Stefan Banz
Morton L. Schamberg: God

English, 222 pages, 43 illustrations.
Distributed by Les Presses du reel, in digital form: www.lespressesdureel.comGod is a well-known assemblage from 1917 by Morton L. Schamberg The Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Louise and Walter Arensberg. Schamberg’s authorship of this unusual object, was only questioned when the well-known Dada scholar Francis M. Naumann suddenly speculated in 1994 that this readymade, as Marcel Duchamp called it, was more a work of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven than one of Morton L. Schamberg. In doing so, he had brought a whole phalanx of feminist forces to the scene, who also took his arguments as a starting point to deny Marcel Duchamp the authorship of his most famous readymade Fountain by Richard Mutt and at the same time tried with a great deal of imagination to ascribe this to the Baroness as well. The present study now attempts to put the authorship of God back into perspective with the help of new sources and to explain why this is actually a work by Morton L. Schamberg.