Introduction

(What Is a Work of Art?)

Elena Filipovic The story is, by now, well known. Marcel Duchamp,
youngest son of a bourgeois family, began his artistic career
as a painter. Oil on canvases, regularly sized, and filled
with rather conventional imagery (portraits, landscapes,
nudes…)—there was little that was revolutionary in it.
Sure, his paintings followed some of the more avant-
garde developments of his time, exploring the formal
implications of Cubism and Futurism, for instance. He even
experienced minor celebrity (a succès du scandale) with one of
his paintings, Nude Descending a Staircase, made in 1912 and
exhibited at the Armory Show in New York in 1913. But we
can easily imagine that if he had not abandoned painting
in favor of a practice that pushed at the very definitions
and limits of the artwork, we wouldn’t need to speak much
about a certain Marcel Duchamp.
Around 1913, something dramatic changed for him.
I couldn’t tell you why or how precisely, and none of the
now-vast literature on the artist contains definitive answers.
Reading Duchamp’s interviews or checking his notes
doesn’t reveal the exact causes either. But suffice it to say
that from that year onwards, nothing would be as it had
been.
It was a moment when modernity was increasingly
celebrating the cults of technology, efficiency, and the
generally unflappable forward movement of progress
(don’t forget, it was a climate in which Taylorist theories
of mass production were circulating, when Ford introduced
automobile production via the assembly line, and when
the zipper was invented). As if in perverse response,
Duchamp flaunted a certain laziness, passing his time
merely “breathing,” as he would later say; he played
with chance, used already industrially produced things,
deployed photographic reproduction, and last but not least,
he scribbled.

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His note-scribbling was no negligible activity, even if
everything about the results suggested the contrary. Half-
phrases, speculations, everyday observations, instructions,
pseudo-scientific theorems, complex theoretical reflections:
they all found a disorderly place on his pages. These pages
were always loose, often scrappy, and sometimes had a first
life as hotel stationery, a gas bill, or a Camembert cheese
label. Much that modernity touted was quietly refused in
Duchamp’s jotting of lines. His departure from painting
and taking up of note-writing went hand-in-hand. Against
traditional painting’s too insistent appeal to the eyes (what
he would admonishingly call “the retinal”), the notes offer
themselves as bastions of conceptual thought. They hold out
ideas. And that was what interested Duchamp most of all.
Amongst those ideas was one in the form of a question:
“Can one make works that are not works ‘of art’?”
Duchamp jotted the question down as if speaking to
himself and must have been wondering if indeed, as an
artist, one could escape conventional definitions of the
artwork, while still making things. After all, what exactly
made an artwork “of art”?
Marcel Duchamp: A Work that Is Not a Work “of Art” makes
reference to that query, taking as its point of departure
the artist’s revision of traditional ideas of what counts as
a work of art. It is arguably that fact, more than any other,
which made the artist’s legacy in the twentieth and twenty-
first centuries as significant and profoundly influential
as it has been. The exhibition thus begins from precisely
the moment, around 1913, when Duchamp began what
would later be understood as a revolutionary shift in his
practice and one that would forever change the history of
art. The moment in question was an incredibly fertile one
for the artist, and his work during this period sent ripples
out in every direction. As Octavio Paz says in a seminal
essay (reproduced in this volume): “The truth is that after
1913, with few exceptions . . . his work not only abandoned
strictly pictorial procedures but, without ceasing to be
visual, turned into the negation of what we have called
painting for two centuries.”1 Painting was the principal
media under attack (it was, perhaps without coincidence,
art history’s most esteemed media), but sculpture and
drawing were no less shaken by Duchamp’s probing. He did
it through different means and started much of it at around
the same period, when he conceived of mass-produced
Ninguna parte de este libro puede ser reproducida, escaneada o distribuida de manera impresa o electrónica sin permiso.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. ©2008FundacionProa
E lena Filipovic
objects as works of art (Bicycle Wheel and Bottlerack, for
example), presented measurement systems as art objects
(3 Standard Stoppages), created cryptic works on glass
(Oculist Witnesses, etc.), began his note-writing, began to
create “multiples” as works of art (Box of 1914), and first
used photography and perspective to redefine painting
(Draft Pistons and First Perspective Study for the Large
Glass, respectively).
Marcel Duchamp: A Work that Is Not a Work “of Art” features
over 120 pieces, dating from that pivotal turning point of
1913 through to Duchamp’s final artwork. He carried those
crucial ideas begun in the early 1910s through a range of
objects that continued his preoccupations, many of which
are represented in this exhibition (in some cases through
studies or replicas), including: a portable string installation
(Sculpture for Traveling, 1918), photographs bearing the
likeness of his invented alter-ego (Rrose Sélavy and Belle
Haleine, 1920s), optical machines and devices (Rotative
plaques verres, 1924; Anémic Cinéma, 1926; Rotoreliefs,
1935), numerous works on glass, including his most famous,
an enigmatic visual epic of failing machinery and frustrated
sexuality (The Large Glass, 1915–1923), a gambling certificate
that he sold as shares in an art business (Monte Carlo Bond,
1924), a portable museum of miniature versions of his
works of art (La Boîte-en-valise, 1942), reproductions of his
notes (The Green Box, 1934, and later, À l’infinitif, 1966),
idiosyncratic exhibition installations (1938, 1942, 1947,
1959), and his final work of art (represented though studies
and a virtual version of Étant donnés . . ., 1946–1966).
Crucial to the thinking about this exhibition is
Duchamp’s fascination with both reproduction and display,
each concern in its own way shaking the concept of the
unique original and its reception before a public. Duchamp
put the pressure of photography’s reproductive capacity
on painting’s singular aura, decontextualized the art
work, refunctioned the object, and shifted the experience
Note
1. Paz, Octavio. “* water writes
always in * plural,” trans. Rachel
Phillips, in D’Harnoncourt, Anne
and McShine, Kynaston (eds.),
Marcel Duchamp, New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 1973, p. 147.

of the work of art. His serial production of reproductions
(first in the form of photographs of his notes in the Box
of 1914, to elaborate boxes of facsimile notes in the Boîte
verte and À l’infinitif, then a miniaturized museum of his
lifework with the Boîte-en-valise, and finally his replication
of the original readymades into multiple editions in the
1950s and 1960s)—perhaps more than any other objects
to emerge from the early twentieth century—anticipated,
explored, and tested out so much of what artists would
be preoccupied with more than a half century later. In
addition, Duchamp’s diverse optical experiments and his
idiosyncratic exhibition installations for the Surrealist
movement demonstrate an insistent questioning of
how objects occupy space, how they transform and are
transformed by their context, and how they shift or
condition perception. What becomes clear is that however
seemingly different, the preoccupations intersect and never
quite leave the artist, their persistence becoming all the
more apparent with the postmortem unveiling of his final,
secret installation, Étant donnés: 1. La chute d’eau, 2. Le gaz
d’éclairage.
The contradictions of an oeuvre are often what fall
out of a monographic exhibition’s—and art history’s—
constructions of coherence. A Work that Is Not a Work “of Art”
tells a story other than the ones of coherence told according
to chronological narrative or progressive development. For
Duchamp’s corpus is less the expression of advancement
and continuity than an endless play of return, repetition,
delay, and deferral. This “delay”—a word Duchamp himself
invoked many times in his notes and interviews—was
itself theorized, performed, written into his oeuvre. For
that reason this exhibition tells its story not in a single
line but in multiple curves that radiate out from different
points like small tornadoes in a Duchampian universe.
As this exhibition hopes to show, there is not one
but many “Marcel Duchamps”: Duchamp, the self-
proclaimed “chess maniac,” the purveyor of sellable
goods, the inventor of optical illusions, the aficionado of
erotism, the curator/exhibition-designer, the note-writer,
the reproduction-maker, the enthusiast of transparency,
the mastermind of “delay”—the list could go on and on.
Capturing so many of these roles—and reducing them
into miniature form—Duchamp’s own portable “museum”
sits at the center of this exhibition, both actually and
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I ntr oduc tion
conceptually, rewriting the time line of the artist’s own
development, simultaneously clearing the way for and
plugging up notions of temporal flow.
There is something highly autobiographical about
La Boîte-en-valise / de ou par Marcel Duchamp ou
Rrose Sélavy, less because it revisits Duchamp’s artistic
oeuvre than because it acts as the crucible of his most
insistent preoccupations: questions of reproduction
and authenticity, photography and temporality,
visuality and display, the subject and authority, and
finally—indeed synoptically—history and the museum.
With it, Duchamp unfurls a fantasia of techniques
and media, but more than a mere sum of its parts, the
boxed armature of reproductions of drawings, paintings,
glass works, experiments in chance, puns, optical
illusions, readymades, and views of his studio— all of
this elaborates a critical project that quietly insinuates
itself between and around the details of its contents.
This exhibition focuses on that critical project and
thus on the importance of display and exhibition-making
to Duchamp, locating his questioning of the work “of art”
precisely in the ambivalent activity of the organization of
the space around the artwork. This is evident in his thinking
for La Boîte-en-valise but also in a series of ephemeral
spatial displays (in which he played the role of “curator”
before the word really existed as such and was represented
in exhibition via photographic documentation and other
traces) whose story never fully entered the history books
like his other pieces did, no matter that it is through them
that one perhaps best understands the artist’s complex
theorization of the artwork and the institutions meant
to validate it. This exhibition thus proposes a new way of
looking at Duchamp’s practice and legacy.
The catalogue follows this course as well, bringing
together several seminal historic texts as well as new
commissions to chart out some of the different voices
and approaches to Duchamp’s life and work. The already-
existing essays have each marked the literature about
Duchamp over the last few decades, engaging some of
the artist’s most trenchant concerns—with time and the
museum, optics and erotics, and the passage from Large
Glass to Étant donnés . . . . The newly commissioned essays
speak about Duchamp’s life and work but also, for instance,
about his curious relationship to Buenos Aires and São
Paulo. At one point, Duchamp proposed exhibitions in both
places and spent considerable effort on them although
neither exhibition was realized in the end. In them one
senses that the eagerness to make exhibitions preoccupied
the artist throughout his career. Here again we detect
the questions, forever at the heart of Duchamp’s oeuvre,
of what an artwork is and can be, and of how it can and
should be exhibited. Thus it seemed imperative for this first
exhibition of Duchamp in Latin America to bring together
an ensemble of objects in an exhibition and catalogue that,
while not pretending to be wholly retrospective, perhaps
best exemplify the complexity of Duchamp’s oeuvre and
its challenge to the “stable” foundations of art, then and to
this day.

Ninguna parte de este libro puede ser reproducida, escaneada o distribuida de manera impresa o electrónica sin permiso.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. ©2008FundacionProa