Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp was the person who realized that what looks like art to us depends on who we are—on who “we” are: that what is non-art in one context might be art in another. To drive that perception home, he displayed non-art as art. Perhaps needless to say, the statement that non-art could become art through the mediation of an artist did some devastating work in Duchamp’s own art context; that was what made the exercise worth his while as an art-world provocateur, and also what made it art (with a bit of forcing, which gladdens an avant-gardist’s heart). There wouldn’t have been any point to it in another time and place. The anonymous designer of this bottle rack undoubtedly put a great deal of care and thought into it and may have even wanted it to look good. But Duchamp’s assumption (which might not be made quite so easily today) was that the designer was in no sense an artist: the object was created in a non-art context for a non-art purpose. Duchamp was the artist, and not because of what he made but because of what he did. He had the wit to see that all he needed was wit—the wit to recognize this object and realize that there was a perfect art-hole for it to fit into. Duchamp’s art was an art of wit, which is not something everyone has very much of. To copy Duchamp is to leave out the wit, and that is one reason (one of many) that Duchamp was not saying everyone could be an artist. In any case he was hardly a man of the people. He was a mandarin among mandarins, out to make rarefied art-world points to stun the art world. Duchamp looked down his nose at the “retinal,” at art of visual pleasure; he considered himself a puller of purely intellectual art stunts or prover of art theorems and felt that mere taste shouldn’t enter into what he did. It’s understandable, but in this respect he failed. His readymades are assertively sculptural; what caught Duchamp’s eye in that Paris hardware store was this extravagantly objecty object, not a length of cord or a puddle of turpentine. And, if not always exactly beautiful, Duchamp’s readymades have a pronounced look. I’ll go further. Duchamp’s readymades vary somewhat in spirit (he never repeated himself). But Bottle Rack—the first found object that Duchamp thought deserved his signature just as it was, without alteration—is so fantastically beautiful, so much like sophisticated sculpture by some unknown sculptor, that I know he was delighted by it in precisely the way snapshot collectors are delighted by a miraculous snapshot. Duchamp is the (lately) unacknowledged patron saint of snapshot collectors—of accumulators of found photos, as recontextualized snapshots used to be called in honor of Duchamp’s objets trouvés (actually André Breton’s term). Like Duchamp, we take things out of their original contexts, elevating them, creating them as art objects, by our own choice. We are up-front about taste, though. If part of the point is to take things out of context, the rest of it is to make our selection look like something. Our taste is all we have that might be new, when you get right down to it; taking things out of context stopped being new in 1914. Now what significant work (if any at all) does it do in our own art context to present not just a found object—because that’s been done—but an entire look made of found objects? Why this now? An important question that I hope to come back to. I am not a curator, a historian, a photography expert, a nostalgist. When I look for photos I am not interested in someone else’s works of art, in documentation of former times or some aspect of them, in technology or technique, in a sepia-tone past. What I look for is a statistical anomaly that makes sense to me as a photo: a picture that, in the relevant sense, no one took—like a sculpture that no one sculpted—but that I still like. No one took a picture that I like: isn’t that sort of marvelous? Partly it is marvelous because it is so rare, as I realized when I found that first photo.

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