"C'est arrive malgre moi” (Who's your Daddy?)

Undoubtedly, Marcel Duchamp can be easily positioned as the “Father of Conceptual Art” and all of its myriad trajectories and continuing artist offspring.

However, it is a little known fact that Duchamp did have one child - not with Alexina “Teeny” Sattler but with Jeanne Serre in 1911. 

Because Jeanne was a married woman, the birth of their illegitimate daughter, Yvonne "Yo" Sermayer, was kept secret. But Duchamp stayed involved in Yo’s life, even later organizing an exhibit of her artwork in New York City in 1967.(1)

IMAGE: Billy Al Bengston and Dennis Hopper tease Andy Warhol at the opening of Duchamp's 1963 retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum; photograph by Julian Wasser.

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1. Cros, Caroline. Marcel Duchamp, London, 2006, 109 and 184; see also The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp

"The Old Fox"

Marcel Duchamp: a system of paradox in resonance.

The man inspires the highest regard (often the love) of those who know him; the public so often regards his work as anathema. He ranks with the greatest artists of the century without any conscious concern for either greatness or specifically being an artist. None of his peers has produced or exhibited as little as he to achieve such stature. He is "a merchant of wit" who's major works are as complex as any produced in the time. It has been said: Duchamp shows it hard, but in the easiest way. 

The paradox of this characterization resolves in a word (and a pun): an-artist. Being neither "anti" nor "pro" art, he has directly and indirectly further the development of many colleagues and modern art in general, participating in movements without the need to join, warning that art can be "a habit-forming drug," and cautioning that removed from the glare and noise of today's vast art world, vital activities will go on "underground." The gentleman is truly an-artist.

As to Duchamp's achievement ("greatness"), let it be enough to say that in spite of all (and intentions, even) the depth and meaning in his work continues to unfold and seems increasingly pertinent. In his pioneering, particularly that of object art with its marriage of "things" and "linguistic concepts," he has registered an incredible number of "patents." 

Walter Hopps

[Single page document found in Norton Simon Museum archives on MD's 1963 retrospective, by or of Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Selavy; n.d.

Photograph by Julian Wasser; © Copyright by Julian Wasser.

Found Object or Readymade?

Now that submissions are starting to roll in on our "Call for Entries" for Readymade@100 at AU's Katzen Arts Center, some definitions are in order before the deluge. In unpacking "what constitutes a readymade" in 2014, 100 years after Duchamp's first object was tagged with the name, there are two art terms that should be examined, both for general readers of this site and, most urgently, for those artists out there who plan to submit their "new readymades." 

The easier of the two terms is assemblage, which is essentially a three-dimensional collage composed of objects instead of flat materials like paper or photographs. Assemblage in art (not to be confused with MIT's now defunct architectural theory journal or the on-line collaborative for "real-time connectedness") can be made from natural or man-made objects, is labor-intensive, sculptural and an additive process to develop form. As such, it is far from the essence of a readymade, even though it is sometimes constructed of found objects.  

That's the thornier of the two art terms, the found object, or objet trouvé. The difficulty arises because some art historians, scholars, critics and curators throughout the 20th Century have exasperatingly continued to classify found objects as readymades, and conversely, confuse readymades with found objects.

True, readymades must be found first but let us be clear: it was Marcel Duchamp who definitively established the manufactured, mass-produced, commodity object as a readymade, first using the term in 1914. As will be mentioned often during the next four months leading up to the September 6th opening of Readymade@100, it was Duchamp's choice that defined his act as an artistic one. Furthermore, Duchamp's engagement with the context of an art exhibition (Society of Independent Artists, 1917) by entering his readymade Fountain (subsequently rejected) that sparked over a century of debate about the definition of art and what constitutes an artwork. 

At this juncture, and again I stress "before the deluge," I simply want to offer Margaret Iversen's distinguished essay, "Readymade, Found Object, Photograph." Let this serve as evidence of the complexities of the associative "unconscious" designation of the objet trouvé:

"The found object shares with the readymade a lack of obvious aesthetic quality and little intervention on the part of the artist beyond putting the object in circulation, but in almost every other respect it is dissimilar. The difference is attributable to [Andre] Breton's positioning the found object in a different space -- the space of the unconscious. [...] The object found as if by chance is situated at the point of connection between external nature, perception, and the unconscious, and thus has a peculiar, elusive relation to vision. The space occupied by the found object is carved out by traumatic experience, defined precisely as an experience that has failed to achieve a representation, but on which, nonetheless, one’s whole existence depends. I will argue that this object calls attention to itself by creating a hole in the fabric of normal perception. This may sound as though I'm contrasting the found object with the readymade in terms of a subjectivity/anti-subjectivity polarity, but the matter is not so simple. The traumatic subject is not the personal self that was so strenuously avoided in the tradition of disinterested art. Both that tradition and Surrealism were interested in the displacement of the artist’s agency."(1)

With both found objects and readymades requiring "little intervention" from the artist we can perhaps see the confusion between the two. However, Iversen's emphasis on the "traumatic experience" that allows the subject to find an object that visualizes the "hole in the fabric of normal perception" distinguishes the found object as an unconscious selection. Moreover, Iversen cites Breton's Mad Love (1937) for later influencing psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's retooling of the Freudian trauma as a "Surrealist encounter," to crystalize her distinction between found object and readymade: 

"The found object is encountered and the effect is traumatic. The contrast between the Duchampian rendezvous and the Bretonian encounter should now be clear. While the readymade is essentially indifferent, multiple, and mass-produced, the found object is essentially singular or irreplaceable, and both lost and found."(2)

How will this figure in my curatorial consideration of your "new readymade" submissions? Instead of requesting a psychoanalyst to accompany my review of the Readymade@100 image submissions, I will have to trust my visceral response to each of the objects that I regard. The possibility that a mass-produced, commodity object may fulfill an artist's "singular or irreplaceable" traumatic need is obviously very real. Certainly, I do not wish to miss such a delightful object as Breton's little wooden spoon that he found in a Paris flea market, and whose delicious mystery Man Ray's evocative photograph, reproduced above, only slightly captures.


IMAGE: "From a little spoon that was part of it..." (1934); photograph by Man Ray, published in Andre Breton, Mad Love. Copyright 2004, Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London. 

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1. Iversen, Margaret. "Found Object, Readymade, Photograph" in Art Journal, Vol. 63, No. 2; Summer 2004; 48-49.

2. Ibid., 50.