The Brooklyn Rail

Rather than an icon of the avant-garde and perhaps its apotheosis, Duchamp represents a turning point, its end. But not in a negative way—quite the opposite. He is the segue that closes one chapter on history and opens up a new one. He represents the transition from modernism to postmodernism. Saying this does not obscure Duchamp’s participation in shaping the avant-garde, which began in the nineteenth century when in reaction to their rejection by the official Paris salon, artists such as Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet, and Paul Cézanne formed their own exhibition, the Salon des Refusés (1863). Later in the early-twentieth century, Russians such as Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin—along with Dada and Surrealism’s rejection of bourgeois society at large—continued this resistance. By the sixties Duchamp was considered the central figure of the avant-garde, especially for Pop art, Minimalism, and Conceptual art. And his critique of retinal art, i.e., returning art to “the service of the mind,”¹ supported Conceptual art’s proposition that art is irreducibly idea.

At the same time that it reinforced the idea of radical art, the readymade signaled its end. Two things were happening at this moment: first, the institutional rejection of rational art was on the wane. As Jeanne Willette argued, “Without any establishment institution to secede from, avant-garde art in New York survived on the impetus of the forward movement of Modernist art.”² Abstract Expressionism and Clement Greenberg represented high modernism and became the target of institutional resistance, which meant that the focus of resistance was against an ideology. The second was that Duchamp’s notion of “idea” or “mind” not only supported the principles of Conceptual art as part of the historic avant-garde, but it also laid the seeds to the postmodern rejection of the empirical work of art, the idea that art exists outside of representation and language.

A way that I chose to think about Duchamp with respect to the postmodern was to return to a set of ideas paradigmatic of the period of the seventies: George Kubler’s investigation into art history as a discipline in his book, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things. He proposes a category of culturally produced objects which he identifies in two ways: one as “Prime Objects” and the other as “Replications”. Prime objects are innovations that open up whole new areas of investigation. Replications are the speculations, experiments, and possible solutions to the problems framed by the prime object. Duchamp’s urinal, for example, can be considered a prime object. It is surrounded by a diversity of other works of art that expand on it. Another way to map this out is to frame this relationship in terms of invention and sequences, where the prime object constitutes the invention, and the variants constitute sequences of speculations and interrogations in the form of works of art.

The diversity that we see in postmodern art is a product of the relationship between style and invention.³ Whereas in modernism, all art objects must aspire to be an invention, in the postmodern we have what Kubler called replications—or stylistic (or sequential) differences that are necessary to form a history of the moment.

In these terms we can see how the readymade underscored the importance of criticality and language that we find in postmodern art. Important artists such as David Hammons and Mike Kelley represent the best example of what we might call individual investigations into the nature of the artwork, the terms of which originate in Duchamp. For example, we can see how Hammons’s Bliz-aard Ball Sale (1983), a performance work where he sold snowballs to passersby at Cooper Square in New York, can be read as a continuation of Duchamp’s urinal, not just as an object, but as a language-based project that gives meaning and significance to the idea. Meaning is given to the snowball as a type of readymade placed in a performative space that reflects on culture and politics.

In this way, an artwork is not simply a behavior of form and material, tools of the artist signature. It is the process of critical speculations and solutions to a particular set of inventions advanced by a prime object. And rather than using nature as a metaphor for style as a natural process of organic growth, style can be more accurately described as sequence and variation, using a mathematical metaphor. This releases us from hierarchy and the modernist idea of art as part of an organic developmental succession, a belief that the work adumbrates a Hegelian idea of an absolute model or principle that transcends culture.