“Dancing around the Bride: Cage, Cunningham, Johns, Rauschenberg, and Duchamp”

“Say we have one problem and one hundred solutions,” writes John Cage in 36 Acrostics re and not re Duchamp, 1970, a dossier of texts organized by chance. “Instead of choosing just one of them, we use them all.” Cage’s phrase nicely encapsulates this exhibition, which focuses on the complex ties and collaborations between the artists referenced in its subtitle. “Dancing Around the Bride” fractures any single point of reference, replacing it with a multiplicity of possible entry points. The result is an open structure that can be viewed at least a hundred different ways, all of which are for the keeping.

Cocurated by Carlos Basualdo and Erica F. Battle, the show breathes new life into considerations of Duchamp, who at times seems to have been more than adequately covered. It does this through the presence of major works, including Robert Rauschenberg’s Dirt Painting, 1953, and more intimate inclusions able to intrigue even those most familiar with Duchamp’s output. Among these unexpected selections are a life-size photographic reproduction of Door 11: rue Larrey, 1927, in which Duchamp refutes the French proverb that “a door must be either open or closed” by creating a door that is at once open and closed, and a small self-portrait on loan from Jasper Johns featuring Duchamp in profile, in which the empty space configuring the “face” opens directly onto the wall behind.

The show is sensitive and far-reaching, beginning in the front room with Philippe Parreno’s “veil” of Plexiglas on which Duchamp’s famed 1912 painting The Bride is suspended, allowing viewers to see both sides of the work. Parreno also contributed a stage that will intermittently feature dancers performing works by Merce Cunningham until January 21, 2013. Notably, the exhibition features art by Duchamp not normally on view in Philadelphia—The Passage from Virgin to Bride, 1912, for instance, which is outstanding for its sheer incomprehensibility—and draws attention to Cage’s production as a creator of visual art in his own right, such as his astonishing Plexigrams of 1969, consisting of planes of Plexiglas lined up in rows that, looked through, compile scattered bits of text.