Marcel Duchamp. Eternal Siesta (after a poem by Jules Laforgue). 1911. Pencil, watercolor, and crayon on light tan wove paper (90%)
Marcel Duchamp. Bottle Rack. 1914-. Galvanized iron bottle rack (90%)
Marcel Duchamp. Box in a Valise (from or by Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy). 1935-66. Leather valise containing miniature replicas and reproductions in various mediums (80%)
Marcel Duchamp. Why Not Sneeze, Rose Sélavy?. 1921. Painted metal birdcage, wood, marble, two glass dishes, thermometer, cuttlebone (56%)
New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art (Exhibition: Marcel Duchamp)
99%/1%
Fountain. 1917-. Porcelain urinal
If there is art it is somewhere inside this. (TFS, 2026)
New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art (Exhibition: Marcel Duchamp)
90%
Eternal Siesta (after a poem by Jules Laforgue). 1911. Pencil, watercolor, and crayon on light tan wove paper
Much as this may be a sketch, and much as it may be an early work, it still seems to lay out — and to do so as clearly as his contemporaneous paintings do, or more so — what Duchamp's project really was, and how, almost in spite of itself, this project relates ineluctably back to histories of looking and of the pictorial arts. The cubism which Duchamp got up to is easy (if deceptively so) to see as, well, cubism; this drawing can't be seen as much at all, except scribblings and maybe (maybe) a richly degenerate Symbolism. And yet, there's a distinctness to this assortment of pictorial signs — not as a registration of thought or a trace of the artist's hand or a representation of some worldly thing, but as itself alone, whatever it is. So what you see is a depicted object struggling to demonstrate, not its transcendent identity with the means through which it's been brought into pictorial being, but instead its distinctness from anything but itself: its essence, I guess. This is obscure, but it's there in the way the drawing hovers just above the abyssal empty space of the page; and in the openness of every form on its own, but the ultimate closure of their amalgamated whole; and in the refusal of any one portion of the arrangement to assert its position behind or before any other; and in the way the color seems neither to accent nor to indicate nor to model nor to mold. This is Duchamp demonstrating what pictures want to achieve but never possibly could; and so he moved on from pictures. (TFS, 2026)
New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art (Exhibition: Marcel Duchamp)
90%
Bottle Rack. 1914-. Galvanized iron bottle rack
The bottle rack suffers for not being the urinal. This isn't Duchamp's fault, except to the degree that it is implicit in his attempt to transcend art's restrictions by completely embodying the artness of art that only a single eloquent gesture could ever take up the Readymade's mantle, with all other similar "moves" being subject to a greater or lesser degree of conventionalism. (This is the case not just within Duchamp's practice, but for the whole subsequent history of appropriation that flows from his work.) Whether because they're so spiky and cool-looking, or because there are many different (potential) versions with slight variations of "form," or simply because they don't quite have the cache of Fountain, the bottle racks demand to be taken as sculpture. Not just as sculpture, to be sure: the non-art aspect seems almost literally to flow through their negative spaces and to hang on their metal hooks, distancing these objects from facile recognizability, despite the resolute presence they possess. But as sculpture none the less: there's a prettiness the bottle racks can't evade, which is the fault of their reception and a mark (however faint) of their failure. (TFS, 2026)
New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art (Exhibition: Marcel Duchamp)
80%
Box in a Valise (from or by Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy). 1935-66. Leather valise containing miniature replicas and reproductions in various mediums
The series of all these boxes taken together is our proper critical object, not any one box in particular. These are machines for fixing the unfixable essences of artworks, or rather, they're jokes on the contingency that underlies our experience of all art. Their aesthetic substance is the gulf that exists between the total sum of their parts, and the actuality of any one of the individual "original" works they reproduce. Criticism of the boxes is therefore, by its nature and theirs, purely speculative, at least to a certain degree. At Duchamp's retrospective, however, MoMA's display of the series forced further speculation than was necessary: the display mystified and materialized the boxes, turning them into art-object fetishes rather than preserving their vastly interpenetrating conceptual mechanics. You can't have visitors pawing at the art, of course, but to display the cases as cheeky design work is to sap them of their potency. (This isn't to say that the way they assert themselves as sleekly made, slightly gauche keepsakes isn't part of what they're doing aesthetically. But what's important is how their odd, evasive connectedness negates the significance of their design for our experience.) Were I able to range out all the components and take my time going through them, I imagine Box in Valise would strike me as a masterpiece. (TFS, 2026)
New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art (Exhibition: Marcel Duchamp)
56%
Why Not Sneeze, Rose Sélavy?. 1921. Painted metal birdcage, wood, marble, two glass dishes, thermometer, cuttlebone
As Greenberg was wont to point out, an artwork that founds some new style (or genre or medium or format or whatever) is usually going to be lower in quality than the works that build off what it proposes. The former will be unwittingly beholden to past forms, while the latter can reflect with more distance and clarity on the relationship between novelty and convention. This famous artwork is as good a contender for the title of "first Surrealist object" as anything. It therefore demonstrates the problem. It's caught between the conventions of sculpture and the frantic aesthetic possibilities of concepts. (The same could actually be said of much, if not most, later Surrealism.) The work's main effect results from a sudden collision: you recognize in a flash the collective unfitness of these objects — you may even recognize a vague poetic relation cultivated between them — but soon the shock morphs into an easy understanding facilitated by the sculptural qualities which the work has failed either to skirt or to transcend. The marble is a joke on sculpture that, to its aesthetic detriment, forces you to gauge the work at least in part against the history of carvings in marble; the formal openness of the birdcage (which Robert Morris would take up to better effect in his own, more successful non-sculptures) does not sufficiently negate the (sculptural) solidity of the assemblage overall. The title of the piece does a lot of the experiential heavy-lifting, which would be fine except that the connection between sneezing and the stuff in the cage is too oblique to reward sustained attention. (TFS, 2026)
New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art (Exhibition: Marcel Duchamp)
...%
Fountain. 1917-. Porcelain urinal
If there is art it is somewhere inside this. (TFS, 2026)