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

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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.

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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.