Duchamp would be pinpointing the tautological norm of exclusion on which the modern establishment is based.”388 Duchamp, in this case with Fountain, pressed the boundaries of art and institution for a show that was designed to be without jury or judgment. By selecting a urinal, Duchamp consciously courted controversy and aimed to shock his audience. He wanted to see how far the selection committee would be willing to go for the sake of their mission. Having established the fact of Duchamp’s wing clipping, in the next section of argument, I examine the consequences of it for his aesthetics and
exhibition practices.
occupation, keeping his general level of creativity intact all the while: “In order to cross Nazi checkpoints without drawing attention to his infamous artistic identity, which might have put him at risk at a time when collaborationist Vichy France was purging its
enemies of the state, he disguised himself as a cheese merchant and shuttled a large suitcase containing material for the Boîte. Its portable structure seems to have anticipated such journeys.”390 Duchamp took care to fabricate an alibi for himself – including
buying cheese and keeping track of his expenses – but he never had to answer any
questions during border crossings.391 Although fleeing Europe during the war is the most extreme case of Duchamp’s expatriation, it exemplifies his state of homelessness in both nation and the artworld. “[H]e had lived as a voluntary nomad for the majority of his adult life. Embracing an internal mobility as much as an itinerant residency, he escaped the pressures of traditions and the limitations of place-bound cultural conventions.”392 Duchamp’s feelings of discomfort with artists and the artworld freed him to explore working outside of the confines of tradition and allowed him not to be limited to or restricted by a single culture or its influences.
As a result of these factors, Duchamp retreated from the artworld, and was rumored to have quit art making altogether in order to pursue chess playing.393 In truth, Duchamp never stopped working, even if he abandoned painting. He experimented with
390Demos, p. 13.
391In Duchamp’s own words, “I had a friend, Gustave Candel, who was a wholesale cheese merchant in Les Halles, and I asked him if he could commission me to go and buy cheese for him in the unoccupied sector. He gave me a letter, which I took to the German authorities, and with that letter and a bribe of twelve hundred francs I got from a secretary that famous little card, called an Ausweis, which allowed me to travel by train from Paris to Marseilles. I thought I had to be very careful and buy cheese, and probably give an account of my expenses when I crossed the border between two zones, but the Germans never asked me any questions.” See Demos, p. 13. See also Calvin Tomkins’ Duchamp: A Biography. New York: Holt, 1996, p. 323-324.
392Demos, p. 20.
393We might consider this to be yet another example of how Duchamp blurred the boundaries of art and life.
the notion of the work, explored alternative exhibition sites and practices, began a multi- year retrospective project that would occupy him for years (Boîte-en-Valise), and often worked in secret (the Étant Donnés assemblage was not revealed until after his death).
When asked about this change in practice by Pierre Cabanne, Duchamp reflected upon the discomfort he experienced in the artworld after Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 was rejected.
Cabanne: Before going into details we could tackle the key event in your life, that is, the fact that, after about twenty-five years of painting, you abruptly abandoned it. I’d like you to explain that rupture.
Duchamp: It came from several things. First, rubbing elbows with artists, the fact that one lives with artists, that one talks with artists, displeased me a lot.
There was an incident, in 1912, which ‘gave me a turn,’ so to speak; when I brought the ‘Nude Descending a Staircase’ to the Indépendants, 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 that this ‘Nude’ wasn’t in line with what 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. I found that naïvely foolish. So, that cooled me off so much that, as a reaction against such behavior coming from artists whom I had believed to be free, I got a job…394
The exclusion was a disappointment on many levels. Duchamp’s sense of homelessness can be traced, in part, to this event.
These rejections and the heimatlos feeling they created led Duchamp to explore alternative exhibition sites and practices. He avoided traditional gallery shows, turning down many invitations, including those of the Dada Salon in 1920 and Walter
Arensberg’s requests to exhibit work:
Duchamp installed his work during this time in unlikely places – specifically, domestic sites and studio contexts in New York, and hotel balconies in Buenos Aires and Paris. These are unusual display areas for sure, resistant to easy
394 Cabanne, p. 17.
classification and clear definition, which is perhaps why Duchamp favored them.
They suggest so many quotidian sites that would offer refuge from the structured zones of official order, dominated by specialized activities and conventional modes of reception, namely the art galleries and museums that Duchamp made every effort to avoid during the later part of the war. It appears that the debacle surrounding the exhibition of the Fountain, as well as the early controversy prompted by his Nude Descending a Staircase, left him reluctant to exhibit his work in any formal environment for years to come. On this Duchamp was suggestive, if evasive: he was fond of explaining that the French verb ‘exposer’
was too close to ‘épouser’: he wished to avoid ‘exhibition’ as much as ‘marriage’
during these years, each implying an unacceptable level of restriction.395
Duchamp made the active decision not to exhibit on any terms but his own. This meant that he rethought exhibition entirely. He often selected spaces that indicated his interest in boundaries – balconies, entrances to exhibitions, and even his own studio.396
Duchamp’s exhibition choices incorporated art into the praxis of life by enmeshing everyday locations and aesthetic experience.
Duchamp’s fondness for exhibiting his works in his studio, where he mixed the domestic aesthetic functions of the space, is an interesting case in point. Regarding Trébuchet (Trap), a readymade hatrack, Duchamp said the following: “It was on the floor and I kept walking into it. It was making me crazy so I finally said: okay, if it is going to stay on the floor I will nail it there.”397 This playful approach to exhibition is central to Duchamp’s attitude. Photographs included in Boîte-en-Valise show that he placed Fountain hanging above one of the doorways and Bicycle Wheel in a corner.398 Consistently, Duchamp placed the readymades in ways that highlighted their change of
395 Demos, p. 118.
396Duchamp specifically had a balcony or terrace in mind when he sent a gift to his newly married sister Suzanne and her husband Jean Crotti. He called the work Unhappy Readymade. He instructed the couple to hang a geometry book on their balcony – exposing it to wind and the elements, as well as any chance occurrences. In his playful manner, Duchamp commented, “the wind had to go through the book, choose its own problems, turn and tear out the pages.” See Demos, p. 115. See Cabanne, p. 61.
397Cros, p. 58. This quotation is from an unpublished interview with Sidney Janis, of the Carroll Janis Collection in New York.
398Demos, p. 119-120.
context and their newfound reusability. One might say this move pointed out the readymades’ homelessness. Duchamp’s desire to coinhabit space with these works also highlights his own feeling of homelessness in the artworld.
Helen Molesworth comments on both the placement of the readymades in the studio and on Duchamp’s documentation of them:
[W]e see the readymades installed, not on pedestals or in vitrines, but positioned (strategically, in a manner that evokes furniture and objets d’art) around an armchair – a coatrack nailed to the floor in front of a bicycle wheel atop a kitchen stool. There is a photograph in the background of which we spy the urinal
suspended from a doorjamb; in the foreground a shovel dangles from the ceiling.
More photographs: a film-noirish one of the shadows cast by an off-kilter hat rack […] That Duchamp thought enough of these photographs to include them in his retrospective Boîte en Valise (1941) and to color them, their sepia tones rendering them ‘historical,’ is not surprising. During the initial ‘invention’ of readymades his studio was their major site of reception.399
Through the “exhibition design” of his studio, Duchamp created an aesthetic atmosphere for himself and any guests he might have. In this way, he blurred the boundaries between domestic, work, and display space. In the process, Duchamp simultaneously blurred the public / private distinction. Duchamp was not only molding his space into an aesthetic space for living. He was also shaping himself in the process. To borrow a Nietzschean phrase, Duchamp was making himself into a work of art and becoming himself in the process.400 In spite of his rejections, in other words, he was making himself comfortable with himself and his aesthetic tendencies. Duchamp merged art and life on an everyday basis.
399Helen Molesworth. “Work Avoidance: The Everyday Life of Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades.” Art Journal 57 (4) (Winter 1998): 51-61, p. 51. While I agree with Molesworth that the inclusion of these photographs of readymades is significant, their coloring may not carry the weight she suggests. Duchamp handcolored all of the reproductions included in Boîte-en-Valise. Their sepia hue could indicate a historical eye upon the works, but it does not single them out wholesale.
400See Friedrich Nietzsche. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs.
Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974, §270 and §290.
The placement of the readymades in his own studio and living space may have also served the function of keeping his works close to him. As aforementioned,
Duchamp’s works became part of collections all across the United States and ultimately, around the world. Rejection, expatriating, and the scattering of his works had a startling effect upon Duchamp. He thought more and more often about the collection of his works – and so the Boîte-en-Valise (Box in Valise) – project began. More than just a traveling museum of his works, Boîte-en-Valise allowed Duchamp to preserve his personal and aesthetic identity. Accuracy and faithfulness in the reproduction process was of
paramount importance to Duchamp. In order to ensure such fidelity, Duchamp traveled to see each of his works in order to refresh his memory and aid in the reproduction process. The colors were so important to Duchamp that he hand-colored each
photographic reproduction personally, returning the artist’s hand into the reproduction process.401 As Demos points out, the more scattered his works became, the harder Duchamp worked to regain them:
The more something is lost, the more energy is expended in its recapture. What results is an obsessive series of replications, a fetishistic multiplication seemingly without end, evident in the decades-long Boîte project as a whole, which, in its totality, amounts to an edition of 300 boxes with more than 22,000 reproductions in all. The point is that La boîte-en-valise was poised to both satisfy memory as well as to announce the cyclical pursuit of its impossible reconstitution.402 Duchamp’s response to the threat of the dissolution and scattering of his works was to create a traveling museum of his oeuvre – that way, he would have an ongoing exhibition
401Demos, p. 49. Demos elaborates upon the process further: “For the coloring of the Boîte’s reproductions Duchamp employed the pochoir technique, an anachronistic, cottage-industry procedure, which required the time-consuming hand-coloring of each print by the use of stencils. By doing so, Duchamp avoided the excessive cost of color photography. But what resulted was an intensive artisanal process. ‘The time required for obtaining a satisfactory first print is about a month for a highly skilled craftsman,’ Duchamp explained. ‘An average of 30 colours is required for each plate…[It takes] seven or eight weeks to apply 30 colours by hand through stencils.’” (p. 49).
402Demos, p. 48.
that preserved his work, and thereby, his identity. Making his corpus whole is part of Duchamp’s quest to maintain his identity in exile. In addition to the “standard box,”
Duchamp created deluxe editions that contained both his previously exhibited works as well as an original work by Duchamp.403
It is clear that Duchamp was thinking about institution, exhibition, and legacy in his workings and reworkings of the Boîte-en-Valise project. As Martha Buskirk
comments:
The curious thing about Duchamp is the way he resituated his work over and over again in relation to a changing network of institutional structures. Fountain was named first for a one-time show and simply disappeared. And then only later, as the museum itself became more of an institution to be reckoned with, did he start to make his work into a sort of museum. And so he himself was resituating his work in relation to the whole idea of exhibition context as other people were starting to think about those issues either through him or not through him.404 Perhaps we might go so far as to say that due to Duchamp’s rejections, he sought to create his own institution in which to preserve his works on his own terms. Moreover, based upon the arguments set forth above, Duchamp is simultaneously working and reworking his sense of identity through this project.