SOMETHING ELSE

The Domestic Life of the Ready-made

I was brought up in a relatively large suburbian house. The house had a main entrance and a rear entrance. The main entrance was only used approximately once every other month in connection with non-family visits. Later I noticed that every home had similar arrangements: in one house I noticed a toilet, which wasnt supposed to be used, as it was reserved for guests who never paid any visit. An other had a room, which as far as I could see always stood empty, but fully equipped and in perfect order. An appartement I frequented for some years was furnished with a richly decorated round table in the living room. No-one never sat at this table, which tablecloth and flower-arrangements nevertheless or rather therefore was impeccably ordered. Common for every home or apartment is that this absent guest had a lot of reserved things, most notably, and inevitably, a newly washed towel.

A home is essentially an aggregate of things that can be consumed, provide means of subsistence, render raw material fit for consumption and act as protection from the vagaries of the climate. This aggregate is handled, undergoes or brings about tangible modifications, and is gradually worn out.

In his extremely influential study, Collectors and curiosities [1], Krysztof Pomian, discusses the other type of objects, namely semiophores, that is objects which were of absolutely no use, [...] but which, being endowed with meaning, represents the invisible. They were put on display instead of being handled, and were not subjected to wear and tear.

Probably every home carries with itself a metaphysics, a metaphysics of the guest. If we are to follow Pomian, this guest represents the value of the home, not necessarily the price. The guest is not linked to real estate, but to the inventory or the arrangement. A cynic would naturally spoil the guest towel, ruin the elaborate floral arrangement at

the round table, and enter through the front door, following Oscar Wildes definition of a cynic, as one who knows the price of everything, but the value of nothing.

One of the first artists who realized this maybe more out of necessity than out of free will was Ilya Kabakov and the School of Moscow Conceptualism (NOMA). Bereft from any opportunity to exhibit in galleries or before any larger audience, Kabakov and NOMA was forced to show their works to each other in their homes or, alternatively, in unpopulated areas outside of Moscow. Later, when Kabakov became a prominent artist in the West with his Total Installations, the majority of the installations represent or re-enacts types of homes or appartements permeated by this invisible guest. This approach is maybe most evident in the installation Ten Characters [2] (1988). The installation itself consists of a community appartement of 17 rooms, housing 10 characters within a realistic staged household. The ten characters are The man who fled into his painting, The man who collects opinions of others, The man who flew

out of his room into the space, The untalented artist, The little man, The composer, The collector, The man who describes his life through other characters, The man who saved Nikolai Viktorovich, and The man who never threw anything away. All theses characters appears in other installations, either in solo installations or together with other characters in group installations.

As any of Kabakovs characters, these ten characters display the common feature that they all illustrates a type of dysfunction in relation to normal domestic practices. This domestic dysfunction is maybe most blatantly expressed by The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away, which appartement thus is filled with objects of no practical use or value.

The majority of characters are however obsessed with observing flies or the little white people. The latter are normally invisible angle-like figures, which however can appear in corners, in the folds of dirty clothes, or in rays of light. They are invisible for normal people, but can appear

for a character when he looks at something else or in the corner of the eye when turning the head.

Another character barricades himself in his apartment, first in a closet, later in a shared toilet where he performs his concerts. The Man Who Flew into his Painting and The Man Who Flew out of his Room into the Space both disappears from their respective apartments with the help of their own devices. In fact, the characters are themselves always absent from the installations. Present are structures and objects and, notably, the little white people, which in real life are as absent as the guest in our houses or apartments.

Ilya Kabakov thus reverses the normal hostguest relation in a home. When we enter an installation we are the guests, together with the objects, the flies, and the little white people. The hosts, all these different, but closely related, characters, are always absent and invisible. Absent is also, of course, any usefulness, any tear and wear; left is only meaning, semiophores.

Even though Kabakov reverses the usual relationship between price and value, between host and guest, and between visibility and invisibility, by making the guest visible and priced, and, conversely, values the host as invisible meaning, he does not explain how this transition is possible: the conversion or transformation is a matter of artistic fact.

But nor does Pomian. For Pomian, the two categories of objects objects of use and semiophores are two diamentrically opposite categories in the sense that the more use an object has, the less meaning it conveys, and vice versa. It is implicitly clear that objects change status in time, but the very transmutation remains inexplicable.

The change was, however, explained in a rather surprisingly way by the anthropologist Michael Thompson in his Rubbish Theory from 1979 [3]. In this he argues that the two categories of objects for use (transient) and semiophores (durables) both are overt and stable categories, and as such

visible. The transmutation from one category to the other is however effected through a hidden and unstable category: rubbish. Rubbish is, following the apt definition of Mary Douglas, matter out of place, and thus invisible. Rubbish is that which is not supposed to be seen. [4]

But it is one thing to understand this transmutation in theoretical terms, and quite an other to produce this transmutation. In my opinion the history of Marcel Duchamps early ready-mades provides an excellent example.

II. Marcel Duchamps first ready-made, the Bottle-rack or Bottle-dryer, is not preserved in any museum or any collection. The only record of this ready-made, as Duchamp himself called it, is a letter he wrote from New York in January 1915 to his sister, Suzanne. The letter reads:

Now if you went up to my place you saw in my studio a bicycle wheel and a bottle rack. I had purchased this as a sculpture already made. And I have an idea concerning the said bottle rack: Listen. Here in N.Y. I bought some objects in the same vein and I treat them as readymade. You know English well enough to understand the sense of readymade that I give these objects. I sign them and give them an English inscription. Ill give you some examples. I have for example a large snow shovel upon which I wrote at the bottom: In advance of the broken arm [...]. Dont try too hard to understand it in the Romantic or Impressionist or Cubist sense that does not have any connection with it. Another readymade is called: Emergency in favor of twice; [...]. This whole preamble in order to actually say: You take for yourself this bottle rack. I will make it a Readymade from a distance. You will have to write at the base and on the inside of the bottom ring in small letters paint with an oil-painting brush, in silver white color, the inscription that I will give you after this, and you will sign it in the same hand as follows: [aprs] Marcel Duchamp. [5]

Later Duchamp stated that he purchased this bottle dryer in 1914, at a department store in Paris, and that it was a

functional, manufactured object, selected on the basis of pure visual indifference [6]. Any inscription did not follow, nor is any reaction or response from Suzanne. Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti, herself a avantgardist painter and sympathetic to her brothers ideas, probably threw away the bicycle wheel and the bottle rack as trash while cleaning up Duchamps Paris-studio sometime after he had left for New York [7]. If Duchamps point with his bottle dryer, to produce a piece of total visual indifference, he indeed succeeded. Not only have we never seen the piece, evidently it was equally invisible and indifferent for the avantgardist artist Suzanne.

Some 22 years later, Duchamp participated in a surrealist exhibition in Paris. As Duchamp was in New York, he asked his friend Man Ray to buy a bottle dryer for him. Man Ray did so, and the bottle dryer was exhibited together with other art works, ethnographica, and curiosities. After the exhibition, the bottle dryer disappeared, probably rejected to the domain to which it belonged: invisibility. But Man Ray did take some photographs from the exhibition, and on two

of them the bottle dryer can be seen. In the late-fifties and the early sixties some artist frieds bought their own bottle dryer and had them signed by Duchamp, so for instance Daniel Spoerri (1960), Robert Rauschenberg (1960), and Richard Hamilton (1963). In 1964, the painter Douglas Gorsline wrote Duchamp to ask if he perchance would sign a bottle dryer he had bought in Paris. Duchamps answer is revealing: In Milan I have just made a contract with Schwarz, authorizing him to make an edition (8 replicas) of all my few ready-mades, including the porte bottle-dryer. I have therefore pledged myself not to sign anymore readymades to protect this edition. But signature or no signature, your find has the same metaphysical value as any other ready-made, [it] even has the advantage to have no commercial value.

If Gorsline was a cynic, he would have thrown away his find, if he was a true art lover, he would have cherished his find even more than before he wrote his letter to Duchamp.

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The same history repeats itself more or less identical with regard to the other early ready-mades from 1914 to 1921. They have with some exceptions all disappeared, and started to become generally known in the art world only when the art dealer Arturo Schwarz in 1964 started to reproduce them in an edition. First at this point did the ready-mades become visible, semiophores and durables. But, we should remember, the replicas produced by Schwarz are technically no ready-mades. They are all produced manually, as durables, and thus in no way already made. That is, these produced editions of objects do in no way traverse any transformation from transient, rubbish to durables.

Duchamp did try to exhibit some of his readymades once. It happened in Bourgeois Gallery in New York in April 1916. In the catalogue we read Marcel Duchamp: Two Readymades. No one know today which readymades the catalogue is referring to, as no one saw them. It could be the Hat Rack hanging in the entrance, it could be Trbuchet, the coat hanger, or it could be something placed in an

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umbrella stand. In fact, we even dont know if they were exhibited at all. The point is exactly this: because no one saw them, they were indeed invisible. In this sense it doesnt matter if they were exhibited or not. The fact stand, that they were invisible and valueless rubbish at place.

The effect is irrelevant if we consider a ready-made as an ordinary object elevated to art by the mere choice of the artist, which is the usual definition of a ready-made. Duchamp did never say anything like this. On the other hand, the effect produced in Bourgeois Gallery by his Two Ready-mades does really make sense if we consider what Duchamp once said apropos his ready-mades. A readymade, he said, is a thing you dont look upon [...] it is something you only see when you turn your head away.

It is thus not a historical error that Duchamps early readymades dont have come down to us. It is rather an inherent property of the very category ready-made. In this sense it is significant, that the only documentation of the early ready-mades we have, are photographs from Duchamps

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studios in New York, which at the same time functioned as Duchamps home from 1915 to 1921.

This is not the place to discuss the art historical implications of these photographs. For the moment I just like to emphasize, that these photographs contain none of the ready-mades which exist today; they contain some readymades we know from later replicas, but which have disappeared, and, most interestingly, they might contain some ready-mades which we didnt know existed. They might have been ready-mades, and they might have been just some stuff in a studio or a home. It is exactly this ambivalent status of the objects which qualify them as vehicles from rubbish to durables, and/or from transient to rubbish. The ambivalence is exactly the crucial point.

Georgia OKeefe once described Duchamps place, and her description underlines this point: On the other side of the room was a bicycle up on the back wheel with a mirror stuck in the top wheel. There was a bathtub in the corner that he said he had put in himself. Duchamps two large glass creations that are now in the Philadelphia Museum were standing against the wall not far

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from the tub, and the scraps of the pieces of metal he had cut to make the patterns on the glass were right on the floor where they had fallen when he cut them. There was a bureau with the bottom drawer out. The drawer ha a good many ties in it, and some were pulled out and hanging over the edge as though he hadnt decided which one he was going to wear. I dont remember much else, but it seems there was a lot of something else in the middle of the room and the dust everywhere was so thick that it was hard to believe. I was so upset over the dusty place that the next day I wanted to go over and clean it up. But Stieglitz told me he didnt think Duchamp would be very pleased. [...] I remember that I was sick with a cold. I just seemed to be sick from having seen this unpleasantly dusty place. This description does indeed give reminiscences of the apartments of Kabakovs characters. But with the difference that this transmutation from transient objects for use, to durable semiophores as art, is not possible in a gallery or a museum, but is perfectly possible in the setting of a private housing. In Georgia OKeefes phrasing: there was a lot of something else ... .

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NOTES
1. Krzysztof Pomian: Collectors and curiosities: Paris and Venice, 15001800, translated by Elizabeth Wiles-Portie. Cambridge: Polity press, 1990. Orig.: Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux, Paris: ditions de lcole des Hautes tudes et Sciences Sociales, 1986. 2. Ilya Kabakov: Ten Characters. Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, 30. April4. June 1988. 3. Michael Thompson: Rubbish Theory. The Creation and Destruction of Value. Oxford etc.: Oxford UP, 1979. 4. Mary Douglas: Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, London: Ark Paperbacks, 1966. 5. Duchamp, in a letter to Suzanne, ca. January 15, 1916; quoted in Naumann, ed., Affectueusement, Marcel: The Letters from Marcel Duchamp. Archives of American Art Journal, vol. XXII, no. 4, 1982, p. 5. 6. Duchamp, in interview with Harriet, Sidney and Carroll Janis, quoted from dHarnoncourt & McShine, edd.: Marcel Duchamp (Philadelphia 1973), p. 275. 7. Upon departing Paris for New York in 1915, he had left Bottle Dryer in his rue Saint-Hippolyte studio, where it remained until his sister Suzanne and sister-in-law Gaby Villon cleared out his belongings sometime in 1916. Schwarz 1997, p. 615.

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