I N T R O 

“a guest + a host = a ghost”
Marcel Duchamp, 1953

Robert McKaskell had a unique and idiosyncratic presence. Long-time colleague-friends and former students described him as having an innate ability to enliven subjects in teaching and life.  One McKaskell colleague wrote in a tribute-recollection, “Bob would do weird walking performance pieces on the busy streets of New York. But so did many others in the Big Apple. Some people do stretch the imagination to be original. This was Bob, a living performance artist. A true character.”

Idiosyncratic suggests volatility and unpredictability, but there is a distinction between posturing and enactment.  Robert understood the latter:  he was focused, knowledgeable, fearless and funny, and had a deep and textured view on artists and the creative act.

There was never any academic posturing.

This project is a tribute to Robert McKaskell and his professional facets as art historian, curator and educator. Rather than memorialize what he did, it is better to channel the spirit and active intelligence, and embody how he thought. Marcel Duchamp is the armature for this exhibition-orchestration.  Robert was a Duchampist, although he and I never spoke of Duchamp directly—and perhaps because one never knows who’s listening.  In the mid-1980s he devised an “Homage to Marcel Duchamp on the occasion of the centennial of his birth,” mounted at the McIntosh, Forest City and (then) London Regional galleries. 

​From his introductory notes to the 1987 exhibition catalogue (published at the conclusion, hence the hindsight tone):

Walking home from the Forest City Gallery [on] the evening of May 23, 1985, my thoughts turned to Marcel Duchamp.  We had just had one of the unamusing meetings in which our discussion was related more to art-politics than art.  I remember imagining Duchamp maintaining a bemused silence through the meeting.


That night I dreamed about an exhibition like the one held by the Society of Independent Artists in New York in 1917. The interesting thing about the dream was that the works in the exhibition presented all possibilities of art practice I knew in 1985, yet all were accepted by everyone—artists, art administrators and educators, the public—who walked through.  Everyone, simply, was enjoying the art.  And Duchamp in the dream, too, smiling benevolently

If the armature in this orchestration is Marcel Duchamp, it is my channeling through Duchamp and Robert McKaskell, and the artists selected, who are not necessarily “Duchampists.”  This is best summarized by Dr. Robert Belton in "Why Duchamp Matters,” written for Christos Dikeakos, Patisserie Duchamp, 2011: “Duchamp explicitly declared that the artist was a kind of thinker rather than maker [and... his] memes have succeeded in being replicated whether we like them or not. You can’t go to a credible contemporary art museum without seeing his offspring at least somewhere in the mix.”

Duchamp never encouraged notions of his influence on artists, yet he was generous and attentive to art that didn’t copy him. Likewise, contradiction—which Duchamp spoke of—is not contrariness; it is a way to maintain self-awareness. As a consequence, plays of language, and silence, were equally important to him.

The guiding principle of this project is in Robert McKaskell’s notes for the (then) Mendel Art Gallery 2000 exhibition Superlatives, Selections from the Collection: “If this exhibition succeeds, people will be prompted to see some of the works differently in the new context and to think differently about some artists whose works are well known.”

I would like to think that Robert is smiling, benevolently.




- Ihor Holubizky, 2021

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The project title is based on an “obscure” Duchamp work. The text “a guest + a host = a ghost” was printed on different coloured pieces of candy wrappers.  The candies were distributed at the opening of William Copley’s (American, 1919-1996) exhibition at Galerie Nina Dausset, Paris, in December 1953.  A facsimile inscription of this text-pun was reproduced on the folio back cover of Copley’s artist edition portfolio  project S.M.S [Shit Must Stop] No.2, April 1968.  The folio front has a 33 1/3rd rpm flexidisc mounted on it, a Duchamp recording made at an amusement booth around 1950, as an “anthology” of texts, aphorisms and puns.

Thanks and appreciation to all the artist-contributors.  All works are courtesy and copyright of the artists, with exceptions and additional credits as noted.

Lois Andison (Canadian)
Dianne Bos (Canadian)
Lynn Dreese Breslin (American)
Hyang Cho (Canadian, b. Republic of Korea)
Paul Collins (Canadian, French)
Christos Dikeakos (Canadian, b. Greece)
Aganetha Dyck (Canadian)
Wyn Geleynse (Canadian, b. Netherlands)
Dave Gordon (Canadian)
Richard Grayson (British)
Brad Isaacs (Mohawk and mixed heritage)
Suzy Lake (Canadian, b. U.S.A.)
David Merritt (Canadian)
Ken Nicol (Canadian)
Gary Pearson (Canadian)
Alexander Pilis (Canadian, b. Brazil)
Eric Robertson (Metis/Gitxsan)
Michael Snow (Canadian)
Gary Spearin  (Canadian)
Christine Walde (Canadian)
Jinny Yu (Canadian, b. Republic of Korea)


Special thanks to Hugh Barrett, the Kelowna Art Gallery, Museum London, the Art Gallery of Windsor and the team at the Embassy Cultural House, especially ECH contributing editor and web designer Olivia Mossuto.

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