The Readymades of Marcel Duchamp: The Ambiguities of an Aesthetic RevolutionAuthor(s): Steven GoldsmithReviewed work(s):Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 42, No. 2 (Winter, 1983), pp. 197-208Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The American Society for AestheticsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/430663 .Accessed: 22/04/2012 18:07

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Blackwell Publishing and The American Society for Aesthetics are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.

http://www.jstor.org

STEVEN GOLDSMITH

The Readymades of Marcel

Duchamp: The Ambiguities of Aesthetic Revolution

THE EFFORT of philosophers in the 1950s to demonstrate, following Wittgenstein's theory of open concepts, that art could not be defined has not hindered some contemporary aestheticians from making the attempt. At the heart of such discus- sions, at least in the visual arts, lie Mar- cel Duchamp's readymades, which more than any other experiment has challenged the boundaries and even the foundations of art as a concept. In the second decade of this century, Duchamp selected commonplace objects, including a urinal provocatively entitled Fountain, and shook the art world by exhibiting them, often physically unaltered except for the appearance of the artist's signature, on pedestals in museums. After the initial re- actions of laughter or disgust, the ready- mades held their status as artworks, usu- ally categorized as sculpture, and since have become the central hurdle over which any attempt to define art must leap. Not only did the readymades find their way into permanent museum collections, but they solidified their position in the academic history of art by crucially influ- encing later developments. Without Du- champ's experiments it is likely that the Pop Art celebration of everyday objects or the current profusion of "junk" sculp- ture might never have occurred. In any case, such vigorous movements have helped theorists perceive the inadequacies of traditional criteria for art, such as imi- tation or expression, and have encour-

STEVEN GOLDSMITH teaches English at the University of Pennsylvania.

aged them either to abandon definition altogether or pursue it in some other direction.

The attempt to define anything is by na- ture a conservative activity. Conceptual definitions are necessarily exclusive; they focus on particular, selected characteris- tics at the expense of actual uniqueness or diversity. They allow us to order our ex- perience by grouping certain things to- gether and leaving others out. If Marcel Duchamp presents an object that radically questions the borders of any definition of art, an object that cannot be ignored be- cause it has been accepted in practice as as art, the conservative critic seeks to enlarge the borders of theory and thus ab- sorb the rebellion. While the peculiar, ir- resolvable nature of the readymade threat- ens to undermine this endeavor with the assertion that everything (or, of course, nothing) is art, it also surprisingly helps to further the conventional cause. The strange paradox embodied in the ready- made is that, depending on the interpreta- tion one accords it, the object can support the extremes of both anarchist and staunchly conservative theories of art. The split impulses, I believe, can be traced back to Duchamp's own enigmatic writing, where he is at once a self-pro- claimed iconoclast and a preserver of the most oppressive strain of traditional aes- thetic value. The conservative interpreta- tion of the readymade, supplied in part by Duchamp himself, has allowed the pro- ponents of the Institutional Theory of Art, today's leading candidate for a defini- tion of art, to overcome the Dada ob-

Copyright © 1983, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

an

198

stacle and to proceed once again in the di- rection of secure categorization.

To some extent, our historical asso- ciation of Duchamp with Dada has tended to blur the artist's curiously mixed impulses. His conventional side becomes lost in the flurry of Dada slogans such as the following, devoted to revolution:

Dada

stands on

the side of the revolutionary

Proletariat

Open up at last

your head

Leave it free

for the

demands of our age

Down with art

Down with

bourgeois intellectualism

Art is dead

Long live

the machine art

of Tatlin

Dada

is the

voluntary destruction

of the

bourgeois world of ideas'

The degree of Duchamp's participation in the Dada movement, itself a nebulous and

GOLDSMITH

ever-changing phenomenon, is uncertain. At times Duchamp openly considered himself a member, yet he would fre- quently assert his independence as well. Clearly, the above attack on bourgeois "intellectualism" and "ideas' contradicts the thrust of much of Duchamp's art, which he continuously acknowledged to be primarily literary and intellectual. The readymades, closest to the Dada spirit of revolution in their deliberate attempt to shake the conventions of the art institu- tion, can become the vehicles of either aesthetic egalitarianism or elitism, de- pending mainly on whether they are per- ceived formally or conceptually, through the theoretical eyes of Aristotle or Plato. As an intriguing physical presence, the readymade destroys the framework of art. Put simply, if a toilet or a bottlerack can provide rewarding formal statisfaction, anything can. Art, as a privileged, isolated category, no longer exists. As a vehicle for the communication of ideas, however, the readymade reaffirms the traditional art world. The found object is art because an artist of special sensibility felt he could convey an important aesthetic idea through it. As a carrier of meaning, the readymade stands apart from what Arthur Danto calls "mere real things."2 Before considering the conservative conceptual approach to the readymade I will first establish the antithetical and radical impli- cations of the formalist position.

The formal principle behind the ready- made is far from revolutionary and hark- ens back to Kant's notion of disinterest- edness. Wrench a common object from its functional environment, eliminate its po- tential for practical use, set it upon a stand like objects traditionally devoted to aesthetic scrutiny, and the formal design previously obscured in the object is thrown into the forefront of consideration. Without the film of familiarity that hinders us from seeing beyond its' function, a urinal can become a highly polished, gleaming artwork that combines masculine piping with rounded feminine curves-not unlike the androgenous figures created by Henry Moore. Unnoticed details sur- face with the encouragement of closer

The Readymades of Marcel Duchamp

examination. Hung upside down and sus- pended from the ceiling, The Bottlerack cannot possibly be appreciated as a tool for drying bottles.3 Yet the strangeness of its form-the threatening protrusion of metal spikes layered symmetrically along a conical shape-suddenly becomes apparent.

Such an interpretation of the readymade can, but does not necessarily, lead to the revolutionary panaestheticism that Muk- arovsky hinted at and feared. Formalism has often proved a most conservative en- terprise which in no way sanctions the be- lief that anything and everything can be art. The New Critics sought rather to iso- late literature from nonartistic phenom- ena, to award it special "aesthetic" sta- tus, much as Clive Bell privileged painting through "significant form." Formalism can become a type of puritanism where disinterested formal scrutiny permits an object to transcend the vulgar world of use and change. Clement Greenberg dis- cussed the importance of abstract art in exactly this way. The avant-garde artist strives to achieve the full formal potential of his medium and thus arrives at an im- mutable absolute that divorces high culture from the transient and degraded public culture.

Hence it developed that the true and most im- portant function of the avant-garde was not to "experiment," but to find a path along which it would be possible to keep culture moving in the midst of ideological confusion and violence. Retiring from the public altogether, the avant- garde poet or artist sought to maintain the high level of his art by both narrowing it and raising it to the expression of an absolute in which all relativities and contradictiors would be either re- solved or beside the point. "Art for art's sake" and "pure poetry" appear and subject matter or content becomes something to be avoided like the plague.4

Even confronting the readymades, these most banal objects, a formalist need not forsake the distinction he desires between art and the common world. Instead of seeing that all objects share in potential the special "aesthetic" quality usually as- cribed only to works in a museum, he marvels at the thought that a few common

199

objects have been elevated to the stature of artworks. Hence Danto calls his book- length explanation of the readymades and the Pop artifacts they inspired The Trans- figuration of the Commonplace. He praises Duchamp, "who first performed the subtle miracle of transforming, into works of art, objects from the Lebenswelt of commonplace existence."5 The "miracle" metaphor tips off Danto's strategy; he is willing to allow that the urinal or bottlerack is art only because they have crossed some mystical border- line where they shed their existence as "mere real things." For Danto, as we shall see later, the readymade ironically makes clear the distance between art and the commonplace.

Of course, it is actually impossible to tell which concept moves in which direc- tion. Do common objects rise to art, or does art fall to the everyday? Duchamp considered the possibility of a reverse readymade, a Rembrandt used as an iron- ing board. He also drew a mustache on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, presum- ably to demonstrate that academic art was not sacred, at least no more sacred than a properly displayed urinal. Jack Burn- ham, inverting Danto's contention that the readymades were somehow elevated, claims that Duchamp's cult "sought to denigrate sculpture to the status of mun- dane object."6 Pushed to its most radical implication, Duchamp's experiment abo- lishes the line between art and anything else, rendering art a useless and arbitrary label. All objects become works of art, just as all works of art become not-so-ex- traordinary objects. If you observe a urinal in a museum and realize its formal potential as art, a formal potential no dif- ferent from that of a Brancusi or a Moore, there is nothing to stop you from regarding an identical urinal in the Van Pelt Library as art. The application of the formal principle is unlimited. If a urinal, why not a doorknob? As you leave the Van Pelt bathroom, stop for a moment before the door and consider the knob's sensuous curve, the muted hue of its brass, the intricate network of scratches that line its surface. Capable of such ex-

200

tended application, Duchamp's ready- mades suggest the following revolutionary consequences. As Arturo Schwarz puts it,

First of all the difference between the artist and the layman ceases to exist, and every man is en- dowed with the faculty of creating beauty (In the case of the Ready-mades, simply by deciding that a common object is to be elevated to the status of a work of art). And secondly, the very distinction between life and art is abolished.7

Duchamp throws into doubt the two con- cepts upon which the traditional humanist sanction of art rests-the special "aes- thetic" quality of the artwork and the spe- cial sensibility of the artist. The total ega- litarianism that results, a democracy of both people and objects, threatens the conventional order of social and aesthetic hierarchy. Morse Peckham, arriving at similar conclusions in his effort to explode accepted theories of art, writes, "The dis- covery that anything becomes a work of art if you perceive it as a work of art, and that it can be given public status if you place it in an artistic situation, is, accord- ing to some critics and a concerned pub- lic, fraught with danger for art."8

As I have suggested, one way to side- step the danger posed by the readymade is to deny or minimize its formal potential in favor of its symbolic or intellectual po- tential. In his recent article, Karsten Har- ries proposes that Duchamp's found ob- jects have reinforced the mainstream of academic modern art precisely because they subordinate form to concept. The importance of the urinal, for instance, lies outside the object's physical presence.

The aesthetic appeal of the object is very lim- ited; it gains its meaning only as a gesture di- rected against the established and the accepted. Duchamp himself spoke of provocation. The title, so obviously at odds with what it names, underscores the provocation.

Capturing the paradox that Fountain com- bines revolutionary intentions with some surprisingly traditional tendencies, he goes on to write,

Like so much modern art, it is first of all art about art. ... What matters is not the concrete

GOLDSMITH

object, but the fact that it has been chosen and the idea governing that choice. . . . That Du- champ's challenge failed to break the rule of the artistic approach is clear, in retrospect. Objects created to provoke and scandalize were soon canonized and collected.9

Fountain is important not as a "concrete object" that levels and demystifies "aes- thetic" appeal, but as a "gesture" or "idea." Rather than destroying institu- tional art, it has fathered a long line of conceptual pieces that promote philosoph- ical inquiry in the scholastic tradition- complex, self-explorative pieces that question the very nature of their own ex- istence as art. The layman claims that anyone could exhibit a urinal on a ped- estal, but the artist did it and did it for a reason. This reason becomes the essential distinguishing factor; the readymade is more that a physical object; it has qual- ities inaccessible to the senses. It can be "daring, impudent, irreverent, witty and clever,"10 all of which, according to Danto, a commonplace, utilitarian object cannot be. Endorsing his work with mean- ing, creating a statement about art, the artist works within a traditional context of aesthetic theory and perpetuates that con- text. Meanwhile, by shifting the grounds from form to concept, the conservative has succeeded in maintaining the privi- leged status of both the artist, who had the delicacy of insight to make such an experiment, and the object, which is capa- ble of provoking an intellectual interpreta- tion in ways that a "mere real thing' cannot.

Although one might be tempted to think otherwise, the conceptual approach to the readymade does not comprise a bourgeois adulteration of Duchamp's revolutionary intentions. Rather, its roots lie in the ar- tist's own theories. A clear indication of his antithetical impulses appears in a prose piece written in 1946 to explain his painting of the period just prior to the readymade experiments. Fully aware of his radical inclinations, Duchamp vehe- mently asserts that he did not want to be a "slave to landmarks."1 He found him- self attracted to Dada mainly because it was "serviceable as a purgative' 12-a

The Readymades of Marcel Duchamp

means of breaking free from a stuffy and restrictive academic institution. Yet the contradictory crux of Duchamp's state- ment is an affirmation of traditional, transcendent aesthetic value; as Harries contends, he sees his work "as an at- tempt to restore to painting its literary di- mension, to lead it back to the tradition it had forsaken."13 For Duchamp, that tra- dition is specifically religious, or at least spiritual, and painting becomes important to him as it moves away from the physical toward the mental. He writes,

I wanted to get away from the physical aspect of painting. I was much more interest in recreating ideas in painting ... For me Courbet had intro- duced the physical emphasis in the nineteenth century. I was interested in ideas-not merely in visual products. I wanted to put painting once again at the service of the mind. And my paint- ing was, of course, at once regarded as "intellec- tual," "literary" painting.14

"Reduce, reduce, reduce,' 15 he states emphatically, meaning that the physical nature of painting, the heavy impasto characteristic of the realist or impres- sionist's indulgence in the medium, should be eliminated in favor of the unconta- minated value of mystical and ineffable ideas. Several of Duchamp's statements express a blatant puritanism, that art should be the embodiment of spirit, and the less body the better.

Dada was an extreme protest against the physical side of painting. It was a metaphysical attitude. 16

Or,

This is the direction in which art should turn: to an intellectual expression, rather than to an ani- mal expression. 17

The apparent disgust with the physical; the belief that art can provide a haven un- touched by animal limitation; the evoca- tion of a mysterious metaphysics upon which traditional aesthetic value has de- pended since the romantics and earlier- all of these elements indicate the rebel's remarkably conservative disposition.

Duchamp's attitude toward painting

201

carries over to the readymades which im- mediately followed. In an interview with Pierre Cabanne, Duchamp discusses how he selected the objects to be exhibited, claiming that "you have to approach something with indifference, as if you had no aesthetic emotion. The choice of readymades is always based on visual in- difference and, at the same time, on the total absence of good or bad taste.'18 In this light the motivation behind the ready- made is no different from that of the ear- lier paintings. Having obliterated the physical influence of the senses and the cultural influence of "good or bad taste," presumably the artist is left in a mental state pure and intellectual. He puts the found object "at the service of the mind"; the fact that it has been chosen and now bears the meaning of an idea triumphs over its ordinary physical presence. The readymade that so threatens to pull high culture from its ivory tower and down to the level of the local restroom, falls prey to the same unwarranted assumptions that traditionally sustain high culture. The readymade consoles the curator who dis- plays the disturbing piece with the two age-old humanist adages: art is timeless (bound to "mind" and not to an era's contingencies) and art reflects an underly- ing human denominator that is universal because it remains free from diverse ex- ternal influences. Aside from the rhetoric of disinterestedness, there is little reason to believe that the artist is capable of stepping out of history, stripping away the physical and cultural contingencies that shape human vision, or even that some intellectual essence would remain after such a process. Duchamp's theory is romantic in high Kantian fashion, seeking the permanent spiritual value exempt from all transient influence, a value that must always be a dubious postulate. Yet it is the evocation of this suspiciously conven- tional value that permits the conservative aesthetician to avoid the formalist implica- tions of the readymade and to focus on its conceptual potential instead.

In one sense, the readymade becomes the perfect vehicle of pure idea-it in- volves no physical construction. The art-

GOLDSMITH

ist never gets his hands dirty and pro- duces a work of art through a sheer act of will. "Part of the irony of the 'Ready- mades," Burnham asserts, "is their very idealism-a consequence of being all idea with no deliberate construction technique on the part of the artist."19 Again, such a consideration leads us away from a for- malist interpretation and back to a con- ceptual one. Duchamp himself writes that the readymade allowed him to "reduce the idea of aesthetic consideration to the choice of the mind, not to the ability or cleverness of the hand [he] objected to in many paintings of [his] generation.'20 An- ticipating Danto's belief that the com- mon object is elevated to the status of art and not vice versa, Duchamp claims that he took the objects "out of the earth" and placed them "onto the planet of aesthetics.''21 While Duchamp's phrase rings with tongue-in-cheek hyperbole, the opposition between a higher aesthetic realm and a lower earthy realm conforms to his notion of pure idea and animal body. The difference between a urinal in the museum's bathroom and a urinal in the museum's modern sculpture gallery is that the latter possesses a hidden essence of aesthetic idea and meaning the former entirely lacks. Moreover, the artist has created that idea without any dependence upon vulgar, physical means.

The particular dilemma of the ready- made is that it confirms the most oppres- sively conservative formulation of aesthet- ic theory while it explodes all attempts to contain art within clearly defined bound- aries. At the same time that he felt he was placing objects on that exclusive "planet of aesthetics," Duchamp also stressed that the readymades "weren't works of art"; they were objects "to which no art terms applied.22 Despite such claims, and an undeniable interest in disrupting bourgeois sensibility, Duchamp certainly treated his readymades like artworks. If the readymade was intended to liberate the aesthetic nature of all objects, it is hard to see why Duchamp early on de- cided to limit the number he would pro- duce. Only when they are seen as tradi- tional artworks fraught with meaning can

we understand his refusal to indulge in in- discriminate production. "I wanted to protect my Ready-mades," he said, "against such a contamination."23 Sim- ilarly, after many of the original pieces were lost, why did Duchamp supervise the 1964 reproduction of "a signed and numbered edition of his most important Readymades"24 The appearance of these late replicas, and even tJie notion that the objects could be ranked in importance, suggests that Duchamp, at least in prac- tice, did indeed consider his readymades artworks in a quite conventional fashion.

If the above activities serve to affirm the privileged nature of the aesthetic ob- ject, they also affirm the special role of the artist who created and preserved them. Herschel B. Chipp's praise of Du- champ is typical of the retrospective as- sessment that perceives the readymade primarily as conceptual art.

Duchamp actually produced very little-a few paintings, drawings and fragmentary writings- yet his superior intellegence and refined sensibil- ity provided a wealth of associated meanings for each of his works, even when, as with the "Ready-mades," he did nothing to the object ex- cept to present it for contemplation.25

The attribution of "superior intelligence and refined sensibility" neatly embeds Duchamp in a tradition that sets the art- ist, in degree if not kind, above the mass of men. If the readymades possess an egalitarian impulse, that impulse is easily lost; does Fountain suggest that any man can create beauty simply by cleansing his doors of perception, or does it celebrate the exclusive power of the artist's pene- trating creativity? Frank Lentricchia aptly summarizes the central paradox that has evolved historically out of contradictory romantic motives.

For all of its demystifying and democratic pre- dispositions toward matters social and aesthetic, at the center of romantic thought there is also (as Harold Bloom has not yet tired of telling us) a powerful elitism. This elitism, put forward in the guises of creative genius and various other ideals of originality, would claim that artistic ac- tivity-by definition something that artists alone may engage in-is the most deeply humanizing activity; the difficulty is that "we." mankind at

202

The Readym cdes of Marcel Duchamp

large, we nonartists, are by this reckoning ex- cluded from the community of the most human sorts of beings.26

Does Fountain imply that the artist can see in a urinal what will forever remain beyond the intellectual grasp of nonartis- tic man? In an almost perverse reversal of their power to unsettle-their power to produce the initial shock that must inevi- tably overwhelm the museum-goer who, having just seen a Rembrandt, suddenly confronts a urinal displayed on equal terms-the readymades forfeit their anar- chist provocation. They become, under the light of the conservative theory Du- champ himself fosters, "touchstones"27 for the conventional aesthetic hierarchy.

Perhaps, in presenting the conservative side of Duchamp's readymades, I have relied too heavily upon the artist's pro- fessed intentions which, after all, carry no more weight than any other interpretation. Moreover, it is impossible to determine how closely Duchamp's statements, all made years after the fact, match the original sentiment with which he first exhibited the found objects. The state- ments always remain playfully enigmatic, but they possess that aura of intellectu- alizing that tends to dampen the initial dynamics of real artistic innovation. In a way, the readymades resemble the avant- garde painting of Picasso and Braque-in the assessment of the many forces that brought forth cubism, one thing is certain; it did not rise out of any clearly formu- lated doctrine. Only years later, well after critics like Apollinaire began to theorize, did Braque finally produce statements that supported the established academic ap- praisal. Picasso never spoke on the sub- ject. Xavier Rubert de Ventos claims that the artist, as creator and not as critic, al- ways strives to develop an expression that escapes the current critical vocabulary. Revolution in the arts, he says, is "neces- sary for things to get outside their 'defini- tions,' so that theorists of art or society would be forced to get rid of their ideolo- gical 'gadgets,' "28 Yet the most fierce re- bellions eventually become old news and soon supply the ideological gadgetry that

203

binds the next generation. Even the artist, looking back on the works that stunned the art world, may be susceptible to the theorizing that attempts to bring intellec- tual order to history.

In any case, I have emphasized Du- champ's stated position on his ready- mades because of its fundamental similar- ity to the contemporary efforts to define aesthetics that have loosely organized themselves around the Institutional The- ory of Art. As Howard Becker notes in his closely related study, this theory marks, as most theories do, "the develop- ment of a new aesthetic to take account of work the art world has already accepted' 29-meaning the readymades and the subsequent Pop artifacts that have firmly established themselves in mu- seum culture. Arthur Danto and George Dickie, the philosophers who sport the two leading, and considerably different, versions of the theory, both pursue the same goal: uncover the elusive definition of art that so many others had declared nonexistent.30 In order to do so, they each confront Duchamp and absorb him into their theories by asserting precisely what the artist himself asserted, that the essence of the artwork lies outside the physical object in unseen qualities. In their quest to find the invisible character- istics that inherently unite Fountain and the works of the old masters under the single category of art, both philosophers rely primarily upon a conceptual interpre- tation of the readymades and display the same sort of conservative aesthetic im- pulse that accompanied the conceptual ap- proach in Duchamp's later writing.

Although he did not provide its name and continues to disagree with Dickie's formulation of it, Danto originated the In- stitutional Theory of Art in a 1964 article where he made a now-famous claim. "To see something as art," he wrote, "re- quires something the eye cannot descry- an atmosphere of theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld."3' In Dickie's later interpretation of this state- ment, the "artworld" becomes the inter- actions of a social organization. For Danto, however, whose approach has not

GOT DSMITH

changed since the early piece,32 the "art- world" means the conceptual or philo- sophical basis of art that transcends its physical dimension. He is the first to admit that on an "aesthetic" or formal level, "the distinction between artworks and mere things is inscrutable."33 There- fore, in order to maintain that distinction and prevent art from losing its privileged status, Danto shifts the defining aesthetic characteristics away from the physical and more toward the mental. In an earlier article with the same title as his recent book, "The Transfiguration of the Commonplace," Danto compares a sim- ple wood crate to an identical object con- structed (or selected) by an artist. The first is truly empty, but the second con- tains something-its "content is the con- cept of art.'34 Detached from the real world, the second artifact, as Danto puts it, belongs to "a world of interpreted things." 35

Not unlike Duchamp's planet of aes- thetics, this world of interpreted things exists as an objectively isolated realm. Its objects remain distinct from identical mere real things not because of someone's subjective categorization of them, but be- cause of inherent qualities-namely, the ability to carry aesthetic meaning-in those objects. Learning that an object is a work of art, Danto tells us, "means that it has qualities to attend to which its un- transfigured counterpart lacks, and that our aesthetic responses will be different. And this is not institutional, it is ontologi- cal. We are dealing with an altogether dif- ferent order of things."36 As we have seen, the attribution of special ontological (and empirically unverifiable) status to artworks represents the most oppressively conservative aesthetic theory; it immedi- ately shuts the door on revolution and even speculation. If interpretability is the decisive criterion for art, I see no reason why it is inconceivable that someone could find meaning, formal or philosoph- ical, in any urinal, or conversely, why a perfectly intelligent and educated mu- seum-goer might be incapable of finding any meaning whatsoever in Duchamp's Fountain. Yet Danto wants to cut off the

possibilities at both ends, declaring once and for all that one object is intrinsically art and the other is not.

Despite his humanist intentions, Danto suffers from an almost tyrannical ideal- ism. Art, under his conceptual theory, be- comes the exclusive intellectual property of those adequate to perceive its inherent spirit. Danto entirely misses the influence of his own subjective perspective; it is no coincidence that the philosopher believes theory to be art's foremost quality and consequently privileges art's theoretical nature. In a revealing passage, Danto states of certain Pop paintings by Lichtenstein,

These paintings are deeply theoretical works, self-conscious to such a degree that it is difficult to know how much of the material correlate must be reckoned in as part of the artwork; so self-conscious are they, indeed, that they almost exemplify a Hegelian ideal in which matter is transfigured into spirit, in this case there being hardly an element of the material counterpart which may not be a candidate for an element in the artwork itself.37

For Danto, objects become art to the de- gree that their physical nature dissolves into pure philosophical idea, and he falls prey to that Hegelian puritanism which in- sists that the body and all of its con- tingencies must be transcended as art evolves into spirit. To place the essence of art in theory is to cut off most people from art and to perpetuate an elite acad- emy. Aesthetic essence lies open only to those scholarly few who have the theoretical knowledge to penetrate it.

Another reference to Hegel clearly lo- cates Danto in a line of conventionally exclusive romanticism that oppresses as it purports to liberate. Setting out his inten- tions in the book's preface, Danto strives to discover the defining characteristics of art that elevate it above the whirling tran- siency of the mundane-the permanent center of theory exempt from the influ- ence of earthly change. In order to do so, he knows that he must account for the endless cycles of revolution that comprise the history of art, especially the recent movements initiated by Duchamp that seem to defy the very barrier between art

204

The Readymades of Marcel Duchamp

and that chaos of common things. Speak- ing of Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes, a con- troversial Pop "sculpture" rendered as close to the commercial packaging as pos- sible, Danto somewhat defensively writes,

Any definition that is going to stand up has ac- cordingly to indemnify itself against such revolu- tions, and I should like to believe with the Brillo Boxes the possibilities are effectively closed and that the history of art has come, in a way, to an end. It has not stopped but ended, in the sense that it has passed into a kind of consciousness of itself and become, again in a way, its own phi- losophy: a state of affairs predicted by Hegel.38

Danto wants a definition that will stand invulnerable to revolution, that will ab- sorb all potential diversity into its univer- sal rule. Almost frightening in its implica- tions, the passage suggests a not un- common desire for stability and order, a desire for some sense of direction and progression that overcomes decay, but at the crucial expense of vitality. History as a living process of change must yield to the revelation of the pure mind's immuta- ble self-consciousness; history must cease its motion. Yet even more disturbing than the comprehensible quest for permanence is what Danto places in the privileged aesthetic center: philosophical self- awareness. Perhaps for the philosopher the development of aesthetics has some- how come to an end (not stopped, of course) with the self-questioning nature of modem art, but Danto tells us throughout his book that this view is rooted in the very ontology of art. Either we accept that art is concept and theory, and the consequent belief that modern art ter- minally culminates an intellectual progres- sion Danto associates with a Hegelian view of the universe, or we are simply wrong.

Danto's version of the Institutional Theory of Art lies closest to Duchamp's conception of aesthetics and is more conservative than Dickie's. Yet it is Dickie, influenced by the growing empha- sis on sociology in aesthetics, who formu- lates a clear, though endlessly problema- tic, defintion of art.

A work of art in the classificatory sense is (1) an

205

artifact (2) a set of the aspects of which has had conferred upon it the status of candidate for ap- preciation by some person or persons acting on behalf of a certain institution (the artworld).39

As with Danto, the physical character- istics of an object are relatively unim- portant to Dickie, though he locates the essence of art not in theory but in an unseen social framework. Art becomes the product of a certain type of social behav- ior. "When I call the artworld an institu- tion," Dickie writes, "I am saying that it is an established practice."40 He never makes explicit, however, whether this "established practice" is universal to mankind or particular to a certain cultural group and his failure to specify the defini- tion marks one of its chief weaknesses. While avoiding the issue of cultural diver- sity--"It would be enough to be able to specify the necessary and sufficient condi- tions for the concept of art which we have'41 (whoever "we" are)-Dickie in- sists that his description of the art world defines art without falling into the conser- vative aesthetic ideology that has hand- cuffed creativity in the past. Of the many problems involved with a definition that seeks to maintain complete artistic free- dom as it imposes limits on the nature of art, I will briefly focus on a few consider- ations relevant to Duchamp and the readymades.

Like Danto, Dickie makes the perplex- ing readymade the central example of his theory, claiming that "Dadaism . . . most easily reveals the institutional essence of art."42 The importance he sees in the readymade is that it brings out an "estab- lished practice" of the art world that was previously unnoticed-the conferring of the status of art upon an object. Accord- ing to Dickie, this behavior always consti- tuted a social criterion for art, but in tra- ditional aesthetics it was accepted without question. In the act of painting or sculpt- ing the artist automatically conferred the status of art upon his creation. "When, however, the objects are bizarre," Dickie tells us,

as those of the Dadaists are, our attention is forced away from the objects' obvious properties

206

to a consideration of the objects in their social context. As works of art Duchamp's 'ready- mades' may not be worth much, but as examples of art they are very valuable for art theory.43

Once again we see the critic shift away from a formal interpretation of the ready- made to a conceptual one, absorbing the work into a realm of theory (here, social theory) that subordinates its revolutionary impulse. Danto uses Duchamp to confirm the ongoing philosophical framework of art by focusing on the theoretical implica- tions of the readymades; Dickie uses him to confirm a perpetual social framework of art in like manner. "I am not claiMn- ing," he writes, "that Duchamp and friends invented the conferring of the sta- tus of art; they simply used an existing institutional device in an unusual way. Duchamp did not invent the artworld, be- cause it was there all along."44 Although their art worlds are different, both Dickie and Danto seek the underlying institution- al substratum that unites the diverse array of artworks of all eras and keeps them distinct from nonartistic objects.

On the surface, Dickie's social ap- proach seems to provide a definition that leaves open the possibilities of art in a way that philosophers like Weitz and Kennick thought impossible. Liberal claims such as the following permeate his writing:

Since under the definition anything whatever may become art, the definition imposes no re- straints on creativity.45

In addition, every person who sees himself as a member of the artworld is thereby a member.46

Dickie attempts to avoid the exclusive elitism which developed out of previous definitions of art that posited some privi- leged "aesthetic" quality as the disting- uishing criterion. Here, anything can be art and anyone can act as artist. But as William Blizek acutely observes, Dickie implies throughout that the art world is more limited than his definition ideally suggests.47 For instance, who actual- ly comprises the art world and confers the status of art upon objects? Dickie responds,

GOLDSMITH

The core personnel of the artworld is a loosely organized, but nevertheless related, set of per- sons including artists (understood to refer to painters, writers, composers), producers, mu- seum directors, museum-goers, theater-goers, re- porters for newspapers, critics for publications of all sorts, art historians, art theorists, philo- sophers of art, and others. These are the people who keep the machinery of the artworld working and thereby provide for its continuing existence. . . . Although I have called the persons just listed the core personnel of the artworld, there is a minimum core within that core without which the artworld would not exist.48

Cores within cores-the art world is clearly composed of a social hierarchy that distinguishes status between mem- bers. While anyone may become a mem- ber simply be seeing himself as one, it does not necessarily allow him to enter the inner circle and share in the power en- joyed there.

Furthermore, can anyone actually act on behalf of the art world? In his study of the art institution, Becker demonstrates that Dickie's theoretical egalitarianism, supposedly based on "established prac- tice," proves an illusion in reality. "A rel- evant feature of art worlds," he writes, "is that, however their position is justi- fied, some people are commonly seen by many or most interested parties as more entitled to speak on behalf of the art world than others."49 In other words, Duchamp could display an unaltered urinal in a museum because he had al- ready established his status as an artist in the art world. In a revealing section, Dickie indicates that he too subscribes to the principle of social-aesthetic hierarchy that reinforces the privileged position of the artist in a traditional romantic manner. Comparing a salesman who displays commonplace wares before a customer and Duchamp who converts common- place artifacts into art, both of whom offer their objects "for appreciation," Dickie explains that the commercial goods are not art because the salesman does not perceive himself as acting on be- half of the art world. Of course, he could, like Duchamp, transform them into art- works, "but such a thing probably would not occur to him."'5 The artist retains his

The Readymandes of Marcel Duchamp

position in the "minimum core" of the art world, his special sensibility distinguishing him from salesmen and other men.

Finally, we must ask what it means to act on behalf of the art world. If one as- pect of the readymade's effect is to dis- turb or perhaps even destroy the sacred notion of institutional art, can we right- fully say that Duchamp was acting on be- half of the art world? True, the found ob- jects can be interpreted as art about art, but as we have seen, their self-reflection is meant, at least in part, to refute the very concept of art; they work within a social or theoretical context only to un- dermine that context. Dickie avoids the deconstructive tendency of the readymade by focusing interpretation on the social behavior it exemplifies and conservatively perpetuates, but at the expense of other implications. The readymade is important for one reason only; it demonstrates the conferring of the status of art. The self- destructive meaning that it carries as a conceptual vehicle and the leveling poten- tial of its formal dimension are entirely ig- nored. The "open" definition of art based on social relationships becomes as limiting as any other definition, suggesting the necessarily conservative nature of the critic who partakes in the defining process.

As its name implies, the Institutional Theory of Art, in Danto's or Dickie's for- mulation, marks a conservative effort to organize the aesthetic experience that is at least confusingly diverse and perhaps outright chaotic. Both versions of the the- ory limit the range of our responses to art by selecting a single characteristic as the decisive classifying criterion. Both ver- sions manage to account for the Duchamp readymade in a way that reinforces an al- ready present institution and excludes the revolutionary potential that would disrupt that institution. Yet the many sides of the readymade that are ignored or suppressed act as testimony against the possibility of aesthetic definition. No matter what type of approach one takes, the readymade has a paradoxical alternative that refutes the approach. If one sanctions its conceptual nature and thus hopes to continue a tradi-

207

tional history of aesthetic philosophy, one must confront the deconstructive quality of the idea it carries, an idea that denies precisely the desired traditional history. If one sanctions the readymade's social na- ture, one must confront its leveling formal potential that renders social context negli- gible. It is not mandatory to act on behalf of the art world to find formal satisfaction in any urinal. And finally, sanctioning the formal approach does not necessarily lead to revolutionary equality among all ob- jects and people. As we have seen, it is just as possible that this mere real thing, this urinal or bottlerack, has been trans- figured by a special mind into the elite realm of art. No matter what he intended with his experiment, Duchamp created a Chinese box of unaccountable paradoxes. Like Keats' Urn, the readymade teases us out of thought. For whatever explanation or interpretation we can propose, it al- ways sports a contradictory answer, leav- ing an elusive portion of itself outside the boundaries of any definition of art.

Herschel B. Chipp, ed., Theories of Modern Art, (University of California Press, 1968), p. 376.

2 Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Harvard University Press, 1981). The phrase comes from the title of the book's first chapter, "Works of Art and Mere Real Things."

3 The Bottlerack was orginally meant to be dis- played in this manner. See Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (New York, 1969), p. 31.

4 Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture (Boston, 1961), p. 5.

5 Danto, p. vi. 6 Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture (New

York, 1968), p. 30. 7 Schwarz, p. 41. 8 Morse Peckham, Man's Rage for Chaos (New

York, 1965), p. 69. 9 Karsten Harries, "The Painter and the Word,"

Bennington Review, 13 (1982), 24. 10 Danto, pp. 93-4. i Chipp, p. 394. 12 Ibid. 13 Harries, 20. 14 Chipp, pp. 393-4. 1i Ibid., p. 393. 16 Ibid., p. 394. 17 Ibid., p. 395. 18 Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Du-

champ (New York, 1971), p. 48. 19 Burham, p. 29. 20 Ann D'Harnoncourt, Marcel Duchamp (New

208 GOLDSMITH

York: The Museum of Modern Art and Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1973), p. 275.

21 Ibid., pp. 275-6. 22 Cabanne, p. 48. 23 Schwarz, p. 45. 24 Ibid., p. 449. 25 Chipp, p. 368. 26 Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism

(University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 216-17. 27 Chipp, p. 368. 28 Xavier Rubert de Ventos, Heresies of Modern

Art (Columbia University Press, 1980), p. 5. 29 Howard Becker, Art Worlds (University of Cali-

fornia Press, 1982), p. 145. 30 Two central articles in the effort to deny the de-

finability of art are Morris Weitz, "The Role of The- ory in Aesthetics," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, XV, no. I (1956), 27-35, and William E. Kennick, "Does Traditional Aesthetics Rest On a Mistake," Mind, 67, no. 267 (1958), 317-34.

31 Danto, "The Artworld." Journal of Philosophy, 61 (1964), 580.

32 Danto repeats the above phrase almost verba- tim on page 135 of the 1981 Transfiguration of the Commonplace.

33 Danto, p. 30. 34 Danto, "The Transfiguration of the Common-

place," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, XXXIII, no. 11 (1974), 148.

35 Danto, The Transfiguration of the Common- place, p. 35.

36 Ibid., p. 99. 37Ibid., p. 111. 38 Ibid., p. vii. 39 George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic: An Insti-

tutional Analysis (Corell University Press, 1974), p. 34.

40 Dickie, p. 31. 41 Ibid., p. 28. 42 Ibid., p. 32. 43 Ibid., pp. 32-3. 44 Ibid., p. 33. 45 Ibid., p. 49. 46 Ibid., p. 36. 47 William Blizek, "An Institutional Theory of

Art," British Journal of Aesthetics, 14 (1974), 146. 48 Dickie, pp. 35-6. 49 Becker, p. 151. 50 Dickie, p. 38.