Can You Make a Work of Art for Which There Is No Artist Duchamp

If the aura of traditional art meant no matter how shut you get, the artwork remains implacably out of reach, then Duchamp suggested that by removing the artwork from immediate proximity one brings it down to world.

Few artists are as widely and wildly celebrated for the endeavor to overthrow the very ontological basis of art every bit Marcel Duchamp. In the early 20th century, Duchamp came to refuse what he referred to as "retinal art", fine art designed only to bring pleasure to the eye, in favor of a more conceptual arroyo, an art (or anti-fine art) that engaged in ideas rather than giving ascent to mere "visual products", equally he put it. In an era that explored the artful furnishings of both the beautiful and the ugly, Duchamp advocated for a kind of aesthetic indifference, "a total absenteeism of skillful or bad gustatory modality". As he succinctly described it, he was wondering: "Tin can works can exist made which are not 'of art'?"

The most oft-discussed of such works "not of art" are certainly his "readymades", objects that were mass-produced and available as commodities and that he declared to exist works of fine art past signing them and giving them clever titles. Some of the readymades, such every bit Cycle Wheel (originally 1913, although the original is no longer extant) involved Duchamp manipulating the objects in some fashion — in this case by mounting the cycle wheel upside downwardly on to a stool. In other cases, such as In Accelerate of a Broken Arm (1915), which is just a snow shovel that he bought and and so signed and dated, he simply left the object more or less equally it was (most often he displayed it by suspending information technology from the ceiling simply information technology remained a mass-produced snow shovel).

The typical take on Duchamp's philosophical move hither, enshrined perhaps most famously in Arthur Danto'south test of his and similar moves in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981), is that these readymades, many of which are after all indistinguishable from the non-art objects of which they are constituted, are made into fine art objects by virtue of the fact that they are brought into the space of the artwork. That is, they are displayed as art and situated in the context of art objects and thus are accounted art.

Elena Filipovic'south new volume, The Patently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp, furthers this view of Duchamp past examining what we might now term Duchamp's curatorial activities throughout his lifetime. According to Filipovic, the profession of the curator was only being formed during the kickoff half of the 20th century (3) and so Duchamp was navigating unfamiliar waters just however, like a modern curator, he made several curatorial interventions into the presentation, understanding, and appreciation of the artworks both of his ain making and by the group of artists surrounding him — the Dadaists, the Surrealists, Constantin Brancusi, and others.

He acted at various times as an archivist, an art dealer, advisor, administrator, publicist, furnisher of reproductions, and even a salesman — all while keeping his ain relatively meager production of artworks out of the view of most people, including many of his most intimate friends. In pursuing Duchamp's seemingly marginal activities (at least marginal from the indicate of view of the narratives we generally rely upon in reference to Duchamp), Filipovic divides her study into 3 large chapters. Each chapter is lavishly illustrated with beautiful reproductions of the works being discussed and photographs of the exhibitions under examination.

The Big Glass (1915–23) Philadelphia Museum of Art Collection

Chapter 1, "Notes for a Theory of the Piece of work of Art", deals with two notation-taking projects both related (in different means) to his large-scale piece of work The Bride Stripped Bare past Her Bachelors, Even, also known as The Large Glass (created over an extended period from 1915 to 1923). The Large Glass was function of Duchamp'south endeavor to get out painting behind equally he turned toward a more than cognitive approach to aesthetic production. Indeed The Big Glass is so steeped in a cryptic and private iconography that it defies comprehension and peradventure even puts into question the very notion of conceptual understanding in the face of fine art.

Duchamp began scribbling notes on random pieces of paper in 1912. He wrote on anything that was to hand including the backs of bills and "the underside of a Camembert cheese label" (13). Some of the notes included little drawings only most were short texts, replete with misspellings, crossing out, and erasures. They documented his ideas for future works and endeavors, his philosophical musings, his thoughts about sex. Many of them refer to the big work he was planning merely had not yet begun, The Large Glass, while it was still in its determinative stages of planning.

And then in 1913-14, Duchamp decided to make something (a piece of work… not of art) out of the notes themselves — and and so again, not out of the notes themselves. He carefully photographed a selection of the notes (along with reproductions of 2 other works of art) in such a way as to reproduce (or nearly so) the original size of the notes. He mounted them so that the torn edges of the original notes were evident and and so placed them within boxes by Eastman Kodak Co. or Lumière Jougla that were designed to hold photographic plates. He made v such boxes and gave four of the boxes abroad to friends, patrons, and family. This box, this work not of art, became known equally the Box of 1914.

Filipovic argues that the Box of 1914 is too ofttimes overlooked in discussions of the history of early 20th century photography: "In using the medium as no art photographer in his time would, and claiming the issue as an artwork in itself and simultaneously as a supplement to, or discursive accompaniment for, another artwork, Duchamp put is finger on photography'southward troubled relation to gimmicky notions of the piece of work of art" (38). By photographing a serial of notes, many of which refer obliquely to another work of art not yet in being, the elements of the Box of 1914 find themselves perched between two categories of understanding the photograph: equally artwork and as documentation. Indeed, Duchamp blurs the line between the two altogether: documentation of the aesthetic becomes an aesthetic rendering of the documentary. Duchamp explored like ground with his Green Box of 1934.

In her 2nd affiliate, "I Myself Will Exhibit Zero", Filipovic turns to more than recognizable curatorial acts on the part of Duchamp — specifically the numerous exhibitions, generally of the works of other artists, that he organized or helped to organize. In many ways, this is the most rewarding of the three chapters and certainly includes what I find to exist Filipovic'southward greatest contribution to Duchamp studies.

Filipovic reads Duchamp's more traditional curatorial efforts every bit a series of experiments regarding the ontology of fine art, and, more to the point, investigations into what makes something annals as participating in the artful. In essence, Duchamp seems to have worked from two different directions at once. On the 1 hand, he "programmatically refused to reduce the artwork to a discrete, auratic thing unto itself" (74). Recognizing that the manner of brandish deeply influences the viewer's understanding of an artwork, indeed even constitutes the conditions nether which a work tin can be seen as art, Duchamp created exhibition spaces that occluded to varying degrees the works on display — by having webs of string interfere with a articulate view, cramming artworks together in tight spaces with no articulate hierarchy of value, forcing patrons to view works through peepholes, and creating rather uninhabitable spaces (for instance, choked with coal grit) so that viewing was anything but a passive, reverential moment of quasi-theological subsumption of the self to the auratic otherness of art.

To break upwardly the cultic vestiges of revelation that artworks after the 19th century had arrogated to themselves is to question the very function of art in the modern historic period. In essence, Duchamp engaged in a clever reversal. If the notion of the "aura" of an artwork involved the assumption that no affair how closely you approached the empirical object on display (let'south say the Mona Lisa as painting) the essence of the artwork remained forever afar from you (that is, the Mona Lisa equally aesthetic presence is always unreachable and unfathomable no matter how shut you physically become to the antiquity), then Duchamp forced the viewer to stay physically at a distance and desacralized the artwork past obstructing its revelatory presence through the odd manner of its situation in the exhibition. In other words, if the aura of traditional art meant no thing how close you get, the artwork remains implacably out of reach, then Duchamp suggested that by removing the artwork from immediate proximity one brings it down to globe.

On the other hand, Filipovic shows that Duchamp used certain exhibitions to "test" his notion of the readymade. In an early exhibition, he placed the readymades inconspicuously in the vestibule of the gallery, without whatever placards, without whatsoever straight means of calling attention to them. Not surprisingly, they were ignored. A snow shovel sitting near the entrance of a gallery might seem odd in certain circumstances but it does not claim to be art. In after showings, even so, Duchamp brought the appliance of exhibition brandish to impact the readymades: the placards, inclusion in the catalogue. So they were noticed. So they became an object of discussion and of controversy.

There are two intriguing lessons to exist learned here. Get-go, the exhibition is a manner of framing art and thus determining its way of being, its ontology. Second, the typical narrative that Duchamp simply "alleged" that the readymades are art and that makes them then is not sufficient. These works had to be initiated into the art world through more than overt methods than mere selection, and those methods were largely curatorial.

Étant donnés, Philadelphia Museum of Art

In the final chapter, "The Dead End of the Museum", Filipovic details the protracted interactions between Duchamp and the Philadelphia Museum of Fine art that led to the installation of the largest public collection of his output and the permanent habitation of his installation and concluding slice, Étant donnés. Although information technology culminates in an investigation of one of Duchamp'due south almost troubling and of import works, this chapter is the least focused and serves as a recapitulation of earlier assertions regarding Duchamp's curatorial approach rather than opening up new territory.

Indeed, needless repetition and a trend to exaggerate the peculiarity of Duchamp's curatorial insights are characteristic flaws of the book equally a whole. Occasionally Filipovic falls into what we might term the "thank God I got here in fourth dimension" mode of bookish writing. She mildly chides art critics such as Rosalind Kraus and Benjamin Buchloh for non recognizing the primal importance of the Box of 1914 to contemporaneous concerns with the photographic image, its indexicality, and its relationship to avant-garde painting. Of form, had they placed the "proper" emphasis on the Box of 1914 there would exist no demand for Filipovic's piece of work (or at least non Chapter One).

More frustratingly, Filipovic uses this chastisement equally an alibi to still again restate her claims (in this case, that the Box of 1914 is a quasi-ontological investigation into the nature of the photographic image). One might get the impression that Filipovic's rhetoric relies more on repetition (if I say it enough times it must be truthful) than on more than considered argument and means of persuasion. And simply in case you managed to somehow miss the interpretation being pounded into your head, Filipovic includes a "Conclusion" to each chapter that summarizes everything one last fourth dimension.

Nonetheless, even with its flaws, The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp manages to do something that seems to be increasingly difficult equally the scholarship on this artist mounts to the heavens: it says something new that is well worth considering.

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