Intellect

Kieran Lyons’ Ph.D. thesis was awarded in August 2007. The research topic considered the implications of militarism in France on Marcel Duchamp in the ten years between 1905 – 1915. He has delivered papers and essays on this and related subjects since 2000, perhaps most significantly with the online publication in ‘Tate Papers’. Recently, a monograph on his installation work made in New Zealand in
1976 has appeared in ‘Reading Room’. Between 1976 and 2009 he has worked in Britain as a performance and installation artist and since the Ph.D. has re-engaged with a different practice producing precise technical drawings, in digital and mechanical form where the rapidly drawn cancelling marks made by ticket inspectors, on his train-tickets, are transferred into outsized statements in his studio - these owe their existence to the research towards his Ph.D. and hope to reflect the influence of its subject.

The Ph.D. research will  develop further in 2010-11 in a new project to decipher, translate and publish 61 letters and postcards from the Western Front, written between 1914-1918 by Duchamp's brother, the artist Jacques Villon. These chronically illegible communications can also be seen as profoundly visual statements and will consequently form the basis of a new set of drawings based on their chaotic appearance.