Schwarz
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It is the exhibition's stated ambition to reconfigure the history of sculpture since World War II (and its constant return to the example of Duchamp) that is more problematic. Leaving aside questions about what does not appear at the Wexner—the polemical exclusion of Pop and Minimalism, the limiting of the potentially far-reaching inquiry to only European and North American art—there remains the question of the historical model being implied here. Do we need more family-tree art histories, however ingeniously regrafted their branches, in which the ultimate referent of contemporary art is the work of a past master? A mental melding of Duchamp's erotic objects and his handcrafted readymade duplicates would indeed seem to license the exciting range of part-body, part-commodity creations gathered here. Yet Molesworth's emphasis on his patrimony risks implying that the condition for these objects' invention and importance rests with previous art, rather than with the way they work through the dilemmas of a half century in which people, places, and resources have been used as parts rather than valued as wholes—the dilemmas of a commercialized world where desire is routed through objects in processes that are anything but organic.