Flash Art  n.270  January-February 2010

GENEALOGY OF A CONCEPT

1

The readymade is an aesthetic object that has no aesthetics, or whose principle of individuation is not aesthetic. “The choice of the readymades,” Duchamp writes in “Apropos of Readymades” in 1961, “was never dictated by aesthetic delectation.” Instead, it was “based on a reaction of visual indifference … a complete anesthesia.” In the Dictionnaire Abregé du Surréalisme (1938) it states that the readymade is a usual object promoted to the dignity of an artwork by the choice of the artist.

2

Duchamp said in an interview with Guy Viau in May 1960 that the readymade “is an

artwork that is not an artwork […] made by the hand of the artist. It is an artwork that

becomes an artwork because I declare or the artist declares it is an artwork without

any participation of the hand of this very artist to make it.” But as soon as the hand of

the artist is not involved in the production of the art object we see that the role and the

definition of the artist change. Three years later Duchamp was telling Francis Roberts

that “a readymade is a work of art without an artist to make it, if I may simplify the

definition. This was not the act of an artist, but of a non-artist, an artisan if you want. I

wanted to change the status of the artist or at least to change the norms used for defining an artist.”

3

One possible interpretation of the facts is that Duchamp used his authority as a renowned painter and important figure of the Parisian salons to intercede for the acceptance of vulgar objects in the exclusive and fortified field of art. Material creatures as unrefined and uncanny as Kafka’s “Odradek” became major artworks because they were chosen. These ‘things’ announced a new lineage for the artworks that directly descended from the head of the artist rather than from his hand and were the citizens of an immaterial republic ruled by instinct and free association, where beauty is perfectly irrelevant.

4

The artist and his work — born from the brain and brought into the world without the help of the creative hand — now has a relationship deprived of intimacy and infused

with irony. The machines, producers and often protagonists of the artwork are there to reveal the conflict between the objects and the human body.

5

There would be no point in holding against Duchamp the fact that readymades possess an aura — even a stronger one than many other artworks — and that they have been co-opted by the art system, as Dan Graham suggests in “My Position.” Duchamp was the first to believe in the magic of the creative process he had started, if not its result. In an interview with Katharine Kuh in 1961 he said, “The curious thing about the readymade is that I’ve never been able to arrive at a definition or explanation that fully satisfies me. There is still magic in the idea, so I’d rather keep it that way than try to be esoteric about it.”

6

What has then been interpreted as a capricious and dandy posture should be reconsidered in relation to Duchamp’s conception of the artist as a ‘medium,’ a spiritualist. By doing so we understand why the title is so essential in the economy of the readymade. If the artist becomes the ambassador of the mute world, only language will help him to complete the decontextualization of the object. Words are in charge of bringing the spectator to the metaphysical wasteland located between metaphors and metonymies.

7

From this perspective the author of the readymade is nothing but the humble listener

of the potential to be an artwork contained in any object, he is the charming prince supposed to awake the sleeping beauty within the industrial item.

8

According to Duchamp the result of this modest and miraculous action is measurable: each artwork contains a “personal coefficient of art,” which is the arithmetic relation between “what is unexpressed but was projected” and “what was unintentionally expressed.” The spectator — and the spectator only — is the final judge of what Duchamp calls the ‘transmutation,’ the change of the inertial material into an artwork, a kind of transubstantiation. This precise conception of the creative process was expressed at the meeting of the American Federation of the Arts in Houston in April 1957, in an incredible panel that included Rudolph Arnheim, Gregory Bateson and Duchamp, who introduced himself as “the poor artist.”

9

The first sketches for The Bride were executed in 1912, one year before the birth of

the first readymade.

10

According to their author, The Large Glass (1915-1923) and the readymades result from the same concern and a similar creative process. The first step of this decisive trajectory, that Duchamp never abandoned since, can be found in the Nude descending a staircase (1912). In this painting he unleashed his obsession for reduction and he transformed the head of the nude into a bare line, une ligne nue.

At this point it was clear to him that the only possible way to escape aesthetics and

especially taste, “even the taste of the chocolate mill,” was to stick to a form of

bareness and whateverness. In the interview realized in 1955 for Robert D. Graff’s movie, James Johnson Sweeney, the director of the Guggenheim Museum in New York asked Duchamp if the liberation from any human intervention in painting and drawing had anything to do with the readymade. Duchamp’s answer was that he came to the readymade as the last step towards the dehumanization of the artwork. The task of making the objects expressive and responsive to human feelings, which for thousands of years had been performed by artists, was at that point executed by capitalism, essentially through television. What is at stake, in the capitalist vision of the world announced by advertising, is the continuous production of a libidinal economy in which behaviors, expressions and gestures contribute to the creation of the new human body that is nothing but a successful product among others. The dehumanized artist cannot create humanized artworks, and the naissance of the readymade artist is the side effect of this state of things.

11

In a book from 1995, The Coming Community, Giorgio Agamben carefully examined

the consequences of the industrialization and the commodification of the human body. In the paragraph entitled “Collants Dim” Agamben recalls the advert for Dim

tights from the ’70s in which the confusion of the girls’ dancing bodies with the fabric

covering their legs exhaled the promise of a new happiness made of the promiscuity

between technology and human flesh. The very movements of the girls’ legs, slightly

desynchronized, had in fact been recorded separately and then edited together: even

the moving image that aroused the desire was an artificial construction, the choreography had been obtained by the addition of solitude. The eroticism of the dancers was as human as the one of the engine representing the bride.

12

The colonization of physiology by industry started in the ’20s and reached its peak

when photography allowed pornography to circulate in mass. The images of anonymous naked bodies mechanically reproduced on paper were able to provoke sexual arousal in anyone; they were, Agamben says, “absolutely whatever.” The ‘whatever’ singularity, protagonist of The Coming Community, is the subjectivity resulting from the dispassionate marriage between representative democracy and capitalism. It is the fully dehumanized human being, the one capable of the best and the worst that we come to discover in this philosophical journey. Free from any moral destiny or any ethical obligation, the contemporary member of the planetary petty

bourgeoisie is the subject that fascism didn’t create but simply registered and exploited.

13

Musil, Michaux, Walser, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Valery and Pessoa were the first messengers of the arrival of these ambiguous creatures. Familiar with objects and insecure with their fellow humans, they were specimens of the same ‘whatever’ singularity we all belong to today.

14

The readymade and the artist whose hand doesn’t intervene in the artwork are part of the same fabricated world. Despite the revival of ecological movements, the living creature’s biological innocence can no longer be opposed to the entirely synthetic organization of life at the time of the ‘whatever’ singularity. Our complicity with the artificial world surpasses the good will of escaping or fighting it.

The strength of Duchamp in the operation of the readymade is to confront us with the fact that the artist and the artwork are prisoners of the analogy between subject and objects both of which are industrially produced. They are no longer father and son but orphan brothers.