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From solo exhibition: Dust to Dust
The Art Gallery at Casa, Lethbridge, Alberta
7 November 2024 - 11 January 2025

Graphite on BFK Rives paper, 15” x 11”

A drawing of a photograph of a postcard pinned to the studio wall.[1]

“I wouldn’t know how to tell you what I do… I’m a respirateur – a breather.” Marcel Duchamp [2]

In 1919, Marcel Duchamp (1887 – 1968) was waiting to board a ship in Le Havre, France, bound for New York when he entered a pharmacy and asked the chemist to empty the serum from a small glass ampoule and to seal it again, thereby trapping the air. He labeled this readymade “Serum Physiologique" suggesting a captive life force.[3] Air de Paris was a souvenir of the romantic city for his friend and patron Walter C. Arensberg in the United States.

This work was made in the same year that national sovereignty in France was extended to the air [4] which, it might be argued, Duchamp echoed in Air de Paris. The assertion of property — both political and aesthetic — in relation to air, raises complex questions about public versus private ownership of air and atmosphere, or about the limits of the commons.

In 1949, the ampoule was broken and repaired. With the pre-Cold War air of 1919 no longer entrapped, Duchamp oversaw the making of several additional versions. These evolutions further destabilized the meaning of this work, moving it from conceptual, poetic, and material to primarily discursive. For this drawing, Mary Kavanagh sourced a photograph of the ampoule made in 1937 (prior to its breakage) with the original Paris air intact.

1. "Ampoule Contenant 50 c.c. d’air de Paris/Ampoule containing 50 c.c. air of Paris," made by artist Marcel Duchamp in 1919, from The Guaranteed Surrealist Postcard Series, photo offset lithograph, 1937, Harvard Art Museums/ Fogg Museum, Accession Year, 2012. Postcard pinned to Mary Kavanagh’s studio wall.

2. Calvin Tomkinson, Duchamp: A Biography, Holt Paperbacks, New York, 1996, p 408.

3. Celia Rabinovitch, Duchamp’s Pipe: A Chess Romance – Marcel Duchamp & George Koltanowski, North Atlantic Books, 2020.

4. Matthew Shannon, “An Incomplete Archaeology of Air,” un Magazine, 4.1, Australia, 2010.

View project: Dust to Dust

[AFTER] AIR DE PARIS (50 CC D’AIR DE PARIS), MARCEL DUCHAMP, 1919

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