I was in Philly this weekend for Rosh Hashanah and stopped by the Philadelphia Museum of Art to see "Etant Donnes", an exhibition exploring Marcel Duchamp's enigmatic final work revealed after his death and created specifically for the PMA. "Etant Donnes" is an installation featuring a nude female sprawled in a lush landscape. The surprising scene is concealed behind wooden doors and can only be viewed through peepholes, one person at a time.

I've been anticipating this exhibition for three years and am struggling with its outcome. The exhibition was an obvious labor of love for curator Michael Taylor, one of the world's leading scholars on Duchamp. Taylor was not only met with the lofty task of shedding light on what Jasper Johns called "the strangest work of art any museum has ever had in it," but was also entrusted to develop an exhibition honoring the museum's beloved director Anne d'Harnoncourt, another Duchampian expert and friend of the artist's family, who passed away suddenly just over a year ago. Not to disappoint, the exhibition and its related symposium have been met with rave reviews by the most critical of critics.

Unfortunately, there were a few glaring voids in the show that no amount of critical praise or rationalizing can coax me to ignore. Though there was no shortage of documentation and artifacts surrounding the work's conception and installation, there was minimal attempt to connect the content of "Etant Donnes" to Duchamp's other work, most notably the "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even," (aka the "Large Glass"). The "Large Glass" is on display in the gallery adjacent to "Etant Donnes" and truly suffered the most as a result of the decision to construct a makeshift wall concealing an important window in the gallery. Okay, so they needed more wall space, but sacrificing a window that was installed at Duchamp's request was a true disturbance. Further, the absent window, which strategically framed the fountain on the east stairs of the museum, was an integral part of the work itself--I recall Taylor's discussion of the deliberate position of the fountain within the scene from a gallery talk given a few years ago. True the exhibition was not about the "Large Glass," but the glass is crucial to understanding "Etant Donnes." Buried in one of the wall labels was the significant fact that "Etant Donnes" can be interpreted as a 3-D representation of the glass, a fact on which the exhibition neglected to build. So why on earth would they allow the glass look so........blah?

Of course the exhibition's catalog eloquently expounds on the work's content, honoring the artist's legacy (and d'Harnoncourt's as well). Unfortunately I did not have time to sit and read the hefty gallery copy all day in search of answers to my questions, nor was I about to shell out an absurd amount of money to purchase the text. I guess this brings to the fore the issue of how much should be revealed in an exhibition versus the catalog. Given Taylor's past successes, I am confident that the decision to leave the exhibition's content so nebulous was intentional, perhaps to preserve the work's ambiguity......or, to be more cynical, maybe the meager explanation of the work was a marketing tool so that people in search of an understanding beyond the work's construction had no choice but to buy the book....but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. Regardless, it seems to be a disservice to rely on the catalog to such a great extent in delivering the exhibition's content, even if the intentions are pure.

Anyway, the moral is that the work remains as enigmatic as ever...and there is no excuse for covering up that window.