In the October, 1922 edition of the Surrealist journal Littérature, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp published a collaborative work consisting of a photograph of Duchamp’s iconic work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors Even or The Large Glass (1915-23) covered in dust along with a brief poetic text. Although the photograph, which Duchamp later titled Dust Breeding, has long intrigued scholars their intriguing photo-text work has been completely overlooked. This thesis recovers this unique work from the margins of art history. Drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Michael Ann Holly and others this thesis examines four aspects of the photo-text’s history identified as the encounter, photograph, text and publication from a meta-critical perspective in order to illustrate the fluid relation between the binaries of subject/object and creator/beholder. This deconstruction, I argue, compels a reconsideration of the relationship between art historians and artworks that moves beyond a binary logic towards a more open, plurivocal and intertextual model of art-historical scholarship.

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