Art does not have a biological excuse.
—Marcel Duchamp
—Marcel Duchamp
Tzanck Check
Marcel Duchamp's rapid passage through
different pictorial idioms, leading to his abandonment of painting and the
discovery of the ready-mades, may seem to many as facile, or even fad oriented.
In his essay "Counter-Avant-Garde" (1971), Clement Greenberg assesses
Duchamp's intervention, not as avant-garde but as avant-gardism:
The Futurists discovered avant-gardness,
but it was left to Duchamp to create what I call avant-gardism. In a few short
years after 1912 he laid down the precedents for everything that
advanced-advanced art has done in the fifty-odd years since. Avant-gardism owes
a lot to the Futurist vision, but it was Duchamp alone who worked out, as it
now looks, every implication of that vision and locked advanced-advanced art
into what has amounted to hardly more than elaborations, variations on, and
recapitulations of his original ideas.[1]
While recognizing Duchamp's decisive impact
on Modernism, Greenberg argues that his gesture reflects his vanguardism: the
desire to embody and consume the avant-garde as an idea, thereby seeking shock
and novelty as ends in themselves. While recognizing Duchamp's role as
innovator, he questions Duchamp's vanguardism, which he equates with the cult
of the new for its own sake, rather than for initial side effects, and with the
deliberate liquidation of cultural traditions. At issue is the notion of
artistic originality, which according to him exceeds conscious intentions,
since it can be neither "envisaged in advance" nor "attained by
mere dint of willing." As Greenberg explains:
Conscious volition, deliberateness, play a
principal part in avantgardist art: that is, resorting to ingenuity instead of
inspiration, contrivance instead of creation, "fancy" instead of
"imagination"; and in effect, to the known rather than the unknown.
The "new" as known beforehand—the general look of the "new"
as made recognizable by the avant-garde past—is what is aimed at, and because
known and recognizable, it can be willed.[2]
Greenberg's critique of avant-gardist art
pits the notion of conscious deliberation or will against notions of artistic
creativity that exceed conscious intentions. While associating originality with
inspiration, creativity, and imagination, he defines vanguardism in terms of
ingenuity, contrivance, and fancy, that is, trivialized forms of artistic
production. The latter are modes of artistic production that rely on
reproduction, the deliberate manipulation of already given elements or ideas.
Greenberg's devaluation of the already known in favor of the unknown is
intended to restore to artistic production forms of unconscious expression and
intent. The problem with Greenberg's distinction, however, is that it
perpetuates an artistic ideology that refuses to acknowledge that forms of
artistic production reflect social and economic forms of production and,
therefore, conventions subject to reproduction.
In contrast to Greenberg's position, Pierre
Bourdieu argues in The Field of Cultural Production that artistic production
is a strategic exercise of positioning the artist as creator in a historical
field of already established determinations. Rather than liquidating artistic
traditions, he suggests that the avant-garde, like previous artistic movements
or styles, "makes history" by introducing a new position into the
field, which "'displaces' the whole series of previous artistic
acts."[3] Comparing Marcel Duchamp and the "Douanier"
Rousseau, as producers, Bourdieu contrasts their respective relations to
notions of artistic production:
Rousseau, the painter as object, who does
something other than what he thinks he is doing, does not know what he does,
because he knows nothing of the field he stumbles into, of which he is the play-thing (it
is significant that his painter and poet "friends" stage parodic
consecration scenes for him); he is made by the field, a "creator"
who has to be "created" as a legitimate producer, with the character
of "Douanier Rousseau," in order to legitimate his product. By
contrast, Duchamp, born into a family of painters, the younger brother of
painters, has all the tricks of the artist's trade at his fingertips, i.e. an
art of painting which (subsequently) implies not only the art of producing a
work but the art of self-presentation; like the chess-player he is, he shows
himself capable of thinking several moves ahead, producing art objects in which
the production of the producer as artist is the precondition for the production
of these objects as works of art.[4]
Bourdieu's distinction emphasizes the fact
that the art of producing a work reflects the art of self-presentation, that
is, the recognition of the creator not as a given but as a product generated by
the artistic understood in the mode of production. Duchamp's conception of the
artistic field is a modal one, as both producer and consumer, where
"history is immanent to the functioning of the field."[5] As
this study has demonstrated, Duchamp's originality lies in his recognition of
the field of artistic production as a field of ready-mades. In this context,
artistic production emerges necessarily in the form of reproduction, that is,
the deliberate staging and reappropriation of previous styles and artistic
movements. The novelty of his works reflects neither the rejection nor the
assimilation of artistic traditions, but rather, the fact of making visible the
conditions of possibility of art, at the very moment where it threatens to
lapse into that which it has designated as outside of itself, as non-art.
Marcel Duchamp's deliberate and strategic
engagement with pictorial traditions, his redefinition of the notion of
artistic creativity through reproduction, challenges Greenberg's dismissal of
vanguardism. As this study has shown, Duchamp draws on pictorial and artistic
conventions only to redefine their meaning. He questions the function of the
creative act by redefining it as "making", as a notion of production
that renders the artist an ordinary being, one akin to a craftsman or even, a
businessman. Refusing the privileged role of the artist, which he associates
with the emergence of art as an autonomous domain in the social sphere, Duchamp
seeks to reinvent the notion of "making" that art involves, even if
that ultimately implies doing away with art altogether. Seeking to distance
himself from art as a form of expression, Duchamp discovers through mechanical
reproduction new ways for envisioning both artistic creativity and the artist,
for mechanical reproduction involves forms of impression whose multiple
character challenges both the uniqueness of the artist and the unity of the
work of art. By appropriating the logic of the multiple, Duchamp valorizes the
notion of reproduction as a form of production, one that brings together the
artistic, social, and economic realms.
If Duchamp's ready-mades usurp the notion of pictorial reproduction by highlighting the redundancy of a work of art as a commonplace object, works such as The Large Glass, The Box in a Valise, and Given expose the redundancy of artworks as artistic ready-mades. In the first instance, ordinary objects make claims on notions of artistic status; in the second case, works that look like art objectify artistic conventions through their reproduction. In both instances, concepts of art and value are not merely treated as philosophical abstractions but as literal and objective inquiries whose reproductive logic is akin to the expenditure of linguistic and figurative meaning through puns. Given the reproductive logic of Duchamp's works, how are we then to understand the notion of authorship?[6] If the creative act is not merely productive but reproductive, what becomes of the authorial signature as a form of validation? Do Duchamp's works provide us with indications about how the authorial signature is conceived, legitimated, and circulated?
The Box in a Valise
The answer to these questions can be found
in Duchamp's works on art and economics. It is in this context that the notion
of value, both as artistic token and as economic currency is at issue. His
explorations of the relation of art and economics including the production of
checks, bonds, and numismatic coins, demonstrate the conflation of financial
and artistic currency, of economic value and artistic worth. In these works,
Duchamp questions how the validity of a work both as a commercial transaction
and as artistic intervention is defined through signature. Works such as Tzanck Check or the Czech Check reveal that the
endorsing value of a signature relies on a larger system of institutional
validation that backs the signature. The signature as authorizing instance is
merely a relay in a network of validation, which includes other agents such as
the bank, or, in the case of the artwork, the public, the critic, and the art
market. The signature in and of itself cannot authenticate either a check or a
work of art. Sundering the relation between the signature and the producer as
authorizing agent, Duchamp places himself into the position of a notary. This
is not altogether surprising, given Duchamp's fascination with his father's
professional occupation and the technical language of the documents he
authorized.
But what does it mean to conceive the
authorial signature in the mode of a notary? A notary (from the Latin notarius, secretary; notare, to
note) is an official permitted by law to attest or acknowledge deeds and
contracts, administer oaths, and take affidavits. In France the authority of
the notary, who often had some legal training, relies both on the credibility
of the individual and his or her legal recognition as a member of a
professional body. In America, however, a notary public is anyone who pays to
become a certified member of the organization. In both cases, the notary does
not have any intrinsic authority, but simply validates the authority of the
transaction. The notary signs or stamps the signature, authorizing and
legitimizing it, and thereby validating a validation. If the value of a work of
art is defined by the signature as authorial inscription, then the fact of
conceiving the signature as a notarized intervention implies positing
authorship in the mode of appropriation. Bypassing the notion of authorial
intent, such a model suggests that authorship is a relay of signatures, of forms
of appropriation that defer the identificatory instance. The authorial
signature becomes yet another way of staging the fact that notions of artistic
production are reproductive, that is, they involve forms of appropriation that
are essentially reappropriative. Duchamp inscribes into the notion of
authorship a deferral or postponement that opens up authorship to future
reappropriations whether they involve the posterity of the spectator or the
posterity of other artists. By demonstrating that art and economics share the
same transactional sphere, since the work of art is a "check" of
sorts, Duchamp opens up authorship to speculative considerations. His
interpretation of art as a field of strategic gestures whose character is
reproductive invites new forms of artistic appropriation and expenditure.
Furthermore, his originality lies less in his individual signature than in his
signing over the signature to posterity understood as a speculative venture. He
"notorizes" Modernism as a field of artistic production whose
legitimacy is not given in advance but can only be reproduced and thus
strategically repeated. This act of signing over the authority of the signature
also opens up modernity to forms of notoriety, that is, forms of symbolic
expenditure that will compete speculatively with other forms of artistic
currency and worth.
Duchamp's legacy to postmodernity is
visible in appropriations of his works in the contemporary context, such as J.
S. G. Boggs's hand-drawn reproductions of money. Boggs issues reproductions of
money in exchange for services, and the receipts and documents surrounding
these transactions are exhibited as art. In the fall of 1987, after
confiscating the works of J. S. G. Boggs and hauling him off to jail, the Bank
of England filed suit against the artist for putative reproduction and,
therefore, deliberate counterfeiting of British currency.[7] The
seriousness of the charge, coupled with the requisite criminal overtones of the
case, only serves to highlight the fact that money is such serious business
that even art cannot make light of it. Boggs's carefully hand-drawn
reproductions of money include such alterations as impersonating, caricaturing,
and/or defacing the engraved images, as well as counterfeiting official
signatures. Rather than restrict himself to reproduction alone, however, Boggs
also annotates original bills, thereby drawing them into his artistic
transactions and thus, in effect, withdrawing them from circulation. While
strategies of quotation and appropriation are common in postmodern art, Boggs's
contribution lies in the fact that his reproductions of money, rather than art,
reveal our premises about value as it is constituted in the artistic and
economic domain.[8] By reproducing money, Boggs revalorizes it artistically;
at the same time, he devalues its utility as a standard of economic exchange.
Boggs's artistic project to reproduce money
and document the transactions it engenders draws on Marcel Duchamp's extensive
explorations of the relation of art and economics. Rather than considering
money as a medium for economic exchange, Boggs, like Duchamp, examines its
artistic interest and speculative potential. As Boggs explains, the lawsuit
against him relies on defining "reproduction," which may vary
according to its artistic or commercial context:
The whole case turned on whether or not I
had been engaged in making "reproductions" of British
currency. . . . Now, in art world parlance, the word
"reproduction" has a very specific meaning. It suggests a debased
form of image production—one achieved in multiples of some sort. In ordinary
usage one says, "Oh, that's not an original, that's a reproduction."
So, I mean,there's no way that I was
doing a reproduction. Regular British pound notes are reproductions. I was
making original drawings. (emphasis added)[9]
Boggs's summation of his case in terms of
the notion of "reproduction" captures most pointedly the problem of
defining the notion of value in the modern age. Instead of considering
reproduction as a debased form of production, Boggs's revalorizes it by
exploring its conceptual and artistic potential. His laboriously hand-drawn
reproductions of money redefine its exchange-value as currency, thereby
introducing a speculative dimension, which, ironically, depends on the
artisanal intervention of the artist.
The notion of originality begins to be
eroded in the modernist context since mechanical reproduction subverts both
artisanal and authorial intervention. In the current postmodern context the
distinction between an original and its reproduction becomes meaningless to the
extent that modes of artistic production can be conceived as a function of
reproduction. In Boggs's case, as in the case of Duchamp's ready-mades,
reproductions are worth more than the original, thereby redefining the notion
of value in relationship to both the art object and notions of authorship.
Given that Duchamp's own works rely on strategies of appropriation, the
question of Boggs's indebtedness becomes meaningless unless examined in terms
of the earlier modernist context. It is within Modernism, therefore, that we
witness the crisis and ultimate failure of traditional notions of value to
account for transformations in both economic and artistic modes of production.
Duchamp's speculative forays into the
reproduction of value by means of different financial species, checks, bonds,
and numismatic coins, set up the horizon of Boggs's artistic inquiry into the
transactional value of money and the artwork as documentation. If Boggs reproduces
certain Duchampian strategies, his appropriations reflect the speculative
potential that he is able to recover or to draw on as "interest." By
literally drawing money into the circuit of art, he cashes in Duchamp's checks.
However, Boggs's cashing in, or banking on money as artistic currency, only
makes legible the fact that its very definition involves strategies of
appropriation, that is, modes of production redefined through reproduction.
Just as Duchamp "reinvested" spectator interest in Leonardo's Mona
Lisa, so does Boggs reinvest our interest in money (following Duchamp's
interventions), postponing its financial impact only to rediscover its
intellectual and speculative potential as art. As Boggs explained in an
interview (6 December 1992): "They said I was a counterfeiter. They don't
understand the difference between art and crime."[10] In the wake of
Duchamp's work the difference between art and crime, between an original and a
copy, has been subverted. This subversion is a symptom of the overlap of art
and economics in the social and technological sphere. It reflects the
redefinition of notions of artistic production by reproduction.
Duchamp's postmodernity lies precisely in
his discovery that Modernism would exhaust itself were it to simply conceive of
itself in terms of vanguardism, seeking shock value for its own sake. Instead,
Duchamp devises a strategic approach, one that "draws" on previous
traditions, only to uncover within them new forms of artistic appropriation. He
plays chess with art, using both sides of the board in order to redefine the
game. In doing so he liberates the artist from the obligation of producing art
objects, for plasticity now emerges as a function of the shifting strategies on
the board, rather than as a feature of a particular object. Artistic creativity
in this context takes on an entirely new meaning. It becomes a form of
production, which, like other forms of social and economic production, involves
reassembling and redeploying already given elements and rules. Duchamp's
discovery through the ready-made is that art, language, and institutions are
ready-mades: they are systems of reference whose meaning, like chess, is
constituted by a set of predetermined rules. The issue is not that these rules
are given but how one plays the game as a function of them. To discover the
world in the modality of the ready-made is to confront the condition of
postmodernity, not as a development in a historical progression but as a
premise whose history is already posted in Modernism itself.[11] Duchamp's
speculative forays, his efforts to redefine both art and the artist, open up
the historical destiny of Modernism to a set of inquiries whose conceptual
potential can continue to be elaborated, appropriated, or simply parodied. The
monumentality of Marcel Duchamp's artistic legacy is one that continues to be
discovered and reinvented as contemporary art strategically engages with its
modernist past, in order to draw on and speculate about its own potential.
From Dalia Judovitz: Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
UC Press E-Books Collection: http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft3w1005ft/
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