The original In Advance of the Broken Arm was a 1915 sculpture by Marcel Duchamp. A readymade, the work consisted of a snow shovel hung from the ceiling of a gallery. I use the past tense here because the original went walking; recreations are on display in museums in New York, Stockholm and Milan. Thinking about these careful replications of an absent absurdity makes me laugh.
Amateur telepathy is a treacherous thing, but I think Marnie Stern probably laughs about all of this too. When I checked whether Stern had said anything about her adoption of Duchamp's title as her own, the best I could find was that she "thought it was funny" and that Mike Powell, who interviewed her for Stylus, agreed.
Is the move from amateur telepathy to criticism a progressive one or a further deterioration? Never mind: it feels like there's more to the choice of name and a laugh, doesn't it? Humour is important to Stern and her work, but it's not the main colour in her pallete. The 2022 "Duluxe Reissue" of In Advance of the Broken Arm does as good a job of setting the scene for the record as Stern's early interviews did. "My best friend Bella and I felt we were alone out there," Stern write. "We started a club with each other called Mad As Hell. We started a book club kicking around ideas about life, creativity, and creating our own destiny."
The record sleeve features six photographs of handwritten notes - presumably Stern's, possibly Bella's - that demonstrate a collosal effort to give shape to the abstract. "DRAW MUSIC ONTO BELLA'S ART",