![]() Acknowledging receipt of a message, however, is a very different process. Both concepts imply definitive causal links that carry an excessive weight of determination. 7ĮVEN IF THE DUCHAMP EFFECT means something quite different from Duchamp’s effect, effect is still similar to influence. I must ask the reader’s patience, for we have a long way to go before I can address that truth. If I did not believe that Enwezor intuitively hit upon an important truth with the equivalence of “is” and “can be,” I would not have dissected his statement with such critical scrutiny. When anything can be art, we find ourselves, as Rosalind Krauss would say, in a “post-medium condition.” 6 Finally, what I find most intriguing in Enwezor’s quick critique of the Duchamp effect is his claim that the artist decides “what an object of art is or what it can be” (emphasis mine). Painting, sculpture, music, poetry, cinema are media, but artart-in-generalis not. Further, when Enwezor speaks of the “medium of art,” he shows that he has not truly grasped the message Duchamp put in the mail. The ’60s was a decade when the name art was up for grabs: Anyone could claim it, everyone would re-define it, artists certainly had no monopoly over itwitness Michel Claura, Seth Siegelaub, Harald Szeemann, or Lucy Lippard. Indeterminacy was very much part of the Duchamp effect in the ’50switness John Cage. Duchamp surely saw to it that the name art be given to his readymades, but he neverI insist, nevergave them that name himself 4 a great deal of the effectiveness of the Duchamp effect is due to his withdrawal from traditional artistic agency and to his redefinition of authorship on novel, much less deterministic grounds. What twentieth-century artist’s work has generated more divergent readings than Duchamp’s, with “narratives” ranging from incest to courtly love to alchemy to the Kabbalah to Mallarméan poetry to Lacanian punning? Regarding the artist as “name giver,” Enwezor is closer to Duchamp’s “pictorial nominalism,” yet he makes the same mistake of lending him too much. I don’t see that Duchamp was ableor wanted, for that matterto control the interpretations his work has spawned. 3 The problem lies with the many assumptions Enwezor makes on the editors’ behalf regarding the “Duchamp effect.” They were careful not to title their special issue “Duchamp’s Effect.” Enwezor misses the nuance: He lends the messenger authorship of the message and then infers the “supremacy of the artist,” a very common error and the symptom of a fundamental misreading. ![]() That point, addressed elsewhere in the article, is well taken. The problem with this statement is not its implicit critique of the Western ethnocentrism of October. For Duchamp, it is not tradition, but the artist who not only decides what the work of art is but also controls its narrative of interpretation. ![]() It is the artist who decides what an object of art is or what it can be, rather than the decision being a result of progressive, formal transformation of the medium of art. The Duchamp effect was the most traditional view, because what it purports to do is delineate the supremacy of the artist: the artist as not only a form giver but also a name giver. The message, in the guise of a urinal, did not arrive at its destination until the 1960s, whereupon the whole Western art world reconfigured itself as “post-Duchamp.” Thirty years later, the message’s arrival was still making ripples: In 1994, the editors of the journal October devoted an entire issue to them they titled it “The Duchamp Effect.” 1 Another nine years down the road, and said effect began to draw serious criticism from the field of postcolonial studies. IN 1917, MARCEL DUCHAMP put a message in the mail stating that anything could be art. The danger remains that he’ll get out of the valise we put him in. Looking anew at long held myths of modernism, de Duve here examines the artistic and institutional legacy of the most notorious artwork of our time, which was rejected by the Society of Independent Artists, only to have a monumental effectand a nearly equally consequential misprisionin the twentieth century. IN THE SECOND IN A SERIES of new essays on the avant-garde for Artforum, historian and philosopher THIERRY DE DUVE picks up where he left off last monthcontemplating the reception of Marcel Duchamp’s iconic readymade Fountain upon its first appearance, in 1917, and then in a 1960s culture steeped in utopic ambition. Photo: Smithsonian Archives of American Art. View of “International Exhibition of Modern Art” (The Armory Show), 1913, 69th Regiment Armory, New York.
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