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

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

Acknowledgments

This project has in its background the writings of Jean-François 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): 193–218.

"(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).

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.

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

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 sorts—that 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 con-

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 (1909–1968), 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 Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même, or The Large Glass; 1915–23), 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, mass-produced 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 (1941–49). 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

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

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 three-dimensional 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

his testamentary installation, Given: 1) the waterfall, 2) the illuminating gas (Etant Donnés: 1) la chute d'eau, 2) le gaz d'éclairage; 1946–66), 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 was—use a reproduction of those paintings that I loved so much, into a small reducedform, in a small shape, and—how to do it—I 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.

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 ready-made 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 Sélavy, 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

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 gen-

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 above-mentioned works as its organizing hinges. Whereas The Large Glass and the ready-mades 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 terms—not 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

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 cassé; 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-

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 three-dimensional 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

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

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).

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 Cézanne 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

Descending a Staircase, No. 2, which is first rejected by the Salon des Indépendants 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 (1910–13), 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

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 François Villon [1431-after 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 Académie 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 Français and Le Rire. Thus, in addition to his early exposure and family background in art, both engraving and cartooning

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.

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 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 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 gesture—one 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-Geneviève 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

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.

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 lines—characteristic of the Fauves' reaction to the Impressionists' careful avoidance of black—is 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.

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.

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 off—a 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

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 "à 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-

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 [1915–23]; Given: 1) the waterfall, 2) the illuminating gas (1946–66); 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.

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 Indépendants 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 Indépendants

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.

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 (1862–63) 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

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

Fig. 8.
Marcel Duchamp, Once More to this Star (Encore 
À 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 à 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

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 Moralités Légendaires, 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'après 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

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 self-reproductive 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

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.

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-

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 étalon ] 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 way—the 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 étalon; 1913–14) 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

Fig. 10.
Marcel Duchamp, The Chess Game (Le Jeu D'échecs), 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 Cézanne, Card Players, 1892. 
Courtesy of The Courtauld Institute Gallery, London.

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'échecs; 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 Cézanne'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 Cézanne'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 Cézanne'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

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

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-and-ink 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 déchiquetées; 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" (déchiqueter, 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 (déchiqueter, however, is also a pun on chessboard or checker pattern (ßchiquier, in French). Rather than interpreting this tearing as Cubist dislocation, Duchampis reinterpreting Cubism itself conceptually from the perspective of chess, as a game whose

Fig. 12.
Marcel Duchamp, Portrait of Chess Players 
(Portrait de Joueurs D'échecs), 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 Déchiquetées), 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-

tions as a way of illuminating it from a conceptual or mental perspective (a pun on matière 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 chess—its adversarial nature—which 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

Surrounded by Swift Nudes (Le Roi et la Reine entourés de nus vites; May 1912) (fig. 14) and The PASSAGE from the Virgin to the Bride (Le Passage de la Vierge à la Mariée; 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 queen—and 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 movement—a 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 traversés

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.

Fig. 15.
Marcel Duchamp, The Passage from the Virgin to the Bride 
(Le Passage de la Vierge à la Mariée), 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.

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.

Fig. 17
Marcel Duchamp, Three Standard Stoppages (3 Stoppages Étalon), 1913–14. Semi-Ready-Made Three Threads, one meter in 
length, dropped from a height of one meter and glued to preserve their outline onto a canvas 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 panels (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 curves 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

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 groom—merely to equip, prepare, or dress up painting—but 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.

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

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.

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-pri-mer 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 ré) of the musical code recorded in

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 (Réseaux des stoppages étalon; 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 diagrammatic—a 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 (Réseaux 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.

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 Roché

In the wake of his pictorial efforts and concomitant with the discovery of the ready-mades, 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

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 glass—a 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.

Fig. 20.
Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even, or The Large 
Glass (La Mariée mise à nu par ses Célibataires, Méme), 1915–23. 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.

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

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 1913–1914, 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, 42–43)

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 (Boîte de 1914 ; 1913–14) (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

Fig. 22.
Marcel Duchamp, The Box of 1914 (Boîte de 1914), 1913–14. 
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 Mariée mise à nu par ses Célibataries, 
Même) from The Green Box, 1934. 8 x 10 in. 
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Louise and Walter Arensberg

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 after-the-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

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 movement—at 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 glass—but 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 picture—to make a "delay" of it in the most

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

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 type—the 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

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 goal—the 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 square—like a chessboard—and 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

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.

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 four-dimensional 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

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.

Fig. 28
Marcel Duchamp, Dust Breeding (Elevage De Poussière), 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

Fig. 29
Marcel Duchamp, Oculist Witnesses 
(TéMoins 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 poussière; 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 (Témoins 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 "cross-eyed, 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

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 mâlic; 1914–15) (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

Fig. 30
Marcel Duchamp, Nine Malic Molds (9 Moules Mâlic), 1914–15. Oil, wire, and glass, 21 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,

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

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

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" (même ) 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 même as "even" or "same" suggests that the

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.

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 Düsseldorf, 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

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 wit—understood 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

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 ready-mades 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 (1452–1519) insistence on an as an intellectual process, to Giuseppe Arcimboldo's (circa 1530–1593) 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

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 "ready-made" 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 Siècle à 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 Cézanne. 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 Cézanne, Duchamp challenges visual representation by exploring its conceptual, "ideatic" character. Duchamp's effort to innovate, that of "inventing a new way to go

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 (1913–14), 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 Valéry'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

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 device—the 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

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.

Fig. 33.
Giuseppe Arcimboldo, water, 1566. Oil on limewood, 26 1/10 x 20 1/5 in. Kunsthistorisches 
Museum, Vienna. Courtesy of Art Resource, New York.

(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 components—the flowers—may 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 other—an 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

Fig. 34.
Giuseppe Arcimboldo, The Cook, circa 1570. Oil on canvas, 20 1/2 x 16 in. Private collection, 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]

According to Barthes, Arcimboldo's talent lies in his poetic and rhetorical abilities—his 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.

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

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 [1877–1933] 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 slightly—it 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

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, 42–43; 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 bias—that as a painter it was much better to be influenced by a writer than by another painter—indicates 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 methods—his experiments generating wordplays from sentences—Duchamp 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 Mallarméan or Rimbaudian sense. It was an obscurity of another order" (DMD, 41; emphasis added). The "antisense" that Duchamp speaks of here has neither

a negative sense nor suggests a hidden meaning, such as we find in the poetic experiments of Stéphane Mallarmé 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 (Première Lumière, 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 André Benoît's poem entitled "Première Lumière." 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 (première lumière), 
1959. Etching, 4 13/16 x 5 7/8 in. 
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Louise 
and Walter Arensberg Collection.

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 Benoît'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 "Thaï'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

field of joy—and 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:

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

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 (Trébuchet; 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). Ready-
made: 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.

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 suspension—suspension 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-mades—the bottle rack, hat rack, and coat rack—are frameworks on which articles are hung, sharing the designation of rack (porte, as in the French porte-bouteilles 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 porte-parole (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 function—not as ordinary words but as utterances—we 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-

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 (Trébuchet), is phonetically identical to the French chess term trébucher, 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 way—not 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 literature—an 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

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-

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 trouvé). 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

Fig. 40.
Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel (Roue de bicyclette), 1964 (original version of 1913, lost). 
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.

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 ready-mades, 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:

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-

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 (Anémic Cinéma; 1925–26), 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.

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 "Impossibilité du fer" (the impossibility of iron), which can also mean the impossibility of making

Fig. 42.
Marcel Duchamp, in Advance of the Broken Arm (En avance 
du Bras Cassé), 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 Société 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 cassé; 1964 version [original version of 1915, lost]) (fig. 42), both articles made of galvanized iron and suspended in the air. In the previous

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 à neige) begins to make sense, once one literally spells out (épeler ) its punning associations. Shovel (pelle, in French), which means scoop or blade, can also be used to signify dustpan (pelle à poussière) 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 dust—to 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, Apolinère Enameled, 1916–17. 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.

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, Apolinèere Enameled (1916–17) (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 "Apolinèere 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, Apolinère Enameled, is a pun on the name of the poet Guillaume ApolliNaire (1880–1918).

But why would Duchamp choose to represent his own dilemmas as an

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 (épargne , 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 1916–1917" 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 Apolinère Enameled: "Marcel Duchamp, painter, signs the impossibility of painting while Rrose Sélavy, artist, depicts (dépeint ) art's possibility. Unless what happens is really that the anartist Marcel Duchamp designates the possibility of painting while the nonpainter Rrose Sélavy paints the impossibility of art."^[58] The issue, however, is less one of deciding who exactly (Marcel or

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.

Fig. 45.
Marcel Duchamp, "Why Not Sneeze Rrose Sélavy'," 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 in. 
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 Apolinère Enameled. But this very coexistence shatters the identity of the artist, who now embodies not only different positions, but also differently gendered personas—Marcel Duchamp and the little girl. Heralding the appearance of Duchamp's artistic alter ego Rrose Sélavy, 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 Sélavy?" (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-

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 Apolinère 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 taste—be 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

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 completely—I 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

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

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 identity—are upstaged by the poetic implosion of puns.

In the case of Alfred Jarry's (1873–1907) 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

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 appearance—the 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 counterpart—his alter ego, Rrose Sélavy. The loophole that Duchamp sought in order to escape both painting and himself, as an artist, emerges as a turnstile—a 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.

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 painter—the difference between the "style" and/ the unexpected name for the/ "experts,"—is the authentic work/ of Rrose Sélavy, 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 Sélavy 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 Sélavy captures the double-edged significance of the ready-made: "The ready-made is a two-edged 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 tongue-in-cheek humor.^[67] A profile drawing of

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.

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]

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 nineteenth-century 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

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 un-artistic. 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

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 "ready-made" 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 ready-made thus embodies an impossible destiny: the predicament of art brought face-to-face with its own conditions of possibility.

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

"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 originals—the 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 ready-mades, 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

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

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 plumbing—a lavatory urinal—was 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 (1864–1946)

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

of mass-produced plumbing, the urinal was further reified through its photographic reproduction, only to come into existence après-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 significant—though 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

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.

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 outdated—its 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 Ülf 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 mass-produced 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

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 interval—what/ 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

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 found—the 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 urinal—who 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.

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 sechée ) 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 Sélavy, 
height 6 in. Galleria Schwarz, Milan. 
Courtesy of Arturo Schwarz. 

Fig. 50.
Book cover designed by Duchamp. Walter Hopps, 
Ülf Linde, Arturo Schwarz, Marcel Duchamp: 
Readymades, etc., 1913–1964. 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 Sélavy. 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 Sélavy, 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

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., 1913–1964 (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 révolutionnaire ); the subtitle "Mirrorical return?" (Renvoi miroirique? ); and a motto, "A faucet which stops running when no one listens to it" (Un robinet qui s'arrête de couler quand on ne l'écoute 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

1950 facsimile) by "Rrose Sélavy" (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/ result—the active state giving/ no interest to the result—the result/ being different if the same/ active/ state is repeated. / mode: experiments.—the result not/ to be kept—not 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 result—its objective character—but 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

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. rasée; 1965), a reproduction of the Mona Lisa pasted on an invitation card, there is a succession of reproductions—printed or photographic—that 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 (1938–58) and the full-scale versions (1950–64), 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 (1941–68). 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

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

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

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 Ülf 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 (1918–19), 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

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 becoming—the 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 tendencies—art as a conceptual intervention (matière 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 matière 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

Fig. 53
.Marcel Duchamp, replica of L.H.O.O.Q., 1919, from Box in a Valise (Boîte En Valise), 1941–42. 
Rectified ready-made: reproduction of the Mona Lisa to which Duchamp has added a moustache 
and beard in pencil, 7 3/4 x 4 7/8 in. 
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection.

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)

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-

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 (1906–1974), 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.

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 Sélavy (1920–21) (fig. 54). The portrait of the artist as female counterpart is captured by Man Ray's soft-focus picture of Duchamp masquerading as a woman (circa 1920–1921). Signed lovingly by Rrose Sélavy 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 Sélavy 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

Fig. 54.
Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy, 1920–21. 
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Samuel S. White and Vera White Collection.

Fig. 55.
Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved (L.H.O.O.Q., 
Rasée), 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 Sélavy 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 Sélavy 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.

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 strength—it 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 status—that 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

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. 

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

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 

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 matter—vegetables. 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 piédestal, 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,

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 objects—pictorial still lifes—which 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.

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 sculpture-morte, it refers to the fact that conventions of artistic production may change or become outmoded—a "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-

ly gets around to "cooking" his mother's still lifes, that is, turning the raw materials of painting (crudités ) into a baked marzipan sculpture. The shapes of these vegetables, however, are sufficiently ambiguous to also punningly allude to brain outcroppings or cold cuts (cervellités, in French). This wordplay is made possible in sculpture-morte by the outline of a head in the creased paper, where the vegetables (crudités, in French) resemble cooked, "debrained" (cervellités ) 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 sculpture-morte 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 Sélavy, 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

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 done—even 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"

(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 York, 10 October 
1917. From Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, trans. George Heard Hamilton. New York: Grove, 1959.

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.

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, mass-produced 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.

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 (Chèque 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,

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

"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)

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 (1876–1957), after he purchased some of the artist's works at the Quinn auction. Constantin Brancusi asked Duchamp and Jean-Pierre Roché (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]

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 aura—in this case an artistic one, that of Dada. As Duchamp explains to Cabanne, this idea was in the same spirit as André 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

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.

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 domain—most particularly, his rejection of the artisanal production of objects (the cult of the "hand"), such as we see embodied in the ready-mades. 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 ready-mades, 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 manuscript version of a 
check, 8 1/4 x 15 1/8 in. Galleria Schwarz, Milan. 
Courtesy of Arturo Schwarz.

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

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 printed—it 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

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, larger-than-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,

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-

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 (Chèque Bruno), 1965. Collection of Mr. 
and Mrs. Phillip A. Bruno. Photograph courtesy of Arturo Schwarz.

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

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:

I had become a member of the Czechoslovakian Mushroom Society, and when I received my membership card—there were various signatures—I 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 attitude—the 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

"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 Sélavy, 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 obligation—usually the payment of a gambling debt—thereby 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

Fig. 62.
Marcel Duchamp, Wanted/$2,000 Reward, replica of original 
version of 1923 (lost) from Box in a Valise (Boîte En Vailse), 
1941—42. 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 SÉLAVY," 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

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 Sélavy, 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

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?
—Stéphane Mallarmé, 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 Sélavy (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 Sélavy, suggests that

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 Man 
Ray of Marcel Duchamp's soap-covered head. 
Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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 Sélavy, 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 spectator—a 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

"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 Sélavy. 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 Sélavy. Duchamp's calling card (and perhaps his business card, as well) introduces him as "PRECISION OCULISM/ RROSE SÉLAVY/ New York-Paris/ COMPLETE LINE OF WHISKWERS AND KICKS" (Oculisme de Précision/ 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.

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]

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

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'échecs ) to checks (jeu des chéques ).^[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

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 , 187–88). 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 Stéphane Mallarmé'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]

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 (1881–1918) and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven's (1874–1927) 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-

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 stopper—a 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.

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.

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, 1984. 
Courtesy of The British Museum.

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 credit—conditional 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

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 object—domains 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 de-historicize 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

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).

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 result—consequently his humour is never gratuitous—but the flagrant disproportion between effort and result proclaims—with hidden noise—this result as the collapse, or better yet, the preposterousness, of a technocracy paralyzed by the very excess of its own efficiency.^[59]

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, François 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."

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 Donnés: 1) la chute d'eau, 2) le gaz d'éclairage ). 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,

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 Donnés 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 Donnés 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-

Fig. 68.
Marcel Duchamp, Water and Gas on All Floors 
(Eau et gaz à tous les étages), 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 à tous les étages ; 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,"

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.

Fig. 70.
Marcel Duchamp, Given: 1) The Waterfall, 2) The 
Illuminating Gas (Etant Donnés: 1) La Chute D'eau, 
2) Le Gaz d'Éclairage), 1946–66. 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,

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'être of the museum as a ready-made . 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

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 different—an 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

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-ready-made) 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]

Fig. 71.
Marcel Duchamp, Given: 1) The Waterfall, 2) The Illuminating Gas (Etant Donnés: 
1) La Chute D'eau, 2) Le Gaz d'Éclairage), 1946–66. 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 place—the 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

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'être—as 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

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 René Magritte's (1898–1967) painting The Threatened Assassin (L'Assassin menacé ; 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

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

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 spectators—potential 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'après 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.

Fig. 73.
Marcel Duchamp, Selected Details 
after Courbet (Morceaux Choisis 
d'après 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'après 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.

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 hyperrealistically—more successfully than life itself. The discourse of eroticism in Given is thus revealed transitively, not as an attribute of

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 Dürer'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 Dürer 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 Dürer's etching, sexuality thus emerges in Duchamp's Given

Fig. 76.
Albrecht Dürer, 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 Dürer 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 death—Eros 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 short-circuited. 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.

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 André 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 René Magritte's painting The Unexpected Answer (La Réponse imprévue ; 1933), Duchamp's door—like Magritte's—is 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

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 , 9–10). The "infrathin" is defined as a surface that acts both as a separating interval and a screen: "infrathin separation—better/ 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

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.

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

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 chasteté ; 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 four-dimensional 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.

Fig. 81.
Marcel Duchamp, Wedge Of Chastity (Coin De 
Chasteté), 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 (Anémic Cinéma; 1925–26) (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 déjà mis la moëlle de l'épée dans le poêle de l'aimée? ) 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 poêle , 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

Fig. 82.
Marcel Duchamp, Anemic Cinema (Anémic Cinéma), 
1925–26. Film made in collaboration with Man Ray and 
Marc Allégret. 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 moëlle de l'épée " and "lepoêle de l'aimée " 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]

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 démontable ), 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 démontage 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 ready-made 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

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

reproduction (its "ready-made" nature), and thus redefines artistic creation. Moreover, Moonlight is no ordinary drawing, since it includes a variety of materials—ink, 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 Alités ; 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

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. 

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 ready-made 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).

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 ready-made 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

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: Hansjörg 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 '

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

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

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 François 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 cenotaph—Given —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 Sélavy , 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 (Sélavy 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 Varése (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

thing for Edgard Varèse, 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

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 prototypes—they 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

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 de-essenrializes the referentiality of gender, and by extension, that of art. In so doing, he once again reactives the interval that separates art from nonart.

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. Avant-gardism 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

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 beforehand—the general look of the "new" as made recognizeable by the avant-garde past—is 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:

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

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 ready-mades. 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

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

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:

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 production—one 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

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

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.

Notes

Introduction: Unpacking Duchamp

1— Painting at a Dead End

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

3— Reproductions: Limited Editions, Ready-Made Origins

4— Art and Economics: From the Urinal to the Bank

5— Rendez-vous with Marcel Duchamp: "Given"

Postscript: Duchamp's Postmodern Returns

Select Bibliography

Adcock, Craig E. "Duchamp's Eroticism: A Mathematical Analysis." Dada and Surrealism 16 (1987): 149–67. Reprinted in Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century, edited by Rudolf E. Kuenzli and Francis M. Naumann, 149–67. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989.

Adcock, Craig E. "Duchamp's Way: Twisting Our Memory of the Past for the Fun of It." In The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp, edited by Thierry de Duve, 311–34. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.

Adcock, Craig E. Marcel Duchamp's Notes from the Large Glass: An N-Dimensional Analysis. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983.

Ades, Dawn. "Duchamp, Dada and Surrealism." In Duchamp, 38–51. Barcelona: Fundación Caja de Pensiones, 1984.

Ades, Dawn. "Marcel Duchamp's Portable Museum." In Marcel Duchamp's Travelling Box. London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1982.

Adler, Kathleen, and Marcia Pointon, eds. The Body Imaged: The Human Form and Visual Culture since the Renaissance. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Aiken, Edward Anselm. "Marcel Duchamp and the Metaphor of the Arcane Pornographic Film." In "Studies in the Motion Picture and Twentieth Century Art, 1909–1930." Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1981.

Antin, David. "Duchamp and Language." In Marcel Duchamp, edited by Anne d'Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine, 99–115. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973.

Antin, David. "Duchamp: The Meal and the Remainder." Art News 71, no. 6 (October 1972): 68–71.

Apollinaire, Guillaume. "Marcel Duchamp." In Les Peintres cubistes, 1913. Reprint, Paris: Hermann, 1965, 90–92. English translation reprint in Marcel Duchamp in Perspective, edited by Joseph Masheck, 25–26. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975.

Armstrong, Carol K. Odd Man Out: Readings of the Work and Reputation of Edgar Dégas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Ashton, Dore. "Interview with Marcel Duchamp." Studio International 171 (June 1966): 244–47.

Ball, Edward, and Robert Knafo. "The R. Mutt Dossier." Artforum (October 1988): 115–17.

Barthes, Roland. "Rhetor and Magician." In Arcimboldo, translated by John Shepley, 15–68. Milan: Franco Maria Ricci, 1980.

Baudrillard, Jean. "L'imaginaire de la linguistique." L'échange symbolique et la mort. Paris: Gallimard, 1976.

Baudry, Jean-Louis. "The Ideological Effects of the Cinematographic Apparatus." In Apparatus: Selected Writings, edited by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. New York: Tanam Press, 1980.

Bauer, George H. "Duchamp, Delay, and Overlay." Mid-America 60 (April 1978): supplement, 63–68.

Bauer, George H. "Duchamp's Ubiquitous Puns." In Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century, edited by Rudolf E. Kuenzli and Francis M. Naumann. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989.

Bauer, George H. "Enamouring a Barber Pole." Dada/Surrealism, no. 12 (1983): 20–36.

Beach, Sylvia, ed. Les Années Vingt: Les écrivains á Paris et leurs amis, 1920–1930, exh. cat. Paris: Centre Culturel Américain, 1959.

Beier, Lucia. "Time Machine: A Bergsonian Approach to The Large Glass." Gazette des beaux-arts 88, series 6 (November 1976): 194–200.

Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1978.

Bensimon, Marc. "Marcel Duchamp: 'Le Grand Verre': Critique manifeste." In Le Manifeste et le caché: Langages surréalistes et autres, edited by Mary Ann Caws, 169–79. Paris: Lettres modernes, 1974

Bernheimer, Charles. Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth Century France. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.

Binkley, Timothy. "Piece: Contra Aesthetics." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 35, no. 3 (Spring 1977): 265–77.

Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.

Bois, Yves-Alain. "La Mariée nue: Du nouveau sur Marcel Duchamp." VH101, no. 3 (Autumn 1970): 62–69.

Bonk, Ecke. De ou par Marcel Duchamp ou Rrose Sélavy, Inventory and History of an Edition. Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 1989.

Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, edited by Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

Bourdieu, Pierre, and Jean-Claude Passeron. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, translated by Richard Nice. 2d ed. London: Sage Publications, 1990.

Breton, André. "Crise de l'objet," translated by Angus Malcolm. Art and Artist 1, no. 4 (July 1966): 12–15. Originally published in Exposition Surréaliste d'Objets, exh. cat., 22–29. Paris: Galerie Charles Ratton, 1936.

Breton, André. "Phare de la Mariée." In Sur Marcel Duchamp, edited by Robert Lebel. Paris: Trianon, 1959. English translation, "Lighthouse of the Bride." View, ser. 5, no. 1 (March 1945); 6–9, 13.

Brisset, Jean-Pierré. La Science de Dieu ou la création de I'homme. Paris: Tchou, 1972.

Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde, translated by Michael Shaw, foreword by Jochen Schulte-Sasse. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Burnham, Jack. Great Western Salt Works: Essays on the Meaning of Postformalist Art. New York: George Braziller, 1974.

Burnham, Jack. Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of This Century. New York: George Braziller, 1982.

Burnham, Jack. The Structure of Art. New York: George Braziller, 1971.

Burnham, Jack. "The True Readymade?" Art and Artists 6, no. 11 (February 1972): 26–31.

Burnham, Jack. "Unveiling the Consort," part 1, Artforum 9, no. 7 (March 1971): 55–60; part 2, Artforum 9, no. 8 (April 1971): 42–51.

Butor, Michel. "Reproduction Interdite." Critique, no. 334 (March 1975): 269–83.

Cabanne, Pierre. Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, translated by Ron Padgett. New York: Da Capo Press, 1987.

Cabanne, Pierre. Entretiens avec Marcel Duchamp. Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1967.

Cage, John. "26 Statements re Duchamp." Art and Literature, no. 3 (Autumn/ Winter 1964): 9–10. Reprinted in Marcel Duchamp in Perspective, edited by Joseph Masheck, 67–69. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975.

Calas, Nicholas. "Duchamp's Last Work." Arts Magazine 48, no. 1 (September-October 1973): 46–47.

Calas, Nicholas. "The Large Glass." Art in America 57 (July-August 1969): 35.

Calvesi, Maurizio. Duchamp Invisible — La Costruzione del simbolo. Rome: Officina Edizioni, 1975.

Camfield, William. Marcel Duchamp: Fountain. Houston: The Menil Collection, Houston Fine Arts Press, 1989.

Camfield William., and Jean-Hubert Martin, eds. Tabu Dada: Jean Crotti and Suzanne Duchamp, 1915–1922. Bern: Kunsthalle Bern, 1983.

Carrouges, Michel. "Duchamp révélateur du déjà vu et du jamais vu." Cahiers de l'Association internationale pour l'étude de Dada et du surréalisme, no. 3 (1969): 22–26.

Carrouges, Michel. "Marcel Duchamp et Franz Kafka." In Les Machines célibataires, 27–59. Paris: Arcanes, 1954.

Cartwright, Julia. Isabella d'Este, vol. 2. London: John Murray, 1932.

Caws, Mary Ann. "Mallarmé and Duchamp: Mirror, Stair, and Gaming Table." L'Esprit créateur 20, no. 2 (Summer 1980): 51–64. Reprinted in The Eye in the Text: Essays on Perception, Mannerist to Modern. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.

Caws, Mary Ann. "Partiality and the Ready Maid, or Representation by Reduction." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 42, no. 3 (Spring 1984): 255–60.

Chaplupecky^[*] , Jindrich^[*] . "Art et transcendance." In Marcel Duchamp: Tradition de la rupture ou rupture de la tradition?, edited by Jean Clair, 11–35. Paris: Union générale d'éditions, 1979. English translation in Flash Art, no. 90–91 (June-July 1979): 3–8.

Chastel, André. "Léonard et la pensée artistique du XXe siècle," 1960. In Fables, Formes, Figures, vol. 2 (Paris: Flammarion, 1978).

Chénieux, Jacqueline. "L'Erotisme chez Marcel Duchamp et Georges Bataille." In Marcel Duchamp: Tradition de la rupture ou rupture de la tradition?, edited by Jean Clair, 193–234. Paris: Union générale d'éditions, 1979.

Chénieux, Jacqueline. "Patience et impatiences chez Marcel Duchamp." Le Nouveau Commerce, no. 24–25 (Spring 1973): 73–99.

Clair, Jean. "L'Adorable Leurre." Chroniques de l'art vivant, no. 37 (March 1973): 4–6.

Clair, Jean. "Continental Drifts." In The Arcimboldo Effect: Transformations of the Face from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century. New York: Abbeville Press, 1987.

Clair, Jean., ed. Marcel Duchamp: Abécédaire: Approches critiques. Paris: Musée national d'art moderne, Centre national d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou, 1977.

Clair, Jean., ed. Marcel Duchamp: Catalogue raisonné, exh. cat. Paris: Musée national d'art moderne. Centre national d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou, 1977.

Clair, Jean. "Duchamp and the Classical Perspectivists." Artforum 16, no. 7 (1978): 40–49.

Clair, Jean. Marcel Duchamp, ou, Le Grand Fictif: Essai de mythanalyse du "Grand Verre." Paris: Galilee, 1975.

Clair, Jean. "Duchamp, Léonard et la tradition maniériste." In Marcel Duchamp: Tradition de la rupture ou rupture de la tradition?, 117–56. Paris: Union générale d'éditions, 1979.

Clair, Jean. Duchamp et la photographie. Paris: Editions du Chêne, 1977.

Clair, Jean. "Marcel Duchamp et la tradition des perspecteurs." In Marcel Duchamp: Abécédaire: Approches critiques, 124–59. Paris: Musée national d'art moderne, Centre national d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou, 1977.

Clair, Jean., ed. Marcel Duchamp: Tradition de la rupture ou rupture de la tradition? Paris: Union générale d'éditions, 1979.

Clair, Jean. "Sexe et topologie." In Marcel Duchamp: Tradition de la rupture ou rupture de la tradition?, 52–59. Paris: Union générale d'éditions, 1979.

Clair, Jean. "Les Vapeurs de la mariée." L'Arc, no. 59 (1974): 44–51.

Clair, Jean. "Villon: Mariage, hasard et pendaison." In Marcel Duchamp: Abécédaire: Approches critiques , 201–2. Paris: Musée national d'art moderne, Centre national d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou, 1977.

Clarkin, Franklin. "Two Miles of Funny Pictures." In Boston Evening Transcript. (25 April 1917).

Compton, Michael. "The Ready-mades, Meaning and Representation in Art." Vanguard (May 1978). Reprinted in Duchamp Readymades, edited by Jo-Anne Birnie. Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1978.

Cook, Albert. "The Meta-Irony of Marcel Duchamp." In The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 44, no. 3 (Spring 1986): 263–70.

Copley, William. "The New Piece." Art in America 57 (July-August 1969): 336–37. Reprinted in Marcel Duchamp in Perspective, edited by Joseph Masheck, 112–14. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975.

Crary, Jonathan. "Marcel Duchamp's The Passage from Virgin to Bride." Arts Magazine 51 (January 1977): 96–99.

Crehan, Herbert. Duchamp Interview, entitled "Dada." Evidence, no. 3 (Fall 1961): 36–38.

Dadoun, Roger. "Rrose Sschize: Sschize d'un portrait-théorie de Marcel Duchamp en Jésus sec célibataire." L'Arc, no. 59 (1974): 24–28.

Dali, Salvador. "Why They Attack the Mona Lisa." Art News 62, no. 1 (March 1963): 36, 63–64.

Damisch, Hubert. "La Défense Duchamp." In Marcel Duchamp: Tradition de la rupture ou rupture de la tradition?, edited by Jean Clair, 65–115. Paris: Union générale d'éditions, 1979. English translation, "The Duchamp Defense." October 10 (Fall 1979): 5–28.

Danto, Arthur. The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

Danto, Arthur. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981.

Davies, Ivor. "New Reflections on the Large Glass: The Most Logical Sources for Marcel Duchamp's Irrational Work." Art History 2, no. 1 (March 1979): 89–94.

Dee, John. "Ce Façonnement symétrique." In Marcel Duchamp: Tradition de la rupture ou rupture de la tradition?, edited by Jean Clair, 351–402. Paris: Union générale d'éditions, 1979.

Delloye, Charles. "Marcel Duchamp, le Grande Verre et le jeu de l'apparaître." Art International 20 (December 1976): 54–60, 72.

d'Harnoncourt, Anne, and Walter Hopps. "Before the Glass: Reflections on Marcel Duchamp Before 1915," 30–36. In Duchamp. Barcelona: Fundación Caja de Pensiones, 1984.

d'Harnoncourt, Anne, and Walter Hopps. "Etant donnés: 1) la chute d'eau, 2) le gaz d'éclairage: Reflections on a New Work by Marcel Duchamp." Philadelphia Museum of Art Bulletin 64, nos. 299–300 (April-September 1969): 6–58. Reprinted in 1973 and 1987

d'Harnoncourt, Anne, and Kynaston McShine, eds. Marcel Duchamp. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973.

Dickie, George. "Defining Art," American Philosophical Quarterly 6, no. 3 (July 1969): 253–56.

Doane, Mary Anne. "Film and Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator." Screen, 13 (September–October 1982): 74–87.

Duchamp, Marcel. "Affectueusement, Marcel: Ten Letters from Marcel Duchamp to Suzanne Duchamp and Jean Crotti," edited by Francis M. Naumann. Archives of American Art Journal 22, no. 4 (1982): 2–19.

Duchamp, Marcel. À l'infinitif [White Box]. New York: Cordier & Eckstrom, Inc., 1967.

Duchamp, Marcel. The Blind Man, edited by Marcel Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roché, and Beatrice Wood. New York: n.p., 1917. Two numbers; no. 2. called The Blind Man.

Duchamp, Marcel. The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even: A Typographic Version by Richard Hamilton of Marcel Duchamp's Green Box. Stuttgart: Hansjörg Mayer, 1967.

Duchamp, Marcel. Duchamp du signe: Ecrits, edited by Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson. Paris: Flammarion, 1975.

Duchamp, Marcel. Manual of Instructions for Marcel Duchamp "Etant Donnés: 1) la chute d'eau, 2) le gaz d'éclairage." Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1987.

Duchamp, Marcel. Marcel Duchamp, Notes, edited by Paul Matisse. Paris: Centre national d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou, 1980. Includes color facsimiles of the notes. U.S. ed., Boston: G. K. H., 1983. Includes new Preface by Anne d'Harnoncourt. Both editions include original French texts and English translation.

Duchamp, Marcel. La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même. Paris: Editions Rrose Sélavy, 1934.

Duchamp, Marcel. "The Richard Mutt Case." The Blind Man, no. 2, 5–6. New York: n.p., 1917.

Duchamp, Marcel., and Vitaly Halberstadt. L'Opposition et les cases conjuguées sont reconciliées. Paris: L'Echiquier, 1932.

Duchamp, Marcel. Rongwrong, edited by Marcel Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roché, and Beatrice Wood. New York: n.p., 1917.

Duchamp, Marcel. Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, edited by Michel Sanouillet. Paris: Le Terrain vague, 1959. All texts presented in the original language in which they were written (French or English).

Duchamp, Marcel (as subject). Marcel Duchamp. Special issue of L'Arc, no. 59 (1974).

Duchamp, Marcel. Marcel Duchamp. Special issue of View, ser. 5, no. 1 (March 1945).

Duve, Thierry de. "Authorship Stripped Bare, Even." RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 19/20 (1990/1991): 234–41.

Duve, Thierry de., ed. The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.

Duve, Thierry de. "Given the Richard Mutt Case." In The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp, 187–230. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.

Duve, Thierry de. "Les Moustaches de la Joconde: Petit Exercise de Méthode." In Marcel Duchamp: Tradition de la rupture ou rupture de la tradition?, edited by Jean Clair, 403–26. Paris: Union Générale d'éditions, 1979.

Duve, Thierry de. Nominalisme Pictural. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1984. English translation, Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp's Passage from Painting to the Readymade, translated by Dana Polan. Theory and History of Literature, vol. 51. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.

Duve, Thierry de. "The Readymade and the Tube of Paint." Artforum 24, no. 9 (May 1986): 110–21.

Duve, Thierry de. Resonances du Readymade: Duchamp entre avant-garde et tradition. Nîmes: Editions Jacqueline Chambon, 1989.

Duve, Thierry de. "Le Temps du ready-made." In Marcel Duchamp: Abécédaire: Approches critiques, edited by Jean Clair, 166–84. Paris: Musée national d'art moderne, Centre national d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou, 1977.

Edson, Laurie. "Confronting the Signs: Words, Images and the Reader-Spectator." Dada/Surrealism 13 (1984): 83–93.

Evelyn, John. "Numismata" [London, 1697]. In Coins and Vases of Arthur Stone Dewing: A Memorial Exhibition, exh. cat. The Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971.

Exhibition of Modern Art, exh. cat. Foreword by Walter Pach. Bourgeois Gallery, New York, April 3–29, 1916.

Exhibition of Pictures by Jean Crotti, Marcel Duchamp, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, exh. cat. Montross Gallery, New York, April 4–22, 1916, no. 27.

Formentelli, Eliane. "Cantique-Duchamp, ou La Théorie du moteur invisible." In Marcel Duchamp: Tradition de la rupture ou rupture de la tradition?, edited by Jean Clair, 263–96. Paris: Union générale d'éditions, 1979.

Foucault, Michel. Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel, translated by C. Russ. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

Fried, Michael. Courbet's Realism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

Galleria Schwarz Milan). Marcel Duchamp: Ready-Mades, etc. Texts by Walter Hopps, Ülf Linde, and Arturo Schwarz. Paris: Le Terrain vague, 1964.

Gervais, André. "Connections: Of Art and Arrhe." In The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp, edited by Thierry de Duve, 397–426. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.

Gervais, André. "Sign ED sign MD: Autographique Portrait of An artist en Rymes." In Marcel Duchamp: Tradition de la rupture ou rupture de la tradition?, edited by Jean Clair, 297–350. Paris: Union générale d'éditions, 1979.

Golding, John. Marcel Duchamp: The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. London: Penguin Press, 1973.

Goldsmith, Steven. "The Readymades of Marcel Duchamp: The Ambiguities of an Aesthetic Revolution." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 42, no. 2 (Winter 1983); 142–51.

Gottlieb, Carla. "Self-Potraiture in Postmodern Art." Wallraf-Richartz Jahrbuch 42 (1981): 267–302.

Gottlieb, Carla. "Something Else: Duchamp's Bride and Leonardo." Kunsthistorisk Tidskrift 45 (June 1976): 52–57.

Goux, Jean-Joseph. Economique et Symbolique. Paris: Seuil, 1973.

Goux, Jean-Joseph. Les Monnayeurs du Langage. Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1984.

Gray, Cleve. "The Great Spectator." Art in America 57, no. 4 (July-August 1968): 20–27.

Greenberg, Clement. "Counter-Avant-Garde." Art International 15, no. 5 (20 May 1971), 16–19. Reprinted in Marcel Duchamp in Perspective, edited by Joseph Masheck, 122–23. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975.

Hahn, Otto. Interview with Duchamp. "Marcel Duchamp." VH101, no. 3 (Autumn 1970): 55–61.

Hahn, Otto. "Passport No. G255300," translated by Andrew Rabenck. Art and Artists 1, no. 4 (July 1966): 6–11.

Hamilton, George H. "In Advance of Whose Broken Arm?" Art and Artist 1, no. 4 (July 1966): 29–31. Reprinted in Marcel Duchamp in Perspective, edited by Joseph Masheck, 73–76. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975.

Hamilton, Richard. The Almost Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, exh. cat. London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1966.

Hamilton, Richard. "The Large Glass." In Marcel Duchamp, edited by Anne d'Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine, 57–67. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973.

Heath, Stephen. "Difference." Screen 19 (Autumn 1978).

Held, René R. "Marcel Duchamp: L'Imposteur malgré lui, ou, Le Grand Canular et la surréalité." In L'Oeil du psychanalyste: Surréalisme et surréalité, 218–55. Paris: Payot, 1973.

Henderson, Linda Dalrymple. The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.

Hess, Thomas B. "J'Accuse Marcel Duchamp." Art News 63, no. 10 (February 1965): 44–45, 52–54. Reprinted in Marcel Duchamp in Perspective, edited by Joseph Masheck, 115–20. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975. Review of exhibition at Cordier & Eckstrom.

Hill, Anthony. "The Spectacle of Duchamp." Studio International 189 (January-February 1975): 20–22.

Hill, G. F. A Corpus of Italian Medals of the Renaissance before Cellini. London: British Museum, 1930, nos. 16–18.

"His Art Is Too Crude for Independents." The New York Herald (14 April 1917): 6 (no author).

Höcke, Gustav René. Labyrinthe de L'Art Fantastique, translated by C. Heim. Paris: Gonthier, 1967.

Hopps, Walter, ed. Marcel Duchamp, Pasadena Art Museum: A Retrospective Exhibition, exh. cat. Pasadena: Pasadena Art Museum, 1963.

Hopps, Walter, Ülf Linde, and Arturo Schwarz. Marcel Duchamp: Ready-mades, etc. ('1913–1964,). Milan: Galleria Schwarz, 1964.

Hulten, Pontus, ed. Ephemerides on or about Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Sélavy, 1887–1968. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993.

Humble, P. N. "Duchamp's Readymades: Art and Anti-Art." The British Journal of Aesthetics 22, no. 1 (Winter 1982): 52–64.

Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One, translated by Catherine Porter and Caroline Burke. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.

James, Carol P. "An Original Revolutionary Messagerie Rrose, or What Became of the Readymades." In The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp, edited by Thierry de Duve, 277–96. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.

James, Carol P. "Duchamp's Early Readymades: The Erasure of Boundaries between Literature and Other Arts." Perspectives on Contemporary Literature 13 (1987): 24–32.

James, Carol P. "Duchamp's Pharmacy." Enclitic 2, no. 1 (Spring 1978): 65–80.

James, Carol P. "Marcel Duchamp, Naturalized American." French Review 49, no. 6 (May 1976): 1097–1105.

Janis, Harriet, and Sidney Janis. "Marcel Duchamp, Anti-artist." View, ser. 5, no. 1 (March 1945). Reprinted in The Dada Painters and Poets, edited by Robert Motherwell, 306–15. 2d ed. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981.

Johns, Jasper. "Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968)." Artforum 7, no. 3 (November 1968): 6. Reprinted in Marcel Duchamp in Perspective, edited by Joseph Masheck, 147. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975.

Johns, Jasper. "Thoughts on Duchamp." Art in America 57 (July-August 1969): 31.

Jouffroy, Alain. "Etant donné Marcel Duchamp 1) individualiste révolutionnaire, 2) respirateur." Opus International, no. 49 (March 1974): 18–23.

Judd, Donald. "Marcel Duchamp and/or Rrose Sélavy." Arts Magazine 39 (March 1965): 53–54. Reprinted in Marcel Duchamp in Perspective, edited by Joseph Masheck, 121. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975. Review of exhibition at Cordier & Eckstrom.

Judovitz, Dalia. "Anemic Vision in Duchamp: Cinema as Readymade." Dada/Surrealism 15 (1986): 46–57. Reprinted in Dada and Surrealist Film, edited by Rudolf E. Kuenzli, 46–57. New York: Willis, Locker & Owens, 1987.

Judovitz, Dalia. "Art & Economics: Duchamp's Postmodern Returns." Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 35, no, 2 (Spring 1993): 193–218.

Judovitz, Dalia. " (Non) sense and (non)art in Duchamp." Art & Text, Nonsense, no. 37 (September 1990): 80–86. Special supplement in conjunction with the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Judovitz, Dalia. "Rendez-vous with Marcel Duchamp: Given." Dada & Surrealism, no. 16 (1987); 184–202. Reprinted in Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century, edited by Rudolf E. Kuenzli and Francis M. Naumann, 189–202. Cambridge; MIT Press, 1989.

Kozloff, Max. "John and Duchamp." Art International 8, no. 2 (March 1964): 42–45. Reprinted in Marcel Duchamp in Perspective, edited by Joseph Masheck, 138–46. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975.

Krauss, Rosalind. "Notes on the Index: Part 1." In The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, 98–199. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987.

Krauss, Rosalind. Passages in Modern Sculpture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981.

Krauss, Rosalind "Where's Poppa?" In The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp, edited by Thierry de Duve. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.

Kuenzli, Rudolf E. "Introduction." Dada and Surrealism, no. 16 (1987). Reprinted in Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century, edited by Rudolf Kuenzli and Francis M. Naumann. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989.

Kuenzli, Rudolf E., and Francis M. Naumann. Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989.

Kuh, Katherine. Interview with Marcel Duchamp. In The Artist's Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists. New York: Harper & Row, 1962.

Kuhns, Richard. "Art and Machine." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 25, no. 3 (Spring 1977): 259–66.

Lebel, Robert. Marcel Duchamp, translated by George H. Hamilton. New York: Grove Press, 1959.

Lebel, Robert. "Marcel Duchamp and Electricity at Large: The Dadaist Version of Electricity." In Electra: L'Electricité et l'électronique dans l'art au XXe siécle, 164–73. Paris: Les Amis du Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris, 1983.

Le Bot, Marc. "Margelles du Sens; ou, les musées de Marcel Duchamp." L'Arc, no. 59 (1974): 8–15.

Le Cercle, Jean-Jacques. Philosophy through the Looking Glass. La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1985.

Linde, Ülf. "La Copie de Stockholm." In Marcel Duchamp: Abécédaire: Approches critiques, edited by Jean Clair, 31–32. Paris: Musée national d'art moderne, Centre national d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou, 1977.

Linde, Ülf. "Duchamp et Matisse." In Marcel Duchamp: Abécédaire: Approches critiques, edited by Jean Clair, 116–17. Paris: Musée national d'art moderne, Centre national d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou, 1977.

Linde, Ülf. "L'Esotérique." In Marcel Duchamp: Abécédaire: Approches critiques, edited by Jean Clair, 60–85. Paris: Musée national d'art moderne, Centre national d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou, 1977.

Linde, Ülf. "MARiée CELibataire." In Walter Hopps, Ülf Linde, and Arturo Schwarz, Marcel Duchamp: Ready-mades, etc. ('1913–1964), 263. Milan: Galleria Schwarz, 1964.

Linde, Ülf. "La Perspective dans les 'Neuf Moules maliques.'" In Marcel Duchamp: Abécédaire: Approches critiques, edited by Jean Clair, 160–65. Paris: Musée national d'art moderne, Centre national d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou, 1977.

Linde, Ülf. "La Roue de bicyclette." In Marcel Duchamp: Abécédaire: Approches critiques, edited by Jean Clair, 35–41. Paris: Musée national d'art moderne, Centre national d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou, 1977.

Linde, Ülf. "Tout n'est que célibat." In Marcel Duchamp: Abécédaire: Approches critiques, edited by Jean Clair, 111–13. Paris: Musée national d'art moderne, Centre national d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou, 1977.

Lippard, Lucy, ed. "Interview with Marcel Duchamp." In Dadas on Art. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971.

Lyotard, Jean-François. "Etants Donnés: Inventaire du dernier nu." In Marcel Duchamp: Abécédaire: Approches critiques, edited by Jean Clair, 87–109. Paris: Musée national d'art moderne, Centre national d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou, 1977.

Lyotard, Jean-François. Les transformateurs Duchamp. Paris: Galilée, 1977.

McEvilley, Thomas. "I Think Therefore I Art." Artforum 23, no. 10 (Summer 1985); 74–84.

McShine, Kynaston. "La Vie en Rrose." In Marcel Duchamp, edited by Anne d'Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine, 125–34. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973.

Malraux, André. The Psychology of Art, vol. 3. New York: Pantheon, 1950.

Marquis, Alice Goldfarb. Marcel Duchamp: Eros, c'est la vie: A Biography. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1981.

Martin, Katrina. "Marcel Duchamp's Anemic Cinema." Studio International 189, no. 973 (January-February 1975): 53–60.

Masheck, Joseph. "Introduction: Chance is zee Fool's Name for Fate." In Marcel Duchamp in Perspective, edited by Joseph Masheck, 1–24. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975. Masheck, Joseph., ed. Marcel Duchamp in Perspective. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975

Matisse, Paul. "Some More Nonsense about Duchamp." Art in America 68, no. 4 (April 1980): 76–83.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible, edited by Claude Lefort, translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968.

Mezei, Otto. Duchamp: 1887–1968. Budapest: Corvina Keadó, 1970.

Micha, Olivier "Duchamp et la couture." In Marcel Duchamp: Abécédaire: Approches critiques, edited by Jean Clair, 33–34. Paris: Musée national d'art moderne, Centre national d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou, 1977.

Micha, René. "Etant Donné Etant Donnés." In Marcel Duchamp: Tradition de la rupture ou rupture de la tradition?, edited by Jean Clair, 33–34. Paris: Union générale d'éditions, 1979.

Michaels, Walter Benn.The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the End of the Century. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.

Michelson, Annette. "'Anemic Cinema': Reflections on an Emblematic Work." Artforum 12, no. 2 (October 1973): 64–69.

Motherwell, Robert. Dada Painters and Poets, 2d ed. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981.

Moulin, Raymonde. Le Marché de la peinture en France. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967.

Mussman, Toby. "Anémic Cinéma." Art and Artists 1, no. 4 (July 1966): 48–51.

Naumann, Francis M. "Affectueusement, Marcel: Ten Letters from Marcel Duchamp." Archives of American Art Journal , 22 no. 4 (1982): 2–19.

Naumann, Francis M. The Mary and William Sisler Collection. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1984.

Nesbit, Molly. "The Language of Industry." In The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp, edited by Thierry de Duve, 251–384. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.

Nesbit, Molly. "Ready-Made Originals: The Duchamp Model." October 37 (Summer 1986): 53–64.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols, translated and with an Introduction by R. J. Hollingdale, 3. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1968.

Norman, Dorothy. Interview with Marcel Duchamp. "Interview by Dorothy Norman." Art in America 57 (July-August 1969): 38.

Norton, Louise. "Buddha of the Bathroom." In The Blind Man, no. 2 (May 1917). Reprinted in Marcel Duchamp in Perspective, edited by Joseph Masheck, 70–72. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975.

Paz, Octavio. Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare, translated by R. Phillips and D. Gardner. New York: Seaver Books/The Viking Press, 1978.

Peirce, Charles Sanders. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, vol. 3. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931–1933.

Pincus-Witten, Robert. "Man Ray: The Homonymic Pun and American Vernacular." Artforum 13, no. 4 (April 1975).

Pingaud, Bernard. "L'Objet littéraire comme 'ready-made.'" L'Arc, no. 59 (1974): 16–23.

Raynal, Maurice. Anthologie de la peinture en France de 1906—à nos jours. Paris: Montaigne, 1927.

Read, Peter. "The Tzanck Check and Related Works by Marcel Duchamp." In Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century, edited by R. Kuenzli and F. Naumann, 95–105. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989.

Reff, Theodore. "Duchamp and Leonardo: L.H.O.O.Q.-Alikes." Art in America, no. 1 (January-February 1977): 83–93.

Richter, Hans. Dada Art and Anti-Art. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965.

Robbe-Grillet, Alain. Topologie d'une cité fantôme: roman. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1976.

Roberts, Colette. Interview with Marcel Duchamp. "Interview by Colette." Art in America 57 (July-August 1969): 39.

Roberts, Francis. Interview with Marcel Duchamp. "I Propose to Strain the Laws of Physics." Art News 67, no. 8 (December 1968): 46–47, 62–64.

Rose, Jacqueline. Sexuality in the Field of Vision. London: Verso, New Left Books, 1986.

Rosenberg, Harold. "The Art World: Not Making It." New Yorker 47 (16 October 1971); 147–55.

Rosenberg, Harold. "The Mona Lisa Without a Mustache: Art in the Media Age." Art News 75 (May 1976): 47–50.

Roth, Moira. "Robert Smithson on Duchamp: An Interview." Artforum 12 (October 1973). Reprinted in Marcel Duchamp in Perspective, edited by Joseph Masheck, 134–37. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975.

Roth, Moira, and William Roth. "John Cage on Marcel Duchamp: An Interview." In Marcel Duchamp in Perspective, edited by Joseph Masheck. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975.

Rougemont, Denis de. "Marcel Duchamp mine de rien." Preuves 18, no. 204 (February 1968): 43–47.

Roussel, Raymond. Comment j'ai écrit certains de mes livres. Paris: Librarie Alphonse Lemerre, 1935.

Roussel, Raymond. Impressions d'Afrique. Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1963.

Rubin, William S. Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1968.

Rubin, William S. "Reflexions on Marcel Duchamp." Art International 4, no. 9 (1960): 49–53. Reprinted in Marcel Duchamp in Perspective, edited by Joseph Masheck, 41–51. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975.

Sanouillet, Michel, and E. Peterson, eds. Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

Sanouillet, Michel, Duchamp du signe: Ecrits. Paris: Flammarion, 1975.

Sayre, Henry M. "Readymades and Other Measures: The Poetics of Marcel Duchamp and William Carlos Williams." Journal of Modern Literature 8, no. 1 (1980): 3–22.

Schwarz, Arturo. "The Alchemist Stripped Bare in the Bachelor, Even," In Marcel Duchamp, edited by Anne d'Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine, 81–98. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1973.

Schwarz, Arturo. The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1970.

Schwarz, Arturo. "Duchamp et l'alchimie." In Marcel Duchamp: Abécédaire: Approches critiques, edited by Jean Clair, 10–21. Paris: Musée national d'art moderne, Centre national d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou, 1977.

Schwarz, Arturo. Marcel Duchamp. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1975.

Seitz, William. "What's Happened to Art?: An Interview with Marcel Duchamp on the Present Consequences of New York's 1913 Armory Show." Vogue 141 (15 February 1963): 110–13, 129–31.

Shell, Marc. The Economy of Literature. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.

Shell, Marc. Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophical Economics from the Medieval to the Modern Era. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982.

Siegel, Jeanne. Interview with Marcel Duchamp. "Some Late Thoughts of Marcel Duchamp: Interview with Jeanne Siegel." Arts Magazine 43 (December 1968-January 1969): 21–22. Reprinted in Artwords: Discourse on the Sixties and Seventies, 15–21. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985.

Simmel, Georg. The Philosophy of Money, translated by Tom Bottomore and David Frisby. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Press, 1978.

Sitney, P. Adams. "Image and Title in Avant-Garde Cinema." October (Winter 1979): 97–112

Smithson, Robert. "Robert Smithson on Duchamp, an Interview." Artforum 12, no. 2 (October 1973): 47. Interview conducted by Moira Roth.

Steefel, Lawrence D., Jr. "The Art of Marcel Duchamp: Dimension and Development in 'Le Passage de la viérge à la mariée.'" Art journal 22, no. 2 (Winter 1962/63): 71–80. Reprinted in Marcel Duchamp in Perspective, edited by Joseph Masheck, 90–106. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975.

Steefel, Lawrence D., Jr. "Marcel Duchamp and the Machine." In Marcel Duchamp, edited by Anne d'Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine, 69–80. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1973.

Steefel, Lawrence D., Jr. "Marcel Duchamp's 'Encore à cet astre'": A New Look." Art Journal 36, no. 1 (Fall 1976): 23–30.

Steefel, Lawrence D., Jr. The Position of Duchamp's Glass in the Development of His Art. New York: Garland, 1977.

Steiner, Wendy. The Colors of Rhetoric. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

Stewart, Susan. Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.

Stites, Raymond. The Sublimations of Leonardo da Vinci, 25–26. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1970.

Stuckey, Charles. "Duchamp's Acephalic Symbolism." Art in America 65 (January 1977): 94–99.

Suquet, Jean. "Le Signe de la concordance." L'Arc, no. 59 (1974): 36–43.

Suquet, Jean. "Possible." In The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp, edited by Thierry de Duve, 85–112. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.

Sweeney, James Johnson. Interview with Marcel Duchamp. "Marcel Duchamp." In Wisdom: Conversations with Elder Wise Men of Our Day, edited by James Nelson. New York: Norton, 1958. Reprinted as "Interview with Marcel Duchamp." In Dadas mon Art, edited by Lucy Lippard, 141–42. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971.

Sweeney, James Johnson. Interview with Marcel Duehamp. "Eleven Europeans in America." The Museum of Modern Art Bulletin 13, nos. 4–5 (1946): 19–21.

Tomkins, Calvin. The Bride and the Bachelors: five Masters of the Avant-Garde. New York: The Viking Press, 1965.

Tomkins, Calvin. The World of Marcel Duchamp. New York: Time Inc., 1966.

Turgot, A. R. J. "Tableau philosophique des progrés succésifs de l'esprit humain" [1750]. In Ecrits économiques, Introduction by Bernard Cazes. Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1970.

Turner, Richard A. Inventing Leonardo. New York: Knopf, 1993.

Tzara, Tristan. "Essai sur la situation de la poésie." Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution, no. 4 (1931).

Van Vechten, Carl. The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten, 1913–1946, edited by Edward Burns. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

Vasari, Giorgio. Artists of the Renaissance, translated by George Bull. New York: The Viking Press, 1978.

Vinci, Leonardo da. The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, edited and translated by Edward MacCurdy. London: Jonathan Cape, 1977.

Weschler, Lawrence. "Boggs's Bills." In Shapinsky's Karma, Boggs Bills: And Other True Life Tales. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988.

Wieand, Jeffrey. "Duchamp and the Artworld." Critical Inquiry 8, no. 1 (Autumn 1981): 151–57.

Williams, Raymond. The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists. New York: Verso, 1989.

Wohl, Hellmut. "Duchamp's Etchings of the Large Glass and Lovers." In Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century, edited by Rudolf E. Kuenzli and Francis M. Naumann. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989.

Wood, Beatrice, ed. The Blind Man, no. 2, edited by Marcel Duchamp and HenriPierre Roché. New York: n.p., 1917. a numbers; no. 2 called The Blind Man.

Wood, Beatrice, I Shock Myself, edited by Lindsay Smith. Ojai, Calif.: Dillingham Press, 1985.

Index

A

Académie 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

Anémic Cinéma, See Anemic Cinema

Antin, David, 95 , 254 n

Apolinère 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 ;

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 Sélavy

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

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 Bürger, 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

Baptême. 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 Sélavy

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 André, 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-évier. See Drain Stopper

Bourdieu, Pierre, 234 -235, 247 n,

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, André, 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

Bürger, 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 Cézanne, Paul

Carrouges, Michel, 248 n

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

Cézanne, 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, André, 251 n

Chénieux, Jacqueline, 268 n

Cheque Bruno, 160 , 167 , 171 -173, 171

Chéque 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 chasteté. See Wedge of Chastity

Cols Alités. 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 ,

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

Déjeuner 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 Dürer, 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 Dürer, 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 Sélavy, 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 Sélavy; With my tongue in my cheek);

speculative manipulation of financial species, 164 -167 (see also Cheque

Bruno; Czech Check; Drain Stopper; Tzank Check; Wanted/$2000 Reward).

See also Artistic creativity; Beautiful Breath, Veil Water; Puns; Reproduction; Rrose Sélavy

Duchamp, Suzanne, 17 , 164

Duchamp, Teeny, 195

Duchamp-Villon, Raymond, 17 , 37

Dürer, 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 poussiére. See Dust Breeding

En avance du bras cassé. See In Advance of the Broken Arm

Encore à 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 donnés: 1) La chute d'eau, 2) Le gaz d'éclairage. 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

F

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

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 Sélavy; 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, André, 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

Heath, Steven, 269 n

Held, René R., 249 n

Hess, Thomas, 8 , 243 n, 244 n

Hill, George F., 256 n

Höcke, Gustav René, 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 Valéry, 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'échecs, 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

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 Sélavy, 144 -146.

See also Gender; Mona Lisa

L.H.O.O.Q. Rasée. See L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved

L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved, 135 , 146 , 147 -148, 210

Laforgue, Jules, 30 -31, 246 n;

Moralités Légendaires, 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, Ülf, 128 , 138

Lippard, Lucy, 253 n

Little Review, The, 182

Lyotard, Jean-François, 205 , 266 n, 268 n, 269 n

M

Madonna of the Bathroom, 125 .

See also Fountain

Magritte, René, 205 -207, 212 , 268 n.

See Threatened Assassin, The

Mallarmé, Stéphane, 88 -89, 178 , 185 , 248 n, 262 n

Malraux, André, 260 n

Manet, Edouard, 28 ;

Déjeuner 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

Marieé. See Bride

Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même, 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

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, René, 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

Moralités Légendaires, 31 .

See also Laforgue, Jules

Morceaux choisis d'aprés 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,

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; Ready-mades

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 á 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'échecs. 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

Première Lumière. See First Light

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,

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

Réseaux des stoppages étalon. 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

Roché, Jean-Pierre, 52 , 163 , 257 n

Roi et la reine entourés de nus vites, Le. See King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes, The

Roi et la reine traversés 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 Sélavy, 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

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

Témoins oculistes. See Oculist Witnesses

Testament, Le, 194 .

See also Villon, Franéois

Threatened Assassin, The, 205 -207, 206 .

See also Magritte, René

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

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

Trébuchet. See Trap

3 stoppages étalon. 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, René

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

Varèse, 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, François, 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

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 Sélavy?, 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 déchiquetées. 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/