The Making and Mauling of Marcel Duchamp's Ready-Made
"The Making and Mauling of Marcel Duchamp's Ready-Made," by Allan Antliff, Spring 2006, pp. 56-60
In December, 2004, the Guardian Weekly ran a short news item entitled "Urinal comes out on top," which announced that a survey of 500 British artists, curators, critics and dealers had determined that "A humble porcelain urinal—reclining on its side, and marked with a false signature—[is] the world's most influential piece of modern art, knocking Picasso and Matisse from their positions of supremacy."
The item in question was Fountain, an industrially produced urinal that the French artist Marcel Duchamp signed "R. Mutt" and submitted for inclusion in a large-scale 1917 exhibition of modern art mounted by the Society of Independent Artists in New York City. Fountain was one of a series of industrially produced items—"ready-mades"—Duchamp purchased following his arrival in New York in 1915. How and why it came out on top is an interesting story.
At its point of origin, the urinal was a mockery of Cubism, a movement Duchamp had participated in, but abandoned just before the outbreak of the First World War. The Cubist aesthetic was based in the main on the metaphysical speculations of the then world-famous French philosopher Henri Bergson. Briefly, Bergson argued that the conventional scientific view of the world—based on the standardized measurement of time, Newtonian physics and Euclidian geometry—was an intellectual formulation invented to serve our utilitarian needs. In Time and Free Will (1889), Creative Evolution (1907) and other widely read works, he constructed an alternative to this utilitarian, rationalizing world view. Whereas Newtonian physics assumed matter was solid and inert, Bergson speculated that matter was actually energy in a perpetual condition of flux and interpenetration. The quantitative division of time epitomized by the clock, with its standard units of seconds, minutes and hours, was also done away with. Time's passage was actually qualitative: each moment was different from the last, similar to matter itself in its unceasing evolution. In the course of our day-to-day lives, Bergson contended, we routinely suppress this knowledge out of necessity. Artists, however, potentially had more freedom. Bergson singled them out and invited them to throw off the rationalist shackles and reveal the reality that lay hidden behind the veil.
In their pre-war polemics, the Cubists celebrated their art as the product of an intuitive, anti-intellectual and qualitative experience of reality. Duchamp's ready-mades were similarly indebted to Bergson, albeit in a far more ironic way. The ready-made idea was derived from an early study, Laughter (1900), in which Bergson analyzed humour as a recuperative response to moments of disjuncture, when manifestations of living, organic, qualitative being get mixed up with the inorganic, quantitative and lifeless. The mind grasps this absurdity not through intuition, but intellectually. When a living being is transformed into something that is lifeless and mechanical, laughter is the release that affirms the true Bergsonian reality underlying our misapprehension.
In a key passage, Bergson characterized the type of being that is the antithesis of a living entity as "ready-made" and "mechanical." "The attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body," he wrote, become laughable "in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine."
If we regard Duchamp's Fountain from this perspective, we have an item submitted to a modern art exhibition that was, paradoxically, art-less, mass-produced and lacking in emotion, empathy or originality—in short, a complete inversion of the Bergsonian qualities that the Cubists evoked to rank their aesthetic as a benchmark expression of intuition in French art.
But the implications of the ready-made go beyond refuting Cubist values. The ready-made can also be interpreted as a general attack on early 20th-century art's culturally elitist function through the disruption of its discursive support—the aesthetic judgments that led to an artwork's designation as "art." The ready-made corroded art's viability by bringing the public's subjectivity into play as a generative component in the formation of both the "artist" and the "art" work. In a single gesture, Duchamp blasted away the art world's institutional parameters: the primacy of the art object, the discerning role of the critic, the taste of dealers, the selective sanction of collectors and the hierarchical ranking of museum curators.
Which brings me back to 1917 and "the world's most influential piece of modern art." It often goes unnoted that the opening of the New York Independents exhibition on April 10 was preceded by four days by America's entry into the First World War. Duchamp was opposed to that war and had fled France in 1915 to escape it. However, some of the Independents exhibition's directors were nationalists and, with a war on, they promoted their show as a patriotic event that displayed modern art free of judges and juries and encapsulated the democratic values that America was fighting to make the world safe for.
The Independents show was supposed to be juryless, but when the directors unpacked Duchamp's Fountain, they balked at exhibiting it. One can well understand their reasoning: equating this industrially produced pissoir with a work of art would sully every other artwork on display and turn the cultural patriotism of their ultra-democratic exhibition into a mockery.
Following the rejection, Duchamp orchestrated a brief controversy in the newspapers that highlighted the hypocrisy of the directors' censorial ways. As for the urinal, it only survives in a photograph (by Alfred Stieglitz). The object was either lost or thrown out after it had served its purpose.
That was Fountain's first time around. Its second time around, circumstances were completely different. In the early 1950s, there was renewed interest in Duchamp's work, thanks in part to his peripheral participation in the activities of exiled Surrealists. More importantly, Duchamp was also becoming a historical figure. His First World Warâera productions, including a few small ready-mades, had figured prominently in a retrospective exhibition, "Twentieth Century Art from the Louise and Walter Arensberg Collections," at the Art Institute of Chicago in the fall of 1949. The art world took notice, and in early 1950, the New York art dealer Sidney Janis asked Duchamp to authorize a substitute 1917 urinal for purposes of an exhibition he was putting together called "Challenge & Defy: Extreme Examples by XX Century Artists, French & American." Duchamp gave Janis the go-ahead to pick out a urinal and sign it R. Mutt, and was happy to have the replica mounted very low to the floor so that "little boys" in need of relief could use it. Others were soon after him as well for replicas to fill gaps in various Duchamp-related exhibitions. Duchamp went along with it, and other "substitute" ready-mades began to sprout like mushrooms.
However, this "authorized ready-made" free-for-all came to an abrupt halt in 1964, when Duchamp signed a contract giving the Italian art dealer Arturo Schwarz exclusive rights. There would be no more free signatures, but so what? Ever the optimist, in a letter to the painter Douglas Gorsline, who was seeking his signature for a bottle rack retrieved from a dump, Duchamp responded, "I have just made a contract with Schwarz, authorizing him to make an edition (8 replicas) of all my few readymades...I have therefore pledged myself not to sign anymore readymades to protect his edition. But signature or no signature, your find has the same 'metaphysical' value as any other readymade, [it] even has the advantage to have no commercial value."
Commercial viability aside, the rapid incorporation of Duchamp-sanctioned ready-mades into the contemporary art market inspired a number of younger artists to emulate him with their own "ready-made" productions: Jasper Johns's Painted Bronze (Ballantine Ale) (1960), for example. A new label, "Neo-Dada," was to be coined to sum up the accelerating departure from conventional painting and sculpture-making on the part of Duchamp's latter-day acolytes. Neo-Dada grew to encompass a wide grab bag of art, from Robert Rauschenberg's junk-collage Combines to Niki de Saint Phalle's shotgun-produced Tir paintings.
And so the anti-art ready-made, circa 1917, was bronzed and sold off. Indeed, in an interview for Calvin Tomkins's 1962 study of Duchamp's influence, The Bride and the Bachelors, Rauschenberg went so far as to assert that Duchamp had never intended the original ready-mades as mere gestures. Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel (1913), for example, was "one of the most beautiful pieces of sculpture" he'd ever seen.
Eventually, Duchamp grew irritated. In a 1962 letter to the Dadaist Hans Richter, he wrote, "This Neo-Dada, which they call New Realism, Pop Art, Assemblage, etc., is an easy way out, and lives on what Dada did. When I discovered ready-mades I thought to discourage aesthetics. In Neo-Dada they have taken my ready-mades and found aesthetic beauty in them. I threw the bottle-rack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty."
Aesthetic beauty was, for Duchamp, the handmaiden of the commercial art system that, working hand-in-glove with the cultural nationalism of the First World War, had fatally compromised modern art. He had deployed the ready-made to attack this state of affairs, but now artists were recuperating it in a quest for career success.
There was nothing Duchamp could do about it. Beating a retreat, he ended a talk at the Museum of Modern Art in 1961 by asserting, "I don't want to destroy art for anybody else, but for myself, that's all." Thereafter, he seems to have been content, at least publicly, to acknowledge and celebrate the ways in which his legacy was escaping his control. Anti-art as art? Why not.
The truth of the matter is that, by the 1960s, aesthetic beauty as a criterion for art was on the way out, as was the convention of the artwork as such. What passed for art-making was undergoing a sea change, and Duchamp's ready-mades, which seemed to anticipate many issues contemporary artists were raising, looked (in retrospect) immensely significant.
Accordingly, hostile critics such as Clement Greenberg blamed Duchamp for opening the Pandora's box. In the polemical essay "Counter-Avant-Garde," Greenberg wrote that the ready-mades had displaced the activity of making high-quality art in favour of a conceptual questioning of what art is. And now artists were debasing their profession by dragging in everything—urinals, etc.—for consideration. "Conceptualist art in all its varieties," Greenberg fumed, is "making a last desperate attempt to escape from the jurisdiction of taste by plumbing remoter and remoter depths of sub-art—as though taste might not be able to follow that far down."
Greenberg, however, was swimming against the stream. By the dawn of this century, an avalanche of curious affinities and strange genealogies had given Duchamp credit for pretty much everything: Happenings, Fluxus, Neo-Dada, Minimalism, Pop art, conceptual art and performance art form a partial list. A sampler of the gymnastics fuelling this remarkable range of influence is Arthur C. Danto's genealogy linking Andy Warhol's silkscreened multiple Brillo Boxes (1964) with Duchamp's ready-mades. Danto argues that, philosophically speaking, both point toward art's reliance on a context to function as art. The anti-art agenda goes down the memory hole and—presto—up pops Warhol, freshly buttered with a historical pedigree not of Duchamp's making.
Indeed, the ready-made's memory has been mauled many times over by those proclaiming affinity with Duchamp. One example was the late-1970s collaborative tribute organized by the National Gallery of Canada and the Alberta College of Art Gallery: "Marcel Duchamp: Ready-mades etc./Marcel Duchamp: A European Investigation." The National Gallery displayed copyrighted Arturo Schwarz-authorized ready-made replicas (Fountain, 5th Version, October, 1964, Milan) while the Alberta College of Art collected Duchampian work by other artists, among them George Brecht (Water Yam, n.d.), Gabor Attalai (Red-y made Coat Hanger, n.d.), Ben Vautier (Geste: Destroying My Works of Art, 1961), Giorgio Ciam (Ciam/Duchamp—Duchamp/Ciam, 1975) and Peter Below (Fake Cheque, 1979). This coming-together of commodified ready-mades and art seeking its own commodification begged the question of where it would end.
In the 1980s and 1990s, ready-mades were turned from objects of emulation to objects of critique. Among a myriad of examples we have Maureen Connor's Untitled (1989), a witty series of replica ready-made Duchamp bottle racks sporting items of female clothing by way of "questioning and attempting to transform and make fluid the identity of an already existing object." In other words: ready-made = art = Duchamp = male. And in a more banal postmodern mode there was also Sherrie Levine's bronzed Fountain (after Marcel Duchamp: A.P.) (1991), which now greets visitors entering the permanent collection of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. An accompanying descriptive panel reads:
What's so special about a copy of a famous work of art? If you compare Levine's Fountain with Duchamp's sculpture, you'll notice that it's not an exact copy. Most notably, Duchamp's piece was an actual urinal, turned upside down and unaltered except for his signature. He believed he could transform such mass- produced, everyday objects into artworks merely by proclaiming them so. He called these works "ready-mades." In contrast, Levine's Fountain is a contemporary urinal cast in a precious metal—bronze, the traditional material for casting sculpture. Polished to a brilliant shine, this work is no longer a common, store-bought object but something quite unique. Levine's Fountain is placed at the entrance to the permanent collection exhibition galleries as a hint at the changes that have taken place in art over our century. Moreover, this sculpture shows that today's artistic innovations continue to be built on the achievements of the past.
Echoing Levine's positioning (after Marcel Duchamp) at the Walker, in 1994 October magazine served up a round-table discussion with Rosalind Krauss, Benjamin Buchloh, Yve-Alain Bois, Martha Buskirk, Alexander Alberro and Thierry de Duve to mull over Duchamp's artistic legacy. In a telling consensus of opinion, Duchamp's selection of ready-mades was declared "the modern formula for the aesthetic judgment" and, in that light, characterized by Krauss as "baptismal."
Baptismal! Certainly numerous blessings have been bestowed upon artists, collectors, critics and the like since the 1950s by way of driving a stake through the historical heart of the ready-mades. But then, what does history matter to "the world's most influential piece of modern art" or its many replicas?
Spring 2006
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