The following interview was conducted via email in advance of David Joselit’s lecture, “Beyond Repetition: Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades,” which will take place at Miami Art Museum on February 18 at 2pm.
René Morales: The current Duchamp display at Miami Art Museum was partly motivated by a desire to highlight the edition of Boîte-en-valise (Box in a Suitcase), Duchamp’s miniature retrospective exhibition of his own work, which is in MAM’s collection. How does this work speak to the subject of art institutions? What are your thoughts on the ways that Duchamp has been absorbed by the same institutional structures that his work was critical of?
David Joselit: I think Duchamp understood early on that there was no “outside” to art’s institutional structure. Thus, rather than performing a critique of the museum, the Boîte concentrates and miniaturizes its operations in order to make them strange (and therefore visible in a different way). One might say that it slows down the museum while simultaneously making it portable, and thus susceptible to different kinds of contemplation (of course, now that they are exhibited in museums this effect is watered down). It’s important to note how Duchamp plays with scale and “installation” in this work, transforming objects and the relationships among them. The Boîte also expands the duration of mechanical reproduction by hand-coloring or hand-making representations that in the normal course of things might be instantaneously reproduced—through, for instance, the automatic procedures of photography.
RM: The point of departure for the display at MAM is the idea that the editions comprise a highly thematic area within Duchamp’s production, though they are often overlooked. It’s clear that he took advantage of the editioning process as a site for extending his questionings of authenticity, the original vs. the copy, the handmade vs. the machine-made and the mass-produced, and so on. What are your thoughts on Duchamp’s approach to the editioning of his work?
DJ: The readymade gesture loses its force through repetition—in other words, you can only be surprised or shocked once to see a urinal as a work of art. Therefore, in order to keep the force and interest of the readymade alive, Duchamp needed to recontextualize, or re-locate the initial objects over and over again. Editioning them is a good way to do so. Duchamp was interested in opening out the act of reproduction and performing it as a process in which the artist could intervene. This is why he often uses outdated hand processes within mechanical reproduction. It is also important to acknowledge that the editions are, in effect, modes of representing artistic practices that are difficult to represent, or that are devoted to resisting representation.
RM: Looking back on your early research on Duchamp, can you say how it may have textured your later work, like your recent work on television or on current painting?
DJ: I have written elsewhere that the television system—as a network that depends upon objects (i.e. television sets) as receivers—is the mid-century inheritor of the readymade. What Duchamp did with his readymades is to cause the viewer to think not about individual objects as autonomous units, but the whole system of values and meanings that authorize a work of art. Therefore, Duchamp was already working with the relation between an object, and a network (specifically the network known as the “art world”). The recent work I’ve done on painting focuses on practices that embed works on canvas in an external network—of performance, or of mechanical reproduction. These framing networks are not understood as “context” but as integral parts of the painterly composition. It is paradoxical to think of paintings as nodes in a network, but in fact, that is what they are.
RM: Would you describe some of your recent essays, such as “Painting Beside Itself” and “Signal Processing,” as an attempt to build the sort of critical armature that painting generally seems to lack today? That lack seems so conspicuous given the almost overbearing influence that criticism has had on painting in the past, and given the almost essayistic character of a lot of recent painting.
DJ: I think a lot of the problem lies in the persistent emphasis on medium as an explanatory structure in criticism—even if it remains in effect through its paradoxical antithesis, the “postmedium.” In a forthcoming book called After Art, I argue that we need to think about art made under the dual conditions of globalization and digital technologies in terms of formats as opposed to mediums: in other words the same quantum of “information” may be formatted in many different ways. This is what Duchamp’s editions already taught us. The use value of painting in a fast-paced informational economy is that it is slow: it can slow down procedures of communication and capture them on canvas or board—in other words it can re-format information that is carried too fast to notice, or too fast to think about in other realms. Paintings capture and reformat information.
David Joselit is a Professor of Art History at Yale University, as well as the author of books such as After Art (forthcoming), Feedback: Television Against Democracy (2007), and Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910-1941 (1998). He is a frequent contributor, as writer and editor, to such journals as ArtForum, Art in America, October, and Grey Room.
René Morales is Associate Curator at Miami Art Museum and the organizer of Focus: Marcel Duchamp, on view at MAM until April 29.
De ou par Marcel Duchamp our Rrose Sélavy (Boîte-en-valise)
(From or by Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy [Box in a Suitcase]) Series D, 1941/1961
Box covered in linen containing miniature replicas and color reproductions of works by Duchamp (68 items)
Edition 1/30
Collection Miami Art Museum, museum purchase with funds from Lang Baumgarten as well as from Mimi Floback and Sally Ashton Story in memory of Jon Ashton
Photo Credit: Sid Hoeltzell
© 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / Succession Marcel Duchamp
A Bruit Secret (With Hidden Noise), 1916
1964 edition
Twine and brass plates
Collection of The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Bequest of Mary Sisler
Photo Credit: Courtesy of The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art
© 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / Succession Marcel Duchamp
