Notes

Notes

Introduction: Unpacking Duchamp

1. John Cage, "Statements Re Duchamp," in Marcel Duchamp in Perspective, ed. Joseph Masheck (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, 1975), 67. [BACK]
2. Ecke Bonk, Marcel Duchamp: The Box in a Valise, trans. David Britt (New York: Rizzoli, 1989), 20. [BACK]
3. Film interview of Marcel Duchamp with James Johnson Sweeney at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (National Broadcasting
Company, 1955); quoted in Bonk, Marcel Duchamp, 177. [BACK]
4. I am referring to Joseph Masheck's comment on Given in "Introduction: Chance is zee Fool's Name for Fate," Duchamp in
Perspective, 23. [BACK]

1— Painting at a Dead End

1. All biographical résumés register this significant event. For a specific example, see Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel
Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett (New York: Da Capo Press, 1987), 116. All further references to this work are abbreviated
as DMD , page number. [BACK]
2. Thomas B. Hess in a set of point/counterpoint arguments suggests that Duchamp was a "second-rate painter," only to
counter this claim with the equally exalted proposition that he did create "two or three masterpieces of
modern art"; see Thomas Hess, "J'Accuse Marcel Duchamp," in Masheck, Marcel Duchamp in Perspective, 116-
17. [BACK]
3. Commenting on this offer, Duchamp explains to Cabanne: "I said no, and I wasn't rich, either. I could have very well
accepted ten thousand dollars, but no, I sensed the danger right away. I had been able to avoid it until then. In 1915-16, I
was twenty-nine, so I was old enough to protect myself. I'm telling you this simply to explain my attitude. It would be the
same today, if I were offered a hundred thousand dollars to do something" ( DMD , 106). [BACK]
4. Duchamp's interest in chance was mediated through his contacts with Picabia in 1913. While Duchamp shares with the
Dada movement an interpretation of chance as a "new stimulus to artistic creation," and as a "mental phenomenon," he
does not pursue its psychological elaboration, as evidenced by the Surrealist appropriation of the term. Hans Richter
observes that Duchamp's formulation and employment of chance in the case of the ready-mades is Cartesian; see Hans
Richter, Dada Art and Anti-Art (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965). For Richter's discussion of Dada, chance, and Duchamp, see
esp. 50-64, 88. [BACK]
5. Masheck, "Introduction," Duchamp in Perspective, 19. [BACK]
6. Thierry de Duve, for instance, argues that it is during Duchamp's visit to Munich that he attempts to work out his
"passage" through and secession from Cubism, which later leads to his abandonment of painting as a métier; see Thierry de
Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp's Passage from Painting to the Readymade, trans. Dana Polan
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 96-118. [BACK]
7. This interest in art is evident throughout the entire family. Duchamp's maternal grandfather was a painter and engraver,
and he suggests that his mother was an artist as well, who did "Strasbourgs on paper" ( DMD , 20). Among his siblings,
Jacques Villon became a painter and engraver, Duchamp-Villon a sculptor, and his sister, Suzanne Duchamp, a painter. [BACK]
8. For an analysis of François Villon's poetry and its impact on Duchamp, see Jean Clair, "Villon: Mariage, hasard et
pendaison," in Marcel Duchamp: Abécédaire: Approches critiques, ed. Jean Clair (Paris: Musée national d'art moderne,
Centre national d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou, 1977), 201-2. [BACK]
9. By the time Duchamp expressed an interest in art, following in his brothers' footsteps, his father even agreed to help him
financially ( DMD , 20). As a
notary he devised a system by which current expenditures were to be deducted from the future inheritance, so as to
assure equitable division among all his children. [BACK]
10. Marcel Duchamp, "A Complete Reversal of Art Opinions by Marcel Duchamp, Iconoclast," Arts and Decoration 5, no. 2
(September 1915): 428; reprinted in Studio International 189 (January-February 1975): 29. [BACK]
11. Robert Lebel observes that Duchamp's reluctance to engage with Cubism as a school is shared by his reluctance to
affiliate himself with the futurists, despite his interest in kinetics and the machine; see his Marcel Duchamp, trans. George
H. Hamilton (New York: Grove Press, 1959), 7-9. [BACK]
12. See Duchamp's comments in his interview with James Johnson Sweeney, "Eleven Europeans in America," The Museum
of Modern Art Bulletin 13, nos. 4-5 (1946): 20. [BACK]
13. Arturo Schwarz, "Eros c'est la vie," in Marcel Duchamp (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1975), v-vi. [BACK]
14. Schwarz, "Eros c'est la vie," ii. [BACK]
15. See Willis Domingo's discussion of Duchamp's Symbolist phase in "Meaning in the Art of Duchamp," Artforum (De
cember 1971): 74. [BACK]
16. Lawrence Steefel, Jr., "The Position of La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (19 15-1923) in the Stylistic and
Iconographic Development of the Art of Marcel Duchamp" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1960), 85. [BACK]
17. Letter of 28 January 1951 in the Archives of the Francis Bacon Foundation, Claremont, California, quoted in
Schwarz, Marcel Duchamp, iii. [BACK]
18. For an analysis of Duchamp's interest in electricity, particularly as it relates to The Large Glass, see Robert Lebel,
"Marcel Duchamp and Electricity at Large: The Dadaist Version of Electricity," in Electra: L'Electricité et l'électronique dans
l'art au XXe siècle (Paris: Les Amis du Musée d'Art moderne de la ville de Paris, 1983), 164—73. [BACK]
19. The Winston Dictionary (Philadelphia and New York: The John C. Winston Co., 1957), 65. [BACK]
20. For an analysis of the erosion of "aura" in the modern period, see Walter Benjamin's seminal essay, "The Work of Art in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken
Books, 1978), 220-25. [BACK]
21. Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956), 27. [BACK]
22. For a history of the female nude as object of male spectatorship and desire, see John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London:
Penguin Books, 1972), 45-64. See also Laura Mulvey's seminal analysis of spectatorship and gender in "Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema," Screen 16 (Autumn 1975): 6-18. For the nude as an erotic genre in Manet, see T. J. Clark, The Painting
of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (New York; Knopf, 1985), 119-31. [BACK]
23. Quoted in Marcel Duchamp, ed. Anne d'Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973),
256.[BACK]
24. For Duchamp's discussion of the influence of Marey's chronophotography on the Nude, see DMD, 34-35. [BACK]
25. Octavio Paz, Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare, trans. R. Phillips and D. Gardner (New York: Seaver
Books/The Viking Press, 1978), 2. [BACK]
26. See Duchamp's qualification of abstraction in the Nude as more Cubist than Futurist ( DMD, 28-29). [BACK]
27. Jules Laforgue's poem reads: "Pock-marked sun, bright yellow skimmer,/The laughing stock of the heartless stars!";
quoted in Lawrence D. Steefel, Jr., "Marcel Duchamp's 'Encore à cet astre': A New Look," Art Journal 36, no. 1 (Fall 1976):
29, n.9.[BACK]
28. I am referring here to the legal definition of "descent." [BACK]
29. Masheck, "Introduction," Duchamp in Perspective, 7. [BACK]
30. Mario Perniola, "Between Clothing and Nudity," in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, ed. Michel Feher (New
York: Zone Books, 1989), vol. 2, 237. [BACK]
31. Prints are the first multiples in the history of art, works that are serial in nature and whose value, like photographs, is
based on the number of printings. [BACK]
32. Paz, Appearance, 7-8. [BACK]
33. Sweeney, "Eleven Europeans," 20. [BACK]
34. Katherine Kuh, "Marcel Duchamp," In The Artist's Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists (New York: Harper & Row, 1962),
81.[BACK]
35. Kuh, "Duchamp," 92. [BACK]
36. The serial nature of these works, involving both paintings and sketches, resembles the serial nature of Nude Descending
a Staircase, No. 2. [BACK]
37. Duchamp's devotion to chess resulted in his publication of a book on pawn and king endings, written with the German
chess master Vital Halberstadt and entitled Opposition and Sister Squares Are Reconciled (Paris: L'Echiquier,
1932). See Francis M. Naumann's discussion in "Marcel Duchamp: A Reconciliation of Opposites," Dada/Surrealism 16
(1987): 32-37; reprinted in Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century, ed. R. Kuenzli and F. M. Naumann (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1989), 32-37. For the most comprehensive study in the area of art and chess, see Hubert Damisch, "The Duchamp
Defense," trans. Rosalind Krauss, October, no. 10 (Fall 1979): 5-28. [BACK]
38. In the right-hand corner of the image, the grid of a fence can be seen through the bushes, thereby reinforcing the sense
of a measuring device. [BACK]
39. For an analysis of the chessboard and Renaissance perspective, see Jean Clair, "L'échiquier, les modernes et la quatrième
dimension," Revue de l'art, no. 3 (1978): 59-6l. [BACK]
40. Francis Roberts, "I Propose to Strain the Laws of Physics," Art News 67, no. 8 (December 1968): 63. [BACK]
41. Quoted in Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1970), 68. [BACK]
42. Roberts, "Laws of Physics," 63. [BACK]
43. I am referring here to Harold Bloom's formulation of the anxiety or burden of tradition on creative artists: see his The
Anxiety of Influence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). My strategic reading relies on a materialist understanding of
the field of artistic production in line with Pierre Bourdieu's elaboration in The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and
Literature, ed. and with an introduction by Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 55-61, 106-
11. [BACK]
44. Quoted in d'Harnoncourt and McShine, Marcel Duchamp, 260. [BACK]
45. Kuh, "Duchamp," 88. John Golding attributes the originality of this work to his new intellectual and personal encounters,
specifically Duchamp's meeting with Francis Picabia at the Salon d'Automne (1911) and later, Apollinaire; see John
Golding, Marcel Duchamp: The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (London: Penguin Press, 1973), 45-47. [BACK]
46. As Duchamp explains: "The word 'swift' ( vite ) had been used in sports; if a man ran 'swift,' he ran well. This amused
me. 'Swift' is less involved with literature than 'at high speed'" ( DMD, 35-36). [BACK]
47. Paz, Appearance, 9. [BACK]
48. De Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, 44. [BACK]
49. From the Museum of Modern Art questionnaire about the Three Standard Stoppages, Artist's Files, undated but
according to Naumann, written shortly
after the acquisition of this work by the museum; see Francis M. Naumann, "Marcel Duchamp: A Reconciliation of
Opposites," Artist of the Century, ed. Rudolf E. Kuenzli and Francis M. Naumann, nn. 16, 17. [BACK]
50. The meter, as a unit of length, is approximately the tenth-millionth part of a quadrant of a terrestrial meridian. The
International Standard meter is defined as the precise distance between two indentations on a platinum-iridium bar, which is
kept under temperature control (at 0°C.). The International Prototype Meter Bar at the International Bureau of Weights and
Measures in Sèvres, France, is a device that resembles Duchamp's work in several significant ways: 1) it is defined as a
system of recorded impressions, 2) it is constituted as a series of three tubular templates, and 3) these tubes are molded
upon each other so as to be boxed together in a tube. [BACK]
51. Roberts, "Laws of Physics," 62. [BACK]
52. Naumann, "Reconciliation," 30. [BACK]
53. Roberts, "Laws of Physics," 62-63. [BACK]
54. Ibid., 63. [BACK]
55. Mary Ann Caws suggests that Duchamp's gesture may be indebted to Mallarmé's throw of dice; see Caws's "Mallarmé
and Duchamp: Mirror, Stair, and Gaming Table," L'Esprit créateur 20, no. 2. (Summer 1980): 53; reprinted in The Eye in the
Text: Essays on Perception, Mannerist to Modern (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). [BACK]
56. Carol P. James, "Duchamp's Silent Noise/ Music for the Deaf," Dada and Surrealism 16 (1987); reprinted in Artist of the
Century, ed. R. Kuenzli and F. Naumann, 110. [BACK]
57. Michel Sanouillet, Duchamp du signe: Ecrits (Paris: Flammarion, 1975), 52-53. [BACK]
58. James, "Silent Noise," 111. [BACK]
59. The first public exhibition of this work was at the International Exhibition of Modern Art at the Brooklyn Museum in
1926.[BACK]
60. Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde (New York: The Viking Press, 1965), 28.
[BACK]
61. The critical approaches to The Large Glass range from André Breton's inaugural reading of the work as a mechanist and
unsentimental speculation on eroticism (1928; rpt. 1959); a symptomatic myth of modernity (Carrouges, 1954); a
representation of barren love (Lebel, 1959); a linguistic and interpretative puzzle (Paz, 1973); as well as alchemical and
esoteric interpretations
(Schwarz, 1970; Burnham, 1974; Calvesi, 1975); psychoanalytic interpretations (Held, 1973); N-dimensional geometry
(Adcock, 1983); and perspective/optics (Clair, 1975). [BACK]
62. For Duchamp's interest in popular culture, and specifically in catalogs and almanacs, see Michel Sanouillet, "Marcel
Duchamp and the French Intellectual Tradition," in Marcel Duchamp, ed. Anne d'Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine, 53-54.
[BACK]
63. Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, 67. [BACK]
64. The Box of 1914 is a commercial Kodak container for photographs, which holds the photograph of one drawing and
sixteen manuscript notes. For an analysis of Duchamp's boxes, see Dawn Ades, "Marcel Duchamp's Portable Museum,"
in Marcel Duchamp's Travelling Box (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1982), 5. [BACK]
65. Roberts, "Laws of Physics," 63. [BACK]
66. The Green Box (1934) contains 94 photos, facsimile notes, diagrams, and calculations which are related to the planning
and execution of the Glass. It was followed by a third collection of notes, À l'Infinitif (1966), also known as the White
Boxbecause of the color of its cover, which contains additional notes on the fourth dimension and non-Euclidian
geometry. [BACK]
67. Roberts, "Laws of Physics," 63. [BACK]
68. Richard Hamilton, "The Large Glass," 60. [BACK]
69. Quoted by Golding, Bride Stripped Bare, 12. [BACK]
70. Quoted by Calvin Tomkins, Bride and Bachelors, 24. [BACK]
71. Roberts, "Laws of Physics," 46. [BACK]
72. When the Glass cracked while in transit, these glass strips described as the "Bride's garment," "Gilled cooler," or simply,
"Horizon,'' were replaced by a thin strip of glass held between two aluminum bars, to provide additional support. [BACK]
73. The string lines on the chocolate drums allude to the second version of the work, The Chocolate Grinder, No. 2 (1914,
oil and thread on canvas). [BACK]
74. Marcel Duchamp, letter of 21 May 1915; reprinted in Ephemerides on and about Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Sélavy,
1887-1968, ed. and with an introduction by Pontus Hulten, texts by Jenifer Gough-Cooper and Jacques Caumont
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993). [BACK]
75. See Paul Matisse's observation regarding Duchamp's manipulation of the meaning of conventional words through illogical
modifiers in "Some More
Nonsense about Duchamp," Art in America 68, no. 4 (April 1980): 81. [BACK]
76. Sweeney, "Eleven Europeans," 21. [BACK]
77. "Marcel Duchamp Speaks," an interview by George H. Hamilton and Richard Hamilton with comments by Charles
Mitchell, broadcast by the Third Programme of the BBC, in the series Art, Anti-Art (1959); quoted in Arturo Schwarz, "Eros
c'est la vie," xv. [BACK]
78. For the most significant and comprehensive study of Duchamp's interest in N-dimensional geometry, see Craig
Adcock, Marcel Duchamp's Notes from the Large Glass: An N-Dimensional Analysis (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press,
1983). [BACK]
79. For a description of the two versions of the Chocolate Grinder (the first painted perspectively, the second painted with
added thread sewn to the canvas), see Schwarz, "Eros c'est la vie," Marcel Duchamp, xxi, and Richard Hamilton's discussion
of its transposition to the Glass, "Large Glass," 60-61. [BACK]
80. For a comprehensive analysis of Duchamp's interest in perspective, see Jean Clair's remarkable study "Marcel Duchamp
et la tradition des perspecteurs," Marcel Duchamp: Abécédaire, 124-59. [BACK]
81. Theodore Reff notes the resemblance of this work to Leonardo's experiments with dust as a miniature terrain in
"Duchamp and Leonardo: L.H.O.O.Q.-Alikes," Art in America 1 (January-February 1977): 87. [BACK]
82. Richard Hamilton suggests that the "breeding of colors" comes closest to his ideal of the Glass as a "greenhouse, in
which transparent colors, as ephemeral as perfumes, will emerge, flourish, ripen, and decay like flowers and fruits"; see
''Large Glass," 66. [BACK]
83. For an analysis of the Nine Malic Molds and dressmaking, see Olivier Micha, "Duchamp et la couture," in Marcel
Duchamp: Abécédaire, ed. Jean Clair, 33-34. [BACK]
84. Olivier Micha also notes the sexual ambiguity implicit in the conception of the dressmaker's pattern as a mold, in
"Duchamp et la couture," 33. [BACK]
85. I am referring here to another meaning of livery, in English law, which signifies the ceremonial delivery of possession of
real property made upon the property itself. [BACK]
86. Hamilton, "Large Glass," 60. [BACK]
87. See Camfield's account of Duchamp's exhibit and Walter Hopps's comments in William Camfield, Marcel Duchamp:
Fountain(Houston: The Menil Collection, Houston Fine Arts Press, 1989). [BACK]

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

1. John Cage, "John Cage on Marcel Duchamp: An Interview," Duchamp in Perspective, 153. Cage's resistance to assimilate
the ready-mades to the Dada project can be contrasted with Hans Richter, Dada Art, 87-93; and William S. Rubin, Dada,
Surrealism, and Their Heritage (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1968), 17-19. [BACK]
2. Roberts, "Laws of Physics," 47. [BACK]
3. Asked by his interviewer Francis Roberts whether this is a paradox, Duchamp replied: "Yes it is a paradox, and the wheel
was the first one and not even named Ready-made at the time," "Laws of Physics," 47. [BACK]
4. Masheck, "Introduction," Duchamp in Perspective, 10. Werner Hoffman suggests that Duchamp's intervention is a critical
gesture that exposes the interface of cultural and artistic forms of production; see his "Marcel Duchamp and Emblematic
Realism," Duchamp in Perspective, 61-63. [BACK]
5. For an analysis of puns as the organizing principle of Duchamp's art, see Robert Pincus-Witten, "Man Ray: The
Homonymic Pun and American Vernacular," Artforum 13, no. 4 (April 1975): 56. [BACK]
6. The punning relation of these works is playfully explored in George H. Bauer's "Duchamp's Ubiquitous Puns," Artist of the
Century, ed. Rudolf E. Kuenzli and Francis M. Naumann, 127-48. My own study examines puns both as poetic and technical
mechanisms that generate visual and linguistic associations, not as forms of individual expression but as instances of
cultural production and reproduction. In this context the very distinction between sense and nonsense, of art and antiart is
in question.[BACK]
7. For the most comprehensive and original exploration of nonsense and its contextual relation to common sense, see Susan
Stewart's Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature (Baltimore. The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1978). [BACK]
8. See Duchamp, "The Great Trouble with Art in This Country," in The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. M. Sanouillet and E.
Peterson, 125. [BACK]
9. Roberts, "Laws of Physics," 63-64. [BACK]
10. Reff, "L.H.O.O.Q.-Alikes," 85. For a comparison of Duchamp and what Paul Valéry called Leonardo da Vinci's "method,"
see André Chastel, "Léonard et la pensée artistique du XXe siècle'' (1960) in Fables, Formes, Figures, vol. 2 (Paris:
Flammarion, 1978), 267-70. While Jean Clair critiques Reff's analoghies
because of their thematic character, he nonetheless reaffirms their methodological concerns; see Clair's "Duchamp,
Léonard et la tradition maniériste," in Marcel Duchamp: Tradition de la rupture ou rupture de la tradition?, ed. Jean Clair
(Paris: Union générale d'éditions, 1979), 118-28. [BACK]
11. Reff, "L.H.O.O.Q.-Alikes," 86. [BACK]
12. The Box of 1914 is a container for Kodak photographic plates, whose printed label on the lid has been altered so as to
read that the box contains "15/16 industrial photographs," with the last word underlined three times. This box holds the
photograph of Duchamp's drawing, Avoir l'apprenti dans le soleil, and sixteen manuscript notes. [BACK]
13. In his "Introduction" to Pierre Cabanne's Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, Robert Motherwell notes Duchamp's
evasiveness regarding the likeliness of his familiarity with Valéry's study; see Cabanne, DMD, 11, n. 11. In his discussion of
Valéry's study, Jean Clair demonstrates the extent to which Valéry's insights regarding Leonardo's method apply to
Duchamp's own artistic methodology; see Clair's "Duchamp, Léonard et la tradition maniériste," in Marcel Duchamp, 135-
38. [BACK]
14. Anne d'Harnoncourt 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): 15. [BACK]
15. Quoted in Raymond Stites, The Sublimations of Leonardo da Vinci (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press,
1970), 175. [BACK]
16. Giorgio Vasari, Artists of the Renaissance, trans. George Bull (New York: The Viking Press, 1978), 189. [BACK]
17. This term was borrowed from Gustav René Höcke, who used it to describe the optical/poetic experiments of Athanasius
Kircher (1601-1680), in his Labyrinthe de L'Art Fantastique, trans. C. Heim (Paris: Gonthier, 1967), 130. [BACK]
18. MS. 2038 Bib. Nat. 19r. and v. 20r. For an analysis of this statement attributed by Plutarch to Simonedes of Ceos, see
Wendy Steiner, The Colors of Rhetoric (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 5-7. [BACK]
19. Leonardo summarizes his position by asking: "Consider, then, which is more fundamental to man, the name of man or
his image? The name changes with change of country; the form is unchanged except by death," MS. 2038 Bib. Nat. 19r. and
v. 20r.[BACK]
20. MS. 2038 Bib. Nat. 19r. and v. 20r. [BACK]
21. This work is a companion piece to another relief sculpture entitled TORTURE-MORTE (1959), which is a plaster cast of a
foot with flies glued to it. These works will be examined in detail in chapter 3. [BACK]
22. Jean Clair considers Duchamp's work as the latest embodiment of Mannerism, a "pure nominalism of thought," in
"Continental Drifts," in The Arcimboldo Effect: Transformations of the Face from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth
Century (New York: Abbeville Press, 1987), 253-54. [BACK]
23. While all the portraits of the seasons are double, only Spring is represented in terms of gender reversibility. The portraits
of the other seasons involve subliminal changes whose impact is "atmospheric," reflecting changes in "mood," rather than in
substance. [BACK]
24. Roland Barthes, "Rhetor and Magician," in Arcimboldo, trans. John Shepley (Milan: Franco Maria Ricci, 1980), 18. [BACK]
25. Barthes, "Rhetor and Magician," 26. [BACK]
26. Ibid., 15-16. [BACK]
27. Ibid., 30. [BACK]
28. Ibid., 30. [BACK]
29. For Rosalind Krauss, this discontinuity between text and image is dispelled once the viewer becomes cognizant of
underlying images of primitive machines, whose purpose is to make "art"; see her "Forms of Readymade: Duchamp and
Brancusi," in Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), 70-71. [BACK]
30. For an analysis of Roussel's experimentation with language, see Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth: The World of
Raymond Roussel, trans. C. Russ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 29-47. [BACK]
31. See Duchamp's comments in "Interview with Marcel Duchamp," Dadas on Art, ed. Lucy Lippard (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, 1971), 142. [BACK]
32. See Jean-Pierré Brisset, La Science de Dieu ou la création de l'homme (Paris: Tchou, 1972). For a brief account of
Duchamp's wordplays and its relation to literary traditions, see Rudolf E. Kuenzli, "Introduction," Dada and Surrealism no.
16 (1987): 5-6; reprinted in Artist of the Century, ed. Rudolf Kuenzli and Francis M. Naumann, 5-6. [BACK]
33. This tension between negation and nomination becomes explicit once one considers the relation of Duchamp's Première
Lumière and the image ( NON ) to TORTURE-MORTE, which is the image of a foot or, more explicitly, an instep ( pas; in
French), thereby generating the French formula for negation ne . . .
pas. Compare George Bauer's inventive analysis of Duchamp's play with this formula, in "Ubiquitous Puns," 129-
32. [BACK]
34. This is a suggestion from Gertrude Stein's lectures, quoted by Susan Stewart in Nonsense, 141-42. [BACK]
35. Kuh, "Duchamp," 89. [BACK]
36. Tristan Tzara, "Essai sur la situation de la poésie," Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution, no. 4 (1931): 19. For an
analysis of Tristan Tzara's position on poetry, see Rudolf E. Kuenzli, "The Semiotics of Dada Poetry," in Dada Spectrum: The
Dialectics of Revolt, ed. Stephen C. Foster and Rudolf E. Kuenzli (Madison: Coda Press, 1979), 54-59. [BACK]
37. Kuh, "Duchamp," 81. [BACK]
38. For David Antin, this implies that "language does not consist of words, but of utterances"; see his "Duchamp and
Language," in Marcel Duchamp, ed. Anne d'Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine, 103. [BACK]
39. Kuh, "Duchamp," 83. [BACK]
40. Referring to his conversations with Duchamp, see Schwarz, "Rrose Sélavy," xxvii-xxviii. [BACK]
41. Roberts, "Laws of Physics," 63. [BACK]
42. Stewart, Nonsense, 161. [BACK]
43. For an analysis of Duchamp's artwork as a kinetic mechanism, see Antin's persuasive analysis, "Duchamp and
Language," 104-6, 115. [BACK]
44. Antin, "Duchamp and Language," 105. Antin's discussion of art and language is also echoed by Hans Richter's accounts
of the Dada movement, particularly in regards to Tzara's, Ball's, and Huelsenbeck's efforts to revolutionize language; see
his Dada Art, 19-24, 44-50. [BACK]
45. Roberts, "Laws of Physics," 62. [BACK]
46. Masheck, "Introduction," Duchamp in Perspective, 11. [BACK]
47. Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of This Century (New
York: George Braziller, 1982), 227. [BACK]
48. In his discussion of the bicycle wheel, Ülf Linde elaborates on the relation between the movement of the wheel and
Gaston de Pawloski's experiments with the fourth dimension, in "La Roue de bicyclette," Marcel Duchamp: Abécédaire, ed.
Jean Clair, 36-37. [BACK]
49. Roberts, "Laws of Physics," 47. [BACK]
50. For an analysis of the kinetic, optical, and reiterative structure of puns, see
Dalia Judovitz, "Anemic Vision in Duchamp: Cinema as Readymade," Dada/ Surrealism 15 (1986): 47-57; reprinted
in Dada and Surrealist Film, ed. Rudolf E. Kuenzli (New York: Willis, Locker & Owens, 1987), 46-57. [BACK]
51. James Joyce to Sylvia Beach, quoted in Les Années Vingt: Les écrivains à Paris et leurs amis 1920-1930 (Paris: Centre
Culturel Américain, 1959), 72. [BACK]
52. Denis de Rougemont, "Marcel Duchamp mine de rien," Preuves 18, no. 204, (February 1968): 45. Thierry de Duve
interprets making as choosing, so that this formulation implies the impossibility of choosing, in his "The Readymade and the
Tube of Paint," Artforum 24, no. 9 (May 1986): 115. [BACK]
53. Leonardo notes: "When a table is struck in different places, the dust that is upon it is reduced to various shapes of
mounds and tiny hillocks" (F 61 r.) in The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, ed. and trans. Edward MacCurdy (London:
Jonathan Cape, 1977), 513-14. [BACK]
54. George H. Hamilton uses the formulation "brain facts" to refer to Duchamp's choice of the snow shovel; see his "In
Advance of Whose Broken Arm?" Duchamp in Perspective, ed. Joseph Masheck, 75. [BACK]
55. Carol P. James, "Duchamp's Early Readymades: The Erasure of Boundaries between Literature and the Other
Arts," Perspectives on Contemporary Literature 13 (1987): 26. [BACK]
56. One only needs to recall here that Duchamp had designated The Large Glass as " A world in yellow: general subtitle"
(Notes, 115), thereby indicating its affinities to the ready-mades, insofar as they question color and the function of painting.
[BACK]
57. I am referring here to Carol P. James' identification of this work as a postcard, in "Duchamp's Early Readymades," 26.
[BACK]
58. De Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, 164-65. [BACK]
59. Roberts, "Laws of Physics," 62. [BACK]
60. Ibid., 62. [BACK]
61. See Jean Baudrillard's analysis of the sign as the imposition of value, "L'imaginaire de la linguistique," in L'échange
symbolique et la mort (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 310-11. [BACK]
62. Baudrillard, "L'imaginaire," 290-92. [BACK]
63. As Nietzsche explains: "The 'apparent' world is the only one: the 'real' world has only been lyingly added "; see
his Twilight of the Idols, trans. and with an introduction by R. J. Hollingdale (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1968), 36. [BACK]
64. Duchamp's conclusion that "grammatically : the arrhe of painting is feminine in
gender" exposes the incommensurability between the art of letters ( grammatike [tekhne] ) and the art of painting.
This is to say that grammar, as a set of rules that governs the relation of words in a language, is insufficient to account for
effects of meaning that exceed both its linear and its synchronic dimensions. [BACK]
65. This allusion to "crook" as a bend in a staff is also a pun on crook as a con man, an allusion to
Duchamp's Wanted poster, which also destabilizes the authority of authorship. For a further discussion of this work, see
chapter 4. [BACK]
66. Paz, Appearance, 27. [BACK]
67. See Albert Cook's analysis of with my tongue in my cheek as a visual representation of what the phrase physically
describes, in his "The Meta-Irony of Marcel Duchamp," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 44, no. 3 (Spring 1986):
267. [BACK]
68. See Duchamp's comments on molds as photographic negatives, in Duchamp du signe: Ecrits, ed. Michel Sanouillet and
Elmer Peterson (Paris: Flammarion, 1975), 121; see also Anne d'Harnoncourt and Walter Hopps's discussion in "Etant
donnés,"37. [BACK]
69. Harriet and Sidney Janis, "Marcel Duchamp, Anti-artist," View, ser. 5, no. 1 (March 1945): 18-19, 21-24, 53-54;
reprinted in The Dada Painters and Poets, ed. Robert Motherwell (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), 2d ed., 313. [BACK]
70. Paz, Appearance, 22. [BACK]
71. Roberts, "Laws of Physics," 47. [BACK]
72. For an examination of this issue, see my discussion of Duchamp's ready-made Pharmacy (1914) in chapter 3 of this
volume. [BACK]

3— Reproductions: Limited Editions, Ready-Made Origins

1. Arthur Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 14-15. [BACK]
2. Walter Benjamin, "Work of Art," 217-42. [BACK]
3. Max Kozloff, "Johns and Duchamp," Duchamp in Perspective, ed. Joseph Masheck, 142-43. [BACK]
4. For Danto's formulation, see his Disenfranchisement of Art, 25. [BACK]
5. For the most comprehensive account of the historical context and the critical reception of Fountain among art historians
and philosophers alike, see William A. Camfield, Fountain. For a summary of these debates, see Edward
Ball and Robert Knafo, "The R. Mutt Dossier," Art forum (October 1988): 115-17. [BACK]
6. In 1916 Duchamp exhibited Two Ready-mades at the Bourgeois Gallery, New York, Exhibition of Modern Art (3-29 April
1916, cat. no. 50), without identifying them. He also exhibited the ready-made Pharmacy at the Montross Gallery, New
York, Exhibition of Pictures by Jean Crotti, Marcel Duchamp, Albert Gleizes, and Jean Metzinger (4-22 April 1916, cat. no.
27). [BACK]
7. The comments of Katherine S. Dreier, a patron, friend, and admirer of Duchamp's, indicate her difficulty in
recognizing Fountain as a ready-made: "the only 'readymades' I saw were groups which were extremely original in their
handling. I did not know that you had conceived of single objects" (letter from Kathenne S. Dreier to Marcel Duchamp, 13
April 1917, Archives of the Société Anonyme, Yale University; quoted by Camfield, Fountain, 31; emphasis added). [BACK]
8. Review of the first exhibition of the American Society of Independent Artists (April 1917) in the anonymous "His Art Is
Too Crude for Independents," The New York Herald, 14 April 1917: 6. [BACK]
9. The Blind Man, ed. Marcel Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roché, and Beatrice Wood, no. 2 (New York, n.p., 1917). [BACK]
10. These latter versions do not resemble the original photograph of Fountain. Even the cast facsimiles fabricated by Galleria
Schwarz have a streamlined, less "anthropomorphically" suggestive shape. [BACK]
11. The question remains whether Stieglitz's deliberate choice to manipulate the lighting and thus, in effect, to "enshrine"
the urinal, does not contradict Duchamp's effort to question the cult value of art. [BACK]
12. Beatrice Wood, I Shock Myself, ed. Lindsay Smith (Ojai, Calif.: Dillingham Press, 1985), 30. [BACK]
13. Carl Van Vechten, The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten, 1913-1946, ed. Edward Burns (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1986), 58-59. [BACK]
14. Camfield, Fountain, 14. [BACK]
15. "The Richard Mutt Case," The Blind Man, no. 2, ed. Marcel Duchamp et al., 5-6. [BACK]
16. Thierry de Duve also insists on the reproducible character of Fountain, in Resonances du Readymade: Duchamp entre
avant-garde et tradition (Nîmes: Editions Jacqueline Chambon, 1989), 49-51. His focus, however, is on the conditions that
define "art" as a set of utterances, rather than the relation of art to nonart. [BACK]
17. Duchamp's multiple signatures of these versions, including his erasure of Linde's signature and reapplication of his own
pseudonym R. MUTT, indicate his persistent effort to question the creative function and agency of the artist. While Peter
Burger recognizes Duchamp's interrogation of the notion of "individual creation," he stops short of considering the fact that
Duchamp submits the urinal under the pseudonym "R. MUTT." Moreover, Duchamp's speculative use of signatures cannot be
summarized as an act of provocation, since they call into question the referential status of the artist. For Bürger's remarks
see his Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 51-53. [BACK]
18. These "found" urinals, however, do not obey the logic of the surrealist objet trouvé, since their choice is determined by
their "resemblance" to mass-produced objects. While I agree with Bürger that the institutionalization of the objet trouvé
may undermine its antiart stance, Duchamp's gestures resist such a recovery. For Bürger's comments,
see Theory, 57. [BACK]
19. For a detailed list of all the different versions of Fountain, see Camfield, Fountain, 162-65. [BACK]
20. Paul Matisse, Marcel Duchamp, Notes, ed. and trans. Paul Matisse (Boston: J. K. Hall & Co., 1983); this is always
abbreviated as Notes, page number. [BACK]
21. Duchamp's enigmatic note in The Box of 1914 inscribes this "feminine" potential into Fountain, in an almost brutal
sense: "one only has: for female the public urinal and one lives by it." [BACK]
22. For Danto, the urinal has even moral implications: "women are anatomically barred from employing them in their
primary function", see his Disenfranchisement of Art, 14. [BACK]
23. Marcel Duchamp's letter to Jean Crotti, 17 August 1952.; quoted in Tabu Dada: Jean Crotti and Suzanne Duchamp,
1915-1922, ed. William A. Camfield and Jean-Hubert Martin (Bern: Kunsthalle Bern, 1983), 8; translation mine. [BACK]
24. Ball and Knafo interpret the faucet as an effort to set into motion a teleology of the vanished object; in doing so, they
leave open the question of Duchamp's strategic use of "mirrorical return." [BACK]
25. Duchamp's invocation of a "mirrorical return" may be interpreted as an allusion to Leonardo's "mirror writing." This
allusion, however, refers to the conceptual potential of Leonardo's gesture. [BACK]
26. Quoted by Schwarz, "Eros c'est la vie," xxxii. [BACK]
27. In Cabanne's query to Duchamp, however, one senses his discomfort regarding the possible entrepreneurial dimension
of such intervention, the scent of the artist as a traveling salesman "commis voyageur," ( DMD, 78-79). [BACK]
28. Benjamin, "Work of Art," 221-23. [BACK]
29. In France, jars of red and green colored water were used as the insignia of a pharmacy. [BACK]
30. See Raymond S. Stites's discussion of painting media in Leonardo's time, in Leonardo da Vinci, 25-26. Leonardo's Codex
Atlanticus (1480) contains numerous drawings of color grinding mills and distillation apparati for turpentine and alcohols, as
well as explanations for the preparation of pigments (fol. 32., recto a, reversed). Duchamp's comment, that the bachelor
grinds his own chocolate, may be interpreted as further evidence of his interest both in pigments and Leonardo. [BACK]
31. See Theodore Reff, "L.H.O.O.Q.-Alikes," 83-93. [BACK]
32. See The Winston Dictionary, "rectify" entry. [BACK]
33. Carol P. James suggests that Pharmacy may be a pun on headlights ( phares ) and a text of the same year referring to
child head-light or fanfare ( enfantphare); see her "Early Readymades," 25. [BACK]
34. Jean Clair, "Tradition des perspecteurs," 154. [BACK]
35. Calvin Tomkins, "Marcel Duchamp," Bride and Bachelors, 24-25. [BACK]
36. For a discussion of Duchamp's relation to Seurat and Cézanne, see Thierry de Duve, Nominalisme pictural, 250-
55. [BACK]
37. For Harold Rosenberg, the addition of the mustache "emphasizes the distance between the commodity provided by the
printing press and the conception of the artist in drawing it"; see his "The Mona Lisa Without a Mustache: Art in the Media
Age," Art News 75 (May 1976): 50. [BACK]
38. Benjamin, "Work of Art," 221. [BACK]
39. Ibid., 223. [BACK]
40. Ibid., 224-25. [BACK]
41. As Pierre Bourdieu points out, the consecration of art objects in the confines of the museum corresponds to both their
economic and visual "neutralization"; see Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 273. [BACK]
42. For an analysis of Duchamp's bilingual puns as a strategy of overlay and delay,
see George H. Bauer, "Duchamp, Delay, and Overlay," Mid-America 60 (April 1978): supplement, 63-68. [BACK]
43. Stites is inclined to favor Isabella d'Este as the model for this painting, in opposition to Vasari's contention that it refers
to Giocondo's wife; see his Leonardo da Vinci, 329-33. [BACK]
44. See Julia Cartwright, Isabella d'Este, vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1932), 10-11. However, even André Malraux is
uncertain of the model's identity; see his The Psychology of Art, vol. 3 (New York: Pantheon, 1950), 153. [BACK]
45. See Lilian Schwartz, "Leonardo's Mona Lisa," Arts and Antiques (January 1987): 50-55. [BACK]
46. My interpretation of Duchamp's gesture as a joke that perpetuates Leonardo's joke in La Gioconda is intended as a
critique of Timothy Binkley's reading of L.H.O.O.Q. in "Piece: Contra Aesthetics," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 35,
no. 3 (Spring 1977): 265-77. [BACK]
47. Duchamp interview with Herbert Crehan, "Dada," in Evidence, no. 3 (Fall 1961): 36-38. [BACK]
48. Binkley, "Piece," 272. [BACK]
49. Ibid., 272. [BACK]
50. The affinity between photographic and printed media, their common reliance on printing techniques as well as on the
increased proliferation of photographic work in print, threatens the artistic autonomy of photography. [BACK]
51. Bauer, "Duchamp's Ubiquitous Puns," 127. [BACK]
52. Charles Sanders Peirce discusses the notion of the index by claiming that an "index asserts nothing: It only says,
'There!' it takes hold of our eyes, as it were," in Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul
Weiss, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931-1933), 211. [BACK]
53. This is an elaboration of Lawrence D. Steefel Jr.'s allusion to Duchamp's "debrained" thought products; see his "Marcel
Duchamp and the Machine," in Marcel Duchamp, ed. Anne d'Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine, 71. [BACK]
54. This personal inscription of "life" into the artwork, as the signature of the artist, may explain why Duchamp ironically
claims that his work cannot have any social importance for the future ( DMD, 72). [BACK]
55. Kuh, "Duchamp," 83. [BACK]
56. Ibid., 90. [BACK]
57. See Danto's discussion of this Platonic legacy, in Disenfranchisement of Art, 5-6. [BACK]
58. See George Bull's discussion of the term natura in Giorgio Vasari, Renaissance, 14.See also, Erwin Panofsky's discussion
of Alberti in his Idea: A Concept in Art History, trans. Joseph F. Peake (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 47-50. [BACK]

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

1. Octavio Paz, Appearance, 20-22. [BACK]

2. These works have remained largely unexamined, except for Peter Read's recent effort to inquire into their psychoanalytic
dimension, in ''The Tzanck Check and Related Works by Marcel Duchamp," Artist of the Century, ed. Rudolf Kuenzli and
Francis M. Naumann (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 95-105. [BACK]
3. Cabanne, DMD, 73-75. [BACK]
4. Moira and William Roth, "John Cage on Marcel Duchamp: An Interview," Duchamp in Perspective,ed. Joseph Masheck,
156.[BACK]
5. Moira and William Roth, "Interview," 156. For recent analyses of the relation of art, business, and the art market, see
Raymonde Moulin, Le Marché de la peinture en France (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967), 49-55, and on Duchamp specifically,
see 471, n. 17. [BACK]
6. Cage's uncertainty regarding Duchamp's gesture to reissue the ready-mades reflects his inability to understand them in
the context of other reproducibles in art, such as lithographs, engravings, and even photographic prints, that is, works of art
in limited edition. [BACK]
7. This was at the Quinn auction of 1925 in New York. See Duchamp's interviews with Cabanne, DMD, 73-74. Cabanne
suspects that Duchamp's gesture of bringing his works together is a way of valorizing himself, while Duchamp insists on the
necessity of keeping the body of work together. [BACK]
8. As Duchamp explains, Mrs. Rumsey was reimbursed for the $8,000 she invested, and the remaining fifteen paintings
were divided between Duchamp and Roché ( DMD, 73). [BACK]
9. They were to be sold for $1.00 or more, according to the value of metal used. This interest in tokens/amulets cast in
different metals anticipates Duchamp's issue of numismatic coins; see Marcel Duchamp Art Medal (1967). [BACK]
10. Excerpts from this archival letter are quoted in Robert Lebel, "Marcel Duchamp: Whiskers and Kicks of all Kinds," Marcel
Duchamp, 96-97. [BACK]
11. Franklin Clarkin, "Two Miles of Funny Pictures," Boston Evening Transcript (25 April 1917). As Camfield notes
in Fountain,no further mention of a damage suit is found, 27. [BACK]
12. Given the society's overt abdication of authority, in the form of aesthetic judgments (jury) and in terms of awards
(prizes), it seems that Duchamp's submission (under the pseudonym of R. Mutt) is prefectly within the guidelines. [BACK]
13. Francis M. Naumann, "Affectueusement, Marcel: Ten Letters from Marcel Duchamp," Archives of American Art
Journal 22, no. 4 (1982): 8, quoted by Camfield, Fountain, 28. [BACK]
14. See my discussion of Fountain in chapter 3, section entitled "The Objective Character of Art." As opposed to the
gratuitous character of other Dada interventions, Stephen C. Foster understands Duchamp's gesture as an analysis of art as
a social phenomenon; see his "Dada Criticism, Anti-Criticism, ACriticism," in Dada Spectrum: The Dialectics of Revolt, ed.
Stephen Foster and Rudolf E. Kuenzli (Madison, Wis.: Loda Press, 1979), 31-35 [BACK]
15. Moira Roth, "Robert Smithson on Duchamp: An Interview," Duchamp in Perspective, ed. Joseph Masheck, 135. [BACK]
16. It is in this regard that Duchamp's work differs from the contemporary artist William Boggs, whose laborious handmade
reproductions of money raise significant questions about the transactional value of money and the artwork as
documentation. However, Boggs's project represents a limited interpretation of Duchamp's treatment of currency, which
includes different types of financial species: checks, bonds, and numismatic coins. For an account of Boggs's work, see
Lawrence Weschler, "Boggs's Bills," in Shapinsky's Karma, Boggs Bills: And Other True Life Tales (San Francisco: North Point
Press, 1988), 178-260. [BACK]
17. The need for titles, to designate or label works of art, reflects historical developments related to the autonomization of
art, as well as the individualization of the "author." [BACK]
18. Maurice Raynal mentions Daniel Tzanck as one of the great collectors of the period; see Raynal's Anthologie de la
peinture en France de 1906-à nos jours (Paris: Montaigne, 1927). For the content of his collection, consult the catalogs of
the two sales published by the Hotel Drouot. For further details, see Read's comprehensive account, Tzanck
Check, 98. [BACK]
19. Peter Read recognizes Tzanck's potential indebtedness to Duchamp, for having passed into the history of art, like
Mallarmé's witty barber, Tzanck Check,
96. However, he does not consider the deliberate nature of Duchamp's gesture in issuing his art check not to an
ordinary dentist but to the patron of a famous art collection. [BACK]
20. Read, Tzanck Check, 99. [BACK]
21. Ibid., 99. [BACK]
22. There are further references to the "teeth" of combs: "Use, as proportional control, this comb with broken teeth, on
another object made up, also of smaller elements (smaller so that it can accommodate this control)" ( WMD, 71). This note,
dated September 1915, precedes Duchamp's ready-made dog comb, entitled Comb (Fe bruary 1916). Also quoted in
Camfield and Martin, Tabu Dada, 14. [BACK]
23. De Duve, "Readymade," 115. [BACK]
24. See Francis M. Naumann, The Mary and William Sisler Collection (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1984), 192-93.
[BACK]
25. For Thierry de Duve, L.H.O.O.Q. represents the ideology of the masterpiece as a figure of cultural consumption, the
relation of art of museums/museums of art; see his "Les Moustaches de la Joconde: Petit Exercise de Méthode," Tradition de
la rupture,ed. Jean Clair, 407-8. [BACK]
26. Duchamp's concern for standards, metric or otherwise, is well documented in his works. For an analysis of the gold
standard and its influence on literary notions of production, see Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of
Naturalism: American Literature at the End of the Century (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). However,
Duchamp's works demonstrate an explicit critique of both standards and norms, since his focus is the arbitrary assignment
and reproduction of value in both the artistic and economic spheres. [BACK]
27. Moira and William Roth, "Interview," 156. [BACK]
28. Ibid., 156. [BACK]
29. Cage appreciates Duchamp's efforts to delimit the ready-mades, without realizing that such a deliberate gesture may
represent not only an artistic but also an economic choice. By restricting its circulation and consumption, one is, in fact,
"economizing" the notion of the ready-made. [BACK]
30. André Gervais also examines the polynomy of names staged by Wanted, without considering the economic subtext, in
"Sign ED sign MD: Autographique Portrait of An artist en Rymes," Tradition de la rupture, ed. Jean Clair, 323-25. [BACK]
31. Gervais observes that the phrases accompanying the signature Rrose Sélavy,
such as "son" or "from," or "copyright by," designate an origin that is notable in respect to the parody of its acceptance,
in "Sign ED sign MD," 327. His insight is echoed by Thierry de Duve's analysis of authorship and criminology in ''Authorship
Stripped Bare, Even," RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 19/20 (1990/1991): 239-40. [BACK]
32. Amelia Jones, "The Ambivalence of Male Masquerade: Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy," in The Body Imaged: The Human
Form and Visual Culture since the Renaissance, ed. Kathleen Adler and Marcia Pointon (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1993), 28. [BACK]
33. Read, Tzanck Check, 102. [BACK]
34. Lebel, 97. [BACK]
35. Camfield and Martin, Tabu Dada, 8. [BACK]
36. Ibid., 8. [BACK]
37. Ibid., 8. [BACK]
38. Read, Tzanck Check, 101. [BACK]
39. Considered in relation to Wanted, it also represents the fictitious trade of securities in order to "bail" the artist out of the
aesthetic dilemma. [BACK]
40. The French term for a chess game ( jeu d'échecs ) carries within it the figurative expression of failure ( échec). [BACK]
41. Damisch points out that roulette (the game of red and black) is a head or tails game, since zero is suppressed on the
roulette table and he concludes:"The difference between chess and the game of heads and tails is that in chess the two
heads in question are ones that think"; see Damisch, "The Duchamp Defense," 19-20. [BACK]
42. Ibid., 19. [BACK]
43. Damisch appropriately describes chess and roulette as respectively, the "calculation of strategy" vs. the "calculation of
probability"; ibid., 19. [BACK]
44. Letter from Duchamp to Francis Picabia (Thursday, Undated, 1924), in WMD, 187. [BACK]
45. A Martingale is a system for recovering betting losses by progressively increasing the stakes. As Duchamp notes,
however, the efficacy of this system (a bad Martingale may work as well as a good one) depends on the number of
uses. [BACK]
46. Moira and William Roth, "Interview," 154. Duchamp's formulation echoes Pierre Bourdieu's assessment of art as a
playing field where authorship is defined strategically; see his The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and
Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 108-11. [BACK]
47. Camfield, Fountain, 112. [BACK]
48. Ibid., 111-12. [BACK]
49. See Walter Benjamin's discussion, "Work of Art," 218. [BACK]
50. For a detailed examination of this work, see chapter 2. [BACK]
51. This medal is based on Alberti's medallion (fig. 66), regarded as a self-portrait, in which he depicts himself in profile with
the emblem of the winged eye under his chin. In his dialogue Anuli Alberti describes the winged eye as a symbol of God's
omniscience and as a reminder to be intellectually perspicacious and alert. See G. F. Hill, A Corpus of Italian Medals of the
Renaissance before Cellini (London: British Museum, 1930), nos. 16-18. [BACK]
52. The phrase Tum in Cicero's motto is one to which Duchamp overtly alludes through his puns on the signature
of Fountain, "R. Mutt," and later in the title of "Tu m'," Duchamp's commemorative assemblage of the projected shadows of
his ready-mades. [BACK]
53. A. R. J. Turgot, "Tableau philosophique des progrés succéssifs de l'esprit humain" [1750], in Ecrits économiques (Paris:
Calmann-Levy, 1970), 57; also quoted by Marc Shell, The Economy of Literature (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1978), 64. [BACK]
54. John Evelyn, "Numismata" [London, 1697], in Coins and Vases of Arthur Stone Dewing: A Memorial Exhibition, exh. cat.,
The Fogg Art Museum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press); quoted by Shell, Economy of Literature, 64. [BACK]
55. Marc Shell, Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophical Economics from the Medieval to the Modern
Era(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), 1. [BACK]
56. Marc Shell, Economy of Literature, 65. Compare to Shell's brief discussion of the relationship of the notion of artistic
reproduction to production in Benjamin, "Work of Art," 85-88. [BACK]
57. Quoted in Ecke Bonk, Marcel Duchamp, 235. [BACK]
58. Moira Roth, "Smithson," 135. [BACK]
59. Lebel, Duchamp, 97. [BACK]

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

1. The public began to believe in a myth that Duchamp was actively promoting
 himself in forums, panels, and interviews; see Anne d'Harnoncourt and Walter Hopps, "Etant Donnés," 6-7. [BACK]
2. Joseph Masheck observes that unlike the Nude and the Bride, Etant Donnés is "totally divorced from modernist abstract
tendencies"; see "Introduction," Duchamp in Perspective, 22. His comment reflects the difficulty of understanding this work
in relation to Duchamp's previous works. [BACK]
3. Masheck summarizes this dilemma as follows: "Did Duchamp actually realize an escape from art in the fabrication of this
work, did he leave art behind just as we thought he had until we found he hadn't?" He goes on to characterize this work as
"startlingly gross and amateurish"; see ibid., 13. [BACK]
4. Moira and William Roth, "Interview," 155. For other comparisons of Given with the Large Glass, see Octavio Paz, "Water
Writes Always in Plural," in Appearance, 91-178; Jean-François Lyotard, "Etant Donnés: Inventaire du dernier nu," Marcel
Duchamp: Abécédaire, ed. Jean Clair, 86-110; Alain Jouffroy, "Etant donné Marcel Duchamp 1) individualiste révolutionnaire,
2) respirateur," Opus International, no. 49 (March 1974): 18-23; René Micha, "Etant Donné Etant Donnés,'' Tradition de la
rupture, ed. Jean Clair, 157-75. [BACK]
5. Moira and William Roth, "Interview," 155. [BACK]
6. See William Camfield's account of Duchamp's exhibit and Walter Hopps's comments, in Fountain, 109. [BACK]
7. Masheck, Duchamp in Perspective, 155. [BACK]
8. John Golding, Bride Stripped Bare, 95. My analysis also relies on the facsimile edition of Given by Marcel
Duchamp, Manual of Instructions for Marcel Duchamp "Etant Donnes: 1) la chute d'eau, 2) le gaz d'éclairage" (Philadelphia:
Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1987). [BACK]
9. D'Harnoncourt and Hopps are an exception, since they insist on the fact that the door frustrates the public's visual
expectations; see "Etant Donnés," 7-8. [BACK]
10. Octavio Paz, Appearance, 95. [BACK]
11. Arturo Schwarz, "List of Illustrations," Marcel Duchamp, no. 130. [BACK]
12. Paz, Appearance, 95. Taking as a point of departure Paz's emphasis on the "hinge," this essay will explore the impact of
this notion on Duchamp's visual and linguistic experiments. [BACK]
13. For an excellent analysis of Duchamp's challenge of the institutional space of the museum, see Marc Le Bot, "Margelles
du Sens; ou, les musées de Marcel Duchamp," L'Arc, no. 59 (1974): 8-15. The museum as site of "immortality" for the work
of art will be further elaborated in the conclusion of this essay. [BACK]
14. Roger Dadoun, "Rrose Sschize: Sschize d'un portrait-théorie de Marcel Duchamp en Jésus sec célibataire," L'Arc, no. 59
(1974): 25. [BACK]
15. Golding, Bride Stripped Bare, 16. [BACK]
16. I interpret this exaggerated realism, which for critics such as Joseph Masheck is an indicator of Duchamp's going against
the "grain of modern art," as a reflection of Duchamp's postmodernism, insofar as it makes visible his rhetorical display of
pictorial and sculptural mimesis as modes of artistic reproduction. For Masheck's comments, see his "Introduction,"
in Duchamp in Perspective, 23. [BACK]
17. Paz, Appearance, 96. [BACK]
18. In the pages that follow, I will demonstrate that Duchamp anticipates the feminist critique of the male gaze by
deconstructing both the structure and, therefore, the ideology of male spectatorship. For a critique of vision as a
predominantly scopic economy, see Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter and Caroline Burke
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 133-48; see also Jacqueline Rose's critique of sexual difference and the visual
image in her Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, New Left Books, 1986), 232-33. [BACK]
19. The coincidence of the point of view and the viewing subject implied in perspective is designated by Jean Pellerin Viator
as "subject." For a critique of the notion of pictorial and cinematographic perspective and the subject's point of view, see
Jean-Louis Baudry, "The Ideological Effects of the Cinematographic Apparatus," in Apparatus: Selected Writings, ed. Theresa
Hak Kyung Cha (New York: Tanam Press, 1980), 25-37. [BACK]
20. Compare Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure," 6—18; and, more recently, Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality, 232-33. See also Mary
Ann Doane, "Film and Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator," Screen 23 (September-October 1982): 74-87. [BACK]
21. For an exploration of vision and its indirect relation to both the body and language, see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "The
Intertwining—The Chiasm," in The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1968), 130-55. See also, Rosalind Krauss's recent examination of the body's relation to the
signifier and to vision in "Where's Poppa?," in The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp, ed. Thierry de Duve (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1991), 433-59. [BACK]
22. For a comprehensive analysis of Courbet's works and this particular painting,
see Michael Fried's excellent study, Courbet's Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 200-5. Fried also
emphasizes the painterliness of the parrot, a detail that may have proven significant to Duchamp's allusion to this
work. [BACK]
23. This reference to Magritte has not yet been elaborated in the critical literature on Duchamp. Alain Robbe-Grillet re-
creates this painting in literal terms in his novel Topologie d'une cité fantôme: roman (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1976),
under the revised title The Mannequin Assassinated, instead of Magritte's The Threatened Assassin. Robbe-Grillet's literary
"translation" of Magritte's image involves puns similar to those that are found in Duchamp's own work. [BACK]
24. Duchamp himself spells out this pun on the facticity of sex; see his quote in Schwarz, Complete Works, 576. For a
general analysis of this lithograph series and its relation to Given, see Hellmut Wohl, "Duchamp's Etchings of the Large
Glass and Lovers," Artist of the Century, ed. Rudolf E. Kuenzli and Francis M. Naumann, 172-76. [BACK]
25. See Clair, Marcel Duchamp: Abécédaire, 158-59. [BACK]
26. Compare to Jacqueline Chénieux's critique of transgression in "L'Erotisme chez Marcel Duchamp et Georges
Bataille," Tradition de la rupture, ed. Jean Clair, 196-218. Although Chénieux alludes to the rhetorical status of eroticism in
Duchamp, she does not elaborate it in visual terms, by examining its figurative structure. [BACK]
27. My interpretation of the nude in relation to the brick wall questions Lyotard's, "Inventaire du dernier nu," 102, and
Golding's suggestions that the nude in Given fell from the ceiling, by analogy to its movement in the Large Glass, from the
upper to the lower regions, Bride Stripped Bare, 99. [BACK]
28. For an analysis of the reversible topology of the male and female position, see Jean Clair, "Sexe et topologie," Marcel
Duchamp: Abécédaire, 52-59. Such a reversibility of sexual difference in the artistic realm contests but does not annul the
conventional opposition of these categories in the social realm. [BACK]
29. This interpenetration of the male and female shape is yet another allusion to Leonardo's anatomical drawings as
discussed by Sigmund Freud in Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood (1910). See Jacqueline
Rose, Sexuality, 225-33. [BACK]
30. D'Harnoncourt and Hopps, "Reflections on a New Work," 37. [BACK]
31. Clair, "Sexe et topologie," 58. The simulational and rhetorical logic of
 Duchamp's operations challenges the priority of the phallus as a privileged signifier; see Stephen Heath,
"Difference," Screen 19 (Autumn 1978): 67. [BACK]
32. Pierre Cabanne, Entretiens avec Marcel Duchamp (Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1967), 165, translation mine. [BACK]
33. For a detailed exploration of these puns in Anemic Cinema, see Katrina Martin, "Marcel Duchamp's Anemic
Cinema," Studio International 189, no. 973 (January-February 1975): 53-6o. As P. Adams Sitney observes, however, "The
sexuality is neither in the literal surface of the words, nor in the optical illusion. It is an operation of the viewer's reading of
one part of the film into the other," see "Image and Title in Avant-Garde Cinema," October" (Winter 1979): 104. [BACK]
34. Compare to my discussion of sexual difference and indifference, in "Anemic Vision," 48-56. For an analysis of the
emblematic and anagrammatic character of this film, see Annette Michelson, "'Anemic Cinema': Reflections on an
Emblematic Work," Artforum (October 1973): 65-69. [BACK]
35. Craig E. Adcock discusses in detail Duchamp's experiments with the mechanical problem of projecting three and four
dimensional figures on a two dimensional surface, which I consider analogous to the punning movement of the male and
female positions; see Craig Adcock, Marcel Duchamp's Notes from the Large Glass: An N-Dimensional Analysis (Ann Arbor:
UMI Research Press, 1983), 118-36. [BACK]
36. Manual of Instructions for Marcel Duchamp "Etant Donnés: 1) la chute d'eau, 2) le gaz d'éclairage" (Philadelphia:
Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1987), 1. [BACK]
37. D'Harnoncourt and Hopps, "Reflections on a New Work," 25. [BACK]
38. Lyotard, in "L'Inventaire," considers chocolate as the medium through which the difference between appearance and
apparition is thematized, 104. [BACK]
39. Jackstraws is a game where miniature (often agricultural) tools are flattened out and piled on top of each other. The aim
is to extricate each of these elements with a hook (a kind of stylus) without disturbing all the others. This miniaturized
assemblage recalls Duchamp's miniature museum, The Box in a Valise. [BACK]
40. This brush for cleaning bottles anticipates, by its pointed indexical character, the gesture of the nude in Given, which is
holding a gas lamp. [BACK]
41. Schwarz, Marcel Duchamp, xxvi. [BACK]
42. See Rosalind Krauss, "Notes on the Index: Part I," in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist
Myths(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 198-99. [BACK]
43. See The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even: A Typographic Version by Richard Hamilton of Marcel
Duchamp'sGreen Box, trans. George H. Hamilton (Stuttgart: Hansjörg Mayer, 1976). [BACK]
44. D'Harnoncourt and Hopps, "Reflections on a New Work," 40. [BACK]
45. Krauss, Originality of the Avant-Garde, 205. [BACK]
46. Schwarz, Marcel Duchamp, xxvi. [BACK]
47. Ibid., xxxiv. [BACK]
48. It is important to recall that François Villon was so admired in the Duchamp household that his brothers added the name
of Villon to their patronymic name. [BACK]
49. For an analysis of Duchamp's signature, Rrose Sélavy, see Roger Dadoun's article, "Rrose Sschize," 24-28; for his
second signature "Belle Haleine," see Arturo Schwarz, "Rrose Sélavy: Alias Marchand de Sel alias Belle Haleine," L'Arc, no.
59 (1974): 29-35. [BACK]

Postscript: Duchamp's Postmodern Returns

1. Clement Greenberg, "Counter-Avant-Garde," Duchamp in Perspective, ed. Joseph Masheck, 123-24. [BACK]
2. Greenberg, "Counter-Avant-Garde," 124. [BACK]
3. Pierre Bourdieu, Field, 108. [BACK]
4. Ibid., 61. [BACK]
5. Ibid., 60. [BACK]
6. For a general analysis of authorship in Duchamp in terms of choosing, naming, and signing, see Thierry de Duve,
"Authorship Stripped Bare," 234-41. My own approach focuses on the authorial signature not as an act of authorization but
as one of notorization. [BACK]
7. This incident is described in detail in a profile based on interviews with the artist by Lawrence Weschler, "Boggs's Bills,"
178-260. Since then, Boggs was charged with counterfeiting in Australia (1989), found not guilty, and awarded $20,000 in
damages. Recently, more than 100 drawings and paintings have been confiscated by United States Secret Service Agents in
Pittsburgh, and he is currently under investigation; see the article on Boggs entitled "Are They Counterfeit Bills or Art? (Or
Both?)," The New York Times (6 December 1992), 42. [BACK]
8. For an examination of strategies of appropriation in the context of postmodernism, see Stephen Melville, "Painting in the
End: Fates of Appropriation," After the future: Postmodern Times and Places, ed. Gary Shapiro (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1990), 158-61. [BACK]
9. Quoted by Weschler, "Boggs's Bills," 227. [BACK]
10. "Are They Counterfeit," 42. [BACK]
11. Jean-François Lyotard suggests that "Post modern would have to be understood according to the paradox of the future
(post ) anterior ( modo ) "; see his "What Is Postmodernism?," The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans.
Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Theory and History of Literature, vol. 10 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1984), 81. For an elaboration of Lyotard's discussion of Modernism and postmodernism, see my "Dada Cinema: At the Limits
of Modernity," Art & Text 34 (Spring 1989). [BACK]

Notes