Nothing, it seems, can stop American art’s flirtation with function. Stylistic bankruptcy or some obscure collective passion has already produced mock furniture, unwearable clothes and uninhabitable buildings. One of many justifications for Janet Kardon’s important “Machineworks” is a shift of emphasis. Implicit in “Machineworks” is the proposition that in the ’80s the Duchampian rite of passage will constitute an analysis of the notes to the Large Glass, and that the way forward will be found less in what it says than in what it does.

Apollinaire believed that Duchamp could reconcile art with

During the mid-1970s, when Roger Brown was singled out as one of the new champions of the “Chicago Imagist School,” his painting underwent a transition toward greater size, more pictorial weight, and global subject matter. His use of symmetry and measure, which in the early 1970s had been implicit, became overt and iconic; he began tackling subjects like An Actual Dream of the Second Coming, 1976, and The Entry of Christ into Chicago in 1976, 1976, in expanded versions of his comic-book style. Behind his signature image of little people with 1940s hairdos, seen most often as silhouettes on window