Please Touch: Dada and Surrealist Objects After the Readymade

In her compelling and beautifully illustrated monograph, Please Touch, Janine Mileaf offers the first full-length consideration of Marcel Duchamp's readymades and their profound legacy in the transatlantic context of Dada and Surrealism. The book embraces a broad range of art objects: consumer items such as the urinal and bottlerack that Duchamp "sneaked" into art exhibits; flea-market assemblages fabricated by his interwar avant-garde successors Man Ray, Andre Breton, Salvador Dali, Meret Oppenheim, and others; and the bricolage boxes of American surrealist Joseph Cornell. While offering an entertaining and engaging history of Dada and Surrealism, Mileaf presents a persuasive argument highlighting the role of "tactility," which she defines as a decentralized, fragmented, and intimate form of knowing. Touch suggests a broad range of physical, intellectual, and emotional connections that serve to undermine the dominance of vision in histories of modernism. By exploding notions of the very nature of art, the artists considered here introduced fundamentally new conceptions of subjectivity and engagement for the modernist era. Please Touch will appeal on these grounds to a broad range of art historians and interdisciplinary scholars.

JANINE MILEAF is an associate professor of art history at Swarthmore College.