre- 1930s’ oeuvre in miniature now forms part of our national patrimony.These events, coupled with an increasing traffic of artists leaving and coming to the country, ensured a quite new engagement with an artist whose reputation and significance were in the process of being codified, proving that New Zealand did not suffer the usual time lag in its encounters with contemporary art and ideas. Perhaps what resonates, given our acceptance of the narrative of belatedness that conditions local art history, is that Duchamp’s reception was delayed not just on the margins, but everywhere; indeed Duchamp himself made a virtue of delay, as a way of resisting the seductions of the visual.

When Duchamp attached a bicycle wheel to a stool (denying its usual function yet allowing the wheel still to turn) and removed two of the stool’s leg- struts, he was testing the sculpture against the laws of gravity. Likewise, by altering the conventional direction of hooks in Hat Rack (1916) and Trebuchet (Trap) (1917), suspending readymades—Hat Rack, Fountain (1917) and In Advance of a Broken Arm (1915)—in the air, and documenting their shadows, as in Ombres portées (1918), Duchamp uses objects to instantiate a pseudo-science that unsettles our comprehension of dimensions and confounds gravity’s function.⁹ Such examples echo in ‘Peripheral Relations’, in the experimental structures and attendant notational drawings of Paul Cullen; in the balancing acts of Michael Parekowhai’s My Sister, My Self (2006) and Mike Stevenson’s The Only Optional Extra (2005); in the spinning circles and cast shadows of Len Lye’s Roundhead (1960–61), and in the crystalline orb that fractures light in g. bridle’s assisted readymade, black work (2011). Secondly, this exhibition draws out the statement that Duchamp’s readymades were made with movement and mobility in mind, or were conceived to travel and to “be looked for”,¹⁰ which in T.J. Demos’s terms are symptomatic of Duchamp’s expatriate status and his peripatetic lifestyle.11 Duchamp had to learn English after he left Paris and this process of acculturation is evident in his titles and inscriptions that play with the rules of English and French and exploit the punning power of homonyms. His constant ocean voyaging led him even to invent work that suited his shipboard situation. Sculpture for Travelling (1918), which accompanied him on his voyage from NewYork to Buenos Aires in 1918, was made out of rubber bathing caps that could be stowed in a suitcase to be removed and stretched to fit whatever space the artist found himself in. In such examples the readymade can be understood as a mobile form, one that can cross borders and change its meaning in relation to different contexts.

Our thanks go to Marcus for his original research, his valuable assistance with preparations for the show and his boundless enthusiasm for his subject. We are grateful to Massey University for awarding Marcus funding that has enabled the re-creation of works for this exhibition and provided invaluable support for aspects of its development. We have been vitally assisted by the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, in facilitating the loan of works from the Isaacs’ Bequest and from its contemporary New Zealand art collections; by Christchurch Art Gallery, which has deftly adapted to its building’s closure to bring us works from its collection; the Sarjeant Gallery, the staff of which have been especially helpful, and by Auckland Art Gallery, the Len Lye Foundation, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, the New Zealand Film Archive and Michael Lett. Special thanks are due to all the artists many of whom have gone out of their way to assist us, especially Paul Cullen, Adrian Hall and Roger Peters who have re-made works for the exhibition, and to the estates of L. Budd, Julian Dashper, Giovanni Intra, Darcy Lange and Malcolm Ross. In addition to Marcus Moore’s contribution to the exhibition I would like to personally thank John Finlay and Matt Plummer, both teaching fellows in Art History at Victoria, who have worked so assiduously on preparing texts on the artists and their works; their role reinforces the close relationship between