Duchamp in Latin America, once more: a route by Bolaño, Antelo and Bellatin

Abstract

In Maria com Marcel – Duchamp nos trópicos (2010), Raúl Antelo carries out what he calls the “politics of anachronism”: he articulates ideas, characters and procedures that transit between continents in the early 20th century; he gives rise to a heterogeneous Latin American fictional archive in which Duchamp's works function as critical engines for thinking about art, politics and literature in Latin America. Along with Antelo, this article brings two contemporary writers who operate Duchampian procedures and issues in different ways: Roberto Bolaño and his appropriation of the Unhappy ready-made, in 2666, and Mario Bellatin in the fiction El gran vidrio – Trés autobiografias. By articulating Duchamp's games around the (in)visible, both point to the revolutionary in his art – an operation that is not retinal, plastic, but critical and philosophical; operation that makes criticism a creation. In this gesture, critical itself, they confer historicity to the inventions of the French artist when viewed from contemporary Latin America, as well as to their own fictions.