Taking the 'ready' out of readymade artwork

By Emily Liebert

Marcel Duchamp was one of the first half of the twentieth century's most revolutionary artists. His influence has remained important in the 30 years since his death, but now, an art historian is working tenaciously to subvert the legitimacy of Duchamp's work.

Early in his career, Duchamp became intrigued by the Dada movement, which he called "antiart." He explained, "[Dadaism] was principally a matter of questioning the artist's behavior as people envisaged it." This affinity to the absurd would become central to perhaps the most lasting part of Duchamp's legacy—his "readymades."

In 1913, Duchamp brought a bicycle wheel into his Paris studio and placed it on a stool because he enjoyed watching it spin. The following year, he bought a bottle rack. In 1915, he came to America, where he collected a snow shovel, birdcage, and urinal, to name a few items. In a letter to his sister Suzanne, he wrote that these sculptures were "already made." For several years following the initial innovation, Duchamp collected ubiquitous mass-produced commodities, his readymades.

Throughout his whole career, Duchamp only put two actual readymades on display. The rest were available to the public only through photographs (including some by Man Ray and Alfred Stieglitz), which were published in journals and included in the 1963 Duchamp retrospective exhibit.

Duchamp wanted the readymades to prove that any object can be a work of art. Some readymades were "assisted"—that is, the artist admitted to manipulating them. But many, such as the bottle rack, snow shovel, and urinal, were unassisted readymades.

Or so he claimed.

In the February issue of Art News magazine, Leslie Camhi reported in her article "Did Duchamp Deceive Us?" that artist Rhonda Roland Shearer has been working with a team of researchers to prove that, in fact, none of Duchamp's readymades were entirely already made. Shearer suspects that he manipulated or made them all and then concealed the evidence to prevent the discovery of his alterations.

Shearer's research lab is filled with hat racks, coat racks, advertising signs, bicycle wheels, snow shovels, etc. which are compared to their representations in Duchamp's work. Some of Shearer's findings include that the readymade snow shovel "would hurt your hand" if you tried to use it because it has a square shaft. Furthermore, it doesn't have the correct reinforcements to keep it from breaking—a fact proven by the craftsman Shearer hired to make snow shovels like Duchamp's and use them until they broke.

The bird cage was too short to have contained a real bird, the French window opens the wrong way, the urinal has more curve than did those made by Mott Iron Works where Duchamp claims to have bought it. But while Shearer & Co. concentrate on minutiae, a larger question remains: whether or not such a discovery matters. Can a piece of information have the power to subvert a genre of art? The answer, quite simply, is no.

Shearer likens her discoveries to learning "there was no historical Jesus...What happens to the artists who took the readymade as a sacred truth? It has meant too much to the people who believe it."

Perhaps it would be distressing for Duchamp scholars and admirers to acknowledge their champion had deceived them (although such findings would add new intrigue to Duchamp.) But more importantly, absolutely no harm is done to the artists whose work was inspired by their perceptions of Duchamp's readymades.

The effect of Duchamp's innovation—the concept behind the readymades—is what has affected the work of half a century of artists. Even if Duchamp had reconstructed the birdcage to the dimensions of his choosing, his birdcage was not traditionally beautiful and, therefore, when it was accepted as art, Duchamp proved that anything could be art. This innovation influenced the work of Jackson Pollock and the generation of action painters that emphasized the process over the product of art. It is evident in Andy Warhol's portraits of Campbell's Soup cans and it pervades the work of countless other artists.

Furthermore, once Duchamp's readymades had been photographed, artistic influence was central to their presentation. The photographer designates the setting for the object, the angle from which the viewer sees the object. Had Duchamp's exhibits consisted of tours down the aisles of hardware stores, then creating the objects supposedly "for sale" would be deception. But by allowing his readymades to be photographed, particularly by such notable artistic photographers as Man Ray and Stieglitz, Duchamp was implicitly admitting that all his readymades were assisted.

To try to subvert a concept that changed American perceptions of art and altered the contributions of decades of great artists by pinpointing technicalities is to miss the way art should progress over time. The legacy of a revolutionary concept remains vibrant through its influence on latter generations of artists. We should thank Duchamp for the artistic imagination and independent intellect that made him present or even create his readymades.

Emily Liebert is a sophomore in Saybrook.

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