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PUBLISHER
Ugly Duckling Presse

BOOK FORMAT
Boxed, special edition, 8.5 x 11.5 in. / 60 pgs / 2 color / 40 bw / 2 posters.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
Out of stock indefinitely

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 2017 p. 65   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9781937027889 SDNR40
List Price: $70.00 CDN $92.50 GBP £62.00

AVAILABILITY
Not available

TERRITORY
WORLD

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UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE

The Blind Man

New York Dada, 1917

Edited by Marcel Duchamp, Henri Pierre-Roché, Beatrice Wood. Introduction by Sophie Seita. Translations by Elizabeth Zuba.

The Blind Man

The Blind Man was a key magazine of the early 20th century, the product of a rich network of proto-Dada, modernist and other avant-garde New York salons and publications that introduced audiences to Dada in the US.

Produced by Marcel Duchamp, Beatrice Wood and Henri-Pierre Roché, only two issues of the Blind Man ever appeared, but these included a who’s who of the New York and Paris avant-gardes: Mina Loy, Walter Conrad Arensberg, Francis Picabia, Gabrielle Buffet, Allen Norton, Clara Tice, Alfred Stieglitz, Charles Demuth, Charles Duncan, Erik Satie, Carl Van Vechten and Louise Norton all appeared in its pages.

Allegedly, the fate of the Blind Man was decided in a chess game between Roché and Picabia (who was about to put out his own Dada publication, 391). And the magazine went out with a bang—its final issue has gone down in art history for featuring Stieglitz’s iconic photograph of Duchamp’s “Fountain” and a defense of that work, seen now as perhaps the most important artwork of the 20th century.

The Blind Man: New York Dada, 1917 brings back the magazine in a facsimile reprint, along with reproductions of the Ridgefield Gazook and the poster for the Blind Man’s Ball designed by Beatrice Wood, all packaged together in a handsome boxed set.


Featured image is reproduced from 'The Blind Man.'

PRAISE AND REVIEWS

The New York Times

Jason Farago

…an absolute must for fellow Duchamp geeks

Hyperallergic

Joseph Neshvatal

A Trove of Dadaist Fun Is Reissued.

Hyperallergic

Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle

Opulently inked on top-shelf stock, as an object it is the veritable Grail of art-cult fetishists. Gazette, galoot, gadzooks! It’s a thing of beauty. (Un)covering art from nude to Bride, behold the hand of glory.

The Blind Man

STATUS: Out of stock indefinitely.

FROM THE BOOK
Excerpt from ‘The Blind Man Sees the Fountain: An Introduction’ by Sophie Seita

History, Editorial Practice, Networks
In April 1917, the short-lived little magazine The Blind Man opened its first issue with a statement of defiance—“The Blind Man celebrates to-day the birth of the Independence of Art in America”—and a catalogue of promises:

XI.
The Blind Man’s procedure shall be that of referendum.
He will publish the questions and answers sent to him.
He will print what the artists and the public have to say.
He is very keen to receive suggestions and criticisms.
So, don’t spare him.


These promises drew their inspiration from the conviction that “Russia needed a political revolution. America needs an artistic one.” With such avant-garde fanfare, the editors Beatrice Wood (an actress, artist, writer, and later ceramicist), Marcel Duchamp, and Henri-Pierre Roché (a journalist, writer, art collector and dealer from Paris) launched The Blind Man initially to support the inaugural exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, established by Katherine Dreier, Duchamp, Man Ray, Walter Arensberg, Joseph Stella, and others in New York in 1916. Seeking greater curatorial democracy than the 1913 Armory Show, the new society sponsored art under the tag line “No Jury, No Prizes.” Inspired by the upcoming exhibition and its motto, Duchamp, Roché, and Wood adopted a similarly jury-free, democratic editorial policy (modeled on a “referendum”) for their magazine.

Like many little magazines, The Blind Man was the product of a friendship and a small, local community. Duchamp arrived in New York in 1915, Roché arrived in November 1916 and shortly thereafter met Duchamp who subsequently brought him along to the Arensberg’s salon. Wood met Duchamp through the composer Edgar Varèse in September 1916 and was introduced to Roché by her friend, the bohemian journalist, Alissa Frank. The wider Blind Man circle included artists and writers now-associated with Modernism, Dada, Cubism, Simultaneism, and the Photo Secession, and the magazine’s two issues published the editors, Mina Loy, Walter Conrad Arensberg, Francis Picabia, Gabrielle Buffet, Allen Norton, Clara Tice, Alfred Stieglitz, Charles Demuth, Charles Duncan, Alfred Frueh, Robert Carlton Brown, Louise Norton, Frank Crowninshield, and Frances Simpson Stevens. But crucially, the magazine emerged from a network of other little magazines published in the 1910s and early 1920s, all of which had overlapping contributors, in particular those with a proto-Dada bent: 291 (1915-1916), The Little Review (1914-1929), TNT (March 1919), The Ridgefield Gazook (March 31, 1915), New York Dada (April 1921), 391 (1917-1924), and several others. To place The Blind Man within its publishing networks acknowledges that texts and artworks are not isolated objects but always appear within a social and material context. Magazines, which are generically serial and heterogeneous forms with multiple contributors of usually multiple affiliations and changing practices, allow us to recover and celebrate the dialogues taking place between contributions, between publications, and beyond the page.

In its opening editorial statement, the personified “Blind Man” fashioned itself as precisely such a dialogic format, as “the link between the pictures and the public—and even between the painters themselves,” since it “realize[d] the need of the public and the artists educating each other.” Insisting on the magazine’s communal and collaborative endeavor, this educative and social “link” necessitated speaking the same language. For that, the public had to learn to appreciate new art “like learning a new language,” a new conceptual vocabulary and a cultural openness to otherness. But the public had “spectacles on wholesome eyes,” as Mina Loy lamented in ‘In . . . Formation’, one of her two polemical pieces in The Blind Man. Drawn to “information” rather than new art and writing which were still in the process of ‘formation’, the public, for Loy, saw only ‘something that has been seen before’, instead of ‘seeing IT for the first time’, as artists do. If the public did not practice “pure uneducated seeing”—free from traditional frameworks that were “blind” to new art—artist and public would never meet, Loy concluded caustically. Indeed, the public’s blindness was further satirized in Alfred Frueh’s cover which portrays a guide dog leading a blind man past a painted and framed nude who is thumbing her nose at the blissfully unaware man.

FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/3/2018

Printed Matter presents The Blind Man Sees the Fountain: Readings from New York Dada

Printed Matter presents The Blind Man Sees the Fountain: Readings from New York Dada

Friday, January 12, from 6-8 PM, Printed Matter hosts the launch event for UDP’s facsimile edition of The Blind Man, edited by Marcel Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roche, and Beatrice Wood in 1917. Scholar and poet Sophie Seita, editor of the facsimile, will be joined by Kim Rosenfeld and Marjorie Welish for a night of performances and readings from and inspired by New York Dada, followed by a conversation moderated by co-editor Harris Bauer. Copies of The Blind Man facsimile edition, named one of the Best Art Books of 2017 by the New York Times, will be available for purchase at the event.
continue to blog


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