Preferred Citation: Judovitz, Dalia. Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit.

Berkeley: University of
California Press, c1995 1995. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft3w1005ft/

Unpacking Duchamp
Art in Transit
Dalia Judovitz
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley Los Angeles Oxford
1995 The Regents of the University of California

to Hamish M. Caldwell,
Eros, c'est la vie

Preferred Citation: Judovitz, Dalia. Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit. Berkeley: University of
California Press, c1995 1995. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft3w1005ft/

to Hamish M. Caldwell,
Eros, c'est la vie
ix

Acknowledgments
This project has in its background the writings of Jean-Franois Lyotard, Octavio Paz,
Arturo Schwarz, Thierry de Duve, Jean Clair, and Rosalind Krauss. I am especially
grateful for the research opportunities offered by a sabbatical year fellowship and grant
awarded by Emory University, which enabled me to successfully complete this project.
My special thanks go to Marjorie Perloff and Naomi Sawelson-Gorse for their generous
comments and suggestions, and to my friends and colleagues of The International
Association for Philosophy and Literature. I owe a great deal to Edward Dimendberg for
his enthusiastic editorial support, as well as to Michelle Nordon, the production editor,
and to Michelle Ghaffari, the copy editor. I am particularly indebted to Patrick Wheeler
for his assistance with the book's bibliographic materials, copy editing, illustration, and

general production. My greatest debt is to the person who inspired this volume and
sustained it with unfailing love and undying humor, my husband Hamish Caldwell.
The following articles served as points of departure, providing initial approaches to the
questions elaborated in this volume:
"Art and Economics: Duchamp's Postmodern Returns," Criticism: A Quarterly for
Literature and the Arts 135, no. 2 (Spring 1993): 193218.
x
"(Non)sense and (non)art in Duchamp," Art & Text, Nonsense (special supplement in
conjunction with the Whitney Museum of American Art), no. 37 (September 1990): 80
86.
"Rendez-vous with Marcel Duchamp: Given, " Dada & Surrealism, no. 16 (1987): 184
202. Reprinted in Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century, ed. Rudolf E. Kuenzli and
Francis M. Naumann (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989).
xi

Author's Note
The most frequently quoted references to Duchamp's writings and interviews are to the
following volumes: Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron
Padgett (New York: Da Capo Press, 1987), which will henceforth be abbreviated as
DMD, page number; Paul Matisse, Marcel Duchamp, Notes, ed. and trans. Paul Matisse
(Boston: J. K. Hall & Co., 1983), which will henceforth be abbreviated as Notes, page
number; and Michel Sanouillet and E. Peterson, eds., Salt Seller: The Writings of
Marcel Duchamp (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), which will henceforth be
abbreviated as WMD, page number.
Copyright for all the Marcel Duchamp illustrations is held by Artists Rights Society
1993 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ ADAGP, Paris; the Man Ray illustration
is 1993 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP and The Man Ray Trust,
Paris. Reproduced here by permission.
1

Introduction:
Unpacking Duchamp
Everything important that I have done can be put into a little suitcase.
Marcel Duchamp
New York, March 1952

The Marcel Duchamp retrospective at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice (Summer 1993)
reminds us once again of the seminal role played by Duchamp in the history of modern
art. Rather than functioning retrospectively, however, this exhibition brings to the fore
the centrality of Marcel Duchamp's work not merely to the history of Modernism but its
living legacy to the current debates regarding postmodernism. At issue is less the
question of canonizing Duchamp for posterity, than the fact of coming to terms with his
works in a manner that addresses their complex, poetic, logical, and also humorous,
urgency. The most troubling aspect of Duchamp's works is that they are not merely
visual artifacts but rather works that embody thought processes, logical and poetic
displacements that resist facile categorization or containment. While there is no unifying
style that defines his work, no single thread or hidden message, Duchamp's works
compel the spectator to question the traditional categories that have defined the notion
of the art object, the creative act, and the position of the artist. The spectator completes,
as it were, the creative process not as a passive consumer but as an active interpreter. It
is this postponement of artistic intent and its manifest realizations that explains
Duchamp's persistent influence on the history of Modernism and his impact on its fate,
whether that future is today labeled as postmodernism, and tomorrow, as something yet
unnamed.
How, then, is the spectator to understand Duchamp's works? What
2
forms of initiation are available to provide an interpretative access to his works? The
critical scholarship on Duchamp constitutes an immense corpus ranging from the
scientific to the theoretical and the esoteric. Given the privileged position of the
spectator in Duchamp's works, every critical approach and scholarly movement has
added significant insights to his oeuvre. So where does one begin, given that Duchamp's
pictorial origins herald an ending of sortsthat of the abandonment of painting,
followed by the renunciation of conventional art forms. One way is to begin with what
initially appears to be a provisional ending, Duchamp's commemorative work The Box
in a Valise (first published in 1941 through 1949), a "portable museum" in miniature
containing reproductions of his principal works. This work is both a compilation of his
previous works, as well as a multiple, since it is merely the first copy in a series of
twenty. Due to its derivative and reproductive character, this work can easily be
dismissed as the least creative of Duchamp's works, reinforcing the contention that
Duchamp had simply run out of new ideas. Yet, a closer scrutiny of The Box in a Valise
suggests that this work may provide fundamental clues toward an understanding of his
works. Notably, this work draws our attention to Duchamp's interest in the notion of
reproduction and the multiple as a way of redefining art, not as an imitation of reality
but as a system of production that takes itself to task. It is a reminder that the notion of
artistic production should be reexamined as a function of reproduction; that is, as a
deliberate restaging and reappropriation of his previous works and the artistic
conventions that define them. Moreover, The Box in a Valise makes manifest the
interpretative challenge that it extends to the spectator through its deliberate invitation
to be unpacked. What does it mean to conceive the work of art as a box or valise?

Furthermore, can the notion of unpacking Duchampprovide us with significant new

insights into his transitive redefinition of the art object, artist, and art?
In light of Marcel Duchamp's summation of his artistic corpus in a box, which is also a
portable valise, his incidental comment "Everything important that I have done can be
put into a little suitcase" takes on a certain gravity. For some, Marcel Duchamp's
contention epitomizes his particular contribution to the history of art: he is an artist
whose real baggage consists not of the objects produced but of the ideas and artistic
con3
ventions in question. For others, Duchamp's statement is merely a factual endorsement
of his relatively small artistic production, a confirmation of his preference for chess or
even inactivity espoused in such pronouncements as: "I like breathing rather than
working." Unpacking Duchamp's works, however, turns out to be at once a more
difficult and a less onerous task than we are led to believe. As John Cage observes, the
challenge that Duchamp extends to posterity is precisely that of refusing to be boxed in,
packed away, and conveniently labeled as an artist: "The danger remains that he'll get
out of the valise we put him in. So long as he remains locked up."[1]
A rapid survey of Duchamp's career, which stretches over a period of fifty-nine years
(19091968), reveals that Duchamp abandons painting in 1918, and that by 1923, he
has ceased to produce conventional art altogether. Having revolutionized painting with
his landmark Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, (Nu descendant un escalier, no. 2;
1912), a work that is part of a series and subject to multiple reproductions, he leaves
traditional art behind with The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (La Marie
mise nu par ses clibataires, mme, or The Large Glass; 191523), which reassembles
and reproduces some of his previous pictorial works on glass. During this period, he
shocks the art world with the discovery and exhibition of the ready-mades, massproduced objects that Duchamp relabels and displays as art. While the Large Glass
entails elaborate technical and mechanical handiwork, the ready-mades require no
manual work at all. Following his compilation of technical/poetic instructions to The
Large Glass in The Green Box (1934), Duchamp began to compile his previous works
in miniaturized facsimile by assembling them in a box, a folding exhibition space
entitled The Box in a Valise (194149). Although speedy reproduction techniques were
already available, Duchamp opted for technically obsolete and time-consuming
methods: collotype printing and hand coloring using stencils. As Ecke Bonk points out:
"By using highly time-consuming techniques, he blurred the boundaries between the
unique art object and the multiple, between the original and its mechanical
reproducibility, and created a number of transitional stages that were hard to define or to
distinguish."[2] Duchamp's deliberate choice to invest more labor in reproducing his own
works rather than producing new ones attests to his consistent effort to
4
challenge the notion of artistic creativity by questioning the distinctions that separate an
original from its reproduction and a unique work from its multiple copies. Did

Duchamp begin reproducing and collecting his own work because he had stopped
making art, or did he discover through The Box in a Valise a new way of thinking about
artistic activity?
Before pursuing further this rapid survey of Marcel Duchamp's artistic career, it is
necessary to examine the paradigmatic nature of The Box in a Valise toward an
understanding of his works. As a literal compilation of his artistic corpus in miniature
reproduction, The Box in a Valise follows Duchamp's previous, although more limited,
efforts at reproduction and assemblage in The Large Glass. The Box in a Valise makes
manifest Duchamp's efforts to redefine the notion of an art object, as well as the modes
of artistic production. To unpack The Box in a Valise is to come to terms with how
artistic representation functions as an assemblage, a system of framing and labeling. It
suggests that artistic production is a system that reproduces and reassembles the
conventions that frame and label various works as art objects. Duchamp's The Box in a
Valise challenges as a compilation of multiples the priority and uniqueness of original
works. This work restages the viewer's experience of Duchamp's works, no longer as
singular or autonomous objects isolated in the museum but as an organic corpus. This
portable museum of works in miniaturized facsimile suggests that the meaning of
represented objects can only be addressed as a context of embedded gestures. By
packing his most significant works in a suitcase, Duchamp withdraws the artwork from
the confines of the museum. In doing so he reveals its embedded nature in the
institutional frameworks that determine its meaning as art.
The invitation to unpack The Box in a Valise involves both a physical and a conceptual
intervention. The physical process of unpacking these miniaturized replicas coincides
with the intellectual discovery of their remarkable affinities and resonances. The process
of unfolding creates a new way of experiencing these works, as a system where
reference or meaning is generated through cross-reference. The significance and value
of these works are revealed by their relationships to each other; their position in the box
generates transparencies, overlaps, or zones of opacity. The autonomy of these works as
individual objects is undermined, since their meaning and value is determined not by
some inherent quality but
5
instead through their position in relation to each other. The Box in a Valise opens up a
new way of approaching Duchamp's work, as a chess game or a language where
meaning is transitional, generated through the interplay and strategic positioning of the
constitutive elements. The meaning of individual works is not guaranteed either by the
artist's intention or by history, it is there to be created anew each time, by the spectator,
as a context generated through the interplay of specific works. The plasticity of
Duchamp's intervention thus lies not in the objects but in their strategic syntax and
poetic associations. Completed during World War II, the portability of The Box in a
Valise stands as a testament to fragility and transition, not as a way of stepping out of
history but as a way of reaffirming the vulnerability of art in the face of catastrophic
historical change. This work underlines the significance of reproduction in Duchamp's
works, not merely as means of perpetuating his works through facsimile but as a means
of redefining artistic production by reassembling its constitutive elements.

Resuming the survey of Duchamp's artistic career, despite his suggestion that he had
given up art in favor of chess, Duchamp did not stop making new works. Starting in the
late 1940s he begins to produce artworks in which exaggerated realism and deliberate
artificiality stand in contrast with the literal simplicity and technological character of the
ready-mades. While appearing to return to figurative conventions, Duchamp redefines
the notion of artistic production by using artistic conventions, rather than objects, as
ready-mades. These works are assemblages that parody the conventions of pictorial
naturalism in order to demonstrate visibly their demise as literal death. These threedimensional works, such as Female Fig Leaf (Feuille de vigne femelle; 1950, a plaster
cast of female genitalia), and Dart-Object (Objet-Dard; 1951, a riblike phallus in
galvanized plaster) are puns on the use of artistic conventions to represent gender.
Following Duchamp's earlier exploration of the nude as a pictorial genre, these
"realistic" plaster casts playfully reveal the artifices employed in both painting and
sculpture to represent issues of sexual difference. They are followed by sculptural puns
on the function of art as a medium for reproduction, notably, the pictorial still life
(nature-morte ) TORTURE-MORTE (1959) and sculpture-morte (1959). During this
period, unknown to his public and critics alike, Duchamp was also working on
6
his testamentary installation, Given: 1) the waterfall, 2) the illuminating gas (Etant
Donns: 1) la chute d'eau, 2) le gaz d'clairage; 194666), a work exhibited
posthumously with the directive that it may not be photographically reproduced for
fifteen years. Devoid of modernist abstract tendencies, this work stunned the critics by
its contrived naturalism, a tableau-vivant of a mock nude that displays herself in a
dioramalike landscape. Painstakingly assembled during a period of twenty years, this
work shocked the public because Duchamp seemed to be returning to pictorial
conventions and a concept of art that he had supposedly abandoned long before.
Duchamp appeared to be coming back full circle to the nude, no longer as an abstract
representation but as a grossly literal one.
Duchamp's rapid abandonment not just of painting but of conventional art, and his
subsequent return to works that mimic art but are not readily classifiable as such, raise
significant questions regarding his paradoxical renunciation of and consistent
dependence on pictorial and artistic conventions. How is it possible to abandon both
painting and traditional art, while continuing to evoke and strategically draw upon
them? Duchamp's deliberate focus on reproduction, on the literal transposition or
translation of a previously defined corpus, represents a literal pun on the task of painting
to reproduce nature. To the extent that Duchamp's work relies on conventional painting,
it displaces its priority by undermining it through reproduction. As Duchamp suggests,
reproduction dispenses with the originality of painting, substituting for it the playful
verisimilitude of the facsimile: "Instead of painting something it wasuse a
reproduction of those paintings that I loved so much, into a small reducedform, in a
small shape, andhow to do itI thought of a book which I didn't like so I thought
of the idea of a box."[3] Duchamp draws on the idea of painting only to reinterpret its
mimetic impulse literally as mechanical reproduction. This literal play on painting
generates a new kind of artwork, whose meaning as a facsimile undermines the logic of
originality. Duchamp challenges the dependence of copies on originals by
demonstrating that originals are multiples of sorts, to the extent that they embody an

assemblage of already determined gestures and conventions. Displacing the priority of

both the artwork and the intervention of the hand with the facsimile, whose
reproduction is associated with laborious, time-consuming techniques, Duchamp
redefines art by questioning its conditions of production.
7
Even when it seems that Duchamp is returning to a more conventional understanding of
reproduction, works such as Given, by their hyperrealistic and contrived character,
parody the notion of artistic reference. Thus, while appearing to return to legitimate
works of art, Duchamp succeeds in questioning the legitimacy of art as a mimetic
medium.
Rather than accepting the traditional labels of art and the artist, Duchamp proceeds to
systematically challenge these definitions. Reacting against Romantic ideology that
isolates the artist from the social and economic sphere and singles out art as a unique
form of expression, Duchamp redefines the artist as a maker, rather than a creator. This
is not because Duchamp denies the powers of either inspiration or creativity but because
he recognizes that any creative act is embedded in a set of conventions and expectations
that predetermine its outcome. If Duchamp appropriates the notion of mechanical
reproduction in order to redefine artistic creativity, this is neither for lack of inspiration
nor for having run out of ideas for making new works. Rather, as I suggested earlier,
mechanical reproduction becomes the paradigm for a new way of thinking about artistic
production, one that recognizes that creativity operates in a field of givens, of readymade rules. By understanding the creative act in context, Duchamp redefines its
meaning as a strategic intervention that derives its significance from its plasticity, its
ability to generate new meanings by drawing upon already given terms. For the
spectator completes the picture, as it were, interpretatively unpacking the work through
the interplay of visual and verbal puns. From this perspective, originality emerges as a
multiple gesture, one that generates, in turn, the illusion of multiple authorship. Is it
then surprising to discover Duchamp's playful use of multiple signatures and personas,
as well as his reliance on the spectator as authorizing agency of his work? His evocation
of Rrose Slavy, his artistic alter ego, de-essentializes the creative act through a
plurality of personas that undermines the notion of authorship. Just as the notion of
artistic production is redefined through reproduction, so does authorship reproduce and
proliferate according to a generative model that disrupts both the identity of the artist
and the artist's proprietary relations to his/her works.
Duchamp, however, is not content to revolutionize the notion of artistic identity or the
identity of the artwork. His efforts to question the
8
generic distinctions that separate various artistic domains coincide with his attempts to
question gender. The attempt to explore issues of genre coincides with the effort to
rethink the notion of gender by destabilizing it referentially and de-essentializing it.
Throughout his career, starting with Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 1 (Nu
descendant un escalier, no. 1; 1911) and culminating in Given: 1) the waterfall, 2) the

illuminating gas, Duchamp keeps returning to the nude in order to question its premises
as a pictorial and artistic genre. Rather than perpetuating traditional representations of
nudity by automatically associating it with femininity and the removal of garments, he
begins to treat the nude as a symptom of the problems embodied in pictorial
representation in general. At issue is the reliance of pictorial representation on its visual,
rather than intellectual, impact; hence the emphasis on spectatorship as voyeurism, on
visual fascination and seduction. Duchamp, however, is concerned with exploring the
conceptual aspects of pictorial representation, with its conditions of possibility not
merely as a visual medium but as a philosophical and institutional construct. Given the
erosion of the traditional mimetic role of painting by mechanical reproduction and the
emergence of new media, such as photography and cinema, which incorporate
technological developments, it is not surprising to note Duchamp's desire to rethink the
function and the representational modes that define painting and sculpture, and by
extension, art in general. While other modernist movements such as Cubism and
Futurism turn to abstraction as a way of responding to social and technological changes,
Duchamp turns to a conceptual investigation of the meaning and function of art. The
technical precision and methodical nature of his interventions stand in contrast to
contemporary Dadaist and Surrealist efforts to radicalize art through chance operations.
Chance in Duchamp's work is grounded in a field of preestablished determinations, so
that its plasticity emerges from its strategic deployment and recontextualization.
Following the trajectory of the lines of inquiry outlined above, on the one hand, this
book unpacks Duchamp's works by focusing on the persistence of the nude as a pictorial
genre as it passes from figuration to abstraction, through its generic decomposition and
transposition in The Large Glass and its belated figurative reassemblage in Given. On
the other hand, it underlines the fact that Duchamp's representations of gen9
der invariably involve a generic crossover into different artistic media. It is important to
note that from its inception in Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 1, the representation of
the nude is staged in the context of a series, indicating the incipient redefinition of
notions of artistic production through the logic of the multiple. Before stumbling on the
discovery of the ready-mades, Duchamp elaborates the nude as a transitive genre whose
logic is in the order of reproducibility. Having begun to strip not the nude but the
pictorial conventions that define it, in The Large Glass Duchamp goes on to strip art
bare. He does not do so by leaving art behind but rather he draws upon it, restaging it in
a manner that postpones its pictorial becoming. Playing on mimesis, a definition of art
as a copy of nature, Duchamp generates copies of art that through reproduction
undermine notions of artistic intent. Despite the seemingly disparate nature of such
works as The Large Glass, the ready-mades, The Box in a Valise, and Given, they all
represent Duchamp's strategic interpretation of art as an assemblage whose productive
logic is reproductive. These works are staged compendia of generic conventions that
enable Duchamp to test the boundaries of art by exceeding and, therefore, postponing its
artistic intent. Thus, the structure of this book unfolds like a box, around the abovementioned works as its organizing hinges. Whereas The Large Glass and the readymades hold up a mirror to painting and sculpture by de-realizing their artistic import,
The Box in a Valise and Given by their mirrorical return to figurality unhinge art by
reproducing and objectifying its generic conventions.

In chapter 1, the focus is on Duchamp's ostensible abandonment of painting and his

challenge of its generic and conceptual limits. I argue that instead of relying on the
notion of pictorial image and the conventions of painting, Duchamp redefines them both
by rethinking them through other media, such as engraving and cartooning. As a mode
of mechanical reproduction, engraving enables Duchamp to conceive the visual image
in new termsnot as a unique entity but as a series of imprints whose temporal
structure acts to delay the retinal impact of the image. The technology of engraving and
printing as media of mechanical reproduction becomes the source for intellectual
insights that Duchamp deploys to redefine the identity and immediacy of the visual
image. As a graphic and linguistic medium, cartooning enables Duchamp to redefine
10
the visual image in conceptual terms as the interplay of visual and verbal puns. If titles
are significant in Duchamp's works, this is because they no longer function as mere
captions or labels but instead as devices that reframe the retinal impact of images in
terms of poetic or punning associations. The visual opacity of the Large Glass attests to
Duchamp's successful displacement of meaning away from the retinal and toward its
active interplay with linguistic and poetic frames of reference. A reassemblage that
reproduces his previous pictorial works on glass, the Large Glass makes manifest the
recognition of the ready-made character of pictorial representation.
In chapters 2 and 3, Duchamp's work speaks eloquently and decisively about art as an
institution, as a system for packaging and framing various objects and gestures.
Exhibiting mass-produced objects as art objects, Duchamp exposes the conditions of
possibility of art through the readymades. Rather than postulating art as an expression
of the object, of its formal and material qualities, Duchamp uncovers the fact that art
inheres less in an object than in the institutional context that frames it and makes it
legible. The ready-mades make visible the provisional and transitional status of art as
they switch back and forth, undecidably, between art and nonart. By documenting this
transition, Duchamp demystifies the art object at the same time that he reactivates the
position of the spectator, as critical to both the reception and production of works of art.
Rather than being restricted to the ready-mades as objects or gestures, this study seeks
to inquire into their nominal properties. While certain ready-mades are named according
to the object they ostensibly represent (the bicycle wheel, for instance), other objects
bear titles that appear to be totally unrelated to them (the snow shovel is entitled In
Advance of the Broken Arm [En avance du bras cass; 1915]). I argue that the legibility
of the ready-mades relies not merely on their visual appearance but on their nominal
properties, since their titles pack in networks of puns and poetic associations. As literal
reproductions of objects, the ready-mades become legible as puns, as relays of
signification, as switches that enable the spectator to discover mechanically the creative
potential of language. Just as mechanical reproduction ensures the production of
commercial prototypes, so do linguistic and social conventions ensure the production
and circulation of puns. Culturally generated and reproduced, puns func 11

tion as vehicles of individual expression only insofar as they embody shared forms of
common or poetic usage. Duchamp's ready-mades make us stumble on the surprising
discovery that linguistic puns are also ready-mades; that is, they are mechanisms whose
venues for generating meaning are technically spelled out in the dictionary. The
legibility of Duchamp's puns thus depends less on the spectator's imagination than on
his or her ability to reactivate the puns by becoming aware and engaging with their
potential meanings. In this context the dictionary becomes a technical manual of sorts
that makes visible the conceptual subtext that underlies the visual and nominal
appearance of the ready-mades. Unfolding Duchamp's ready-mades as threedimensional puns requires concerted attention to the interplay of language and image, as
each system of reference intervenes to generate or undermine the production of
meaning. Unpacking Duchamp's ready-mades, therefore, refers less to the handling of
objects proper than to theunderstanding of the way they function as utterances in
context. As bearers of speech or cultural mouthpieces, the ready-mades capture the
dilemma of an art that postpones its pictorial becoming and thus the finality of its
attainment to become art.
As the "plastic equivalent of a pun" (to use Octavio Paz's terms), the ready-made stages
the gratuitous conversion of an ordinary object into a work of art, while undermining
through this very gesture the notion of an art object. Chapter 4 is an examination of how
the ready-made functions as a critique of classical notions of value. Instead of assuming
the autonomy of art from the social and economic sphere, the focus is on how Duchamp
rethinks the question of artistic value by redefining it as a function of its economic and
social currency. Instead of condemning Duchamp's forays into commercial ventures in
art, I argue that Duchamp is redefining art according to a speculative model, whose
conceptual implications liberally draw upon and expend classical economics. Ranging
from checks and bonds to numismatic coins, Duchamp's artworks mimic economic
currency and exchange only to undermine the notion of both artistic and monetary
standards. These works redefine artistic and economic forms of production byexploiting
the speculative potential of reproduction.
This study concludes with an examination of Duchamp's posthumously exhibited work
Given: 1) the waterfall, 2) the illuminating gas, a work
12
that, like his earlier The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even and The Box in a
Valise, is a compilation of his previous works. Described as "startlingly gross and
amateurish," Given "startles" by mirroring back the spectator's look.[4] The violence of
this work appears to lie less in its deliberate exhibitionism and voyeurism than in the
fact that the spectator is put face-to-face with his or her desire to look, to be fascinated,
and to consume sexuality as an image. In the context of the museum where everything is
on display, however, the display of sexuality takes on an ironic tone. Having questioned
the logic of the visible, does Duchamp's Given represent a continued challenge or a
return to conventional modes of representation? I argue that despite this work's oven
sexual display, or rather, because of its exaggeration as display, the equation of sexuality
and vision is sundered. Duchamp undermines the logic of voyeurism by questioning the
coincidence of sight with visual pleasure. In doing so he moves away from equating
sexuality with anatomical destiny, toward redefining it as a rhetorical operation.

However, this effort to de-essentialize gender can be understood only in the framework
of his attempts to experiment with genre. Just as Given fails to provide the spectator
with a stable representation of sexuality, so does it also resist any generic classification.
Given is an installation, an assemblage of works that mimic artistic media such as
painting, sculpture, and photography, without being reducible to a specific genre. The
generic identity of this work, like the status of gender, remains transitive, resisting both
fixity and closure.
If Duchamp's works resist canonization, this is not simply because of their complexity
or enigmatic character but rather because his works are by definition transitive. They are
like hinges, straddling the gap between vision and language, art and nonart, forms of
artistic production and reproduction. Resembling Duchamp's elusive presence as an
artist, his works are packages whose meaning continues to unfold in new and surprising
ways. In the postscript is a brief assessment of Duchamp's impact on the history of
Modernism. His redefinition of artistic modes of production through reproduction opens
up the scope of Modernism to a notion of artistic production that is speculative, insofar
as it reinvests rather than liquidates the legacy of tradition. In doing so, Duchamp
discovers within the experimental scope of Modernism a conceptual potential that
becomes the terrain for the emergence of postmodernism. Having done away with
13
the classical categories that define the artist, the creative act, and the artwork, Duchamp
opens up the horizons of Modernism to speculative explorations, to forms of
appropriation that postpone the fate of Modernism, its exhaustion through novelty. Just
as Duchamp draws upon pictorial conventions to redefine the meaning of art, so does
the legacy of his work open itself to appropriation by others. Is it then surprising to see
artists such as J. S. G. Boggs issuing bogus bills on Duchamp's pseudoartistic/financial
transactions? Boggs's postmodern appropriation realizes a potential inscribed in
Duchamp's postponed legacy of Modernism. If Duchamp's artistic life and his works are
on credit, this credit can continue to be reinvested or spent. The possibilities are
unlimited, since, as Duchamp reminds us, "Posterity is a form of the spectator" (DMD,
76).
15

1
Painting at a Dead End
The rest of them were artists. Duchamp collects dust.
John Cage

Among Marcel Duchamp's gestures and artistic interventions, few have created as much
controversy or been as puzzling as his putative abandonment of painting.[1] Duchamp
begins painting at fifteen, producing a series of competent, if not particularly

distinguished, landscapes and portraits, which he qualifies as "pseudo-Impressionist" or

"misdirected Impressionism" (DMD, 22). Although Duchamp starts to exhibit his work
publicly in 1909, the earliest works of his that are considered significant date to 1910.
At the age of twenty-three, his enriched pictorial and compositional vocabulary is
deployed in a figurative context, where nudes and group scenes dominate. Reflecting
the influence of Paul Czanne and the Fauvists, the emphatic use of color and design in
these works represents a decisive turn toward abstraction. Robert Lebel compares their
"acid stridence to that of Van Dongen, and also, German Expressionism" (DMD , 23).
By 1911, Duchamp's use of abstraction demonstrates shared affinities with Cubism,
insofar as it brings into question the figurative identity of the body through its spatial
fragmentation and its serial deployment. At this time he also begins to expand the
meaning of the pictorial image by trying to find new ways of illuminating it, either
through experiments with gaslight or by exploring how the title may have an impact on
the nominal expectations of painting.
At the end of 1911 and culminating in 1912, Duchamp irrevocably establishes his
authority as a painter through his signatory work, Nude
16
Descending a Staircase, No. 2, which is first rejected by the Salon des Indpendants in
March, only to be exhibited in Barcelona in May. In late 1912, this work is chosen by
Walter Pach to be included in the upcoming International Exhibition of Modern Art in
New York (the Armory Show of 1913). It is during this same period that Duchamp
begins to incorporate machine imagery and morphology in his paintings, leading to his
mechanomorphic paintings. This three-year trajectory that establishes Duchamp's
creative identity and credibility as a painter renders his abandonment in 1913 of
conventional painting and drawing all the more surprising, if not altogether shocking. At
issue is neither Duchamp's failure nor, ironically, his success as a painter but rather his
challenge of the limits of pictorial practice.[2] The fact that in 1916 a New York art
dealer named Knoedler, after seeing Nude Descending a Staircase, offered Duchamp
$10,000 a year for his "entire production" (DMD , 106), alerts us to Duchamp's
painterly reputation and financial worth in the nascent New York art world.[3]
Duchamp's refusal of this offer at a time when his financial means were limited all the
more decisively underscores his choice to move beyond painting in order to challenge
the social and institutional conventions that define both pictorial production and the
painter.
Thus within this three-year span (191013), Duchamp establishes himself as an
internationally renowned painter, one who moves decisively from figuration to
abstraction, only to begin to question painting altogether. In 1913 Duchamp practically
gives up conventional forms of painting, but this does not mean that he stops working.
Instead, he begins to experiment with chance as a way of getting away from the
traditional methods of expression generally associated with art. He lets pieces of string
fall and records the shapes they generate; when his work on glass cracks he accepts the
cracks as part of the work.[4] These chance-generated works challenge the position of the
artist as autonomous producer and the determinism that defines art as a creative
medium. During this period, Duchamp experiments with mechanical drawings, painted

renderings, and notations that serve as studies for his seminal work, The Bride Stripped
Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.
By 1923, the idea that Duchamp did not just give up painting but art altogether comes
into currency. As Joseph Masheck explains: "Duchamp never discouraged it and seems
to have enjoyed the mysterious notoriety
17
that it gave him as well as the silent isolation to carry on his activities out of the
limelight. Duchamp was said to have taken up a decided antiart position, abandoning art
in favor of playing chess."[5] Thus, from Duchamp's supposed abandonment of painting
we arrive (through The Large Glass, which, as I argue, is also a looking glass) at the far
more radical conclusion that Duchamp has reneged on art altogether, that he has
abandoned art in favor of chess. How do we explain these radical transitions, from
figuration to abstraction leading to the abandonment of painting, and ultimately art,
given the speed at which these gestures succeed one another? Can these transitions be
illuminated by particular events in Duchamp's life, and more specifically, how are they
manifest when considering works from this period?[6] Are there conditions or strategies
evidenced in these works that dictate a radical revaluation of painting both as artistic
practice and as profession?
A small number of biographical details may prove to be significant to our discussion of
Duchamp's pictorial origins. Born in a solid French bourgeois family on 28 July 1887
and following in the footsteps of his two brothers Jacques Villon and Raymond
Duchamp-Villon and his sister Suzanne, Duchamp also became interested in art.[7] It
should be noted, however, that the initial disapproval expressed by his father regarding
an artist's career for his sons led his elder brothers to change their names by assuming a
pseudonym (Villon, after the renowned medieval French poet Franois Villon [1431after 1463]) or partial pseudonym (Duchamp-Villon).[8] Despite the paternal reluctance
to endorse the professional choices of his sons and despite the age differences among
the siblings, the entire family was deeply steeped in their shared interests in music, art,
and literature.[9] It is important to recall, however, that Duchamp's formal art training
was limited to one year of studies at the Acadmie Julien, from 1904 to 1905. Far more
significant in his professional formation was his apprenticeship as a printer in Rouen in
1905, in lieu of doing military service. As an "art worker" he received exemption from
military service after one year, having passed a juried exam based on the reprints of his
grandfather's engravings. From 1905 to 1910, following the example of his brother
Jacques Villon, he executed cartoons for two newspapers, the Courier Franais and Le
Rire. Thus, in addition to his early exposure and family background in art, both
engraving and cartooning
18
were formative media to his development as painter.
The influence of Duchamp's exposure to engraving and cartooning impacted on his
efforts to discover alternative ways of conceiving painting and art. Unlike his siblings,

Duchamp is not content to simply become a painter, for he will rapidly abandon
painting in favor of activities that challenge the very meaning and definition of art.
When one considers attentively Duchamp's early works, one is invariably struck by his
efforts to put into question the notion of pictorial image, by examining its relation to
other frames of reference, the title, or the nominal expectations of the public. Moreover,
his early explorations of serial works, or multiples, attest to his efforts to challenge the
uniqueness and autonomy of the pictorial image. Engraving and cartooning thus enabled
Duchamp to conceive the plastic image in new terms, whose technical and intellectual
content opened up the possibility of redefining the notion of artistic creativity as a form
of production based on reproduction. Duchamp did not becomean engraver nor a
cartoonist. He did, however, draw on the intellectual and speculative potential of these
two media, in order to redefine not only painting as a medium but also art itself. The
fact that Duchamp began his artistic career as an "art worker" is significant, insofar as it
enabled Duchamp to question the creative function of the artist and the meaning of art
as a form of making:
I don't believe in the creative function of the artist. He's a man like any other. It's his job
to do certain things, but the businessman does certain things also, you understand? On
the other hand the word "art" interests me very much. If it comes from the Sanskrit, as
I've heard, it signifies "making." Now everyone makes something, and those who make
things on a canvas, with a frame, they're called artists. Formerly, they were called
craftsmen, a term I prefer. We're all craftsmen, in civilian or military life. (DMD, 16).
In the pages that follow, Duchamp's effort to question the meaning of art as pictorial
practice, as an institution, and as a profession will be at issue. The notion of art as
"making" enlarges the meaning of artistic activity to forms of production that include
not only artisanal efforts but also conceptual insights.
19

Painting Stripped Bare

I have been a little like Gertrude Stein
Marcel Duchamp

In his interview with Marcel Duchamp, Pierre Cabanne asks him to explain the key
event of his life: his abandonment of painting. Duchamp's response identifies Nude
Descending a Staircase, No. 2 as the turning point. While serving to establish his
reputation, the initial rejection of the work alerts him to the norms and strictures that
define not just conventional art but also contemporary art movements, such as Cubism:
There was an incident, in 1912, which "gave me a turn," so to speak; when I brought the
"Nude Descending a Staircase" to the Indpendants, and they asked me to withdraw it
before the opening. In the most advanced group of the period, certain people had
extraordinary qualms, a sort of fear! People like Gleizes, who were, nevertheless,
extremely intelligent, found this "Nude" wasn't in the line that they had predicted.

Cubism had lasted two or three years, and they already had an absolutely clear,
dogmatic line on it, foreseeing everything that might happen. (DMD , 17)
Duchamp is less concerned with the rejection of the painting than the fact it embodies a
doctrinal gestureone where a work of art is defined by living up to its nominal
expectations. By failing to fall into line, that is to conform to a set of pregiven rules,
Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 was perceived as a challenge to Cubism, whose
precepts had already been laid out by Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes. For Duchamp,
the turning point that the Nude represents is not merely its challenge to the public but
also to his peers, whose artistic and intellectual expectations define the work's
conditions of possibility. For Duchamp this incident was symptomatic of the dogmatic,
programmatic character of art, and led him to abandon both painting and the artistic
milieus he frequented, in favor of a job as a librarian at Sainte-Genevive Library in
Paris.
Was Duchamp's dramatic gesture an expression of his "distrust of systematization," of
his inability to contain himself to "accept established formulas" (DMD , 26)? Duchamp
rejects Cubism not just as an artistic movement but as a discipline with a set aesthetic
program: "Now, we have a lot of little Cubists, monkeys following the motion of a
leader
20
without comprehension of their significance. Their favorite word is discipline. It means
everything to them and nothing."[10] Duchamp deliberately distances himself from the
aesthetic agendas of Cubism, since his aim is to "detheorize Cubism in order to give it a
freer interpretation" (DMD , 28).[11] If this is true, then one must examine in what sense
Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 challenges preestablished Cubist pictorial and
generic formulas. Coming in the wake of a series of representational nudes in 1910,
Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 marks Duchamp's decisive turn from figuration to
abstraction. As this study will demonstrate, however, Duchamp's passage through
abstraction involves the speculative goal of getting away from "the physical aspect of
painting" by putting "painting once again to the service of the mind."[12] As Arturo
Schwarz observes, Duchamp's aim was to liberate the notion of painting from its
aesthetic function to please the eye, in order to reassess its intellectual potential.[13]
Duchamp's efforts to expand the horizons of painting, by exploring the literal and
nominal expectations that define it, led to his subsequent abandonment of the medium.
Duchamp's adoption of the nude as pictorial genre did not have entirely auspicious
beginnings. It is also interesting to recall that he failed the Ecole des Beaux-Arts
competition over a test that involved doing a nude in charcoal (DMD , 21). In 1910,
when Duchamp turns to the genre of the nude

Fig. 1.
Marcel Duchamp, Nude Seated in a Bathtub (Nu
Assis Dans Une Bagnoire), 1910. Oil on canvas,
36 1/4 x 28 3/4 in.
Courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago.
21
after extensive work in landscape and portraiture, his explorations of this subject matter
reveal an acute awareness of pictorial traditions and contemporary artistic movements
and styles. Schwarz notes that in Nude with Black Stockings (Nu aux bas noirs; 1910),
the "use of heavy black linescharacteristic of the Fauves' reaction to the
Impressionists' careful avoidance of blackis freely adopted."[14] Duchamp's deliberate
deployment of one of the signatory gestures of Fauvism, which is itself a reaction to the
aesthetic ideology of Impressionism, suggests his recognition of the plastic and strategic
character of artistic conventions. It reflects an understanding of the extent to which an
artistic movement may be defined by its strategic response to the aesthetic tenets of a
previous, or even contemporary, movement. Duchamp's use of heavy black lines to
outline the body, as in Nude Seated in a Bathtub (Nu assis dans une bagnoire; 1910)
(fig. 1), Nude withBlack Stockings (fig. 2), and Red Nude (Nu rouge; 1910) (fig. 3),
establishes a tension between the rhetoric of drawing and that of color. The black lines
emphatically reframe the successive color shadings, thus

Fig. 2.
Marcel Duchamp, Nude with Black Stockings (Nu
Aux Bas Noirs), 1910. Oil on canvas, 45 3/4 x 35 1/8 in.
Galleria Schwarz, Milan. Courtesy of Arturo Schwarz.

Fig. 3.
Marcel Duchamp, Red Nude (Nu Rouge), 1910. Oil
on canvas, 36 1/4 x 28 3/4 in.
Courtesy of The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
22

inscribing a graphic dimension into the painterly impact of these works. In the Red
Nude, color as one of the constitutive elements of painting is deployed in a manner that
reveals its affinity to engraving. The red shadings and black lines compete as color
templates that redefine the pictorial appearance of the nude as a successive set of
impressions or imprints.
If these nudes are graphic, it is in their treatment of painting and not in their ostensible
subject matter. When comparing Duchamp's Nude with Black Stockings with Gustave
Courbet's Woman with White Stockings (Femme aux bas blancs; 1861), one is struck by
its unerotic demeanor that resists voyeuristic appropriation as an image. Rather than
emphasizing and framing genitality, as the white stockings do in Courbet's painting, the
black stockings dismember the body by erasing it from the

Fig. 4.
Marcel Duchamp, The Bush (Le Buisson), 1910. Oil on
canvas, 50 x 36 1/4 in.
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Louise and
Walter Arensberg Collection.
23
knees down. Duchamp's cropping of the nude body displaces the viewer's attention from
the frontality of sex to the pictorial frame that cuts the body offa feature shared by
other works, such as Two Nudes (Deux Nus; 1910), and Red Nude. The effort to draw
the spectator's attention to framing devices is deliberately underlined in Red Nude ,

where the profile of the crouching red nude breaking out of the frame of the painting
also cuts into the frame of another painting. Located in the upper lefthand corner of the
image, this painting is further disfigured by the painter's signature cutting across the
head of a female figure. The authorial signature is displaced into a position where its
nominal content interferes with the visual content and consumption of the image. Rather
than merely stripping the nude, Duchamp begins to strip away the visual conventions
that define the nude as a pictorial genre.
By 1910, Duchamp's exploration of the nude enters a new phase, one where issues of
pictorial abstraction are reframed by their interplay with nominal expectations triggered
by the title. Loosely identified as his "Symbolist" phase because of its visual affinities to
the works of Paul Gauguin and Pierre Girieud, Duchamp's works betray the Symbolist
conceit of combining word and image.[15] Duchamp challenges notions of visual and
verbal reference by playing them against each other through puns. The doubling of
female nudes in The Bush (Le Buisson ; 1910) (fig. 4) and in Baptism (1911) is
underlined by framing of the figures by a shrublike halo, an aura that conflates their
physical outline with the landscape that surrounds them. For Lawrence Steefel, The
Bush "seems to point towards the ultimate goal of turning the world inside out."[16] This
doubling and melding of background and bodily composition can be seen as a pun on
the painting's title, The Bush , which nominally makes available the sexual referent that
is traditionally dissimulated or visually veiled in the representation of nudity. Duchamp
trivializes the visual referent by his puns on the title "bush," thereby defying the
nominal expectations of the spectator as voyeur. In Paradise (Le Paradis; 1910) (fig. 5)
the abject representation of the male and female nudes challenges the promissory tone
of the title. There is no illumination nor spiritual "Ascension" here. The title Paradise
contradicts the viewer's expectations, unless it is interpreted literally, as a pun on the
French word paradis, which means no radiance, to be struck out, canceled, or just
broken. The lack of radiance in Paradise
24

Fig. 5.
Marcel Duchamp, Paradise (Le Paradis), 1910. Oil on
canvas, 45 1/8 x 50 1/8 in.
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art,
Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection.

may reflect the fact that Symbolism as a pictorial style, rather than the painting's subject
matter, has reached exhaustion.
While Duchamp admits in his interview with Cabanne: "I don't know where I had been
to pick up on this hieratic business" (DMD , 23), this statement should not discourage us
from considering this question. This halo effect or aura can be found in another work of
this period entitled Portrait of Dr. R. Dumouchel (Portrait du Dr. R. Dumouchel; 1910)
(fig. 6), where a nimbus surrounds the upper torso of the figure and, especially, the
hands. Referring to this painting, Duchamp wrote in a letter to his patrons Louise and
Walter Arensberg: "The portrait is very colorful (red and green) and has a note of humor
which indicated my future direction to abandon mere retinal painting."[17] The note of
humor that Duchamp evokes here may be a reference to the painting's caption " propos
de ta 'figure' mon cher Dumouchel" (loosely translated as, "by way of your 'appearance'
my dear Dumouchel"). The word figure means figure, shape, or form, but its use by
Duchamp suggests that it refers to Dumouchel's appearance: it is a reflection on the way
he looks, his "air," or "aura." The colorful nature of this painting, its red and green
colors, is a pun on color blindness. This pun on color blindness in the context of
painting foreshadows, as it were, Duchamp's denunciation and subsequent aban 25
donment of retinal painting. For Duchamp, the hieratic aura associated with Symbolist
painting becomes the locus of investigation of the interplay of word and image, not
under the guise of symbols but as puns.
This "halo" effect or aura continues to reappear throughout Duchamp's works, either as
an analogy to smell (in such works as Fountain [1917] and Beautiful Breath, Veil Water
[Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette; 1921]), or as an analogy for electricity (in Bec Auer [a
gas lamp circa 1902]; The Large Glass [191523]; Given: 1) the waterfall, 2) the
illuminating gas (194666); and in a set of prints entitled The Bec Auer [1968]).[18] The
word "aura" (in Greek, breeze or breath) signifies an influence or emanation issuing
from the human body, although invisible to ordinary eyes and surrounding it as an
atmosphere.[19] In Duchamp's later works the "aura" is deployed as a critique of painting
as a visual event, in

Fig. 6.
Marcel Duchamp, Portrait of Dr. R. Dumouchel (Portrait Du
Dr. R. Dumouchel), 1910. Oil on canvas, 39 1/2 x 25 5/8 in.
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Louise
and Walter Arensberg Collection.
26
order to recover its intellectual potential. Considered from this perspective, Duchamp's
early experiments with the hieratic can be understood as an allusion to the history of
painting. This was at a time when the appearance of the nude, like painting itself,
attained value by virtue of its religious, philosophical, and moral function, and was thus
in excess of visual semblance. If painting exuded an "aura," this is because its
significance was originally defined by its social rather than cultural function. The loss of
painting's "aura" in the age of mechanical reproduction heralds the end of painting as a
purely manual and visual event and its conceptual rebirth as a practice stripped of the
hallowed echoes of visual semblance.[20] Duchamp's antiretinal stance reflects his effort
to expand the meaning of painting by returning to a historical understanding of painting
that takes into account its functional role. As Duchamp explains to Cabanne:
Since Courbet, it's been believed that painting is addressed to the retina. That was
everyone's error. The retinal shudder! Before, painting had other functions: it could be
religious, philosophical, moral. If I had the chance to take an antiretinal attitude, it
unfortunately hasn't changed much; our whole century is completely retinal, except for
the Surrealists, who tried to go outside it somewhat. And still, they didn't go so far!
(DMD , 43)

In this context, painting is redefined: it is considered no longer merely visual/erotic

stimulation but also conceptual intervention.
If Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (fig. 7) scandalized both the critics and the public
alike, this is because it challenged the nominal expectations of the viewer more than any
of Duchamp's previous works. Its rejection by the Salon des Indpendants in 1912, and
the public furor occasioned by its exhibition at the New York Armory Show in 1913, are
a barometer of the painting's transgressive character. Described as an "explosion in a
shingle factory," Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 was further humored by a cartoon
depiction entitled Rude Descending a Staircase. The word rude appropriately captures
the impact of the Nude, its deliberate disregard for the artistic conventions of the genre.
This work scandalized not only the general public but also the avant-garde circles of the
time. Duchamp withdrew his work from the Salon des Indpendants
27

Fig. 7.
Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (Nu Descendant Un Escalier,
No. 2), 1912. Oil on canvas, 57 1/2 x 35 1/8 in.
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection.
28
by refusing to comply with Metzinger's and Gleizes's request to change the title because
it was too "literary," in a caricatural sense. As Duchamp explains, the title plays a
significant role in explaining the particular interest and impact of this work:

What contributed to the interest provoked by the canvas was its title. One just doesn't do
a nude woman coming down the stairs, that's ridiculous. It doesn't seem ridiculous now,
because it's been talked about so much, but when it was new, it seemed scandalous. A
nude should be respected . (DMD, 44; emphasis added)
Duchamp's comments indicate that the reception of this painting was being filtered
through a set of expectations, whose nominal character was staged by the title. The
abstract nature of this work and thus its failure to provide a visual referent for the title
only increased the public's disappointment. Nude. . . No. 2 presents a clash of nominal
and visual expectations that are the expression of the history and conventions of
painting. Instead of reclining passively, Duchamp's fractured nude is actively
descending a staircase. The scandal surrounding the exhibition of Nude. . . No. 2 thus
reflects the destruction of the nude as traditional subject matter of painting. In his book
The Nude, Kenneth Clark maintains that the nude is not the starting point of a painting
but a way of seeing that the painting achieves.[21] The nude embodies a set of
representational strategies that imply a particular relation between the spectator and the
spectacle of the body reduced toan image on display. Constructed as the subject of
desire from the Renaissance to the late nineteenth century, the nude as a pictorial genre
involves a structure of spectatorship that relies upon the objectification of the female
body. This interplay of visual and nominal expectations staged by the nude as a pictorial
genre was put into question by painters such as Edouard Manet, who in Olympia (1863)
and Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe (186263) challenged the inscription of the desiring look of
the spectator.[22] Moving away from figuration into abstraction, Duchamp's Nude. . . No.
2 further challenges this congruence of visual, nominal, and generic expectations.
The Nude. . . No. 2 reduces the anatomical nude to a series of successively fractured
volumes: "Painted, as it is, in severe wood colors, the
29
anatomical nude does not exist, or at least cannot be seen, since I discarded completely
the naturalistic appearance of a nude, keeping only the abstract lines of some twenty
different static positions in the successive action of descending."[23] The renunciation of
the naturalistic appearance of the nude in favor of its twenty positions in the successive
act of descent reflects Duchamp's radical critique of painting through
chronophotographic freeze-frame techniques.[24] What is at issue here is a challenge of
the pictorial medium through sequential photography: a critique of vision as a cognitive
medium that conflates spectatorship and pleasure. The splintering of vision into a series
of frames that fragment and abstract both the identity of the nude and the process of
movement inscribe into the painting an interval, a temporal dimension. Functioning
neither descriptively nor prescriptively, the title Nude Descending a Staircase inscribes
a temporal delay that interferes with the visual consumption of the image. This strategy
of delay also redefines and defers notions of visual reference that are traditionally
associated with photography. While appealing to techniques of mechanical
reproduction, such as photography, to redefine the pictorial medium and its subject
matter, Duchamp succeeds in redefining painting itself as a process whose plasticity
includes temporal considerations.
Asked by Cabanne how did the painting originate, Duchamp responded:

In the nude itself. To do a nude different from the classic reclining or standing nude, and
to put it into motion. There was something funny there, but it wasn't funny when I did it.
Movement appeared like an argument that made me decide to do it.
In the "Nude Descending a Staircase," I wanted to create a static image of movement:
movement is an abstraction, a deduction articulated within the painting, without our
knowing if a real person is or isn't descending an equally real staircase. Fundamentally,
movement is in the eye of the spectator, who incorporates it into the painting. (DMD,
30)
The picture presents the viewer with a "vertigo of delay," to use Paz's term, rather than
one of acceleration.[25] Duchamp's interest in kinetics here is conceptual: the movement
in the painting is produced through the
30

Fig. 8.
Marcel Duchamp, Once More to this Star (Encore
Cet Astre), 1911. Pencil, 9 3/4 x 6 1/2 in.
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art,
Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection.
decomposition of the graphic elements. The staggered motion of the "nude"
demonstrates an analysis of movement rather than the Futurist seduction with the
dynamics of movement.[26] The kinetic character of the nude is not merely the

thematization of movement as a pictorial fact but rather the discovery that the retinal is
not an essential given but a rhetorical condition.
But why is the nude descending? This question is all the more interesting, since in its
preliminary sketch Once More to This Star (Encore cet astre; 1911) (fig. 8), based on
the title of Jules Laforgue's poem, the primary figure is ascending a staircase. A network
of visual puns connects Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 to Once More to This Star:
instead
31
of ascending to a star, the star becomes a staircase for the obverse movement of descent.
Duchamp explained his interest in Laforgue's poetry, particularly his prose poems
Moralits Lgendaires, in terms of their humor and poetic quality, as such: "It was like
an exit from Symbolism" (DMD, 30). Just as Laforgue's poem denounces the idealist
aspirations of Symbolist poetry by pointing out that the stellar image of the sun is
undermined by its ordinary and pockmarked appearance, so does Duchamp transform
the idealism that underlies pictorial praxis into a mere stair, a pun on the notion of
descent understood both literally and figuratively.[27] The fact that the nude may be
descending from its pedestal should be of no surprise, given that its ascension into a
"genre" is ungendered by being at once sexually and pictorially redefined.
The ambiguous title of the Nude (nu, in French) gives no particular indication as to the
referent's gender, although critics have identified it generically as female, de rigueur.
Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 thus emerges as a critique of pictorial
representation to the extent that it challenges the ideological underpinnings of the nude
as a genre that is invariably femininely gendered. Unable to incarnate the nominal
expectations of the spectator, the nude visually fractures the spectator's gaze by setting it
into a spiraling motion. In doing so Duchamp points both to the title and to the
spectator's gaze as the sites on which hinges the facticity of gender. This resistance to
the equation of spectatorship with visual consumption and delectation is explicitly
thematized in Duchamp's later works. In Selected Details After Courbet (Morceaux
choisis d'aprs Courbet; 1968), for instance, the spectator's gaze is conflated with the
falcon (faucon, inFrench: a pun on the facticity of sex) in the foreground, thereby
revealing the role of language in the constitution of gender as sexual referent. The Nude
's descent thus functions as an index of Duchamp's strategic displacement and
rethematization of the nude as a pictorial genre and its declension from the spectator's
nominal expectations.
As a descendant from the lineage of painterly traditions, Duchamp's Nude Descending a
Staircase, No. 2 stages both its genealogical derivation, as well as its own deviation
from this ancestry. The descent of the Nude is not merely the mark of a genealogical
decline but also the legal index of the passage of an estate through inheritance.[28] The
Nude's
32

descent illuminates Duchamp's own inheritance of previous pictorial traditions and his
efforts to literally draw on this heritage by reproducing it in new ways. Is it surprising
then that Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 is the first of Duchamp's serial works,
having been preceded by Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 1 (Nu descendant un
escalier, no. 1; 1911) (fig. 9), only to be followed by Duchamp's full-sized photographic
and hand-colored facsimile entitled Nude Descending a Staircase, No.3 (Nu descendant
un escalier, no.3; 1916). As Joseph Masheck notes: "Typical of Duchamp is this work's
self-illustrative and self-reproductive function, as well as the fact that as an actual
photograph it returns to one of the technical sources of the 'original' painting."[29] The
self-illustrative and self-reproductive aspects of Duchamp's Nude Descending a
Staircase demonstrate his efforts to redefine the notion of pictorial production, as a
genealogical intervention based on reproduction.
However, this reproductive industry did not stop short with the fullsized versions of the
Nude. This work was further reproduced as a miniature pencil-and-ink drawing
Nude . . . No. 4 (1918) for the dollhouse of Carrie Stettheimer. This doll-sized version of
the Nude was followed by further miniature reproductions in The Box in a Valise (1938
41). From a single work that is by definition a multiple, insofar as it is part of a series,
Duchamp generates an entire corpus. By discovering the self-productive and selfreproductive potential of the Nude, Duchamp redefines the nude as a medium of and for
reproduction. Eroticism in this context no longer refers to the visual appearance of the
nude but instead functions as an index of its proliferation as modes of appearance.
Duchamp challenges the eroticism traditionally associated with spectatorship and
voyeurism by proposing an alternative eroticism whose speculative, technical, and
humorous character restages through reproduction the notion of artistic creativity and
production.
Given Duchamp's explicit rejection of the equation of vision and eroticism, how are we
to explain his interest in the nude as pictorial genre? It seems that the entire trajectory of
his life's work is defined by the arching movement from Nude Descending a Staircase,
No. 2 to The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, and culminating in his
testamentary work Given: 1) the waterfall, 2) the illuminating gas. While Duchamp
maintains that eroticism is the only -ism he believes in, it is
33
clear that eroticism for him is not linked to an anatomical or essentialist destiny but
rather, like humor, it is defined through movement, as transition instead of stasis.
Eroticism in the figurative arts is most commonly represented as the relationship
between clothing and nudity, and thus, as Mario Perniola suggests, it is conditional on
the possibility of movement or transition from one state to another.[30] For Duchamp,
however, eroticism signifies conceptually and philosophically as a reflection on
representation, a presentation understood in the mode of reproduction, where
appearance is the result of repeated modes of impressions.
Now we begin to understand the conceptual import of both engraving and cartooning in
Duchamp's work. Engraving is one of the earliest forms of mechanical reproduction that
involves a different way of conceiving

Fig. 9.
Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 1
(Nu Descendant Un Escalier, No. 1), 1911. Oil on
cardboard, 38 1/8 x 23 1/4 in.
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Louise and
Walter Arensberg Collection.
34
the plastic image. Not only is the appearance of the engraved image the result of
multiple reproductions but its very identity is defined as a technical process, involving
multiple impressions or imprints. An engraving is a template, a sculptural mold that
functions like a photographic negative. Engraving as a medium challenges the
autonomy of the pictorial image, insofar as the image acts as a temporal record of
multiple impressions.[31] Although associated historically with craft rather than art,
engravings challenge both the uniqueness of the plastic image and traditional notions of
artistic creativity. Duchamp's pictorial series of Nude Descending a Staircase, as a
multiple that undergoes extensive reproduction, illustrates the logic of engraving
operative in his works. This is not to say that these works are engravings, since they are
clearly paintings; rather, the conditions of production and reproduction evidenced in

these series suggest conceptual processes akin to those involved in the technical
reproduction of engravings.
You may ask how cartoons inform Duchamp's oeuvre? The answer by now is clear.
Regarded as a form of popular art associated with the print medium, cartoons are
images that are constructed like rebuses, as composites of language and image. Their
humor is not just visual but intellectual. They are often visual analogues of linguistic
puns. This is not to suggest, however, that Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 is merely
a cartoon, a rude joke at the expense of painting. Rather, Duchamp's use of the title as
nominal intervention in order to restage the expectations of the spectator reframes the
reception of this work as an intellectual, instead of a purely visual, experience.
Consequently, despite its mechanomorphic character, Duchamp's Nude can also be seen
an an "anti-machine." As Octavio Paz explains: "These apparatuses are the equivalent of
the puns: the unusual ways in which they work nullify themselves as machines. Their
relation to utility is the same as that of delay to movement;they are without sense and
meaning. They are machines that distill criticism of themselves."[32] If the Nude is an
elaborate visual and linguistic pun, where exactly is the joke? As this study has
suggested, Duchamp's humor lies in redefining the visual image as a serial imprint, as a
construct where appearance does not refer to an external reality but to a mode of
production whose logic is reproductive. Duchamp doubly displaces painting: first, by
redefining it through the logic of engraving, as a print medium, and second, by draw 35
ing on the linguistic and intellectual logic of cartooning in order "to put painting once
again at the service of the mind."[33] Eroticism in this context is no longer defined as a
transitional movement between clothing and nudity. Instead, it becomes the rhetorical
interplay between language and vision, which constructs the facticity of gender as a
pun.

The Mainspring of the Future: Playing the Field

While all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.
Marcel Duchamp

When asked by Katherine Kuh, one of his interviewers, which of his works he considers
to be the most important, Marcel Duchamp replied:
As far as date is concerned I'd say the Three Stoppages [3 stoppages talon ] of 1913.
That was really when I tapped the mainspring of my future. In itself it was not an
important work of art, but for me it opened the waythe way to escape from those
traditional methods of expression long associated with art. I didn't realize at that time
exactly what I had stumbled on. When you tap something you don't always recognize
the sound. That's apt to come later. For me the Three Stoppages was a first gesture
liberating me from the past.[34]

As Duchamp subsequently explains, the idea of letting a piece of thread fall on a canvas
was accidental, but "from this accident came a carefully planned work."[35] What exactly
did Duchamp stumble on that enabled him to escape the traditional means of expression
associated with art? Was it the idea of chance, or its plastic deployment and embodiment
as an event or work? Before exploring in more detail the role of Three Standard
Stoppages (3 stoppages talon; 191314) as a gesture that would liberate him from the
past, one must first understand how this work emerges out of Duchamp's pictorial
experiments, for this work decisively signifies both his break with painting and his
strategic turn toward the ready-mades and The Large Glass.
Duchamp's interest in chance as a way of redefining conventional forms of artistic
expression appears early on in his paintings and is tied to his interest in chess. For
Duchamp, chess is not merely a pastime or an ordinary game because its intellectual
character represents for him a plastic
36

Fig. 10.
Marcel Duchamp, The Chess Game (Le Jeu D'checs), 1910. Oil on canvas,
44 7/8 x 57 1/2 in.
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Louise and Walter
Arensberg Collection.

Fig 11
Paul Czanne, Card Players, 1892.
Courtesy of The Courtauld Institute Gallery, London.
37
and thus, by extension, an artistic dimension. As a strategic game that requires the
interplay of two opponents, chess provides Duchamp with a new way of envisioning art
in its dialogue with the tradition. The analogy of art and chess enables Duchamp to
appropriate chance and redefine its plastic impact in a field of already given
determinations. Starting with The Chess Game (Le jeu d' hecs; 1910) (fig. 10), and
continuing through 1911, Duchamp produces a series of works dealing with chess.
These include six drawings/sketches, which culminate in the painting Portrait of Chess
Players (Portrait de Joueurs d'checs; 1911).[36] These works range from a relatively
conventional depiction of a chess game, to progressively more abstract renditions of the
players, the board, and the chess pieces.
Duchamp's lifetime interest and preoccupation with chess is well known, but its
significance and precise impact on his art is less recognized.[37] While Duchamp openly
acknowledges his indebtedness of The Chess Game to Paul Czanne's Card Players
(1892) (fig. II), it is clear that he is already playing another game (DMD, 27). In The
Chess Game the centrality of the table in Czanne's Card Players is displaced on a
diagonal axis along which there are two tables, one with a chessboard on it and another
set in the manner of a still life.[38] Duchamp's choice to replace the card game with a
chess game makes visible something that would otherwise remain invisible: the
chessboard as a metaphor for the mental ground rules that define it as a game. The
checkered pattern of the board, however, is also an allusion to another set of rules, those
of Albertian perspective that have guided the development of painting.[39] This allusion
is reinforced by the fact that the chess players are Duchamp's brothers, who are both
practicing artists. If we pursue Duchamp's analogies in The Chess Game, art no less

than chess emerges as a strategic, rather than purely plastic, domain. Both chess and
perspective are systems whose normative standards prescribe and determine the nature
of representation. What had been originally conceived as an arbitrary relation between
painting and the world is now revealed to be a strategic, albeit conventional game, a
chess game.
Why, you may ask, did Duchamp choose not merely to reshuffle Czanne's cards but to
play a different game altogether? The answer lies in his understanding of chess as a
plastic, rather than a purely intellectual, game. As Duchamp's comments to James
Johnson Sweeney indicate, playing
38
chess is like painting insofar as "it is like designing something or constructing a
mechanism of some kind" (WMD, 136). This plasticity, however, is not in the realm of
the visible but in the abstraction of the movement of pieces on the board. In his
interview with Francis Roberts, Duchamp explains how the strategic and positional
nature of chess generates plastic effects:
In my life chess and art stand at opposite poles, but do not be deceived. Chess is not
merely a mechanical function. It is plastic, so to speak. Each time I make a movement
of the pawns on the board, I create a new form, a new pattern, and in this way I am
satisfied by the always changing contour. Not to say that there is no logic in chess.
Chess forces you to be logical. The logic is there, but you just don't see it.[40]
The plasticity that Duchamp ascribes to chess is not aesthetic in the visual sense but
rather intellectual. The movement of the pieces on the board creates patterns and forms
whose contours are constantly shifting. This moving geometry is described by Duchamp
as "a drawing" or as a "mechanical reality" (DMD, 18). As Duchamp elaborates: "In
chess there are some extremely beautiful things in the domain of movement, but not in
the visual domain. It's the imagining of the movement or the gesture that makes the
beauty, in this case. It's completely in one's gray matter" (DMD, 18). The beauty that
Duchamp appeals to is not one based on aesthetic categories, on visual appearance and
artistic self-expression. Rather, the beauty in question is defined by the plasticity of the
imagination, by the poetry of its ever changing contours.
The analogy of chess and art is one that is mediated by an allusion to the abstract nature
of both music and poetry. As Duchamp explains:
Objectively, a game of chess looks very much like a pen-and-ink drawing, with the
difference, however, that the chess player paints with black-and-white forms already
prepared instead of having to invent forms as does the artist. The design thus formed on
the chessboard has apparently no visual aesthetic value, and it is more like a score for
music, which can be played again and again. Beauty in chess is closer to beauty in
poetry; the chess pieces are the block
39

alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on
the chessboard, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem. Actually, I believe that
every chess player experiences a mixture of two aesthetic pleasures, first the abstract
image akin to the poetic idea of writing, second the sensuous pleasure of the
ideographic execution of that image of the chessboards.[41]
Relying on analogies to the media of music and poetry, Duchamp uses chess as a way of
expanding the meaning of art. No longer bound to the creation or invention of visual
forms, the chess player "paints" with already given black-and-white forms. The interest
of the exercise lies in the composition of the design, a visual score that is open to
multiple performances, for the nature and value of chess exists only as a performance, a
duet where two interpreters put their heads together, so to speak. The chess pieces in
this game function as linguistic elements already given by convention, but ready to be
redeployed poetically in new ways. While subject to particular rules governing the
possibility of movement, the mechanisms generated, as the "ideographic execution of
that image," are always open to further reinterpretation. Thus Duchamp uncovers within
chess a paradigm for the reinterpretation of aesthetic pleasure as a pleasure derived
neither from invention nor the sensuality of the pieces themselves, but from their
recomposition and poetic deployment as a game.
Is it then surprising that the later versions of The Chess Game, including the pen-andink drawings/sketches that culminate in the highly abstracted painting Portrait of Chess
Players (fig. 12), represent a visual decomposition of the image in terms of the
chessboard? Another painting from this period, Yvonne and Magdeleine (Torn) in
Tatters (Yvonne et Magdeleine dchiquetes; 1911) (fig. 13), representing Duchamp's
sisters, provides one with some verbal clues in regards to the mechanics of these
images. The expression "torn in tatters" (dchiqueter, in French) means to hack, slash,
tear to shreds, or tear up. As Duchamp explains to Cabanne, "this tearing was
fundamentally an interpretation of Cubist dislocation" (DMD, 29). The word for tearing
(dchiqueter, however, is also a pun on chessboard or checker pattern (chiquier, in
French). Rather than interpreting this tearing as Cubist dislocation, Duchampis
reinterpreting Cubism itself conceptually from the perspective of chess, as a game
whose
40

Fig. 12.
Marcel Duchamp, Portrait of Chess Players

(Portrait de Joueurs D'checs), 1911. Oil on

canvas, 42 1/2 x 39 3/4 in.
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art,
Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection.

Fig. 13.
Marcel Duchamp, Yvonne and Magdeleine (Torn)
Tatters (Yvonne et Magdeleine Dchiquetes), 1911.
Oil on canvas, 23 5/8 x 28 3/4 in.
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art,
Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection.
illogical visual character becomes legible once seen from the perspective of chess. More
specifically, the serial fragmentation and multiplication of the protagonists into shards,
while depersonalizing them into mechanical patterns, illuminates painting in a new
light. Duchamp visibly draws on Cubism, only to redefine its logic as a representation:
the dislocations visible in the image are but the diagrams of movements ideographically
transposed from chess.
While such an interpretation seems to force Duchamp's hand, as it were, it is important
to recall Duchamp's comment to Cabanne regarding the fact that Portrait of Chess
Players was painted not in ordinary light, but by gaslight:
This "Chess Players," or rather "Portrait of Chess Players," is more finished, and was
painted by gaslight. It was a tempting experiment. You know, that gaslight from the old
Aver jet is green; I wanted to see what the changing of colors would do. When you paint
in green light and then, the next day, you look at it in day light, it's a lot more mauve,
gray, more like what the Cubists were painting at the time. It was an easy way of getting
a lowering of tones, a grisaille. (DMD, 27).
Duchamp's innovative use of a green gaslight as a way of lowering the color tones of
this painting (grisaille, in French and in English) also func 41
tions as a way of illuminating it from a conceptual or mental perspective (a pun on
matire grise, in French). Rather than merely seeking to reproduce Cubist colors,

Duchamp uses the "gas" light as a pun that reframes the notion of pictorial "gaze." The
title Portrait of Chess Players alerts the viewer to the mise-en-abyme representational
nature of this work: its visual character is mediated conceptually: "it's light that
illuminated me" (DMD, 27). Duchamp's portrait (pourtraire, in French, from Latin, pro
[forth] and trahere [to draw]) draws upon and restages earlier versions of chess games
and chess players by redefining the meaning of pictorial representation as a practice that
is not merely visual but also mental.
If the sequence of paintings and sketches from The Chess Game to Portrait of Chess
Players represents Duchamp's artist brothers playing chess, in later paintings the chess
pieces themselves become the subject matter of art. They take over the board, as it were.
Having uncovered the affiliation between art and chess by revealing their shared
strategic and positional nature, Duchamp now proceeds to examine the plastic
dimension of the mechanics of strategy. As Duchamp observes: "In chess, as in art, we
find a form of mechanics, since chess could be described as the movement of pieces
eating one another."[42] This analogy highlights another aspect of chessits adversarial
naturewhich is equally applicable to art, for Duchamp's own effort to rethink painting
means devising new strategies for an old game. Whether his adversaries may be his own
brothers, who were also artists, or artistic movements such as Cubism, Duchamp's
understanding of art as a strategic game enables him to redefine the notion of artistic
creativity as a form of production based on reproduction. Duchamp's redefinition of art
in terms of chess involves, on the one hand, accepting one's affiliation to traditions, that
is, the readymade character of pictorial convention, and on the other hand, the effort to
redraw the board in order to radically rethink the terms of the game. Consequently,
artistic innovation is freed from the "anxiety of influence," since tradition itself provides
conventional or ready-made elements that Duchamp can redeploy in a strategic fashion.
[43]

Following Portrait of Chess Players and Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, Duchamp
produces a set of sketches and paintings whose mechanomorphic appearance is
underlined by titles that pursue chess analogies. Among the most significant are The
King and Queen
42
Surrounded by Swift Nudes (Le Roi et la Reine entours de nus vites; May 1912) (fig.
14) and The PASSAGE from the Virgin to the Bride (Le Passage de la Vierge la
Marie; 19) (fig. 15), the latter being one of the preliminary works to The Large Glass.
According to Duchamp, the title "'King and Queen' was once again taken from chess,
but the players of 1911 (my two brothers) have been eliminated and replaced by the
chess figures of the King and Queen."[44] In the case of The PASSAGE from the Virgin to
the Bride, the chess analogy is embedded in the notion of marriage implicit in the
transformation of the virgin into the bride. In some card games, pinochle for instance,
the term marriage refers to the combination of the king and queen of the same suit. In
these paintings we are witnessing the passage from chess analogies into works whose
diagrammatic character begins to challenge the very limits of art.

The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes was painted on the back of an earlier
painting, Paradise, which was turned upside down. Commenting on this work to
Katherine Kuh, Duchamp notes:
You know this was a chess king and queenand the picture became a combination of
many ironic implications connected with the words "king and queen." Here the "swift
nudes," instead of descending, were included to suggest a different kind of speed, of
movementa kind of flowing around and between the two central figures. The use of
nudes completely removed any chance of suggesting an actual scene or an actual king
and queen.[45]
The irony in question here involves the substitution of chess pieces for the traditional
subject matter of painting, which as reproductions put into question the referential status
of painting. His choice of renaming the nudes in terms of their quality or agility of
movement was "literary play," a way of transposing sport terminology into painting.[46]
The juxtaposition of the king and queen with the "swift nudes," which are reproductions
of Duchamp's earlier descending nudes, redefines painting itself as a space of
reproduction, where visual appearance is merely the diagrammatic record of various
transitions.
When discussing the relation of Nude Descending a Staircase and The King and Queen
Traversed by Swift Nudes (Le Roi et la Reine traverss
43
par des nus vites; April 1912), Duchamp describes it as minimal, except that they share
"the same form of thought": "as for the swift nudes, they were the trails which crisscross
the painting, which have no anatomical detail, no more than before" (DMD, 35). The
introduction of speed into these paintings is not merely a concession to Futurism but
rather the affirmation of the affinity between art and chess. If playing chess is like
designing or constructing a mechanism, then art becomes a way of setting this
mechanism into motion strategically. Instead of visually representing motion, Duchamp,
following Marey's chronophotographic techniques, maps it as a "system of dots
delineating different movements" (DMD , 34). He thus reduces the intervention of
vision by demonstrating that all the visible traces are but forms of ideographic mapping.
By interpreting painting as a conceptual intervention that converts visible objects into
cartographic networks, Duchamp redefines painting as a philosophical enterprise. As
Octavio Paz observes:

Fig. 14.
Marcel Duchamp. The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes (Le Roi et la Reine
Entoures de Nus Vites), 1912. Oil on canvas, 45 1/8 x 50 1/2 in.
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection.
44

Fig. 15.
Marcel Duchamp, The Passage from the Virgin to the Bride
(Le Passage de la Vierge la Marie), 1912 Oil on canvas,

23 3/8 x 21 1/4 in.

Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
In these canvases the human form has disappeared completely. Its place is not taken by
abstract forms but by transmutations of the human being into delirious pieces of
mechanism. The object is reduced to its most simple elements: volume becomes line;
the line a series of dots. Painting is converted into a symbolic cartography; the object
into idea. It is not the philosophy of painting but painting as philosophy.[47]
The painting The passage from the Virgin to the Bride (fig. 15) thus literalizes a
transition that Duchamp is effecting from visual to conceptual painting. The resonant
tension that this work sustains between abstraction and figuration is amplified by the
punning echoes of the title. Itself a transitional work, between two preliminary sketches
Virgin No. 1 and Virgin No. 2 , this painting is a study for the final painting of Bride
(Mariee; 1912) (fig. 16). The "passage" in question here refers both to the intermediary
status of this work and, more importantly, to the redefinition of painting itself as a
transitional activity, a "rite of passage" of sorts.
45

Fig. 16.
Marcel Duchamp, Bride (Mariee), 1912. Oil on canvas, 35 1/4 x 21 5/8 in.
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection.
46

Fig. 17
Marcel Duchamp, Three Standard Stoppages (3 Stoppages talon), 191314. SemiReady-Made Three Threads, one meter in
length, dropped from a height of one meter and glued to preserve their outline onto a ca
nvas painted Prussian blue. The canvas
was cut into three strips (47 1/4 x 5 1/4 in .), which were then glued onto three glass pan
els (49 3/8 x 7 1/4 in.) ) Three flat wooden
strips (47 x 2 3/8 in; 42 7/8 x 2 1/2 in ., and 43 1/2 x 2 1/2 in) were cut to repeat the curv
es of the threads. The entire assembly is
enclosed in a wooden box (50 7/8 x II x 9 1/8 in .)
Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Katherine S. Dreier Bequest
47
If engraving has enabled Duchamp to conceive painting itself as a transitional activity,
as a set of impressions or imprints, chess enables him to redefine it strategically. From
the chess Queen of King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes, Duchamp now stages
the process of becoming painting, the passage from visual ("Virgin") to conceptual
("Bride") painting. As Thierry de Duve observes: "the painting does what it says, and
says what it does," but in so doing it opens up the space for a new kind of passage, away
from painting altogether.[48] By visibly deploying the strategies that define painting,
Duchamp effectuates a climactic passage through painting that opens up the possibility
of resituating artistic activity within a terrain that no longer requires the confines of the
pictorial space or the handiwork of the brush. The nuptial rites that The PASSAGE from
the Virgin to the Bride initiates and enacts by covenant involve the redefinition of both

painting "the Bride" and the painter, as "the groom." Duchamp, however, is no ordinary
groom in the sense of assuming the position of a liveried servant, that is, an inferior
attendant in relation to painting. His job is not that of an ordinary groommerely to
equip, prepare, or dress up paintingbut rather, equipped with the insights that painting
provides, he draws on painting in order to redefine the meaning of art.
Given Duchamp's exploration of the limits of painting as a kind of end game (to use an
expression that is common in chess), it is not surprising that by 1913 he begins to
envisage leaving it behind altogether. He starts experimenting with chance operations,
which, while drawing on pictorial traditions, also announce his future discovery of the
ready-mades. As Duchamp himself noted, Three Standard Stoppages (fig. 17) represents
a radical turning point in his work, marking his abandonment not only of painting but
also of the conventional notions of art. This work is an assemblage (a semi-ready-made)
consisting of a croquet box that contains three separate measuring devices that were
individually formed by chance operations. Three different threads, one meter in length,
were dropped (or allowed to fall freely, depending on one's perspective) onto a canvas
painted Prussian blue, and glued into place. The resulting impressions, capturing the
curved outline of their chance configurations, were then permanently affixed to glass
plate strips. These plates served as imprints for the preparation of three wood templates.
48
Designated as an instance of "canned chance," this work is also categorized by
Duchamp as "a joke about the meter."[49] Francis M. Naumann concludes that "the
central aim of this work was to throw into question the accepted authority of the meter,"
as a standard unit of measurement.[50] Duchamp's own description of this work, as "three
meters of thread falling and changing the shape of the unit of length," verifies
Naumann's contention with a twist. Not only does Three Standard Stoppages distort the
length of the meter through curvature but in doing so, it demonstrates the recognition
that the meter itself as a unit of length is generated through approximation: the
straightening out, as it were, of a curved meridian.[51] Duchamp sets the viewer straight
by graphically showing that the authority of the meter as a measuring device relies upon
distortions that he corrects through chance operations.
While this work may parody the authority of the meter, and thus by extension challenge
notions of authority in general, it is less clear whether it reflects Duchamp's effort to
champion individual rights, as Naumann claims.[52] As a quasi-scientific device, Three
Standard Stoppages draws on the authority of a scientific standard, only to uncover its
arbitrary and institutionally sanctioned character. Duchamp's invocation of chance is not
a strategy to personalize the laws of physics but merely to ironically "strain" its laws in
order to reveal their instability. As he explains:"I was satisfied with the idea of not being
responsible for the form taken by chance."[53] Chance suspends the notion of personal
responsibility by redefining the notion of artistic creativity as a form of production
whose plasticity is contingent rather than deliberate.
Duchamp's experiment with "canned chance" not only questions scientific authority but
also notions of artistic authority, which by their embedded and ingrained character
reduce art to a mechanical practice. Roberts's question whether the dependence on
chance betrays a disdain for the mechanics of art, leads Duchamp to respond:

I don't think the public is prepared to accept it . . . my canned chance. This depending on
coincidence is too difficult for them. They think everything has to be done on purpose
by complete deliberation and so forth. In time they will come to accept chance as a
possibility to produce things. In fact, the whole world is based on
49
chance, or at least chance is a definition of what happens in the world we live in and
know more than any other causality.[54]
The notion of coincidence challenges through its arbitrary logic both personal and
institutional forms of determinism. More important still, it puts into question the
voluntaristic and intentional logic that defines the creative act and the identity of the
artist. To assume chance as a locus for production is to understand causality itself not as
an origin but as a productive event, whose plasticity can redefine the notion of artistic
creativity.
While Three Standard Stoppages captures the "form taken by chance," it does so not as
a unique event but as a series of impressions that are recorded first on canvas, then on
glass, only to become the molds for a set of wood templates. The first set of chance
operations is twice reproduced, each time redrawing the meter and reshaping it as the
unit of length. The systematic transposition of the impression of the string to the
painterly surface, which is affixed to glass, becomes like a printing plate that generates
the outline of wood templates as its photographic negative. In this work we begin to
witness the stripping bare of painting, the reduction of its operations to chance
understood as a mode of production that relies on "mechanical" conventions. Under the
rubric "The Idea of Fabrication," Duchamp discusses the compositional strategies of this
work: "3 patterns obtained in more or less similar conditions: considered in their
relation to one another, they are an approximatereconstitution of the measure of length"
(WMD , 22). Chance deployed as a strategic set of operations replaces the notion of
pictorial composition by that of fabrication, a mode of production defined by
reproduction.
When Duchamp playfully suggests that Three Standard Stoppages may be a "joke about
the meter," he also opens up the possibility that the meter in question may involve a
poetic and musical referent, rather than a purely metric one.[55] In poetry the meter is not
a unit of length but is instead an indicator of rhythm: a measured arrangement of a line
of verse, or groups of syllables, having a time unit and regular beat. This may explain
why Duchamp in the Box of 1914 refers to Three Standard Stoppages as "the meter
diminished" (WMD, 22). Duchamp's efforts to "diminish" the meter are visible in his
musical experiment Erratum Musical (from The Green Box; 1934) (fig. 18), which
lacks both time signatures and measure markers.
50

Fig. 18
Marcel Duchamp, Erratum Musical, from The
Green Box, 1934 8 x 10 in
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art,
Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection
As Carol P. James explains: "To bend meter in music, Erratum actually straightened it
out, giving each note the same time value. Having no difference of length in relation to
each other, the notes have no real time at all; all are equally hollow."[56] Just as Duchamp
straightened out our idea of the meter, so does Duchamp in Erratum bend the notion of
musical meter, by straightening it out and thus reducing it to meaninglessness.
In his Erratum Musical Duchamp sets to music a randomly chosen dictionary definition
of the verb "to print": "Make an imprint mark traits a figure on a surface print a seal on
wax" ("Faire une em-prein-te mar-quer des traits u-ne fi-gure sur une sur-face im-primer un sceau sur ci-re" ).[57] This definition of printing as a mode of impression also
alludes to the fate of music in the modern age, the fact that early recordings of sound
were made in wax. As James observes: "The text of the Erratum cannily repeats the
processes of reproduction of meaning, be they the printing of alphabetic letters, the
visual traces codified as representations of meaning, i.e., writing, or do-re-mi (mi sol fa
do r) of the musical code recorded in
51
wax."[58] This insistence on printing as a recording device captures its affinity with
music as a medium that generates "meaning" through successive reproductions.
Whether it is a question of a figure or a melodic line, representation in prints or in music
challenges conventional modes of artistic creativity, since meaning is constructed
reiteratively and successively, rather than in the sweep of an off-handed manner.

Following Three Standard Stoppages, Duchamp transposes his experiments with chance
operations back onto one of his last pictorial works entitled Network of Stoppages
(Rseaux des stoppages talon; 1914) (fig. 19). This work marks Duchamp's effort to
contextualize chance not merely as an event but as a set of reiterative impressions
whose plasticity is diagrammatica cartographic network. It involves the mirrorical
return onto painting of chance operations exercised in Three Standard Stoppages. Using
an already painted vertical canvas, Duchamp rotates it horizontally, divides it into two
sections, and lightly repaints over the right section in white wash. This gesture
anticipates his sectioning into two regions that we later find in The Large Glass.
Duchamp remaps on the surface of an

Fig. 19
Marcel Duchamp, Network of Stoppages (Rseaux des Stoppages Etalon),
1914. Oil and pencil on canvas, 58 5/8 x 77 5/8 in.
Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
52
already given painting, a set of bifurcating lines and angles that redefine the painting as
symbolic cartography. He redeploys chance operations by drawing upon painting, only
to redraw painting itself according to the plastic logic of the network stoppages.
Proceeding from chance understood as a stopgap measure, Duchamp generates a set of
imprints whose reproductive character serves to redefine the originality of pictorial
practice.

Through the Looking Glass

His [Duchamp] finest work is his use of time.
Jean-Pierre Roch

In the wake of his pictorial efforts and concomitant with the discovery of the readymades, Duchamp began a series of sketches and works that culminate in the production
of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, also known as The Large Glass
(figs. 20, 21). The sheer duration of this work (which took eight years to evolve and was
"finally unfinished" in 1923) and its accidental completion (it cracked in 1926 while in
transit from its first public showing to its owner Katherine Dreier), reveal the magnitude
of Duchamp's desire to leave traditional forms of art behind.[59] As he explained to
Cabanne: "Art was finished for me. Only the 'Large Glass' interested me." (DMD, 41).
Considered as Duchamp's major opus, this work has elicited enormous critical reflection
and engendered many debates in regard to its meaning and significance. As Calvin
Tomkins observes:
The Large Glass stands in relation to painting as Finnegan's Wake does to literature,
isolated and inimitable; it has been called everything from a masterpiece to a
tremendous hoax, and to this day there are no standards by which it can be judged.
Duchamp invented a new physics to explain its "laws," a new mathematics to fix the
units of measurement of the new physics, and a condensed, poetic language to formulate
its ideas, which he jotted down on scraps of paper as they occurred to him and stored
away in a green cardboard box for future reference.[60]
Despite its visual transparency, or perhaps because of it, this work continues to resist
definitive critical appropriations. Like the viewer's body, which is inscribed in this work
as the tain, or silver backside, of a mirror, this
53
work's opacity most often reflects the presuppositions of the critical discourses that have
sought to illuminate it.[61] My purpose in this study is not to provide a definitive account
of The Large Glass, since it may be impossible to do so, but rather to use it as a vehicle,
as a looking glassa context for understanding Duchamp's particular passage through
art as he explores the very limits of its conditions of possibility and its potential future.
When challenged by Pierre Cabanne to provide his own interpretation of The Large
Glass, Duchamp responded:
I don't have any, because I made it without an idea. There were things that came along
as I worked. The idea of the ensemble was purely and simply the execution, more than
descriptions of each part in the manner of the catalogue of the "Arms of Saint-Etienne."
It was a renunciation of all aesthetics in the ordinary sense of the word . . . not just
another manifesto of new painting. (DMD , 42)
Duchamp's reluctance to provide an interpretation of his own work should not be
understood as a mere refusal, as evasiveness, or as a sign of the work's intelligibility.
Rather, Duchamp's statement repositions the significance of this work as a process: a
repository of meaning not as given but as generated by the spectator through his or her
active interplay with the work. The idea of this work does not function as a mere
blueprint; rather, the logic of the ensemble emerges through the execution and
assemblage of its specific elements. Using the analogy to the Arms of Saint-Etienne (the
early twentieth-century French equivalent of a Sears and Roebuck catalog), Duchamp

underlines the encyclopedic character of this work, as well as its ready-made logic.[62]
By referring to a logic of assemblage whose nature is not artistic but technical and
commercial, Duchamp is able to enact his renunciation of traditional aesthetics. His
insistence that this work does not represent "just another manifesto of new painting,"
marks his effort to redefine aesthetics by invoking the mechanical logic of media of
mass production, such as printing, engraving, and photography. The Large Glass thus
represents "a sum of experiments," without the idea of creating yet another movement in
painting, in the sense of Impressionism, Fauvism, or, for that matter, the contemporary
Cubist and Futurist avant-gardes of the period.
54

Fig. 20.
Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even, or The Large
Glass (La Marie mise nu par ses Clibataires, Mme), 191523. Oil,
varnish, lead foil and wire, and dust on glass mounted between two glass panels,
9 ft. x 1 1/4 in. x 5 ft, 9 1/4 in.
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Katherine S. Dreier Bequest.
55

Fig. 21.
Diagram based on Marcel Duchamp's etching, The Large Glass Completed, 1965.
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art.

 56
The idea of the glass as a compendium of experiments is further compounded by the
fact that the spectator's visual experience of it is intended to be mediated by the
intervention of Duchamp's notes in a box. As he explains to Cabanne:
For the "Box" of 19131914, it's different. I didn't have the idea of a box as much as just
notes. I thought I could collect, in an album like the Saint-Etienne catalogue, some
calculations, some reflections, without relating them. Sometimes they're on torn pieces
of paper. . . . I wanted that album to go with the "Glass," and to be consulted when
seeing the "Glass" because, as I see it, it must not be "looked at" in the aesthetic sense
of the word. One must consult the book, and see the two together. The conjunction of
the two things entirely removes the retinal aspect that I don't like. It was very logical.
(DMD, 4243)
The notes, calculations, and speculations that are part of the "Box" constitute a catalog,
an arbitrary inventory of items to be consulted when looking at The Large Glass. The
conjunction of written and visual information disrupts the visual consumption of the
Glass by interfering with its "retinal" character. The act of vision is contextualized,
thereby redefining the aesthetic autonomy of the Glass . As Duchamp explains: "The
Glass is not to be looked at for itself but only as a function of a catalogue that I never
made."[63] Although Duchamp did not produce an actual catalog to accompany The
Large Glass, his comment indicates that the Box of 1914 (Bote de 1914 ; 191314) (fig.
22) is intended to serve as its companion piece.[64] By designating the Box of 1914 as a
kind of manual to the Glass , Duchamp emphasizes the conditions of its production. In
doing so he removes the Glass from the aesthetic realm by introducing technical
considerations. By mediating the perception of the Glass through the Box of 1914,
Duchamp redefines the Glass not as an object in its own right but as a prototype, a
blueprint of sorts, whose function is to redefine through industry the very meaning of
art.
Duchamp's appeal to mechanical drawing as a way of challenging painting is a "reaction
against the easy splashing way," reflecting his continued struggle: "I was fighting
against the hand."[65] Considered in
57

Fig. 22.
Marcel Duchamp, The Box of 1914 (Bote de 1914), 191314.
Kodak photographic box containing sixteen photos of manuscript
pages and one of the design. To Have the Apprentice in the Sun,
9 7/8 x 7 1/4 in. Galleria Schwarz, Milan, Courtesy of Arturo Schwarz.

Fig. 23.
Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (La Marie mise
nu par ses Clibataries,
Mme) from The Green Box, 1934. 8 x 10 in.
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Louise and Walter Arensberg
58
light of the Box of 1914, and the subsequent Green Box (1934) (fig. 23), which bears the
same title as The Large Glass (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even), the
Large Glass emerges as a compilation of various forms of mechanical reproduction, a
work whose transitional status reflects Duchamp's efforts to challenge pictorial
conventions through mechanical drawing.[66] Duchamp's use of mechanical drawing,
however, reflects his effort to move away from pictorial representation by appealing to a
form of schematism that relies on both visual and discursive cues. As he explains to
Francis Roberts: "My approach to the machine was completely ironic. I made only the
hood. It was a symbolic way of explaining. What was really beneath the hood, how it
really worked, did not interest me. I had my own system quite tight as a system, but not

organized logically."[67] Duchamp's experiments with mechanical drawing and other

forms of technical reproduction are not based on physical or scientific principles;
instead, they represent a "symbolic way of explaining," one that privileges the logic of
the machine, only to reveal its ironic underpinnings. Commenting on Duchamp's
annotations on the painted Bride, Richard Hamilton observes that: "They are an afterthe-fact determination of a possible physical nature and operation, justifying the
fortuitous disposition of forms which would be abstract if they did not give a strong
illusion of existence and if some alien causality could not be read into them."[68] Using
straightforward descriptions that are as exact as those of a "patent engineer," Duchamp
hints that the fortuitous visual appearance of the Bride may be the expression of some
form of physical causality, a manifestation of hidden physical laws and operations.
The Large Glass thus embodies both Duchamp's appeal to technical means of
production and the machine, only to discredit through this very fidelity the logic of
science. But why challenge painting by introducing scientific and technical
considerations, only to humor them in turn? The answer, as provided by Duchamp, is
quite simple:
All painting beginning with Impressionism, is antiscientific, even Seurat. I was
interested in introducing the precise and exact aspect of science, which hasn't often been
done, or at least hadn't been talked about very much. It wasn't for the love of science
that I did
59
this; on the contrary, it was rather in order to discredit it, mildly, lightly, unimportantly.
But irony was present. (DMD, 39)
Duchamp's appeal to science is merely a vehicle for irony, a way of distancing himself
from painting in order to discover in the literal logic of technical terminology a new
kind of poetic device. The Large Glass becomes a looking glass, a mirror of various
forms of literal and visual transposition whose technical precision and exactitude
undermines the plasticity of painting through the poetry of scientific redundancy.
Duchamp's description of this work as "a wedding of mental and visual concepts"
makes us aware that the ceremony that The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even
enacts may involve a symbolic union, one whose seamless appearance and transparency
reflects the opacity of the artistic and technical processes that constitute it.[69]
Duchamp's comments on the Large Glass underline his desire to abandon oil painting
and the artistic conventions it involves. As Duchamp explains: "From Munich on, I had
the idea of the Large Glass. I was finished with Cubism and with movementat least
movement mixed up with oil paint. The whole trend of painting was something I don't
care to continue. After ten years of painting I was bored with it."[70] As the analysis of
his painting The PASSAGE from the Virgin to the Bride (from the Munich period) has
demonstrated, however, Duchamp's desire to strip painting bare by redefining it as a
transitional activity, as a set of impressions or imprints, leads to the redefinition of this
work as a strategy of delays. This work defines a passage through painting as it is being
reconceptualized through engraving, that is, a process of drawing upon painting as a
way of challenging pictorial conventions and the confines of pictorial space. The

subtitle of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, "Delay in Glass" ("Retard
en Verre "), attests to Duchamp's continued efforts to move beyond the notion of
painting by refusing to assimilate this work to a "picture on glass":
Use "delay" instead of picture or painting; picture on glass becomes delay in glassbut
delay in glass does not mean picture on glass
It's merely a way of succeeding in no longer thinking that the thing in question is a
pictureto make a "delay" of it in the most
60
general way possible, not so much in the different meanings in which "delay" can be
taken, but rather in their indecisive reunion "delay"/a "delay in glass" as you would
say a "poem in prose" or a spitoon in silver. (wmd, 26)
Duchamp introduces the notion of delay as a way of holding both painting and pictorial
conventions at bay. This strategy of postponement or deferral does not involve the mere
transposition of painting into another medium such as glass but rather, the redefinition
of the medium itself in terms of a deferral, a passage that postpones the pictorial
becoming of painting.
When asked by Francis Roberts why he felt compelled to paint on glass, Duchamp
answered:
The main point is the subject, the figure. It needs no reference. It is not in relation. All
that background on the canvas that had to be thought about, tactile space like wallpaper,
all that garbage, I wanted to sweep it away. With the glass you can concentrate on the
figure if you want and you can change the background if you want by moving the glass.
The transparency of the glass plays for you. The question of painting in background is
degrading for the painter. The thing you want to express is not in that background.[71]
By using the transparency of glass as a medium, Duchamp denies one of the signatory
marks of painting, that of figure/ground relations. By using glass, Duchamp reduces the
notion of pictorial background to a readymade, one that changes with the position of the
glass. The referential relations between figure and background now emerge as no longer
internal to the logic of the image, but as a product of its chance encounters with the
world. This gesture liberates the subject matter of painting, the figure, from its
referential relations to painting, as well as redefines it as a new site. This site is no
longer governed by the regime of sight, of pictorial vision, but its deferral as pictorial
becoming. The figure in this work is merely an allegorical appearance whose logic
stages its own representational conventions as an apparition.
The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass ) is a multimedia
work that combines oil, varnish, lead foil and wire, and dust
61

Fig. 24.
Marcel Duchamp, The Bride (Pendu
femelle), detail of The Large Glass, 1965.
Courtesy of The Museum of Modern
Art, New York
on glass mounted between two glass panels. Divided into two regions and separated by
three fins of glass that are perpendicular to the plane of the work, they are described by
Duchamp as belonging respectively to the Bride and the Bachelors (WMD, 39).[72] Both
of these regions are generated as reflections and projections of his previous pictorial
works: the literal transposition of the Munich Bride of 1912, oil on canvas, and The
Chocolate Grinder, No. 1 (Broyeuse de chocolat, no. 1; 1913, oil on canvas) on the
upper and lower panels of the Glass, respectively.[73]The Bride (Pendu femelle; 1965)
(fig. 24) is a visual excerpt, a silhouette print of Duchamp's finger-painted Bride.
Duchamp had attempted to transfer the painted Bride by projecting a negative of the
Bride onto the surface of the glass treated with a photosensitive emulsion. Since this
print did not develop properly, he then used lead fuse wire to draw the silhouette, which
he painted in by using gradations of black and white, in order to simulate a photograph
of the Bride. The deployment of these elaborate technical strategies for reproducing the
Bride on glass, not in its original colors but as a black-and-white photograph, reveals
that the graphic dimensions of this work may be less in its iconographic content than in
the projection of the material and technical conditions of its production as a
reproduction. Duchamp's efforts to strip bare painting coincide with a strategy of
reproduction of the Bride, one that delays its pictorial becoming through its deferral as a
series of impressions, as photographic or engraved prints.
Such a conclusion could seem farfetched, were it not to be understood in light of
Duchamp's consistent efforts to challenge painting by rethinking the functions of
different media of mechanical reproduction, such as engraving, photography, and

cinema. These allusions to mechanical reproduction constitute both the subject matter
and metaphorical subtext of his notes. In the Green Box Duchamp refers to the upper
region of the Bride's domain, The Top Inscription (1965) (fig. 25), as the "cinematic
blossoming":
Grafting itself on the arbor typethe cinematic blossoming (controlled by the electrical
stripping)/ This cinematic blossoming is the most important part of the painting.
(graphically as a surface)/ It is in general, the halo of the bride, the sum total of her
splendid vibrations: graphically, there is no question of symbolizing by a
62

Fig. 25.
Marcel Duchamp, The Top Inscription, detail of The Large Glass, 1965
Wash study on handmade paper for the second state of the etching
of the same subject.
Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
grandiose painting this happy goalthe bride's desire; only more clearly, in all this
blossoming, the painting will be an inventory of the elements of this blossoming,
elements of the sexual life imagined by her bride-desiring. (WMD, 42)
Duchamp's graphic rendering of this "cinematic blossoming" is not symbolic but literal
to the extent that the surface of caption is punctuated by the three exposures of draft
pistons. The Draft Piston (Piston de courant d'air; 1914) (fig. 26) is a photograph of a
plane of square gauze or netting material in front of an open window that assumes
different shapes when moved about by air drafts. As Duchamp explains: "I wanted to
register the changes in the surface of that square, and use in my Glass the curves of the
lines distorted by the wind. So I used a gauze, which has natural straight lines. When at
rest, the gauze was perfectly squarelike a chessboardand the lines perfectly straight
as in the case of graph paper."[74] Embedding both allusions to chess and chance, and
specifically to his Three Standard Stoppages, Draft Piston contextualizes chance events
as a series of imprints whose plasticity undermines pictorial modes of production
through mechanical reproduction. The Bride's "cinematic blossoming" thus coincides
with her "electrical stripping." It emanates like a halo constituting the aura of the Bride,
"the sum total of her splendid vibrations." It corresponds to the inventory of her literal
development through different modes of mechanical impression, since the gauze acts as
a free floating screen ("a very fine 'sculpture' of skill," to use Duchamp's terms), which
is photographed only to have its imprints manually transposed onto

 63
the glass in the manner of engraving. Duchamp's appeal to the "graphic" in the context
of the Glass serves to underline his efforts to "draw" on painting while redefining its
meaning through reproductive techniques.
Such a technical reading of the "blossoming" and "stripping" of the Bride appears,
however, to overlook the sexual overtones of Duchamp's formulation of "cinematic
blossoming" as the "elements of the sexual life imagined by her bride-desiring." The
very designation of the Bride as the "hanged" (pendu; a masculine term in French),
followed by the adjective female (femelle ), inscribes the specter of gender ambiguity
and reversal into her/his supposed blossoming.[75] The term "hanged" is associated with
the public display of painting, handled by "hanging committees." Could it be, then, that
the sexual blossoming of the Bride alludes to gender, only to make manifest the process
of engenderment? The suspension of the Bride's pictorial and iconographic identity is
captured precisely in her/his development through mechanical reproduction. It is the
Bride's nonidentity as a pictorial entity that justifies painting's "blossoming" as a
multiple mechanism of irony. The painted Bride's "cinematic development" on glass
coincides with its suspension as a pictorial artifact, while this work's emergence as
nonart coincides with its ironic destiny as a machine. Having literally hanged painting
out to dry, Duchamp uncovers within its conceptual potential a generative mechanism,
whose very blossoming engenders its demise.
The notion of chance that subtends the mechanical operations of the Bride is revealed
by the Nine Shots, a group of nine holes drilled into the glass, underneath and to the
right of the Top Inscription. Using a match dipped in paint and a toy cannon, Duchamp
aimed shots at a target point that "corresponds to the vanishing point (in perspective),"
leading each

Fig. 16
Marcel Duchamp, Draft Piston (piston De
Courant D'air), 1914. Gelatin silver print,
23 1/8 x 19 3/4 in.
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art.
64

time (the process was repeated three times) to generating three points. This projection
results in a "demultiplication of the target," representing the "schema of any object
whatever" (WMD, 35). The multiplication of the target also coincides with the
"demultiplied body," which is a system that represents its plasticity according to rules
whose logic is flexible. Taking potshots at painting and its perspectival conventions,
Duchamp's projections of the painted Bride emerge as reflections of his effort to rethink
the plasticity of painting according to laws whose mechanical and technical nature is
poetic, rather than physical.
The experiments of the Bride region of the Large Glass cast Duchamp's interest in
science, and particularly the fourth dimension, in a new light. Duchamp himself
admitted that he understood non-Euclidian geometry as "a way of thinking about art on
a broader scale."[76] Speaking about the Bride and the fourth dimension, he explains that
the Bride is the expression of a system of multidimensional projections:
Anything that has a three-dimensional form is the projection in our world from a fourdimensional world, and my Bride, for example, would be a three-dimensional projection
of a four-dimensional bride. All right. Then, since it's on glass it's flat, and so my Bride
is a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional Bride, who also would be a
four-dimensional projection on a three-dimensional world of the Bride.[77]
Duchamp's technical account of the Bride as a four-dimensional projection into our
three-dimensional world may involve more than a simple account of Duchamp's
fascination with four-dimensional geometry. His statements regarding geometry, where
the appearance of an object or image is conceived as the result of a system of
mathematical projection, may also be seen as a metaphorical reflection on art.[78] Could
Duchamp be using the notion of perspective as an analogy for the effort of putting the
concept of art itself, in perspective, as it were?
If classical perspective is the expression of geometrical illusionism, then Duchamp's
attempt to redefine art may be the expression of an ironic approach to geometry. The
Bride as pictorial referent, as the result of a system of geometric projections, is
undermined by her literal transposition
65
onto the Glass . Duchamp draws on the painted Bride, only to delay the impact of its
becoming as pictorial event. Duchamp's literal reproduction of the pictorial Bride on
glass reduces her to a ready-made, one whose mechanical existence is simulated by her
appearance as a photograph or engraving. The redundancy of the Bride, achieved
through reproduction, derealizes her pictorial uniqueness by presenting her, not as a
unique entity but as a multiple one. The very fidelity of her reproduction on glass
reflects back on the pictorial original to undermine its unique identity. The reproduction
of the Bride is a perfect projection, insofar as it involves literal transposition, but, given
the reversibility of the glass, fidelity to geometry emerges as a pun with an ironic twist.
By conflating the work of art with the mimetic impulse that subtends it, Duchamp
literalizes the dilemma of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction by
putting it in front of amirror. But like other mirrors, the Glass reflects art perfectly
backward, reducing its visual appearance to the logic of puns. A linguistic pun, however,

like visual puns, wrecks havoc with meaning, since the reversibility of terms
undermines the conventions of meaning.
The strategies of reproduction deployed in the Bride region of the Glass are pursued
consistently and with exactitude in the lower half of the glass. Duchamp proceeds to
reproduce on glass several of his previous works, most notably Chocolate Grinder, No.
2 (Broyeuse de chocolat, no. 2 ; 1914) (fig. 17). By reproducing the Chocolate Grinder
on glass, Duchamp

Fig. 27
Marcel Duchamp, Chocolate Grinder, No. 2 (Broyeuse
De Chocolat, No. 2), 1914. Oil and thread on canvas,
25 5/8 x 21 1/4 in.
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art,
Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection.
66

Fig. 28
Marcel Duchamp, Dust Breeding (Elevage De Poussire), 1920. Photograph taken by
Man Ray of dust in the region of the Sieves on the Large Glass. Galleria Schwrz, Milan.
Courtesy of Arturo Schwarz.
brings to completion a pictorial series that started with Chocolate Grinder, No. 1, in
1913. The significance of this work, as Duchamp describes it, resides in the fact that it
led him to think that he "could avoid all contact with traditional painting" (DMD, 37).
An instance of Duchamp's interest in mechanical drawing, this work represents the
beginning of Duchamp's investigation of a "dry form of art," that is, by capturing its
physical qualities as a machine as objectively as possible.[79] Duchamp's interest in the
chocolate grinder as a commercial machine reflects his effort to move beyond the notion
of pictorial color as artisanal activity, since "The bachelor grinds chocolate himself"
(WMD , 68). But why the analogy between chocolate and color? Under the rubric of
"Color" in the Green Box, Duchamp suggests that the solidity of chocolate as a
sculptural mold enables one to conceive of color ("physical dyeing") as an "apparition
in the negative of the apparent colors of the substance of the objects" (WMD, 70). In
this context color is redefined, not as an inherent quality but as the product of a system
of conceptual projections.
Right above the Chocolate Grinder, and crossing the moving axis of
67

Fig. 29
Marcel Duchamp, Oculist Witnesses
(TMoins Oculistes), 1920. Pencil on
the reverse of a carbon paper, 19 3/4 x 14 3/4 in.
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art,
Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection.
the Scissors, are the Sieves or Parasols, seven cones that resemble cones used in
seventeenth-century treatises on perspective and anamorphic imagery, where their
function was to either construct or correct visual distortion.[80] In the Green Box the
Sieves are described as a "reversed image of porosity" (WMD , 53), a pun on the
"breeding dust" that was "raised" on the Glass for a period of several months, then
carefully graded in concentration, before being fixed with varnish. This section of the
Glass was photographed by Man Ray and entitled Dust Breeding (Elevage de
poussire; 1920) (fig.28).[81] According to Duchamp, "this dust will be a kind of color"
(WMD , 53), suggesting that this miniature relief, or molded terrain, undermines the
primacy of color through its perspectival effects. The temporal delays involved in the
sedimentation of dust, as well as its lack of distinctive color, become in this instance the
generators of a nonpictorial kind of color whose dryness and porosity argue against the
liquidity of paint. If the Glass is a "greenhouse" of sorts, the colors that it breeds are not
those of traditional painting.[82] By analogy to perspective ("perspective resembles
color," WMD, 87), color in this context emerges as a projection of time, a delay whose
imprint actively holds painting at bay.
In 1918, as a way of further emphasizing his particular interpretation of color, Duchamp
added to the right corner of Glass the Oculist Witnesses (Tmoins oculistes; 1920, a
French term for eyewitnesses) (fig. 29), a ready-made oculist chart that Duchamp
multiplied three times and placed one above the other. These shimmering rings were
reproduced by working in the negative, on the back side of the glass, through a process
of laboriously scraping away excess silver. The transposition of the commercial eye
charts bears further witness to the fact that the visual appearance of the Glass may be in
the order of a visual trick or a pun, a set of projections that must be looked at "crosseyed, like a piece of silvered glass, in which are reflected the objects in the room"
(WMD , 65). In his notes Duchamp also describes this section as a "Sculpture of drops
(points) which the splash forms after having been dazzled across the oculist charts, each
drop acting as a point and sent back mirrorically to the high part of the glass to meet the
9 shots=/Mirrorical return" (WMD , 65). The ocular mirages engineered by the eye
charts emerge as mechanisms of projection, which instead of mirroring external reality

reflect the very mechanisms of projection that structure the glass, connecting
mirrorically its upper and
68
lower region. The Glass is thus a folding mirror that reflects back upon itself, a looking
glass that transforms the spectator's view into a play of reflections whose visual logic
has been reified through puns.
Connected to the Scissors above the Chocolate Grinder and to the Sieves, the Capillary
Tubes act as a conduit for the Illuminating Gas that circulates from the Nine Malic
Molds to the rest of the Glass. In order to generate the network of lines of the Capillary
Tubes Duchamp reproduced his painting Network of Stoppages, which is a reproduction
of his earlier experiments with chance in Three Standard Stoppages. Having originally
"canned chance" by capturing the outlines of three fallen strings on templates, he later
used each template three times to map out a set of imprints that trace a network of lines.
Duchamp multiplies the original imprint of chance by generating a network of lines,
whose graphic character draws upon and plastically elaborates his initial experiment.
Through multiple reproductions of this work of "canned chance," Duchamp redeploys
chance in his work as a plastic device whose formal appearance generated by accident
informs the shape of the precisely crafted elements of the Large Glass. Rather than
functioning merely as a conduit, the Capillary Tubes draw one's attention to the notion
of reproduction, not merely as a vehicle but as a generator of plastic and conceptual
effects. The mechanical aspects of reproduction are recuperated in the service of forms
of production that challenge traditional artistic conventions.
On the left-hand side of the lower region of the Glass are the Nine Malic Molds (9
moules mlic; 191415) (fig. 30), whose position coincides with the Bride in the upper
quadrant. Also entitled the Eros Matrix and forming the Cemeteries of Uniforms and
Liveries, the Nine Malic Molds look like hollow shells or dressmakers' dummies. Like
dressmakers' patterns that outline three-dimensional form on a two-dimensional surface,
the Nine Malic Molds are "uniforms or hollow liveries" destined to give form to the
illuminating gas (WMD , 51).[83] They are "gas castings," inflated forms that parody
social positions: the Priest, Delivery Boy, Gendarme, Cavalryman, Policeman,
Undertaker, Flunky (liveried servant), Busboy, and Stationmaster. Absent from this
schema is the Artist, the social medium par excellence, who functions ostensibly as
society's mirror. Unless, that is, the Artist embodies the plurality or types of social
positions designated above as afigurative die or mold. The distinctive
69

Fig. 30
Marcel Duchamp, Nine Malic Molds (9 Moules Mlic), 191415. Oil, wire, and glass, 2
1 1/8 x 39 3/4 in.
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection.
costumes that comprise the Nine Malic Molds (alluded to in the subtitle Cemeteries of
Uniforms and Liveries) indicate Duchamp's attempt to redefine the service that the artist
owes to both society and art. As the previous analysis of The PASSAGE from the Virgin
to the Bride has shown, Duchamp is no ordinary attendant to painting. He is not its
"groom," since he neither equips it nor dresses it up, but rather draws on it conceptually.
The illuminating "gas" that takes or receives the form of the Nine Malic Molds thus
emerges as a pun on the "gaze," illuminating the institutional conventions of painting
only to reify it as a visual practice.
The designation of the Nine Malic Molds as Eros Matrix inscribes a feminine dimension
into this bachelor machine or apparatus. Their visual appearance as dressmaking
patterns creates an ambiguity between the exterior and the interior (malic/matrix), an
ambiguity that reflects the mechanics of projection in the Glass, since the feminine
matrix is also a masculine mold.[84] The ambiguity of projection mechanisms in the
Glass,
70
based on notions of form turned inside out, suggests that gender itself may be a
rhetorical operation. Duchamp's specification regarding the alignment of the Nine Malic
Molds that each of the forms is "built above and below a common horizontal plane, the
plane of sex cutting them at the pnt. of sex" (WMD , 51), suggests that sexuality is
presented as a system of projection, by analogy to a perspectival model. The gender
ambiguity of the Nine Malic Molds is engendered by notions of artistic production

redefined through reproduction. The multiplication of personality embodied in the Nine

Malic Molds is the result of strategies of reproduction that defer the traditional notion of
authorship as a unitary entity, by representing it as a compound of different personae
and gender identities. In The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even the stripping
bare of painting coincides with the dressing up of the artist, who emerges as a multiple
of himself/herself. The creative act is redefined as an act of dispossession, one that
delivers the artist from the obligation of perpetuating the conventions of traditional
painting, as well as perpetrating the myth of his or her own identity.[85] By strategically
redeploying the notion of painting through reproduction, Duchamp redefines both the
meaning of art as product, and the artist as a unique maker or producer.
Richard Hamilton has noted that "the Bride's irregular organic shapes and hinged,
flexing relationships are contrasted with the Bachelor's predetermined, mensurated,
rectilinear planning and simple mechanical movements."[86] These iconographic
differences between the two regions of the Glass are not to be taken at face value as
mere rationalizations of gender positions, where the feminine is equated with organic
forms, while the masculine is equated with mathematical forms of rationality. While
both regions of the Glass emphasize reproduction both as a process of production and as
conceptual intervention, the iconographic differences indicate that these two regions
may be associated with different interpretations, and hence, treatments of painting and
pictorial conventions. Despite the excesses of lubricious behavior attributed to the
Bride, her reproduction as a photographic negative accompanied by her cloudy and
drafty blossoming suggests that whatever liquidity was involved in herpainterly fate has
evaporated and turned into gas. An heir to painting, the Bride's projections have reified
and dried out her painterly pretensions by subjecting her to repeated drafts (draughts).
She now emerges as an instance of dry
71
art: more like air (heir), than art (arhhe), understood in the conventional sense. And the
Bachelor Machine? Although seemingly more masculine because it is more measured
and precise, the lower part of the glass turns out to be a spoof on rationality. The
machines represented in this section, the chocolate grinder, the glider, the malic molds,
the sieves, and the capillary tubes, are all machines that deal with the production of
pigment, of painting defined as an art of color: a veritable waterfall associated with
painting understood as "the splashing of paint."
This insistence on the retinal aspects of painting is emphasized by the presence of the
oculist witnesses and other puns on the viewer's gaze, which liquefy painterly reality by
drawing our attention to its material character. Despite its mechanical and schematic
nature, the lower half of the glass functions as a "greenhouse" for "breeding colors,"
which like ephemeral perfumes caution the viewer to the fact that the "fruit still has to
avoid being eaten" (WMD , 70). The Bachelor Apparatus emerges, therefore, as an
elaborate spoof of pictoriality and the painterly gaze, that is to say the aesthetic, despite
its technical pretensions. Thus, both sections of the Glass wreck havoc with the viewer's
expectations, insofar as these regions defy traditional gender qualifications.
Duchamp's deliberate choice to place the three ready-mades Paris Air (Air de Paris;
1919), Traveler's Folding Item (Pliant de voyage ; 1916) and Fountain (1917),

respectively, above, in the middle, and below, coinciding with the three regions of the
reproduction of the Large Glass, in the Green Box (1934) and The Box in a Valise
(1941), helps elucidate its meaning further. On Walter Hopps's query at Duchamp's
retrospective exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum, Duchamp responded that these
three ready-mades were like "ready-made talk of what goes on in the Glass."[87]
Duchamp's comment is quite telling, to the extent that it suggests that the logic of the
Glass is in the order of the ready-mades, that is, a principle of reproduction whose
sequential order may be collapsible, pliant, or flexible, like the middle section of the
Glass that corresponds to Duchamp's ready-made Traveler's Folding Item (Pliant de
voyage ). The transparency (transparence ) of glass allows the two sections of the glass
to fold on each other, like a collapsible hood. By defining visual appearance, in the
mode of apparition, Duchamp defies a filiational or genealogical model. The collapse,
and thus the coincidence of the upper and lower
72
regions of the Glass, may be seen as a pun on its transparency (transparent ),
understood literally, not just as appearance but also as across or beyond (trans ) filiation
or kinship (parent ).
This appeal to filiation, in the context of a discussion on modes of appearance, might
seem trivial, were it not for the fact that Duchamp's critique of the notion of artistic
production through reproduction undermines the notion of artistic creativity and its
filiational logic with the tradition. As Duchamp explains:
In the "Bride," in the "Glass," I tried constantly to find something which would not
recall what had happened before. I have had an obsession about not using the same
things. One has to be on guard because, despite oneself, one can become invaded by
things of the past. Without wanting to, one puts in some detail. There, it was a constant
battle to make an exact and complete break. (DMD , 38)
While Duchamp's Large Glass radically breaks with previous pictorial traditions, the
irony is that Duchamp consistently reproduces previous works, thereby defining the
Glass as a compendium of all his previous efforts. While distancing himself from the
tradition, the Glass emerges as a corpus whose identity is defined through reproduction,
as a process of contextualization. The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even
redefines artistic production according to the logic of reproduction, thereby inscribing
gender as a pun into the mechanical and technical processes that orchestrate this work.
Despite its more traditional monumental and aesthetic character, The Large Glass
announces Duchamp's abandonment of pictorial conventions and his elaboration of the
notion of reproduction as an objectification of artistic traditions. The meaning of The
Large Glass relies less on its ostensible subject matter, alluded to by the title The Bride
Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, than on the manner in which it stages the notion
of representation as a literal transposition and reproduction of his previous works. The
nonsensical adverb "even" (mme ) that qualifies the title and to which Duchamp
ascribes no meaning, is also used in French as an adjective that signifies "same," or after
a noun, "self" or "very," in a reflexive form. The pun on mme as "even" or "same"
suggests that the

 73
reflective properties of The Large Glass implode in a mirage of reproducibility, a
reiterative exploration of minute differences in a field of supposed identity or sameness.
The explicit emphasis on reproduction in the Glass, specifically in regard to the
transposition of pictorial images and idioms to glass by allusion to other media (such as
photography and film) suggests its conceptual affinity to the project of the ready-mades,
as instances of mechanical reproduction, and the miniature compendium of Duchamp's
works in The Box in a Valise. Rather than envisioning The Large Glass as a unique
monument that marks Duchamp's departure from and abandonment of painting, The
Large Glass emerges as a commemorative work that plays upon the mimetic impulses
of painting by literalizing them through puns on the notion of reproduction. The process
of stripping painting bare coincides with the effort of making apparent the conventions
that subtend the pictorial process.If gender appears in the context of this filiational
enterprise it does so as a rhetorical gesture embedded in Duchamp's experiments to
expand the generic meaning of painting. The discovery of this affiliation based on
reproduction linking The Large Glass, the ready-mades, and The Box in a Valise, reveals
that the heir of painting is a function of notions of artistic production redefined through
reproduction. The mythical encounter between the bachelors and the bride, between
painters, spectators, and painting, opens up the possibility of envisioning art as the
postponement of painting's pictorial becoming. For what emerges through The Large
Glass belongs less to what painting looks like than the return of a likeness on glass
generated by drawing on painting, while redefining through this reflection its condition
of possibility.
75

2
Ready-Mades: (Non) sense and (Non) art
Thought is produced in the mouth
Tristan Tzara

Nonsense . . . is the sense of all senses.

Raul Hausmann

Commenting in 1973 on Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades, John Cage underlines the

originality of his contribution to the history of art, as well as his unique position among
other modern artists:
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. And, in fact, as you look from Duchamp to the light

fixture (pointing in the room) the first thought you have is, "Well, that's a Duchamp."
(emphasis added)[1]
Cage suggests that the ready-mades are unartistic, to the extent that even today they
remain unacceptable as art. Compared to other Dada artists, such as Kurt Schwitters and
Francis Picabia, Duchamp's interventions retain their uniqueness, since their humdrum
appearance and resonant titles resist assimilation to traditional artistic idioms. Despite
Duchamp's contacts with the Dada and Surrealist movements, his gestures
retrospectively challenge these affiliations. The ready-mades redefine the relation of art
and reality through the elaboration of the social and critical conventions that inform the
"objective" reality of these terms. As Cage suggests, the ready-mades transform our
experience of art and reality so
76
fundamentally that it makes us wonder whether our own commonplace reality is but an
extension of Duchamp's challenge of the autonomy of art.
Following his experiments with chance in Three Standard Stoppages, and while
sketching out the project of what was to become The Large Glass, Duchamp became
interested in exploring the artistic potential of ordinary objects that he later entitled
"ready-mades." Duchamp describes his chance discovery as follows: "As you know, in
1914, even 1913, I had in my studio a bicycle wheel turning for no reason at all.
Without even knowing whether I should put it with the rest of my works or call it a
work."[2] Duchamp's interest in the double status of the bicycle wheel as an ordinary
object and/or artwork, suggests that it is this paradox, rather than the object itself, whose
potential as a work began to intrigue him.[3] Commenting on his choice to label these
works as "ready-made," he explains: "It seemed perfect for these things that weren't
works of an, that weren't sketches, and to which no art terms apply" (DMD , 48). The
label "ready-made" designates a work, which is "already" made by mass production, but
whose readiness to be "made" into art is delayed by its technological history and whose
terms are unassimilable to an artistic terminology.
Marking his supposed abandonment of painting, Duchamp's ready-mades embody his
most radical critique and departure from artistic traditions. Because of their
commonplace character as items freely available in any hardware store, the ready-mades
do away with the very gesture that signifies artistic creativity: the intervention of the
artist's hand. However, the elision of the hand as the constitutive artistic gesture is
replaced by an intellectual intervention, akin to witunderstood as a form of sagacity
that combines intelligence and humor. As Joseph Masheck observes: "The wit was in
making a common object as remarkable as an art object and making a work of art as real
as an ordinary thing at the same time."[4] Duchamp's recourse to wit, to an intelligence
of the tongue, rather than simply an intelligence of the mind, reflects his efforts to
rethink the notion of artistic creativity both as a material and conceptual mode of
production. The ready-mades redefine the notion of artistic creativity, since they do not
involve the manual production of objects but their intellectual reproduction. Duchamp's
intervention consists in redefining their status, both as objects and as representations,
for the objective character of the

 77
ready-mades affirms their special status as reproductions that comment upon and
question the representational function of art.
Duchamp's originality lies precisely in his elaboration of the ready-mades as critical
gestures framed as ordinary objects. Despite their resemblance to sculpture, the readymades embody Duchamp's efforts to move beyond traditional means of artistic
production by taking to task and objectifying the conventions of art as a medium for
reproduction. The redundancy of the ready-made, both as ordinary object and as critical
intervention, makes visible the preeminence of mechanical reproduction in redefining
both the subject matter and the means of artistic representation. Rather than viewing
Duchamp's gesture as a denial or even an abandonment of painting or sculpture, this
study will demonstrate how the ready-mades speculatively draw on and reinvest the
conventions of previous artistic traditions. The radicality of ready-mades, as both
objects and critical gestures, lies in the fact that they embody the effort to rethink visual
representation through the mediation of a poetic interpretation of language. They
embody Duchamp's exploration of the contextual production of pictorial and linguistic
meaning through puns.[5] More precisely, the ready-mades stage the interplay of sense
and nonsense, since they are punning visual and verbal allusions to the meaning of art as
a medium of reproduction.[6] In this context, non-sense is no longer opposed to
commonsense.[7] Rather, nonsense implies the destruction of the referential status of
both pictorial and linguistic meaning through its punning associations to different
senses. The ready-made thus emerges as a rhetorical intervention, signifying Duchamp's
strategic operation on the terms that have come to define the parameters of artistic
experience.
While Duchamp has explicitly acknowledged his indebtedness to poets and writers, his
dismissal of pictorial antecedents has often been taken at face value. Before proceeding
to examine Duchamp's fascination for puns as linguistic and poetic machines, it is
important to consider whether the pictorial traditions of the past may have provided him
with models for rethinking the notion of pictorial representation as a rhetorical
operation. From Leonardo da Vinci's (14521519) insistence on an as an intellectual
process, to Giuseppe Arcimboldo's (circa 15301593) experiments with the linguistic
and poetic foundations of painting, we see traditions that anticipate Duchamp's own
efforts to "put painting once again at the service
78
of the mind."[8] By considering Duchamp's pictorial and poetic sources, this study will
explore how he draws upon the traditions of the past and those of his Dada
contemporaries in order to challenge the conventional definition of art through an
elaboration of its conceptual potential. Even before arriving at the idea of the "readymade" as an object, Duchamp had begun to explore the "ready-made" character of
pictorial and poetic conventions that define our "ideas" about art. Thus, without
knowing it, he had "opened a window onto something else" (DMD , 31).

Retinal Art and Conceptual Euphoria

Art is a mental thing.

Leonardo da Vinci

Quel Sicle mains!

Arthur Rimbaud

Duchamp's explicit rejection of painting as a purely visual medium whose purpose is to

incite "visual euphoria" must be taken, like his other pronouncements, with a grain of
salt. Duchamp's objections to painting are strategic, rather than purely oppositional.
They are less a statement of denial of the significance of pictorial traditions, than an
effort to rethink the legacy of painting in conceptual terms. In an interview with Francis
Roberts, Duchamp clarifies his position by affirming his interest in innovation, that is,
an "ideatic" interpretation of visual painting:
In France there is an old saying, "Stupid like a painter." The painter was considered
stupid, but the poet and writer very intelligent. I wanted to be intelligent. I had to have
the idea of inventing. It is nothing to do with what your father did. It is nothing to be
another Czanne. In my visual period there is a little of that stupidity of the painter. All
my work in the period before the Nude was visual painting. Then I came to the idea. I
thought the ideatic formulation a way to get away from influences.[9]
Duchamp's commitment to "intelligence" that he associates with poets and writers
reflects his effort to redefine pictorial language in new terms. Rather than remaining
subject to the constraints of pictorial language, even when its figurative limits are
strained and questioned through the emergence of abstraction by painters such as
Czanne, Duchamp challenges visual representation by exploring its conceptual,
"ideatic" character. Duchamp's effort to innovate, that of "inventing a new way to go
79
about painting," cannot be seen purely as a dismissal of pictorial traditions. At issue is
the question of rethinking the concept of innovation in terms that amount to new ways
of drawing on pictorial traditions, thus enabling the rediscovery of art's conceptual
potential.
The affinities between Duchamp and Leonardo da Vinci have been noted by Theodore
Reff, particularly regarding their shared conviction that "art is primarily the record of an
intellectual process rather than a visual experience."[10] This emphasis on intellectual
rather than visual experience explains why both artists were "more concerned with
formulating their ideas than with producing finished paintings, more excited by research
than execution."[11] This interest in research, in the effort to rethink the relationship
between science and art, is visible in Duchamp's extensive notes, which were published
in exact replica, starting with The Box of 1914 (191314), which anticipates the project
of The Large Glass, The Green Box (1934).[12] His initiative to publish them may have
been inspired by the publication of Leonardo's notebooks in facsimile (circa 1900), as

well as by Paul Valry's seminal work, Introduction to the Method of Leonardoda Vinci
(1894).[13] Like Leonardo's notebooks, Duchamp's boxes include sketches, notes, and
word associations. Duchamp eventually includes in his boxes reproductions of his own
works, however, thereby transforming the provisional status of boxes into actual works.
These boxes document not only his research and technical efforts but also his thought
processes, combining artistic and poetic methods. Rather than functioning merely as
research prototypes, Duchamp's notes, sketches, and reproductions represent an effort to
challenge the notion of the work of art as an objective product by redefining it as a
process, the embodiment of intellectual, artistic, and technical methods. Anne
d'Harnoncourt and Walter Hopps consider these compilations as "masterworks in
themselves, as important as any of Duchamp's realized visual projects, perhaps more
so."[14] Thus, both Leonardo and Duchamp expand the meaning of pictorial
representation by exploring how it interfaces with science, with notational devices in the
form of mechanical instructions and poetic constructions (lists of word associations,
anagrams, and puns).
A rapid glance at Leonardo's Codex Trivulzianus reveals the deliberate mixture of verbal
and visual information, so that a "whole diagram may be a play on words."[15] This is
also reflected in Leonardo's writing style in
80
which his characters, written in reverse with the left hand, "cannot be deciphered by
anyone who does not know the trick of reading them in a mirror."[16] By mediating the
legibility of writing through mirrors, Leonardo inscribes the eye into written script. In
doing so he awakens the viewer to the figurative aspects of writing, to its technical and
conceptual dimensions. The presence of extensive word lists, compiled according to a
logic of free association that veers from poetic usage to ordinary puns, documents
Leonardo's obsession with language as a mechanism for the production of signification.
These lists attest to Leonardo's ambition to technologize metaphor, since language, like
vision, becomes an object of fascination, a game of mirror images.[17]
Despite his exhaustive investigations of language, Leonardo nonetheless maintains that
painting, because of its visual character, may have an advantage over poetry. In his
"Comparison of the Arts" Leonardo parodies the Renaissance distinction between the
arts, which stipulates that painting is "mute poetry," while poetry is a "speaking
picture":
If you call painting "dumb poetry," then the painter may say of the poet that his art is
"blind painting." Consider then which is the more grievous affliction, to be blind or to
be dumb! . . . And if the poet serves the understanding by way of the ear, the painter
does so by the eye which is the nobler sense.[18]
Leonardo's comparison leads him to affirm the power of painting (dumb poetry) over
poetry (blind painting), since he considers visual forms to be more universal than
language, whose conventions vary with different cultures.[19] This defense of the visual
power of painting, based on its ability to reproduce forms through exact images, is
pursued by Leonardo, who tries to save painting from its association with manual work:
"You have set painting among the mechanical arts!"[20] Leonardo suggests that both

painting and writing, as modes of reproduction, share the same mechanical devicethe
hand: the instrument of the imagination (painting) and the handiwork of the mind
(writing). Leonardo's faith in the visual image, as a universal language whose posterity
is guaranteed, is challenged by Duchamp, who finds both the silence of the painter and
the intervention of the hand unbearable, if not outdated. Duchamp reverses Leonardo's
81
dictum by abandoning painting because it is "dumb." Moreover, he redefines art in
poetic terms, as "ideatic" rather than "retinal"a possible pun on Leonardo's definition
of poetry as "blind painting."
Duchamp's extensive quotations and allusions to Leonardo's paintings and his
notebooks have obscured other possible sources of inspiration for his work. Duchamp's
interest in verbal and visual puns, and specifically, his treatment of ready-mades as
"three-dimensional puns," leads us to inquire whether there are other influences that are
informing his work. Duchamp's sculpture-morte, which is an assemblage of marzipan
vegetables and insects in the shape of a head, suggests Duchamp's indebtedness to the
works of Giuseppe Arcimboldo.[21] Duchamp's appeal to an intellectual interpretation of
art evokes the Mannerist understanding of concept as conceit (concetto );that is, both
as wit and as abstract schema.[22] The incongruous, witty, and monstrous character of
Arcimboldo's paintings of Composed Heads captured the attention of the Surrealists as
well. In these paintings elements of pictorial still life, such as flowers, vegetables,
kitchen utensils, and cooked foods, are assembled in order to generate monstrous
portraits. These allegorical portraits represent seasons, elements

Fig. 31.
Giuseppe Arcimboldo, spring, 1573. Oil on canvas,
29 2/3 x 25 in. Musee du Louvre, Paris.
Courtesy of Giraudon/Art Resource, New York.

Fig. 32.
Giuseppe Arcimboldo, spring, 1572. Oil on canvas,
29 8/10 x 22 1/5 in. Private collection, Bergamo.
Courtesy of Art Resource, New York.
82

Fig. 33.
Giuseppe Arcimboldo, water, 1566. Oil on limewood, 26 1/10 x 20 1/5 in. Kunsthistoris
ches
Museum, Vienna. Courtesy of Art Resource, New York.
83
(such as air, fire, or water), or types of individuals (such as the cook or the gardener), by
compiling both literal and metaphorical objects associated with each particular subject.

Spring (1573) (fig. 31) is a portrait composed of a variety of flowers with individual
features that delineate the visible outlines of a woman's face, while another flower
portrait, also entitled Spring (1572.) (fig. 32), suggests the features of a young man.
These reversibly gendered images of Spring may be taken as a playful pun on its
regenerative nature, and as a reflection of the hermaphroditic nature of flowers.[23] Such
images underline the fact that the same material componentsthe flowersmay
engender different figurative effects. The portrait of Water (1566) (fig. 33), which is
both a physical and alchemical element, is presented through the grotesque assemblage
of a dizzying variety of coiling fish, crustaceans, corals, and shells piled madly on each
otheran assemblage suggesting the elemental, pagan, even primitive portrait of an
alien being (a primeval sea goddess, or perhaps, an inhabitant of the New World).
Initially The Cook (circa 1570) (fig. 34) and The Vegetable Gardener (circa 1590) (fig.
35) are represented respectively as a platter of cooked meats or a still life of vegetables
in a bowl. On rotation, however, these images reveal the humorous semblance of the
cook and the gardener, coded into the punlike reversibility of the meat platter or
vegetable bowl.
These images encode into the visible a double register of perception: they are legible not
only as the contents of a cooked plate or a bowl of vegetables but also as human heads.
As Roland Barthes observes:
The identity of the two objects does not depend on the simultaneity of perception, but
on the rotation of the image, presented as reversible. The reading turns around with no
cogs to arrest it; only the title acts to contain it and makes the picture the portrait of a
cook, since one infers metonymically from the plate to the man for whom it is a
professional utensil.[24]
The rotation of the image reveals the fact that meaning is kinetic, since it is
mechanically generated through the reversibility of the image. The perceptual unity of
the image is fractured by a process of double legibility, suggesting its affinity to
linguistic puns. This intellectual dimension of
84

Fig. 34.
Giuseppe Arcimboldo, The Cook, circa 1570. Oil on canvas, 20 1/2 x 16 in. Private coll
ection, Stockholm.
Courtesy of Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York.
Arcimboldo's paintings, the fact that they function on two levels at once, leads Barthes
to conclude that these works function as a "terrifying denial of pictorial language."[25]
While appearing to rely on pictorial traditions, Arcimboldo is violating the perceptual
identity of the image by encoding within it several meanings at once. These images are
visual puns highlighting the constructed and thus conceptual dimension of the visible.
They reveal the fact that visual meaning is no more immediate or direct than linguistic
puns, which unhinge meaning through the interplay of literal and figurative
associations.
If Arcimboldo's work represents a denial of painting as a purely visual idiom, its
intellectual impact can best be summarized in linguistic, poetic, and rhetorical terms. As
Barthes concludes:
His painting has a linguistic foundation, his imagination is poetic in the proper sense of
the word: it does not create signs, it combines them, permutes them, deflects them
exactly what a craftsman of language does.[26]
85
According to Barthes, Arcimboldo's talent lies in his poetic and rhetorical abilitieshis
exploration of similes, metaphors, and other figures of speech transmuted magically into
objects. His painting represents a fascination with language and its rhetorical figures, so
that the canvas becomes a veritable "laboratory of tropes."[27] Thus, Arcimboldo's
paintings embody a marvelous reflection on the conceptual power of language, "the fact
that in language there could be transferences of meaning (metaboles), and that these

metaboles could be coded and to that extent classified and named."[28] Rather than
enumerating exhaustively Arcimboldo's use of rhetorical figures, it suffices to note that
his works present a theory of painting that is deliberately allegorical, to the extent that it
designates itself as a system both of encoding and of decoding. Painting emerges in this
context as a rhetorical gesture of deploying elements of pictorial still life in order to
bring them to life again in the manner of lifelike portraits. Arcimboldo invokes the
conventions of the still-life genre through the depiction of fruits and vegetables, only to
divert these conventions into the service of portraiture. Rather than representing

Fig. 35.
Giuseppe Arcimboldo, The Vegetable Gardener, circa 1590. Oil on wood, 13 3/5 x 9 2/5
in. Museo Civico
Ala Ponzone, Cremona. Courtesy of Scala/Art Resource, New York.
86
nature mimetically, he represents pictorial language as a "ready-made," that is, as a set
of preestablished conventions. These pictorial conventions function like linguistic
meaning: they are open to figurative interpretations, and consequently, to diverse
rhetorical manipulations.
Instead of focusing on unifying forms, Arcimboldo's portraits draw our attention to the
process of composition, to the fact that each element, whether flower, vegetable, or
animal, retains its distinct (if muffled) existence. The composition of the image wavers
and threatens to lapse at any moment into decomposition, thereby undermining its
signatory role as the trademark of artistic creativity. This mutability, scripted into the
image, is present at every level: it is a hinge structuring the relationship between
individual details, as well as the reversibility or rotation of the image as an assemblage
of diverse elements. The creative gesture implied in the composition of the visual image
reveals its affinity to both poetry and humor, for composition signifies assembling

elements already established by previous traditions, organizing them in a manner that

both recalls and expands their original intent. Originality in this context becomes
rhetorical, since it no longer signifies starting anew. Instead,the recovery of elements of
pictorial still life in the service of portraiture leads to their reassemblage according to
the logic of their literal and figurative potential.
Having briefly outlined Arcimboldo's contribution to painting, as a craftsman and poet
of language, it is time to investigate his potential influence on Duchamp's putative
abandonment of painting. Arcimboldo's recodification of the visual image in technical
and mechanical terms may have influenced Duchamp's own manipulations of both
images and objects. As this study will show, rotation, reversibility, and hinges are key
devices to Duchamp's elaboration of the ready-mades, as linguistic and visual puns. The
presence of these devices in Arcimboldo's works, which contributed to their status as
"curiosities," makes visible a technical and mechanical dimension within pictorial
traditions that predate the rise of industrialization. Even before Duchamp makes his own
"discovery" of the idea of "ready-mades," Arcimboldo's paintings attest to the possible
redefinition of painting as a rhetorical operation, which enacts the confluence and
interplay of literal and figurative meaning. Duchamp's technical interest in rotation,
reversibility, and hinges, all of which structure the production of visual and verbal
meaning, leads him to explore puns as
87
conceptual machines. By actively staging the interplay of language and image, puns
emerge not merely as humorous devices but as theoretical constructs expanding the
notion of pictorial representation through linguistic analogues.
The discovery of the strategic role of puns enables Duchamp to abandon painting proper
by providing a conceptual basis for art, understood as a medium that reassembles
already given elements, and thus as a medium for reproduction rather than creativity, as
it is understood in the conventional sense. Duchamp expands Arcimboldo's
compositional strategies by recognizing the rhetorical character not only of pictorial
representation but also of other forms of artistic representation. Arcimboldo's innovation
thus does not rely on the creation of a new pictorial language but rather on the rhetorical
deployment of its conventions as linguistic and visual givens. By understanding the
conventions of painting as "intellectual ready-mades," Duchamp uncovers within artistic
production a technical, "mechanical" dimension. In question is how the ready-made as a
conceptual intervention and as a critical gesture literalizes the conventions of pictorial
representation, only to expend their meaning through the redundancyof puns.
Duchamp's ready-mades make possible a new interpretation of the notion of artistic
production as a continued dialogue with the tradition, one which invites the spectator to
complete the picture, as it were.

Puns: Verbal and Figurative Machines

It's true literally and in all the senses.
Arthur Rimbaud

At certain moments even spelling-books and dictionaries seemed to us poetic.

Novalis

When citing influences on his artistic work, Marcel Duchamp singles out the event of
attending a performance with Francis Picabia and Guillaume Apollinaire of Raymond
Roussel's Impressions of Africa in 1911. (Roussel [18771933] mechanized art-making
and language in this book.) He describes this event as follows: "It was tremendous. On
the stage there was a model and a snake that moved slightlyit was absolutely the
madness of the unexpected. I don't remember much of the text. One didn't really listen.
It was striking" (DMD, 33).[29] When questioned by Cabanne whether the spectacle
struck him more than the language, Duchamp responded: "In effect, yes. Afterward, I
read the text and could associate the two" (DMD, 34). The impact of Roussel's spectacle
cannot be summarized purely in terms of its outlandish visual, mechanical, and
88
nonsensical character; equally significant is Duchamp's observation that the dissociation
of the visual and linguistic aspects of the spectacle can be reassembled upon the reading
of the text. Hence the text retrospectively illuminates the image, and in doing so,
displaces the priority of both the visual performance and the text.
This anecdote becomes significant once it is understood that Roussel's interest in the
mechanisms of language and his "secession" from literature corresponds to Duchamp's
challenge to, and final abandonment of, painting.[30] Later, commenting on The Large
Glass, Duchamp underlines the fact that the notes contained in The Box of1914 are
essential to the visual experience of the work: "I wanted that album to go with the Glass,
and to be consulted when seeing the Glass, because, as I see it, it must not be 'looked at'
in the aesthetic sense of the word. One must consult the book and see the two together.
The conjunction of the two things removes the retinal aspect that I don't like " (DMD,
4243; emphasis added). This statement elucidates Duchamp's earlier assessment of
Roussel's Impressions of Africa by defining his antiaesthetic position as a strategic
interplay: the active dissociation and reassemblage of the visual and textual elements.
Duchamp's expressed biasthat as a painter it was much better to be influenced by a
writer than by another painterindicates his effort to reinterpret art as "intellectual
expression." His concomitant rejection of painting as "animal expression" reflects his
project to overcome the purely visual (retinal) constraints of a medium that reduces the
artist to silence, rendering him: "dumb as a painter."[31] This is not because the verbal is
more "intellectual" than the visual; rather, it is the possibility of their interplay that
arouses his curiosity. Duchamp's appeal to Roussel, as an answer to the crisis he
perceives in painting, reflects his interest in the conceptual experiments with language
through which Roussel challenged the very limits of literature.
Without being familiar with Roussel's writing methodshis experiments generating
wordplays from sentencesDuchamp specifies his influence as follows:"But he gave
me the idea that I too could try something in the sense of which we were speaking; or
rather antisense . . . . His word play had a hidden meaning, but not in the Mallarman

or Rimbaudian sense. It was an obscurity of another order" (DMD, 41; emphasis added).
The "antisense" that Duchamp speaks of here has neither
89
a negative sense nor suggests a hidden meaning, such as we find in the poetic
experiments of Stphane Mallarm or Rimbaud. For Duchamp, "antisense" refers to
Roussel's investigations of language as a mechanism that can generate "poetic"
associations and to Jean-Pierre Brisset's analysis of language through puns.[32] Hence
Duchamp's efforts to "strip" language "bare" of meaning, and thus explore its creative
potential through "non-sense" (DMD, 40). This "linguistic striptease" liberates language
from sense in order to open its field to the play of nonsense, that is, to the contextual
generation of a variety of senses.
In order to elucidate what Duchamp means by nonsense, we turn to First Light
(Premire Lumire, 1959) (fig. 36), a work that explores the contextual production of
pictorial and literal meaning through puns. First Light is a blue and black etching
depicting the word NON, made to illustrate Pierre Andr Benot's poem entitled
"Premire Lumire." What is striking about this etching is the fact that its status as an
image or as a text is unclear. Are we dealing with the illustration of a poem, or merely
the image of a title acting as a commentary on the official title? The relation of the
image of the word NON and the title First Light is opaque as long as we do not shed
light on this image with a pun. NON (both a negation and a particle of the French
negative ne . . . pas ) is a pun on nom (meaning name or noun, in French). The "first
light" that is cast on the word NON (orNOM ) reveals its fragile and conditional
existence as a noun. NON hovers precariously between negation (a particle that brackets
and derealizes

Fig. 36.
Marcel Duchamp, First Light (premire lumire),
1959. Etching, 4 13/16 x 5 7/8 in.
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Louise
and Walter Arensberg Collection.
90

the existence of another term) and nomination (a word that entitles an object or person).
[33]
The punning ambiguity between negation and nomination is further complicated by
what appears to be the lack of reference to the title of the work First Light. However,
once we recall Duchamp's subtitle to Given, "the illuminating gas" (a pun on gaze), it
becomes clear that the discrepancy between the title and the image (which is like a title)
reflects the difficulty of illuminating the image.
Duchamp's effort to reproduce Benot's "creation" in this "literal" image results in the
discovery that there are only "non-words" and "non-images," since neither the name (as
image) nor the image (as a negative) has any intrinsic essence. Despite their nominative
and essentialist character, the meaning of names, like those of images, depends on their
context. Thus, both title and image are nonsensical to the extent that their ability to refer
relies on the circuit of their interplay. Like Gertrude Stein, Duchamp discovers that "We
must get rid of nouns, for objects are never stable."[34] The effort to provide a literal
representation generates an excess of sense that spills out from the verbal into the visual
domain, echoing Rimbaud's pronouncement: "It's true literally and in all the senses."
Nonsense in this context no longer signifies "non-sense," but instead a gesture whose
contextual character strategically stages and engages all the different senses.
Duchamp's active use and understanding of nonsense as a hinge between the linguistic
and the visual defies the simplistic reduction of nonsense to a purely "literary"
procedure. When Duchamp speaks of the poetic value of words, the "poetry" in question
encompasses sound, wit, rhyme, and figurative considerations:
I like words in a poetic sense. Puns for me are like rhymes. The fact that "Tha's"
rhymes with "nice" is not exactly a pun but it's a play on words that can start a whole
series of considerations, connotations and investigations. Just the sound of these words
alone begins a chain reaction. For me, words are not merely a means of communication.
You know, puns have always been considered a low form of wit, but I find them a
source of stimulation both because of their actual sound and because of unexpected
meanings attached to the inter-relationships of disparate words. For me, this is an
infinite
91
field of joyand it's always right at hand. Sometimes four or five different levels of
meaning come through.[35]
Duchamp's interest in language is neither communicative nor expressive. His preference
for puns, which he compares to rhymes, demonstrates his acceptance and use of chance.
A pun plays on words that are similar in sound but different in meaning, just as a rhyme
arbitrarily couples together two different verses. The sound of words produces a "chain
reaction," in which "different levels of meaning come through," thereby producing an
"infinite field of joy." As Duchamp warns us, the pleasure generated by these wordplays
cannot be construed merely in terms of wit. Rather, for Duchamp, this pleasure is
endemic to his description of intelligence: "There is something like an explosion in the
meaning of certain words: they have a greater value than their meaning in the
dictionary" (DMD, 16). In describing the meaning of intelligence, Duchamp is, in fact,
distinguishing sense from nonsense. The intelligence that he has in mind is an

intelligence of the tongue, an explosion of meaning whose verbal and figurative

character defies the referential character of language. By situating intelligence, "right at
hand," that is as a figurative principle generated through the play of puns, Duchamp
stretches the logical limits of rational intelligence. His exploration of the plasticity of
language, hinged upon its verbal and figurative associations, inscribes in his work a
pleasurable dimension, that of an eros generated through their interplay.
Although Duchamp speaks of liking words in a poetic sense, his examples demonstrate
that the poetry in question is conceptual, rather than "literary." Tristan Tzara's remark
that "the poetic work has no static value, since the poem is not the end of poetry: the
latter can perfectly well exist elsewhere," echoes Duchamp's own efforts to recover the
plasticity of language and images.[36] As Duchamp explains in reference to The Large
Glass : "I refer to purely mental ideas expressed as part of the work but not related to
any literary allusions."[37] This denial of the literary captures Duchamp's understanding
of his work as a new kind of language, one which rejects both literary and pictorial
conventions, as well as the conventional meanings of words and images.[38] Michel
Sanouillet considers Duchamp's strategy an effort to sunder the relation of expression to
expressive content:
92
Once words are thus emptied and freed through the sudden visible strangeness of their
internal structure or through a new association with other words, they will yield
unexpected treasures of images and ideas. The adventure of language thus unfolds
differently from the striving for style, which pursues freshness and visual and auditory
sensations. The principle is that a word too much in view, like a landscape, loses its
savor, wears itself out, and becomes a commonplace. The interest which its semantic
content gives rise to is reduced to the vanishing point. It is only and precisely at the
point where the stylist in search of the picturesque gives up that Duchamp intervenes.
Once the container is stripped of its content, the word as assemblage-of-letters assumes
a new identity, physical and tangible, as a surprising interpreter of a new reality.
(WMD , 6)
Sanouillet's eloquent description of Duchamp's "adventure of language" suggests that
this adventure applies equally to words and images, insofar as their meaning has been
petrified and rendered commonplace through repetitive usage. Hence, Duchamp's
experiments with puns emerge not merely as examples of self-expression, a gratuitous
appeal to the private joke, but also as significant efforts to rethink the nature of both
poetic and visual language.
Duchamp's interest in visual and verbal puns is expressed explicitly in his ready-mades.
The selection and visual display of the ready-mades also involves the naming of the
object, since the ready-made becomes a work of art by Duchamp's performance, by his
declaration that it is such. Thus the title of the ready-made inscribes the object into a
temporal and linguistic dimension. In his statement "Apropos of 'Readymades'"
Duchamp explains: "That sentence, instead of describing the object like a title, was
meant to carry the mind of the spectator towards other regions, more verbal" (WMD,
141). These titles are the expression of Duchamp's poetic concerns with language, his
dynamic conception of words not merely as bearers but also as producers of meanings.

Commenting on the title of the Nude, Duchamp remarked that it "already predicted the
use of words as a means of adding color, or shall we say, as a means of adding to the
number of colors in a work."[39] He also considered words in visual terms as
"photographic details of largesized objects." Arturo Schwarz observes
93
that Duchamp was motivated by the desire "to transfer the significance of language
from words into signs, into a visual expression of the word, similar to the ideograms of
the Chinese language."[40]
Thus Duchamp's act of nomination of the ready-made is not a gesture of closure, that is,
of framing the visual referent by a verbal one. The punning title of the ready-made
stages the active interplay of phonetic and figurative elements, thereby engendering the
destruction and dissemination of its objective character. Duchamp's understanding of
words as mechanisms that may trigger a variety of associations enables him to
manipulate the literal object-ness of the ready-mades. Like its title, the ready-made is
more or less an object. Its meaning and existence as an object are validated by the act of
nomination, but the title fractures the object to the extent that its literal and figurative
dimensions interfere and condition our perception of the object. The title thus functions
not purely as name but as a signifying material whose phonetic redundancies with
respect to the object set up a relay of significations that displace and scramble the
identity of the object. The redundancies and alliterations that come to define the object
expend its objective character through nonsense.
A quick review of Duchamp's ready-mades, a bottle rack, Bottle Rack (Egouttoir; 1964
version [original version of 1914, lost]) (fig. 37), a hat rack, Hat Rack (Porte-chapeaux;
1964 version [original version of 1917, lost]) (fig. 38), and a coat rack nailed to the
floor, Trap (Trbuchet; 1964 version [original version of 1917, lost]) (fig. 39), reveal his
interest in

Fig. 37.
Marcel Duchamp, Bottle Rack (Egouttoir),
1964 (original version of 1914, lost). Readymade: galvanized iron, height 25 in.
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Fig. 3 8.
Marcel Duchamp, Hat Rack (portechapeaux),
1964 (original version of 1917, lost). Assisted
ready-made: hat rack suspended from the
ceiling, height 9 1/4 in., diameter at base 5 1/2
in. Galleria Schwarz, Milan.
Courtesy of Arturo Schwarz.

Fig. 3 9.
Marcel Duchamp, Trap (trebuchet), 1964
(original version of 1917, lost). Assisted
readymade: coat rack nailed to the floor.
Galleria Schwarz, Milan.
Courtesy of Arturo Schwarz.
94
exploring how physical displacement may be translated into logical and artistic
paradoxes. The visual suspension of the bottle rack and the hat rack highlights their
ambiguous status as ordinary objects. Hung from a support, they become inaccessible as
functional objects. The coat rack, on the other hand, is rendered functionally redundant
by being nailed to the floor. Floating in the air as if unattached, the bottle rack and hat
rack draw the viewer's attention to the temporal, as well as visual, meaning of
suspensionsuspension as a brief interruption, or delay. Playing on both meanings of
suspension, Duchamp inscribes a temporal interval into the visual dimension. In doing
so, however, he reveals the nature of his intervention to be that of an intellectual fact,
one which may "strain a little bit the laws of physics," to use his own terms. As he
observes to Francis Roberts: "Even gravity is a form of coincidence or politeness, since
it is only by condescension that a weight is heavier when itdescends than when it
rises."[41]

Three of the ready-madesthe bottle rack, hat rack, and coat rackare frameworks on
which articles are hung, sharing the designation of rack (porte, as in the French portebouteilles porte-chapeau, and porte-manteau. ) Not only has Duchamp selected three
objects that act as bearers for other objects porte (from porter, which is also door in
French) but, lest his audience misses the joke, he has provided us with a further verbal
clue with the coat rack (porte-manteau. ) A portmanteau is an artificial word
construction that packs two meanings into one word. The coat rack (porte-manteau )
reveals Duchamp's understanding of ready-mades, not as actual objects but as porteparole (spokesman or mouthpiece in English), that is, as bearers of speech or as
mechanisms for the production of linguistic and visual puns. The visual suspension of
these ready-mades reveals their affinity to puns, since puns suspend
conventionalmeaning by creating an interval that delays their capacity to refer, by being
objectified or "made" either into words or into images. As bearers of other objects and
other meanings these ready-mades embody through their visual characteristics the
mechanical displacements operated through puns.
In order to elucidate how puns functionnot as ordinary words but as utteranceswe
return to Duchamp's coat rack Trap, which instead of being physically suspended is
nailed to the floor. Keeping in mind Arturo Schwarz's observation that a "Ready-made is
sometimes a pun in three 95
dimensional projection," this work helps us clarify the relation of linguistic and visual
puns in Duchamp's oeuvre. The visual meaning of this work, that of the physical
displacement of the coat rack, remains quite opaque as long as we do not consider the
conceptual displacement enacted by the title. The title of this ready-made, Trap
(Trbuchet), is phonetically identical to the French chess term trbucher, meaning to
"stumble over," thus suggesting both the kind of impediment (trap) and the kind of
movement (stumbling) that puns engender. Susan Stewart has noted that puns "trip us
up," and that they are an "impediment to seriousness" since they split the flow of
meaning and events in time.[42] Yet, by making us stumble, puns invite us to think about
language in a new waynot as a static object but as a mechanism generating
movement. Considered in these terms, the so-called "poetic" or "creative" aspects of
language emerge as "ready-made," to the extent that a pun is like a switch that
mechanically enables us to discover the creative potential of language.
If Duchamp's work is a "pressure responsive mechanism" (to use Antin's expression),
the linguistic and the visual elements can be considered as "trap doors" that open up
kinetic possibilities. As Duchamp observes, "the trap door, and by its falling open/ the
trap door effects the instantaneous pulling / of the carriage (through the system of pull
cords.)" (Notes, 97).[43] The coat rack in Trap, on which clothes used to hang neatly in a
row like words in a sentence, is a mechanical trap that unhinges our concepts both of
language and of vision. The "linguistic trap" is the idea or rather conceit that "art could
free itself from language" and "come to occupy a kind of neutral space between
thoughts."[44] This illusion, that art can transcend language, is based on the mistaken
assimilation of linguistics to literaturean assimilation that, in Antin's view, denies its
conceptual and kinetic nature. The other trap in question is the "retinal" or "visual

shudder," the illusion that an image or an object needs no further illumination since it is
autonomous from language.
Duchamp's interest in puns as machines whose nonsensical character challenges the
conventions of meaning is echoed by his Dada contemporaries' efforts to revolutionize
both language and artistic modes of expression. For instance, Tristan Tzara's Manifeste
de Monsieur Anti-pyrine and Manifeste Dada (1918) are neither purely discursive nor
poetic artifacts but instead efforts to critique language itself as the purveyor of a logical
96
and metaphysical worldview. By setting into play the visual, graphic, and acoustic
properties of language, through experimental typography that disrupts the conventional
organization of words on the page, these manifestos challenge our presuppositions about
the communicative or informational function of language. Like Hugo Ball's and Richard
Huelsenbeck's optophonetic experiments, these texts are visual and acoustic
performances that operate at the very limits of language. These experiments with
language, however, must be distinguished from Duchamp's own discovery of puns as
verbal and poetic machines. The specificity of the Duchampian project lies in the
systematic elaboration of puns as embodied objects whose concrete identity is
disseminated through verbal and visual reproduction. Instead of testing the limits of
language, as do his Dada contemporaries, Duchamp uncovers within ordinary language
a creative potential that reflects his understanding of it as a generative mechanism. As
linguistic ready-mades, puns act like switches between common sense and nonsense,
thereby technically reactivating and enriching their common usage. Their meaning is
transitive, reflecting less their specific content than their strategic and contextual nature
as utterances. By positing puns as mechanical prototypes, Duchamp invites the spectator
to envision language itself in the mode of mechanical reproduction. Instead of just
restricting himself to the nominal properties of ordinary objects, however, Duchamp
proceeds to explore through the ready-mades their peculiar redundancy as both artistic
and unartistic gestures.

What is a Ready-Made?
A work is a machine for producing meanings.
Octavio Paz

When asked whether he considers the ready-mades in the same order of achievement as
his other works, Duchamp replied: "They look trivial, but they're not. On the contrary,
they represent a much higher degree of intellectuality."[45] In order to elucidate
Duchamp's comment, consider in some detail the varieties of gestures embodied in the
otherwise trivial appearance of the ready-made. What kind of object is the ready-made?
Its three-dimensional character suggests its affinity to sculpture, while its commonplace
character suggests that it may be a pun on the objective reality of the work of art. Is the
ready-made an artwork or a critical gesture? And if the ready-made is not an artwork,
how does it maintain its critical dis-

 97
tance from reverting into a work of art? In this context, what becomes of the artist and
the creative act?
The ready-made is the culmination of Duchamp's critique of artistic vision, a critique
seeking to transform that vision, to undermine its optical verisimilitude by reinscribing
it through verbal and cognitive activity. As the ready-made is often a commonplace
object (a bicycle wheel, comb, snow shovel, urinal, and so forth), it engages the
spectator in a new dynamic, one where the object is no longer defined by its visual
appeal as an aesthetic object. The visual pleasure induced by the formal and material
qualities of the object is not rejected; instead, it is deliberately avoided as an intervening
criterion in the choice of the ready-mades. As Duchamp explains:
In general, I had to be beware of its "look." It's very difficult to choose an object,
because, at the end of fifteen days, you begin to like it or hate it. You have to approach
something with an indifference, as if you had no aesthetic emotion. The choice of the
readymades is always based on visual indifference and, at the same time, on the total
absence of good or bad taste. (DMD , 48)
The experience of the ready-made is one of indifference and anesthesia, since these
commonplace objects have been selected because of their lack of "aesthetic emotion,"
as a defense against "taste" or the spectator's "look." This invocation of "visual
indifference" marks Duchamp's turn away from the "visual" arts and toward an art that
seeks to define itself in terms of its intellectual, rather than "retinal," potential. It is this
lack of aesthetic emotion and taste that distinguishes Duchamp's ready-mades from
subsequent experiments, such as the Surrealist found object (objet trouv). The choice
of the found object often relies on its visual appearance, its evocative powers, or its
melancholic character.
But as Duchamp admits, no object can resist visual appropriation. Sooner or later, you
begin to either like it or hate it, since the object is recovered under the aegis of one's
artistic habits as either good or bad taste. How then does one escape taste? Duchamp's
solution, in the context of his pictorial work, is to take recourse to "mechanical
drawing," which according to him "upholds no taste, since it is outside all pictorial
98

Fig. 40.
Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel (Roue de bicyclette), 1964 (original version of 1913, l
ost).
Assisted ready-made: a bicycle fork with its wheel screwed upside down onto a kitchen
stool painted white, height 50 in.
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection.
99
conventions" (dmd, 48). This appeal to mechanical drawing is intended as an alternative
to pictorial conventions, since the technical and schematic aspects of the industrial
prototype appear to escape artistic considerations. In choosing actual objects as readymades, however, Duchamp extends the notion of "mechanical drawing" to include the
objects themselves rather than their models (design prototypes). In making this dramatic
leap over the figurative into the literal, Duchamp disrupts the logic of representation that
defines both technology and art. Instead of representation, that is, a presentation that
conforms to and confirms something previously given, Duchamp resorts to a mode of
literal presentation that undermines the "idea" of the object as a representation. As
Masheck observes, the ready-made enables Duchamp to "reduce representation to the
amusing redundancy of each object fully representing itself both as a unique entity and
as a representative of some class of objects."[46] While Masheck understands Duchamp's
move as an effort to outwit Cubism, without resorting to abstraction, one should note
that Duchamp's true wit lies in his rediscovery of the object as a pun.
Duchamp's intervention consists not in the artisanal production of ready-mades but
rather in the intellectual intervention of their selection, naming, and display. The Bicycle
Wheel (Roue de bicyclette; 1964 version [original version of 1913, lost]) (fig. 40) is
displayed with the fork upside down, screwed to a kitchen stool. The Bottle Rack, the
snow shovel in In Advance of the Broken Arm, and the Hat Rack are hung from the
ceiling, whereas the coat rack called Trap is nailed to the floor instead of the wall, its
usual place. This rotation or reversibility on the object's functional place draws attention
to the creation of its artistic meaning by the choice of the setting and position ascribed
to the object. The meaning of the ready-made seems to lie less in its objective status
than in the shifts in position that qualify its potential as work of art or non-art. The
ready-made is not merely an art object on display but one that displays the constitution
of the objective character of art. The ready-mades thus emerge as the paradoxical
symptoms of an age obsessed with materialism, but unable to account for the
conventions defining materiality.
Commenting on Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel, Jack Burnham notes the punning
displacements that this work operates on both the utilitarian and artistic domains:
100
While beautiful in itself, the utilitarian wheel has been rendered functionally immobile
like a turtle on its back. It is motion that goes nowhere and a machine that does not
"work" in the accepted sense. Yet, by aesthetic inversion, Duchamp has transformed the
wheel into an optical device. As in the glass paintings that he was shortly to create, the

viewer was given the option of looking through the moving wheel or catching the
reflective patterns of its glinting spokes.[47]
As Burnham suggests, Duchamp alludes to the utilitarian and mobile function of the
bicycle only to suspend this usage by recovering it in the service of optics. An instance
of kinetic art, the moving wheel is transformed into an optical device. Duchamp
harnesses the mechanical aspects of the moving wheel, discovering a plastic potential,
in the transparency of the spokes or mirrorlike reflective surface.[48] The rotational
movement of the bicycle wheel also suggests links between optical properties and
verbal puns. Consequently, Burnham's claim regarding Duchamp's "aesthetic inversion"
should not be understood as a concession to optics, and hence, as the recovery of the
ready-made into the artistic domain. Instead, as this discussion will demonstrate,
Duchamp uncovers in the mechanical rotation of the bicycle wheel, a plastic dimension,
including reversibility, as well as inversion. Considered in these terms, the bicycle
wheel emerges as a switch or a faucet, a mechanical device whose artistic significance
may be turned on or off at will, like a pun.
Duchamp recognizes that his interest in movement is an extension of his earlier pictorial
explorations: "Again, the idea of movement, you see just transferred from the Nude into
a bicycle wheel, at the same time I was working on The Glass."[49] Yet the movement in
question here is not linear, since the diagrammatic arrows marking the progression of
movement in the Nude describe a set of rotations. Rather than functioning as simple
deictical markers that designate something by pointing at it, these arrows outline a
circular movement, so that they point back upon themselves. Asked by Cabanne
whether the arrow has a symbolic significance, Duchamp responds: "None at all. Unless
that which consists in introducing slightly new methods into painting. It was a sort of
loophole. You know, I've always felt this need to escape myself." (DMD , 31). The dia 101
gramatic arrow is defined as a "loophole," that is, as a loop whose figurative "turn"
outlines a double strategy: the movement away from the conventions of painting is
simultaneously an evasive ploy that turns back on itself, since it also implies coming to
terms with pictorial traditions.
While the functional utility of the bicycle wheel has been suspended, its ability as a
ready-made to generate "work" of a cognitive nature is being elaborated. The bicycle
wheel can be seen as a machine that generates verbal, as well as optical and kinetic
effects. The rotation of the arrows in Duchamp's pictorial experiments is literally
embodied in the rotation and reversibility of the spokes of the bicycle wheel. The
Bicycle Wheel recalls Duchamp's other mechanical analogy for puns Door: 11, rue
Larrey (Porte: 11, rue Larrey; 1927) (see fig. 78, p. 214), a door that Duchamp built in
such a way that its rotation around a hinge opens one doorway as it closes another. This
door thus represents a logical conundrum, since it is paradoxically open and closed at
the same time. The door is an allusion to the Bicycle Wheel, to the extent that they both
function as machines whose motion generates multiple effects. The bicycle wheel and
the door emerge as mechanical analogues for the kinetic, optical, and reiterative
structure of puns. Duchamp's subsequent experiments with rotation and puns, in Project
for the Rotary Demisphere (1924), Discs Inscribed with Puns (1926), Anemic Cinema

(Anmic Cinma; 192526), and Rotoreliefs (optical discs) (1935), demonstrate his
continued efforts to elaborate puns as devices, whose rotation and reversibility
("mirrorical return") suspend and unhinge meaning.[50]
If the bicycle wheel documents Duchamp's fascination with movement as a way of
distancing himself through kinetics from pictorial optics (albeit in a roundabout way),
his ready-made Comb (Peigne; 1916) (fig. 41), a gray steel comb bearing an autograph
inscription on its edge, appears at

Fig. 41
Marcel Duchamp, Comb (Peigne), 1916. Ready-made: gray steel comb, 1 1/4 x 6 1/2 in.
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection.
102
first glance to be a return to a more static and thus conventional position. However, the
static quality of this steel, or rather "still," comb is disrupted once we consider its title.
Comb (peigne, in French) refers not to the infinitive to paint but instead to the French
subjunctive form of painting, que je peigne (translated from French as "if I could only
paint" or as "I should or ought to paint"). These tentative formulations capture the
necessity of painting as a conditional, rather than as a given or selfevident activity. What
then explains Duchamp's hesitancy or reluctance to resort to or engage in painting, in
the first place? Duchamp's reproduction of the Comb on the cover of the journal
Transition (New York, 1937, no. 26) alerts the viewer to the "transitional" status of this
ready-made, yet the question persists as to what kind of "transition" Duchamp may have
had in mind. A joking comment by James Joyce to Sylvia Beach that "the comb with
thick teeth shown on this cover was the one used to comb out Work in Progress,"
reveals the figurative and artistic potential of the comb as a brush: a figurative
instrument for combing through a text, but also an instrument that makes representation
possible, like a painter's brush.[51]
While these observations highlight the figurative and pictorial potential of the comb,
they do not as yet illuminate decisively Duchamp's use of the comb as a commentary on
painting. The enigmatic inscription on the edge of the comb provides further clues
toward elucidating his position: "3 OU 4 GOUTTES DE HAUTEUR N'ONT RIEN A
FAIRE AVEC LA SAUVAGERIE" (3 OR 4 DROPS OF HEIGHT HAVE NOTHING
TO DO WITH SAVAGERY). Once we consider this inscription in terms of its punning
character, we begin to have an insight into its potential meanings. "3 OU 4 GOUTTES

DE HAUTEUR" read phonetically generates "3 OU 4 GOUTTES D'ODEUR" (3 OR 4

DROPS OF ODOR), an expression that appears equally meaningless unless we consider
it in light of Duchamp's condemnation of painting in terms of both the "splashing of
paint" and the "intoxication of turpentine." The expression A FAIRE (to do) may also be
translated as making or creating; however, it can also be read as a pun on a business
transaction (affaire), or as something made of iron (un fer ). This double pun on faire as
fer may seem gratuitous, were it not the very formulation that Duchamp employs when
he was asked to define genius "Impossibilit du fer" (the impossibility of iron), which
can also mean the impossibility of making
103

Fig. 42.
Marcel Duchamp, in Advance of the Broken Arm (En avance
du Bras Cass), 1964 (original version of 1915, lost). Ready-made:
wood and galvanized iron snow shovel, height 52 in. Yale
University Art Gallery, gift of Katherine S. Dreier to the
Collection Socit Anonyme. Courtesy of Arturo Schwarz.
(faire )[52] Savagery (sauvagerie ) is a figurative expression for designating unsociable,
uncultured, or unsavory behavior. Now we begin to understand that Duchamp's punning
inscription on the comb may refer to the iron (y) of his position as an artist who
abandons one form of creativity, that of making paintings (which he associates with

savagery of the splash and odor of paint), in order to adopt another form of making,
which is conceptual rather than artistic in the traditional sense. The ready-made
embodies this new form of non- or an-artistic making, since it involves intellectual,
rather than manual work.
If this inference seems a little farfetched, it is possible to confirm it by rapidly
examining other ready-mades: the bottle rack, Bottle Dryer (1914), and the snow
shovel, In Advance of the Broken Arm (En avance du bras cass; 1964 version [original
version of 1915, lost]) (fig. 42), both articles made of galvanized iron and suspended in
the air. In the previous
104
discussion on puns the bottle rack was examined as a mechanical analogue of linguistic
puns. The function of this object as a bottle dryer, however, makes one wonder whether
this object is intended as an example of "dry art," that is, as yet another instance of
Duchamp's rejection of painting (which he associates with the wetness of paint). The
snow shovel is also an example of "dry art" to the extent that the liquidity of water must
crystallize into snow (a solid, dry powder) in order to be shoveled. The snow shovel
(pelle neige) begins to make sense, once one literally spells out (peler ) its punning
associations. Shovel (pelle, in French), which means scoop or blade, can also be used to
signify dustpan (pelle poussire) or a fall off of a bicycle. One only has to recall Man
Ray's and Duchamp's photograph Dust Breeding a picture of the Large Glass lying
flat and showing the accumulation of dustto realize Duchamp's leap from the
colorless snow to the insignificant grayness of dust. Like Leonardo before him, who
recognized the plastic and temporal potential of dust since he saw in its reliefs a
miniature terrain and also recommended using it as a device for measuring time, so, too,
does Duchamp begin to breed dust.[53] Mimicking his affection for "gray matter," or
"brain facts," the dust becomes both a symptom of the temporal erosion

Fig. 43
Marcel Duchamp, Apolinre Enameled, 191617. Ready-made: cardboard and

painted tin advertisement for Sapolin brand of enamels, 9 5/8 x 13 3/8 in.
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection.
105
of the traditions of painting (its "gathering dust") and, paradoxically, a statement about
the conceptual future made visible by this very decline.[54] If painting implies being in
the "color" business, Duchamp demonstrates that he will have no hand in it. Is it then
surprising that the snow shovel is entitled In Advance of the Broken Arm?
But if Duchamp will have no hand in painting, does that mean that he stops making art
altogether? Or does it mean that someone else picks up the relay, another person, or
perhaps, another persona? In order to examine these questions, we turn to another of
Duchamp's ready-mades, Apolinere Enameled (191617) (fig. 43), a cardboard and
painted tin advertisement for the Sapolin brand of enamels. Duchamp alters this
advertisement by covering some letters in black paint and adding in new letters, so that
"Sapolin Enamel" became "Apolinere Enameled." By drawing a reflection of the girl's
hair (in pencil) in the mirror above the chest of drawers, he adds new visual details to
the original image. Moreover, he transforms the commercial slogan, printed on the
bottom right-hand side of the image, into what appears to be a nonsensical message:
"Any act red by her ten or epergne." Carol P. James interprets this complicated visual
and linguistic rebus as the scene of a narration, which Duchamp renarrates to his own
ends:
The scene of the little girl who wields a paint brush as she would her comb (her hair,
sketched in by Duchamp, is reflected in a mirror), as a practical gesture, is a sort of
allegory of the ready-made where artists who paint ("peignent") give up their brushes to
choose everyday objects like the comb ("peigne").[55]
James's remarks correctly identify this scene as an allegorical reflection on Duchamp's
dilemma as an artist who gives up the traditional means of painting (the brush), in favor
of conceptual and poetic tools embodied in the ready-made as a pun. Instead of
representing (enameling or embellishing) by using paints, Duchamp chooses to depict
not by using colors but by resorting to poetic forms of expression. Hence the title of this
work, Apolinre Enameled, is a pun on the name of the poet Guillaume ApolliNaire
(18801918).
But why would Duchamp choose to represent his own dilemmas as an
106
artist seeking to question the limits of art, in the form of a little girl wielding a brush?
By drawing in the girl's "hair" as a reflection in the mirror, Duchamp literally designates
her legacy as an "heir." "Heir" is, however, also a pun on the French pronunciation of
the letter "r" (air, ) which in English is pronounced as "arh" (the same as art, in French).
This pun on art is a reference to another ready-made, Paris Air (fig. 44), a glass ampule
accompanied by a printed label "Serum Physiologique." Serum is a yellowish, clear,
watery fluid drawn from blood that has been made immune through inoculation.[56] The

punning analogies of air and art reveal the fact that the heir to painting may be engaged
in a bloodless, or rather, a colorless task. The inscription on the right-hand bottom, "Any
act red by her ten or epergne," now becomes less enigmatic, since it stages allusions to
the color (red), to reading "any act red" and to painting (the comb, peigne, as a pun on
epergne). Epergne can also be read as a pun on thrift or savings (pargne , in French),
thereby suggesting that painting may be kept at bay, or safeguarded against itself,
through its read (red) or ready-made embodiment as a pun.
Given Duchamp's critique of ocular (oculiste ) art, it is not surprising that this image,
which depicts a little girl painting, also functions as a pun on Duchamp's own legacy, an
immunity to painting guaranteed through in(ocul)ation. The signature "[from] Marcel
Duchamp 19161917" designates the gesture of authorship both as an issue (coming
from someone and issued to someone else) and as a temporal interval, a space that
shatters the self-identity of authorship through circulation. This signature no longer
designates Duchamp, but rather his displacement as an authorial persona. Rather than
functioning simply as a postcard (an item circulated through the mail, also a pun on
male), this work marks both the displacement of the authority of painting and its future
reissue (its post, or future legacy) as the impossibility of art.[57] Thierry de Duve's
comments regarding Duchamp's painting, The PASSAGE from the Virgin to the Bride,
anticipate the paradoxes that are explicitly spelled out in Apolinre Enameled: "Marcel
Duchamp, painter, signs the impossibility of painting while Rrose Slavy, artist, depicts
(dpeint ) art's possibility. Unless what happens is really that the anartist Marcel
Duchamp designates the possibility of painting while the nonpainter Rrose Slavy
paints the impossibility of art."[58] The issue, however, is less one of deciding who
exactly (Marcel or
107

Fig. 44.
Marcel Duchamp, Paris Air (Air De Paris), 1919. Readymade: glass ampule, height 514
in.
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection.

 108

Fig. 45.
Marcel Duchamp, "Why Not Sneeze Rrose Slavy'," 1921 Semi-ready-made: 152
marble cubes with thermometer and cuttlebone in small birdcage, 4 1/2 x 8 5/8 x 6 1/4 i
n.
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection.
Rrose) depicts the possibility or impossibility of painting or art, but rather the fact that
these positions act as mechanical relays that may be switched on or off, like puns. As
our subsequent discussion will show, the reversibility of these positions can only be
understood by conceiving them according to the poetic and thus reversible logic of
puns, as instances of "mirrorical return."
Duchamp's gestures embody a logical impossibility, since affirmation and denial, past
and future, male and female coexist within Apolinre Enameled. But this very
coexistence shatters the identity of the artist, who now embodies not only different
positions, but also differently gendered personasMarcel Duchamp and the little girl.
Heralding the appearance of Duchamp's artistic alter ego Rrose Slavy, this little girl is
not someone to be taken lightly or even sneezed at. After all, she will go on to sign and
thus authorize Duchamp's semi-ready-made, "Why Not Sneeze Rrose Slavy?" (1921)
(fig. 45), a birdcage filled with marble cubes in the shape of sugar lumps with a
thermometer and cuttlebone. The cuttlebone is a fig 109
urative expression for commerce (the cuttlebone of commerce) and thus an indicator of
Duchamp's particular dealings (affairs) with both painting and the notion of authorship.
This work, like Apolinre Enameled, suggests that authorship is not fixed referentially,
since it cannot be contained by the identity of the artist. Considered in these terms,
authorship emerges as a process of engenderment, a commercial and erotic affair, which

sets the author into motion as a relay of personas, thereby delaying, and thus
postponing, the author or artist from attaining a proper or fixed identity.

Ready-Made Ironies
Humor and laughter. . . . are may pet tools.
Marcel Duchamp

I act like an artist although I'am not one.

Marcel Duchamp

The previous discussion of ready-mades begins to outline something in the order of a

paradox. While the ready-made is chosen according to visual indifference and its lack of
aesthetic qualities, the punning associations engendered by its title appear to play an
extremely significant, if not a determining role. When asked by Francis Roberts to
explain how he chooses a ready-made, Duchamp disarmingly replies:
It chooses you, so to speak. If your choice enters into it, then, taste is involved, bad
taste, good taste, uninteresting taste. Taste is the enemy of art, A-R-T. The idea was to
find an object that had no attraction whatsoever from the aesthetic angle. This was not
the act of an artist, but of a non-artist, an artisan if you will. I wanted to change the
status of the artist or at least to change the norms used for defining an artist. Again to
de-deify him. The Greeks and the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
thought of him as a worker, an artisan.[59]
Duchamp's disclaimer regarding his choice of the ready-made is qualified by the
proposition that the ready-made chooses him. If the choice of the ready-made poses a
problem, this is because it involves the notion of tastebe it good, bad, or indifferent.
By refusing the attraction of the aesthetic qualities of the object, Duchamp attempts to
resist the appropriative powers of taste, whose normative strictures are enforced through
a process of repetition that precludes invention. By questioning the definition of art and
the artist, Duchamp demystifies ("de-deifies") the endeavor
110
and the position of those involved in the production of artworks. By comparing himself
to an artisan, Duchamp redefines the notion of artistic creativity as a skill, craft, or
trade: a process of production based on literal reproduction and execution.
As the ready-mades have demonstrated, however, Duchamp's artisanal intervention is
not manual but intellectual. While rejecting a visual engagement with the object, since
this premise has been one of the unquestioned givens (or "ready-mades") of art,
Duchamp resorts to another kind of "making," one that draws on the craft of wit,
understood as wisdom or sagacity. This appeal to intellectual activity is not idealistic but
humorous, insofar as it erases the distinctions between objects and their names by

treating them both as signifying mechanisms or puns. Resorting to ordinary objects,

Duchamp discovers that their materiality is no more solid than the materiality of the
linguistic and philosophical conventions that constitute them. While abstaining from
"making" objects in the visual, aesthetic sense, Duchamp engages in a process of
making, which both unmakes and reshapes the boundaries of the objective world and
the position of the artist.
When asked by Francis Roberts whether he thought of himself as being "antiart,"
Duchamp corrected him:
No, no the word "anti" annoys me a little, because whether you are anti or for, it's two
sides of the same thing. And I would like to be completelyI don't know what you say
nonexistent, instead of being for or against . . . . The idea of the artist as a sort of
superman is comparatively recent. This I was going against. In fact, since I've stopped
my artistic activity, I feel that I'm against this attitude of reverence the world has. Art,
etymologically speaking, means to "make." Everybody is making, not only artists, and
maybe in coming centuries there will be a making without the noticing.[60]
This resistance to being labeled "antiart" reflects Duchamp's understanding that an
aesthetics of negation may not be different from an aesthetics of affirmation. To be for
or against something means simply to maintain a position within the framework of art
as a preestablished paradigm. His attack on the idea of the artist as "superman" reflects
his rejection of
111
nineteenth-century ideology, which equates the creative act with an act of will.
Duchamp defines the creative act as a "difference between the intention and its
realization" (WMD, 139); that is, as a critique of the identity of the creative subject, as
well as the objectification of the creative act. In the wake of Nietzsche's critique of
representation, Duchamp redefines art as "the making without the noticing." But what
kind of making and maker does this statement involve?
Duchamp's enigmatic pronouncement in The Box of 1914, a set of puns whose rationale
revolves around the devaluation of art and its feminine reengenderment, enables us to
understand the philosophical implications of his treatment of ready-mades as puns:
arrhe is to art as
shitte is to shit
arrhe/art = shitte/shit
grammatically :
the arrhe of painting is feminine in gender. (WMD, 24)
These proportional fractions summarize in a graphic fashion Duchamp's transformation
of art and its relation to value for modernity. In one of the notes to The Green Box
entitled "Algebraic Comparison," Duchamp resorts to similar ratios, while clarifying
this formulation by indicating that the term above the bar is a ("being the exposition")

and the term below is b ("the possibilities") (WMD, 28). This indication alerts the
viewer to the fact that the rationale of these ratios is not to be found in mathematics but
in poetry: "the sign of ratio which separated them remains (sign of the accordance or
rather of . . . look for it )" (WMD, 28).
At first sight, Duchamp's punning analogy amounts to a scatological joke: art is like, or
is, shit, insofar as it does not possess any inherent value. This rapid analogy between art
and excrement, however, breaks down the
112
moment that one takes a closer look at Duchamp's formulation. His analogy of arrhe/art
and shitte/shit is not based on the equation or comparison of these puns but rather
reflects the internal dissemblance of these terms insofar as they are puns. The problem
is that the identity of both of these terms is destabilized through their punning
representations: they sound phonetically alike, but are graphically different. Duchamp's
humorous formulation thus captures the tendentious reach of logic, whose pet tools
analogy and identityare upstaged by the poetic implosion of puns.
In the case of Alfred Jarry's (18731907) Ubu roi (1896), it is exactly the difference
between shitte/shit (merdre/merde ) that allowed him to pass off his play as an aesthetic
exercise, despite the vocal protestations of an audience threatening to riot. This poetic
infraction that fails to be punished as aesthetic contraband establishes a pattern by
which nonsense emerges as a gesture beyond contestation or negation. The analogical
relation of arrhe/art and shitte/shit is undermined through nonsense. Hence the
incapacity of these signs to generate value; for value presupposes the equivalence of
two terms through reference to a common standard, so that a sign can stand in for
something else.[61] In the examples above, however, the phonetic reiteration of arrhe/art
annuls these terms through its mirrorical reversibility or implosion. Rather than
generating meaning, this phonetic reproduction annuls its very possibility.[62]
The punning equivalence of arrhelart = shitte/shit is reduced to a statement about
duration, an inscription of temporality into the logic of similitude:
= in each fraction of duration (?) all/future and antecedent fractions are reproduced
All these past and future fractions/ thus coexist in a present which is/ really no longer
what one usually calls/ the instant present, but sort of/ present of multiple extensions/
See Nietzsche's eternal Return, neurasthenic/ form of a/ repetition in succession to
infinity. (Notes, 135)
Duchamp's note on The Large Glass makes it possible to understand how repetition
generates temporality, rather than identity. Duration, in this case, is not defined linearly,
since past and future fractions coexist in a "present
113
of multiple extensions." This fractioning of appearance expands the present to an
interval that no longer corresponds to its traditional reduction to an instant. Duchamp's

reference to Nietzsche's "eternal Return" as a "neurasthenic form of a repetition"

highlights the paradox of the logic of appearance. For Nietzsche, as for Duchamp, the
notion of return is crucial, insofar as all appearance is re-presentation, that is, a return as
appearance."[63] That which appears, or manifests itself, returns as representation. The
ready-made may be considered as an instance of the "eternal Return" to the extent that it
signifies, not the return of the sameness or identity of things (the thing itself) but instead
of their appearancethe manner and mode through which things show themselves. The
triumph of appearance in this context becomes the stage for the "show" of
representation, Thus the attempt to represent leads not to identification but rather to the
expenditure of the notion of signification through puns.[64]
By exploring the allegorical character of representation ("allegorical appearance")
through the ready-mades, which function as mechanisms of "allegorical reproduction,"
Duchamp extends the mechanical logic to art as a whole. The ready-mades embody
Duchamp's literal understanding of representation as "re-presentation"a circular, and
hence reversible, presentation, acting as the loophole that enables Duchamp to escape
from himself. If the rotation of the bicycle wheel is a visual reminder of the loop (the
circular diagrammatic arrows that Duchamp deployed in his pictorial work), this same
loop outlines a hole, the escape hatch of the artist who "gets off the hook" of art only to
rediscover himself in its "crook."[65] Rather than "getting into a hole," Duchamp gets
moving, no longer quite himself, and yet, not quite someone entirely different either.
Duchamp's earlier pronouncement that "the arrhe of painting is feminine in gender" now
begins to make sense, since in attempting to turn away from painting, he turns back on
himself, only to discover through this process of rotation his reversible counterparthis
alter ego, Rrose Slavy. The loophole that Duchamp sought in order to escape both
painting and himself, as an artist, emerges as a turnstilea mechanism that regulates
passage like a switch. Reminiscent of the ready-made Door: II, rue de Larrey, whose
rotation about its hinge functions as the plastic equivalent of a pun, Duchamp's concept
of style is redefined as a movement, a literal "turn" on the notion of "style," straddling
the hinge between art and nonart.
114
Can one even speak of "style" in the context of the ready-mades, since these works are
already made (prefabricated)? As Duchamp explains in his notes, the question of style
does not refer to the making, in the physical sense, but rather to the reworking of the
nominal expectations attached to the work:
buy or take known/ unknown paintings/ and sign them with the name of/ a known or
unknown painterthe difference between the "style" and/ the unexpected name for the/
"experts,"is the authentic work/ of Rrose Slavy, and defies forgeries. (Notes, 169)
According to Duchamp, style no longer defines the signifying economy of a work, or
set of works, as a set of reiterative gestures, for the imprint of authenticity is defined as
the "difference between the 'style' and/ the unexpected name," that is, as the difference
between modes of expression and nominal expectations. This is the difference that the
ready-mades project as they undermine the notion of style. If the work of Rrose Slavy
defies forgeries, despite the fact that it may involve the manipulation of "already" extant

works, this is because it bears the imprint of "wit" as a conceptual turn, which redefines
the specificity of both style and signature as the authentic imprints of artistic production.
Duchamp's fragmentation of his artistic persona into Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Slavy
captures the double-edged significance of the ready-made: "The ready-made is a twoedged weapon: if it is transformed into a work of art, it spoils the gesture by desecrating
it; if it preserves its neutrality, it converts the gesture into a work."[66] This comment by
Octavio Paz vividly summarizes the dilemma that the ready-made presents: its
transformation into art would spoil the gesture by desecrating both the work and the
artist. The ready-made encapsulates the threat that the assimilation of a work into art
presents both to the work and its maker. How can the ready-made preserve its neutrality
as a work, and thus strategically resist its artistic destiny? The answer to this question is
found in one of Duchamp's signatory works, with my tongue in my cheek (1959) (fig.
46), which may be seen as the postscript to the project outlined by the ready-mades.
This work is a self-portrait that initially appears to be the visual embodiment of tonguein-cheek humor.[67] A profile drawing of
115

Fig. 46.
Marcel Duchamp, With My Tongue in My Cheek, 1959. Sculpture drawing: plaster,
pencil, paper, and wood, 9 3/4 x 5 7/8 x 2 in. Centre National de Culture Moderne
Georges Pompidou, Paris. Courtesy of Arturo Schwarz.
116

Fig. 47.
Marcel Duchamp, Equilibrium (L'equilibre), 1958
Drypoint on celluloid, 6 7/8 x 4 1/2 in Galleria
Schwarz, Milan. Courtesy of Arturo Schwarz.
Duchamp's face is doubled by an exaggerated relief plaster sculpture of the swollen
cheek, the absent index of the tongue alluded to in the title. A closer look at this work,
however, reveals the punning relation of the title to the work, which is literally one of
mockery, irony, or insincerity. The phrase "with my tongue in my cheek" is a statement
about humor, defined as the impossibility of literal meaning, since it establishes a
disjunction between what is said and what is meant.
On the visual level, this image is profoundly ambiguous, despite its illusion of literality.
It consists of the supenmposition of two independent artistic domains, that of drawing
(which resembles engraving here) and that of sculpture. In his Notes Duchamp points
out that engraving and sculpture are modes of impression. Both engraving and sculpture
capture the existence of an object by tracing out its absence, like a photographic
negative. The two media function according to the modality of the "mold"; that is, they
generate an impression of life by capturing its outline in materials whose lifelessness
and remoteness only heighten the illusion.[68]
117
The plaster cast of Duchamp's cheek preserves within its swollen outline the hidden
noise of language (tongue; langue in French). Rather than embodying an act of speech,

with my tongue in my cheek captures the mocking tone of the utterance as a delay. Its
sculptural character as a mold traces within its outline the presence of an absence,
thereby becoming merely a vehicle for signifying something different from itself.
This self-portrait of the artist as a master of mockery and whimsy of the art of tongue
and cheek, however, turns out to be less humorous on further reflection. The visual
inscription of laughter (rire ,) associated with the tongue and cheek expression, congeals
in this image with the rictus of death, the spasm of the face captured by the nineteenthcentury death mask. Intended to celebrate and commemorate famous artists by capturing
their lifelike likeness in plaster molds applied to the face and sometimes to the hands,
the death mask ironically preserves the illusion of life through the image of death. The
inscription of death in with my tongue in my cheek is not surprising once we consider
what may happen to the artist who holds his "tongue in check," that is, the artist who
resigns himself not to speak and thus becomes "Stupid as a painter." If we recall
Duchamp's irritation with painting, which he considers "nonconceptual" or "retinal,"
then we can begin to understand how important the tongue (langue, or language) may
be for the viability, or rather "life," of an image. Thus, with my tongue in my cheek
stages life and death, language and image, humor and dead-seriousness, as a series of
contextual frames on which hinges Duchamp's statement about the conditional future of
the artist as "life on credit" (Notes, 289).
Now it is possible to understand why Duchamp speaks of his work in terms of
"metairony," and visual "anesthesia" or aesthetic "indifference": "Irony is a playful way
of accepting something. Mine is an irony of indifference. It is a 'Meta-irony.'"[69]
Duchamp's "metairony" is ready-made, rather than created anew. It does not involve
either affirmation or denial, since both of these gestures are subject to logic, rather than
humor. Humor in Duchamp's work is not merely an attitude or a disposition, a sleight of
hand or a furtive wink; it is a philosophy whose ludic nature "strains the laws of
physics." In a print entitled Equilibrium (L'Equilibre; 1958) (fig. 47), Duchamp's
phonetic and visual rendering of the word equilibrium (equilibre) is presented as if
inverted in a mirror. This phrase
118
is legible only upon being placed before a mirror, the witness of our ocular obsessions.
"Et qui libre?" The question encrypted in the "mirrorical return" of the proof captures
both the swing of humor and its momentary collapse into seriousness: freely switching
on and off, like a faucet running hot and cold. The print L'Equilibre stages the insignia
of humor as a pun, a movement whose signatory imprints waver between equilibrium (a
figurative allusion to irony) and destiny (metairony) understood as a fated, because
mechanically determined, gesture. If humor occupies such a central position in
Duchamp's work, this is not merely because it represents an individual temperament or
disposition; instead, humor represents a strategy that generates displacements through
decontextualization. Humor in Duchamp is not transgressive: it neither opposes, nor
merely transcends conventional frames of reference. Instead it repoeticizes the notion of
reference by staging it as a playful and strategic interplay. As Octavio Paz observes:
"The Ready-mades are not anti-art, like so many modern creations, but rather unartistic. Neither art nor anti-art, but something in between, indifferent, existing in a
void."[70] Like the ready-mades, Duchamp's humor functions as a balancing act between

various artistic conventions; it neither affirms or negates them but instead opens up an
interval whose ostensible indifference becomes the space for questioning the
programmatic fate of both art and art objects.
In response to Francis Roberts's question, "What is a ready-made?" Duchamp elaborates
the challenge that the ready-made presents both to the notion of artistic creativity and
the history of art:
A Ready-made is a work of art without an artist to make it, if I may simplify the
definition. A tube of paint that an artist uses is not made by the artist; it is made by the
manufacturer that makes paints. So the painter really is making a Ready-made when he
paints with a manufactured object that is called paints . . . . Well, the Impressionists
were iconoclasts for the Romantics and the Fauves were the same and again Cubism
against Fauvism. So when I came along, my little idea, my iconoclastic gesture, was
ready-made.[71]
In the sweep of a single sentence Duchamp has captured the drama of the ready-made in
the history of art, since the ready-made is a work "without
119
an artist." Like Luigi Pirandello's celebrated play Six Characters in Search of an Author,
Duchamp's ready-mades have apparently been set loose in the world in search of their
maker. But the anonymity of the maker of the ready-made is not simply the result of
industrialization, since as Duchamp points out, painters paint with "manufactured
objects," which are called "paints." The artisanal dimension of manufacturing color had
even in the Renaissance been displaced by the availability of pigment at apothecaries.[72]
At issue is less the impact of industrialization on the material level (embodied in the
tube of paint), than the far more significant issue, that painting is defined by
conventions, which set up and define its conditions of possibility. Before an artist even
begins to paint, the idea of painting is "already-made," defined by social norms and
expectations. Duchamp's originality lies precisely in having recognized the "readymade" as an "idea" that concerns objects, only insofar as it invokes the history of their
artistic representation. Duchamp's "iconoclastic gesture" draws on a history of
iconoclasm in painting, but only repeats it in order to disrupt its continuity, for he draws
upon a historical reflection on the conceptual status of painting, and deliberately
literalizes this dilemma in objects incapable of bearing artistic connotations. The readymade thus embodies an impossible destiny: the predicament of art brought face-to-face
with its own conditions of possibility.
121

3
Reproductions: Limited Editions, Ready-Made Origins
Fundamentally, I don't believe in the creative function of the artist .
Marcel Duchamp

Considering the significance of the ready-mades, Arthur Danto reminds us that

"Duchamp did not merely raise the question What is Art? but rather Why is something a
work of art when something exactly like it is not ?"[1] Danto's reformulation of the
classical question "What is Art?" displaces the locus of value from a generic question
about art to a specific inquiry about its meaning for the modern period. In the age of
mechanical reproduction art can no longer be defined by presuming an essential relation
between the uniqueness of objects and the individuality of the producers.[2] The
technological reproduction of objects disrupts the referential relation of the artist and the
work, as well as a valuative inscription of objects as art objects. In doing so it redefines
the notion of value as no longer inherent to the actual production of an object, but
rather, as generated through its technical and social reproduction.
Starting with Duchamp's experiments with the ready-mades, of which Fountain and
L.H.O.O.Q. (1919) are the best known examples, we see a consistent effort to explore
the effects that mechanical reproduction has on the definition of the work of art. These
works deliberately stage the challenge that the reproducibility of objects poses to the
work of art, since a new work is created by reactivating the conceptual interval between
the original and the reproduction. In doing so Duchamp creates an "interval" or "delay"
in the valuative inscription of the work. This
122
"delay" in establishing how value is vested in an object becomes the conceptual space
within which Duchamp experiments speculatively with a new definition of art.
Duchamp, however, is not content to simply explore the impact of mechanical
reproduction on the work of art. His project is more expansive, since it includes
exploring the speculative potential of the concept of artistic reproduction. As Max
Kozloff has noted, the "potentialities of the reproducible" constitute Duchamp's legacy
to American art:
The potentialities of the reproducible, in fact, constitute the most over arching of his
legacies to recent American art (as well as a story incredibly complex in itself).
Doubtless reproduction was a way of demoting the uniqueness of his objects at the same
time as promulgating his ideas. His activities here fall into two categories:
reincarnations of lost or destroyed objects which are in no sense different from their
originalsthe bicycle wheel, the urinal; and fac-similes and photographs of his whole
production, such as in Box in a Suitcase, which are different scaled reconstructions and
records of the original works. All this makes possible, in a burst of brilliant paradox, the
coexistence of allusion (to concepts), and literal quotation, of objects.[3]
Kozloff's assessment of Duchamp's contribution identifies the significance of
Duchamp's experiments with reproduction and reproducibles. Reproduction functions as
a way of "demoting the uniqueness of objects" in order to reactivate them conceptually.
This coexistence of allusion to concepts and literal quotation is embodied in the readymades, whether it involves the mechanical reproduction of objects, as in the case of
Fountain, or the mechanical reproduction of prints, as in the case of L.H.O.O.Q. In this

chapter I will explore how mechanical reproduction, accompanied by certain signatory

gestures, generates an "original" whose status as multiples challenges the notion of
artistic originality. Instead of merely reproducing either ordinary objects or works of art,
Duchamp uses these multiples strategically in order to question the meaning of art as a
reproductive medium, as well as challenge its artistic limits. While in the process of
literalizing the notion of reproduction, Duchamp uncovers in
123
its reiterative and generative character a creative and speculative potential.
Kozloff also identifies another aspect of reproduction in Duchamp's works, one
involving Duchamp's scaled reconstructions of his own work in The Box in a Valise.
This work, however, goes far beyond mechanical reproduction, since these objects are
carefully handcrafted facsimiles. They cannot be considered to be mere
"reincarnations"; that is, objects that are in "no sense different from originals." Are we
dealing here simply with "literal quotation of objects," as Kozloff contends, or with
"literal quotation," in a "smaller case," as it were? The reduction in scale of the objects
and prints in The Box in a Valise adds a tactile dimension to what was previously a
visual experience. The tactility of these objects redefines their "literalness" as
quotations, since they can no longer be perceived as autonomous objects, but rather as
text and texture of an artistic corpus.
Is it sufficient, however, to speak about "literal quotation" in this context? On closer
scrutiny, it seems that it is not the object alone that is subject to citation but the artistic
medium as well. Given that these are carefully crafted and scaled reconstructions, one
can no longer claim that sculpture or painting is being replaced by mechanical
reproduction. Quite the contrary, The Box in a Valise represents a concerted effort of
artisanal production, where reproduction is no longer limited to mass-produced objects,
but applies to Duchamp's entire artistic corpus. In this context reproduction refers both
to the relation of art to ordinary objects and to the conventions that define its domain.
By actively engaging the spectator in a process of reflection on the limits of artistic
representation, Duchamp challenges the traditional definition of painting and sculpture,
as media of artistic reproduction.
Playing with the notion of artistic reproduction, Duchamp redirects the viewer's gaze
from the object to the artistic conventions defining its appearance. Duchamp's effort to
highlight artistic convention is visible in a set of later works, TORTURE-MORTE and
sculpture-morte relief sculptures whose exaggerated realism may be considered as
proof of Duchamp's return to classical representation. Given their deliberate artificiality
and ostentatious evocation of pictorial conventions in a sculptural context, however,
these works will be examined as a further elaboration of the notion of the ready-made.
Rather than concerning specific objects, the notion of "ready-made" will be applied to
the artistic conventions
124

that govern the production of objects. In this context Duchamp moves away from the
notion of mechanical reproduction, only to evoke a related issue, that of the
"mechanical" character of artistic production. While Duchamp's ready-mades impel
"undeniably real objects to serve as media," works such as TORTURE-MORTE and
sculpture-morte constrain the artistic media to the position of objects.[4] Duchamp
objectifies painting and sculpture by exposing their "ready-made" character: the
conventions that govern their definition as modes of representation. By extending the
notion of the "ready-made" from specific objects to artistic modes of production,
Duchamp challenges the primacy of mimesis as an artistic origin. This redefinition of
artistic production, according to the speculative potential of reproduction, will
fundamentally alter the definition of the artist's "creative function."

Reproduction 1: The "Objective" Character of Art

It can no longer be a matter of a plastic Beauty.
Marcel Duchamp

Among Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades, no object has drawn more interest,

controversy, and notoriety than his Fountain (fig. 48).[5] Although Duchamp had been
working on ready-mades since 1913, these works were largely relegated to the privacy
of his studio.[6] The controversy surrounding the exhibition of Fountain represents the
first explicit encounter of the public with the idea of the ready-made.[7] In Fountain an
ordinary piece of plumbinga lavatory urinalwas chosen by Duchamp, rotated
ninety degrees on its axis, set on a pedestal, and signed "R. MUTT." Submitted to the
first exhibition of the American Society of Independent Artists of April, 1917, Fountain
never made it past the deliberations of the hanging jury. Fountain was not exhibited
because the jury was unable to recognize the aesthetic value of the work: " [The
Fountain ] may be a very useful object in its place, but its place is not an art exhibition,
and it is, by no definition, a work of art."[8] Consequently, this scandalous object was
"suppressed" (to use Duchamp's term) by being hidden behind a partition for the rest of
the exhibition, only to be retrieved later and sold to Walter Arensberg, who lost the
piece while it was in his possession.
All that is left of Fountain today is the documentation surrounding a nonevent
concerning a nonexisting object: Alfred Stieglitz's (18641946)
125

Fig. 48.
Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917. (Photograph of lost
original.) Assisted ready-made: urinal turned on its back.
Version of 1964, height 24 5/8 in.
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Louise
and Walter Arensberg Collection.
famous photograph published as the cover to The Blind Man, no. 2 (May 1917), an
unsigned editorial entitled "The Richard Mutt Case," and Louise Norton's "Buddha of
the Bathroom."[9] There are several full-scale versions of the urinal in existence, whose
status as either found objects (they have only an approximate resemblance to the
photographic reproduction of the urinal), or as cast facsimiles (full size and miniature
size), further modify, through reproduction, the viewer's perception of the lost
"original."[10] It is important to note, however, that no subsequent urinal resembles the
model photographed by Stieglitz.[11] Renamed the Madonna of the Bathroom, due to a
"shadow on the urinal suggesting a veil," this image celebrates an attitude of comic
irreverence.[12] The centrality and the sculptural qualities of the urinal are emphasized by
its position in front of a painting. By relegating painting to mere background, this
bathroom fixture assumes a formal authority that hints at a subjective presence. It is not
surprising that Stieglitz's photograph of Fountain is described as looking "like anything
from a Madonna to a Buddha."[13]
What is most striking about Fountain is the fact that despite the extraordinary
controversies generated by the urinal, the object in question, artistic or otherwise, seems
to have barely existed. Initially a mere sample
126
of mass-produced plumbing, the urinal was further reified through its photographic
reproduction, only to come into existence aprs-coup, as a reproduction that replaces
the original. The fact that these authorized and signed belated copies of Fountain are
assessed as having significant monetary value further highlights the paradox of a work
whose copies are worth more than the original. Fountain , or the drama of the urinal that

pretends to be art, thus stages fundamental questions involving the relation of objects to
art and value. William Camfield eloquently summarized this dilemma:
Some deny that Fountain is art but believe that it is significant for both the history of art
and aesthetics. Others accept it grudgingly as art but deny that it is significant. To
complete the circle, some insist that Fountain is neither art nor an object of historical
consequence, while a few assert that it is both art and significantthough for utterly
incompatible reasons.[14]
Camfield's assessment of the debates about the artistic value or nonvalue of Fountain
outlines the impasse generated by this work. It seems that neither the status nor the
significance of this object can be decided as long as the challenge that this object
proposes to art is not elucidated.
The question regarding the artistic or nonartistic value of Fountain overshadows the fact
that this "object" was never displayed. Its scandalous presence is evoked only by the
instances of its reproduction, be it photographic or belatedly artisanal. Thus it seems
that the value of the urinal is, from the very beginning, tied in with the history of the
object's reproduction; that is, with the documentation surrounding the object, rather than
the object itself. This emphasis on documentation should not be surprising, once we
recognize Duchamp's interest in "a dry conception of art" based on his mechanical
interests. Commenting on the Chocolate Grinder, Duchamp explains: "I couldn't go into
the haphazard drawing or the paintings, the splashing of paint. I wanted to go back to a
completely dry drawing, a dry conception of art. . .< And the mechanical drawing for
me was the best form for that dry conception of art" (dmd , 130). His interest in
mechanical drawing marks both his radical break with painting and his point of
departure for the conceptual developments leading to the
127
Large Glass; such developments include the use of mechanical renderings, painted
studies, and working notations (collected in The Box of 1914 ). Thus, the integration of
documentation not merely as a process but as an aspect of the work of art, becomes the
trademark of this "dry conception of art." The passage to the ready-mades, that is, the
shift from mechanical drawing to an actual mass-produced object, thus emerges as a
necessary development. Rather than prescribing the production of an object through
mechanical drawing and notation, Duchamp uses documentation as a way of creating a
new point of view, "a new thought for that object."[15] The role of documentation now
changes: it is neither prescriptive nor descriptive, but rather, poetic. An examination of
these poetics will help to elucidate the question of how Duchamp's conception of "dry
art" is translated into the "wet art" of the urinal/fountain.
Before exploring this question in more detail, it is important to recall briefly the
problems raised by the fact that our knowledge of Fountain is mediated solely through
the documentation published in The Blind Man, no. 2. (May 1917). Given that this
documentation is not merely a record but also constitutes the only knowledge that we
have of this object/event, we must consider what is at stake in this strategy of delayed
exposure. The set of displacements that this work actively stages includes: I) an
artisanal object replaced by a mass-produced object, 2) an object replaced by a

photograph, 3) Duchamp's signature replaced by the pseudonym "R. Mutt," 4) the

author (Duchamp) replaced by a photographer (Stieglitz) and a woman writer (Norton),
and 5) the spectator (who attends the Independents' Show, but does not see the work)
replaced by The Blind Man (a document that publicly exhibits and comments on this
work, which was previously not shown).[16] Each of these displacements involves a
violation of the traditional criteria defining a work of art: I) the urinal is not an original
object, since it is mass-produced, 2) a reproduction (photograph) is exhibited rather than
the original, 3) the use of a pseudonym to sign the work raises questions of attribution,
4) it is difficult to attribute the work to a single author, since its reproduction involves
other authors, and 5) the spectator does not see the original but knows the work only
through its reproduction. In each of these instances one of the terms necessary to the
definition of a work of art is displaced, thereby staging the impossibility of classical
conditions to define the work as art.
128
But the history of Fountain does not end here; instead, it continues with the history of
its further reproduction through full-scale versions and miniature editions. The
reproductions of Fountain are haunted by a technological rather than a human fatality;
the urinal chosen by Duchamp in 1917 becomes outdatedits obsolescence being the
expression of its technical extinction. Having suffered a "death" of sorts, the object is
approximately reassembled in several versions, each different from the other. The
Fountain (1950, second version) is selected by Sidney Janis at a flea market in Paris,
following Duchamp's request. The Fountain (1963, third version) is based on a urinal
selected by lf Linde in Stockholm, later approved and re-signed by Duchamp.[17] In
these cases the obsolescence of the urinal is compensated for by treating this massproduced object as a "found" object, and by using intermediaries who act as agents,
negotiating its discovery as an "already made" object.[18] There is also a fourth version
of Fountain (1964), a cast facsimile edition of eight copies produced by Galleria
Schwarz under Duchamp's supervision. In addition there are miniature cast facsimiles
for The Box in a Valise, starting with Fountain (1938, a maquette made by Duchamp)
and subsequent cast reproductions based on molds, made by different craftsmen (1938,
1940, and 1950).[19] These latter attempts at the reproduction of Fountain, in series of
multiples, cannot be considered as "reincarnations of lost and destroyed objects" (as
Kozloff contends) but rather as instances mimicking the processes of industrial
production.
Thus, the efforts to reproduce Fountain set into motion a veritable industry: an original
that is a documented copy leads to the proliferation of copies that are now documented
originals. These two disparate gestures both mirror and invert one another. The first
gesture involves selecting a mass-produced object and passing it off as art. The second
involves the reproduction of a copy in order to produce legitimate art objects, signed by
Duchamp. Both conceive the creative act in economic terms, that is, the concept of
artistic value in each of these cases is tied to the reproduction of the object. In the first
case, the strategy of substitutions operating on the work, the author, and the signature
defers systematically the concept of originality by ascribing value not to the object itself
but rather to its circulation. In the second case, the reproduction of an object now
recognized as art leads to the production of serial works, thereby associating the concept

 129
of value with the production of multiples. The supposed originality of the work of art is
subverted by inscribing the work into a relay that corresponds to a set of delays. Artistic
value emerges as a function of reproduction, that is, as a process of repetition that
postpones the value of the work by inscribing it into the temporality of the future
perfect.
If we consider the status of the urinal as a mass-produced object, additional questions
arise. What kind of object is the urinal? Can we speak of it as an object in ordinary
terms? Because it is mass-produced, Fountain shares with the other ready-mades the
fate of being a perfect copy. Its serial reproduction through molds assures the
impossibility of distinguishing it from the original; as an industrial object it is a copy
with no original, so to speak. In his notes on the infrathin, Duchamp evokes the
dilemma of thinking about difference in the context of mass reproduction: "The
difference/ (dimensional) between/ 2 mass produced objects/ [from the same mold]/ is
an infra thin/when the maximum (?)/precision is/ obtained" (Notes, 18).[20] It seems that
the reproduction, and hence, repetition of the object generates an infinitesimal
difference making this object more or less similar to itself. As Duchamp explains, "In
Time the same object is not the/ same after a I second intervalwhat/ Relations with
the identity principle?" (Notes, 7). By drawing the viewer's attention to the temporal
dimension involved in the process of mass production, Duchamp inscribes a delay, an
infrathin difference, into its principle of identity. The act of choosing the urinal, or any
other ready-made, is based on the assumption that all reproduction involves a temporal
dimension mediating the presence of the object. This inscription of a temporal
dimension into the perception of the urinal further disrupts the immediacy of the object,
just as the title Fountain sets up an incongruence between this ordinary object and the
spectator's expectations.
Moreover, not only is the urinal a mold (the same mold that can generate a multitude of
analogous objects) but it is also molded to the needs and body of the anonymous
spectator. The shape of the urinal follows the dictates of anatomy, but in reverse order.
Although it represents the quintessential male instrument, the adaptation of this
receptacle to male anatomy generates the potential inscription of femininity, since its
visual appearance is that of an oval receptacle.[21] This effort to reproduce the male body
by molding the urinal to its shape ironically generates the literal
130
impression of femininity, its obverse. This double allusion to gender in the guise of
femininity and masculinity can be seen as an instance of the infrathin. Duchamp defines
this interval as "separation has the 2 senses male and female" (Notes , 9). Thus,
eroticism appears in the object where it is least expected to be foundthe urinal. It is
particularly ironic that eroticism should be potentially inscribed in the gesture
associated with the most sterile and precise forms of both corporeal (bodily waste) and
industrial production (mass production as the generation of sameness). Reproduction in
this context becomes generative, since it recontextualizes both gender and the
distinction of ordinary and art objects. The notion of reproduction that Duchamp plays

with redefines the nature of the aesthetic object by delaying its becoming an object
proper. The interval of this delay, engendered both by the visual appearance of the
object and its playful title, becomes the infrathin trace of its libidinal expression.
While Fountain shares with other ready-mades the fate of being a massproduced object,
there is a way in which it remains unique. While the choice of ready-mades is based on
"visual indifference" and "a total absence of good and bad taste," the urinal stands out
because it is difficult to disengage this object from its physical function and its cultural
connotations.[22] While Duchamp may ask rhetorically, "A urinalwho would be
interested in that?," it is clear that this mass-produced object raises issues that other
ready-mades do not. The isolation of this porcelain plumbing fixture on a pedestal
evokes, irrevocably, its previous context and history. The urinal is traditionally kept out
of sight because of its bodily associations; the evanescent odor of the urinal continues to
haunt the metaphorical fountain. The urinal not only is a mass-produced object but it
also serves the repeated needs of the masses. The repetition inscribed in the
manufactured nature of the urinal is reiterated by its use value, the automatic sense in
which it indiscriminately serves the public's bodily needs. Superficially devoid of all
artistic connotations, since it is a receptacle for human waste, the urinal activates the
potential presence of the male spectator through the pun arroser (to water or sprinkle),
thus suggesting the punning coincidence of art and eros (arose ) in a gesture we least
expect to associate it with: that of expenditure or waste. Like a lingering smell, the
urinal bears the unassailable imprint, the impression of the spectator's body as a
negative, and thereby mechanically "draws" in the spectator.
131
The invisible inscription of this olfactory dimension follows the logic of the infrathin:
"smells more infrathin/ than colors" (Notes, 37). Duchamp invokes the olfactory sense
in discussing modern art's loss of its "original perfume," its vulgarization when taught
according to a "chemical formula": "I believe in the original perfume, but, as all
perfume, it evaporates very quickly (after a couple of weeks, or a couple of years
maximum); what is left is the dried kernel (noix seche ) classified by the art historians
in the chapter 'history of art.'"[23] Playing on painting as a medium that involves both
color and smell (which adds an invisible dimension to painting, like traces of
turpentine), Duchamp uses this analogy to comment on the fate of art that has lost its
originality. Originality is described as evanescent, precariously inscribed in the work
and fleeting like the smell of perfume. The work itself is only the "dry" imprint of a
"wet" medium, and thus, ironically, classifiable as art only once it has ceased to exist as
a process. This is why smells are more "infrathin" than colors, since the former invoke
different sensations at the same time; even as it has ceased to be a liquid through
evaporation, perfume lingers as a gas. This may also explain why Duchamp chose the
urinal, that is, a mass-manufactured object which, like painting, bears the invisible
traces of smell.
Had the viewer missed the olfactory dimension of Fountain as an instance of "dry" art,
this allusion is spelled out explicitly in a later work, Beautiful Breath, Veil Water (fig.
49). This empty perfume bottle in a box

Fig. 49.
Marcel Duchamp, Beautiful Breath, Veil Water
(Belle Haleine, Eau DE Voilette), 1921. Assisted
ready-made: perfume bottle bearing label with
photograph of Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Slavy,
height 6 in. Galleria Schwarz, Milan.
Courtesy of Arturo Schwarz.
132

Fig. 50.
Book cover designed by Duchamp. Walter Hopps,
lf Linde, Arturo Schwarz, Marcel Duchamp:
Readymades, etc., 19131964. Paris: Le Terrain
Vague, 1964.
Courtesy of The Menil Collection, Houston.

Fig. 51
.Marcel Duchamp, Mirrorical Return (Renvoi Miroirique),
1964. Copperplate engraving, 7 1/16 x 5 1/2 in.
Courtesy of The Menil Collection, Houston.
is relabeled with a picture of Duchamp's alias and signature Rrose Slavy. The work
wittily refers back to Fountain literally in disguise, as veiled toilet water (eau de
toilette ). Thus the potential inscription of liquid built reversibly in the urinal/fountain is
repeated here by the empty perfume bottle, which invokes the absence of liquid by
alluding to the perfume (as gas). The toilet water whose female associations are those of
veiling or masking bodily odors becomes veiled water (eau de voilette ), a pun on
Duchamp's abandonment of painting (as a "wet" medium). This empty bottle, bearing
Duchamp's picture travestied as Rrose Slavy, captures the fragrance of the artist as a
seductive woman. Authorship is deessentialized, or rather, reengendered through
reproduction. A "female" analogue of the "male" fountain, this work locates artistic
originality within the ephemeral scent, the immanence of the "arrhe of painting is
feminine in gender"(WMD, 24).
In order to further elucidate the nature of the artistic and gender inversions engendered
by Fountain , it is important to consider the mechanism
133
of verbal and visual puns staged by this work. In 1964 Duchamp produces an ink copy
of Stieglitz's photograph of Fountain, on the basis of which he designs a cover for an
exhibition catalog, Marcel Duchamp: Ready-mades, etc., 19131964 (fig. 50). This
cover, which looks like a photographic negative, is later reproduced in an etching that is
its positive image, entitled Mirrorical Return (Renvoi miroirique; 1964) (fig. 51). The
etching contains three inscriptions: the title "An original revolutionary faucet" (Un

robinet original rvolutionnaire ); the subtitle "Mirrorical return?" (Renvoi

miroirique? ); and a motto, "A faucet which stops running when no one listens to it"
(Un robinet qui s'arrte de couler quand on ne l'coute pas ). Structured as an emblem,
the visual and linguistic elements set up a punning interplay that helps us to explore
further the mechanisms that Fountain actively stages. On the one hand, there is the
mirror-effect of the drawing and the etching, which, although they are almost identical
visually, involve an active switch from one artistic medium to the other. On the other
hand, there is the internal mirrorical return of the image itself, since this urinal, like the
one in 1917, has been rotated ninety degrees. This internal rotation disqualifies the
object from its common use as a receptacle, and reactivates its poetic potential as a
fountain; that is, as a machine for waterworks. The "splash" generated by Fountain is
thus tied to its "mirrorical return," like the faucet in the title.
The predominance of the r 's in the text accompanying the image insinuate the implicit
significance of the word art (arh) to the decoding of this image. In other words, the
legibility of the image is activated by the pun on "r," [arrhe or art, in French), which, if
not articulated, stops working, like the "faucet which stops running when no one listens
to it." In other words, Fountain can only make artistic sense when the linguistic faucet is
switched on. The word faucet (robinet ) means cock, valve, or tap, and turning the
faucet means turning on the waterworks.[24] The punning associations of the faucet bring
together all the elements that define Fountain as a Mirrorical Return. These include the
"mirrorical return" of art and nonart; the "mirrorical" reproduction and switch from one
artistic medium into another; and the notion of gender inscribed as a hinge, a pun that
switches back and forth between the male and the female positions. It is not surprising
that Duchamp's signature on Fountain, "R. Mutt," which translates literally as "Mongrel
Art," is re-signed later (in a
134
1950 facsimile) by "Rrose Slavy" (a pun on Eros c'est la vie or arroser la vie), his
female alias. Rrose, an anagram of eros, is also a pun on arroser (to water, wet, or
sprinkle), a play on the so-called "male" connotations of Fountain.
What initially appears as an instance of Duchamp's conception of "dry" art now emerges
as a convincing example of "wet" art. The status of art in this work emerges according
to the logic of the "mirrorical return," that is, as a potential mode rather than as an
inherent quality.[25] In his notes on the "Infrathin," Duchamp explores the notion of
modality:
mode: the active state and not the/ resultthe active state giving/ no interest to the
resultthe result/ being different if the same/ active/ state is repeated. / mode:
experiments.the result not/ to be keptnot presenting any/ interest(Notes, 26)
Considered as a faucet, the significance of Fountain may be found in its active state as
an artistic, erotic, and punning machine. As suggested earlier, the interest of this work is
not manifest in its resultits objective characterbut rather in the differences
produced through the impressions or imprints of the object's reproduction. Fountain is,
therefore, an experiment rather than a product, whose interest is purely speculative,
insofar as it explores and transforms the boundaries defining a work of art. As an art

object, Fountain provisionally hovers at the limits of art and nonart; its existence is
purely conditional. The referential meaning of art, as a copy of nature according to good
taste, is here eroded through reproduction; a new concept of value emerges through
circulation and consumption. The artistic value of Fountain in the age of mechanical
reproduction is inseparable from this effort to conceive value in a dynamic, rather than
static sense. The erosion of the concept of value as an inherent property of a work of art
is transformed by examining the expenditure of value through its circulation and
reproduction. The value of Fountain no longer refers to a traditional concept of art but
instead to the conditions rendering inseparable the distinction between art and nonart.
The "splash" of the Fountain/ urinal creates an active interval, making it impossible to
affirm the uniqueness of art without considering the possibility that at any moment it
might revert into nonart, like the faucet that
135
stops running when no one listens to it. As Duchamp explains to Schwarz: "What art is
in reality is this missing link, not the links which exist. It's not what you see that is art,
art is the gap."[26]

Reproduction 2: The Work of Art as Limited Edition

My landscapes begin where da Vinci's end.
Marcel Duchamp

The artistic questions raised by Fountain, as an object of mass production, are

compounded by Duchamp's explicit use of art prints, reproductions that he "rectifies"
with small alterations and signs as works of art. Starting with Pharmacy (Pharmacie;
1914), a commercial print of a winter landscape to which Duchamp adds "two little [red
and green] lights in the background" (DMD , 47); followed by Nude Descending a
Staircase, No. 3 , a photograph of his painting that is hand colored; culminating with
L.H.O.O.Q., a reproduction of Leonardo's Mona Lisa to which Duchamp added a
mustache and a goatee; and L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved (L.H.O.O.Q. rase; 1965), a
reproduction of the Mona Lisa pasted on an invitation card, there is a succession of
reproductionsprinted or photographicthat are re-presented as original works of art.
Moreover, beginning with the color plate reproduction of The Bride Stripped Bare by
Her Bachelors, Even (The Green Box; 1934), followed by miniature facsimiles of the
urinal (193858) and the full-scale versions (195064), one can sense Duchamp's
deliberate effort to reproduce not only specific works but a sample of his entire artistic
corpus, as in the case of The Box in a Valise (194168). Pierre Cabanne interprets
Duchamp's reproduction of his own works as a sign of his desire to assemble and
preserve them as a miniaturized and transportable corpus[27] This hypothesis, however,
in no way accounts for Duchamp's systematic experimentation with the concept of
artistic reproduction and the questions it poses regarding the "originality" of works of
art. Unlike Walter Benjamin, who, in his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction" (1936), questions the impact of mechanical reproduction on
the loss of "aura" of the work of art, Duchamp assumes mass reproduction as a given, as

the most salient and pervasive manifestation of modernity.[28] The concept of mechanical
reproduction becomes for Duchamp a new way of thinking about art, one that treats the
"object" as
136
a series of "impressions," or multiples, in order to redefine the conceptual relation
between art and nonart.
Pharmacy (fig. 52) is a commercial color print that Duchamp bought in an art supply
store. The only appropriation (or, rather, rectification) that he carries out on this
commercially reproduced image is the addition of two identically painted touches of
color, red and yellow-green, in the form of three superimposed circles. Duchamp
explains that the addition of these two colored lights "resembled a pharmacy" (DMD ,
47).[29] Before examining this work in further detail, one must note the impact of
Duchamp's recuperation of a commercially available color print, which is available
alongside painting supplies in an art store. Is this work the equivalent of painting
supplies? In other words, is there a relation between the mass fabricated tubes of paint
and this commercial color print? In a talk "Apropos of 'Readymades'" (1961), Duchamp
concludes: "Since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured and readymade
products, we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are 'ready-mades aided'
and also works of assemblage" (WMD, 142). This comment sheds an indirect light on
Pharmacy insofar as Duchamp establishes an equivalence between the materials of
painting and prints as painterly materials. The fact that they are both mass-produced
serves to redefine the nature of the art of painting into works that can be considered as
either assisted or reassembled ready-mades.
The title Pharmacy further verifies the hypothesis that this work marks Duchamp's
inquiry into the relation between the materials and the art of painting. In Leonardo's
time the pigments and the media of painting could be sold only by the Guild of Doctors
and Apothecaries.[30] This implicit allusion to Leonardo is not accidental, considering his
use of the reproduction of Mona Lisa in L.H.O.O.Q. .[31] Thus, it seems that certain
pigments were already made, even during the Renaissance when the artistic and
artisanal aspects of painting were considered to be at their height. Duchamp's refusal of
color and ultimate abandonment of painting was expressed in terms of his rejection of
the visual seduction of painting, as "retinal euphoria" and the "easy splashing way,"
which entails an aversion to "the cult of the paint itself" and the "intoxication of
turpentine." While deploying touches of color, Pharmacy represents an effort to
problematize the fetishization with the materials of painting and thus alter the very
medium
137

Fig. 52
Marcel Duchamp, Pharmacy (Pharmacie), 1914. Rectified
ready-made: commercial print of a winter landscape with
two sets of three vertical dots added in gouache, red
and green, alluding to the bottles in a pharmacy window,
10 1/4 x 7 5/8 in. Galleria Schwarz, Milan.
Courtesy of Arturo Schwarz.
of painting. It is perhaps not by accident that the conditions of production of Pharmacy
on a train, in the half-darkness of dusk, recall Duchamp's earlier experiment in Portrait
of Chess Players with painting by a green gaslight. This rejection of daylight is tied to
his efforts to discover new tones in painting. "I wanted to see what the changing of
colors would do. . . . It was an easy way of getting a lowering of tones, a grisaille"
(DMD , 27). In the case of Pharmacy, however, the lowering or graying of tones
(grisaille) is already part of the work, since this commercial color print reproduced by
printed dots cannot have the brilliance of paint.
Why then does Duchamp add those two touches of red and green, which are, in fact, the
only marks of "rectification" of this otherwise banal commercial print? Duchamp's
designation of this work as a "Rectified Ready-Made" becomes clearer once we
consider its meanings. The word "rectify" comes from the Latin (rectus, right and
facere, to make). Its other meanings provide some interesting clues: 1) to correct the
138
faults in; remove mistakes from; set right; 2) to refine or purify, as liquids, by
distillation; 3) to adjust correctly: in electricity, to change from alternating to direct, as
an electric current; in mathematics, to find the length of (a curved line).[32] That these

various meanings might inflect Pharmacy seems at first remote, if not downright
farfetched. As a ready-made, however, Pharmacy seems to be an effort to rehabilitate
painting from one of its fundamental conditions: the artisanal intervention of the artist.
By analogy to an apothecary, Pharmacy emerges as that original site where the
production of pigment, through grinding and distillation, becomes displaced through
mass production. This image is rectified at dusk, in the absence of light, while two
lights, red and green, are added to the image. The presence of these two lights playfully
alludes to color blindness and/or the alternating colors of a semaphore (appropriate to a
train or to headlights; a pun on the phares of Pharmacy ).[33] Through this pun,
electricity becomes inscribed in the image in an inverted form, as alternating current,
rather than direct current.
When asked by Cabanne if this work was an instance of "canned chance," Duchamp
agreed, signaling an affiliation between Pharmacy and Three Standard Stoppages. In the
latter, three threads one meter in length are dropped. Their curved outline is reproduced
by being glued first to canvas, then to glass, and finally, by being reproduced as a wood
template. This work thus "cans chance" by destroying the notion of a metric standard
and by addressing the mathematical problem of finding the length of a curved line.
Analogously, Pharmacy destroys the notion of an aesthetic standard by deploying points
of color on a print. The mathematical intervention in this case remains invisible, as long
as one does not consider the optical properties of this piece. In fact, as lf Linde and
Jean Clair suggest, Pharmacy might be Duchamp's earliest experiment with anaglyphic
vision, for if the spectator dons red and green glasses, these points coalesce, generating
a figure in relief against the blurred background.[34] This stereoscopic effect is explored
explicitly in another work, Hand Stereoscopy (191819), where two visual pyramids
(such as we find in treatises on perspective) come to the foreground when viewed
through these special glasses. A third dimension comes into view by its optical
projection through color, thereby suggesting that these dots of pigment are the
projection of the perspectival (mathematical) principles
139
underlying optics. This is why, according to Duchamp, "perspective resembles color"
(WMD , 87).
This inscription of a potential figurative dimension into a set of colored dots captures
the dilemma that confronted Georges Seurat when he did away with the brush in order
to construct images from fields of colored dots. The act of viewing a Seurat painting
involves a projection of the points of paint into actual figures. This dilemma is alluded
to by Duchamp in an early note: "the possible is/ an infra-thin/ The possibility of
several/ tubes of color/ becoming a Seurat is/ the concrete 'explanation'/ of the possible
as infra/ thin The possible implying/ the becomingthe passage from/ one to other
takes place/ in the infra thin" (Notes, 1). In his interviews Duchamp describes Seurat as
the "greatest scientific spirit of the nineteenth century" and as an "artisan" who
nevertheless "did not let his hand bother his spirit."[35] As the embodiment of two
divergent tendenciesart as a conceptual intervention (matire grise ) and art as an
artisanal skill that relies on the hand (patte )Seurat's work exemplifies the dilemma
that painting poses for Duchamp.[36] This dilemma is reenacted in Pharmacy, to the
extent that the presence of red and green dots inscribes an allusion to Seurat's pointillist

technique, suggesting the possibility of the tubes of color "becoming a Seurat." At the
same time, this implied passage (ready-made, in a sense) from paint to painting also
introduces the possibility of conceptualizing this relation. The effort to tone down color
(grisaille) diminishes color's material centrality to the art of painting by privileging the
matire grise, in this context, literally the "gray matter," and the grayness of the
commercial print. As a transitional object between paint and painting, Pharmacy
rectifies the dominance of art through the repetitious logic of the ready-made. What
appears initially as an act of reproduction now emerges in a new sense, as an act of
production based on a new concept of materiality that combines the materials of
painting with painting understood as conceptual material.
This gesture is repeated in a new way in L.H.O.O.Q. (fig. 53), Duchamp's infamous
appropriation of Leonardo's Mona Lisa (which is also known as La Gioconda ). Instead
of choosing an ordinary reproduction, Duchamp selected a work that is identified with
all that is sacred and beautiful in art. By disfiguring this idealized image through the
graffitilike addition of a mustache and a goatee, Duchamp attacks both the
140

Fig. 53
.Marcel Duchamp, replica of L.H.O.O.Q., 1919, from Box in a Valise (Bote En Valise),
194142.
Rectified ready-made: reproduction of the Mona Lisa to which Duchamp has added a m
oustache

and beard in pencil, 7 3/4 x 4 7/8 in.

Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection.
141
painting's "aura" and its cult value in the history of art.[37] Walter Benjamin observes the
danger that the work of art incurs in the age of mechanical reproduction:
That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of a work of art . . .
the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of the
tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique
existence.[38]
For Benjamin, the "uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from being embedded in
the fabric of tradition." His statement affirms the cult value of art as defined by the
"contextual integration of art in tradition."[39] By using a commercial print of a
masterpiece, Duchamp does in fact remove it from the painterly tradition, since the
plurality of the reproduction challenges the uniqueness and originality of the work. This
gesture, however, merely reiterates the manner in which works of art are removed from
their original location in order to be amassed under the institutional authority of the
museum. The decontextualization that takes place through the reproduction of a work of
art is but the extension of the decontextualization that the museum performs on works
of art as it makes them readily accessible for viewing by a mass public.
As Benjamin points out, in the modern age the "exhibition value" of the work
supersedes the "cult value" of art. Insofar as artistic production begins with ceremonial
objects, the value of these objects is defined by their "existence, not their being on
view."[40] The fact, however, that in a museum all objects are displayed equally tends
already to destroy the specificity of particular works of art. As Duchamp observes, the
act of viewing involves an interchange between the spectator and the work that is
minimized by the conditions of display of the object:
The exchange between what one/ puts on view [the whole/setting up to put on view (all
areas)]/ and the glacial regard of the public (which sees and/forgets immediately)/ Very
often/ this exchange has the value/ of an infra thin separation/ (meaning that the more/ a
thing is admired/ and looked at the less there is an inf. t./ sep). (Notes, 10)
142
In the context of the museum where everything is on display, the display determines the
act of seeing. The regard of the public becomes "glacial," to the extent that admiration
of a work of art supplants its visibility, obviating the conventions and criteria that define
it.[41] The eyes of the spectator become "glazed," as "seeing" in this context means
"forgetting." Public regard is conceived of in terms of an exchange whose value is
described by Duchamp through the notion of the "infrathin," which he compares to an
"allegory of forgetting" (Notes, 1). What is being forgotten in the popularization of art is
the fact that value is neither acquired nor inherited; rather, value belongs to the
possibility of an exchange between the spectator and the work.

By actively posing the question of popularization through the notion of reproduction,

L.H.O.O.Q. reactivates the question of value and its relation to a work of art. This joke
on the Gioconda emerges as a commentary on a punning reading of L.H.O.O.Q. as
"LOOK," that is, the "infrathin" separation or interval inscribed into the gaze that
constitutes the work.[42] The addition of the mustache and the goatee to this smiling and
impassive image of the Mona Lisa exposes the fragility of the viewer's gaze, the ease
with which this embodiment of feminine ideals can switch gender and thus inscribe a
masculine dimension into the image. Although the title L.H.O.O.Q. can be read as the
French slur, "she has a hot ass" (elle a chaud au cul ), this vulgar reference to feminine
desire is undermined by the masculine "hair," or rather "air," of the image. This
vulgarization of an image, whose impact relies on the lack of expression and an
ambiguous smile, is due to a con joke on Gioconda, the falsification of its pictorial
intent. Not only is the spectator conned by a reproduction but the potential androgyny of
this figure suggests that the original itself may be a con job.
Leonardo's Mona Lisa is a portrait with no referent, because this image has never been
definitively identified with a particular historical persona. Possible identifications vary,
including people such as Isabella d'Este and the wife of a merchant named Giocondo,
whose portrait was painted by Leonardo and whose name can be construed as a pun on
playfulness (gioco, in Italian).[43] Although Isabella d'Este was known as a practical
joker, a detail that might explain the peculiar turn of her smile, in the end there is no
evidence clearly indicating the identity of the model of this enigmatic portrait.[44] In
addition to the inconclusive nature of the paint 143
ing's double title, recent computer studies suggest that this portrait might in fact be a
self-portrait, inverted as if in a mirror.[45] Given Leonardo's penchant for inverting his
handwriting by writing from right to left, a "mirrorical turn," it would not be surprising
that this visual representation of himself might take such a turn. This act of optical
transvestism inscribes a fundamental ambiguity into the image, an ambiguity that,
ironically, has traditionally been interpreted as the ultimate sign of femininity: Mona
Lisa (La Gioconda ) as la prima donna del mondo.
Duchamp's own playful joke on this portrait appears less as a gesture of desecration and
violation than as the perpetuation of a long-standing artistic joke.[46] The discrete,
delicately penciled-in mustache and goatee inscribe into the image the masculine
referent that heretofore had disguised itself in the ambiguity of an optical illusion. The
mustache and the goatee return this missing dimension to the image. As Duchamp
observes: "The curious thing about that mustache and goatee is that when you look at it
the Mona Lisa becomes a man. It is not a woman disguised as a man; it is a real man,
and that was my discovery without realizing it at the time" (emphasis added).[47] The
mustache and goatee function as a playful index both of Leonardo's "mirrorical turn"
and of Duchamp's repetition and rectification of this gesture as a "mirrorical return."
In a work entitled Moustache and Beard of L.H.O.O.Q. (1941), which is a drawing
made as a frontispiece for a poem by George Hugnet (19061974), entitled Marcel
Duchamp (8 November 1939), the mustache and beard are presented by themselves,
accompanied by Duchamp's signature. These two elements marking Duchamp's

appropriation of Leonardo's Mona Lisa and functioning as his visual signature become
decontextualized and reassembled, as it were, under Duchamp's own signature, but as an
illustration for a volume whose author is Hugnet and whose subject matter is Duchamp.
Thus, the effort to equate Duchamp's visual and written signature is undermined by a
relay of signification, making it impossible to locate the precise author. As insignias of
Duchamp's appropriation, the mustache and goatee emerge as false indexes of the
author. Like theatrical props, they appear as objects for disguise or travesty, rather than
as means for designating and legitimizing the authorial gesture. Moustache and Beard
of L.H.O.O.Q. problematizes the gesture of artistic appropriation, insofar as it
transitively designates the artist, en passant.
144
Thus neither L.H.O.O.Q. nor Moustache and Beard of L.H.O.O.Q. amount to a portrait,
that is, the original act of creating a likeness, of a person either in pictures or in words.
Instead, the portrait functions here in the literal sense of pour and traire (forth and
draw); that is, as a drawing forth of several images (imprints) from what appears to be a
single image. While trait may be interpreted to mean characteristic touch (as in trait of
character), it can also mean stroke of genius or of witticism, as well as currency, a bank
bill, or draft. Just as the word trait can acquire very different meanings depending on
context, so the Mona Lisa, as an image, reveals itself as a repository not only of
different but even of mutually exclusive images. The effort to appropriate Leonardo's
portrait Mona Lisa, literally results in milking (traire ) this masterpiece. By using a
reproduction of Mona Lisa, Duchamp draws forth other likenesses (appearances) that
only jokingly recapture its features. The gesture of portraying is translated, therefore,
into a drawing forth of other likenesses that differentially inhabit the same image. This
is why the addition of the mustache and beard is not a transgressive gesture of violation
or desecration. Duchamp is not negating Leonardo's work; rather, he rediscovers within
Leonardo's work a set of gestures that make possible his own appropriation and
reinscription of the image.
It should come as no surprise that following L.H.O.O.Q. in 1919, Duchamp inaugurates
the birth of his female artistic alter ego in Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Slavy (192021)
(fig. 54). The portrait of the artist as female counterpart is captured by Man Ray's softfocus picture of Duchamp masquerading as a woman (circa 19201921). Signed
lovingly by Rrose Slavy alias Marcel Duchamp, this photograph coyly captures
Duchamp's play with the signs defining sexual identity, and by extension, identity in
general. As he explains to Cabanne: "In effect I wanted to change my identity, and the
first idea that came to me was to take a Jewish name. I was a Catholic, and it was a
change to go from one religion to the other . . . suddenly, I had an idea: why not change
sex? It was much simpler" (DMD , 64). The artistic pseudonym becomes an elaborate
con joke. Rather than dissimulating identity, Duchamp's alias Rrose Slavy disrupts the
notion of artistic identity by reducing it to an arbitrary convention. Identity is reduced to
a set of signs and conventions that can be manipulated, so that changing names becomes
no more difficult than
145

Fig. 54.
Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Slavy, 192021.
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Samuel S. White and Vera White Collecti
on.
146

Fig. 55.
Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved (L.H.O.O.Q.,
Rase), 1965. Ready-made: reproduction of the
Mona Lisa, 3 1/2 x 2 7/16 in., pasted on the invitation
card given on 13 January 1965 on the occasion of the
preview of the Mary Sisler Collection at the Cordier
and Ekstrom Gallery, New York.
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Louise
and Walter Arensberg Collection.
changing religion or sex. In L.H.O.O.Q. the addition of the mustache and beard
uncovered the sexual ambiguity of the Mona Lisa, while in the portrait of Rrose Slavy
it is the lack of facial hair that engenders sexual ambiguity. Duchamp's shaved face and
discreet smile, generously framed by a fur collar (a punning displacement of facial hair),
invokes the illusion of a feminine presence. Like the Mona Lisa, it is precisely the lack
of certain signs and the indexical ambiguity of other signs that constructs gender as a
riddle. But this riddle functions as a pun or a switch equally designating femininity and
masculinity, rather than being construed uniquely as the trademark of the feminine.
Thus, it is neither the presence nor the absence of signs that generates gender, but rather
their active interplay. In the same way, the question of artistic identity emerges as a
game between various personas or positions without a firm referent, but constructed
provisionally through their circulation. If Rrose Slavy is Duchamp's alias (from the
Latin meaning at another time), this temporal dimension, or delay, permits us to
understand how s/he comes to be Marcel Duchamp at the same time s/he becomes
herself.
147
The relation of portraiture to the artistic persona and the question of the reproducibility
of a work of art come to a head in L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved (fig. 55), This work is yet another
reproduction of the Mona Lisa, with an added twist: the image has not been altered in

any way, other than the title. As Timothy Binkley points out, although this work is
restored to its original appearance, it is not restored to its original state. He summarizes
Duchamp's intervention as follows:
The first piece makes fun of the Gioconda, the second destroys it in the process of
"restoring" it. L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved re-indexes Leonardo's artwork as a derivative of
L.H.O.O.Q. , reversing the temporal sequence while literalizing the image, i.e.,
discharging its aesthetic delights. Seen as "L.H.O.O.Q. shaved," the image is sapped of
its artistic/ aesthetic strengthit seems almost vulgar as it tours the world defiled.[48]
The process of "restoring" the Mona Lisa by shaving her does not, as Binkley contends,
"destroy" the artistic value of this portrait by merely defiling and vulgarizing this image.
Instead, by returning this reproduction to its original statusthat of a mere reproduction
Duchamp reveals how the process of reproduction itself fundamentally alters the
concept of artistic value. Binkley correctly notes that L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved suggests a
reversal of the temporal sequence, making it seem that Leonardo's Mona Lisa would be
derivative of L.H.O.O.Q.[49] This apparent dependence of the original on the copy is not
entirely fictitious, however, insofar as the spectator's experience of Mona Lisa is, in
fact, invariably mediated through its reproduction. The look of the spectator has already
been "glazed" over by the reproduction, so that the act of seeing the Mona Lisa is
merely an act of conformity, that of verifying the adequacy of the original to its copy.
Rather than being a destructive or negative gesture, Duchamp's intervention clarifies the
tenuous relation between works of art and their copies. Consequently, L.H.O.O.Q.
Shaved does not "sap" this image of its artistic/aesthetic strength, since the artistic value
of Mona Lisa hinges on its explicitly ambiguous character. With L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved, we
come back full circle to a Mona Lisa that is and is not entirely herself. Duchamp's
perpetuation of Leonardo's joke, that is his "mirrorical
148
return" on Leonardo's "mirrorical turn," restores to the viewer an image that has been
reactivated through its interpretations. Rather than "restoring" a painting to his
audience, Duchamp restores the concept of painting as a conceptual exercise. By
delaying the sensorial impact of paint, L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved as a reproduction inscribes
into the perception of the original work an interval reactivating the exchange between
the spectator and the work. By seeing the image both as the original and as the
reproduction, the spectator discovers the fragile interval separating art from nonart. By
switching back and forth between them, the question of value emerges as the correlative
of an engagement with the work: an interpretation of art as "making" that demands
activity on the part of the artist as well as the spectator. Thus, the notion of artistic value
emerges as an index not of the work but instead of the exchanges that it can generate
between work and spectator.
Now we can begin to understand what Duchamp meant when he

Fig. 56.
Marcel Duchamp, Still-Torture (Torture-Morte),
1959. Sculpture of painted plaster and flies
with paper background on wood, 11 5/8 x 5 1/4 x
2 1/4 in. Centre national d'art et culture Georges
Pompidou, Paris.
Courtesy of Arturo Schwarz.
149
claimed that "The onlookers make the picture," or as he explained in his talk "The
Creative Act" (1957): "All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the
spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and
interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act"
(WMD, 140). By ascribing to the spectator the creative role of bringing the work into
contact with the external world through a process of interpretation, Duchamp
contextualizes the authority of the creative act. This process of contextualization is
made explicit in The Box in a Valise, which replaces the museum's authority as an
institution mediating our perception of art, with a valise, a portable "museum" in
miniature. The spectator unpacks this valise on a table and unloads its contents
manually, thereby not merely bringing these miniature reproductions into contact with
the world but making these works part and parcel of the world.

Reproduction 3: A Critique of Mimesis

The Possible without the/ slightest grain of ethics of aesthetics / and of metaphysics
Marcel Duchamp

In a letter to Alfred Stieglitz (22 May 1922) Duchamp, having noted photography's
displacement of painting, suggests that photography itself may one day be replaced:
"You know exactly how I feel about photography. I would like to see it make people
despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable" (WMD , 165).
By 1922, the success of photography as a medium of mechanical reproduction was
already challenged by the emergence of other media, such as cinema. Photography's
"fidelity" and "originality" as artistic reproduction, however, will eventually face the
greater challenge of its mass reproduction and circulation in print.[50] Thus, while
photography calls into question the autonomy of painting as a medium for artistic
reproduction, it may fall victim to the reproductive technology that first made it
possible.
It is this particular "fatality" of an artistic medium, its vulnerability to technical
conditions, that fascinates Duchamp, particularly with regard to painting and sculpture.
The viability and legitimacy of these media, identified with classical conceptions of art,
are at stake in Duchamp's exploration of their putative "end," or rather, "death." In a set
of related works, TORTURE-MORTE (fig. 56) and sculpture-morte (fig. 57), Duchamp
150

Fig. 57
Marcel Duchamp, Sculpture-Morte, 1959. Marzipan Sculpture and Insects, 13 1/4 x 8-/8
x 3 1/4 in.
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection
151
proceeds to explore the concept of artistic reproduction, no longer literally, as in the
case of the ready-mades, but as a figurative strategy. These works are handmade
originals reproducing traditional pictorial or sculptural subjects with a twist. The plaster

cast imprint of the foot and the marzipan sculpture of vegetables capture more than the
mere likeness of objects. They mimic the material properties of the sculptural medium,
either by erasing the distinction between the model and the rendering (the plaster cast),
or by using materials such as marzipan, whose edible character reveals its material
affinity to its subject mattervegetables. If these works haunt the spectator, they do so
by breaking down, through reproduction, the formal and material distinctions defining
art as a mimetic medium. Rather than marking Duchamp's return to figurative art, these
"excessively" realistic works emerge as parodies of the conventions that define it as
such.
The titles of these two works suggest a series of puns based on the still life (nature
morte, ) one of the major traditions in the history of painting. In both works, however,
the word nature has been replaced by either torture or sculpture, indicating that the
mimetic representation of nature, which constitutes the genre of still-life painting
(nature morte, ) is here elided and taken literally to mean dead (morte. ) In other words,
these works stage the death of painting and sculpture both literally and figuratively.
These works are particularly troubling because they use mimetic genres destined to
portray the illusion of nature as "alive" by depicting a double death: that of the subject
of art and its modes of representation. While TORTURE-MORTE depicts the plaster
instep of a foot in relief with flies on it, sculpture-morte presents an equally disturbing
portrait, a vegetable still life made from marzipan with insects on it. In these works the
presence of insects as emblems of decomposition inscribes a disturbing allusion to death
into the already "stilled life" or "death" of the image.
George Bauer interprets TORTURE-MORTE as a footnote to the writing of art history,
since it embodies Duchamp's literal step enacting the slippery passage from painting to
sculpture: "The slip from painting to sculpture relies on the absent pidestal, now
replaced by letters that support the work of pun, pain and paint in the essential lay-over
of different media and difference in language, art, and letters."[51] The image of the
instep of the foot (pas, ) becomes for him an index of Duchamp's antiaesthetic position,
152
a faux-pas. This faux-pas, however, embodies Duchamp's stumble or misstep over
traditional art, since it acts as a metonymic relay that transitively connects seemingly
disparate artistic domains. While we may see TORTURE-MORTE and sculpture-morte
as "Ironic concessions to/ still lives" (Notes, 107), the irony in question turns out to be a
very profound reflection on the limits of sculpture and painting as forms of visual
representation. What makes these works particularly difficult to interpret is their
deadpan realism and dead-end illusionism. If the ready-made disenfranchised the object
by being the object itself, here, the plaster cast of the foot and the legumes represent yet
another step forward. Whereas the ready-made was an ordinary mass-produced object
that had been nominated as an art object because of its lack of aesthetic value, in this
case, we have seemingly legitimate art subjects or objectspictorial still lifeswhich
are derealized through their punning relation to both sculpture and language. These
works represent yet another interpretation of the ready-made, insofar as they play with
the concept of art as a medium for mimetic reproduction.

The insects, which are the incestuous element in these two works, do not make them
any easier to swallow, for their presence functions as the exclamation mark of all artistic
reproduction: they are the touch of the real, glued or tacked on as a false index.[52] In
other words, the flies on both TORTURE-MORTE and sculpture-morte become
derealized, since paradoxically their being "real" or the "thing-itself" undermines their
aesthetic referential function as mimetic allusions to reality. Hence, these works stage
the death of painting and sculpture by renouncing the mimetic function of art only to
literalize its conventions. Here, mimesis, as a set of conventions governing the
modalities of artistic production, comes to an untimely, almost tragicomic end. For these
works mimic the notion of mimesis by reproducing this process literally, thus reducing
it to a set of nonsensical puns, TORTURE-MORTE and sculpture-morte. Death (morte )
in this context becomes a reflection on traditional art, its "still" or "dead" character,
through which it attempts to create the illusion of "life" in art. The illusion of life
sustained by mimetic traditions is expended here, in order to question the fictitious
immortality and durability of artistic artifacts. In both of these cases the concept of art
as that which exceeds the confines of history is radically redefined through an inquiry
into the historicity of all artistic production.
153
Duchamp's assessment, his pronouncement that pictures, as well as men, are mortal,
captures most vividly the shared destiny of humanity and its artifacts:
I think painting dies, you understand. After forty or fifty years a picture dies because its
freshness disappears. Sculpture also dies. . . . I think a picture dies after a few years like
the man who painted it. Afterward it's called the history of art. . . . Men are mortal,
pictures too. The history of art is something very different from aesthetics. (DMD , 67)
The "mortality" of painting and sculpture in this context does not simply imply the
historical end of these artistic domains. Rather, as in TORTURE-MORTE and sculpturemorte, it refers to the fact that conventions of artistic production may change or become
outmodeda "death" of sorts. If it is true, as Duchamp contends, that paintings can lose
their freshness and visual impact, such a loss would merely be symptomatic of a larger
problem. As he further explains, this tendency is merely one aspect of a larger problem
involving the historical preservation of artworks within the institution of the museum.
The works of art that "survive" are often not necessarily the best works of a particular
epoch. Instead, they reflect the conventions of taste of that particular period, which may
be quite different from our own. Thus, a work of art may "die" simply because it has
failed to be recognized. This is why Duchamp makes the philosophical distinction
between aesthetics and art history. The fact that both painting and sculpture have begun
to decompose and thus to smell, as testified by the flies on TORTURE-MORTE and
sculpture-morte, signifies the incapacity of the visual to sustain itself without a
conceptual context. Thus, for Duchamp, the gesture of continuing to paint or to sculpt
becomes obscene and obsolete, like torturing the dead.
Given this artistic dilemma, Duchamp's solution in sculpture-morte is particularly
ingenious. In his interview with Cabanne he explains that his mother was a painter of
still lifes and that she "wanted to cook them too, but in all her seventy years she never
got around to it" (DMD , 20). Sculpture-morte thus represents the legacy of an artistic

heritage, starting with Arcimboldo's renowned "vegetable portraits," until Duchamp

final 154
ly gets around to "cooking" his mother's still lifes, that is, turning the raw materials of
painting (crudits ) into a baked marzipan sculpture. The shapes of these vegetables,
however, are sufficiently ambiguous to also punningly allude to brain outcroppings or
cold cuts (cervellits, in French). This wordplay is made possible in sculpture-morte by
the outline of a head in the creased paper, where the vegetables (crudits, in French)
resemble cooked, "debrained" (cervellits ) outcroppings of the imagination: food for
thought, one might say.[53] Thus, Duchamp's representation of the crisis of art for
modernity becomes a footnote or foodnote: a lame joke running through a plaster cast
foot or a half-baked marzipan sculpture.
Despite their cryptic and cryptlike character, both TORTURE-MORTE and sculpturemorte inscribe, through their visual and linguistic puns, the evanescent perfume of the
living artist, who likes "living, breathing, better than working" (DMD , 72,). In
sculpture-morte the inscription of Duchamp's signature is present as an unexpected
visual pun. The unreal rosy tint that is painted on the work, illuminating it as a gaze or
as a gas (an exhalation), marks the presence of Duchamp's artistic alter egos: Rrose
Slavy, alias Marcel Duchamp, alias Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette all con artists of
the art of breathing, heavy and otherwise. In this image aspiration and inspiration come
together in the pun of respiration marking, through this fragile hinge, the lingering
breath of the artist, the odor of the man whose epitaph appropriately reads:"And
Besides/It's Always The Others That Die."
Built on the strategic manipulation of linguistic and visual puns, Duchamp's artistic
project emerges as an ephemeral pun on whose nonsensical appearance hinges the
facticity of life: "Therefore, if you wish, my art would be that of the living: each second,
each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral.
It's a sort of constant euphoria" (DMD , 72). Duchamp's self-definition as an artist, "I
am a breather" (je suis un respirateur ), summarizes the peculiar coincidence of art,
chance, and life in his work. His description of his artistic identity as a "breather"
captures the "mechanical" character of this gesture, as well as its "creative" function,
since it animates and sustains life. Duchamp's "art of the living" is at the same time a
"breath" and a "work," whose meaning is derived from its lack of inscription in a
specific domain, be it visual
155
or cerebral. As an evanescent index of Duchamp's art, it explains how his works hover
between the visual, linguistic, and conceptual, without being identified exclusively with
any particular artistic domain.[54]
This euphoria attached to the "art of living" is like the infinitely joyful field (champ, in
French, and an allusion to his own name) that Duchamp finds right at hand through

puns. The pleasure that he takes in nonsense is that of discovering himself in a punning
game that eroticizes intelligence:
Tradition is the great misleader because it's too easy to follow what has already been
doneeven though you may think you're giving it a kick. I was really trying to invent,
instead of merely expressing myself. I was never interested in looking at myself in an
aesthetic mirror. My intention was always to get away from myself, though I knew
perfectly well that I was using myself. Call it a little game between "I" and "me."[55]
Duchamp's refusal to identify himself with previous artistic traditions, and even his own
artistic corpus, reflects his claim: "I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to
avoid conforming to my own taste." The aesthetic mirror whose reflection Duchamp
eschews involves the interpretation of art as a medium for expression, rather than
invention. Through analogy to puns, his artistic identity emerges as a creative
movement engendered by the interplay of his aliases: a strategic chess game played by
con men. This position is made visually explicit in a photographic self-portrait
Photograph of Marcel Duchamp Taken with a Hinged Mirror (1917) (fig. 58). In this
photograph the referential position of the artist as model is elided; facing multiple
reflections of himself, Duchamp has his back to the camera. His visual identity is both
supplanted and refracted by a hinged mirror dividing him from himself while
multiplying his reflections. This game, by which Duchamp refuses to assume a stable
identity as an artist, marks the kinetic and hence, erotic, character of his work. Playing
the ready-made field, among "I" and "me," Duchamp discovers "antiart": a game that
eschews any specular reduction, since it is governed by the generative power of
nonsense.
If Duchamp rejects the conventional notion of artistic creativity"fundamentally, I
don't believe in the creative function of the artist"
156
(DMD , 16)this refusal reflects his understanding of art in terms of its Sanskrit
etymology, which signifies "making." Visual and linguistic puns are already "made"
they exist as a field of associations to be called upon, reassembled, or made anew, not to
be created. Hence the creative originality of the artist is defined in terms of the
conceptual operations that are exercised in a field that is always already ready-made.
Duchamp's claim that "art has no biological source" (DMD , 100) must be understood as
a rejection of the traditional concept of art, which defines originality as the power of the
artist to create something totally new, ex nihilo. This is why Duchamp describes the
artist as a craftsman, a chess player, or a waiter, that is, as someone whose creativity is
transitive rather than originary. If the artist can never create from scratch, this is because
s/he functions as a relay, or even a delay. In other words, the artist becomes a "hinge,"
strategically transporting and transposing the ideas of others in a kinetic exercise that
does not foreclose either artistic identity or artistic production. Rather than considering
this condition of the artist as a "predicament," Duchamp treats it as a necessary given.
He redefines the notion of biological creation as an origin through the strategic
evocation of the ready-made: "So man can never expect to start from

Fig. 58.
Marcel Duchamp, Photograph of Marcel Duchamp taken with a hinged mirror, New Yor
k, 10 October
1917. From Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, trans. George Heard Hamilton. New York:
Grove, 1959.
157
scratch; he must start from ready-made things like even his own mother and father."[56]
Duchamp's strategic use of reproduction, ranging from ready-mades to prints,
culminates in his parodies of painting and sculpture as artistic media. Along the way,
Duchamp succeeds in challenging both the notion of the art object and the objective
character of art. What is remarkable about Duchamp's interventions is the fact that they
do not represent a negation or rejection of artistic traditions. Rather, they represent
Duchamp's speculative exploration of the conceptual potential of art as a medium whose
meaning hinges on the manipulation of appearance. Art as the creation of "appearances
of appearances" is believed to be the task of art, ever since it was defined by Plato.[57]
Yet, the interpretation of art as the imitation of nature is qualified during the
Renaissance by the allowance that it need not involve literal reproduction.[58] Duchamp
deliberately returns to the notion of literal reproduction in order to explore its poetic and
philosophical potential. Whether by using actual ready-mades, or by using artistic
conventions as ready-mades, Duchamp redefines art as a strategic medium, and the
artist as a transitional figure whose role is to restage both the terms and the conventions
defining artistic practice.
159

4
Art and Economics: From the Urinal to the Bank

Can one make works which are not works of "art"?

Marcel Duchamp

In assessing the significance of the ready-made, Octavio Paz underlines its challenge to
traditional concepts of art and value. According to Paz, the ready-made represents a
contradictory gesture, since the artist's gratuitous choice of an anonymous, massproduced object converts it into a work of art, while destroying the notion of an art
object:
The essence of the act is contradiction; it is the plastic equivalent of a pun. As the latter
destroys meaning, the former destroys the notion of value. . . . The Ready-made does
not postulate a new value: it is a jibe at what we call valuable. It is criticism in action: a
kick at the work of art ensconced on its pedestal of adjectives.[1]
The ready-made implies an active critique of the notion of value. This critique is not
dialectical: it involves neither the negation nor the affirmation of value. Rather, the
ready-made is conceived as the "plastic equivalent of a pun," that is, as a mechanism
staging the gratuitous conversion of an ordinary object into a work of art, while
simultaneously undermining the notion of an art object through this gesture. The
destruction of value, entailed by the first moment, corresponds to the annulment of
meaning in the second. As "criticism in action," the ready-made radically disrupts the
valuative judgment of a work as art.
160
As the ready-mades demonstrate, Duchamp's exploration of the concepts of art and
value is not an abstract philosophical inquiry but a literal one. Instead of asking what
value is, Duchamp proceeds to demonstrate its conditions and modes of operation as a
social phenomenon. Not content to explore the philosophical conundrums generated by
the ready-mades, he takes on the question of value on its most basic level, not merely as
artistic abstraction but also as an economic phenomenon. In a series of works starting
with Tzanck Check (1919), and later continuing with Cheque Bruno (Chque Bruno;
1965) and Czech Check (1965), Duchamp proceeds to explore the relationship between
art and economics, by presenting the facsimile of a check, both as monetary payment
and as art. The idea of producing a work that problematizes the transactions involved in
both the circulation of a work of art and of monetary currency is pursued in Wanted/
$2000 Reward (1923), a parody of a police "wanted" poster. This is followed by the
Monte Carlo Bond (Obligations pour la Roulette de Monte Carlo; 1924), a financial
document issued by Duchamp in order to raise funds to test his formula for a betting
system at the roulette wheel. In these works the autonomy of the artistic and economic
domains is challenged by a speculative interpretation of value that uncovers their shared
social and symbolic concerns.[2]
This inquiry into value as a function of art and economics culminates in Duchamp's
return at the end of his oeuvre to a ready-made that is both an artistic and economic
artifact. First issued under the title Drain Stopper (Bouche-Evier; 1964), this work is
reissued subsequently as a set of numismatic coins, and retitled Marcel Duchamp Art

Medal (1967). These works return to Duchamp's Fountain (fig. 48, p. 125) by
commemorating the urinal that literally flushed the notion of artistic value down the
drain. The reproduction of Drain Stopper as Marcel Duchamp Art Medal transforms the
work of "art" into a limited edition of numismatic coins, that is, works embodying both
artistic and economic notions of value. Duchamp's deliberate conflation of artistic and
economic categories, however, produces a paradoxical effect: that of undermining both
art and economics. By challenging the concept of inherent value through reproduction,
the notion of the artistic value will emerge as a speculative correlative of economic
value. Hence the questions that this study will address are: 1) what is the relation of
artistic and commercial activity,
161
2) can money or the record of a monetary transaction become a work of art, 3) is art a
gamble or a speculative transaction, and 4) are numismatic coins economic and/or
artistic artifacts? Duchamp's works stage, in dramatic terms, a transformation in the
concept of value for modernity, since a debate about artistic value becomes the ground
for a revaluation of the concept of value itself.

Is it Business or Is it Art?
Money was always over my head.
Marcel Duchamp

There is one detail in Marcel Duchamp's lengthy artistic career that troubles both his
sympathizers and critics alike: the fact that he bought and sold paintings, those of
others, as well as his own. Pierre Cabanne questions Duchamp's forays into commercial
activity, since they blatantly contradict his own expectations of Duchamp's artistic
attitude and supposed "detachment" from material concerns.[3] Cabanne is not alone in
asking these questions. When asked about why Duchamp allowed an expensive edition
of ready-mades to be done by Arturo Schwarz, John Cage echoes Cabanne's sense of
contradiction:
"Why did you permit that, because it looks like business rather than art" and so forth.
Marcel admitted that it could be so interpreted, but it did not disturb him. He was
extremely interested in money. At the same time, he never really used his art to make
money. And yet he lived in a period when artists were making enormous amounts of
money. He couldn't understand how they did it. I think he thought of himself as a poor
businessman. These late activities were like business.[4]
Cage's comments demonstrate the difficulty of sorting out, or rather, understanding how
art and commerce come together in Duchamp's works. Insisting that Duchamp was not
"using" his art to make money, Cage underlines both Duchamp's interest in money and
his attempt to disengage his art from monetary concerns.

Still, Cage has problems with the late editions of the ready-mades, which, unlike the
"original" editions, he now considers to be like "business." While Cage recognizes
Duchamp's caution and discipline in not
162
"extending the notion of the Ready-mades to everything," as well as his original
difficulty of coming to the decision to make them, he also feels that later in life,
Duchamp abandons this caution and "would sign anything that anyone asked him to."[5]
Thus, while Cage is able to recognize the limited edition aspect of the ready-mades, he
is unable to deal with Schwarz's reissuing them as a "second edition." Whereas Cage is
willing to assume Duchamp's initial signature as the signature of the artist, he is
uncertain whether the second signature is not merely that of the businessman.[6] The
effort to extricate art from economics proves to be extremely difficult, since Duchamp's
oeuvre stages significant questions regarding the effects that the ready-mades, as
reproducible objects, will have on the relation between art and economics, as well as the
definition of the artist as author and guarantor of artifacts.
Cage's and Cabanne's difficulty in reconciling art and business reflects a fundamental
prejudice in the Western conception of the artist, which supposes art to be entirely
removed from the economic sphere. There is, however, something fundamental shared
by art and economics: the notion of value. It can be argued that value in art is an
abstraction, since masterpieces are so valuable that they are often priceless. Yet the same
is true of the value generated by commercial transactions, insofar as worth is relative to
the system of exchange that generates it. What fascinates Duchamp is the process by
which a work acquires artistic and commercial value. The production of value entails,
for him, a social and speculative dimension. In his interview with Cabanne, Duchamp
describes his earliest venture into commercial activity "sometime before" 1934:
That was with Picabia. We agreed that I would help him with his auction at the Hotel
Drouot. A fictitious auction, however, since the proceeds were for him. But obviously he
didn't want to be mixed up in it, because he couldn't sell his paintings at the Salle
Drouot under the title "Sale of Picabias by Picabia!" It was simply to avoid the bad
effect that would have had. It was an amusing experience. It was all very important for
him, because, until then, no one had had the idea of showing Picabias to the public, let
alone selling them, giving them a commercial value. . . . I bought a few little things
then. I don't remember what, anymore. (DMD , 73)
163
Duchamp's account of his first business venture sounds more like a performance art
piece than a genuine commercial endeavor. By staging a fictitious auction of Picabia's
works in order to recover the proceeds for Picabia, Duchamp uncovers the relationship
of artistic and commercial value in the intervals between the signature, the work, and its
circulation. As he points out, it would have been absurd to have a "Sale of Picabias by
Picabia," since there would be no buyers. The artist's signature authorizes the work, but
cannot confer value on it, since value is not inherent to the object but defined through
social exchange. The price of a work in an auction is determined by the prospective

buyers bidding against each other. Thus, value is created through exchange, through the
display, circulation, and consumption of the work, in a game where worth has no
meaning in and of itself.
Duchamp mentions other instances of participating in art deals, such as his efforts to
buy back his own works for his patron Walter Arensberg, and later, helping Arensberg to
"round them up" for the Philadelphia Museum.[7] Preceding his efforts to help Arensberg
there is also Duchamp's initiative to organize an exhibition featuring the works of
Constantin Brancusi (18761957), after he purchased some of the artist's works at the
Quinn auction. Constantin Brancusi asked Duchamp and Jean-Pierre Roch (1879
1959) to buy back his works, since he wanted to avoid a public sale, afraid that it would
bring in lower prices than previous sales of individual works. Duchamp asked Mrs.
Rumsey to buy back the twenty-two Brancusis, which were split up among three
partners, and helped Duchamp make his living.[8] Moreover, there was Duchamp's
curious idea, the amusing project of selling for $1.00 insignias bearing the letters DADA
"cast separately in metal and then strung on a small chain."[9] Outlined in his letter to
Tristan Tzara (New York, 1921), Duchamp proceeds to explore the implications of his
project by considering its potential effects:
The act of buying this insignia would consecrate the buyer as Dada . . . the insignia
would protect against certain diseases, against the numerous annoyances of life,
something like those Little Pink Pills which cure everything. . . . Nothing "literary" or
"artistic," just straight medicine, a universal panacea, a fetish in this sense: if you have a
toothache, go to your dentist and ask him if he is a Dada.[10]
164
Duchamp's parody of Tzara's "everything is Dada," becomes a parable of commercial
consumption, insofar as the possession of the Dada insignia consecrates the buyer as
Dada. The equation between acts of consumption and consecration reveals the magical
and curative dimensions of commercial activity. The act of possessing this insignia or
fetish endows the bearer with a special aurain this case an artistic one, that of Dada.
As Duchamp explains to Cabanne, this idea was in the same spirit as Andr Breton's
idea of opening up a Surrealist office to give people advice (DMD , 74). Duchamp's
commercial ventures thus emerge as mechanisms that reveal the shared social and
ideological subtext of both commercial and artistic exchange.
If Duchamp's commercial ventures invariably involve an artistic context, his artistic
ventures, in turn, involve an unexpected legal and economic dimension. In a newspaper
account about Fountain in the Boston Evening Transcript (25 April 1917), the public is
provided with the "official record of the episode of its removal":
Richard Mutt threatens to sue the directors because they removed the bathroom fixture,
mounted on a pedestal, which he submitted as a "work of art." Some of the directors
wanted it to remain, in view of the society's ruling of "no jury" to decide the merits of
the 2,500 paintings and sculptures submitted. Other directors maintained that it was
indecent at a meeting and the majority voted it down. As a result of this, Marcel
Duchamp retired from the board. Mr. Mutt now wants more than his dues. He wants
damages.[11]

The threat of a lawsuit becomes an in-joke, once we recognize Mr. Mutt as Duchamp's
artistic alter ego. This incident summarizes the performative dimension of Fountain, the
fact that the failure to exhibit the work becomes a "work" of sorts in its own right. Thus,
a debate regarding value may generate value in turn (in the form of either interest,
damages, or both). Given that the motto of the American Society of Independent Artists
is "No jury, no prizes," Mr. Mutt's (alias Duchamp's) suit, not for dues but for damages,
translates the artistic debate about Fountain into legal and economic terms.[12] In a letter
to his sister Suzanne (11 April 1917), Duchamp claims that a female friend submitted
the urinal under a
165
male pseudonym. After announcing his resignation from the association, Duchamp
concludes: "it will be a bit of gossip of some value in New York" (emphasis added).[13]
Rather than clarifying his own status as author of Fountain, Duchamp persists in
mystifying his own participation. This act of mystification, through the introduction of
both a male and a female alias, highlights the fact that this debate about artistic value
might refer less to the object than to its authorial and social context. Duchamp's
comment about the "value" of his own resignation underlines the strategic role of
Fountain in generating value from a debate about value. Thus, as suggested earlier, the
value of the urinal is determined not by its "objective" character but instead by the
exchanges it generates.[14] The value of this object is strategic: it is a mechanism that
triggers critical debate, by staging the interplay of structures of authority, legitimization,
and authorship in the constitution of artistic value.
Rather than being reassured by Duchamp's answers, however, his interviewer Cabanne
persists in challenging his involvement in commercial activity. In response to Cabanne's
question regarding whether commercial activity may contradict his artistic position,
Duchamp elaborates:
No. One must live. It was simply because I didn't have enough money. One must do
something to eat. Eating always eating, and painting for the sake of painting are two
different things. Both can certainly be done simultaneously, without one destroying the
other. And then, I didn't attach much importance to selling them. I bought back one of
my paintings, which was also in the Quinn sale, directly from Brummer. Then I sold it, a
year or two later, to a fellow from Canada. This was amusing. It did not require much
work from me. (DMD , 74; emphasis added)
Duchamp's comment is revealing to the extent that it resituates the question of economic
activity alongside, and not in contradiction with, artistic activity. Duchamp's bemused
interest in commercial activity reflects his artistic bias, since value is generated
independently from the conditions of the actual "making" or production of an object.
Value is generated transitively through exchange, not requiring "work" in the ordinary
sense but requiring another kind of labor of an intellectual, speculative order.
166

Now we can begin to understand Duchamp's interest in economics, since the question of
value in the economic domain presents problems that are analogous to those Duchamp
explores in the artistic domainmost particularly, his rejection of the artisanal
production of objects (the cult of the "hand"), such as we see embodied in the readymades. It is this intellectual dimension of ready-mades that is regarded with some
suspicion by artists, such as Robert Smithson, who claims that in the case of the readymades, Duchamp is trying to "transcend production itself" and that "He has a certain
contempt for the work process and here. . . he is sort of playing the aristocrat."[15]
Smithson's comment highlights the contradictions that the ready-made poses as a work
of art, insofar as its "value" cannot be linked to a manual system of production, since it
is mass-produced. Rather, the "value" of the ready-made is determined in relation to the
artistic norms that it defies and reduces to meaninglessness. Based on the discussion in
chapter 2, it seems that while the ready-made is not the result of artisanal production but
rather of mass reproduction, this aspect forcefully engages the spectator in another kind
of "work" of an intellectual order. The ready-made is not an object in the ordinary

Fig. 59.
Marcel Duchamp, Tzanck Check, 1919. Imitated rectified readymade: enlarged manuscr
ipt version of a
check, 8 1/4 x 15 1/8 in. Galleria Schwarz, Milan.
Courtesy of Arturo Schwarz.
167
sense, since it is the "plastic equivalent of a pun," that is, a visual and linguistic
machine. This mechanism "works" by translating a set of abstract concerns, about the
effects of mechanical reproduction on the work of art, into their plastic equivalents.
Consequently, given Duchamp's interest in how an art object accrues both artistic and
financial value, his own involvement in the sale and acquisition of art should come as
no surprise. Rather than viewing Duchamp's commercial activity as a betrayal of both
his artistic detachment and putative disinterest in financial value, his fascination for the

speculative value of art can be better understood in intellectual terms. It is a fascination

with how artistic and monetary value is generated arbitrarily through social exchange.
Duchamp's interest in the speculative character of money does not translate itself into
the subservience of his own artistic work to monetary considerations. Instead, it
expresses the recognition that value, be it artistic or financial, is embedded in a circuit
of symbolic exchange.

Reproduction as Crime: Money as Art

And above all, I wanted as much as possible not to make money
Marcel Duchamp

Duchamp's explicit interest and involvement in commercial and artistic transactions

becomes the very subject of a series of works, starting in 1919. These works include
several types of facsimile checks, Tzanck Check, Cheque Bruno, and Czech Check,
which were issued over a period of forty years. In these works the question of value is
no longer implied as an abstract reflection, hence the discrimination between what may
or may not be art. Rather, Duchamp chooses to address the question of value literally,
not as abstract worth but as concrete currency. Just as Duchamp problematized the
distinction between art and nonart, so he now proceeds to examine the distinction
between art and economics as a function of the social and institutional exchanges they
imply.
Although contemporary to Duchamp's reproduction of the Mona Lisa in L.H.O.O.Q.
(fig. 53, p. 140), the Tzanck Check (fig. 59) is a reproduction of money, rather than a
work of art. In this particular case money, as a means toward the acquisition of art,
becomes the end, since its reproduction through a check transforms it into a work of art.
It is important to note, however, that Duchamp chooses to reproduce a check rather than
168
currency.[16] A check is merely an order for the payment of money on demand. It is
another kind of legal tender, which is more specific than money, since it involves a
blank (the addressee), a bank (institutional endorsement), a date, and a signature
(individual endorsement). These institutional markers that define the legal identity of a
check also define the institutional parameters of a work of art. The anonymous spectator
of the work of art occupies the blank space of the addressee, while dates are essential to
both art and business. The author's signature, however, acts as the guarantor of the
authenticity of the work, as well as the general guarantor, the "bank" (the artist's
reputation that backs this particular issue of the work). But the work of art has a title,
descriptive or poetic, although it is unclear whether this type of designation is specific
or generic. It is this entrance into nomination that distinguishes art from checking, to the
extent that the name confers identity by individualizing the object. This "entitlement" of
art is relatively recent, however, and reflects a shift in our definition of the authority of
the artist and the status of an artwork.[17]

Like Duchamp's ready-made Fountain, which embodies his "dry" interpretation of art,
these checks become the basis for exploring the conceptual interval between art and
economics. This process literally involves "checking," that is, verifying by comparison
how value is posited and expended in these otherwise autonomous domains. The Tzanck
Check documents a transaction between Duchamp and his dentist Daniel Tzanck, which
Duchamp summarizes as follows:
I asked him how much I owed, and then did the check entirely by hand. I took a long
time doing the little letters, to do something which would look printedit wasn't a
small check. And I bought it back twenty years later, for a lot more than it says it's
worth! Afterward I gave it to Matta, unless I sold it to him. (DMD , 63)
As Duchamp explains, this check is a payment in "art" for medical services rendered. In
return for what he owes Duchamp gives his dentist a work of art, whose value, however,
unlike money, continues to accrue interest. In settling what appears to be an ordinary
debt Duchamp's payment in "art" exceeds the terms of the original obligation. It is
important to recall, however, that in addition to being a dentist, Tzanck was an avid
169
art lover and the founder of a society of art collectors dedicated to the appreciation of
modern art, who proposed the creation of a museum of modern art in Paris.[18] Given
Tzanck's involvement with modern art, one must wonder whether the Tzanck Check is
more than an ordinary payment. By recording their anecdotal transaction through a
check that is also a work of art, Duchamp translates his obligation from financial into
symbolic terms. Within this system of symbolic exchange, reciprocity replaces debt,
insofar as Duchamp's gesture leads to Tzanck's indebtedness for having "slipped into the
history of art."[19]
A closer examination of the Tzanck Check, created in December 1919, reveals how
these apparent contradictions are explicitly staged by this work. Given the fact that this
work immediately follows the notorious L.H.O.O.Q., which dates to October 1919, the
question of the shared concerns of these two works imposes itself. Notably, both are
reproductions, albeit in different ways. Whereas L.H.O.O.Q. is a commercial
reproduction of a masterpiece, a ready-made, the Tzanck Check is a hand-drawn, largerthan-life facsimile, which looks as if it were printed. The difference is that the "artist has
painstakingly applied his skill to the manual imitation of an item which modern
techniques of mass production would normally print out in an instant."[20] This work is
an "Imitated Rectified Ready-made," that is to say, a work that reproduces mechanical
mass production, like a mechanical drawing that, according to Duchamp, "upholds no
taste, since it is outside all pictorial conventions" (DMD, 48). Although we are dealing
with two different types of reproduction, commercial and manual (based on
commercial), the effects of these two gestures are very different. In the first instance, the
act of commercial reproduction challenges the uniqueness of the masterpiece, insofar as
mechanical production displaces pictorial and artisanal techniques. In the second
instance, the deployment of manual dexterity is merely an imitation of commercial
reproduction and hence, no more original than an industrial drawing or prototype for a
machine.

Duchamp provides clues to how the Tzanck Check should be interpreted by comparing
it to the phonetic puns of L.H.O.O.Q ., where in his words "reading the letters is very
amusing" (DMD , 63). If L.H.O.O.Q. is a very elaborate linguistic and visual game,
what are the puns staged by the Tzank Check? In addition to the alliterative sound of the
title, this work,
170
also published under the title of Dada Drawing (Dessin Dada) in Francis Picabia's
journal Cannibale (25 April 1910), presents a network of puns combining artistic
allusion with monetary analogy. The name of the bank, designated on the check as "The
Teeth's Loan & Trust Company," seems initially a gratuitous inversion of the guarantor
(the Bank) and its client (the dentist), since in this case the check appears to be backed
by a loan and trust (not exactly a savings) bank called "Teeth." The insistence of the
phrase "the teeth'sloanandtrustcompanyconsolidated," which is repeatedly stamped on
the lower half (with a rubber stamp of the phrase made especially to be used on this one
occasion) along with the word "ORIGINAL" printed across in red, can be interpreted at
face value as attempts against forgery and guarantees of the "originality" of this fake
check.[21] But the face value of this check is only backed by a "rubber stamp," whose
limited use by no means clarifies the nature of such fictitious backing. What then is the
fiction that underlies the history of this check?
Duchamp's references to "teeth" in his Notes invariably involve combs: "Classify combs
by the number of their teeth" (WMD, 71).[22] Thus the "teeth" in the title of the Tzanck
Check 's bank, "The Teeth's Loan & Trust Company," is a reference to one of
Duchamp's earlier ready-mades, entitled Comb (Peigne, a pun on painting, in French).
This allusion to painting in Tzanck Check, scripted in the guise of the bank (as the
check's backer or guarantor), is not altogether surprising given the affinities of this work
with L.H.O.O.Q. As respective reproductions of money and art, these works reflect the
problem of assigning, defining, and preserving a classical notion of value in the modern
context. The emergence of mechanical forms of production redefines economic and
artistic modes of production, as modes of reproduction. As a reproduction of money,
which also makes claims to be art, the Tzanck Check alludes both to the loss of
painting's bite, engineered by industrialization, and also to its potential to prevail by
"hanging on by its teeth." Thierry de Duve summarizes the paradoxical relation of the
Comb to the history of painting:
The work refers to painting as it is both impossible and possible, i. e., on the one hand,
felt and judged as doomed by industrialization and therefore having to be actively
destroyed or abandoned, and on the other, retaining a potential that lies precisely in its
abandon 171
ment, understood as the postponement of any pictorial "happening" and therefore of
painting's final demise.[23]

But in order to hang on, painting can no longer be defined by the hand, but by the head.
The Tzanck Check embodies Duchamp's efforts to save painting by redefining it as an
intellectual, rather than a manual endeavor. Instead of putting painting simply "out to
dry," or out of business, Duchamp merely "hangs up his hat" (similar to the English
expression to take possession of a new home, especially by marrying a daughter of the
house). In other words, Duchamp redefines painting in terms of the conceptual
possibilities generated by the postponement of its pictorial conventions. While escaping
pictorial conventions, this hand-drawn work still "draws" on the history of painting,
since the word "to draw" (tirer, in French) refers equally to drawing a portrait or a
check. The Tzanck Check continues to draw (understood also as an inspiration and as a
prize) speculatively on painting, thereby announcing its demise while postponing its
conceptual potential or interest. Given that Duchamp describes the language of his
father's (a notary) legal papers as "killingly funny" (DMD, 103), we wonder whether the
Tzanck Check does not represent his own "drawing up" of a document/work whose
intent is to legitimize his particular interpretation of art: one where the will and
testament of art is defined by its symbolic expenditure.
In 1965 Duchamp produced another facsimile of a check, a signed, blank check made
payable to "Philip Bruno" (fig. 60) for an unlimited amount drawn on the "Banque
Mona Lisa."[24] By declaring "Banque

Fig. 60.
Marcel Duchamp, Cheque Bruno (Chque Bruno), 1965. Collection of Mr.
and Mrs. Phillip A. Bruno. Photograph courtesy of Arturo Schwarz.
172

Fig. 61.
Marcel Duchamp, Czech Check, version of 1966. Collection of Mr. and
Mrs. Harris K. Weston. Courtesy of Arturo Schwarz.
Mona Lisa" as the guarantor of this "carte blanche" check, Duchamp further clarifies the
inscription of painting as the equivalent of monetary currency in his works; by
designating "Mona Lisa" explicitly as a bank, Duchamp invites the spectator to consider
how value is generated, as well as how Duchamp will "spend it" by drawing checks on
it.[25] The value of the Mona Lisa as a "priceless work of art" presents a paradox: it is a
work that is so valuable artistically that it is of immeasurable financial worth. As a
"masterpiece," this work's artistic and economic value invokes a concept of value in
excess of all values. Yet Leonardo's Mona Lisa is not a pictorial equivalent of gold or
metric standard.[26] Rather, its artistic value is arbitrarily backed by a speculative market,
whose authority relies on the manipulation of both academic and financial credit and
currency. Given the authority of the Mona Lisa, Duchamp proceeds to issue "checks" on
this masterpiece, backed by its artistic and financial authority. L.H.O.O.Q. may be the
first of these checks, since like money it is a unique print insofar as it is signed and
issued as a numbered edition. Although L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved appears to restitute the
Mona Lisa to her former "carte-blanche" appearance (minus the mustache and goatee),
it does not succeed in completely restoring her original value. This "devaluation" of the
Mona Lisa is a minute, almost imperceptible event, obeying the logic of the "infrathin."
Duchamp defines the "infrathin" as an infinitesimal difference generated by repetition:
"All 'identicals' as/ identical as they may be, (and/ the more identical they are)/ move
toward this/ infra
173
thin separative/ difference" (Notes, 35). Associating the logic of reproduction with the
"infrathin," Duchamp accounts for the production of differences through repetition.
By "spending" the Mona Lisa, that is, by putting into circulation signed prints or by
drawing on her indirectly as a "bank," Duchamp sets into motion an alternate
interpretation of value based on notions of expenditure. Value, be it artistic or monetary,
is generated through exchange; it is neither essential to nor coextensive of actual
objects. Duchamp's works break down the notion of an artistic standard through
speculation. His reproductions abolish the notion of artistic production through
expenditure, that is, through a gesture that mimics economy only to abolish the concept
of abstract worth. While celebrating exchange through speculation, these
economic/artistic works annul the traditional norms and institutional standards that
define value in a classical sense. These works rectify the tradition within which the
Mona Lisa is perceived as a masterpiece; they emerge as artifacts, whose value depends
not on an original but instead on the playful subversion of the notion of artistic
creativity.
These multiples inscribe within the original a concept of seriality that redefines it as a
limited edition. The Tzanck Check and the Cheque Bruno are originals whose value
derives from their reproducibility: they are, by definition, limited editions. As financial
documents, their value is transactional. It resides not in their artistic content but in the
displacement of value into the overlap of monetary and artistic categories. The

ostensible financial referent of these checks involves payments and banks that reveal the
fictitious character of commercial transactions. The fact of "drawing" on these fictitious
categories means inscribing into the act of commercial exchange a speculative
dimension that amounts to a new way of thinking about art.
Not content to challenge the categories of the check and the bank as guarantors of a
financial transaction, Duchamp proceeds to challenge the notion of signature. After all,
both the originality of artworks and the viability of monetary currency is guaranteed
through signature. Along with the Cheque Bruno (1965), Duchamp produced another
work entitled the Czech Check (fig. 61), consisting of Duchamp's own signature added
to John Cage's membership card in a Czech mycological society. Cage describes
Duchamp's gesture as follows:
174
I had become a member of the Czechoslovakian Mushroom Society, and when I
received my membership cardthere were various signaturesI thought what a
pleasure it would be to have Marcel's signature too. And so I gave it to him; and he
signed it immediately and very beautifully. By beautifully, I mean in an interesting
place. It looked as though he was one of the Czechs, (emphasis added)[27]
What is unusual about the Czech Check is the fact that it is not a check, in the ordinary
sense of the word. This is Cage's membership card, which Duchamp signs as if he were
one of the founding Czechs of the association, that is, as a board member acting as a
symbolic guarantor for the institution. Rather than designating Duchamp the individual,
his signature on the membership card impersonates someone else's symbolic authority
and Czech nationality. Why, then, is this work called the Czech Check, or rather, how
does a membership card become a check? By signing his name along with the Czechs,
as a sign of his endorsement of the association, Duchamp "endorses" the rights of the
rank and file members to "draw" on the authority of the association. Becoming a
member thus implies using this endorsement as if one were writing a check. Following
the playful logic of this gesture literally, becoming "Czech" means that one can write
checks. By staging the conditions of authority that define membership, Duchamp
identifies the transactional context that subtends both the membership card and
commercial exchange.
The story, however, does not end here. As Cage explains, he was able to sell his
membership card signed by Duchamp for $500 in order to raise money for the
Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Regretting the loss of his card, Cage was delighted
when he received in the mail, the very same day it was sold, the next year's membership
card. Having pointed out this coincidence to Duchamp, he replied: "There's no problem;
I'll sign it too."[28] Cage tells this anecdote as a way of documenting a change in
Duchamp's attitudethe fact that later in life, Duchamp would sign anything.[29]
Duchamp's willingness to sign Cage's second membership card, and thus to reproduce
his own signature, raises the specter of the artist trivializing the work through its
repetition. How, then, are we to understand Duchamp's gesture? Duchamp's decision to
sign the second membership card is as deliberate as the first. The fact that the first card
is

 175
"sold" underlines its affinity with a check, hence its title the Czech Check.
Retrospectively, however, it appears that the value of this card is not determined by the
authority of the Czechoslovakian Mushroom Society but rather by Duchamp's signature.
It is his abstract "value" as an artist that backs his signature, thereby acting as an
endorsement that can be translated into precise financial terms. If a masterpiece such as
the Mona Lisa can become a "bank," why can't Duchamp become a "bank," as well? If
Duchamp is in fact posing questions regarding the authority vested in the artist, signing
the second card is simply the equivalent of issuing another check on the same bank. But
in doing so has he become a counterfeiter of himself?
Wanted/$2000 Reward (fig. 62) is a joke "Wanted" poster for "George W. Welch, alias
Bull, alias Pickens, etcetry," which has been altered by adding two mug shots
(photographs, one profile and one full face) of Duchamp, and the name Rrose Slavy,
on the bottom, which was substituted for the previous name by a printer. The only
extant version of this item is a color reproduction in The Box in a Valise. This work
presents a new interpretation of the artist as a wanted criminal for operating a bucket
shop. A bucket shop is an office for gambling, as in stocks or grain, by going through
the form of buying and selling with no actual purchases or sales. In other words, the
criminal in question is guilty of gambling and of going through the motions of
commercial transactions, without actually engaging in them. The crime involves
speculation without the actual trade of the goods themselves.
This bucket shop is operated by an individual under the alias "HOOKE, LYON and
CINQUER," a name that is a joke both on a corporation and a common expression
signifying that by fair or foul means, any individual may be ensnared lock, stock, and
barrel, that is, taken for a ride or deceived. The other aliases of this con man include the
name "Bull," which in commercial terminology refers to a dealer in stocks who
endeavors to raise the price of stock in order that he may sell at a higher price. Even the
original name on the poster, "George W. Welch," is deceptive, insofar as "Welch" is the
colloquial expression for cheating, defaulting, or evading an obligationusually the
payment of a gambling debtthereby inscribing within the proper name the insignia of
a con job.[30] This extensive proliferation of aliases on the poster suggests a crime whose
nature
176

Fig. 62.
Marcel Duchamp, Wanted/$2,000 Reward, replica of original
version of 1923 (lost) from Box in a Valise (Bote En Vailse),
194142. Rectified ready-made: photographs on paper.
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Louise and
Walter Arensberg Collection.
involves deception through speculation, that is, generating value gratuitously, from fake
transactions. The nature of the gamble in question does not involve actual sums but
rather expectations. As the alias "Pickens" punningly implies, this elaborate scam may
involve only small pickings, that is, small, cautious bets placed by someone who knows
how to choose or select the best ones.
Still unanswered is the question of what kind of "Wanted" poster this is. Who exactly is
wanted, and for what kind of crime? Is Duchamp a counterfeiter of money, art, or both?
The last alias on the poster, "RROSE SLAVY," provides a clue, since this alias is the
name of Duchamp's female artistic alter ego, a name with which he sometimes signed
his works. The adoption of a female alias, after a lengthy list of aliases associated with
177
different types of con men and con jobs, inscribes a new kind of gamble into this relay
of identities. This gamble involves his artistic project, his self-identification with his
female artistic alter ego Rrose Slavy, as well as the eroticism implied in artistic activity
understood in the mode of reproduction. The eruption of female identity in the midst of

this litany of male names inscribes the trace of difference into the apparently sterile
reproduction of sameness. This self-multiplication of the authorial persona into a relay
of identities "eroticizes" the authorial function as a process of engenderment.[31] It
redefines the author as the site of reproduction, so that self-representation corresponds
to the self-portrait of the artist as another, or as multiple others. This delirium of
personas that Wanted actively stages embodies the dilemma of the artist as a necessary
con man or woman, since making art ultimately implies becoming subject to someone
else's expectations.
This nonidentity of the artist and the work, as well as the artist him/ herself, is explicitly
staged in Wanted, insofar as the efforts to designate the artist through the work, or as the
work, are doomed to failure. In forging his own identity as an artist by affiliating it with
a criminal gesture Duchamp declares himself to be "Wanted," that is, worthy of
identification and arrest. The price of the reward$2,000 (a sizable sum in 1923)is a
measure of the urgency of the public's desire to capture him. Given the fact that
Duchamp himself issues this "Wanted" poster, this public announcement corresponds to
an act of self-denunciation. This situation takes on absurd dimensions, since the
authorities, the informer, and the criminal are one and the same person, the artist.
Duchamp thus uses his artwork to denounce art itself as a gamble with criminal
implications. Using art to denounce himself as an artist, Duchamp perpetrates the
unusual gamble of assigning value to himself, there by conflating his desire with that of
the spectator. If art is a blind gamble, being an artist means gambling one's own identity
in order to generate a reward (interest) that only the spectator can collect. Wanted thus
stages the problematic status of the artist as a conflation, or even as a corporation, of
artistic personae, and that of art as a gamble, whose speculative character resembles
financial transactions, like interest bearing certificates. If art is a scam, its "criminal"
nature is but the reflection of the fundamental impossibility both of identifying the artist
as anything other than a set of appearances
178
and of isolating artistic activity from the circuit of symbolic exchange, that is, from all
other forms of social consumption and expenditure. This is why art is conceived by
Duchamp as a gamble whose outcome is uncertain, since the wager in question relies on
the contingent interest and speculative investment of the spectator.

Reproduction as Speculation: Drawing on Chance

No stars? chance annulled?
Stphane Mallarm, Igitur

You see I haven't quit being a painter, now I'am drawing on chance.
Marcel Duchamp

In the Monte Carlo Bond (fig. 63), a work immediately following Wanted/$2000
Reward, Duchamp explicitly pursues the analogy between art and gambling. In addition
to the financial implications of this work, the Monte Carlo Bond may be considered an
effort on Duchamp's part to put up a bond for himself, as security for another, in order to
bail himself out of jail. Presumably, this is a response to his self-identification as an
artist/gambler and his identification of art as a scam in Wanted/$2000 Reward. The
problem, however, is that Duchamp appears to be issuing a bond on his own authority,
responding to the initial scam staged by Wanted, through the introduction of an even
more elaborate scam. A bond is an interest-bearing certificate issued by a government or
a corporation to pay a principal sum on a certain date, with interest. The Monte Carlo
Bond (issued as a limited edition of thirty copies) was to be sold at Fr 500 with a
guarantee of 20 percent interest redeemable in three years by "artificial drawing of lots"
(Remboursable au pair en trois ans par tirages artificiels), starting 1 March 1925. The
appearance of this fictitious bond immediately undermines the authority of the financial
transaction it is intended to secure. The Monte Carlo Bond is a collage (an "Imitated
Rectified Ready-made") of a color lithograph of a roulette table with Man Ray's photo
of Duchamp's soap-covered face and head, glued to a roulette wheel. Parodying an
official financial document, this bond bears all the marks of "authenticity" associated
with this type of transaction. It is an individually numbered bond, signed twice by
Duchamp, on the right as Rrose Slavy (president of the company), a "name by which
Marcel is as well-known as his regular name" (WMD, 185), and on the left as Marcel
Duchamp (an administrator). As Amelia Jones observes, Duchamp's double signature as
himself and as Rrose Slavy, suggests that
179

Fig. 63.
Marcel Duchamp, Monte Carlo Bond (Obligations Pour La Roulette De Monte Carlo),
1924. Imitated rectified ready-made: collage of color lithograph with photograph by Ma
n
Ray of Marcel Duchamp's soap-covered head.
Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
180
Rrose is an independent partner, one who, as president, presumably has authority over
Duchamp, who is a mere administrator: "Rrose becomes an author through signing and

yet she herself has been 'authored'."[32] Duchamp's game with his own authorial persona,
Rrose Slavy, legitimizes the bond through the production of a corporate entity whose
composite identity is generated by the fiction of his alias, of himself as an other. The
collective signatures designating the corporate identity embodied in the bond, which
both authenticate and authorize it, here emerge as the punning mirrors of Duchamp's
literal embodiment as a corporation. By problematizing his own authority as an artist,
through the fictional inscription of an other (be it Rrose, his female counterpart, or the
spectator who "makes the picture"), Duchamp reveals the tenuous bond between the
author and the work, especially when the work functions as a putative embodiment of
the artist.
Duchamp's photograph on the Monte Carlo Bond, a self-portrait of his head covered
with shaving foam and his hair pulled up into horns, further destabilizes the authority of
this financial document. The fact that this bond is framed by the uninterrupted phrase
"Moustiquesdomestiquesdemistock" (domestic mosquitos half-stock), only adds
evidence that the visual appearance of this work might be as unreliable as the signatures
backing it up. While Duchamp's appearance, his readiness for a "shave," might be
interpreted psychoanalytically as a sign of decapitation or castration, such a premise
fails to take into account the fact that the context of this bond involves gambling.[33]
Could Duchamp's ready-to-be-shaved head be the Joker, that extra card used in certain
card games as the highest trump, or in another context the nullifying clause of a
legislative measure? What kind of concealed obstruction or difficulty does this image
represent, and is the threat of this close shave the sign of a narrow escape? The clue to
this image, as in most of Duchamp's works, lies not merely in its visual referent, but in
its discursive one as well. To shave means to fleece or cheat, to drive a hard bargain, and
in commercial slang it means to buy notes or securities at a discount greater than the
legal rate. Is Duchamp's impending "shave" intended to take a barb at the spectatora
pointed joke on himself and others? Having "shaved" the Mona Lisa by taking a
reproduction that has not been altered by his graffiti mustache and goatee, Duchamp
181
"spends" this image by putting it into circulation under his own signature. By
reinvesting this reproduction with a new kind of "interest," in effect, he "banks" on it,
thereby reducing it to a financial issue, a "bond" of sorts. Duchamp and Leonardo
become the corporate backers of this reproduction, which now attains an "original"
status.
Likewise, in the case of the Monte Carlo Bond, Duchamp's hint at "shaving" himself
suggests a clue as to how he might be "shaving" (cheating or fleecing) the spectator. The
threat of his impending "shave" implies restoring his own image to its female
counterpart, Rrose Slavy. This act of restoration, however, does not lead to the
uncovering of an original but that of an alias (a reproduction), whose financial authority
is backed by the fictitious corporate identity of Duchamp/Rrose Slavy. Duchamp's
calling card (and perhaps his business card, as well) introduces him as "PRECISION
OCULISM/ RROSE SLAVY/ New York-Paris/ COMPLETE LINE OF WHISKWERS
AND KICKS" (Oculisme de Prcision/ Poils et Coups de Pieds en Tous Genres ). This
dual specialty in precision oculism and whiskers and kicks further emphasizes

Duchamp's particular expertise as an artist whose business is visual and linguistic puns.
Oculiste sounds like (au culiste, meaning "in the ass" in French), yet another allusion to
Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q., thereby attesting to Rrose's specialization in precision ass and
glass work. Whiskers and kicks refer to Duchamp's pointed barbs at tradition, his
travesties of the Mona Lisa "shaved" and "unshaved." As Michel Sanouillet and Elmer
Peterson point out, "Duchamp hardly ever misses a chance to boot us in the rear when
we are reverently bent over examining and explicating his work" (DMD , 105).
Rather than identifying its carrier, this calling card thus establishes Duchamp's
particular intervention as an artist of multiple embodiments: his interrogation of the
visual (ocular) invariably sets the spectator into motion by forcing him/her to stumble
through puns. Robert Lebel points out that Duchamp "cheerfully masqueraded as an
American style 'businessman'." He participated in the management of a cleaning and
dyeing establishment, simply because it allowed him to designate himself as a "tinter" (a
pun on peintre [painter] and teinturier [dyer]).[34] Thus, while it may seem that Duchamp
is abandoning art when he turns to issuing bonds, this gesture emerges as yet another
attempt to rethink art in speculative terms.
182
The public reception of Duchamp's bond verifies the speculative conflation of the
artistic and the economic. Duchamp's issue of the Monte Carlo Bond was immediately
valued not for its financial interest but as an artistic investment. In The Little Review
(New York, Fall-Winter, 1924-25) we find an account of the public's reaction to this
work:
If anyone is in the business of buying art curiosities as an investment, here is a chance to
invest in the perfect masterpiece. Marcel's signature alone is worth much more than the
500 francs asked for the share. Marcel has given up painting entirely and has devoted
most of his time to chess in the last few years. He will go to Monte Carlo early in
January to begin the operation of his new company. (WMD, 185)
This account of Duchamp's work indicates that the "interest" of the public is not focused
on the "interest" bearing possibilities of the bond but rather on the value of this work as
an art investment, guaranteed by Duchamp's signature. Given the fact that Duchamp
"gave up" painting, buying a bond assures getting a "masterpiece," since the artistic
value of this limited edition work is guaranteed to exceed its actual value as a financial
investment. The interest bearing value of this work as art exceeds its reality as financial
security by invoking contingencies that extend beyond the authority and life of the artist
into the speculative futures of posterity.
In order to illuminate the artistic implications of the Monte Carlo Bond it is important to
consider Duchamp's letter to Jean Crotti (17 August 1952). In this letter Duchamp
explains that artists are like gamblers, and that their reputation is made by the chance
encounter of the work with the spectator:
Artists throughout history are like gamblers in Monte Carlo and in the blind lottery
some are picked out while others are ruined. . . . It all happens according to random
chance. Artists who during their lifetime manage to get their stuff noticed are excellent

travelling salesmen, but that does not guarantee a thing as far as the immortality of their
work is concerned.[35]
183
By identifying artists with gamblers in a blind lottery, Duchamp underlines the arbitrary
way in which value is generated by the artwork. The successful artists are like traveling
salesmen, able to capitalize on their chance encounters with the spectator, in order to
valorize their work. By defining the viewer as someone who "makes the picture"
alongside with the artist, Duchamp inscribes the work within a circuit of symbolic
exchange. The artwork is thus redefined: it is neither an independent object nor does it
belong to the author any more than the viewer. The artistic value of the work cannot be
isolated from its social context: its display, consumption, and circulation. This is why
"Posterity is a form of the spectator" (DMD , 76).
This redefinition of the artistic process as a gamble, which relies on the regard, or
rather, "interest" of the spectator, leads to a radical challenge of the autonomy of
painting as a discipline. As Duchamp explains to Crotti: "I don't believe in painting
itself. Painting is made not by the painter but by those who look at it and accord it their
favors; in other words, there is no painter who knows himself or is aware of what he is
doing."[36] The authority of painting is fractured by the fact that the artist alone cannot
confer value on a work. The appeal to the tradition, to those works whose value is
ensured by the museum, is unreliable to the extent that the exhibition value of the work
depends on institutional considerations. A last resort to individual judgment is also
doomed to failure, since neither self-knowledge nor self-discipline can guarantee the
future "interest" of the work. As Duchamp points out to Crotti, "don't judge your own
work, since you are the last person to see it truly (avec des vrais yeux ). What you see is
not what makes it praiseworthy or unpraiseworthy."[37] The individual judgment of the
artist is shaped by the authority of one's education or one's reaction against it. Thus the
effort to evaluate the work reveals the artist's subjective limits, the extent to which they
are arbitrarily mediated by institutional givens.
Duchamp's refusal of aestheticism, the belief in painting for its own sake, is visible in
Duchamp's earliest attempts to move away from painting and toward mechanical
drawing and experiments with chance operations. The Monte Carlo Bond is issued in
order to test a formula for turning the odds at roulette in the player's favor by "pitting
the logic of chess against the luck of the gaming tables."[38] This work may be
considered as
184
yet another instance of Duchamp's efforts to "can chance," as in Three Standard
Stoppages and Dust Breeding (the photograph of dust in the region of the Sieves on the
Large Glass ). The Monte Carlo Bond represents a deliberate effort to examine the
speculative gamble entailed by both financial and artistic endeavors.[39] If the logic of
chess is invoked in the context of this financial and artistic parody, this is by no means
accidental, given the punning relation of chess (jeu d'checs ) to checks (jeu des
chques ).[40]

How can the "logic" of chess be pitted against the "luck" of the roulette table? As we
have shown earlier, Duchamp sees chess as a "visual and plastic thing," that is, not
purely geometric, since it moves"it's a drawing, it's a mechanical reality" (DMD , 18).
According to Duchamp, playing a game of chess is "like designing something or
constructing a mechanism of some kind by which you win or lose" (WMD , 136). In
chess this mechanism is constituted by a strategy (a set of moves or decisions) of two
opponents, who, in order to play, must literally put their "heads together." The case of
roulette, however, is closer, as Hubert Damisch notes, to a head or tails game.[41] Yet
roulette is more than a game of chance, since at each moment the player must decide on
a number and a color.[42] But despite its arbitrary character, betting is often handled like
chess, through predetermined strategies attempting to contain the chance element
through the number of moves.[43]
The Monte Carlo Bond is issued by Duchamp to raise funds for a betting system for the
roulette, which Duchamp describes as follows:
It's delicious monotony without the least emotion. The problem consists in finding the
red and black figure to set against the roulette. . . . The Martingale is without
importance. They are all either completely good or completely bad. But with the right
number even a bad Martingale can work and I think I've found the right number. You
see I haven't quit being a painter, now I'm drawing on chance . (WMD , 187; emphasis
added)[44]
Duchamp's attempts literally to "draw on chance" (dessiner sur le hasard ) can be
understood as an effort to recognize its plastic character by outlining its mechanism
through a number of moves, thus, containing
185
it through a calculus of probability.[45] Rather than functioning as an invocation of pure
contingency, chance, for Duchamp, is contextually defined, like value. Betting strategies
have no meaning in and of themselves; they are indifferent. What matters, on the
contrary, is the fact that these betting mechanisms contextualize chance, by literally
"drawing" it in. The monotony of repeating a set of moves, with very small variations,
uncovers the strategic and transitory outline of chance, an imprint of its fugitive
passage.
Duchamp's financial gambit stages his artistic gamble as an artist whose reputation is,
like life itself, "on credit." If art is a blind gamble, then the Monte Carlo Bond
represents the obligation: it is a guaranteed interest-bearing certificate. As a speculative
financial instrument, this bond provides the strategic mechanism for addressing the
question of "interest" art. As Duchamp explains in a letter to Jacques Doucet (Paris, 16
January 1925): "Don't be too skeptical, since this time I believe I have eliminated the
word chance. I would like to force the roulette to become a game of chess. A claim and
its consequences: but I would like so much to pay my dividends" (WMD , 18788).
Duchamp's belief to have eliminated chance corresponds to his efforts to "can chance"
(hasard en conserve ), by conserving or containing it. Duchamp's gesture emerges as a
challenge to Stphane Mallarm's statement that "a throw of dice will never abolish
chance." At issue for Duchamp is not the abolition of chance (which has little meaning)

but rather, the effort to foil it by "canning" it, that is, preserving it as a strategic gesture
particular to a set of determinations. Thus Duchamp's "canning" is also another way of
"drawing" (dessiner ) on chance, like drawing checks (or drafts) on a bank. The Monte
Carlo Bond enacts, in its "interest" generating potential as a financial document, the
gamble that the artist is engaged in, in terms both of the artistic medium, and of the
history and traditions that validate the work. If Duchamp is able to issue bonds as a way
of securing and guaranteeing dividends on his "interest," this is because while art may
be a gamble, the contextual logic of its operations is like a chess game. If we recall
Duchamp's advice to John Cage, "Don't just play your side of the game, play both
sides," we begin to see that Duchamp's success in "drawing on chance" is the result of
playing the game of art from both sides, interchangeably and simultaneously as artist
and spectator.[46]
186

Fig. 64.
Marcel Duchamp, Drain Stopper (Bouche-Evier), 1964 (obverse/reverse). Bronze.
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection.

Down the Drain: Numismatics as Art

. . . sooner find the Prosodia in a Comb as Poetry in a Medal.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Among Duchamp's last ready-mades, we find two works, Drain Stopper (fig. 64) and
Marcel Duchamp Art Medal (fig. 65), which bring us back full circle to Fountain ,
while simultaneously raising questions about value and its relation to art and monetary
tokens. Drain Stopper is an item of hardware that Duchamp recycles from his bathroom
in Spain, modified by being thickened with additional lead. Marcel Duchamp Art Medal
is a cast from Drain Stopper in several versions, including bronze, steel, and silver
editions, issued by the International Numismatic Agency (also known as the
International Collectors Society, New York.[47] William Camfield considers Drain
Stopper as a companion piece to Fountain , Morton Schamberg (18811918) and Elsa
von Freytag-Loringhoven's (18741927) God (circa 1918), and a part of Duchamp's
"conceptual plumbing system."[48] Although plumbing and various items of hardware
feature prominently in Duchamp's works, functioning as backhanded jokes on the

sanctity of art, the reissue of the drain stopper as an art medal demands that the question
of value in the context of mechanical and artistic reproduction be addressed once again.
The invocation of plumbing in this "artistic" context becomes the literal conduit for
examining how value is generated and expended, both as abstract property and as
precise currency. The transformation of a drain stopper (thickened with lead) into art,
and its reproductions, or rather transmutations, into coins and/or medals, attest to the
expandable liquidity of art as a symbolic currency.
Duchamp's sole "rectification" of the Drain Stopper is to have thick 187
ened it by adding more lead. This intervention may not seem to amount to much,
particularly in terms of accounting for the recuperation of this object as a work of art. If
we consider the gesture of adding lead as a pun, however, it seems that this object takes
on new proportions. By thickening the drain stopper, Duchamp literally adds more
weight to it, and figuratively suggests that he is now dealing with weighty matters. At
first sight a joke, the Drain Stopper now emerges as an object whose literal gravity
attests to its potential seriousness as a work of art. But is Drain Stopper a work of art?
Duchamp's gratuitous gesture of choosing the drain stopper converts it into a work of art
at the same time that it destroys the notion of the drain stopper as an art object. Thus,
like Fountain, Drain Stopper is only provisionally a work of art; it is more like a
stoppera stop-gap measure or makeshift substitute (a pun on bouche-trou , its French
title)or a punctuation mark (indicating a pause or delay), rather than an actual art
object. Poised between the wet (an allusion to painting as a purely material art "the
splashing of paint") and the dry (a conceptual interpretation of art that includes
mechanical reproduction), Drain Stopper acts like

Fig. 65.
International Collectors Society sales brochure cover, 1967. Shows Duchamp with

cigar smoke holding Marcel Duchamp Art Medal, which is based on Drain Stopper.
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art.
188

Fig. 66.
Leon Battista Alberti, Medallion, self-portrait, 1438.
From George Francis Hill, A Corpus of Italian Medals
of the Renaissance before Cellini Firenze: Studio per
edizioni scelte, 1984. Courtesy of The British Museum.
a regulative device controlling the transition between art and nonart. Like a pun,
"stopper"which means to regulate sound (as pitch in music) or light (as a
photographic aperture)mechanically triggers both the linguistic and the visual
registers.
But "stopper" also has another meaning, that of securing one's chances in bridge (a
stopper is a card that will ultimately take the trick in that suit). This latter pun inscribes
the Drain Stopper into a gamble, which in the context of Duchamp's works is invariably
a gamble on art. This gamble is explicitly played out in the transformation of Drain
Stopper into Marcel Duchamp Art Medal , that is, from a ready-made into a mold for a
series of artistic medals and/or numismatic coins. Duchamp's issue of an art medal (also
known as Metallic Art ) would seem to be contrary to his iconoclastic position as an
artist, particularly one who refuses to be identified as such. The fact that this art medal
is also a numismatic coin, however, reminds the viewer of the coincidence of economic
and artistic concerns, insofar as they embody ancient modes of mechanical
reproduction, those of Greek founding and stamping.[49] Duchamp's Art Medal or
Metallic Art is a Janus-faced representation of two opposing traditions.

 189
The first is the commemorative tradition of the art medal, particularly popular during
the Renaissance, which singles out the deeds or actions of an individual by
immortalizing those actions through a motto and emblematic insignia. The second refers
to the economic and symbolic value of coinage as an archaic measure and standard of
exchange.
What then is the function of Marcel Duchamp Art Medal , as both a commemorative
medal and a numismatic coin? As a commemorative medal, Marcel Duchamp Art
Medal can be said to celebrate the emergence of a new type of art object: Fountain, the
ready-made that literally flushed the traditional concept of art down the drain. Given
Duchamp's concern that "Men are mortal, pictures too" (DMD , 67) and that "The
onlookers make the picture," the effort to commemorate either the work of art or the
artist takes on a "tongue and cheek" dimension. Duchamp's challenge of the
commemorative aspects of art and its equation with the "rictus" of death is explicitly
staged in his ironic self-portrait with my tongue in my cheek (fig. 46, p. 115).[50] This
work celebrates Duchamp's specific contribution to art, his refusal to hold his "tongue in
check," like other artists. Could this "tongue and cheek" work be considered as a belated
commentary on the artistic medals of the Renaissance?
If we briefly consider the similarities between Duchamp's with my tongue in my cheek,
Leon Battista Alberti's Medallion, Self-Portrait (1438) (fig. 66), and Matteo de' Pasti's
Medal of L. B. Alberti (1448) (fig. 67), some surprising conclusions emerge. Alberti's
medallion includes a profile self-portrait with a winged eye under the chin. De' Pasti's
medal divides

Fig. 67.
Matteo de' Pasti, Medal of L. B. Alberti, 1448. From George Francis Hill, A Corpus of
Italian Medals of the Renaissance Before Cellini. Firenze: Studio per edizioni scelte, 19
84.
Courtesy of The British Museum.
190

these elements, by separating Albert's profile and name on one side of the medal, while
the reverse side depicts the winged eye surrounded by laurel wreaths, with the
inscription Quid Tum.[51] The visual message of both Albert's medallion and de' Pasti's
medal affirms the affinity of artistic conception with divine omniscience and glory. This
visual message, however, is undermined on de' Pasti's medal by Cicero's motto "Quid
Tum" ("What Then?"), which is believed to be a query on that which follows death.[52]
Given Duchamp's critique of the artist as master of the visual, or "retinal euphoria,"
could it be that the winged eye under Alberti's chin may reappear transposed as
Duchamp's swollen cheek, as the "tongue and cheek" signature of the artist as
metaironist?
Now we may begin to understand Duchamp's interest in artistic medals, and in
numismatics in general. The artistic medal, like the numismatic coin, is an archaic
ready-made, whose double-faced (punning) visual and scriptural character captures the
ironic nature of art: that artistic glory is not assured but on creditconditional on the
judgment of the spectator. The effort to commemorate the artist or the work, through
medals or tokens, relies on the posthumous judgment of the spectator. This is why,
according to Duchamp, "Posterity is a form of the spectator." Thus the commemorative
gesture is merely a gamble whose interest lies in the hands of the future.
As a numismatic coin, Marcel Duchamp Art Medal immortalizes artistic glory by
transforming it into coinage (commonplace, koinon , in Greek), that is a token of
exchange. This medal/coin, however, no longer refers to the artist in a historical sense
but rather to the history of the medium, since coins are the ready-mades of antiquity.
The reproducible character of numismatic coins alludes to the origins of technology, the
traditions of founding and stamping that precede the advent of the print medium and
modern modes of mechanical reproduction by thousands of years. Coins are among the
earliest artifacts of history; they are the first publications or impressions, whose
characters give voice to history.[53] According to John Evelyn, coins are "vocal
Monuments of Antiquity," the first and most lasting material traces of history.[54] Like
the ready-mades, ancient coins embody contradiction, since they are simultaneously a
material commodity (exchanged by virtue of material weight, for example, an ingot),
and abstract currency (as medium and measure of exchange). Marc
191
Shell attributes this distinction between substantial value (material currency) and face
value (intellectual currency) to the development of the polis.[55] The inscriptions on
ancient coins attest to the transformation of the concept of value from value based on
weight, to value based on political authority, that is, forms of legitimacy defined through
symbolic exchange.
This tension between the coin as material and symbolic currency is compounded by a
further ambiguity, that of the apparent contradiction of the coin as an artistic and as an
economic object. This confusion is tied to the effects of inscription, be it verbal or
visual, that conceptually transform a piece of metal into both an aesthetic and economic
artifact. As Marc Shell observes: "The pictorial or verbal impression in this material
qualitatively changes it (aesthetically) from a shapeless piece of metal into a sculptured
ingot and, more significantly, qualitatively changes it (economically) from a mere

commodity into a coin or token of money."[56] The minting of coins generates qualitative
changes that transform the coin into both an aesthetic and economic objectdomains
that are considered to be mutually exclusive today. This coincidence of material and
symbolic properties, as well as the processes of artistic reproduction and economic
production, reveal Duchamp's interest in numismatic coins. Not only is a coin an archaic
ready-made but it is also a pun, to the extent that its double-faced (Janus-like) character
functions not as an object but as a mechanism that stages a new way of conceiving
modernity. Marcel Duchamp's Art Medal numismatic coin suggests that mechanical
reproduction, believed to define the origins of modern art, is present in antiquity before
the emergence of the artistic as an autonomous domain. At issue is not the effort to dehistoricize modernity by denying the preeminence of mechanical reproduction as its
defining idiom, but rather to recognize the presence and social impact of its archaic
manifestations. Instead of identifying mechanical reproductions as a purely
technological intervention, Duchamp discovers in its socially symbolic character a
conceptual potential, thereby demonstrating the intellectual overlap or punning relation
of artistic and economic modes of production. In what is literally a "mirrorical return"
on the opposition of art and economics, his Drain Stopper and Marcel Duchamp Art
Medal suggest that coins are the "first" ready-mades, and that his own ready-mades are
a mere extension and rectification of this tradition. By insisting on the conceptual
dimension of
192
numismatics, Duchamp delays its economic impact, only to recover its intellectual
impact. In doing so, Duchamp restores to the viewer a purely speculative concept of
artistic production, which can only be thought through the expenditure of the terms that
define economic production.
Duchamp's works challenge classical notions of value, by radically redefining both
artistic reproduction and economic production through a revalorization of the
intellectual potential of mechanical reproduction. This study has demonstrated that the
concept of reproduction in Duchamp's works involves a new way of thinking about art.
By exploring the "infrathin" interval separating an original from its copy, Duchamp is
able to overcome the opposition between art and nonart. Taking mechanical
reproduction as a given, Duchamp redefines the "object" as a set of impressions, like
imprints drawn off the same template. Rather than considering the art object as unique,
Duchamp redefines it as multiples, ready-mades that are like a limited edition of prints
or coins, whose artistic value, like that of money, is negotiated by limited editions. In a
photographic print of Duchamp's ready-mades in his studio (taken by Man Ray in 1920)
there is a type chart from a French printing firm that serves to remind us of the
significance of printing to our understanding of his work:
Printing is not such a recent invention as it is usually believed. Block printing had been
used in China for more than sixteen hundred years; the Greeks and the Romans were
familiar with movable stamps or types; the picture books that appeared in the early
fifteenth century served as models for the experiments made by Gutenberg in Mainz in
1450 with wooden types.[57]

The history of printing and its affinity to techniques for founding and stamping marks
the convergence of the artistic and the economic domains. By revalorizing printing as a
medium that involves a conceptual potential, Duchamp does away with the opposition
between the artist and the printer, between fine art and artisanal technique. This attempt
to challenge the boundaries of art and technology explains his preference to define art as
"making," and the artist as "craftsman" or "art-worker" (DMD , 16, 20).
193
Quaintly labeled by Robert Smithson as the "spiritualist of Woolworth," because of his
relic-like, almost "spiritual" pursuit of the commonplace, Marcel Duchamp extends
through his works the most radical critique of the notion of artistic value.[58] Foregoing
both sentimentality and idealization, Duchamp explores how the notion of mechanical
reproduction, based on principles of economic production and expenditure, alters the
concept of artistic production. As this chapter has shown, however, Duchamp's appeal to
and use of economic notions, such as commercial transactions and monetary tokens, is
speculative rather than empirical. His interest in economics is conceptual involving an
understanding of the mechanisms involved in the generation and expenditure of value.
Duchamp is not concerned with the recovery of value in the classical economic sense
but rather, in its expendability, for his works attest to the redefinition of notions of both
artistic and economic production through the deliberate exploration of the notion of
economic and artistic reproduction. Just as the ready-made challenges the autonomy of
a work of art, not by postulating new value but instead by embodying its expenditure as
"criticism in action," so does Duchamp's invocation of economic categories function as
a way of challenging artistic categories. The result involves the subversion of art
through the elaboration of an unartistic concept of art (nonart), leading to a critique of
value as social and economic reality through its speculative expenditure.
According to Robert Lebel, Duchamp "derived his most obvious satisfaction from the
very modesty of his profits." Duchamp's enjoyment in minimal economic returns
corresponds to his efforts to maximize speculative "profits." It reflects Duchamp's
artistic strategy as the master of "tongue and cheek" humor. Commenting on Duchamp's
humor, Lebel suggests that its logic is more in the order of expenditure, than a rational
economy based on interest:
If at all costs a rule must be discerned in Duchamp's humour, we think this is it: that it
has to have a concrete resultconsequently his humour is never gratuitousbut the
flagrant disproportion between effort and result proclaimswith hidden noisethis
result as the collapse, or better yet, the preposterousness, of a technocracy paralyzed by
the very excess of its own efficiency.[59]
194
This disproportion between efforts and result in Duchamp's humour corresponds to the
strategies of delay that Duchamp deploys in the economic domain in order to challenge
the notion of value in the artistic domain. The invocation of a technocracy and even
bureaucracy serves to undermine through the expenditure of efficiency the economic
and artistic rationale of modernity. Like his father, who was a notary, and his symbolic

father, Franois Villon, who celebrated his poetic legacy in his Testament , Duchamp
commemorates his own artistic legacy as a stop-gap measure, a ready-made drain
stopper that is also an art medal. Poised between an art that has lost its physical bite, and
another, which can bite only because it is no longer art, Duchamp's stop-gap measure
emerges as both predicament and testament. As the notary of modernity, Duchamp
writes its most tortuous and deliberate "will," one whose language continues to this day
to be "killingly funny."
195

5
Rendez-vous with Marcel Duchamp: "Given"
Besides it's only the others that die.
Marcel Duchamp

During the last twenty years of his life, Marcel Duchamp secretly worked in his
Fourteenth Street studio with the help of his wife, Teeny Duchamp, on his testamentary
work, Given: 1) the waterfall, 2) the illuminating gas (Etant Donns: 1) la chute d'eau,
2) le gaz d'clairage ). During those twenty years, from 1946 to 1966, Duchamp's
friends and critics alike were willing to take his "apparent" artistic inactivity as the final
statement of his abandonment of art. They wanted to believe that Duchamp had finally
abandoned art for chess.[1] The public began to take literally Duchamp's pronouncement
that he preferred "living rather than working," by accepting his self-description "I am a
breather" (Je suis un respirateur ), heavy or otherwise.
Once Given was reassembled and displayed as an installation at The Philadelphia
Museum of Art, its defiant presence challenged the critics to a reevaluation of the entire
Duchampian corpus. Exhibited posthumously, this work illuminates Duchamp's oeuvre
retrospectively, recasting the viewer's perceptions and inviting a renewed evaluation of
his contribution to the history of modern art.[2] Given Duchamp's overt admission that
"eroticism" is the only ism he believes in, the sexual nature of this work was not
surprising, although the androgyny of the nude continues to occasion discussion. Rather,
what upset art critics more was Duchamp's apparent rejection of his own antiaesthetic
position, as exemplified by the ready-mades. In spite of the multimedia nature of this
installation,
196
Duchamp's ostensible return to a "figurative approach," was, for many, a sign of his
return to aestheticism.[3]
The most obvious and objectionable aspect of Given is its peephole character: the fact
that the viewer is fixed in a voyeuristic position, more akin to carnivals or pornographic
shows than to a museum. This sense of discomfort is all the more pronounced, given

that Duchamp's best known work, the Large Glass , is transparent and affords the
spectator a view from all sides. Despite these notable differences, John Cage suggests
that Given may be a translation of the Large Glass :
He would like us to believe, I think, that the Etant Donns is a translation of the Large
Glass the same work restated in a way which is very uncomfortable for us, because
we had grown to like the transparency for one thing. In Etant Donns he does the exact
opposite, imprisoning us at a particular distance and removing the freedom we had so
enjoyed in the Large Glass .[4]
Cage's hypothesis is based on Duchamp's own repeated observations (like a "refrain"),
that "he thought it would be interesting if artists would prescribe the distances from
which their work should be viewed. He didn't understand why artists were so willing to
have their work seen from any position."[5] Thus the spectator's predicament as voyeur
reflects Duchamp's deliberate gesture to hold the viewer at an arm's length. But why,
and why now? In our previous discussion of the ready-made In Advance of the Broken
Arm , I suggested that this work reflects Duchamp's effort to abandon painting by
literally holding it off, at an arm's length. At first sight, Given may be interpreted as a
return to figuration, and thus, by extension, to pictorial conventions. However,
Duchamp's strategy of imposing the peephole set-up on the spectator, while denying the
public visual access to this work (since for fifteen years this work could not be
photographically reproduced), attests to his continued inquiry into and challenge of the
spectator's position as a consumer of works of art.
But how is Given a "translation" (to use Cage's terms) of the Large Glass? The double
subtitle of Given: 1) the waterfall, 2) the illuminating gas provides some interesting
clues. Since both the waterfall and the illu 197

Fig. 68.
Marcel Duchamp, Water and Gas on All Floors
(Eau et gaz tous les tages), 1958. Imitated
ready-made: white lettering on blue enamel plate

(5 7/8 x 7 7/8 in.), facsimile of the plates affixed to

apartment houses in France in the early 1890s.
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art,
Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection.
minating gas are explicit visual elements in Given , their itemization in the title suggests
their affinity to ready-mades. This association is not altogether surprising considering
that the sign Water and Gas on All Floors (Eau et gaz tous les tages ; 1958) (fig. 68)
designating the comforts of modern life, or rather, its "conditions of possibility," was
one of Duchamp's favorite "ready-mades." During his first solo retrospective at the
Pasadena Art Museum (1963), Duchamp not only insisted that the ready-mades be
exhibited in the same room with the Large Glass but he also specified that the three
ready-mades Paris Air, Traveler's Folding Item , and Fountain be installed as they
appear in the Box in a Valise (fig. 69). To Walter Hopps's query, Duchamp responded
that they were like "ready-made talk of what goes on in the Glass ."[6]
Considering the nature of these works, dealing with air (gas, a pun on art and
evaporated paint) and water (Fountain , an instance of "dry art," signifying a departure
from the "splashing of paint"), we may begin to understand their implicit commentary
on both the Large Glass and Given. The typewriter folding case that separates the two
(bearing the brand name "Underwood") takes on new meaning once we consider
Duchamp's comment to Cage, that having a second studio "was a way of going
underground."[7] Duchamp's deliberate effort to go "underground,"
198
by hiding his work on Given for twenty years, illuminates the challenge that this work
presents to posterity: that of "getting out of the woods," a figurative allusion, perhaps, to
Duchamp's own efforts to move away from a traditional concept of artistic
representation. The traveling case of the Box in a Valise reiterates Duchamp's continued
desire for movement, already present in such early works as Nude Descending a
Staircase . But Duchamp's move away from pictorial traditions, which has defined so
conclusively the meaning of art to this day, is a movement that has unwrapped and
unfolded them, a gesture already hinted at in his earlier Traveler's Folding Item . By
exploring how Given functions not as an individual work but as a context for the entire
Duchampian corpus, the following pages will demonstrate how this work stages the
strategic interplay of the various artistic media, those of painting, photography, and
sculpture. The "appearance" of this work will be examined as a function of these
different media, as modes of "impression," that conflate artistic and mechanical forms
of reproduction.

Fig. 69.
Marcel Duchamp, Centerpiece Of Box in a Valise, series of 1961.
Galleria Schwarz, Milan.
Courtesy of Arturo Schwarz.
199

Fig. 70.
Marcel Duchamp, Given: 1) The Waterfall, 2) The
Illuminating Gas (Etant Donns: 1) La Chute D'eau,

2) Le Gaz d'clairage), 194666. Exterior view.

Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, gift of the
Cassandra Foundation.

Rendez-vous with the Visible: Cul-de-Sac

No need for birds and bees to tell us that.
Lord Byron

Most critical discussions of Marcel Duchamp's last work begin at the threshold, as if
one were looking at a painting:
At the end of a narrow, underlit room, little more than a corridor, stands an ancient
weather-worn door of wood, arched and encased in a surround of bricks. One senses at
once that the door cannot be opened but one is drawn towards it as if by a magnet, and
as one comes closer one becomes aware of two small holes, at eye level, drilled through
the wood. Beyond the door lies an extraordinary sight.[8]
John Golding's description of the door (fig. 70) is an echo of Anne d'Harnoncourt's
catalog notice, which is repeated by other critics since the work was not allowed to be
photographed for fifteen years. Invariably, an account of the door is followed by the
story of what is given, of what one sees beyond the door, as if this obstacle did not
really exist.[9] Octavio Paz, underlining the material obstacle presented by the door,
observes: "The door sets its material doorness in the visitor's way with a sort of aplomb:
dead end."[10] But this dead end becomes for him,
200
as for Golding, a mere pretext, the invitation to step through the threshold of the door
into the scene beyond. This door, "A real condemned door" (to use Paz's words),
"magnetically" (Golding) invites transgression, that is to say, it provokes one to look
beyond it and thus challenge its objective inviolability. Paz sees this door as different
from Duchamp's previous door, Door: II, rue Larrey , which is described by Arturo
Schwarz as a "three dimensional pun," a door which is permanently open and shut at the
same time.[11] The door of Given is for him "the opposite of hinges and their paradoxes,"
that is, a door whose objective reality condemns further exploration.[12]
It is exactly on the door, however, that the narrative of the spectator hinges. Such a
narrative presupposes another unspoken given: that of the enlightened spectator or
informed critic. What Golding's and Paz's interpretations fail to take into account is the
difficulty the viewer might have in finding the door and the peepholes in the first place
in a narrow, underlit room. Rather than being "magnetically" (Golding) attracted by the
door, the first-time observer has trouble identifying the room as a site for art, since an
underlit room does not correspond to our expectation of what constitutes display in a
museum. The darkened room, which is accidentally stumbled upon, is often
disregarded, despite the label of a work not visible within its confines. The only thing
that draws us into the room is the presence of other spectators like us, looking. Their

look initiates us into the possibility that there is something worthy to look at.
Conspiratorially, we join them, since after all, we are expected to look in a museum.
Unless the viewer is already initiated, she or he risks missing out entirely on the
experience, intoxicated as one is with the conviction that the museum is an archive for
visual consumption.
By contrast, the initiated critic comes to the museum informed. She or he "knows" that
Given is Duchamp's last and most mysterious work, and thus rediscovers only that
which is already given as looked for the raison d'tre of the museum as a readymade . Before the question of visibility, of what we see in Given , can even begin to be
posed, Duchamp has already fragmented the spectator's point of view, repositioning us
through this "hinge" experience within the institutional space of the museum. Detouring
the spectator from simply looking, Duchamp's Given makes us stumble on the idea of
the museum, on which "hinges" the reality of a
201
work of art. The idea of the museum is no less opaque than the door of Given , guarding
a mythical testament, that of the visible immortality of works of art. This visual
immortalization supplants the mortality of the artist, however, by substituting itself for
it.[13] The "visibility" of the work of art functions as the "cemetery" of the artist, since it
objectifies and perennially simulates the gesture of creation as the illusion of life.
Before we can ever begin to experience a work of art, we are "unhinged" by the
realization of the "ready-made" character of all art: the tautological logic of the
institutional conventions establishing the legitimacy of the museum as a cemetery of
authority, of "uniforms and liveries" (to use Duchamp's terms in the Large Glass ).
This experience of encountering the door to Given is prefigured by the experience of
Duchamp's ready-mades. Before arriving at the doorway of Given , the viewer has
already been initiated into the fate of ready-mades as artistic "givens." Despite one's
resistance to seeing ordinary objects transformed into art objects, the viewer has already
witnessed the artistic legitimization of works such as Bicycle Wheel (fig. 40, p. 98) and
Trap (fig. 39, p. 93). These ready-mades resist the visual appropriation of the public by
instilling a sense of discomfiture: an internal doubt or split as spectators, before the
elevation of an ordinary object through the artist's nomination (a rendez-vous, in
Duchamp's terms), into something differentan art object. The ready-made is a visual
lure; it is the perfect copy of an object, since it is the object itself. Roger Dadoun
understands Duchamp's materialist intervention in terms of this dissociation marking the
visible character of the object as "a sign which expropriates the object of its proper
character."[14] The visible appearance of the object thus emerges as an obstacle to its
perception as an "art-object." This visual expropriation of the object marks the
contextual nature of the ready-made as a sign that is only legible as a punning hinge
between an ordinary object and/or an art object. As a hinge, the ready-made is the
doorway between the visible and the discursive, between art and nonart, whose
"objective" character is merely the construct of this interplay as a "delay" effect.
At first sight, Duchamp's door in Given , which is an imported real-life Spanish country
door, resists because of its material abjectness and its being nailed shut its immediate
assimilation to the ready-mades. Since one

 202
can look through the peepholes, however, this door also functions as a window,
recalling two of Duchamp's earlier door/windows, Fresh Widow (1920; semi-readymade) and The Brawl at Austerlitz (1921). These works, like the door in Given , block
the spectator's view, thus inviting a reflection on the accessibility of vision as
constructed through spectatorship. Thus the door that the viewer literally stumbles on in
his or her efforts to see beyond is not merely the obstacle but also the medium through
which the always extraordinary dimension of the visible is figured. The problem is not
merely that the visible is "ready-made," constructed through the logic of the museum,
but also that the act of looking involves a construct (as that which gives itself to sight
the "peep show") of varied modalities combining the image and its discursive frames of
reference. This door thus emerges as a pun on the immediacy of the visible, since it also
acts as an obstacle to understanding the structures of spectatorship that frame visual
experience. The material obstacle that the door presents becomes the site of reflection
on the mediated character of vision within the institutional space of the museum. In the
pages that follow the construction of vision, spectatorship, and gender will be at issue.

Looking at the Looking, Even

The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
Oscar Wilde

The spectator makes the picture.

Marcel Duchamp

Once we are on the threshold of the door to Given , an unusual sight confronts us (fig.
71). Looking through two small holes at eye level, we find ourselves in front of a
display akin to both window displays and to a rudimentary peep show. Golding
summarizes this "extraordinary" sight as follows:
On a plane parallel to the door and some few feet beyond is a brick wall with a large
uneven opening punched through it. Beyond and bathed in an almost blinding light is
the figure of a recumbent woman modelled with great delicacy and veracity but also
slightly troubling because the illusion of three dimensionality is strong but not totally
convincing (the figure is in fact in about three-quarter relief). She lies on a couch of
twigs and branches and she opens her legs out towards the spectator with no false
prurience or sense of shame.[15]
203

Fig. 71.
Marcel Duchamp, Given: 1) The Waterfall, 2) The Illuminating Gas (Etant Donns:
1) La Chute D'eau, 2) Le Gaz d'clairage), 194666. Interior view.
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, gift of the Cassandra Foundation.
Before examining this scene, it is important to consider the voyeuristic context in which
it takes placethe way in which the gaze of the viewer is set up. The problem with the
scene is its "hyperreality," its excessive realism, which stages eroticism as a "too"
obvious spectacle.[16] The dioramalike character of the scene is further emphasized by
the presence of an almost blinding light, an excess of illumination. The enigma that
Given presents to the viewer is like no other. What mystifies the viewer is exactly
204
the overdetermined "explicitness" of Given : its hypervisibility and emphatic sexuality.
The excessive clarity of the scene makes us question the unquestionable: "What then is
less clear than light?"[17] This scene problematizes one of the major givens of the
Western pictorial and philosophical tradition: the equation of reason and light, since
light here functions as the sign of doubt. The excessive illumination of the scene makes

us uncomfortable, breaking up the structure of voyeurism, its raison d'treas the

equation of sight and pleasure.[18]
The perspective of the viewer is fragmented by the hyperreality of the image, by its
overdetermined character. The illumination of the scene illuminates our gaze,
effectively disrupting the coincidence of vision and the reality of sex. Thus, the
verisimilitude of the scene, the reduction of the body to reality, is derealized, since
vision itself is refracted by being staged through the peephole apparatus. The scene
presented to the spectator can be neither anticipated nor participated in. The traditional
structure of spectatorship is dislocated, since the viewer cannot simply identify him- or
herself through looking, and thus take pleasure in "making" or appropriating the picture
by inscribing his or her own desire. This image "unmakes" its viewer. The authority and
the legitimacy that Western "retinal" painting confers on its spectator are here undone,
since the blatant sexuality of the image challenges the act of looking. The coincidence
of the eye and the "I," represented in the notion of perspective as a point of view, is
irrevocably disrupted.[19] This is why, despite its explicit sexual content and its peephole
character, Given cannot be equated with the objectification of the female body through
voyeurism. While feminist and film studies have elucidated the ideological
underpinnings of the male gaze through an analysis of the role of the camera and
structures of spectatorship, Given challenges such a reduction by objectifying the very
presuppositions that govern the visible"[20]
A tableau vivant that travesties itself as a "nature morte," Given restages the issues that
Duchamp elaborated in sculpture-morte (fig. 57, p. 150), or more explicitly, in
TORTURE-MORTE (fig. 56, p. 148). Contemporary to Given, these assemblages stage
the dead-end character of visual illusion, as it attempts to replicate the real. The
excessive realism of these assemblages reveals that they, like Given , are false doorways
to the "real." They problematize the indexical nature of vision, its ability to
205
refer or point, since their simulated reality cannot be resumed either in the order of
demonstration or designation. Rather than taking for granted the referential relation of
vision and sexuality (as art historians have done), or by reducing vision to the ideology
of the gaze (as feminist critics have suggested), this essay will resituate the notion of
sexual difference by questioning how vision determines its "modes of appearance" (to
use Duchamp's terms) in Given . At issue, therefore, is the phenomenality of vision, its
construction, and its effects.[21] In order to explore how the visible is constructed in
Given through the displacement of indexical relations, it is vital to examine two of its
major "hinges," the body and the landscape, which are both traditional sites in the
history of art for the mimetic creation of "reality."
To begin with, the androgynous nature of this nude figure (the "last nude," to echo
Lyotard) is ambiguous, with passively and/or aggressively bared genitals that are echoed
in the pointed gesture of the raised and disproportionately enlarged arm that is
assertively clasping a gas lamp. Recalling Gustave Courbet's Woman with a Parrot
(1866), the nude's upraised arm holds a gas lamp, instead of the vividly colored parrot.
The painterliness of the parrot, whose range of colors recalls the painter's palette, may
be an allusion to Courbet's own fascination with pictoriality.[22] Replacing the parrot, the

"phallic" upturn of the gas lamp illuminates Duchamp's invitation to the spectator to
renew his or her "gaze," by literally casting painting in a new light. While drawing on
the conventions of painting, Duchamp's installation of the plaster cast nude also
announces its imminent demise. The androgynous character of the nude, manifest in the
deictical gesture of the raised arm with the gas lamp, activates the nude as a potential
agent or subject, rather than as a mere object of display. Although more can be said
about the androgyny of the nude, little has been said about its "dead" or "mechanical"
character. The sexual ambiguity of the nude is compounded by a more profound
ambiguity: that of the reality of its "life." Before examining some of Duchamp's explicit
references to nudes in a series of lithographs based on Courbet, it is helpful to consider
his allusions to Ren Magritte's (18981967) painting The Threatened Assassin
(L'Assassin menac ; 1926) (fig. 72).[23]
In addition to presenting a mannequin (a "dead nude"), Magritte's The Threatened
Assassin , like Given , stages the structure of voyeurism as a
206

Fig. 72
Ren Magritte, The Threatened Assassin (L'Assassin Menac), 1926.
Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
207

gendered gaze, since the ambiguous "assassin" and/or "policeman" in the foreground is
conflated with the gaze of the viewer. This painting represents the fragmentation of
pictorial perspective or point of view through the multiplication of figures of assassins,
policemen, and/or witnesses within its frame. The two "assassins/ policemen" in the
foreground are conflated in the figure of the man listening to the gramophone, as
witnessed by three men in the background, surveying the scene from behind the
balcony. These three figures look at the viewer looking. The painting sets into motion a
delirium of vision, a variety of male spectatorspotential assassins and policemen,
organized around the spread-eagled nude. Magritte's painting, like Duchamp's Given ,
stages both the transgressive (assassin) and the rationalizing (policing) dimensions of
the spectator's gaze. The victim at the center of the scene, the nude as both text and
pretext of representation, embodies the "deadening" or even "murderous" character of
the male gaze, as it objectifies (and thus "kills") the body offered for viewing. The body
of the nude thus emerges merely as residue, the dead torture (torture morte ) of the male
gaze that has immortalized it in the history of painting. The violence of the gaze,
however, paradoxically killed a mannequin, a figure embodying ready-made
conventions.
Duchamp's allusions to Courbet's paintings make explicit the structures of spectatorship
and voyeurism implicit in his works. The lithograph Selected Details After Courbet
(Morceaux choisis d'aprs Courbet ; March 1968) (fig. 73) reproduces Courbet's
famous painting in the Barnes's Collection Woman with White Stockings (fig. 74), with
one remarkable difference. At the bottom of Duchamp's lithograph is the additional
figure of a falcon (faucon , in French, a pun on faux con ) who disrupts our perspective
of the visual field, since the falcon in the foreground is disproportionately smaller
although it is closer to our field of vision. Presented as a peeping torn, the falcon
embodies visual prurience since his name is a pun on faux con (false sex, in French).
This verbal pun on false sex (faux con ) competes with and displaces our attention from
the visual referent, the "true sex" (vrai con ) of the nude's bared genitals.[24] Embodying
the voyeuristic desires of the spectator, the falcon makes explicit the representational
conventions that define the construction of sexuality as visual referent. The supposed
reality of sex as visual fact is reframed by the verbal puns that play the falcon off
against the facticity of sex.
208

Fig. 73.
Marcel Duchamp, Selected Details
after Courbet (Morceaux Choisis
d'aprs Courbet), second state, 1968.
Etching pulled on japan vellum, 19 7/8 x
12 3/4 in.
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art,
Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection.

Fig. 74.
Gustave Courbet, Woman with White Stockings
(Femme Aux Bas Blances), 1861.
Courtesy of The Barnes Foundation, Merion Station, Pennsylvania.
The punning reference to the genitals of the nude can also be seen in another lithograph
from the same series as Selected Details After Courbet , entitled The Bec Auer (January
1968) (fig. 75). Superimposed in this lithograph depicting a nude who is clasping a gas
lamp like the one in Given is the figure of a male companion whose hairy head
decenters our gaze from the woman's genitalia, thus resituating the sexual referent of the
image. The viewer's gaze of the woman's head is physically blocked by the man's elbow
and internalized within the image through his gaze back at her. The spectator's
voyeurism is illuminated, as it were, by the man's privileged visual access to this scene.
The title of this lithograph. The Bec Auer , which refers to the brand name of an electric
bulb, reinforces this suggestion. Duchamp thus illuminates the spectator's gaze in a
manner that recalls the falcon (faux con ) in Selected Details After Courbet (Morceaux
choisis d'aprs Courbet ), which is a pun on the viewer's gaze as visual delectation. As
the figure of desire, the gaze is equated with the falcon's beak pecking at favorite
morsels, "morceaux choisis ." This interplay of visual and verbal puns suggests that the
"illuminating gas" in the title of Given may refer to and illuminate the "gaze" as well.
These lithographs illuminate the conventions of spectatorship by documenting the
failure of the male gaze to penetrate or objectify the notion of sexuality.
209

Fig. 75.
Marcel Duchamp, The Bec Auer, Second State, 1968. Etching pulled on
Japan vellum, 19 7/8 x 12 13/16 in. Courtesy of The Philadelphia
Museum of Art, Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection.
For the display of nudity in these works makes visible the dead-end character of
painting understood as a peep show
Duchamp's allusions to sexuality in Given parody its "reality" through his punning
reproductions of Courbet. The "sexuality" of the nude is depicted as it is being
"reproduced," assembled and taken apart, realized and derealized, simultaneously. Thus,
the pictorial representation of sexuality emerges as a mere decoy, an object simulating
the illusion of life by acting mechanically as lifelike. The nude in Given derives her
eroticism from her mannequin-like character: her lifelike semblance stages life
hyperrealisticallymore successfully than life itself. The discourse of eroticism in
Given is thus revealed transitively, not as an attribute of
210
appearance but as a movement, the declension of an apparition (recalling Duchamp's
famous Nude Descending a Staircase , No. 2) (fig. 7, p. 27). Rather than merely
revealing the naked sex, the absence of pubic hair on the sex of the nude also alludes to
the pictorial tradition throughout which the female sex had been dissimulated, and thus
outlined, even more emphatically. Duchamp's allusion in his notes to the veiled sex, the
"Abominable abdominal furs" (Notes , 232) becomes a pun on fur (fourrure ) as mad

laughter (fou rire) (Notes , 272). This pun stages the ambiguous meaning of genitalia in
Given . It designates the recognition that sexual organs may be only the "indirect" index
of gender, and consequently, no more reliable than a joke, like the false mustache and
beard added to Leonardo's Mona Lisa in Duchamp's rectified ready-made L.H.O.O.Q.
(fig. 53, p. 140). Instead of veiling the female sex in Given by covering it up with
"abdominal furs," Duchamp bares it, or rather, shaves it like L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved (fig.
55, p. 146). The field of twigs (shavings) surrounding the nude marks this displacement.
Sexuality is thus presented as a movement, the imperceptible visual and linguistic slip
(the fake striptease), enacting through the anamorphosis of a pun the transitional
character of eroticism.
This construction of eroticism as a movement can also be seen in Duchamp's implicit
reference in Given to Albrecht Drer's Draftsman Doing Perspective Drawings of a
Woman from De Symmetria Humanorum Corpum (Nuremberg, 1532) (fig. 76). In this
print a stylus is interposed between the eye of the spectator and the view point (which
corresponds to the sex of the woman). The stylus is an archaic instrument, a machine for
the organization of perspective, at whose edge or point the viewer adjusts his or her eye.
At some distance, there is a small gate through which the visual rays of the body are
projected. Jean Clair, in "Marcel Duchamp et la tradition des perspecteurs," describes
the scene in similar terms, without dwelling, however, on its meaning.[25] The figure of
the body viewed through the stylus elucidates the nature of eroticism in Duchamp as a
rhetorical operation .[26] In the Drer etching the stylus , which is normally a writing
utensil, doubles as a visual instrument for the construction of the body, designating
sexuality as the site (sight) of coincidence, constituted through both writing and vision.
By analogy to Drer's etching, sexuality thus emerges in Duchamp's Given
211

Fig. 76.
Albrecht Drer, Draftsman Doing Perspective Drawings of a Woman,
from De Symmetria Humanorum Corpum (Nuremberg, 1532).
as an artificial construct, like the construction of the body in the history of perspective.
Rather than merely representing an anatomical destiny or the embodiment of a gendered
gaze, as Drer does, eroticism in Given emerges as the figure of passage. Its transitional
nature as the movement of style marks it simultaneously as the site of composition and
decomposition, of life and deathEros and Thanatos. The transitive nature of this

movement cannot be embodied and figured through the body as either an object or
image. Instead the body becomes the "hinge," a frame of reference for sexuality
understood as the figure of style . For Duchamp, "the logic of appearance" is expressed
by the "style" (Notes , 69), indicating his recognition that form is merely "conditional"
(Notes , 71). This is why the transgressive aspects of voyeurism in Given are shortcircuited. Eroticism cannot be reduced to a gaze that isolates sexual difference from its
metonymic position, its circuit of signification. Since sexual difference in Duchamp's
works is conditional , it can also be assimilated to indifference. Femininity and
masculinity are set not in opposition to each other, but in conjunction. Their strategic
coincidence marks a repetition, whose difference emerges not as a set term,
ontologically grounded, but as the declension, the descending nude outlying the trace of
the figurative movement of style.
212

Casting: The Die of Eros

. . .males and females are cast in the same mold.
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

The transitive nature of the nude in Given , its "passage," becomes explicit once we
examine the nude in the context of the scene, framed by the brick wall through which it
is perceived. This brick wall also acts as a screen, blocking a view, already restricted by
the peepholes of Given . This wall marks the site of an ambiguous passage, since it is
unclear whether the break in the wall acts as a "doorway" for the nude or whether it is
more like a window whose solid frame impedes the viewer's visual perception of the
scene.[27] This inability to distinguish the function of the frame as a foreground or as a
background element is present in a lithograph, contemporary to Given , from the same
series mentioned above, entitled The Bride Stripped Bare . . . (February 1968). In this
lithograph a female nude crouches, surrounded by an aura that makes the figure look
like a cutout, rendering its outline undecidable as far as questions of foreground or
background are concerned. This allusion to the visual aura of the figure can also be seen
as a pun on The Bec Auer (fig. 75), a lithograph in the same series, of a female figure
holding a gas lamp whose outline is disrupted by the superimposition of a male figure
cradling his head in his hands. These two lithographs are visual and verbal allusions to
the aura (nimbus shape) outlined in the wall, framing our vision of Given . The opening
in the brick wall acts as a doorway, whose shape frames and thus brings the visible into
view, while bracketing it off as a screen.
This carved brick aperture brings to mind yet another example of Duchamp's doors, his
Door for Gradiva (Porte pour Gradiva ; 1937) (fig. 77), a glass door for Andr Breton's
gallery, destroyed at Duchamp's request when the gallery closed down. A drawing of
this door, Sketch of "Door for Gradiva ," depicts the silhouette of a couple of enlaced
lovers as a cutout. Resembling Ren Magritte's painting The Unexpected Answer (La
Rponse imprvue ; 1933), Duchamp's doorlike Magritte'sis ambiguous, since it is
closed while bearing the outline of an aperture. Duchamp's Door for Gradiva presents
yet another instance of a "hinge," since its transparence outlines an undecidable passage.

This glass door thus functions as a visual pun that affirms incompatible realities. It acts
as a hinge demarcating the play of the door as site of both opening and closure, a
transparent surface opening onto a space only to block entry into
213

Fig. 77.
Marcel Duchamp, Door for Gradiva (Porte pour Gradiva),
1968 (original version of 1937, Paris, destroyed). Plexiglass,
78 x 52 in. Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt.
Courtesy of Arturo Schwarz.
it. The outline of this couple in profile confuses the viewer's perception by its reversible
character, since it is impossible to distinguish the inside from the outside and depth from
surface. This glass door that frames the viewer's field of vision, like the brick wall in
Given , brings the visible into view only to draw attention to its limited character.
Door for Gradiva thus acts as a "hinge," whose liminal surface alludes to Duchamp's
exploration in his Notes of the "infrathin" (infra mince ) principle (Notes , 910). The
"infrathin" is defined as a surface that acts both as a separating interval and a screen:
"infrathin separationbetter/ than screen, because it indicates/ interval (taken in one
sense) and/ screen (taken in another sense)separation has the 2 senses male and
female" (Notes , 9). The infrathin is both a surface and an interval, whose deictical
character points in two different directions at the same time. Its ambiguous
214

Fig. 78.
Marcel Duchamp, Door: 11, Rue Larrey (Porte: 11, Rue
Larrey), 1927. Three-dimensional pun: a door that
permanently opens and shuts at the same time, made
by a carpenter after Duchamp's design, 86 5/8 x 24 11/16 in.
Collection Arman, New York. Courtesy of Arturo Schwarz.
215

nature prefigures the role of eroticism in Given , as the "index mark" of the androgynous
sexuality of the nude, pointing in two different senses, or sexes (male and female), at the
same time.[28] The opening in the brick wall in Given can thus be understood according
to the logic of the "infrathin" principle, acting as the hinge to what is seen (a pun on
"thin") in Given . This hinge opens onto two directions in the erotic scene of Given , like
Duchamp's Door: 11, rue Larrey (fig. 78), indicating that sexuality is "hinged" on the
reversibility of the male and female positions.[29] Sexuality is presented, therefore, as an
interplay whose ambiguous indexical character resituates the notion of sexual difference
and its equation with visibility.
Duchamp's definition of the "infrathin" suggests that this principle may also be applied
to the nude in Given , insofar as it is a mold. Commenting on molds, Duchamp observes
the same principle of infrathin separation: "2 forms cast in/ the same mold(?) differ/
from each other/ by infra thin separative/ amount" (Notes , 35). The molded character of
the nude (its lifelike sculptural dimension) erases the separation between life and death
through an imperceptible, artificial difference. This difference that marks the nature of
the mold is summarized by Anne d'Harnoncourt as follows: "The paradox of an
impression taken from life, captured in lifeless material, works to create a form of
realism that seems highly artificial, so intimately related to the real thing and yet so
remote."[30] This artificial separation between life and death stages their difference as
"hinged" on the principle of their "infra-thin" separation. The mold is "the
(photographic) negative," a negative impression "from the perspective of form and
color," as Duchamp observes in his notes to the White Box (In the Infinitive, [WMD ,
85]). The photographic aspects of the molded nude in Given thus allude to its
artificiality not merely as an object but also as an art object. In this work Duchamp
plays with the concept of art, insofar as its modes of impression (apparition),
photographic or sculptural, highlight the contrived "look" of the nude, its hyperreality.
This analysis of the nude as a mold is reinforced by Duchamp's implicit allusion to
molds in Door for Gradiva , since the imprint of Gradiva's existence, the trace of her
apparition, is preserved in a mold. The notion of the mold is embedded in the reversible
hinge character of the wall in Given serving as a further reflection on the transitive
nature of
216
the eroticism of the nude. The nude is a mold, and thus a "ready-made," a form molded
on another, similar and yet different from itself. The "infrathin" separation between the
model and its copy becomes the site (a pun on sight) of the fragile interval separating a
body from its impression, life from art, a work of art from its copy. In Given this
"infrathin" separation becomes the deceptive and reversible interval of sexual
difference.
Duchamp's obsession with molds, captured in such objects as Female Fig Leaf (fig. 79),
Dart-Object (fig. 80), and Wedge of Chastity (Coin de chastet ; 1954) (fig. 81), can be
seen as yet another exploration of his theories elaborated through the notion of the
"infrathin." These figures turn eroticism inside out like a glove. Sexuality emerges as
the obverse trace of the female sex molded negatively by the imprint of the female body,
as in Female Fig Leaf . In Dart-Object the protrusive presence of the "dart" (simulated

riblike phallus) suggests the outward projection of an absence as a positive shape. Jean
Clair notes that in Dart-Object gender is envisaged as a break (coupure ), as a division
within being, as a lack that is but the effect in three-dimensional space, of a fourdimensional projection. In other words, he suggests that gender is merely the effect of
an ironic causality, that of a system of projection whose laws challenge the conventional
rationale both of conventional geometry and the gendered gaze.[31]
The conjunction of the male and female positions is made explicit by Duchamp in
Wedge of Chastity , where both shapes are embedded in each other. The concavity of
"femininity" is welded to the convexity of "maleness" in the outline of the wedge, yet
another "hinge" by which Duchamp marks the liminal character of sexuality. The two
shapes emerge as

Fig. 79,
Marcel Duchamp, Female Fig Leaf (Feuille de Vigne Femelle),
1950. Galvanized plaster, 3 1/2 x 5 1/2 x 4 7/8 in.
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, gift of Mrs.
Marcel Duchamp.

Fig. 80,
Marcel Duchamp, Dart-Object (Objet-Dard), 1951.
Galvanized plaster with inlaid lead, 3 x 8 x 2 3/8 in.
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, gift of
Mrs. Marcel Duchamp.

 217

Fig. 81.
Marcel Duchamp, Wedge Of Chastity (Coin De
Chastet), 1954. Sculpture of two interlocking parts,
galvanized plaster for the wedge and dental plastic
for the base, 2 1/4 x 3 3/8 in.
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art.
reversible molds of each other, an interpenetration of forms that informs their
interpretation. This visual and discursive ambiguity that marks Duchamp's
representation of sexuality is elucidated by his comment on the Wedge of Chastity as
"the meaning of the wedge driven in (like a nail), not the place" (le sens du coin qui
s'enfonce, pas le lieu ).[32] The word enfoncer also means breaking open a door, thus
referring explicitly to the ambiguous character of the door in Given , which is both
broken open and shut with nails, at the same time. The wedge as a corner (coin, in
French) in Wedge of Chastity becomes the mark of sexual difference through coitus
(coit , in French), a turning point that through reiteration marks the objective
"coincidence" (or is it "coitcidence"?) of the male and the female positions.
This pun on eroticism as a wedge, corner, and turning point, is made explicit in
Duchamp's Anemic Cinema (Anmic Cinma; 192526) (fig. 82), where the anagram on
the rotary disk "Have you ever put the marrow of the sword into the stove of the loved
one?" (Avez vous dj mis la molle de l'pe dans le pole de l'aime? ) captures,
through the spiraling movement of the disk, the visual and literary convergence of the
male and female positions as puns on the "sword/penis" and the "stove/vagina." The
figure of sexuality is here dubbed through further wordplays on stove (le pole , which
in French also means a shroud that covers the dead).[33] This process of bilingual
dubbing inscribes death within eros as its obverse. Commenting on the effect of the
movement of the spiral on the viewer, Duchamp remarks that "The spiral at rest doesn't
give/ any impression of relief/ (or at least only imagined/ psychologically)/" (Notes ,
170). Duchamp's observation confirms the vertiginous conflation of sexuality
218

Fig. 82.
Marcel Duchamp, Anemic Cinema (Anmic Cinma),
192526. Film made in collaboration with Man Ray and
Marc Allgret. Ten optical discs alternated with nine
discs with puns. Courtesy of Arturo Schwarz.
and death, as motion (life) and rest (death) converge in the rotation of the spiral.
In the quote above Duchamp also suggests that the spiraling movement of the rotoreliefs
is connected with the visual illusion of relief, thereby suggesting the affinity of motion
to both molds and photographic negatives. Likewise, the puns on "la molle de l'pe "
and "lepole de l'aime " converge anagrammatically, signifying the reduction of sexual
difference to indifference.[34] This punning visual and literary play in Anemic Cinema
helps elucidate the status of eroticism in Given . It suggests that sexual difference
cannot be understood as a difference intrinsic to the body, as a set visual and discursive
signifier, but rather that "difference" is merely the illusory effect of movement, that is to
say, shifts in the rotation of the body as a punning "hinge." Thus sexual difference in
Given emerges not as an anatomical fact but rather as the projection of the gaze of the
spectator that attempts to "fix" and thus put to rest the androgynous appearance of the
nude. The nude is merely a "hinge," a figurative device that acts like a pun, swinging
back and forth between the male and female positions. Consequently, Given stages the
gaze as a mechanical illusion whose "truth" is no more real than the reality of puns.[35]
219
The visual seduction operated by the nude in Given can be considered as the
"collapsible approximation" (one that can be taken to pieces, dismantled)
(l'approximation dmontable ), that is, a seduction that is undone by the way in which it
is set up. As Duchamp specifies in his instructions to Given , "By approximation I mean
a margin (or edge) of ad libidum (a play on libido and male genitalia) in the dismantling
(dismounting) and the remantling" (remounting) ("Par approximation j'entends une
marge d'ad libitum dans le dmontage et remontage ").[36] The gaze of the viewer is
dismantled by the very spectacle that stages it as an assemblage of puns that simulate

sexuality. The sexual connotation of the work is undone by its contextual character,
since the nude is not a static object but a "hinge" to an assemblage of visual and literary
puns. Given presents an assemblage (montage ) of visual, literary, and institutional
givens , whose play, as contextual frames of reference, dismantles the reality of vision,
bringing out its approximate nature as the "hinge" between appearance and apparition.

Given: The Delayed Snapshot

An oeuvre by itself doesn't exist. It's an optical illusion.
Marcel Duchamp

To make a painting or sculpture as one would wind a reel of cinematic film.

Marcel Duchamp

Having examined the nude and its function in Given , I will now focus on the
illusionistic landscape that frames it, on its "startlingly naturalistic and eerily unreal
character," to evoke Anne d'Harnoncourt and Walter Hopps's description.[37] The
background landscape in Given is a photograph retouched by hand, which is yet another
ready-made alluding to the general photographic illusionism of the work. Duchamp's
references to photography, and particularly chronophotography, in works such as Nude
Descending a Staircase, Nos. 1 and 2 (figs. 9 and 7), express his interest in the readymade character of photography. This interest is already manifest in Pharmacy , a
commercial print of a winter landscape retouched through the addition of red and green
dots. When seen through special red and green glasses, these dots tend to overlap and
produce the illusion of relief. Considered as an early instance of Duchamp's experiments
with anaglyphic vision, Pharmacy anticipates both the photographic aspects of Given ,
as well as its anaglyphic character: its play with the illusion of relief, and thus, an
implicit allusion to sculpture.
This double allusion to photography and sculpture can also be seen in
220

Fig 83.
Marcel Duchamp, Moonlight on the Bay at Basswood (Clair De
Lune Sur La Baie A Basswood), 1953. Pen, pencil, talcum powder,
and chocolate on blue blotter, 10 3/8 x 7 1/4 in.
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art.
another of Duchamp's later works. Moonlight on the Bay at Basswood (Clair de lune
sur la bale a Basswood ; 1953) (fig. 83), a work contemporary to Given , which is partly
drawn from life and partly from a photomural, so that two different gestures are
simultaneously conflated in one image. The traditional role of painting as a mimetic
rendering of reality is subverted, since this drawing also takes a photomural as its point
of reference. Photography undermines painterly traditions, since it substitutes itself for
them. It displaces artisanal production through mechanical
221
reproduction (its "ready-made" nature), and thus redefines artistic creation. Moreover,
Moonlight is no ordinary drawing, since it includes a variety of materialsink, pencil,
crayon, talcum powder, and chocolate on blotting paper. The addition of such unusual
materials as talcum powder and chocolate to the drawing of this landscape modifies our
painterly and photographic expectations.[38] Their inclusion suggests the intrusion of

material ingredients from everyday life. Both the talcum powder and the chocolate are
associated with molds: talcum powder can be applied to the body, like the plaster of a
mold, and chocolate is often molded into different shapes. The landscape of Moonlight
thus presents the allusion to relief, inscribed this time not visually (anaglyphically) but
literally, insofar as these elements are constitutive of the image. They inscribe
anamorphically the trace of the body into the image, like the negative imprint of a body
in a mold.
This inscription of photography, which is also an indirect allusion to sculpture in the
landscape of Given , is echoed by Duchamp's own gesture of drawing a landscape into
the Large Glass in Bedridden Mountains (Cols Alits ; 1959) and in his literal
association of ready-mades and photography in his note entitled "Without glue" (Sans
colle ): "/Make an assembly of/ 'ready mades' balanced/ one on top of the other/ and
photograph them/ (Jackstraws so to/ speak)" (Notes ) 167). This statement clarifies the
contextually assembled, photographically superimposed, and ready-made character of
both the nude and the landscape in Given . The reference to "jackstraws" provides a clue
to the game that Given sets up. It tells us that no element in the scene can be picked up
and singled out without disturbing all the others.[39] Duchamp's reference to "jackstraws"
suggests that Given can only be deciphered strategically, so as to preserve the contextual
nature of the elements, since each element of the assemblage is merely a "hinge."
Likewise, the photographic and sculptural references in Given do not provide stable
frames of reference as distinct modes of artistic representation. Their instability is
prefigured in Tu m' (1918) (fig. 84), Duchamp's "assemblage" of his ready-mades in a
painting. In Tu m' Duchamp does not reproduce the ready-mades directly; instead, he
casts their elongated shadows on a canvas (the bicycle wheel and the hat rack). Instead
of a depiction of Bottle Rack (fig. 37, p. 93), however, we only find its
222

Fig. 84.
Marcel Duchamp, Tu m', 1918. Oil and pencil on canvas with bottle brush, three safety
pins,
and one bolt, 27 1/2 x 10 ft., 2 3/4 in.
Courtesy of Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, gift from the Estate of Katherine
S. Dreier.
223
metonymic displacements: the projection of a corkscrew on the canvas and a brush
(used to clean bottles, or lamps) sticking out, perpendicular to the field of vision of the
viewer.[40] As if to further underline the pointed nature of this work, a painted hand
(signed by the commercial artist A. Klang) points its index finger to the brush and to a
series of strips of commercial paint samples (copied from a catalog of oil paints,
according to Schwarz).[41] At the center, the canvas is slashed and held together by safety
pins. Rosalind Krauss interprets the cast of the shadows as "signifying these objects by
means of indexical traces." Her argument relies on the pointing finger as evidence of the
indexical character of the image, which she interprets as a photographic allusion.[42]
Tu m' , however, cannot be reduced to a photographic allusion, since the photographic
character of the ready-made is also equated by Duchamp with the act of nomination.
Although he summarizes his operation on the ready-made in photographic terms, as a
matter of timing, this "snapshot" effect is also equated with the temporal and
performative dimension of nomination: "The important thing is just/ this matter of
timing, this snapshot effect, like/ a speech delivered on no matter/ what occasion, but at
such and such an hour ."[43] The analogy between the photograph and the ready-made
involves a "snapshot effect" triggered either by the push of a button or by the shutter
(stutter) of language. In both of these cases the indexical gesture is undermined, since
the pointed hand and the ability of language to point are turned back on themselves.
This reflexive gesture is alluded to by the title Tu m .' The photograph and the readymade thus present the reification of the artist's hand: they negate its intervention in the
creation of the object.
Duchamp summarizes the ambivalent nature of his artistic intervention when he
comments in his interviews to Cabanne: "It's fun to do things by hand. I'm on guard,
because there's the danger of the 'hand' (la patte ) which comes back, but since I'm not
doing works of art, it's fine" (DMD, 106.) The danger of the "hand" (literally, the paw,
but also a homonym of paste, an allusion to the mold, in French) brings together
references to the indexical character of the hand, only to suggest the erasure of its
imprint (the mold). The ready-made is marked by a process analogous to both
photographic impression and the sculptural mold, both of which, however,
paradoxically derealize the object by pointing to it (indexically).
224
The gesture of pointing (demonstration) thus signifies their ambiguity as modes of
representation. The indexical character of Tu m ' and of Given points to their readymade reality as artistic objects, the fact that their "completed illusion negates the

process that went into its artistic creation."[44] The pointing hand is erased by the
ambiguous indexical inscription of the ready-made, which points toward the object,
photographically and sculpturally, only to elide the intervention of the hand through
verbal intervention. This play on the index is already suggested in the text of the
Preface to the Large Glass (fig. 85), which also establishes the major formal elements
of Given .
For Krauss, this language of rapid exposures that produces a state of rest as an isolated
sign is the language of photography. She finds this process implied in the subtitle of the
Large Glass , which is Delay in Glass .[45] However, this insight is complicated, as
shown earlier, by the ambiguous nature of the indexical sign in Duchamp's Tu m' and in
Given . The photographic illusion of Given is merely an appearance, the construct of the
index, as a mode of determination. Given can no more be reduced to a photograph than
to a ready-made.
The impossibility of reducing Given to a photographic allusion is prefigured in the
ambiguity of indexical gestures in Tu m .' The index finger in Tu m ' points toward
pictoriality, to the bottle brush and painting samples, only to redirect the viewer's gaze
to their commercial, ready-made character. Thus the gesture of pointing to painting
corresponds to pointing away from it. By alluding literally to the ready-mades (the
brush sticking out of the painting), Duchamp also undoes the very gesture of painting,
since the brush (a sculptural ready-made object) points to itself as the instrument
constructing the appearance of objects in painting. Tu m ' thus stages the play of
painting, photography, sculpture, and language as different modes of "impression."
Painting as a retinal imprint is mimicked by the photographic negative, which, as the
cast of shadows and the brush, constitutes a kind of "shadow sculpture" or mold. As a
sculptural mold, however, Tu m ' lapses into language, capturing its deictical fold. Tu m '
inscribes both literal allusions to Given (the brush stands in as the indexical mark of the
gas lamp) and formal allusions to its mixed-media character as an assemblage of
painting, photography, sculpture, and language.
However, neither painting nor photography nor sculpture nor language
225

Fig. 85.
Marcel Duchamp, Preface to The Large Glass, from The Bride Stripped
Bare by Her Bachelors, Even: A Typographic Version by Richard
Hamilton of Marcel Duchamp's Green Box, trans. George Heard
Hamilton. Stuttgart: Hansjrg Mayer, 1976.
functions traditionally. In each of these cases the hand of the artist is elided by a
mechanical procedure. The painter's brush is displaced by the camera, the photograph as
a negative imprint or mold threatens to become sculpture, sculpture is undermined by
the ready-made object, and the object is derealized through its title. Visual meaning thus
dissolves into linguistic pun. This movement through the visual arts into language and
back in Tu m ' and in Given demonstrates that all lifelike illusion is captured through
mechanical procedures. Both visual and discursive reproductions suppress the artist's
hand, the artisanal intervention, only to draw attention to it, a gesture analogous to the
ready-made.
The "assembled" character of Tu m ' suggests that Given does not function as an
individual work but as a context for the entire Duchampian corpus. While Duchamp
expresses the reservation regarding Tu m '
226
that "summarizing one's works in a painting is not a very attractive form of activity,"
this does not stop him from later assembling his works in Box in a Valise and
reassembling them in Given , his testamentary work.[46] When Duchamp mentions his
desire to have all his works assembled in one museum, we begin to see that this
preference expresses a fundamental aspect of his work: "I had a certain love for what I

was making, and this love was translated in that form" (DMD , 74). This inscription of
eroticism in the gesture of assemblage suggests Duchamp's particular understanding of
his own work as a corpus: "I wanted the whole body of work to stay together" (DMD ,
74). This assembled body of work stages an eroticism that "hinges" on the strategic play
of different artistic contexts and media. As such, it reiterates the eroticism of the nude in
Given as referring not to the anatomical body but to its assembled character as a set of
visual and artistic determinations. The "appearance" of the nude, like that of Given , is
but the "effect" of the contextualized media of painting, photography, sculpture, and
language. The active play of visual and linguistic puns elucidates the status of eroticism
in Given as a transitive moment, generated by shifts in the position of the body acting as
a punning "hinge." Like Duchamp's Door: 11, rue Larrey (fig. 78, p. 214), which is
open and closed at the same time, the body in Given, like the assembled structure of this
work, becomes an undecidable frame of reference for eroticism. Given is but an
"allegorical appearance," a work whose anamorphic and anagrammatic character is
"eccentric." It is a work whose meaning cannot be situated analogically (put to rest), but
which is constituted through movement, the delayed collision (or even assault, to use
Duchamp's terms in the "Avertissement" following the "Preface") of all determinations.

Epitaph: Cenotaph: Epigraph

Thel future can give an ironic tone to/ the sentence.
Marcel Duchamp

Duchamp's dismantling of the hegemony of vision in Given , as indexical and

institutional givens, resituates the position of the artist. By questioning the criteria
defining the construction of the visible, Duchamp challenges the immortality of both the
work of art and the artist as sanctioned by the museum. In Given this visual
immortalization no longer supplants the mortality of the artist by substituting itself for
it. Echoing Duchamp's
227
statement that "men are mortal, pictures too" (DMD , 67), Given stages the shared
mortality of the artist and the artifact. In doing so it destabilizes both the authorial
persona and the work: it delays them both by encrypting them in a snapshot, postponing
life and death in the illusory temporality of the future-perfect. It is this postponement of
pictorial and artistic intent that opens up Duchamp's works to future forms of artistic
appropriation, anticipating the developments of postmodernism.
Arturo Schwarz describes Duchamp's death in the same terms that he used to describe
his life, as an unannounced, informal departure:
The following morning I found him on his bed, fully dressed, and wearing his favorite
tie. Beautiful, noble, serene. Only slightly paler than usual. A thin smile on his lips. He
looked happy to have played his last trick on life by taking a French leave. No better
ending to no better life. His last masterpiece.[47]

Duchamp's "departure" is presented as being consistent with his life, a French leave that
evacuates the drama of death by its informal character. This "departure," which Schwarz
assimilates too readily to the reality of a work of art (as Duchamp's last "masterpiece"),
marks the accidental confluence of life and death of an artist whose focus had been the
mortality of both art and artist.
Anticipating the desire for canonization that haunts the fate of the artist as a historical
character, Duchamp explicitly questions the necessity of such fictions: "The idea of the
great star comes directly from a sort of inflation of small anecdotes. It was the same in
the past. It's not enough that two centuries later we have to look at certain people as if
they were in a museum, the entire thing is based on a made-up history" (DMD , 104).
For Duchamp, the effort to canonize historical figures amounts to the "inflation of small
anecdotes" in a process corresponding to museumification. It is exactly this process of
mummification that Duchamp actively resisted, both in his life and in his works. As if
anticipating this desire, Duchamp plays one last joke on the spectator with his epitaph:
"and besides/ it's only the others that die" (fig. 86). Engraved on his tombstone, this
statement affirms the fact of death as an impossible experience. Impossible, if only
because we can only witness the death of
228
another and not our own. Duchamp's epitaph haunts the spectator by evoking, through
our utterance of it, Duchamp's lifelike presence. Although it may be construed as a
denial of death, this statement challenges the facticity of both life and death as
fundamental givens. This epitaph ironically recasts the relation between life and death,
engraving the shadow of life into the traces of death. Duchamp's death is notorized, as it
were, by his testamentary statement. Like Franois Villon's literary testament,
Duchamp's epitaph casts a retrospective light on a grave whose significance is defined
not by how one dies but by how one lives.[48] Duchamp's humorous epitaph derealizes
the gravity of death by suggesting that its reality is no less subject to humor than life
itself.
Duchamp's epitaph points to another cenotaphGiven the lifelike assemblage of the
immortal mannequin simulating life in the artificial confines of the museum (the
"cemetery" of visual artifacts). If Given holds its viewer at a fixed distance, this distance
becomes both the interval and the delay marking the separation and/or continuity of life
and death. It is the last "hinge," the sign of "Life on credit" (Notes , 289), to use
Duchamp's own words. Given , an apparent "snapshot" of life, is engraved with the
imprint of its negative, of death obversely reiterating its outline. Within it is inscribed
the figure of the artist in movement, the double signature Rrose Slavy , alias Belle
Haleine : Eau de Voilette , androgynous embodiments of the art of "heavy breathing."[49]
Delayed in the interval between these signatures, Duchamp "breathes," he lives (Slavy
or c'est la vie ) not as himself but as an alias, ready-made for a rendez-vous with the
spectator.
So how does one take leave from Marcel Duchamp? Duchamp's comment about his
own taking leave from his dying friends Francis Picabia and Edgard Varse (1883
1965) provides a humorous, yet poignant reminder. His response to Pierre Cabanne

captures with ironic simplicity his recognition of both the pathos and the reality of
death:
Duchamp: It's hard to write to a dying friend. One doesn't know what to say. You have
to get around the difficulty with a joke. Good-bye, right?
Cabanne: You cabled, "Dear Francis, see you soon."
Duchamp: Yes, "see you soon." That's even better. I did the same
229
thing for Edgard Varse, when he died a few months ago . . . . So I simply sent, "See
you soon!" It's the only way of getting out of it. If you make a panegyric it's ridiculous.
Everyone isn't a Bossuet. (DMD , 87)
Thus we take leave of Marcel Duchamp, without a panegyric, like an old friend in
whose honor we send our own telegram "Dear Marcel, see you soon!"

Fig. 86.
"And besides/ it's only the others that die" ("D'ailleurs c'est toujours les autres
qui meurent"). Epitaph on Marcel Duchamp's tombstone in the cemetery in Rouen.
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art.
In conclusion, Given: 1) the waterfall, 2) the illuminating gas , Duchamp's testamentary
installation, emerges as an assemblage, the living corpus of his previous works. Despite
its figurative character, its gross naturalism, and its staged voyeurism, this work
posthumously exhibited to the public functions as a testamentary work insofar as it is a
compendium that references his previous works. It embraces the trajectory of the nude
as a pictorial genre from its earliest embodiments in Nude Descending a Staircase ,
through its passage in The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large
Glass ), and its fragmentary reembodiments in such sculptural works as Female Fig
Leaf and Wedge of Chastity . Just as The Large Glass reproduces and transposes his
previous pictorial works on glass, so does Given restage artistic conventions by
reproducing and literalizing them through their exaggerated realism. This corpus cannot
be assimilated to a corpse, since what is dead and rendered obsolete in this installation is
the spectator's gaze. The obscenity of the spread-eagled nude lies less in its outward
appearance than in the fact that it deliberately
230

stages the spectator's look as an apparatus of display. The violence of the nude concerns
less the way it looks than the violence that is made explicit by the pictorial history of the
gaze as a mode of objectification.
If painting was stripped bare and rendered transparent in The Large Glass , in Given the
nude, as the subject matter of painting, returns with the dead-weight literalness and
opacity of an object whose density incarnates the figurative conventions of classical
painting. The nude as subject matter of painting thus emerges as a reflection on the
matter of painting, restaging the rules that define its specificity as a genre. By
literalizing the mimetic impulses of painting in a three-dimensional installation,
Duchamp dismantles its generic specificity by its affiliation and contextualization
through other media, such as photography, sculpture, and language. Thus the reliance on
painting as a medium for reproduction becomes the stage for enacting through literal
reproduction the possibility of its demise. The simulational logic of Given restages the
conventions that define art in order to generate objects that are the obverse of
readymades. Whereas the ready-mades look like ordinary objects that are redefined as
art, the landscape and nude in Given look like art in a grossly exaggerated sense only to
challenge its conditions of possibility. While the ready-made is the perfect copy of an
object because it is the object itself, the objects in Given are literal renderings of
conceptual prototypesthey are projections of the rules governing pictorial mimesis. In
both of these cases Duchamp uses reproduction as a way of expropriating objects of
their visual appearance through a strategy of redundancy and repetition whose logic is
akin to puns. By literalizing the figurative ambitions of painting, either by generating
perfect copies or perfecting its conceptual prototypes, Duchamp brings painting face to
face with its conditions of possibility. While The Large Glass brought painting into the
realm of transparency by drying out conceptually its pictorial intent, Given returns to
notions of figurality as a rhetorical projection of painting, which makes tangible its
otherwise invisible conventions.
If The Large Glass held a mirror up to painting by reifying its visual appearance, that is,
by reducing the spectator's gaze to gas, then Given recondenses the gaze, making visible
its material properties. The water and gas alluded to in the subtitle of Given suggest
Duchamp's intervention, his recondensation of the spectator's gaze. Just as The Large
Glass
231
unpacked through its transparency pictorial appearance, so does Given unpack the
spectator's look as a ready-made, or given of pictorial conventions. Whether it is a
question of challenging pictoriality through the logic of the ready-made, or of returning
to figurality as a way of uncovering its ready-made character as a given, Duchamp
persists in questioning and challenging the limits of the pictorial as a system of
representation. Duchamp's originality consists in the discovery that the way out of
painting does not involve the movement from figuration into abstraction, since such a
move would still preserve the material properties of the pictorial medium. Rather,
finding a way out of painting means reframing it in the mode of reproduction, a strategy
where the figural emerges as a rhetorical condition of painting dispossessed of its
outward appearance. Staging its complicity with the viewer's gaze, with painting
understood in the mode of a peep show, Given as an installation disassembles and

reassembles the gaze, freeing it from its constraints by delaying its impact.
Recontextualizing painting through its generic crossover into other media, Duchamp deessenrializes the referentiality of gender, and by extension, that of art. In so doing, he
once again reactives the interval that separates art from nonart.
233

Postscript:
Duchamp's Postmodern Returns
Art does not have a biological excuse.
Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp's rapid passage through different pictorial idioms, leading to his
abandonment of painting and the discovery of the ready-mades, may seem to many as
facile, or even fad oriented. In his essay "Counter-Avant-Garde" (1971), Clement
Greenberg assesses Duchamp's intervention, not as avant-garde but as avant-gardism:
The Futurists discovered avant-gardness, but it was left to Duchamp to create what I call
avant-gardism. In a few short years after 1912 he laid down the precedents for
everything that advanced-advanced art has done in the fifty-odd years since. Avantgardism owes a lot to the Futurist vision, but it was Duchamp alone who worked out, as
it now looks, every implication of that vision and locked advanced-advanced art into
what has amounted to hardly more than elaborations, variations on, and recapitulations
of his original ideas.[1]
While recognizing Duchamp's decisive impact on Modernism, Greenberg argues that
his gesture reflects his vanguardism: the desire to embody and consume the avant-garde
as an idea, thereby seeking shock and novelty as ends in themselves. While recognizing
Duchamp's role as innovator, he questions Duchamp's vanguardism, which he equates
with the cult of the
234
new for its own sake, rather than for initial side effects, and with the deliberate
liquidation of cultural traditions. At issue is the notion of artistic originality, which
according to him exceeds conscious intentions, since it can be neither "envisaged in
advance" nor "attained by mere dint of willing." As Greenberg explains:
Conscious volition, deliberateness, play a principal part in avantgardist art: that is,
resorting to ingenuity instead of inspiration, contrivance instead of creation, "fancy"
instead of "imagination"; and in effect, to the known rather than the unknown. The
"new" as known beforehandthe general look of the "new" as made recognizeable by
the avant-garde pastis what is aimed at, and because known and recognizeable, it can
be willed.[2]

Greenberg's critique of avant-gardist art pits the notion of conscious deliberation or will
against notions of artistic creativity that exceed conscious intentions. While associating
originality with inspiration, creativity, and imagination, he defines vanguardism in terms
of ingenuity, contrivance, and fancy, that is, trivialized forms of artistic production. The
latter are modes of artistic production that rely on reproduction, the deliberate
manipulation of already given elements or ideas. Greenberg's devaluation of the already
known in favor of the unknown is intended to restore to artistic production forms of
unconscious expression and intent. The problem with Greenberg's distinction, however,
is that it perpetuates an artistic ideology that refuses to acknowledge that forms of
artistic production reflect social and economic forms of production and, therefore,
conventions subject to reproduction.
In contrast to Greenberg's position, Pierre Bourdieu argues in The Field of Cultural
Production that artistic production is a strategic exercise of positioning the artist as
creator in a historical field of already established determinations. Rather than liquidating
artistic traditions, he suggests that the avant-garde, like previous artistic movements or
styles, "makes history" by introducing a new position into the field, which "'displaces'
the whole series of previous artistic acts."[3] Comparing Marcel Duchamp and the
"Douanier" Rousseau, as producers, Bourdieu contrasts their respective relations to
notions of artistic production:
235
Rousseau, the painter as object, who does something other than what he thinks he is
doing, does not know what he does, because he knows nothing of the field he stumbles
into, of which he is the play-thing (it is significant that his painter and poet "friends"
stage parodic consecration scenes for him); he is made by the field, a "creator" who has
to be "created" as a legitimate producer, with the character of "Douanier Rousseau," in
order to legitimate his product. By contrast, Duchamp, born into a family of painters,
the younger brother of painters, has all the tricks of the artist's trade at his fingertips, i.e.
an art of painting which (subsequently) implies not only the art of producing a work but
the art of self-presentation; like the chess-player he is, he shows himself capable of
thinking several moves ahead, producing art objects in which the production of the
producer as artist is the precondition for the production of these objects as works of art.
[4]

Bourdieu's distinction emphasizes the fact that the art of producing a work reflects the
art of self-presentation, that is, the recognition of the creator not as a given but as a
product generated by the artistic understood in the mode of production. Duchamp's
conception of the artistic field is a modal one, as both producer and consumer, where
"history is immanent to the functioning of the field."[5] As this study has demonstrated,
Duchamp's originality lies in his recognition of the field of artistic production as a field
of ready-mades. In this context, artistic production emerges necessarily in the form of
reproduction, that is, the deliberate staging and reappropriation of previous styles and
artistic movements. The novelty of his works reflects neither the rejection nor the
assimilation of artistic traditions, but rather, the fact of making visible the conditions of
possibility of art, at the very moment where it threatens to lapse into that which it has
designated as outside of itself, as nonart.

Marcel Duchamp's deliberate and strategic engagement with pictorial traditions, his
redefinition of the notion of artistic creativity through reproduction, challenges
Greenberg's dismissal of vanguardism. As this study has shown, Duchamp draws on
pictorial and artistic conventions only to redefine their meaning. He questions the
function of the creative act by redefining it as "making," as a notion of production that
renders
236
the artist an ordinary being, one akin to a craftsman or even, a businessman. Refusing
the privileged role of the artist, which he associates with the emergence of art as an
autonomous domain in the social sphere, Duchamp seeks to reinvent the notion of
"making" that art involves, even if that ultimately implies doing away with art
altogether. Seeking to distance himself from art as a form of expression, Duchamp
discovers through mechanical reproduction new ways for envisioning both artistic
creativity and the artist, for mechanical reproduction involves forms of impression
whose multiple character challenges both the uniqueness of the artist and the unity of
the work of art. By appropriating the logic of the multiple, Duchamp valorizes the
notion of reproduction as a form of production, one that brings together the artistic,
social, and economic realms.
If Duchamp's ready-mades usurp the notion of pictorial reproduction by highlighting the
redundancy of a work of art as a commonplace object, works such as The Large Glass,
The Box in a Valise, and Given expose the redundancy of artworks as artistic readymades. In the first instance, ordinary objects make claims on notions of artistic status; in
the second case, works that look like art objectify artistic conventions through their
reproduction. In both instances, concepts of art and value are not merely treated as
philosophical abstractions but as literal and objective inquiries whose reproductive logic
is akin to the expenditure of linguistic and figurative meaning through puns. Given the
reproductive logic of Duchamp's works, how are we then to understand the notion of
authorship?[6] If the creative act is not merely productive but reproductive, what
becomes of the authorial signature as a form of validation? Do Duchamp's works
provide us with indications about how the authorial signature is conceived, legitimated,
and circulated?
The answer to these questions can be found in Duchamp's works on art and economics.
It is in this context that the notion of value, both as artistic token and as economic
currency is at issue. His explorations of the relation of art and economics including the
production of checks, bonds, and numismatic coins, demonstrate the conflation of
financial and artistic currency, of economic value and artistic worth. In these works,
Duchamp questions how the validity of a work both as a commercial transaction and as
artistic intervention is defined through signature. Works such as Tzanck Check or the
Czech Check reveal that the endorsing value of a
237
signature relies on a larger system of institutional validation that backs the signature.
The signature as authorizing instance is merely a relay in a network of validation, which

includes other agents such as the bank, or, in the case of the artwork, the public, the
critic, and the art market. The signature in and of itself cannot authenticate either a
check or a work of art. Sundering the relation between the signature and the producer as
authorizing agent, Duchamp places himself into the position of a notary. This is not
altogether surprising, given Duchamp's fascination with his father's professional
occupation and the technical language of the documents he authorized.
But what does it mean to conceive the authorial signature in the mode of a notary? A
notary (from the Latin notarius, secretary; notare, to note) is an official permitted by
law to attest or acknowledge deeds and contracts, administer oaths, and take affidavits.
In France the authority of the notary, who often had some legal training, relies both on
the credibility of the individual and his or her legal recognition as a member of a
professional body. In America, however, a notary public is anyone who pays to become
a certified member of the organization. In both cases, the notary does not have any
intrinsic authority, but simply validates the authority of the transaction. The notary signs
or stamps the signature, authorizing and legitimizing it, and thereby validating a
validation. If the value of a work of art is defined by the signature as authorial
inscription, then the fact of conceiving the signature as a notarized intervention implies
positing authorship in the mode of appropriation. Bypassing the notion of authorial
intent, such a model suggests that authorship is a relay of signatures, of forms of
appropriation that defer the identificatory instance. The authorial signature becomes yet
another way of staging the fact that notions of artistic production are reproductive, that
is, they involve forms of appropriation that are essentially reappropriative. Duchamp
inscribes into the notion of authorship a deferral or postponement that opens up
authorship to future reappropriations whether they involve the posterity of the spectator
or the posterity of other artists. By demonstrating that art and economics share the same
transactional sphere, since the work of art is a "check" of sorts, Duchamp opens up
authorship to speculative considerations. His interpretation of art as a field of strategic
gestures whose character is reproductive invites new forms of artistic appropriation and
238
expenditure. Furthermore, his originality lies less in his individual signature than in his
signing over the signature to posterity understood as a speculative venture. He
"notorizes" Modernism as a field of artistic production whose legitimacy is not given in
advance but can only be reproduced and thus strategically repeated. This act of signing
over the authority of the signature also opens up modernity to forms of notoriety, that is,
forms of symbolic expenditure that will compete speculatively with other forms of
artistic currency and worth.
Duchamp's legacy to postmodernity is visible in appropriations of his works in the
contemporary context, such as J. S. G. Boggs's hand-drawn reproductions of money.
Boggs issues reproductions of money in exchange for services, and the receipts and
documents surrounding these transactions are exhibited as art. In the fall of 1987, after
confiscating the works of J. S. G. Boggs and hauling him off to jail, the Bank of
England filed suit against the artist for putative reproduction and, therefore, deliberate
counterfeiting of British currency.[7] The seriousness of the charge, coupled with the
requisite criminal overtones of the case, only serves to highlight the fact that money is
such serious business that even art cannot make light of it. Boggs's carefully hand-

drawn reproductions of money include such alterations as impersonating, caricaturing,

and/or defacing the engraved images, as well as counterfeiting official signatures.
Rather than restrict himself to reproduction alone, however, Boggs also annotates
original bills, thereby drawing them into his artistic transactions and thus, in effect,
withdrawing them from circulation. While strategies of quotation and appropriation are
common in postmodern art, Boggs's contribution lies in the fact that his reproductions
of money, rather than art, reveal our premises about value as it is constituted in the
artistic and economic domain.[8] By reproducing money, Boggs revalorizes it artistically;
at the same time, he devalues its utility as a standard of economic exchange.
Boggs's artistic project to reproduce money and document the transactions it engenders
draws on Marcel Duchamp's extensive explorations of the relation of art and economics.
Rather than considering money as a medium for economic exchange, Boggs, like
Duchamp, examines its artistic interest and speculative potential. As Boggs explains, the
lawsuit against him relies on defining "reproduction," which may vary according to its
artistic or commercial context:
239
The whole case turned on whether or not I had been engaged in making "reproductions"
of British currency. . . . Now, in art world parlance, the word "reproduction" has a very
specific meaning. It suggests a debased form of image productionone achieved in
multiples of some sort. In ordinary usage one says, "Oh, that's not an original, that's a
reproduction." So, I mean, there's no way that I was doing a reproduction. Regular
British pound notes are reproductions. I was making original drawings. (emphasis
added)[9]
Boggs's summation of his case in terms of the notion of "reproduction" captures most
pointedly the problem of defining the notion of value in the modern age. Instead of
considering reproduction as a debased form of production, Boggs's revalorizes it by
exploring its conceptual and artistic potential. His laboriously hand-drawn
reproductions of money redefine its exchange-value as currency, thereby introducing a
speculative dimension, which, ironically, depends on the artisanal intervention of the
artist.
The notion of originality begins to be eroded in the modernist context since mechanical
reproduction subverts both artisanal and authorial intervention. In the current
postmodern context the distinction between an original and its reproduction becomes
meaningless to the extent that modes of artistic production can be conceived as a
function of reproduction. In Boggs's case, as in the case of Duchamp's ready-mades,
reproductions are worth more than the original, thereby redefining the notion of value in
relationship to both the art object and notions of authorship. Given that Duchamp's own
works rely on strategies of appropriation, the question of Boggs's indebtedness becomes
meaningless unless examined in terms of the earlier modernist context. It is within
Modernism, therefore, that we witness the crisis and ultimate failure of traditional
notions of value to account for transformations in both economic and artistic modes of
production.

Duchamp's speculative forays into the reproduction of value by means of different

financial species, checks, bonds, and numismatic coins, set up the horizon of Boggs's
artistic inquiry into the transactional value of money and the artwork as documentation.
If Boggs reproduces certain Duchampian strategies, his appropriations reflect the
speculative potential that he is able to recover or to draw on as "interest." By literally
240
drawing money into the circuit of art, he cashes in Duchamp's checks. However,
Boggs's cashing in, or banking on money as artistic currency, only makes legible the
fact that its very definition involves strategies of appropriation, that is, modes of
production redefined through reproduction. Just as Duchamp "reinvested" spectator
interest in Leonardo's Mona Lisa, so does Boggs reinvest our interest in money
(following Duchamp's interventions), postponing its financial impact only to rediscover
its intellectual and speculative potential as art. As Boggs explained in an interview (6
December 1992): "They said I was a counterfeiter. They don't understand the difference
between art and crime."[10] In the wake of Duchamp's work the difference between art
and crime, between an original and a copy, has been subverted. This subversion is a
symptom of the overlap of art and economics in the social and technological sphere. It
reflects the redefinition of notions of artistic production by reproduction.
Duchamp's postmodernity lies precisely in his discovery that Modernism would exhaust
itself were it to simply conceive of itself in terms of vanguardism, seeking shock value
for its own sake. Instead, Duchamp devises a strategic approach, one that "draws" on
previous traditions, only to uncover within them new forms of artistic appropriation. He
plays chess with art, using both sides of the board in order to redefine the game. In
doing so he liberates the artist from the obligation of producing art objects, for plasticity
now emerges as a function of the shifting strategies on the board, rather than as a feature
of a particular object. Artistic creativity in this context takes on an entirely new
meaning. It becomes a form of production, which, like other forms of social and
economic production, involves reassembling and redeploying already given elements
and rules. Duchamp's discovery through the ready-made is that art, language, and
institutions are ready-mades: they are systems of reference whose meaning, like chess,
is constituted by a set of predetermined rules. The issue is not that these rules are given
but how one plays the game as a function of them. To discover the world in the modality
of the ready-made is to confront the condition of postmodernity, not as a development in
a historical progression but as a premise whose history is already posted in Modernism
itself.[11] Duchamp's speculative forays, his efforts to redefine both art and the artist,
open up the
241
historical destiny of Modernism to a set of inquiries whose conceptual potential can
continue to be elaborated, appropriated, or simply parodied. The monumentality of
Marcel Duchamp's artistic legacy is one that continues to be discovered and reinvented
as contemporary art strategically engages with its modernist past, in order to draw on
and speculate about its own potential.

 243

Notes
Introduction: Unpacking Duchamp
1. John Cage, "Statements Re Duchamp," in Marcel Duchamp in Perspective, ed.
Joseph Masheck (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975), 67.
2. Ecke Bonk, Marcel Duchamp: The Box in a Valise, trans. David Britt (New York:
Rizzoli, 1989), 20.
3. Film interview of Marcel Duchamp with James Johnson Sweeney at the Philadelphia
Museum of Art (National Broadcasting Company, 1955); quoted in Bonk, Marcel
Duchamp, 177.
4. I am referring to Joseph Masheck's comment on Given in "Introduction: Chance is
zee Fool's Name for Fate," Duchamp in Perspective, 23.

1 Painting at a Dead End

1. All biographical rsums register this significant event. For a specific example, see
Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett (New York: Da
Capo Press, 1987), 116. All further references to this work are abbreviated as DMD ,
page number.
2. Thomas B. Hess in a set of point/counterpoint arguments suggests that Duchamp was
a "second-rate painter," only to counter this claim with the equally exalted proposition
that he did create "two or three masterpieces of
modern art"; see Thomas Hess, "J'Accuse Marcel Duchamp," in Masheck, Marcel
Duchamp in Perspective, 116-17.
3. Commenting on this offer, Duchamp explains to Cabanne: "I said no, and I wasn't
rich, either. I could have very well accepted ten thousand dollars, but no, I sensed the
danger right away. I had been able to avoid it until then. In 1915-16, I was twenty-nine,
so I was old enough to protect myself. I'm telling you this simply to explain my attitude.
It would be the same today, if I were offered a hundred thousand dollars to do
something" ( DMD , 106).
4. Duchamp's interest in chance was mediated through his contacts with Picabia in
1913. While Duchamp shares with the Dada movement an interpretation of chance as a
"new stimulus to artistic creation," and as a "mental phenomenon," he does not pursue
its psychological elaboration, as evidenced by the Surrealist appropriation of the term.
Hans Richter observes that Duchamp's formulation and employment of chance in the
case of the ready-mades is Cartesian; see Hans Richter, Dada Art and Anti-Art (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1965). For Richter's discussion of Dada, chance, and Duchamp, see
esp. 50-64, 88.

5. Masheck, "Introduction," Duchamp in Perspective, 19.

6. Thierry de Duve, for instance, argues that it is during Duchamp's visit to Munich that
he attempts to work out his "passage" through and secession from Cubism, which later
leads to his abandonment of painting as a mtier; see Thierry de Duve, Pictorial
Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp's Passage from Painting to the Readymade, trans.
Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 96-118.
7. This interest in art is evident throughout the entire family. Duchamp's maternal
grandfather was a painter and engraver, and he suggests that his mother was an artist as
well, who did "Strasbourgs on paper" ( DMD , 20). Among his siblings, Jacques Villon
became a painter and engraver, Duchamp-Villon a sculptor, and his sister, Suzanne
Duchamp, a painter.
8. For an analysis of Franois Villon's poetry and its impact on Duchamp, see Jean
Clair, "Villon: Mariage, hasard et pendaison," in Marcel Duchamp: Abcdaire:
Approches critiques, ed. Jean Clair (Paris: Muse national d'art moderne, Centre
national d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou, 1977), 201-2.
9. By the time Duchamp expressed an interest in art, following in his brothers' footsteps,
his father even agreed to help him financially ( DMD , 20). As a
notary he devised a system by which current expenditures were to be deducted from the
future inheritance, so as to assure equitable division among all his children.
10. Marcel Duchamp, "A Complete Reversal of Art Opinions by Marcel Duchamp,
Iconoclast," Arts and Decoration 5, no. 2 (September 1915): 428; reprinted in Studio
International 189 (January-February 1975): 29.
11. Robert Lebel observes that Duchamp's reluctance to engage with Cubism as a school
is shared by his reluctance to affiliate himself with the futurists, despite his interest in
kinetics and the machine; see his Marcel Duchamp, trans. George H. Hamilton (New
York: Grove Press, 1959), 7-9.
12. See Duchamp's comments in his interview with James Johnson Sweeney, "Eleven
Europeans in America," The Museum of Modern Art Bulletin 13, nos. 4-5 (1946): 20.
13. Arturo Schwarz, "Eros c'est la vie," in Marcel Duchamp (New York: Harry N.
Abrams, 1975), v-vi.
14. Schwarz, "Eros c'est la vie," ii.
15. See Willis Domingo's discussion of Duchamp's Symbolist phase in "Meaning in the
Art of Duchamp," Artforum (De cember 1971): 74.
16. Lawrence Steefel, Jr., "The Position of La Marie mise nu par ses clibataires,
mme (19 15-1923) in the Stylistic and Iconographic Development of the Art of Marcel
Duchamp" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1960), 85.

17. Letter of 28 January 1951 in the Archives of the Francis Bacon Foundation,
Claremont, California, quoted in Schwarz, Marcel Duchamp, iii.
18. For an analysis of Duchamp's interest in electricity, particularly as it relates to The
Large Glass, see Robert Lebel, "Marcel Duchamp and Electricity at Large: The Dadaist
Version of Electricity," in Electra: L'Electricit et l'lectronique dans l'art au XXe sicle
(Paris: Les Amis du Muse d'Art moderne de la ville de Paris, 1983), 16473.
19. The Winston Dictionary (Philadelphia and New York: The John C. Winston Co.,
1957), 65.
20. For an analysis of the erosion of "aura" in the modern period, see Walter Benjamin's
seminal essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in
Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books,
1978), 220-25.
21. Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (New York: Doubleday Anchor
Books, 1956), 27.
22. For a history of the female nude as object of male spectatorship and desire, see John
Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972), 45-64. See also Laura
Mulvey's seminal analysis of spectatorship and gender in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema," Screen 16 (Autumn 1975): 6-18. For the nude as an erotic genre in Manet, see
T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers
(New York; Knopf, 1985), 119-31.
23. Quoted in Marcel Duchamp, ed. Anne d'Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine (New
York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973), 256.
24. For Duchamp's discussion of the influence of Marey's chronophotography on the
Nude, see DMD, 34-35.
25. Octavio Paz, Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare, trans. R. Phillips and D.
Gardner (New York: Seaver Books/The Viking Press, 1978), 2.
26. See Duchamp's qualification of abstraction in the Nude as more Cubist than Futurist
( DMD, 28-29).
27. Jules Laforgue's poem reads: "Pock-marked sun, bright yellow skimmer,/The
laughing stock of the heartless stars!"; quoted in Lawrence D. Steefel, Jr., "Marcel
Duchamp's 'Encore cet astre': A New Look," Art Journal 36, no. 1 (Fall 1976): 29, n.9.
28. I am referring here to the legal definition of "descent."
29. Masheck, "Introduction," Duchamp in Perspective, 7.
30. Mario Perniola, "Between Clothing and Nudity," in Fragments for a History of the
Human Body, ed. Michel Feher (New York: Zone Books, 1989), vol. 2, 237.

31. Prints are the first multiples in the history of art, works that are serial in nature and
whose value, like photographs, is based on the number of printings.
32. Paz, Appearance, 7-8.
33. Sweeney, "Eleven Europeans," 20.
34. Katherine Kuh, "Marcel Duchamp," In The Artist's Voice: Talks with Seventeen
Artists (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 81.
35. Kuh, "Duchamp," 92.
36. The serial nature of these works, involving both paintings and sketches, resembles
the serial nature of Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2.
37. Duchamp's devotion to chess resulted in his publication of a book on pawn and king
endings, written with the German chess master Vital Halberstadt and entitled
Opposition and Sister Squares Are Reconciled (Paris: L'Echiquier,
1932). See Francis M. Naumann's discussion in "Marcel Duchamp: A Reconciliation of
Opposites," Dada/Surrealism 16 (1987): 32-37; reprinted in Marcel Duchamp: Artist of
the Century, ed. R. Kuenzli and F. M. Naumann (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 32-37.
For the most comprehensive study in the area of art and chess, see Hubert Damisch,
"The Duchamp Defense," trans. Rosalind Krauss, October, no. 10 (Fall 1979): 5-28.
38. In the right-hand corner of the image, the grid of a fence can be seen through the
bushes, thereby reinforcing the sense of a measuring device.
39. For an analysis of the chessboard and Renaissance perspective, see Jean Clair,
"L'chiquier, les modernes et la quatrime dimension," Revue de l'art, no. 3 (1978): 596l.
40. Francis Roberts, "I Propose to Strain the Laws of Physics," Art News 67, no. 8
(December 1968): 63.
41. Quoted in Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (New York:
Harry N. Abrams, 1970), 68.
42. Roberts, "Laws of Physics," 63.
43. I am referring here to Harold Bloom's formulation of the anxiety or burden of
tradition on creative artists: see his The Anxiety of Influence (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1975). My strategic reading relies on a materialist understanding of the field of
artistic production in line with Pierre Bourdieu's elaboration in The Field of Cultural
Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. and with an introduction by Randal
Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 55-61, 106-11.
44. Quoted in d'Harnoncourt and McShine, Marcel Duchamp, 260.

45. Kuh, "Duchamp," 88. John Golding attributes the originality of this work to his new
intellectual and personal encounters, specifically Duchamp's meeting with Francis
Picabia at the Salon d'Automne (1911) and later, Apollinaire; see John Golding, Marcel
Duchamp: The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (London: Penguin Press,
1973), 45-47.
46. As Duchamp explains: "The word 'swift' ( vite ) had been used in sports; if a man
ran 'swift,' he ran well. This amused me. 'Swift' is less involved with literature than 'at
high speed'" ( DMD, 35-36).
47. Paz, Appearance, 9.
48. De Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, 44.
49. From the Museum of Modern Art questionnaire about the Three Standard
Stoppages, Artist's Files, undated but according to Naumann, written shortly
after the acquisition of this work by the museum; see Francis M. Naumann, "Marcel
Duchamp: A Reconciliation of Opposites," Artist of the Century, ed. Rudolf E. Kuenzli
and Francis M. Naumann, nn. 16, 17.
50. The meter, as a unit of length, is approximately the tenth-millionth part of a quadrant
of a terrestrial meridian. The International Standard meter is defined as the precise
distance between two indentations on a platinum-iridium bar, which is kept under
temperature control (at 0C.). The International Prototype Meter Bar at the International
Bureau of Weights and Measures in Svres, France, is a device that resembles
Duchamp's work in several significant ways: 1) it is defined as a system of recorded
impressions, 2) it is constituted as a series of three tubular templates, and 3) these tubes
are molded upon each other so as to be boxed together in a tube.
51. Roberts, "Laws of Physics," 62.
52. Naumann, "Reconciliation," 30.
53. Roberts, "Laws of Physics," 62-63.
54. Ibid., 63.
55. Mary Ann Caws suggests that Duchamp's gesture may be indebted to Mallarm's
throw of dice; see Caws's "Mallarm and Duchamp: Mirror, Stair, and Gaming Table,"
L'Esprit crateur 20, no. 2. (Summer 1980): 53; reprinted in The Eye in the Text: Essays
on Perception, Mannerist to Modern (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).
56. Carol P. James, "Duchamp's Silent Noise/ Music for the Deaf," Dada and
Surrealism 16 (1987); reprinted in Artist of the Century, ed. R. Kuenzli and F. Naumann,
110.
57. Michel Sanouillet, Duchamp du signe: Ecrits (Paris: Flammarion, 1975), 52-53.
58. James, "Silent Noise," 111.

59. The first public exhibition of this work was at the International Exhibition of
Modern Art at the Brooklyn Museum in 1926.
60. Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde
(New York: The Viking Press, 1965), 28.
61. The critical approaches to The Large Glass range from Andr Breton's inaugural
reading of the work as a mechanist and unsentimental speculation on eroticism (1928;
rpt. 1959); a symptomatic myth of modernity (Carrouges, 1954); a representation of
barren love (Lebel, 1959); a linguistic and interpretative puzzle (Paz, 1973); as well as
alchemical and esoteric interpretations
(Schwarz, 1970; Burnham, 1974; Calvesi, 1975); psychoanalytic interpretations (Held,
1973); N-dimensional geometry (Adcock, 1983); and perspective/optics (Clair, 1975).
62. For Duchamp's interest in popular culture, and specifically in catalogs and almanacs,
see Michel Sanouillet, "Marcel Duchamp and the French Intellectual Tradition," in
Marcel Duchamp, ed. Anne d'Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine, 53-54.
63. Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, 67.
64. The Box of 1914 is a commercial Kodak container for photographs, which holds the
photograph of one drawing and sixteen manuscript notes. For an analysis of Duchamp's
boxes, see Dawn Ades, "Marcel Duchamp's Portable Museum," in Marcel Duchamp's
Travelling Box (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1982), 5.
65. Roberts, "Laws of Physics," 63.
66. The Green Box (1934) contains 94 photos, facsimile notes, diagrams, and
calculations which are related to the planning and execution of the Glass. It was
followed by a third collection of notes, l'Infinitif (1966), also known as the White Box
because of the color of its cover, which contains additional notes on the fourth
dimension and non-Euclidian geometry.
67. Roberts, "Laws of Physics," 63.
68. Richard Hamilton, "The Large Glass," 60.
69. Quoted by Golding, Bride Stripped Bare, 12.
70. Quoted by Calvin Tomkins, Bride and Bachelors, 24.
71. Roberts, "Laws of Physics," 46.
72. When the Glass cracked while in transit, these glass strips described as the "Bride's
garment," "Gilled cooler," or simply, "Horizon,'' were replaced by a thin strip of glass
held between two aluminum bars, to provide additional support.
73. The string lines on the chocolate drums allude to the second version of the work,
The Chocolate Grinder, No. 2 (1914, oil and thread on canvas).

74. Marcel Duchamp, letter of 21 May 1915; reprinted in Ephemerides on and about
Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Slavy, 1887-1968, ed. and with an introduction by Pontus
Hulten, texts by Jenifer Gough-Cooper and Jacques Caumont (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1993).
75. See Paul Matisse's observation regarding Duchamp's manipulation of the meaning
of conventional words through illogical modifiers in "Some More
Nonsense about Duchamp," Art in America 68, no. 4 (April 1980): 81.
76. Sweeney, "Eleven Europeans," 21.
77. "Marcel Duchamp Speaks," an interview by George H. Hamilton and Richard
Hamilton with comments by Charles Mitchell, broadcast by the Third Programme of the
BBC, in the series Art, Anti-Art (1959); quoted in Arturo Schwarz, "Eros c'est la vie,"
xv.
78. For the most significant and comprehensive study of Duchamp's interest in Ndimensional geometry, see Craig Adcock, Marcel Duchamp's Notes from the Large
Glass: An N-Dimensional Analysis (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983).
79. For a description of the two versions of the Chocolate Grinder (the first painted
perspectively, the second painted with added thread sewn to the canvas), see Schwarz,
"Eros c'est la vie," Marcel Duchamp, xxi, and Richard Hamilton's discussion of its
transposition to the Glass, "Large Glass," 60-61.
80. For a comprehensive analysis of Duchamp's interest in perspective, see Jean Clair's
remarkable study "Marcel Duchamp et la tradition des perspecteurs," Marcel Duchamp:
Abcdaire, 124-59.
81. Theodore Reff notes the resemblance of this work to Leonardo's experiments with
dust as a miniature terrain in "Duchamp and Leonardo: L.H.O.O.Q.-Alikes," Art in
America 1 (January-February 1977): 87.
82. Richard Hamilton suggests that the "breeding of colors" comes closest to his ideal of
the Glass as a "greenhouse, in which transparent colors, as ephemeral as perfumes, will
emerge, flourish, ripen, and decay like flowers and fruits"; see ''Large Glass," 66.
83. For an analysis of the Nine Malic Molds and dressmaking, see Olivier Micha,
"Duchamp et la couture," in Marcel Duchamp: Abcdaire, ed. Jean Clair, 33-34.
84. Olivier Micha also notes the sexual ambiguity implicit in the conception of the
dressmaker's pattern as a mold, in "Duchamp et la couture," 33.
85. I am referring here to another meaning of livery, in English law, which signifies the
ceremonial delivery of possession of real property made upon the property itself.
86. Hamilton, "Large Glass," 60.

87. See Camfield's account of Duchamp's exhibit and Walter Hopps's comments in
William Camfield, Marcel Duchamp: Fountain (Houston: The Menil Collection,
Houston Fine Arts Press, 1989).

2 Ready-Mades: (Non) sense and (Non) art

1. John Cage, "John Cage on Marcel Duchamp: An Interview," Duchamp in
Perspective, 153. Cage's resistance to assimilate the ready-mades to the Dada project
can be contrasted with Hans Richter, Dada Art, 87-93; and William S. Rubin, Dada,
Surrealism, and Their Heritage (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1968), 17-19.
2. Roberts, "Laws of Physics," 47.
3. Asked by his interviewer Francis Roberts whether this is a paradox, Duchamp
replied: "Yes it is a paradox, and the wheel was the first one and not even named Readymade at the time," "Laws of Physics," 47.
4. Masheck, "Introduction," Duchamp in Perspective, 10. Werner Hoffman suggests that
Duchamp's intervention is a critical gesture that exposes the interface of cultural and
artistic forms of production; see his "Marcel Duchamp and Emblematic Realism,"
Duchamp in Perspective, 61-63.
5. For an analysis of puns as the organizing principle of Duchamp's art, see Robert
Pincus-Witten, "Man Ray: The Homonymic Pun and American Vernacular," Artforum
13, no. 4 (April 1975): 56.
6. The punning relation of these works is playfully explored in George H. Bauer's
"Duchamp's Ubiquitous Puns," Artist of the Century, ed. Rudolf E. Kuenzli and Francis
M. Naumann, 127-48. My own study examines puns both as poetic and technical
mechanisms that generate visual and linguistic associations, not as forms of individual
expression but as instances of cultural production and reproduction. In this context the
very distinction between sense and nonsense, of art and antiart is in question.
7. For the most comprehensive and original exploration of nonsense and its contextual
relation to common sense, see Susan Stewart's Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in
Folklore and Literature (Baltimore. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).
8. See Duchamp, "The Great Trouble with Art in This Country," in The Writings of
Marcel Duchamp, ed. M. Sanouillet and E. Peterson, 125.
9. Roberts, "Laws of Physics," 63-64.
10. Reff, "L.H.O.O.Q.-Alikes," 85. For a comparison of Duchamp and what Paul Valry
called Leonardo da Vinci's "method," see Andr Chastel, "Lonard et la pense
artistique du XXe sicle'' (1960) in Fables, Formes, Figures, vol. 2 (Paris: Flammarion,
1978), 267-70. While Jean Clair critiques Reff's analoghies
because of their thematic character, he nonetheless reaffirms their methodological
concerns; see Clair's "Duchamp, Lonard et la tradition maniriste," in Marcel

Duchamp: Tradition de la rupture ou rupture de la tradition?, ed. Jean Clair (Paris:

Union gnrale d'ditions, 1979), 118-28.
11. Reff, "L.H.O.O.Q.-Alikes," 86.
12. The Box of 1914 is a container for Kodak photographic plates, whose printed label
on the lid has been altered so as to read that the box contains "15/16 industrial
photographs," with the last word underlined three times. This box holds the photograph
of Duchamp's drawing, Avoir l'apprenti dans le soleil, and sixteen manuscript notes.
13. In his "Introduction" to Pierre Cabanne's Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, Robert
Motherwell notes Duchamp's evasiveness regarding the likeliness of his familiarity with
Valry's study; see Cabanne, DMD, 11, n. 11. In his discussion of Valry's study, Jean
Clair demonstrates the extent to which Valry's insights regarding Leonardo's method
apply to Duchamp's own artistic methodology; see Clair's "Duchamp, Lonard et la
tradition maniriste," in Marcel Duchamp, 135-38.
14. Anne d'Harnoncourt and Walter Hopps, "Etant donns: 1) la chute d'eau, 2) le gaz
d'clairage: Reflections on a New Work by Marcel Duchamp," Philadelphia Museum
of Art Bulletin 64, nos. 299-300 (April-September 1969): 15.
15. Quoted in Raymond Stites, The Sublimations of Leonardo da Vinci (Washington,
D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1970), 175.
16. Giorgio Vasari, Artists of the Renaissance, trans. George Bull (New York: The
Viking Press, 1978), 189.
17. This term was borrowed from Gustav Ren Hcke, who used it to describe the
optical/poetic experiments of Athanasius Kircher (1601-1680), in his Labyrinthe de
L'Art Fantastique, trans. C. Heim (Paris: Gonthier, 1967), 130.
18. MS. 2038 Bib. Nat. 19r. and v. 20r. For an analysis of this statement attributed by
Plutarch to Simonedes of Ceos, see Wendy Steiner, The Colors of Rhetoric (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982), 5-7.
19. Leonardo summarizes his position by asking: "Consider, then, which is more
fundamental to man, the name of man or his image? The name changes with change of
country; the form is unchanged except by death," MS. 2038 Bib. Nat. 19r. and v. 20r.
20. MS. 2038 Bib. Nat. 19r. and v. 20r.
21. This work is a companion piece to another relief sculpture entitled TORTUREMORTE (1959), which is a plaster cast of a foot with flies glued to it. These works will
be examined in detail in chapter 3.
22. Jean Clair considers Duchamp's work as the latest embodiment of Mannerism, a
"pure nominalism of thought," in "Continental Drifts," in The Arcimboldo Effect:
Transformations of the Face from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (New York:
Abbeville Press, 1987), 253-54.

23. While all the portraits of the seasons are double, only Spring is represented in terms
of gender reversibility. The portraits of the other seasons involve subliminal changes
whose impact is "atmospheric," reflecting changes in "mood," rather than in substance.
24. Roland Barthes, "Rhetor and Magician," in Arcimboldo, trans. John Shepley (Milan:
Franco Maria Ricci, 1980), 18.
25. Barthes, "Rhetor and Magician," 26.
26. Ibid., 15-16.
27. Ibid., 30.
28. Ibid., 30.
29. For Rosalind Krauss, this discontinuity between text and image is dispelled once the
viewer becomes cognizant of underlying images of primitive machines, whose purpose
is to make "art"; see her "Forms of Readymade: Duchamp and Brancusi," in Passages
in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), 70-71.
30. For an analysis of Roussel's experimentation with language, see Michel Foucault,
Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel, trans. C. Russ (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1986), 29-47.
31. See Duchamp's comments in "Interview with Marcel Duchamp," Dadas on Art, ed.
Lucy Lippard (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 142.
32. See Jean-Pierr Brisset, La Science de Dieu ou la cration de l'homme (Paris:
Tchou, 1972). For a brief account of Duchamp's wordplays and its relation to literary
traditions, see Rudolf E. Kuenzli, "Introduction," Dada and Surrealism no. 16 (1987):
5-6; reprinted in Artist of the Century, ed. Rudolf Kuenzli and Francis M. Naumann, 56.
33. This tension between negation and nomination becomes explicit once one considers
the relation of Duchamp's Premire Lumire and the image ( NON ) to TORTUREMORTE, which is the image of a foot or, more explicitly, an instep ( pas; in French),
thereby generating the French formula for negation ne . . .
pas. Compare George Bauer's inventive analysis of Duchamp's play with this formula,
in "Ubiquitous Puns," 129-32.
34. This is a suggestion from Gertrude Stein's lectures, quoted by Susan Stewart in
Nonsense, 141-42.
35. Kuh, "Duchamp," 89.
36. Tristan Tzara, "Essai sur la situation de la posie," Le Surralisme au service de la
Rvolution, no. 4 (1931): 19. For an analysis of Tristan Tzara's position on poetry, see
Rudolf E. Kuenzli, "The Semiotics of Dada Poetry," in Dada Spectrum: The Dialectics

of Revolt, ed. Stephen C. Foster and Rudolf E. Kuenzli (Madison: Coda Press, 1979),
54-59.
37. Kuh, "Duchamp," 81.
38. For David Antin, this implies that "language does not consist of words, but of
utterances"; see his "Duchamp and Language," in Marcel Duchamp, ed. Anne
d'Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine, 103.
39. Kuh, "Duchamp," 83.
40. Referring to his conversations with Duchamp, see Schwarz, "Rrose Slavy," xxviixxviii.
41. Roberts, "Laws of Physics," 63.
42. Stewart, Nonsense, 161.
43. For an analysis of Duchamp's artwork as a kinetic mechanism, see Antin's
persuasive analysis, "Duchamp and Language," 104-6, 115.
44. Antin, "Duchamp and Language," 105. Antin's discussion of art and language is also
echoed by Hans Richter's accounts of the Dada movement, particularly in regards to
Tzara's, Ball's, and Huelsenbeck's efforts to revolutionize language; see his Dada Art,
19-24, 44-50.
45. Roberts, "Laws of Physics," 62.
46. Masheck, "Introduction," Duchamp in Perspective, 11.
47. Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology
on the Sculpture of This Century (New York: George Braziller, 1982), 227.
48. In his discussion of the bicycle wheel, lf Linde elaborates on the relation between
the movement of the wheel and Gaston de Pawloski's experiments with the fourth
dimension, in "La Roue de bicyclette," Marcel Duchamp: Abcdaire, ed. Jean Clair,
36-37.
49. Roberts, "Laws of Physics," 47.
50. For an analysis of the kinetic, optical, and reiterative structure of puns, see
Dalia Judovitz, "Anemic Vision in Duchamp: Cinema as Readymade," Dada/
Surrealism 15 (1986): 47-57; reprinted in Dada and Surrealist Film, ed. Rudolf E.
Kuenzli (New York: Willis, Locker & Owens, 1987), 46-57.
51. James Joyce to Sylvia Beach, quoted in Les Annes Vingt: Les crivains Paris et
leurs amis 1920-1930 (Paris: Centre Culturel Amricain, 1959), 72.

52. Denis de Rougemont, "Marcel Duchamp mine de rien," Preuves 18, no. 204,
(February 1968): 45. Thierry de Duve interprets making as choosing, so that this
formulation implies the impossibility of choosing, in his "The Readymade and the Tube
of Paint," Artforum 24, no. 9 (May 1986): 115.
53. Leonardo notes: "When a table is struck in different places, the dust that is upon it is
reduced to various shapes of mounds and tiny hillocks" (F 61 r.) in The Notebooks of
Leonardo da Vinci, ed. and trans. Edward MacCurdy (London: Jonathan Cape, 1977),
513-14.
54. George H. Hamilton uses the formulation "brain facts" to refer to Duchamp's choice
of the snow shovel; see his "In Advance of Whose Broken Arm?" Duchamp in
Perspective, ed. Joseph Masheck, 75.
55. Carol P. James, "Duchamp's Early Readymades: The Erasure of Boundaries between
Literature and the Other Arts," Perspectives on Contemporary Literature 13 (1987): 26.
56. One only needs to recall here that Duchamp had designated The Large Glass as " A
world in yellow: general subtitle" (Notes, 115), thereby indicating its affinities to the
ready-mades, insofar as they question color and the function of painting.
57. I am referring here to Carol P. James' identification of this work as a postcard, in
"Duchamp's Early Readymades," 26.
58. De Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, 164-65.
59. Roberts, "Laws of Physics," 62.
60. Ibid., 62.
61. See Jean Baudrillard's analysis of the sign as the imposition of value, "L'imaginaire
de la linguistique," in L'change symbolique et la mort (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 310-11.
62. Baudrillard, "L'imaginaire," 290-92.
63. As Nietzsche explains: "The 'apparent' world is the only one: the 'real' world has
only been lyingly added "; see his Twilight of the Idols, trans. and with an introduction
by R. J. Hollingdale (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1968), 36.
64. Duchamp's conclusion that "grammatically : the arrhe of painting is feminine in
gender" exposes the incommensurability between the art of letters ( grammatike
[tekhne] ) and the art of painting. This is to say that grammar, as a set of rules that
governs the relation of words in a language, is insufficient to account for effects of
meaning that exceed both its linear and its synchronic dimensions.
65. This allusion to "crook" as a bend in a staff is also a pun on crook as a con man, an
allusion to Duchamp's Wanted poster, which also destabilizes the authority of
authorship. For a further discussion of this work, see chapter 4.

66. Paz, Appearance, 27.

67. See Albert Cook's analysis of with my tongue in my cheek as a visual representation
of what the phrase physically describes, in his "The Meta-Irony of Marcel Duchamp,"
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 44, no. 3 (Spring 1986): 267.
68. See Duchamp's comments on molds as photographic negatives, in Duchamp du
signe: Ecrits, ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (Paris: Flammarion, 1975), 121;
see also Anne d'Harnoncourt and Walter Hopps's discussion in "Etant donns," 37.
69. Harriet and Sidney Janis, "Marcel Duchamp, Anti-artist," View, ser. 5, no. 1 (March
1945): 18-19, 21-24, 53-54; reprinted in The Dada Painters and Poets, ed. Robert
Motherwell (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), 2d ed., 313.
70. Paz, Appearance, 22.
71. Roberts, "Laws of Physics," 47.
72. For an examination of this issue, see my discussion of Duchamp's ready-made
Pharmacy (1914) in chapter 3 of this volume.

3 Reproductions: Limited Editions, Ready-Made Origins

1. Arthur Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1986), 14-15.
2. Walter Benjamin, "Work of Art," 217-42.
3. Max Kozloff, "Johns and Duchamp," Duchamp in Perspective, ed. Joseph Masheck,
142-43.
4. For Danto's formulation, see his Disenfranchisement of Art, 25.
5. For the most comprehensive account of the historical context and the critical
reception of Fountain among art historians and philosophers alike, see William A.
Camfield, Fountain. For a summary of these debates, see Edward
Ball and Robert Knafo, "The R. Mutt Dossier," Art forum (October 1988): 115-17.
6. In 1916 Duchamp exhibited Two Ready-mades at the Bourgeois Gallery, New York,
Exhibition of Modern Art (3-29 April 1916, cat. no. 50), without identifying them. He
also exhibited the ready-made Pharmacy at the Montross Gallery, New York, Exhibition
of Pictures by Jean Crotti, Marcel Duchamp, Albert Gleizes, and Jean Metzinger (4-22
April 1916, cat. no. 27).
7. The comments of Katherine S. Dreier, a patron, friend, and admirer of Duchamp's,
indicate her difficulty in recognizing Fountain as a ready-made: "the only 'readymades'
I saw were groups which were extremely original in their handling. I did not know that
you had conceived of single objects" (letter from Kathenne S. Dreier to Marcel

Duchamp, 13 April 1917, Archives of the Socit Anonyme, Yale University; quoted by
Camfield, Fountain, 31; emphasis added).
8. Review of the first exhibition of the American Society of Independent Artists (April
1917) in the anonymous "His Art Is Too Crude for Independents," The New York
Herald, 14 April 1917: 6.
9. The Blind Man, ed. Marcel Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roch, and Beatrice Wood, no. 2
(New York, n.p., 1917).
10. These latter versions do not resemble the original photograph of Fountain. Even the
cast facsimiles fabricated by Galleria Schwarz have a streamlined, less
"anthropomorphically" suggestive shape.
11. The question remains whether Stieglitz's deliberate choice to manipulate the lighting
and thus, in effect, to "enshrine" the urinal, does not contradict Duchamp's effort to
question the cult value of art.
12. Beatrice Wood, I Shock Myself, ed. Lindsay Smith (Ojai, Calif.: Dillingham Press,
1985), 30.
13. Carl Van Vechten, The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten, 1913-1946,
ed. Edward Burns (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 58-59.
14. Camfield, Fountain, 14.
15. "The Richard Mutt Case," The Blind Man, no. 2, ed. Marcel Duchamp et al., 5-6.
16. Thierry de Duve also insists on the reproducible character of Fountain, in
Resonances du Readymade: Duchamp entre avant-garde et tradition (Nmes: Editions
Jacqueline Chambon, 1989), 49-51. His focus, however, is on the conditions that define
"art" as a set of utterances, rather than the relation of art to nonart.
17. Duchamp's multiple signatures of these versions, including his erasure of Linde's
signature and reapplication of his own pseudonym R. MUTT, indicate his persistent
effort to question the creative function and agency of the artist. While Peter Burger
recognizes Duchamp's interrogation of the notion of "individual creation," he stops short
of considering the fact that Duchamp submits the urinal under the pseudonym "R.
MUTT." Moreover, Duchamp's speculative use of signatures cannot be summarized as
an act of provocation, since they call into question the referential status of the artist. For
Brger's remarks see his Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 51-53.
18. These "found" urinals, however, do not obey the logic of the surrealist objet trouv,
since their choice is determined by their "resemblance" to mass-produced objects. While
I agree with Brger that the institutionalization of the objet trouv may undermine its
antiart stance, Duchamp's gestures resist such a recovery. For Brger's comments, see
Theory, 57.

19. For a detailed list of all the different versions of Fountain, see Camfield, Fountain,
162-65.
20. Paul Matisse, Marcel Duchamp, Notes, ed. and trans. Paul Matisse (Boston: J. K.
Hall & Co., 1983); this is always abbreviated as Notes, page number.
21. Duchamp's enigmatic note in The Box of 1914 inscribes this "feminine" potential
into Fountain, in an almost brutal sense: "one only has: for female the public urinal and
one lives by it."
22. For Danto, the urinal has even moral implications: "women are anatomically barred
from employing them in their primary function", see his Disenfranchisement of Art, 14.
23. Marcel Duchamp's letter to Jean Crotti, 17 August 1952.; quoted in Tabu Dada:
Jean Crotti and Suzanne Duchamp, 1915-1922, ed. William A. Camfield and JeanHubert Martin (Bern: Kunsthalle Bern, 1983), 8; translation mine.
24. Ball and Knafo interpret the faucet as an effort to set into motion a teleology of the
vanished object; in doing so, they leave open the question of Duchamp's strategic use of
"mirrorical return."
25. Duchamp's invocation of a "mirrorical return" may be interpreted as an allusion to
Leonardo's "mirror writing." This allusion, however, refers to the conceptual potential of
Leonardo's gesture.
26. Quoted by Schwarz, "Eros c'est la vie," xxxii.
27. In Cabanne's query to Duchamp, however, one senses his discomfort regarding the
possible entrepreneurial dimension of such intervention, the scent of the artist as a
traveling salesman "commis voyageur," ( DMD, 78-79).
28. Benjamin, "Work of Art," 221-23.
29. In France, jars of red and green colored water were used as the insignia of a
pharmacy.
30. See Raymond S. Stites's discussion of painting media in Leonardo's time, in
Leonardo da Vinci, 25-26. Leonardo's Codex Atlanticus (1480) contains numerous
drawings of color grinding mills and distillation apparati for turpentine and alcohols, as
well as explanations for the preparation of pigments (fol. 32., recto a, reversed).
Duchamp's comment, that the bachelor grinds his own chocolate, may be interpreted as
further evidence of his interest both in pigments and Leonardo.
31. See Theodore Reff, "L.H.O.O.Q.-Alikes," 83-93.
32. See The Winston Dictionary, "rectify" entry.
33. Carol P. James suggests that Pharmacy may be a pun on headlights ( phares ) and a
text of the same year referring to child head-light or fanfare ( enfantphare); see her
"Early Readymades," 25.

34. Jean Clair, "Tradition des perspecteurs," 154.

35. Calvin Tomkins, "Marcel Duchamp," Bride and Bachelors, 24-25.
36. For a discussion of Duchamp's relation to Seurat and Czanne, see Thierry de Duve,
Nominalisme pictural, 250-55.
37. For Harold Rosenberg, the addition of the mustache "emphasizes the distance
between the commodity provided by the printing press and the conception of the artist
in drawing it"; see his "The Mona Lisa Without a Mustache: Art in the Media Age," Art
News 75 (May 1976): 50.
38. Benjamin, "Work of Art," 221.
39. Ibid., 223.
40. Ibid., 224-25.
41. As Pierre Bourdieu points out, the consecration of art objects in the confines of the
museum corresponds to both their economic and visual "neutralization"; see
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 273.
42. For an analysis of Duchamp's bilingual puns as a strategy of overlay and delay,
see George H. Bauer, "Duchamp, Delay, and Overlay," Mid-America 60 (April 1978):
supplement, 63-68.
43. Stites is inclined to favor Isabella d'Este as the model for this painting, in opposition
to Vasari's contention that it refers to Giocondo's wife; see his Leonardo da Vinci, 32933.
44. See Julia Cartwright, Isabella d'Este, vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1932), 10-11.
However, even Andr Malraux is uncertain of the model's identity; see his The
Psychology of Art, vol. 3 (New York: Pantheon, 1950), 153.
45. See Lilian Schwartz, "Leonardo's Mona Lisa," Arts and Antiques (January 1987):
50-55.
46. My interpretation of Duchamp's gesture as a joke that perpetuates Leonardo's joke in
La Gioconda is intended as a critique of Timothy Binkley's reading of L.H.O.O.Q. in
"Piece: Contra Aesthetics," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 35, no. 3 (Spring
1977): 265-77.
47. Duchamp interview with Herbert Crehan, "Dada," in Evidence, no. 3 (Fall 1961):
36-38.
48. Binkley, "Piece," 272.
49. Ibid., 272.

50. The affinity between photographic and printed media, their common reliance on
printing techniques as well as on the increased proliferation of photographic work in
print, threatens the artistic autonomy of photography.
51. Bauer, "Duchamp's Ubiquitous Puns," 127.
52. Charles Sanders Peirce discusses the notion of the index by claiming that an "index
asserts nothing: It only says, 'There!' it takes hold of our eyes, as it were," in Collected
Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, vol. 3
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931-1933), 211.
53. This is an elaboration of Lawrence D. Steefel Jr.'s allusion to Duchamp's
"debrained" thought products; see his "Marcel Duchamp and the Machine," in Marcel
Duchamp, ed. Anne d'Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine, 71.
54. This personal inscription of "life" into the artwork, as the signature of the artist, may
explain why Duchamp ironically claims that his work cannot have any social
importance for the future ( DMD, 72).
55. Kuh, "Duchamp," 83.
56. Ibid., 90.
57. See Danto's discussion of this Platonic legacy, in Disenfranchisement of Art, 5-6.
58. See George Bull's discussion of the term natura in Giorgio Vasari, Renaissance,
14.See also, Erwin Panofsky's discussion of Alberti in his Idea: A Concept in Art
History, trans. Joseph F. Peake (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 47-50.

4 Art and Economics: From the Urinal to the Bank

1. Octavio Paz, Appearance, 20-22.
2. These works have remained largely unexamined, except for Peter Read's recent effort
to inquire into their psychoanalytic dimension, in ''The Tzanck Check and Related
Works by Marcel Duchamp," Artist of the Century, ed. Rudolf Kuenzli and Francis M.
Naumann (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 95-105.
3. Cabanne, DMD, 73-75.
4. Moira and William Roth, "John Cage on Marcel Duchamp: An Interview," Duchamp
in Perspective,ed. Joseph Masheck, 156.
5. Moira and William Roth, "Interview," 156. For recent analyses of the relation of art,
business, and the art market, see Raymonde Moulin, Le March de la peinture en
France (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967), 49-55, and on Duchamp specifically, see 471,
n. 17.
6. Cage's uncertainty regarding Duchamp's gesture to reissue the ready-mades reflects
his inability to understand them in the context of other reproducibles in art, such as

lithographs, engravings, and even photographic prints, that is, works of art in limited
edition.
7. This was at the Quinn auction of 1925 in New York. See Duchamp's interviews with
Cabanne, DMD, 73-74. Cabanne suspects that Duchamp's gesture of bringing his works
together is a way of valorizing himself, while Duchamp insists on the necessity of
keeping the body of work together.
8. As Duchamp explains, Mrs. Rumsey was reimbursed for the $8,000 she invested, and
the remaining fifteen paintings were divided between Duchamp and Roch ( DMD, 73).
9. They were to be sold for $1.00 or more, according to the value of metal used. This
interest in tokens/amulets cast in different metals anticipates Duchamp's issue of
numismatic coins; see Marcel Duchamp Art Medal (1967).
10. Excerpts from this archival letter are quoted in Robert Lebel, "Marcel Duchamp:
Whiskers and Kicks of all Kinds," Marcel Duchamp, 96-97.
11. Franklin Clarkin, "Two Miles of Funny Pictures," Boston Evening Transcript (25
April 1917). As Camfield notes in Fountain, no further mention of a damage suit is
found, 27.
12. Given the society's overt abdication of authority, in the form of aesthetic judgments
(jury) and in terms of awards (prizes), it seems that Duchamp's submission (under the
pseudonym of R. Mutt) is prefectly within the guidelines.
13. Francis M. Naumann, "Affectueusement, Marcel: Ten Letters from Marcel
Duchamp," Archives of American Art Journal 22, no. 4 (1982): 8, quoted by Camfield,
Fountain, 28.
14. See my discussion of Fountain in chapter 3, section entitled "The Objective
Character of Art." As opposed to the gratuitous character of other Dada interventions,
Stephen C. Foster understands Duchamp's gesture as an analysis of art as a social
phenomenon; see his "Dada Criticism, Anti-Criticism, ACriticism," in Dada Spectrum:
The Dialectics of Revolt, ed. Stephen Foster and Rudolf E. Kuenzli (Madison, Wis.:
Loda Press, 1979), 31-35
15. Moira Roth, "Robert Smithson on Duchamp: An Interview," Duchamp in
Perspective, ed. Joseph Masheck, 135.
16. It is in this regard that Duchamp's work differs from the contemporary artist William
Boggs, whose laborious handmade reproductions of money raise significant questions
about the transactional value of money and the artwork as documentation. However,
Boggs's project represents a limited interpretation of Duchamp's treatment of currency,
which includes different types of financial species: checks, bonds, and numismatic
coins. For an account of Boggs's work, see Lawrence Weschler, "Boggs's Bills," in
Shapinsky's Karma, Boggs Bills: And Other True Life Tales (San Francisco: North Point
Press, 1988), 178-260.

17. The need for titles, to designate or label works of art, reflects historical
developments related to the autonomization of art, as well as the individualization of the
"author."
18. Maurice Raynal mentions Daniel Tzanck as one of the great collectors of the period;
see Raynal's Anthologie de la peinture en France de 1906- nos jours (Paris:
Montaigne, 1927). For the content of his collection, consult the catalogs of the two sales
published by the Hotel Drouot. For further details, see Read's comprehensive account,
Tzanck Check, 98.
19. Peter Read recognizes Tzanck's potential indebtedness to Duchamp, for having
passed into the history of art, like Mallarm's witty barber, Tzanck Check,
96. However, he does not consider the deliberate nature of Duchamp's gesture in issuing
his art check not to an ordinary dentist but to the patron of a famous art collection.
20. Read, Tzanck Check, 99.
21. Ibid., 99.
22. There are further references to the "teeth" of combs: "Use, as proportional control,
this comb with broken teeth, on another object made up, also of smaller elements
(smaller so that it can accommodate this control)" ( WMD, 71). This note, dated
September 1915, precedes Duchamp's ready-made dog comb, entitled Comb (Fe bruary
1916). Also quoted in Camfield and Martin, Tabu Dada, 14.
23. De Duve, "Readymade," 115.
24. See Francis M. Naumann, The Mary and William Sisler Collection (New York: The
Museum of Modern Art, 1984), 192-93.
25. For Thierry de Duve, L.H.O.O.Q. represents the ideology of the masterpiece as a
figure of cultural consumption, the relation of art of museums/museums of art; see his
"Les Moustaches de la Joconde: Petit Exercise de Mthode," Tradition de la rupture, ed.
Jean Clair, 407-8.
26. Duchamp's concern for standards, metric or otherwise, is well documented in his
works. For an analysis of the gold standard and its influence on literary notions of
production, see Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism:
American Literature at the End of the Century (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1987). However, Duchamp's works demonstrate an explicit critique of
both standards and norms, since his focus is the arbitrary assignment and reproduction
of value in both the artistic and economic spheres.
27. Moira and William Roth, "Interview," 156.
28. Ibid., 156.
29. Cage appreciates Duchamp's efforts to delimit the ready-mades, without realizing
that such a deliberate gesture may represent not only an artistic but also an economic

choice. By restricting its circulation and consumption, one is, in fact, "economizing" the
notion of the ready-made.
30. Andr Gervais also examines the polynomy of names staged by Wanted, without
considering the economic subtext, in "Sign ED sign MD: Autographique Portrait of An
artist en Rymes," Tradition de la rupture, ed. Jean Clair, 323-25.
31. Gervais observes that the phrases accompanying the signature Rrose Slavy,
such as "son" or "from," or "copyright by," designate an origin that is notable in respect
to the parody of its acceptance, in "Sign ED sign MD," 327. His insight is echoed by
Thierry de Duve's analysis of authorship and criminology in ''Authorship Stripped Bare,
Even," RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 19/20 (1990/1991): 239-40.
32. Amelia Jones, "The Ambivalence of Male Masquerade: Duchamp as Rrose Slavy,"
in The Body Imaged: The Human Form and Visual Culture since the Renaissance, ed.
Kathleen Adler and Marcia Pointon (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 28.
33. Read, Tzanck Check, 102.
34. Lebel, 97.
35. Camfield and Martin, Tabu Dada, 8.
36. Ibid., 8.
37. Ibid., 8.
38. Read, Tzanck Check, 101.
39. Considered in relation to Wanted, it also represents the fictitious trade of securities
in order to "bail" the artist out of the aesthetic dilemma.
40. The French term for a chess game ( jeu d'checs ) carries within it the figurative
expression of failure ( chec).
41. Damisch points out that roulette (the game of red and black) is a head or tails
game, since zero is suppressed on the roulette table and he concludes:"The
difference between chess and the game of heads and tails is that in chess the two
heads in question are ones that think"; see Damisch, "The Duchamp Defense," 1920.
42. Ibid., 19.
43. Damisch appropriately describes chess and roulette as respectively, the
"calculation of strategy" vs. the "calculation of probability"; ibid., 19.
44. Letter from Duchamp to Francis Picabia (Thursday, Undated, 1924), in WMD, 187.

45. A Martingale is a system for recovering betting losses by progressively increasing

the stakes. As Duchamp notes, however, the efficacy of this system (a bad Martingale
may work as well as a good one) depends on the number of uses.
46. Moira and William Roth, "Interview," 154. Duchamp's formulation echoes Pierre
Bourdieu's assessment of art as a playing field where authorship is defined strategically;
see his The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1993), 108-11.
47. Camfield, Fountain, 112.
48. Ibid., 111-12.
49. See Walter Benjamin's discussion, "Work of Art," 218.
50. For a detailed examination of this work, see chapter 2.
51. This medal is based on Alberti's medallion (fig. 66), regarded as a self-portrait, in
which he depicts himself in profile with the emblem of the winged eye under his chin.
In his dialogue Anuli Alberti describes the winged eye as a symbol of God's
omniscience and as a reminder to be intellectually perspicacious and alert. See G. F.
Hill, A Corpus of Italian Medals of the Renaissance before Cellini (London: British
Museum, 1930), nos. 16-18.
52. The phrase Tum in Cicero's motto is one to which Duchamp overtly alludes through
his puns on the signature of Fountain, "R. Mutt," and later in the title of "Tu m',"
Duchamp's commemorative assemblage of the projected shadows of his ready-mades.
53. A. R. J. Turgot, "Tableau philosophique des progrs succssifs de l'esprit humain"
[1750], in Ecrits conomiques (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1970), 57; also quoted by Marc
Shell, The Economy of Literature (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1978), 64.
54. John Evelyn, "Numismata" [London, 1697], in Coins and Vases of Arthur Stone
Dewing: A Memorial Exhibition, exh. cat., The Fogg Art Museum (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press); quoted by Shell, Economy of Literature, 64.
55. Marc Shell, Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophical Economics
from the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1982), 1.
56. Marc Shell, Economy of Literature, 65. Compare to Shell's brief discussion of the
relationship of the notion of artistic reproduction to production in Benjamin, "Work of
Art," 85-88.
57. Quoted in Ecke Bonk, Marcel Duchamp, 235.
58. Moira Roth, "Smithson," 135.
59. Lebel, Duchamp, 97.

5 Rendez-vous with Marcel Duchamp: "Given"

1. The public began to believe in a myth that Duchamp was actively promoting
himself in forums, panels, and interviews; see Anne d'Harnoncourt and Walter Hopps,
"Etant Donns," 6-7.
2. Joseph Masheck observes that unlike the Nude and the Bride, Etant Donns is "totally
divorced from modernist abstract tendencies"; see "Introduction," Duchamp in
Perspective, 22. His comment reflects the difficulty of understanding this work in
relation to Duchamp's previous works.
3. Masheck summarizes this dilemma as follows: "Did Duchamp actually realize an
escape from art in the fabrication of this work, did he leave art behind just as we thought
he had until we found he hadn't?" He goes on to characterize this work as "startlingly
gross and amateurish"; see ibid., 13.
4. Moira and William Roth, "Interview," 155. For other comparisons of Given with the
Large Glass, see Octavio Paz, "Water Writes Always in Plural," in Appearance, 91-178;
Jean-Franois Lyotard, "Etant Donns: Inventaire du dernier nu," Marcel Duchamp:
Abcdaire, ed. Jean Clair, 86-110; Alain Jouffroy, "Etant donn Marcel Duchamp 1)
individualiste rvolutionnaire, 2) respirateur," Opus International, no. 49 (March 1974):
18-23; Ren Micha, "Etant Donn Etant Donns,'' Tradition de la rupture, ed. Jean
Clair, 157-75.
5. Moira and William Roth, "Interview," 155.
6. See William Camfield's account of Duchamp's exhibit and Walter Hopps's comments,
in Fountain, 109.
7. Masheck, Duchamp in Perspective, 155.
8. John Golding, Bride Stripped Bare, 95. My analysis also relies on the facsimile
edition of Given by Marcel Duchamp, Manual of Instructions for Marcel Duchamp
"Etant Donnes: 1) la chute d'eau, 2) le gaz d'clairage" (Philadelphia: Philadelphia
Museum of Art, 1987).
9. D'Harnoncourt and Hopps are an exception, since they insist on the fact that the door
frustrates the public's visual expectations; see "Etant Donns," 7-8.
10. Octavio Paz, Appearance, 95.
11. Arturo Schwarz, "List of Illustrations," Marcel Duchamp, no. 130.
12. Paz, Appearance, 95. Taking as a point of departure Paz's emphasis on the "hinge,"
this essay will explore the impact of this notion on Duchamp's visual and linguistic
experiments.
13. For an excellent analysis of Duchamp's challenge of the institutional space of the
museum, see Marc Le Bot, "Margelles du Sens; ou, les muses de Marcel Duchamp,"

L'Arc, no. 59 (1974): 8-15. The museum as site of "immortality" for the work of art will
be further elaborated in the conclusion of this essay.
14. Roger Dadoun, "Rrose Sschize: Sschize d'un portrait-thorie de Marcel Duchamp en
Jsus sec clibataire," L'Arc, no. 59 (1974): 25.
15. Golding, Bride Stripped Bare, 16.
16. I interpret this exaggerated realism, which for critics such as Joseph Masheck is an
indicator of Duchamp's going against the "grain of modern art," as a reflection of
Duchamp's postmodernism, insofar as it makes visible his rhetorical display of pictorial
and sculptural mimesis as modes of artistic reproduction. For Masheck's comments, see
his "Introduction," in Duchamp in Perspective, 23.
17. Paz, Appearance, 96.
18. In the pages that follow, I will demonstrate that Duchamp anticipates the feminist
critique of the male gaze by deconstructing both the structure and, therefore, the
ideology of male spectatorship. For a critique of vision as a predominantly scopic
economy, see Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter and
Caroline Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 133-48; see also Jacqueline
Rose's critique of sexual difference and the visual image in her Sexuality in the Field of
Vision (London: Verso, New Left Books, 1986), 232-33.
19. The coincidence of the point of view and the viewing subject implied in perspective
is designated by Jean Pellerin Viator as "subject." For a critique of the notion of
pictorial and cinematographic perspective and the subject's point of view, see JeanLouis Baudry, "The Ideological Effects of the Cinematographic Apparatus," in
Apparatus: Selected Writings, ed. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (New York: Tanam Press,
1980), 25-37.
20. Compare Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure," 618; and, more recently, Jacqueline
Rose, Sexuality, 232-33. See also Mary Ann Doane, "Film and Masquerade: Theorising
the Female Spectator," Screen 23 (September-October 1982): 74-87.
21. For an exploration of vision and its indirect relation to both the body and language,
see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "The IntertwiningThe Chiasm," in The Visible and the
Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1968), 130-55. See also, Rosalind Krauss's recent examination of the body's
relation to the signifier and to vision in "Where's Poppa?," in The Definitively
Unfinished Marcel Duchamp, ed. Thierry de Duve (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 43359.
22. For a comprehensive analysis of Courbet's works and this particular painting,
see Michael Fried's excellent study, Courbet's Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1990), 200-5. Fried also emphasizes the painterliness of the parrot, a detail that
may have proven significant to Duchamp's allusion to this work.

23. This reference to Magritte has not yet been elaborated in the critical literature on
Duchamp. Alain Robbe-Grillet re-creates this painting in literal terms in his novel
Topologie d'une cit fantme: roman (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1976), under the
revised title The Mannequin Assassinated, instead of Magritte's The Threatened
Assassin. Robbe-Grillet's literary "translation" of Magritte's image involves puns similar
to those that are found in Duchamp's own work.
24. Duchamp himself spells out this pun on the facticity of sex; see his quote in
Schwarz, Complete Works, 576. For a general analysis of this lithograph series and its
relation to Given, see Hellmut Wohl, "Duchamp's Etchings of the Large Glass and
Lovers," Artist of the Century, ed. Rudolf E. Kuenzli and Francis M. Naumann, 172-76.
25. See Clair, Marcel Duchamp: Abcdaire, 158-59.
26. Compare to Jacqueline Chnieux's critique of transgression in "L'Erotisme chez
Marcel Duchamp et Georges Bataille," Tradition de la rupture, ed. Jean Clair, 196-218.
Although Chnieux alludes to the rhetorical status of eroticism in Duchamp, she does
not elaborate it in visual terms, by examining its figurative structure.
27. My interpretation of the nude in relation to the brick wall questions Lyotard's,
"Inventaire du dernier nu," 102, and Golding's suggestions that the nude in Given fell
from the ceiling, by analogy to its movement in the Large Glass, from the upper to the
lower regions, Bride Stripped Bare, 99.
28. For an analysis of the reversible topology of the male and female position, see Jean
Clair, "Sexe et topologie," Marcel Duchamp: Abcdaire, 52-59. Such a reversibility of
sexual difference in the artistic realm contests but does not annul the conventional
opposition of these categories in the social realm.
29. This interpenetration of the male and female shape is yet another allusion to
Leonardo's anatomical drawings as discussed by Sigmund Freud in Leonardo da Vinci
and a Memory of his Childhood (1910). See Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality, 225-33.
30. D'Harnoncourt and Hopps, "Reflections on a New Work," 37.
31. Clair, "Sexe et topologie," 58. The simulational and rhetorical logic of
Duchamp's operations challenges the priority of the phallus as a privileged signifier; see
Stephen Heath, "Difference," Screen 19 (Autumn 1978): 67.
32. Pierre Cabanne, Entretiens avec Marcel Duchamp (Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1967),
165, translation mine.
33. For a detailed exploration of these puns in Anemic Cinema, see Katrina Martin,
"Marcel Duchamp's Anemic Cinema," Studio International 189, no. 973 (JanuaryFebruary 1975): 53-6o. As P. Adams Sitney observes, however, "The sexuality is neither
in the literal surface of the words, nor in the optical illusion. It is an operation of the
viewer's reading of one part of the film into the other," see "Image and Title in AvantGarde Cinema," October" (Winter 1979): 104.

34. Compare to my discussion of sexual difference and indifference, in "Anemic

Vision," 48-56. For an analysis of the emblematic and anagrammatic character of this
film, see Annette Michelson, "'Anemic Cinema': Reflections on an Emblematic Work,"
Artforum (October 1973): 65-69.
35. Craig E. Adcock discusses in detail Duchamp's experiments with the mechanical
problem of projecting three and four dimensional figures on a two dimensional surface,
which I consider analogous to the punning movement of the male and female positions;
see Craig Adcock, Marcel Duchamp's Notes from the Large Glass: An N-Dimensional
Analysis (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983), 118-36.
36. Manual of Instructions for Marcel Duchamp "Etant Donns: 1) la chute d'eau, 2) le
gaz d'clairage" (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1987), 1.
37. D'Harnoncourt and Hopps, "Reflections on a New Work," 25.
38. Lyotard, in "L'Inventaire," considers chocolate as the medium through which the
difference between appearance and apparition is thematized, 104.
39. Jackstraws is a game where miniature (often agricultural) tools are flattened out and
piled on top of each other. The aim is to extricate each of these elements with a hook (a
kind of stylus) without disturbing all the others. This miniaturized assemblage recalls
Duchamp's miniature museum, The Box in a Valise.
40. This brush for cleaning bottles anticipates, by its pointed indexical character, the
gesture of the nude in Given, which is holding a gas lamp.
41. Schwarz, Marcel Duchamp, xxvi.
42. See Rosalind Krauss, "Notes on the Index: Part I," in The Originality of the AvantGarde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 198-99.
43. See The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even: A Typographic Version by
Richard Hamilton of Marcel Duchamp's Green Box, trans. George H. Hamilton
(Stuttgart: Hansjrg Mayer, 1976).
44. D'Harnoncourt and Hopps, "Reflections on a New Work," 40.
45. Krauss, Originality of the Avant-Garde, 205.
46. Schwarz, Marcel Duchamp, xxvi.
47. Ibid., xxxiv.
48. It is important to recall that Franois Villon was so admired in the Duchamp
household that his brothers added the name of Villon to their patronymic name.
49. For an analysis of Duchamp's signature, Rrose Slavy, see Roger Dadoun's article,
"Rrose Sschize," 24-28; for his second signature "Belle Haleine," see Arturo Schwarz,
"Rrose Slavy: Alias Marchand de Sel alias Belle Haleine," L'Arc, no. 59 (1974): 29-35.

Postscript: Duchamp's Postmodern Returns

1. Clement Greenberg, "Counter-Avant-Garde," Duchamp in Perspective, ed. Joseph
Masheck, 123-24.
2. Greenberg, "Counter-Avant-Garde," 124.
3. Pierre Bourdieu, Field, 108.
4. Ibid., 61.
5. Ibid., 60.
6. For a general analysis of authorship in Duchamp in terms of choosing, naming, and
signing, see Thierry de Duve, "Authorship Stripped Bare," 234-41. My own approach
focuses on the authorial signature not as an act of authorization but as one of
notorization.
7. This incident is described in detail in a profile based on interviews with the artist by
Lawrence Weschler, "Boggs's Bills," 178-260. Since then, Boggs was charged with
counterfeiting in Australia (1989), found not guilty, and awarded $20,000 in damages.
Recently, more than 100 drawings and paintings have been confiscated by United States
Secret Service Agents in Pittsburgh, and he is currently under investigation; see the
article on Boggs entitled "Are They Counterfeit Bills or Art? (Or Both?)," The New York
Times (6 December 1992), 42.
8. For an examination of strategies of appropriation in the context of postmodernism,
see Stephen Melville, "Painting in the End: Fates of Appropriation," After the future:
Postmodern Times and Places, ed. Gary Shapiro (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1990), 158-61.
9. Quoted by Weschler, "Boggs's Bills," 227.
10. "Are They Counterfeit," 42.
11. Jean-Franois Lyotard suggests that "Post modern would have to be understood
according to the paradox of the future ( post ) anterior ( modo ) "; see his "What Is
Postmodernism?," The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff
Bennington and Brian Massumi, Theory and History of Literature, vol. 10
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 81. For an elaboration of Lyotard's
discussion of Modernism and postmodernism, see my "Dada Cinema: At the Limits of
Modernity," Art & Text 34 (Spring 1989).

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291

Index
A
Acadmie Julien, 17
Adcock, Craig E., 249 n, 250 n, 269 n
Ades, Dawn, 249 n
Air de Paris. See Paris Air
Alberti, Leon Battista, 188 -190, 265 n;
Medallion Self Portrait, 188
American Society of Independent Artists, 124 , 126 , 164
Anemic Cinema (Discs Inscribed with Puns ), 101 , 217 -218, 218
Anmic Cinma, See Anemic Cinema
Antin, David, 95 , 254 n
Apolinre Enameled, 104 , 105 -106, 108 -109
Apollinaire, Guillaume, 87 , 105
Appropriation:
critical appropriations, 13 , 52 -53;
modernism, 13 (see also Ready-mades);
of Arcimboldo's works, 81 -87;
of Leonardo's works, 67 , 79 -80, 135 -136, 139 -149, 171 -173;
postmodern, 13 , 240 -241, 271 n;

re-appropriation of earlier works, 16 , 64 -65, 221 -226 (see also Box in a Valise, The).
See also Artistic creativity; Authorship
Apropos of 'Readymades,' 92 , 136
Arcimboldo, Giuseppe, 77 , 81 -87, 153 ;
and visual and linguistic puns, 80 -87
Arensberg, Louise and Walter, 24 , 124 , 163
Armory Show, 16 , 26
Arms of Saint-Etienne, 53 , 56
Art:
abandonment of, 2 , 5 , 6 , 9 , 16 , 17 , 72 -73, 77 , 109 , 114 , 118 -119, 266 n;
and anti-art, 110 -111;
and non-art, 75 -76, 118 -119, 167 , 231 , 257 ;
and science, 58 -59, 79 , 139 ;
as criminal activity (see Wanted/$2000 Reward);
as institution system for packaging and framing, 10 , 168 ;
as scatological joke, 111 -113;
autonomy of, 11 ;
292
avant-garde, 233 -234;
conditions of possibility, 73 , 119 , 126 , 230 -231;
postponement of pictorial becoming, 9 , 19 -35, 42 -44, 47 -52, 56 -58, 73 , 101 -105,
170 -171;
speculative model, 11 , 175 -178, 185 , 240 -241 (see also Art and economics);
transitional states, 10
Art and economics, 159 -194, 236 -241;

commercial/artistic ventures, 161 -167 (see also Wanted/$2000 Reward);

financial and artistic species, 178 -185 (see also Monte Carlo Bond);
checks, 166 -173 (see also Cheque Bruno; Tzank Check);
membership cards, 173 -175 (see also Czech Check);
numismatic coins, 186 -192 (see also Drain Stopper; Marcel Duchamp Art Medal)
Artist:
absence of, 68 -69, 109 -110;
artistic identity, 7 -8, 16 , 106 -108, 143 -146, 155 -157;
as an artist, 106 ;
as art worker, 18 ;
as breather, 154 -155;
as counterfeiter, 240 ;
as gambler, 182 -185;
as hinge, relay, delay, 113 , 156 ;
as maker, 7 , 156 ;
as notary, 237 -238;
canonization of, 227 -229;
challenge definition, 7 , 16 -17, 18 , 48 , 78 -79, 102 -103;
critique of biological creation, 156 -157;
formal training, 17 ;
immortality of, 226 -229;
life and works on credit, 13 ;
mortality of, 201 , 226 -229;
plurality of personas, 7 , 70 , 114 , 143 -144, 159 , 175 -180, 181 , 228 ;
reaction against Romanticism, 7 ;

selfportrait, 114 -117.

See also Authorship; Rrose Slavy
Artistic creativity:
affinity to humor, 86 ;
anxiety of influence, 41 , 247 n;
as strategic intervention, 7 ;
challenge notion of, 4 , 114 , 118 -119, 156 -157, 234 -236;
filiational logic, 71 -73;
in economic terms, 128 -129;
originality as rhetorical gesture, 86 n;
production and reproduction, 234 -236;
redefine, 18 , 76 , 240 -241;
rejects notion of, 155 -156
Artistic meaning:
and poetic associations, 5 , 90 -96 (see also Puns);
as context, 5 , 72 -73, 90 , 198 , 221 , 225 -226, 231 ;
as strategic systems, 53
Artistic production:
and logic of the multiple, 9 , 31 -32, 122 -123, 125 -126, 192 ;
and mechanical reproduction, 7 , 8 , 122 , 135 , 139 -142, 245 n, 259 n, 265 n;
as speculation, 12 , 192 -193, 237 -240 (see also Art and economics);
as system of reproduction, 2 , 12 , 32 , 152 , 192 ;
conceptual potential, 12 , 59 -60, 72 -73, 87 , 139 , 157 , 173 , 192 -193, 241 ;
in a field of readymade rules, 7 , 119 , 123 -124, 157
Art Medal. See Marcel Duchamp Art Medal

 293
Art objects:
as hinges, 12 , 200 , 221 -225, 226 ;
as multiples, 9 , 18 , 32 , 122 , 126 , 246 n;
as transitive, 12 , 102 , 154 -155, 194 , 226 ;
resisting canonization, 12 , 75 -76, 117 -128
Art work:
as box, 2 (see also Box in a Valise, The);
as check, 167 -173, 237 ;
dry and wet art, 66 -67, 102 -105, 106 , 127 , 130 -134
Aura:
as air, 24 ;
as critique of painting, 25 ;
as halo, 23 -25, 212 . (see also Bec Auer, The);
and Benjamin, Walter, 141 , 245 n;
of painting, 141 -142.
Authorship; and style, 113 -114;
authorial signature, 23 , 113 -119, 168 , 173 -175, 237 -238, 258 n, 270 n;
critique of Brger, 258 n;
disrupt identity, 7 ;
plurality of personas, 7 , 70 , 106 -107, 113 -114, 132 -134, 154 , 175 -179, 180 -181,
228 , 270 n

B
Bagarre d'Austerlitz, La. See Brawl at Austerlitz, The
Ball, Edward, 256 n, 258 n

Ball, Hugo, 96
Bank of England, 238
Baptme. See Baptism
Baptism, 23
Barnes Collection, The, 207
Barthes, Roland, 83 -85
Bataille, Georges, 268 n
Baudrillard, Jean, 255 n
Baudry, Jean-Louis, 267 n
Bauer, George, 151 , 251 n, 254 n, 259 n, 260 n
Beach, Sylvia, 102 , 255 n
Beautiful Breath, Veil Water, 25 , 131 -132, 131 , 154 , 228 , 270 n.
See also Rrose Slavy
Bec Auer, Le. See Bec Auer, The
Bec Auer, The, 25 , 208 -209, 209 , 212
Bedridden Mountains, 221
Belle haleine, eau de voilette. See Beautiful Breath, Veil Water
Benjamin, Walter, 135 , 139 -142, 245 n, 256 n, 259 n, 265 n;
concept of aura, 141 (see also Aura);
exhibition value vs. cult value, 141 ;
mechanical reproduction, 7 , 8 , 122 , 135 , 139 -142, 245 n, 259 n, 265 n.
See also Artistic production; Reproduction
Benoit, Pierre Andr, 90
Berger, John, 246 n
Bicycle Wheel, 98 , 99 -101, 201

Binkley, Timothy, 147 , 260 n

Blind Man, The (journal), 125 -126, 257 n
Bloom, Harold, 247 n
Boggs, J. S. G., 13 , 238 -240, 262 n, 270 n
Boite en valise. La. See Box in a Valise, The
Bonk, Ecke, 3 , 243 n, 265 n
Boston Evening Transcript, 164
Bottle Rack, 93 -94, 93 , 99 , 103 , 221
Bouche-vier. See Drain Stopper
Bourdieu, Pierre, 234 -235, 247 n,
294
259 n, 264 n, 270 n
Bourgeois Gallery, 257 n
Box in a Valise, The, 4 , 9 , 12 , 32 , 71 , 73 , 122 -123, 128 , 135 , 149 , 175 , 197 -198,
198 , 226 , 236 , 269 n;
and reproductive logic, 9 , 31 , 73 ;
as chess game of language, 5 ;
as Duchampian corpus, 4 , 32 ;
as paradigm, 4 , 9 , 12 , 72 -73, 197 -198, 136 ;
as portable museum, 4 , 123 , 135 , 149 , 226 ;
unpacking, 2 , 122 -123
Box of 1914, The, 49 , 56 -58, 57 , 79 , 88 , 111 , 126 , 249 n, 252 n, 258 n
Brancusi, Constantin, 163
Brawl at Austerlitz, The, 201 -202
Breton, Andr, 164 , 212 , 248 n

Bride, 44 , 45 , 58 , 61
Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, The, (The Large Glass), 3 -4, 8 -10, 17 ,
15 , 35 , 42 , 54 , 229 -230, 249 n, 255 n, 270 n;
and electricity, 62 ;
and Finnegan's Wake, 51 ;
and gender, 69 -71;
and mechanical drawing, 56 -58;
and transparency, 51 , 60 , 71 -72;
and visual opacity, 10 ;
as a function of manual, 56 ;
as assemblage based on reproductive logic, 9 , 61 , 72 -73;
as delay, 59 -60;
as ironic machine, 58 -59;
as machine for/of reproduction, 61 -73, 230 -231;
as mirror, 9 , 65 , 230 ;
as system of mathematical projection, 64 ;
critical approaches to, 248 n, 249 n;
discussion of, 51 -73;
encyclopedic character, 53 ;
interplay of linguistic and poetic frames of reference, 10 ;
reassemblage in Given, 8 ;
word and image, 56 .
See also Box of 1914, The; Green Box, The
Bride Stripped Bare . . ., The (lithograph series), 212
Bride, The, 61 -65, 61 , 70 , 72
Brisset, Jean-Pierre, 89 , 253 n

Broyeuse de chocolat. See Chocolate Grinder

Buddha of the Bathroom, 125 .
See also Fountain
Buisson, Le. See Bush, The
Bull, George, 261 n
Burnham, Jack, 99 , 100 , 249 n 254 n
Brger, Peter, 258 n
Bush, The, 22 , 23
Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 199

C
Cabanne, Pierre, 19 , 24 , 26 , 29 , 39 -40, 51 , 53 , 57 , 87 , 100 , 135 , 138 , 144 , 153 ,
161 -162, 164 -165, 223 , 228 , 243 n, 244 n, 259 n, 261 n, 269 n
Cage, John, 3 , 15 , 75 , 161 -162, 173 -174, 185 , 196 -197, 243 n, 251 n, 263 n, 264 n,
266 n
Calves, Maurizio, 249 n
Camfield, William, 127 , 186 , 250 n, 256 n, 258 n, 262 n, 263 n
Cannibale (journal), 170 .
See also Picabia, Francis
Card Players, 36 , 37 .
See also Czanne, Paul
Carrouges, Michel, 248 n
295
Cartooning, 9 -10, 17 -18, 33 -34;
as graphic/linguistic medium, 9 -10;
conceptual implications, 18 , 33 -34;
formal training, 17 -18;

redefining pictorial image, 9 , 18

Cartwright, Julia, 260 n
Caumont, Jacques, 249 n
Caws, Mary Ann, 248 n
Czanne, Paul, 15 , 37 , 78
Chance:
and chess, 35 -37;
canned, 35 , 47 -52, 63 , 68 , 138 , 184 -185 (see also Three Standard Stoppages);
challenge artist as autonomous producer, 16 ;
critique of conventional modes of expression, 16 , 35 ;
compared to Dada and Surrealism, 249 n;
determinism of art as creative medium, 16 ;
experiments with, 16 , 35 -37, 47 -52, 62 , 68 , 76 , 138 , 182 -185;
plasticity of, 8 ;
strategic deployment, 8
Chastel, Andr, 251 n
Chnieux, Jacqueline, 268 n
Cheque Bruno, 160 , 167 , 171 -173, 171
Chque Bruno. See Cheque Bruno
Chess, 5 , 17 , 35 -47, 195 , 240 , 264 n;
and art, 35 -47, 195 ;
and cards, 37 ;
and roulette, 184 -185;
Duchamp's interest in, 5 , 17 , 35 -37, 246 n, 247 n
Chess Game, The, 36 , 37 , 39 , 41

Chocolate Grinder, 66 , 68 , 127

Chocolate Grinder, No. 1, 61 , 66
Chocolate Grinder, No. 2, 65 -66, 65 , 249 n
Cicero, 190
Clair, Jean, 138 , 211 , 216 , 247 n, 249 n, 250 n, 251 n, 252 n, 254 n, 259 n, 266 n, 268
n
Clair de lune sur la baie Basswood. See Moonlight on the Bay at Basswood
Clark, Kenneth, 28 , 245 n
Clark, T. J., 246 n
Codex Atlanticus, 259 n.
See also Leonardo da Vinci
Codex Trivulzianus, 79 .
See also Leonardo da Vinci
Coin de chastet. See Wedge of Chastity
Cols Alits. See Bedridden Mountains
Comb, 101 -103, 101 , 170
Composed Heads, 81 .
See Arcimboldo, Giuseppe
Cook, Albert, 256 n
Cook, The, 83 , 84 .
See also Arcimboldo, Giuseppe
Courbet, Gustave, 22 , 26 , 205 -209, 267 n, 268 n
Courier Francais (newspaper), 17
Crehan, Herbert, 260 n
Crotti, Jean, 182 -183, 258 n
Cubism, 8 , 15 , 19 -20, 39 -41, 53 , 59 , 99 , 118 , 246 n;

and photography, 29 -30, 43 ;

machine imagery and morphology, 16 , 43 (see also Futurism);
movement as abstraction, 8 , 19 -30, 43 -47;
outwitting, 99 , 245 n
Czech Check, 160 , 167 , 172 ,
296
173 -175, 236
Czechoslovakian Mushroom Society, 173 , 174 , 175 .
See also Cage, John; Czech Check

D
da Vinci, Leonardo. See Leonardo da Vinci
Dada, 75 , 95 -96, 163 -164, 244 n;
and chance operations, 8 ;
contrasted with Duchamp, 8 , 244 n
Dada Drawing, 170
Dadoun, Roger, 201 , 267 n, 270 n
Damisch, Hubert, 184 , 264 n
Danto, Arthur, 121 , 256 n, 258 n, 260 n
Dart-Object, 5 , 216 , 216
Djeuner sur l'herbe, Le, 28 .
See also Manet, Edouard
Delay in Glass, 59 , 224 .
See also Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, The
De Symmetria Humanorum Corpum, 210 .
See also Drer, Albrecht

Deux nus. See Two Nudes

Discs Inscribed with Puns, 101 , 217 , 218 , 218 .
See also Anemic Cinema
Doane, Mary Anne, 267 n
Domingo, Willis, 245 n
Door: 11, rue Larrey, 101 , 113 , 200 , 214 , 215 , 226
Door for Gradiva, 212 -213, 213 , 215
Doors:
as figurative device for puns, 101 , 113 ;
as hinges, 200 , 212 -215.
See also Door: 11, rue Larrey; Door for Gradiva; Given: 1) the waterfall, 2) the
illuminating gas
Doucet, Jacques, 185
Draft Piston, 62 , 63
Draftsman doing perspective drawings of a woman, 210 -211, 211 .
See also Drer, Albrecht
Drain Stopper, 160 , 186 -192, 186 .
See also Marcel Duchamp Art Medal
Dreier, Katherine, 52 , 257 n
Duchamp, Marcel:
abandonment of painting, 3 -4, 6 -7, 15 -18, 47 , 72 -73 (see also Ready-mades);
artistic career, 3 -10 (see also Artist; Authorship);
artistic training, 17 -18;
as Rrose Slavy, 144 -146, 145 ;
canonization as artist, 227 -229;
commercial/artistic ventures, 160 -167 (see also Art and economics);

epitaph, 228 , 229 ;

legacy of, 12 -13, 238 -241;
literary and poetic antecedents, 30 -31, 87 -96, 105 ;
pictorial antecedants, 15 , 19 -20, 21 , 23 -26, 77 -87, 139 -143, 147 -148, 153 , 205 ,
207 -209, 212 ;
reproductions of artistic conventions, 5 -7, 149 -157, 229 -231 (see also Artistic
production);
self-portraits (see Beautiful Breath, Veil Water; Monte Carlo Bond; Photograph of
Marcel Duchamp taken with a hinged mirror; Rrose Slavy; With my tongue in my
cheek);
speculative manipulation of financial species, 164 -167 (see also Cheque
297
Bruno; Czech Check; Drain Stopper; Tzank Check; Wanted/$2000 Reward).
See also Artistic creativity; Beautiful Breath, Veil Water; Puns; Reproduction; Rrose
Slavy
Duchamp, Suzanne, 17 , 164
Duchamp, Teeny, 195
Duchamp-Villon, Raymond, 17 , 37
Drer, Albrecht, 210 -211
Dust Breeding, 66 , 67 , 104 , 184 .
See also Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, The
Duve, Thierry de, 47 , 106 , 170 , 244 n, 247 n, 255 n, 257 n, 259 n, 263 n, 264 n, 270 n

E
Eau et Gaz sur Tous les Etages. See Water and Gas on All Floors
Ecole des Beaux-Arts, 30
Egouttoir. See Bottle Rack
Electricity, 25 , 204 -205, 245 n.

See also Bee Auer, The

Elevage de poussire. See Dust Breeding
En avance du bras cass. See In Advance of the Broken Arm
Encore cet Astre. See Once More to This Star
Engraving, 9 , 17 -18, 33 -34, 53 , 59 ;
and redefinition of artistic creativity, 18 , 53 ;
and redefinition of pictorial image, 9 , 17 -18, 59 ;
as mechanical reproduction, 9 (see also Painting; Reproduction);
conceptual implications, 33 -34;
technological and intellectual impact, 9
Equilibre, L'. See Equilibrium
Equilibrium, 116 -118, 116
Eroticism, 32 -33, 69 , 195 , 203 , 209 , 215 -217, 226 ;
as figurative structure, 215 -217, 226 , 268 n;
as rhetorical operation, 210 -211, 218 ;
puns on, 217 -218 (see also Rrose Selavy);
voyeurism, 203 -211
Erratum Musical, 49 -50, 50
Etant donns: 1) La chute d'eau, 2) Le gaz d'clairage. See Given: 1) the waterfall, 2) the
illuminating gas
Eternal Return, 112 , 113 ;
as neurasthenic force of repetition, 112 ;
ready-mades as instances of, 113 .
See also Nietzsche, Friedrich
Evelyn, John, 190 , 265 n

Fauvism, 15 , 21 -23, 53 ;
as reaction to Impressionism, 21 ;
influence of, 15 ;
rhetoric of drawing and color, 21 -23
Female Fig Leaf, 5 , 216 , 216 , 229 ;
and sexual difference, 5 , 216 (see also Eroticism; Sexuality).
See also Dart-Object; Given: 1) the waterfall, 2) the illuminating gas; Wedge of Chastity
Feuille de vigne femelle. See Female Fig Leaf
First Light, 89 -90, 89
Foster, C. Steven, 254 n, 262 n
Foucault, Michel, 253 n
298
Foundation for Contemporary Arts, 174
Fountain, 25 , 71 , 121 , 124 -135, 160 , 164 , 168 , 186 , 189 , 197 , 257 n, 258 n;
as mass-produced object, 129 -130;
as photographic documentation, 124 -129;
as switch or faucet, 133 -135;
olfactory dimension, 131 ;
re-authored, 128 ;
rotation, 124 ;
value of, 134 , 164 -165.
See also Beautiful Breath, Veil Water
Fresh Widow, 201 -202
Freud, Sigmund, 268 n
Freytag-Loringhoven, Elsa von, 186

Fried, Michael, 268 n

Futurism, 8 , 43 , 53 , 233 , 246 n

G
Galleria Schwarz, 128
Gauguin, Paul, 23
Gender:
and feminist critique of the gaze, 23 , 28 , 31 -32, 70 , 204 -205, 207 , 211 , 231 , 246 n,
267 n;
as reversible topology, 108 , 216 -218, 268 n;
destabilize and decentralize, 8 , 12 , 111 , 146 , 231 ;
parody of, 5 .
See also Eroticism; L.H.O.O.Q.; Mona Lisa; Rrose Slavy; Sexuality
Genre, 7 -12, 21 -23, 31 -32, 151 , 230 , 231 ;
and generic crossover into artistic media, 9 , 198 , 224 -226, 230 ;
and role of language, 31 .
See also Eroticism
German Expressionism, 15
Gervais, Andr, 263 n
Gioconda, La, 139 ;
original subject, 142 -143.
See also Mona Lisa
Girieud, Pierre, 23
Given: 1) The Waterfall, 2) The Illuminating Gas, 6 -9, 11 -12, 25 , 195 -231;
allusion to molds, 216 -228, 221 , 223 -224;
and sexuality, 12 , 202 -211, 213 -219, 229 -231;
as assemblage based on reproductive logic, 9 , 195 , 198 , 221 , 225 , 226 , 229 , 230 ;

hyperrealism, 5 , 7 , 203 -204;

parody of artistic reference, 7 ;
photographic aspects of, 215 , 219 -226;
relation to The Large Glass, 196 -198, 229 -231
Gleizes, Albert, 19 , 28 , 249 n
Golding, John, 199 -200, 202 , 247 n, 249 n, 266 n, 267 n, 268 n
Gough-Cooper, Jenifer, 249 n
Greenberg, Clement, 233 -236, 270 n
Green Box, The, 3 , 49 , 57 , 58 , 61 , 66 -67, 71 , 79 , 111 , 249 n

H
Hak Kyung Cha, Theresa, 267 n
Halberstadt, Vital, 246 n
Hamilton, George H., 245 n, 250 n, 255 n
Hamilton, Richard, 58 , 70 , 249 n, 250 n, 270 n
Hand Stereoscopy, 138
Harnoncourt, Anne d', 79 , 199 , 215 , 219 , 247 n, 249 n, 252 n, 254 n, 256 n, 260 n,
266 n, 268 n, 269 n, 270 n
Hat Rack, 93 -94, 93 , 99
Hausmann, Raul, 75
299
Heath, Steven, 269 n
Held, Ren R., 249 n
Hess, Thomas, 8 , 243 n, 244 n
Hill, George F., 256 n
Hcke, Gustav Ren, 252 n

Hoffman, Werner, 251 n

Hopps, Walter, 71 , 79 , 197 , 219 , 250 n, 252 n, 256 n, 266 n, 270 n
Huelsenbeck, Richard, 96
Hugnet, George, 143
Hulten, Pontus, 249 n
Humor, 24 , 34 , 117 -119, 193 -194;
and redefinition of visual image, 34 ;
as critique of transgression, 118 -119;
as expenditure, 193 -194;
poetic logic of, 117 -118;
tongue in cheek, 114 -118.
See also Puns

I
Imitated Rectified Ready-Made, 169 , 178
Impressionism, 21 , 53 , 118 , 139
Impressions of Africa (play), 87 -88.
See also Roussel, Raymond
In Advance of the Broken Arm, 10 , 99 , 103 -105, 103 , 196 ;
and painting, 103 -105
Index, 260 n, 269 n;
deictical gesture, 205 ;
false index, 152 ;
indexical charater of vision, 204 -205
"Infrathin," 129 -131, 134 , 139 -142, 173 , 192 , 213 , 215 -216;
and molds, 215 -217;

as photographic negative, 215

International Collectors Society, 186 , 252
International Exhibition of Modern Art. See Armory Show
International Numismatic Agency. See International Collectors Society
In the Infinitive (The White Box), 215
Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci, 79 .
See also Valry, Paul
Irigaray, Luce, 267 n
Irony:
artist as ironist, 114 -118;
ironic concessions to still-lifes, 152 (see also Sculpture-morte; TORTURE-MORTE );
meta-irony, 117 -118;
of indifference, 117

J
James, Carol P., 50 , 105 , 248 n, 255 n, 259 n
Janis, Harriet and Sidney, 128 , 256 n
Jarry, Alfred, 112
Jeu d'checs, Le. See Chess Game, The
Jones, Amelia, 178 , 264 n
Jouffroy, Alain, 266 n
Joyce, James, 52 , 102 , 255 n
Judovitz, Dalia, 255 n, 269 n, 271 n

K
King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes, The, 41 -43, 43 , 47
King and Queen Traversed by Swift Nudes, The, 42 -43

Klang, A., 223

Knafo, Robert, 257 n, 258 n
Knoedler, Janies, 16
Kozloff, Max, 122 -123, 128 , 256 n
Krauss, Rosalind, 223 -224, 247 n, 253 n, 267 n, 269 n, 270 n
300
Kuenzli, Rudolf E., 248 n, 251 n, 253 n, 254 n, 261 n, 262 n, 268 n
Kuh, Katherine, 35 , 42 , 246 n, 247 n, 259 n, 260 n

L
L.H.O.O.Q., 121 -122, 135 -136, 139 -144, 140 , 147 , 167 , 169 -172, 181 , 210 ;
as a check, 169 -171;
as pun on "Look," 142 ;
compared to Rrose Slavy, 144 -146.
See also Gender; Mona Lisa
L.H.O.O.Q. Rase. See L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved
L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved, 135 , 146 , 147 -148, 210
Laforgue, Jules, 30 -31, 246 n;
Moralits Lgendaires, 31
Large Glass, The. See Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, The
Large Glass Completed, The (diagram based on etching), 55
Lebel, Robert, 15 , 181 , 193 , 245 n, 248 n, 249 n, 261 n, 265 n
Le Bot, Marc, 266 n
Lefort, Claude, 267 n, 271 n
Leonardo da Vinci, 77 -80, 104 , 135 -136, 139 -144, 146 -149, 172 , 210 , 240 , 251 n,
252 n, 255 n, 258 n, 268 n;

and puns, 79 -80;

Codex Atlanticus, 259 n;
Codex Trivulzianus, 28 , 71 ;
painting media, 259 n
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 186
Linde, lf, 128 , 138
Lippard, Lucy, 253 n
Little Review, The, 182
Lyotard, Jean-Franois, 205 , 266 n, 268 n, 269 n

M
Madonna of the Bathroom, 125 .
See also Fountain
Magritte, Ren, 205 -207, 212 , 268 n.
See Threatened Assassin, The
Mallarm, Stphane, 88 -89, 178 , 185 , 248 n, 262 n
Malraux, Andr, 260 n
Manet, Edouard, 28 ;
Djeuner sur l'herbe, Le, 28 ;
Olympia, 28
Manifeste Dada, 95
Manifeste de Monsieur Anti-pyrine, 95
Mannerism, 81 ;
Duchamp as embodiment of, 253 n.
See also Arcimboldo, Giuseppe
Man Ray, 104 , 144 , 178 , 192 , 251 n

Marcel Duchamp Art Medal, 160 , 186 -191, 187 , 261 n.

See also Drain Stopper
Marey, Edouard, 43 , 246 n
Marie. See Bride
Marie mise nu par ses clibataires, mme, La. See Bride Stripped Bare by Her
Bachelors, Even, The
Martin, Katrina, 269 n
Masheck, Joseph, 16 , 32 , 76 , 243 n, 246 n, 251 n, 254 n, 255 n, 266 n, 267 n
Matisse, Paul, 249 n, 250 n, 258 n
Medallion Self Portrait, 188 , 189 -190.
See also Alberti, Leon Battista
Medal of L. B. Alberti, 189 , 189 -190
301
See also Pasti, Matteo de'
Melville, Steven, 271 n
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 267 n
Metallic Art, 188 .
See also Marcel Duchamp Art Medal
Metzinger, Jean, 19 , 28
Micha, Olivier, 250 n
Micha, Ren, 266 n
Michaels, Walter Benn, 263 n
Mimesis, 9 , 157 , 230 ;
as copy of nature, 9 ;
critique of, 149 -154.

See also Reproduction

Mirrorical Return, 132 , 133 -135;
as switch, 133 -134;
on Leonardo's mirrorical turn, 147 -148.
See also Fountain
Modernism, 1 , 8 , 12 , 75 , 121 , 233 , 238 , 239 , 240 -241;
as vanguardism, 240 ;
history of, 1 , 12 ;
legacy of, 1 .
See also Postmodernism
Mona Lisa, 135 -136, 139 -144, 146 -147, 167 , 171 -175, 180 , 210 , 240 .
See also Gender; Genre
Montaigne, Michel de, 212 .
Monte Carlo Bond, 160 , 178 -185, 179
Montross Gallery, 257 n
Moonlight on the Bay at Basswood, 220 -221, 220
Moralits Lgendaires, 31 .
See also Laforgue, Jules
Morceaux choisis d'aprs Courbet. See Selected Details After Courbet
Motherwell, Robert, 252 n
Moulin, Raymonde, 261 n
Moustache and Beard of L.H.O.O.Q., 143 -144
Mulvey, Laura, 246 n, 267 n
Museum:
as institutional framework, 4 , 266 n, 267 n;

visual logic of, 200 -201

N
Naturalism, pictorial, 5
Naumann, Francis M., 48 , 248 n, 251 n, 253 n, 261 n, 262 n, 263 n, 264 n, 268 n
Network of Stoppages, 51 , 51 , 68
Neuf moules malics. See Nine Malic Molds
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 111 -113;
appearance, logic of, 113 ;
critique of representation, 110 -112 (see also Eternal Return);
definition of apparent world, 255 n
Nine Malic Molds, 68 -70, 69 .
See also Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, The
Non-Euclidian geometry, 64
Norton, Louise, 125 , 126
Novalis, 87
Nu assis dans une bagnoire. See Nude Seated in a Bathtub
Nu aux bas noirs. See Nude with Black Stockings
Nu descendant l'escalier. See Nude Descending a Staircase
Nu descendant l'escalier, no. 2. See Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2
Nu rouge. See Red Nude
Nude, 8 , 20 -35, 202 -211, 218 -219,
302
246 n;
androgyny, 195 -205;
and voyeurism, 196 , 205 -209;

as pictorial genre, 8 , 20 -35 (see also Nude Descending a Staircase);

body as hinge, 34 -35, 218 -219;
eroticism of, 31 , 33 , 205 -211 (see also Eroticism; Sexuality);
graphic treatment of painting, 22 ;
history of nude/spectatorship, 28 , 246 n;
nominal expectations, 31 ;
reproductions of, 32 ;
sexuality and vision, 12 -31, 205 -211 (see also Gender);
symptom of pictorial representation, 8 ;
visual and nominal expectations, 28
Nude Descending a Staircase, 15 -16, 29 -34, 42 -43, 92 , 100 , 198 , 210 , 219 , 229 ;
as anti-machine, 34 ;
as challenge to cubism, 19 ;
as genealogical derivation, 31 ;
as pictorial genre, 8 ;
as serial works, 32 ;
figuration to abstraction, 20
Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 1, 8 -9, 32 , 33 , 219
Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 16 , 19 -20, 26 , 27 , 28 -32, 34 , 41 , 210 , 219
Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 3, 32 , 135
Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 4, 32
Nude Seated in a Bathtub, 20 , 21
Nude with Black Stockings, 21 -22, 21

O
Objet-dard. See Dart-Object

Obligations pour la roulette de Monte Carlo. See Monte Carlo Bond

Oculist Witnesses, 67 , 67 .
See also Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, The
Olympia, 28 .
See also Manet, Edouard
Once More to This Star, 30 , 30
Optics, anaglyphic vision, 138 -139
Originality:
and spectator as authorizing agency, 7 ;
as multiple authorship, 7 .
See also Artistic creativity; Authorship

P
Pach, Walter, 16
Painting, 2 , 8 , 9 , 15 , 19 , 24 -25, 33 -35, 72 , 84 -87, 111 -113, 149 -154, 230 -231;
abandonment of, 2 , 9 , 15 , 19 , 21 , 28 , 30 , 72 , 110 , 113 , 183 ;
and color blindness, 24 -25;
and limits of pictorial representation, 230 -231;
and photography, 29 ;
and puns on still-life, 149 -154;
as framing device, 23 ;
as rhetorical gesture, 84 -87;
critiquing aesthetic function of, 20 ;
death or mortality of, 151 -154;
gender of, 111 -113;
in motion, 29 -30;

linguistic foundation of, 84 -86;

materials of, 136 -138;
parody of, 5 ;
redefined through engraving and cartooning, 33 -35;
stripped bare, 19 -35, 70 -72, 230 ;
use of abstraction, 15 -16.
See also Comb; Cubism; Fauvism; Futurism; In Advance of the Broken Arm; Readymades
303
Palazzo Grassi, 1
Panofsky, Erwin, 261 n
Paradis, Le. See Paradise
Paradise, 23 , 24 , 42
Paris Air, 71 , 106 , 107 , 197
Pasadena Art Museum, 71 , 197
Passage de la Vierge la Marie, Le. See passage from the Virgin to the Bride, The
Passage from the Virgin to the Bride, The, 42 -44, 44 , 47 , 59 , 69 , 106
Pasti, Matteo de', 189 , 190 ;
Medal of L. B. Alberti, 189
Pawloski, Gaston de, 254 n
Paz, Octavio, 11 , 29 , 34 , 43 , 96 , 114 , 118 , 159 , 199 -200, 246 n, 247 n, 248 n, 256
n, 261 n, 266 n, 267 n
Peigne. See Comb
Pendu femelle. See Bride, The; Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, The
Perniola, Mario, 33 , 246 n
Perspective:

Albertian, 37 ;
conventions of, 64 ;
Duchamp's interest in, 250 n;
vanishing point of, 63
See also Draft Piston
Peterson, Elmer, 181 , 251 n, 256 n
Pharmacie. See Pharmacy
Pharmacy, 135 -139, 137 , 219 , 259 n.
See also Impressionism
Philadelphia Museum of Art, The, 163 , 195
Photograph of Marcel Duchamp taken with a hinged mirror, 155 , 156
Photography, 29 -30, 43 , 221 -225, 260 n;
displacement of painting, 149 .
See Artistic production, Reproduction; Reproduction, mechanical
Picabia, Francis, 75 , 87 , 162 , 163 , 170 , 228 , 264 n
Pierce, Charles Sanders, 260 n
Pincus-Witten, Robert, 251 n
Pirandello, Luigi, 119
Piston de courant d'air. See Draft Piston
Plato, 157
Pliant de voyage. See Traveler's Folding Item
Pointillism, 139 .
See also Impressionism; Seurat, Georges
Porte: 11, rue Larrey. See Door: 11, rue Larrey
Porte pour Gradiva. See Door for Gradiva

Porte-chapeau. See Hat Rack

Portrait de joueurs d'checs. See Portrait of Chess Players
Portrait du Dr. R. Dumouchel. See Portrait of Dr. R. Dumouchel
Portrait of Chess Players, 37 -40, 40 , 41 , 137
Portrait of Dr. R. Dumouchel, 24 , 25
Postmodernism, 1 , 12 , 267 n, 271 n;
appropriation vs. postponed legacy, 12 ;
as speculation, 239 -240;
impact on, 233 -234;
postmodernity, 240 , 271 n.
See also Modernism
"Preface" to The Large Glass, 224 , 225
Premire Lumire. See First Light
304
Printing:
dictionary definition of, 50 ;
history of, 192 .
See Engraving; Erratum Musical; Reproduction
Project for the Rotary Demisphere, 101
Puns, 10 , 11 , 84 -96, 99 , 101 , 156 , 251 n 253 n, 255 n
and literary traditions, 253 n;
as denial of literacy, 91 -92;
as duration, 112 -113;
as mechanical prototypes, 96 ;
as poetic and rhetorical figures, 84 -87;

as rhymes, 90 ;
as switches, 10 ;
as utterances, 11 , 254 n;
as verbal and figurative machines, 87 -96, 251 n, 254 n 255 n;
creative potential of, 10 ;
dictionary definition of, 11 ;
individual expression, 11 ;
linguistic and social conventions, 10 ,
nominal properties of, 10 , 253 n;
reversibility, 83 -87;
rotation, 83 , 99 , 101 ;
sense and nonsense, 88 -96;
strategic role of, 87 ;
visual and linguistic, 156 .
See also Anemic Cinema; Arcimboldo, Giuseppe; Leonardo da Vinci; Ready-mades

Q
Quinn auction, 261 n

R
R. Mutt, 124 , 126 , 133 , 164 , 262 n
Raynal, Maurice, 262 n
Read, Peter, 261 n, 262 n, 263 n, 264 n
Ready-mades, 3 , 5 , 10 -11, 75 -78, 93 -114, 123 -124, 133 -135, 159 -161, 166 -167,
192 -194, 223 -225, 236 ;
analogy with photography, 223 -225;
artistic conventions as, 5 , 123 -124, 236 ;
as abandonment of painting, 75 ;

as critical gesture, 77 , 96 , 159 , 193 ;

as critique of value, 11 , 159 -161, 166 -167, 192 -194 (see also Art and economics;
Value);
as intellectual wit, 76 ;
as literal reproduction, 10 ;
as puns and switches, 10 , 11 , 77 , 133 -135, 159 ;
as sketches, 76 ;
choice of ready-mades, 109 -110;
critique of manual production, 3 , 223 -224 (see also Reproduction);
difficulty of recognition, 257 n;
nominal properties of, 10 , 87 -96;
pictorial precursors, 79 -87;
rectified, 137 ;
redefine relation of art and reality, 75 -76;
rotation and reversibility, 100 -101;
significance of, 159 , 201 , 230 , 240 ;
undermining notion of art object, 10 , 11 , 76 -77, 93 -95, 124 -135, 139 -143, 147 -148;
visual expropriation, 201 , 230 ;
visual indifference, 97 -99
Ready-mades, etc., 1913-1964, 123 ;
cover, 122
Red Nude, 21 -23, 21
Reff, Theodore, 79 , 250 n, 251 n, 252 n, 259 n
Renaissance, 28 , 80 , 119 , 136 , 157 , 189
Renvoi miroirique. See Mirrorical Return
Reproduction, 2 , 3 , 6 , 8 , 121 -124, 135 -136, 141 , 151 -153, 171 -173,

 305
190 -194, 230 -236, 239 -240;
and pictorial representation, 8 , 32 , 61 -66, 77 -78, 81 , 86 -87, 122 -124, 139 -148, 151
-154;
as labor, 3 ;
as manual intervention, 6 ;
dispense with originality of painting, 6 (see also Cartooning; Engraving);
of currency, 239 (see also Boggs, J. S. G.);
speculative potential of, 11 , 171 -173, 230 -231, 236 , 240 .
See also Art and economics; Artistic production; Box in a Valise, The; Value
Reproduction, mechanical:
and artistic reproduction, 123 , 151 -153, 192 -194;
archaic manifestations of, 190 -192;
as form of artistic production, 2 , 8 , 235 -236;
impact of, 121 -124, 135 -136.
See also Benjamin, Walter; Photography; Ready-mades
Rseaux des stoppages talon. See Network of Stoppages
Retard en Verre. See Delay in Glass; Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, The
Richard Mutt Case, The, 125 , 257 n
Richter, Hans, 249 n, 254 n
Rimbaud, Arthur, 78 , 87 -90
Rire, Le (newspaper), 17
Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 268 n
Roberts, Francis, 38 , 48 , 58 , 60 , 78 , 94 , 109 , 118 , 247 n, 248 n, 249 n, 250 n, 254
n, 255 n, 256 n
Roch, Jean-Pierre, 52 , 163 , 257 n

Roi et la reine entours de nus vites, Le. See King and Queen Surrounded by Swift
Nudes, The
Roi et la reine traverss de nus vites, Le. See King and Queen Traversed by Swift
Nudes, The
Romanticism, 7 , 118
Rose, Jacqueline, 267 n, 268 n
Rosenberg, Harold, 259 n
Roth, Moira and William, 261 n, 262 n, 263 n, 264 n, 265 n, 266 n
Rotoreliefs, 101
Roue de bicyclette. See Bicycle Wheel
Rougemont, Denis de, 255 n
Rousseau, Henri "Le Douanier," 234 -235
Roussel, Raymond, 87 -88, 253 n
Rrose Slavy, 106 -109, 113 -114, 132 , 134 , 144 -147, 154 , 175 -178, 180 -181, 228 ,
270 n;
as artistic alter-ego, 7 .
See also Artist; Artistic creativity; Duchamp, Marcel
Rumsey (art collector), 163 , 261 n

S
Salon des Indpendants, 16 , 19 , 26
Sanouillet, Michel, 91 -92, 181 , 248 n, 249 n, 251 n, 256 n
Schamberg, Morton, 186
Schwartz, Lillian, 260 n
Schwarz, Arturo, 20 -21, 92 , 135 , 161 -162, 200 , 223 , 227 , 245 n, 247 n, 249 n, 250
n, 254 n, 259 n, 266 n, 268 n, 269 n, 270 n
Schwitters, Kurt, 75
Sculpture-morte, 5 , 81 , 123 -124, 150 , 149 -154, 204 ;

in relation to Given, 204 -205

306
Selected Details After Courbet, 31 , 207 -209, 208
Seurat, Georges, 58 , 139 , 259 n.
See also Impressionism, Pharmacy
Sexuality, 12 , 22 -23, 28 , 31 , 144 -146, 204 -211, 215 -218, 231 , 268 n, 269 n;
and gender, 22 -23, 28 , 31 , 144 -146, 204 -211, 216 -218;
and puns, 269 n;
as movement, 210 -211;
as rhetorical operation, 12 , 70 , 73 , 210 -211, 231 , 268 n, 269 n;
critique of anatomical destiny, 12 ;
parodied, 209 -210;
reversibility of male/female positions, 70 , 213 , 215 -217, 268 n;
sexual difference/ indifference, 218 , 269 n;
sexual referent, 23 , 207 -208.
See also Eroticism; Gender; Nude
Shell, Marc, 191 , 265 n
Sieves, The, 67 -68, 184 .
See also Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, The
Sitney, Pierre Adams, 269 n
Six Characters in Search of an Author, 119
Smithson, Robert, 166 , 193
Society of Independent Artists, 164
Spectator, 1 , 10 , 23 , 96 , 190 , 207 -209, 240 ;
as position of reception and production, 1 , 7 , 10 (see also Authorship);

as posterity, 13 , 237 ;
logic of voyeurism, 8 , 12 , 203 -211, 231 , 246 n (see also Gender);
privileged position, 2 ;
visual consumption, 31
Spring, 81 , 83 , 253 n.
See also Arcimboldo, Giuseppe
Steefel, Lawrence, 23 , 245 n, 260 n
Stein, Gertrude, 19 , 90 , 254 n
Steiner, Wendy, 252 n
Stettheimer, Carrie, 32
Stewart, Susan, 95 , 251 n, 254 n
Stieglitz, Alfred, 124 -126, 133 , 149 , 257 n
Stites, Raymond, 252 n, 259 n, 260 n
Style:
and stylus, 210 ;
as hinge between art and non-art, 113 -114;
as rhetorical operation, 114 , 210 -211
Surrealism, 26 , 75 , 97 , 164 , 244 n
and chance operations, 8 ;
and found-objects, 97 , 258 n
Sweeney, James Johnson, 37 , 243 n, 246 n, 250 n
Symbolism, 23 , 24 , 25 , 31 ;
as combintion of word and image, 23 ;
hieratic aura, 23 -25;
poetry of, 30 -31

"Symbolist" phase, 23

T
Tmoins oculistes. See Oculist Witnesses
Testament, Le, 194 .
See also Villon, Franois
Threatened Assassin, The, 205 -207, 206 .
See also Magritte, Ren
Three Standard Stoppages, 35 , 46 , 47 -51, 62 , 68 , 76 , 138 , 184 (see also Chance,
canned);
authority of the meter, 48 -50;
definition of meter, 248 n;
musical and poetic 306
307
meter, 49 -51
Tomkins, Calvin, 52 , 248 n, 249 n, 259 n
Top Inscription, The, 61 , 62 .
See also Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, The
TORTURE-MORTE , 5 , 123 -124, 148 , 149 -154, 204 ;
as pun on "naturemorte," 151 -154;
in relation to Given, 204 -205
Transition (journal), 102
Trap, 93 -95, 93 , 99 , 201
Traveler's Folding Item, 71 , 197 -198
Trbuchet. See Trap
3 stoppages talon. See Three Standard Stoppages

Tu m', 221 -226, 222 ;

as context for Duchampian corpus, 225 -226;
"Tum," 265 n
Turgot, A. R. J., 265 n
Two Nudes, 23
Tzanck Check, 160 , 166 , 167 -173, 236
Tzanck, Daniel, 168 -169, 262 n
Tzara, Tristan, 75 , 91 , 95 , 163 , 164 , 254 n

U
Ubu Roi, 112
Unexpected Answer, The, 211 .
See also Magritte, Ren
Unpacking:
as generic decomposition and transposition, 8 ;
as physical and conceptual intervention, 3 ;
refusing to be boxed in, 3 ;
unfolding as (non) referential system, 4

V
Valery, Paul, 79 , 251 n, 252 n
Value, 112 , 121 , 159 -161, 165 -167, 172 -173, 182 , 191 -194, 239 ;
artistic and economic, 11 , 160 -163, 192 -194, 236 -241;
artistic and monetary standards, 11 ;
as temporal delay, 121 -122.;
classical notion of, 11 ;
expenditure of, 11 , 134 , 193 ;

redefinition of, 121 -122, 192 -193;

speculative potential of reproduction, 11 (see also Reproduction).
See also Art and economics
Van Dongen, Kees, 15
Varse, Edgard, 228 -229
Vasari, Georgio, 252 n
Vechten, Carl, 257 n
Vegetable Gardener, The, 83 , 85 .
See also Arcimboldo, Giuseppe
Viator, Jean Pellerin, 267 n
Villon, Franois, 17 , 194 , 228 , 244 n, 270 n
Villon, Jacques, 17 , 37
Visible, logic of the, 12
Vision, 12 , 26 , 106 , 204 -205, 226 ;
anaglyphic, 138 -139;
anti-retinal stance, 26 ;
critique of ocular, 106 ;
hegemony of vision, 226 (see also L.H.O.O.Q.);
indexical character of, 204 -205.
See also Gender; Perspective; sexuality

W
Wanted/$2000 Reward, 160 , 175 -178, 176
Water, 82 , 83 .
See also Arcimboldo, Giuseppe
308

Water and Gas on All Floors, 197 , 197

Wedge of Chastity, 216 -217, 217 , 229
Weschler, Lawrence, 262 n, 270 n, 271 n
White Box, The, 215
Why Not Sneeze Rrose Slavy?, 108 -109, 108
Wilde, Oscar, 201
With my tongue in my cheek, 114 -117, 115 , 189
Woman with a Parrot, 205 .
See also Courbet, Gustave
Woman with White Stockings, 22 , 207 , 208 .
See also Courbet, Gustave; Selected Details After Courbet
Wood, Beatrice, 257 n
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, The, 135 .
See also Artistic production; Benjamin, Walter; Reproduction; Reproduction,
mechanical

Y
Yvonne and Magdaleine (Torn) in Tatters, 39 , 40
Yvonne et Magdaleine dchiquetes. See Yvonne and Magdaleine (Torn) in Tatters

Preferred Citation: Judovitz, Dalia. Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit. Berkeley: University of
California Press, c1995 1995. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft3w1005ft/