The Onlooker (original) (raw)

Marcel Duchamp's Language: Deconstructing the Meaning of the Image

As the ‘inventor’ of the readymade, Marcel Duchamp left an important legacy to twentieth century art. Considered by many critics as the father of post-modernity, certainly a bachelor and bastard father, not only did he successfully displace the question of the ontology of art, but he also questioned art and representation itself. This paper will examine a lesser-known aspect of his work, the ‘Boîtes-en-valise’, (boxes in a suitcase). This will allow me to analyze Duchamp’s impact on visual art, as well as his impact on language and systems of signification. According to Duchamp, the work of art must aspire to transcend the experience of the visible, thus positioning himself as ‘anti -retinal’. He values the idea, the intellectual experience of art, which is why the work that he creates does not exist by itself: works of art are not autonomous. They are manuals, real operating systems that are available to the public, who must use them to complete their interpretation. The text of these manuals will be examined here with the aim of understanding the impact of Duchamp’s language, which is mechanic, neutral and indifferent, but always ends up in an ironic word game. It is a language that also suggests anamorphosis, where the transformation of meaning breaks the relation to the reference. I suggest that this use of language can be thought of as a critique of the institution of art, because the work of art cannot operate without its accompanying commentary. However, it is not up to art history to establish this discourse anymore, for a democratization of the artistic experience is offered by our potential accessibility to this specific language. The ‘boîtes-en-valise’ contain these manuals, as well as all the handwritten notes, letters and sketches of every major work by Duchamp. ‘The White Box,’ for example, is entirely dedicated to the ‘Big Glass’. The last proposition that I will explore concerns the reproducibility of these boxes. Already criticizing authorship and authority, Duchamp uses the reproducibility of the text as a way to position language in the center of the experience of visual art. As such, language is inseparable from the intellectual experience; the work of art does not exist without a public, a public that understands it, that comments on it, that allows art to pursue its trajectory further than the retinal/visual. After all, as Duchamp said, it is the viewers that make the painting.