Rrose Sélavy (Marcel Duchamp): Some French Moderns Says McBride (1922)

A collection of essays by the art editor and critic Henry McBride, published in the New York Sun and the New York Herald, 1915-1922, compiled and designed by Marcel Duchamp.

“In 1922, Henry McBride, who had been close to Duchamp for years, commissioned him to design a book for his art essays. The resulting pamphlet was composed of eighteen cardboard sheets, held together by three rings. Its title, Some French Moderns says McBride, is spelled out in twenty-seven separate file tabs attached to the right edge of each page; when viewed from the verso, these same tabs spell out the name of the book’s publisher: ‘SOCIÉTÉ ANONYME INCORPORATED’.” (from Marjorie Perloff, “A Cessation of Resemblances”, 2012)

Duchamp described his idea for layout in a June 1922 letter to McBride: “The brochure would have 26 or 27 pages (front–back) since each letter is on a page of its own. Now, if I have enough room, I propose the following: Set off on the first page with minute characters, ending up on the last page with big characters, making the characters progressively larger with each page. [..] I have already chosen the typeface ranging from 5 pt for the first page to 12 or more for the last page which will have 5 words (I think). With each page, the typeface, from the same family, will gradually increase in size. The first two articles on Cézanne will have to be read with a magnifying glass.” And about the illustrations: “My idea is to incorporate them into the text by gluing them onto the binding strip. I think it will be better to spread them out.” (from Duchamp, Selected Correspondence, 2000).

Publisher Société Anonyme, New York, 1922
Printed by Melomine Publications, New York
18 cardboard sheets, with 7 sheets illustrated with Charles Sheeler photographs
via Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library

Commentary (David Joselit, 1997)
Commentary (Caroline Cros, 2006)
A copy sold at Christies for over $35,000 (2000)

PDF (low resolution, 12 MB)
PDF (146 MB)

Herculine Barbin, Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite (1978–) [FR, EN, ES]

“With an eye for the sensual bloom of young schoolgirls, and the torrid style of the romantic novels of her day, Herculine Barbin tells the story of her life as a hermaphrodite. Herculine was designated female at birth. A pious girl in a Catholic orphanage, a bewildered adolescent enchanted by the ripening bodies of her classmates, a passionate lover of another schoolmistress, she is suddenly reclassified as a man. Alone and desolate, he commits suicide at the age of thirty in a miserable attic in Paris.

Here, in an erotic diary, is one lost voice from our sexual past. Provocative, articulate, eerily prescient as she imagines her corpse under the probing instruments of scientists, Herculine brings a disturbing perspective to our own notions of sexuality. Michel Foucault, who discovered these memoirs in the archives of the French Department of Public Hygiene, presents them with the graphic medical descriptions of Herculine’s body before and after her death. In a striking contrast, a painfully confused young person and the doctors who examine her try to sort out the nature of masculine and feminine at the dawn of the age of modern sexuality.”

“Herculine Barbin can be savored like a libertine novel. The ingenousness of Herculine, the passionate yet equivocal tenderness which thrusts her into the arms, even into the beds, of her companions, gives these pages a charm strangely erotic…Michel Foucault has a genius for bringing to light texts and reviving destinies outside the ordinary.” (Le Monde, July 1978)

Originally published as Herculine Barbir, dite Alexina B., Gallimard, 1978

English edition
Edited and Introduced by Michel Foucault
Translated by Richard McDougall
First published by Pantheon Books, 1980
Publisher Vintage Books, 2010
ISBN 9780394738628
199 pages
via homoluden

Review (Andrea Rossi, Foucault Studies, 2013)
Review (G. S. Rousseau, Medical History, 1981)
Review (Kirkus Reviews)
Commentary (Sarug Dagir Ribeiro, Belo Horizonte, 2010, in Spanish)

Wikipedia (EN)

Adélaïde Herculine Barbin: Mes souvenirs (French, 1978/2002, on Scribd.com)
Herculine Barbin, Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite (English, 1980/2010) (updated to OCR’d version, via bbjanz).
Herculine Barbin, Llamada Alexina B. (Spanish, sel. Antonio Serrano, 2a ed., 1985/2007)

Adrien Lucca: Light Transformer Prototype, 1–2 (2010–2012) [French, English]

“Le présent travail est le fruit d’une recherche qui s’étendit sur plus d’un an, et que cette première publication n’épuise pas. [..] J’ai voulu offrir à son lecteur ou à sa lectrice une véritable expérience de lecture – au sens peut-être le plus conservateur du terme – doublée d’une expérience visuelle et tactile de première main. Je prétends ainsi leur communiquer une synthèse d’observations et de pensées privées, personnelles. Cet essai pourra par conséquent contenir des erreurs ou des naïvetés qui m’auront échappées. Avant tout, j’espère y avoir trouvé un point d’équilibre entre contenus vusuels, textuels et stylistiques.” (extrait de l’avant-propos)

Interview with the author, with a Foreword by Haseeb Ahmed (in English/French)
Author

Prototype de transformateur de lumière: Essai & documents, version 1 (in French, 32 pp, 2010, PDF)
Light Transformer Prototype (picture documentation, blog post, in English, 2012)