For the last six years or so, I’ve been writing about our engagement with glass and how it defines the past century. This was always an interest of mine, but I did grow up going to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where Duchamp’s shattered Large Glass (1915–23) lives. When I was young and didn’t know about art, the gallery there devoted to Duchamp confused me. I would go look at the Large Glass, but how it mattered and why it mattered was very far away from me. I thought it was so strange.
Maybe I was drawn to his colors. There are these ochres, these browns, this really beautiful pink: those colors have a history or a humanity to them that doesn’t feel as saccharine and electro-pop as the world we know now. I love them so much. And then there’s his reverse glass painting, which I’ve long studied. This was all an entry point for my work. Early on, I was thinking about the clothes he wore and the material he was using, be it a chess piece or just things of the world, which he put into spaces as readymades. As I get older, this work seems to speak to how objects show that they are of a specific time.
For my in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, I played Duchamp and his alter ego Rrose Sélavy, and then another version of Duchamp as the Joker from Batman. The characters I embody are always cornerstones of culture, be they Eminem or Jim Henson or Duchamp. Their histories and their stories precede me in ways that are intimidating, of course; but my desire to approach them comes largely from being unable to understand them. I want to understand them better, or differently.
ROY G BIV led to a bunch of different opportunities to speak about Duchamp’s work and really engage with his thinking. Beyond Calvin Tomkins’s book and the fascinating interviews published by Paul Chan, I was able to look at the kind of salons that Duchamp was having, his sidebar conversations with peers, the ways they would play games with each other, and how language was so much a part of their relationships, of their zine-making, and of their book-making.
[Curator] Stephanie D’Alessandro approached me while she was organizing [the Met’s 2025] Man Ray show, asking about my engagement with Duchamp and his relationship with glass. My talk at the Met [earlier this year] involved cobbling together all these publications, almost like an exquisite corpse. I talked about this idea of a glass age, a space where we live within a screen and among a grand history of images that we have to reconcile, interrogate, accept, refute, or turn on their head, as he did so wonderfully throughout his career.
Duchamp coined the term the “infrathin” to describe this invisible space between things and us as a culture. Now, even as I speak with you on the phone, there is a kind of invisible space between us. It’s separated by just a piece of glass within our phones.
Alex Da Corte (b. 1980 in Camden, New Jersey; based in Philadelphia) is an artist who recently organized a permanent collection display for the MAXXI museum in Rome called “The Large Glass,” whose title references a Duchamp work. With Meg Onli, he is currently organizing a Roy Lichtenstein retrospective for the Whitney Museum in New York.
