Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain was devised not to be exhibited as art but precisely not to be exhibited. In this it was, notoriously, successful: the object was refused inclusion in the inaugural exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in 1917, after which it went missing. Today, the work is not only on display at the Museum of Modern Art in a copious retrospective curated by Ann Temkin, Michelle Kuo, and Matthew Affron, but is being shown in three exemplars—replicas made between 1950 and 1964—as well as in the 1917 photograph by Alfred Stieglitz, which was for a long time the only form in which it was known, not to mention a multitude of charming little miniature versions created for the no fewer than ten copies of the Boîte-en-valise gathered here.

From meteoric advent and immediate disappearance to near-ubiquity: Fountain seems an apt synecdoche for Duchamp’s oeuvre and reputation. What does another exhibition, even or especially one as thorough and well organized as this one is, have to offer beyond bringing to the point of supersaturation a process of reproduction, historicization, and, implicitly, canonization that had already been initiated by Duchamp himself? It all began when Duchamp had putatively stopped making art: first with the so-called Green Box (1934), the editioned set of notes and drawings for the Large Glass, La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (1915–23); then with the Boîte-en-valise, with more than 300 copies made between 1935 and 1966, and the installation of the Walter Conrad Arensberg Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1953–54, as well as his collaboration with Arturo Schwarz on the publication of editioned replicas of many of his readymades. Sol LeWitt would later say, “For each work of art that becomes physical there are many variations that do not,”1 but in Duchamp’s case, most of the variations seem to have been given some physical form. To a great extent, any posthumous exhibition of Duchamp’s work is merely one more reiteration of a process of reiteration that Duchamp himself launched and which goes on thanks to the fascination his seemingly inexhaustible oeuvre continues to exert.

That fascination consists, I think, in this: that the multiplication of the same—so many urinals, so many bicycle wheels, so many bottle racks and hat racks—always somehow leads back to difference, to non-identity, and therefore to individuation. It conjures not only the individual Marcel Duchamp, who as a young man had so admired the philosophical egoism of Max Stirner’s Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (The Ego and its Own, 1844) and who was certainly pleased to be (and to be known as) an artist unlike any other, but also the individual, whoever that happens to be, who perceives and cognizes—well, cognizes first and perceives afterward—and thereby gives meaning to the difference between one object and another (not just between a urinal that’s a work of art and one that’s not, but between one work-of-art urinal and another), or who refuses to do so. It’s in this sense that we must understand Willem de Kooning’s invocation of the one and the multitude when he described Duchamp as a “one-man movement” who was nonetheless “a movement for each person and open for everybody.”2 The multiple is a proliferation of singularities as much as of similitude.

That’s why, for me, any account of Duchamp’s historical importance that turns his work into an excuse for the promulgation of rules—“After Duchamp you should not paint”; “After Duchamp art must be a purely intellectual activity”—is misguided. His is the art that never says, “You must do this” or “You must not do that.” Instead, it’s always, “You can do this” and “You don’t have to do that.” And what you do and what you say need not be congruent. In Duchamp’s case, that meant, for instance, saying that he was not making art, that he was spending his time just breathing, while in fact—as this exhibition makes patent—he was working incessantly and meticulously. I’m not thinking only of the twenty years of tinkering that went into making Étant donnés: 1° la chute d'eau / 2° le gaz d’éclairage. . . (1946–48), which was completely unknown until it was installed at the Philadelphia Museum in 1969 (and because of its fragility could not be transported to New York, though it is represented in absentia through many photographs of it under construction, and perhaps most saliently through the binder of notes, diagrams, and photographs made as instructions for the work’s assembly), but more broadly of the evidence of Duchamp’s voluminous production of works and non-works during the whole period after completing the Large Glass in 1923. I remain enchanted by Rhonda Roland Shearer’s contention that Duchamp’s readymades were not necessarily readymade but were surreptitiously made or altered in order to appear so; I’m not convinced it’s true, but it would be truer to Duchamp’s trickster spirit if it were so.3 The true dandy is willing to put any amount of effort into creating the look of effortlessness.

What becomes clear through this exhibition is that, for Duchamp, the execution of his work was never what LeWitt would call a perfunctory affair.4 The meticulousness with which each thing is made reflects the artist’s passion for the realization of his ideas—and for me, that passion is the movement that I can join up with, more than the ideas, though those are eccentric and appealing in themselves. But the coils of Duchamp’s thinking can lead away from the work—it has led some to the Kabbalah, or to the art of courtly love, or to all sorts of things that are, as it were, complete in themselves without any need of a Duchampian supplement—rather than through it to a critical or even antithetical engagement with art itself. Duchamp warned that “the Glass is not made to be looked at,” and if one imagines this to be true of his work in general, then the obvious question would be, why show it?5 In the end, there is very much to be looked at, because there was so much to be made.