So… I guess there was a lot I didn’t know about Marcel Duchamp? I understood some of the work at a distance, as he is one of those artists that is just, well, around, right? Duchampian is a word, a verb, an adjective, a thing. I understood the audacity and brilliance of calling a urinal art, not quite claiming it, turning everyday objects into a studio practice and concept and then ready-making the readymades into an almost Ikea like production-line to basically oversell the readymade concept thus making it a better version of the concept in the first place. I understood the rejection of Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) in Europe and the fame he received when the painting arrived in New York and what that did for his career. I understood he was a painter first, conceptual artist second, printmaker and edition maker during WWII, but what I didn’t know is how much of Duchamp’s ideas weren’t completed but were fully fleshed out. He was thinking about how to make art all of the time, and what it meant to have art follow you around all your life. I think what I didn’t understand is that he is better than I ever really knew he was, and his retrospective at MoMA is one of the best shows I have seen since the pandemic.
What MoMA and curator Ann Temkin do so well in this show, and this seems so simple, but they put the show in chronological order. You would think… smart, right? But many shows don’t do this. They sort of meander a bit through the decades, bodies of work, often sort of jumping around. MoMA says no, the important thing here is the order of Duchamp’s life, and that is essential when you see this show. It’s important to know that he started as a painter, became a concept artist, made Readymades, made films, designed product, created books, box sets, edition sets, and so on. The fact that you open the show with a painting he made of his siblings playing chess is also smart, because that is exactly what Duchamp was doing: playing chess with his audience, critics, himself, his peers. He was one move ahead, sometimes a few moves away from his own checkmate, but constantly looking at the chessboard of art and seeing how he could defeat it.
I can go on and on and on about individual works and his long lost The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915–23) that he never quite completed, but something really moved me was a work he made during World War II while living in France. It was, I guess the best way to describe it was a boxed set, an edition set, of his works printed in a set. Entitled Boîte-en-valise (Box in a Valise), it was conceived from 1935 and 1941, it acted as a portable "mini-museum," containing miniature reproductions of nearly 80 of his most iconic works, so meticulously recreated it was hard to fathom. The works could fit in a custom briefcase he made, where he would include perhaps an original work of art for each set, giving the editions a little bonus lucky charm so to speak. But it was the concept of it that was so charged, so incredibly smart. During the war, so many people had only minutes to escape with just one case in their hands, their whole life placed into the smallest of carrying cases as terror and war forced them to exile. Duchamp thought, well, my life is my art, and how do I fit my life’s work in one place, and it would be the most important thing I could take with me, saying “everything important that I have done can be put into a little suitcase."
In some ways the work was conceived and produced as Europe slid toward war and Duchamp was to relocate to the U.S. this idea looks at nomadic and a response to displacement and fragile national belonging that so many people went through at the time. Also, in miniaturizing and reproducing canonical works and packaging them as a portable museum, Duchamp challenged museum authority, gatekeeping, and official art histories — a political intervention in cultural institutions.
This is where you begin to understand some of the weight of his work. The way he thought. The way his work thought about the time it was made. The ways in which his work can be seen today are fresh today. There is a politic to it, thinking about art and life and the things that you carry and the ways in which art can be carried through generations. —Evan Pricco
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