Domestsic Sabotage

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SOMETHING ELSE

The Domestic Life of the Ready-made

I was brought up in a relatively large suburbian house. The

house had a main entrance and a rear entrance. The main

entrance was only used approximately once every othermonth in connection with non-family visits.

Later I noticed that every home had similar arrange-

ments: in one house I noticed a toilet, which wasn’t

supposed to be used, as it was reserved for guests who

never paid any visit. An other had a room, which as far as I

could see always stood empty, but fully equipped and in

perfect order. An appartement I frequented for some years

was furnished with a richly decorated round table in the

living room. No-one never sat at this table, which tablecloth

and flower-arrangements nevertheless – or rather therefore

– was impeccably ordered. Common for every home or

apartment is that this absent guest had a lot of reserved

things, most notably, and inevitably, a newly washed towel.

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A home is essentially an aggregate of things that can be

consumed, provide means of subsistence, render raw

material fit for consumption and act as protection from the

vagaries of the climate. This aggregate is handled,

undergoes or brings about tangible modifications, and is

gradually worn out.

In his extremely influential study, Collectors and curiosities

[1], Krysztof Pomian, discusses the other type of objects,

namely semiophores, that is ”objects which were of

absolutely no use, [...] but which, being endowed with

meaning, represents the invisible. They were put on display

instead of being handled, and were not subjected to wear

and tear.”

Probably every home carries with itself a metaphysics, a

metaphysics of the guest. If we are to follow Pomian, this

guest represents the value of the home, not necessarily the

price. The guest is not linked to real estate, but to the

inventory or the arrangement. A cynic would naturally spoil

the guest towel, ruin the elaborate floral arrangement at

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out of his room into the space”, “The untalented artist”,

“The little man”, “The composer”, “The collector”, “The

man who describes his life through other characters”, “The

man who saved Nikolai Viktorovich”, and “The man who

never threw anything away”. All theses characters appears

in other installations, either in “solo installations” or

together with other characters in “group installations”.

As any of Kabakov’s characters, these ten characters

display the common feature that they all illustrates a type

of dysfunction in relation to normal domestic practices. This

domestic dysfunction is maybe most blatantly expressed by

“The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away”, which

appartement thus is filled with objects of no practical use or

value.

The majority of characters are however obsessed with

observing flies or “the little white people”. The latter are

normally invisible angle-like figures, which however can

appear in corners, in the folds of dirty clothes, or in rays of

light. They are invisible for normal people, but can appear

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for a character when he looks at something else or in the

corner of the eye when turning the head.

Another character barricades himself in his apartment, first

in a closet, later in a shared toilet where he performs his

concerts. “The Man Who Flew into his Painting” and “The

Man Who Flew out of his Room into the Space” both

disappears from their respective apartments with the help

of their own devices. In fact, the characters are themselves

always absent from the installations. Present are structures

and objects and, notably, the little white people, which in

real life are as absent as the guest in our houses or

apartments.

Ilya Kabakov thus reverses the normal host–guest relation in

a home. When we enter an installation we are the guests,

together with the objects, the flies, and the little white

people. The hosts, all these different, but closely related,

characters, are always absent and invisible. Absent is also,

of course, any usefulness, any tear and wear; left is only

meaning, semiophores.

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Even though Kabakov reverses the usual relationship

between price and value, between host and guest, and

between visibility and invisibility, by making the guest

visible and priced, and, conversely, values the host as

invisible meaning, he does not explain how this transition is

possible: the conversion or transformation is a matter of

artistic fact.

But nor does Pomian. For Pomian, the two categories of

objects – objects of use and semiophores – are two

diamentrically opposite categories in the sense that the

more use an object has, the less meaning it conveys, and

vice versa. It is implicitly clear that objects change status in

time, but the very transmutation remains inexplicable.

The change was, however, explained in a rather surprisingly

way by the anthropologist Michael Thompson in his Rubbish

Theory from 1979 [3]. In this he argues that the two

categories of objects for use (transient ) and semiophores

(durables) both are overt and stable categories, and as such

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visible. The transmutation from one category to the other is

however effected through a hidden and unstable category:

rubbish. Rubbish is, following the apt definition of Mary

Douglas, “matter out of place”, and thus invisible. Rubbish

is that which is not supposed to be seen. [4]

But it is one thing to understand this transmutation in

theoretical terms, and quite an other to produce this

transmutation. In my opinion the history of Marcel

Duchamp’s early ready-mades provides an excellent

example.

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II.

Marcel Duchamp’s first ready-made, the Bottle-rack or

Bottle-dryer , is not preserved in any museum or any

collection. The only record of this ”ready-made”, as

Duchamp himself called it, is a letter he wrote from New

York in January 1915 to his sister, Suzanne. The letter reads:

”Now if you went up to my place you saw in my studio abicycle wheel and a bottle rack. I had purchased this as asculpture already made. And I have an idea concerning thesaid bottle rack: Listen. Here in N.Y. I bought some objects inthe same vein and I treat them as ‘readymade.’ You knowEnglish well enough to understand the sense of ‘readymade’ that I give these objects. I sign them and givethem an English inscription. I’ll give you some examples. Ihave for example a large snow shovel upon which I wrote atthe bottom: In advance of the broken arm [...]. Don’t try too

hard to understand it in the Romantic or Impressionist orCubist sense – that does not have any connection with it.Another ‘readymade’ is called: Emergency in favor of twice;[...]. This whole preamble in order to actually say: You takefor yourself this bottle rack. I will make it a ‘Readymade’from a distance. You will have to write at the base and onthe inside of the bottom ring in small letters paint with anoil-painting brush, in silver white color, the inscription that Iwill give you after this, and you will sign it in the same handas follows: ‘[après] Marcel Duchamp’”.[5]

Later Duchamp stated that he purchased this bottle dryer in

1914, at a department store in Paris, and that it was a

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”functional, manufactured object, selected on the basis of

pure visual indifference” [6]. Any inscription did not follow,

nor is any reaction or response from Suzanne. Suzanne

Duchamp-Crotti, herself a avantgardist painter and

sympathetic to her brothers ideas, probably threw away the

bicycle wheel and the bottle rack as trash while cleaning up

Duchamp’s Paris-studio sometime after he had left for New

York [7]. If Duchamp’s point with his bottle dryer, to produce

a piece of total visual indifference, he indeed succeeded.

Not only have we never seen the piece, evidently it was

equally invisible and indifferent for the avantgardist artist

Suzanne.

Some 22 years later, Duchamp participated in a surrealist

exhibition in Paris. As Duchamp was in New York, he asked

his friend Man Ray to buy a bottle dryer for him. Man Ray

did so, and the bottle dryer was exhibited together with

other art works, ethnographica, and curiosities. After the

exhibition, the bottle dryer disappeared, probably rejected

to the domain to which it belonged: invisibility. But Man Ray

did take some photographs from the exhibition, and on two

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of them the bottle dryer can be seen. In the late-fifties and

the early sixties some artist frieds bought their own bottle

dryer and had them signed by Duchamp, so for instance

Daniel Spoerri (1960), Robert Rauschenberg (1960), and

Richard Hamilton (1963). In 1964, the painter Douglas Gors-

line wrote Duchamp to ask if he perchance would sign a

bottle dryer he had bought in Paris. Duchamp’s answer is

revealing: “In Milan I have just made a contract with

Schwarz, authorizing him to make an edition (8 replicas) of

all my few ready-mades, including the porte bottle-dryer. I

have therefore pledged myself not to sign anymore ready-

mades to protect this edition. But signature or no signature,

your find has the same ‘metaphysical’ value as any other

ready-made, [it] even has the advantage to have no

commercial value.”

If Gorsline was a cynic, he would have thrown away his find,

if he was a true art lover, he would have cherished his find

even more than before he wrote his letter to Duchamp.

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The same history repeats itself more or less identical with

regard to the other early ready-mades from 1914 to 1921.

They have – with some exceptions – all disappeared, and

started to become generally known in the art world only

when the art dealer Arturo Schwarz in 1964 started to

reproduce them in an edition. First at this point did the

ready-mades become visible, semiophores and durables.

But, we should remember, the replicas produced by

Schwarz are technically no ready-mades. They are all pro-

duced manually, as durables, and thus in no way “already

made”. That is, these produced editions of objects do in no

way traverse any transformation from transient, rubbish to

durables.

Duchamp did try to exhibit some of his readymades once. It

happened in Bourgeois Gallery in New York in April 1916. In

the catalogue we read “Marcel Duchamp: Two Ready-

mades”. No one know today which readymades the

catalogue is referring to, as no one saw them. It could be

the Hat Rack hanging in the entrance, it could be Trébuchet ,

the coat hanger, or it could be something placed in an

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umbrella stand. In fact, we even don’t know if they were

exhibited at all. The point is exactly this: because no one

saw them, they were indeed invisible. In this sense it

doesn’t matter if they were exhibited or not. The fact stand,

that they were invisible and valueless rubbish “at place”.

The effect is irrelevant if we consider a ready-made “as an

ordinary object elevated to art by the mere choice of the

artist”, which is the usual definition of a ready-made.

Duchamp did never say anything like this. On the other

hand, the effect produced in Bourgeois Gallery by his “Two

Ready-mades” does really make sense if we consider what

Duchamp once said apropos his ready-mades. A ready-

made, he said, “is a thing you don’t look upon [...] it is

something you only see when you turn your head away.”

It is thus not a historical error that Duchamp’s early ready-

mades don’t have come down to us. It is rather an inherent

property of the very category “ready-made”. In this sense it

is significant, that the only documentation of the early

ready-mades we have, are photographs from Duchamp’s

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studios in New York, which at the same time functioned as

Duchamp’s home from 1915 to 1921.

This is not the place to discuss the art historical implications

of these photographs. For the moment I just like to

emphasize, that these photographs contain none of the

ready-mades which exist today; they contain some ready-

mades we know from later replicas, but which have

disappeared, and, most interestingly, they might contain

some ready-mades which we didn’t know existed. They

might have been ready-mades, and they might have been

just some stuff in a studio or a home. It is exactly this

ambivalent status of the objects which qualify them as

vehicles from rubbish to durables, and/or from transient to

rubbish. The ambivalence is exactly the crucial point.

Georgia O’Keefe once described Duchamps place, and her

description underlines this point:

“On the other side of the room was a bicycle up on the backwheel with a mirror stuck in the top wheel. There was abathtub in the corner that he said he had put in himself.Duchamp’s two large glass creations that are now in thePhiladelphia Museum were standing against the wall not far

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from the tub, and the scraps of the pieces of metal he hadcut to make the patterns on the glass were right on the floorwhere they had fallen when he cut them. There was abureau with the bottom drawer out. The drawer ha a good

many ties in it, and some were pulled out and hanging overthe edge as though he hadn’t decided which one he wasgoing to wear. I don’t remember much else, but it seemsthere was a lot of something else in the middle of the roomand the dust everywhere was so thick that it was hard tobelieve. I was so upset over the dusty place that the nextday I wanted to go over and clean it up. But Stieglitz toldme he didn’t think Duchamp would be very pleased. [...] Iremember that I was sick with a cold. I just seemed to besick from having seen this unpleasantly dusty place.”

This description does indeed give reminiscences of the

apartments of Kabakov’s characters. But with the difference

that this transmutation from transient objects for use, to

durable semiophores as art, is not possible in a gallery or a

museum, but is perfectly possible in the setting of a private

housing. In Georgia O’Keefes phrasing: “there was a lot of

something else ...” .

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NOTES

1. Krzysztof Pomian: Collectors and curiosities: Paris and Venice,1500–1800, translated by Elizabeth Wiles-Portie. Cambridge: Polity

press, 1990. Orig.: Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux , Paris: Éditionsde l’École des Hautes Études et Sciences Sociales, 1986.

2. Ilya Kabakov: Ten Characters. Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, 30.April—4. June 1988.

3. Michael Thompson: Rubbish Theory. The Creation and Destruction of Value. Oxford etc.: Oxford UP, 1979.

4. Mary Douglas: Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, London: Ark Paperbacks, 1966.

5. Duchamp, in a letter to Suzanne, ca. January 15, 1916; quoted inNaumann, ed., “Affectueusement, Marcel: The Letters from MarcelDuchamp”. Archives of American Art Journal, vol. XXII, no. 4, 1982, p. 5.

6. Duchamp, in interview with Harriet, Sidney and Carroll Janis, quotedfrom d’Harnoncourt & McShine, edd.: Marcel Duchamp (Philadelphia1973), p. 275.

7. “Upon departing Paris for New York in 1915, he had left Bottle Dryerin his rue Saint-Hippolyte studio, where it remained until his sisterSuzanne and sister-in-law Gaby Villon cleared out his belongingssometime in 1916.” Schwarz 1997, p. 615.

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Domestsic Sabotage

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