The Green Box
| April 18, 2008

Why can't a book be more like a box?  

Marcel Duchamp's 1934 "Green Box: The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even" is a good place for anyone to begin to answer that question. Much more than we might like to think, an object lesson in the art of contemporary book design, and our ambitions for what can be done with the form, sets us firmly on a trail that leads back to the mind of Marcel Duchamp.

As with much of what's celebrated as new in art, including such objects as can be found beyond the trampled fence that once stood between art and design, it was Duchamp (or possibly Rose Selavy) who staked out this territory first, and with exquisite prescience and style.

Although contemporary printing techniques and manufacture have made this landscape accessible to any traveller with the necessary means, it's ever worth pausing along the way to doff one's hat in recognition and respect for the buen hombre who blazed the trail to begin with.
Duchamp continues still, less by some deathless act of historical will than by a pervasive and persistent inevitability, to define the avant garde.
Along with the soon-to-follow "Box in a Valise" (Boîte-en-valise, 1936) Duchamp was doing more than "thinking outside the box." He was inventing the box, and quite a lot of what could happen outside it... much to the benefit of all who, 70 years on, follow in his footsteps whether we know it or not.

Link:  Marcel Duchamp's 1934 "Green Box"

Tags:  art, book design, design

Topic: Book Design