Readymade = Discharging Ideas

When a finger points to the moon, the imbecile looks at the finger Chinese Proverb

In analyzing the readymade, we must pass through a series of definitions that only partially are able to comprehend the essence of this specific work of art. Andr Breton and Paul luard defined the readymade in the Dictionnaire abrg du Surralisme as an ordinary object elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist.1 But, as Duchamp pointed out:
The curious thing about the readymade is that I've never been able to arrive at a definition or explanation that fully satisfies me.2

This is in part due to the fact that definitions dont fully work on objects of extrinsic contradictory nature, and in part because there are several types of ready-mades, which embody different thoughtprocesses. Im going to focus on a singular category of these specific artworks, and consequently pick up the most pertinent explanation. Probably the most interesting ready-mades are the ones that appear exactly as commodities works such as Duchamps In Advance of the Broken Arm (fig.1), Warhols Brillo Soap Pad Box (fig.2), and Jeff Koons New Hoover Convertibles (fig.3). It helps here to recall Marx, who clearly places the commodity at the center of his speculation. In Das Kapital he writes that:
The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an immense collection of commodities; the individual commodity appears as its elementary form.3

Rather that studying the interaction between the object and the
Quoted in H. Obalk, The Unfindable Readymade, Tout-Fait vol.1/issue2 (may 2000) 2 C. Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (Location: Henry Holt , 1996), p.159. 3 K. Marx, Capital volume 1. (London: Penguin Books), p. 125.
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external world, for Marx, we must transcend the aesthetic appearance of the commodity and dive into it to illuminate its internal structure, which reveals the laws of motion of capitalism. This shift though, requires also a new way of thinking about what we see. If the external surface is only instrumental to the understanding of its internal essence, a purely visual approach is no longer sufficient. As a consequence, Marxs analysis cannot be fully understood without a radical changing of the ground of judgment: what we see must not be passively justified but actively criticized. That is to say, the mind should recuperate its role and be free to elaborate and judge the external information that our senses perceive. Similarly, Duchamp conceives a work of art that is able to go beyond the pure materiality of the object. His works are in fact, as Calvin Tomskins affirms, an antidote to what he called retinal art.4. With this term is intended an artwork that represents a feast for the eyes, that somehow over-stimulates the human visual sensitivity as, for instance, the Impressionists do. Marx and Duchamp share a fundamental distrust with objective appearances. The readymade is Duchamps antidote to the detrimental effects of retinal art an attack on all art concerned solely with surface and appearances. It is necessary then, in order to expose completely the internal concept, anesthetized our senses temporarily to escape the temptation of judging with them rather than with our brain. In Aesthetic Theory, Theodor Adorno explains:
Art aesthetically perceived is art aesthetically misperceived.5

However, the only way of experiencing the reality around us is natural (the body), and the only means available to the artist are cultural. In the Duchampian readymade the method is represented by the spatial displacement of an everyday use object; what this operation entails is that the object lays on its own nature claiming to be something that is not (this technique will be later used by the surrealists, as in Magrittes famous Ceci nest pas une pipe, fig.4). What the French artist does with this expedient is provoking the crisis of our cultural experience of the thing; paraphrasing Pablo Picassos famous aphorism6 we can affirm that the readymade lies on its nature of work of art to expose a conceptual idea.

4 5 6

Tomkins, 158 T. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, Rev. ed (London : Continuum, 2004 )p.7

As a consequence, a cultural shock is necessary pace to wake up our mind in order to perforate the layer of the material and get in touch with the core of the concept. Although, this passage is not the simplest one; in fact, the spectator must be willing to take up the challenge and review his role from passive consumer to active interpreter7. Without this step, as a matter of fact, a shovel remains a simple shovel. As Slavoj iek8 puts it, the viewer is forced to redefine the space of art in such a way to consider a urinal an artwork. Following always his analysis, being an object of art is not an immediate property of an object but its reflexive determination (Hegel). 9 Consequently, art in its totality is brought back to the external world of the object to the conceptual world of mind, to the world of the ideology to the world of the idea. What art is turns out to be what we think art is. Hence, our idea of art does not stand still but turns out to be a continuous work in process .The exact instant of acceptance of a urinal as a work of art then, represents the recomposition point of a struggle between what it is and what has become. Theodor Adorno and Alain Badiou seem to share the same vision on this ongoing process; the Frankfurt School philosopher, in fact, asserts: The definition of art is at every point indicated by what art once
was, but it is legitimated only by what art became with regard to what it wants to, and perhaps can, become. [] Art can be understood only by its laws of movement, not according to any set of invariants

By the same token, Badiou observes:

Art has become a question of movement, of what we get to rather than the abolition of this getting to in a result closed in the idolatrous cult of the work of art. Art is only the trace of its own action10

These observations have the consequence of not only discharging the previous idea on the mode of production, content and effect of an artwork, but also entail a different vision with regards to the general function of art in the society. Lets focus for a moment, though, to the first order of problems, which can be
Dalia Judovitz, Unpacking Duchamp: art in transit (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998) p.1 8 Extract taken from a footnote in Slavoj iek, Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze & Consequences (New York: Routledge) p. 149 9 Similarly Adorno says there is no aesthetic refraction, without something being refracted Adorno, 5 10 http://www.lacan.com/symptom9_articles/badiou29.html
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summarized as the demystification of art in its totality. What this vision primarily implies is the fact that the artwork, using a benjaminian terminology, looses its aura. Duchamp was obviously well aware of this, as some others debunking works clearly testify (see L.H.O.O.Q., a famous pub on Elle a chaud au cul, fig.5). Consequently, neither art nor the artwork can be conceived anymore as an immortal entity, which bear absolute principles of romantic heritage such as taste, beauty, originality and so on. As Adorno underlines, works of art born, age, grow cold and die 11 . Paradoxically, one might suggest that a readymade is a work of art as long as it is considered as a non-work of art, as long as it withstands to the absorption of our culture; in other words, as long as it does resist to the commodification of the idea. As John Cage comments:
At a Dada exhibition in Dsseldorf, I was impressed that though Schwitters and Picabia and the others had all become artists with the passing of time, Duchamp's works remained unacceptable as art.12

That is to say, a readymade remains a readymade in the Duchampian mode as long as it is not accepted by an establishment, and presents a critique of art. It can be argued since the beginning then, that the commodification presents itself, as Baudrillard puts, in the form of an active agent13 which acts recomposing the existing contradiction between the idea and the object. This process reshapes and distorts the idea to such an extent to present finally a thing, which bears no contradiction in itself: the commodity. In order to explain this process is worth analyzing the difference between the use of the readymade in the three artworks which we refer at the beginning of this text. However, if we fail to recognize the readymade as an instrument, we will finish to be trapped in an endless and unfruitful diatribe. The point in question is not, as Thierry De Duve 14 does, trying to understand whether or not Duchamp made possible to extend the parameters of the objects that can be given the exchange value of an artwork be worth 11m
Adorno, 5 John Cage, "John Cage on Marcel Duchamp: An Interview," Duchamp in Perspective, 153. 13 J. Baudrillard as quoted in S.Lutticken, Art and Thingness, part 1: Bretons Ball and Duchamps Carrot, e-flux journal vol.3 (February 2010), p.5 14 Thierry De Duve and Rosalinda Krauss, Marcel Duchamp, or The Phynancier of Modern Life, October vol.52 (spring 1990) p.60-75
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What is at issue, instead, is if these objects, which are externally similar, express or not different values and ideas. In this perspective, surely the works of the French artist have more levels of interpretation. Duchamp, in the text Apropos du Ready-mades write:
A point that I want really much to establish is that the choice of these ready-mades was never dictated by aesthetics delectation. This choice was based on a reaction of visual indifference with at the same time a total absence of good or bad tastein other word a complete anesthesia 15

Duchamps gesture, however, must not be read as an act of pure nihilistic aesthetics provocation, as for example Malevichs Black Square (see fig.6). Peter Burger, for instance, recognizes in the signature, the artists intention of exposing the fake relationship between aesthetic and exchange value in the art market:
Duchamps provocation not only unmasks the art market where the signature means more than the quality of the work; it radically questions the very principle of art in bourgeois society according to which the individual is considered the creator of the work of art16

Interestingly, if we consider this observation in the light of what has happened recently in the financial crisis, Duchamps provocative act turns to be into a true prophetic jaccuse against, the art market, and more generally, against a system that creates value solely through the monetary speculation. The parallel with the financial system in advanced capitalistic society is here much more than obvious; consequently, both the category the category of work17 than the one of use value are therefore the key points of this discussion. As Duchamp points out if we do things for the pure idea of functional reasoning, the idea of aesthetics disappear 18 . Combining this statement with the one reported above, it emerges that the readymade has the intent of exposing the use value of the commodity in its primary function. What does happened to this use value through the process of commodification can be explained observing what the readymade becomes with Warhol and, maybe much more distinctly with Koons. In these artworks, in fact the, use value be firstly darkened and then completely substituted by the aesthetic value. In the Brillo Soap Pads Box (fig.2) it seems that,
Marcel Duchamp Apropos of ready-mades quoted in Kristine Stiles,Peter Howard Selz, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: a Sourcebook of Artists' Writings (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press)p.819820
15 16 17 18

Burger, 56 Badiou 5

the process of identification between the artwork and the commodity it is somehow not completed. We can guess, for instance, whether the box contains or not the object or if the artwork does want to hide a much more interesting content as for example Man Rays artwork The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse(fig.7). On the other hand, it is also true that the viewer is definitely attracted by the catchy industrial design. We can in some ways define this artwork, as a representation of a commodity.

Marcel Duchamp: "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."

Consequences of a movement 2: art and society However, the two philosophers also divide a common view with regards to the fact that art becomes, using again Badiou words,
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self-sufficient. But whereas Badiou sees in this point the danger of an anti-democratic and self-expressive drift, Adorno sees its salvation. What is in question here is the relationship, as previously said, between art and society. This impasse, that seems to trap art in an aseptic container, is in reality for Adorno, a declaration of independence, which serves the function of avoiding any instrumentalisation both from the market, as in the culture industry, that from the politics, as in social realism. Art remains locked in the realm of the concept to avoid its easily exploitation. Art becomes social by its opposition to society, and occupies this position only as autonomous art. By crystallizing in it as something unique to itself, rather than complying with existing social norms and qualifying as socially useful, it criticizes society by merely existing, for which puritans of all stripes condemn it. What is social in art is its immanent movement against society, not its manifest opinions as a consequence rather no art than social realism

APPENDIX

Figure 1: In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915) Marcel Duchamp

Figure 2: Brillo Soap Pads Box (1964) Andy Warhol

Figure 4: Ceci nest pas une pipe (1928-29) Rene Magritte

Figure 5: L.H.O.O.Q (1919) Marcel Duchamp

Figure 6: Black Square (1915)

Kazimir Malevich

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