Wise cracks/Bruchstellen und Gedanken-Sprünge

Discusses the installation The Bell and the Glass (2003; col. illus.) which the American artist Christian Marclay (b.1955) created for the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Philadelphia. The author describes a sequence of the work's two-channel video projection in which the French artist Marcel Duchamp appears on the top screen and comments on the cracks in The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915-23; illus.), while the lower screen shows a close-up of Philadelphia's cracked Liberty Bell. She enquires into the origins of these cracks, and surveys the contents of glass cases filled with Duchamp material from the Museum, souvenir Liberty Bells, and an artist's book including a score based on Duchamp's statement, on view alongside the projection (illus.). She considers the complex dialogue that arises from these separate components, and concludes by drawing a comparison with Joseph Cornell's Duchamp Dossier (1942-53), and with two earlier pieces which utilized analogous sampling techniques, namely Dust Breeding (1982) and Video Quartet (2002).