>> Good afternoon everyone.
I'm really pleased
with this turnout.
You know, I am a Marcel Duchamp
scholar and there's about eight
of us in the world, and we
normally talk to each other
in rooms that are pretty empty.
[Laughter] You can sort of see
that sage brush just
rolling down the floors.
But I'm thrilled
with the turnout
and I've got an entertaining
lecture for you,
that is also full, hopefully,
of insights into Duchamp's work.
Now, the reason for this lecture
is the museum recently acquired
"A Box in a Valise" by
Duchamp, arguably one
of the greatest works of art
of the twentieth century.
And I wanted to -- before you
see it in the galleries and have
to deal with its
esoteric contents,
I wanted to give you
some baggage, you know,
so you could approach it.
And as I said, I think that
for us, when we were thinking
about acquisitions
when I started,
I talked with the curators
and my senior staff
and we were very concerned
about the under representation
of women in the collection, and
we were very lucky to acquire
at auction a painting
by Angelica Kaufman
that I think is going to
be a big boost for us.
And it seemed to me we had this
wonderful collection of fluxes,
and the fluxes artists were
the followers of Duchamp
in the 1960s and they made their
own boxes called flux kits,
and I'll be showing some of you
-- some of those here at the end
of the talk and I thought
this is the connecting tissue.
Get the Box in a
Valise in the collection
and those will come to life too.
So I'm going to talk for
probably about 40 minutes.
We'll have some questions.
We can go up to the galleries
and look at the new piece,
and there's also a wonderful
exhibition called the
expanding grid.
And it was a project that
was designed by 30 students
in the studio art
department under the auspices
of Brenda Garrant and
we worked with a number
of faculty members, and what
was terrific about it was the -
they chose the works and they
designed the space that they're
in and I think the
results are extraordinary.
So you'll see that upstairs too.
And there's a reception in
Kim gallery for those of you,
like me, who like
a glass of wine.
Okay. We're going to get going.
Can we have the lights
down please?
Marcel Duchamp described
his Boit in Valise
as a portable museum that
would allow him to carry
around his life's work
in a traveling box.
The artist spent six
years, between 1935
and 1941 recreating
his [inaudible]
in miniature using an
elaborate and, at that time,
virtually obsolete
technique known as [inaudible]
which allows the colors
to be precisely applied
to multiple impressions
of the same black
and white reproduction
by means of stencils.
[Cough] These accurate
facsimiles -- show here --
of the artist's early
paintings and drawings,
as well as the diminutive models
of three of his ready-made's --
so you have at the top
-- this is Air de Paris.
It's a [inaudible]
from a chemist's shop
and Duchamp was in Paris.
He was returning to America
and he had a friend
called Walter Aaronsberg.
And so he had the
chemist break the file,
fill it with Paris
air and seal it.
Very simple idea.
Duchamp's ideas are
always very simple.
This is a typewriter
cover called Underwood.
And this is the notorious
fountain.
A men's urinal that he
submitted to an exhibition.
And of course it was censored.
And what you have
to understand is,
that all of these things
were about that big.
They're -- this is
like a doll's house,
so three of the ready mades --
and these provided the source
material for the first edition
of the work, which
was issued in 1941
in a series of 20 deluxe boxes.
So this is one of the 20.
The works in the deluxe edition
consist of a plywood box,
fitted inside a leather
covered suitcase or valise,
with a carrying handle.
Now, Duchamp commissioned
a joiner in Paris
to create the wooden
components using his own designs
and this is one of the drawings
that he did for the work --
including the guide rails for
the two [inaudible] pulling outs
and the wooden struts which make
up the monogram M for Marcel.
This project is nothing
if not an autobiography.
Each box in the deluxe edition
also contained an original work
of art mounted on the inside
of the lid in addition
to the 68 standard reproductions
of Duchamp's most
significant works.
And you can see in this image
on the far side, you get --
this is the original
work of art.
There are these chess pieces
that he designed and the put
in a map of the United States.
Here's another one -- the
drawing Hand Reflection.
And what's interesting
about this is
that some collectors
have no idea
about what was a reproduction
and what was original.
So, you know, for
years, these people --
I should tell you who they are.
They're Helene and
Henri Oppenau.
They were Swiss friends
of the artist.
Nothing to do with
the art world.
You know, never really
were collectors.
They just got this as a
gift for Christmas one year,
and when they were told at
the end of their lives, oh,
I see you have a great Duchamp
drawing, they said, "Yes.
Isn't it great.
He reproduced all his work," and
the dealer [inaudible] said "No.
That's the real thing.
That's the real deal."
The artist spent the rest
of his life assembling
six further editions,
each slightly different
from the other which make
up the standard edition
of 300 boxes
that were [inaudible]
likely distributed
in small batches during the last
three decades of his lifetime.
Eventually Duchamp grew
tired of the repetitive
and time-consuming nature of the
project, and hired assistants
to help complete the set.
These assistants included Xenia
Cage, the wife of John Cage
and a wonderful collage
artist in her own right,
as well as Joseph Cornell,
who would later become famous
for his own box constructions.
And Cornell's boxes often
include references to the work
of his friend and mentor,
as seen in the disks found
in the woodpecker habitat
series that recycled materials
that Duchamp had discarded
from his earlier experiments
with rotating disks.
Now, these disks in this box --
and obviously the scale is off.
This is quite a small work.
It looks huge.
Duchamp designed these box --
these disks for a toy
that he wanted to sell
in Macy's department store,
and Macy's were originally
interested
but they couldn't agree on the
price and Duchamp put these
in the trash and we know that
Cornell in a later interview,
said that he retrieved
these disks from the trash
and put them in his work
and Duchamp came to one
of his openings and
he said, "Oh,
Those look very familiar to me.
[Laughter] Where
did you get them?"
And we did a wonderful
exhibition in Philadelphia.
It was called Duchamp
Cornell in residence.
And we found all
sorts of examples.
Whenever you see -- I don't know
if you noticed that
earlier piece.
I should probably go back to it.
This drawing, for example,
where -- can you see?
This is actually torn.
It's like a collage.
So he tore the paper to give
this map of the United States.
So the other side, the
part that he threw away,
turns up in a Cornell box.
[Laughter] You know,
this is the sort
of thing we're dealing with.
But he was a great assistant
and Joseph Cornell made
basically I would say something
like 75 boxes.
And then he made his
own boxes which were,
you know, very different.
So this is the work that the
Hood Museum has acquired.
It's from the final edition
of the Box in a Valise.
It's known to scholars
as Series F. You got
to love these scholars like me.
[Laughter] We minutely
document the differences
between each series
with our little rulers.
This is Series F. Which
Duchamp completed in 1966
and obviously this is
upstairs on the second floor.
I invite you to see
it after the talk.
We've made a huge
[inaudible] to show it in
and I think you'll
really enjoy it.
House in a Red Leather Box.
The size of a large
attache case, and assembled
with the help of the
artist's stepdaughter,
Jacqueline Matisse Monier.
The works in Series F are the
most sought after by museums
and collectors since,
they represent Duchamp's
final statement on the theme
of the portable museum.
In addition to the 68
standard reproductions,
these Series include
12 additional works.
Now one of them you see here.
This is the Wedge of Chastity.
Duchamp got married in
1954 to Teeny [inaudible].
She had been married to the
art dealer, Pierre Matisse.
And he gave her as a wedding
present, a thick wedge of bronze
that stuck inside a gummy
piece of dental plastic.
She carried it around
in her purse.
I met her.
For the rest of her life,
she had that in her purse.
And this is one of my favorites.
This is Objet d'Art.
Now this looks like a penis.
[Laughter] I don't think there's
any doubt about that, right?
It's a vain detumescent penis,
and Duchamp surprised
really everyone by revealing
that it's actually a --
it was used to make a
cast of female breast.
And Bob Gover once
explained to me
that casting a female breast is
the most difficult think you can
ever do if you're used to doing
body casts, because it's --
it's just, you know, such a
soft pliable area of the body.
And so it's like a brace and you
can imagine it being filled up.
But what Duchamp loved was that
it signified something else
and all of his life he was
interested in this breaking
down barriers, you know,
gender indeterminacy was
something he absolutely adored,
as well as the art world.
I mean his work, basically after
1912, was taking on tradition
and turning it over and he was
such a radical avant
garde artist
and I think that's why everyone
still looks at his work today.
So this is one a series, along
with the Wedge of Chastity,
of erotic objects that he
had issued in the 1950s
with virtually no explanation.
It was another 15 years before
he actually started speaking
about what tehse things were,
and people would just --
you know, you can imagine the
imagination ran away with them.
And it's interesting.
For these works that are
reproduced in this series,
he actually used
color photography.
Color photography had advanced
to the stage that it had caught
up with that [inaudible]
technique
that he had been using.
Okay. It seems clear
from the correspondence
that Duchamp's original
intention in the Boit
in Valise project was
to create something akin
to a catalogue raisonner,
with color reproductions
and explanatory text.
On March 5, 1935,
just a few months
after publishing
the Green Box Notes,
Duchamp told Katherine Dryer
that he was considering
making an album
of approximately all
the things I produced.
The fact that Duchamp was
planning a catalogue raisonner
of his work in the
mid-1930s is surprising,
given his Dadesque beliefs,
as well as his notoriously
meagre artistic output.
Even his long-time
friend, Walter Aaronsberg,
who prided himself
on understanding even the most
esoteric of the artist's works,
was perplexed by the
autobiographical nature
of the Boit in Valise,
while also recognizing the
uniqueness of the project.
And this is Aaronsberg.
It has been difficult to
know exactly what to say
of such an epitome of
a life's work he wrote
to Duchamp on May 21, 1943.
"You have invented a new
kind of autobiography.
It is the kind of autobiography
in a performance of marionettes.
You have become the
puppeteer of your past."
End quote.
Unlike many of his
contemporaries,
including Pablo Picasso,
[inaudible] and Henri Matisse,
who had by this time had
created a prodigious number
of paintings, Duchamp had
deliberately limited his
artistic production to
a handful of key works.
In doing so, Duchamp believed
that he could avoid
repeating himself,
which he argued had
been the sad fate
of so many successful
painters in the modern era.
The Boit in Valise can thus be
seen as a self-deprecated joke
with an undertone of
criticism for the excesses
of his fellow artists which
allowed Duchamp to proudly claim
that his [inaudible] was so
small that he could fit all
of his art objects
into a small suitcase.
There is also the possibility
that the artist initially
intended his album
as a humorous parody
of the comprehensive catalogue
raissoner of the Picasso's work
that Christian Zervas
began in 1932.
The monumental task
of documenting Picasso's
work throughout his lifetime.
The Spanish-born artist
would live another 40 years
and the catalogue raissoner
would eventually number 33
volumes, that you see
here, was widely publicized
at the time especially after
Picasso decided to aid Zervas
by signing each painting
with the exact date
of its completion.
Long suspicion --
suspicious of the notion
of the artist's genius,
Duchamp was rather scornful
in his comments to the press
about the Zervas catalogue
raissoner which smacked to him
of narcissism and careerism.
In the television interview with
James Johnson Sweeny that aired
on NBC in 1956, Duchamp
explained his reasons
for making a comprehensive
anthology of his own works,
as well as, a shift from
book form to portable museum.
"It was a new form
of expression for me.
Instead of painting
something, the idea was
to reproduce the paintings that
I love so much in miniature.
I didn't know how to do it.
I thought of a book but
I didn't like that idea.
Then I thought of the
idea of a box in which all
of my works would be mounted
like in a small museum
and here it is in this valise."
End quote.
At a time when no art
museum would honor Duchamp
with a retrospective, the
artist decided in effect
to be his own curator organizing
a self-contained traveling
exhibition of his life's
work that could be changed
at will simply by rearranging
the contents of the box.
I should point out that
every one of these kind
of loose black folders, if you
turn it over, has another image.
So essentially you
can keep remaking
and playing with his endlessly.
There's an endless cycle
of repetitions possible.
Why the artist should want
to faithfully reproduce
the highlights
of his artistic career in
miniature and pack them
into a small suitcase has been
the subject of great discussion
since the first Boix in
Valise appeared in 1941.
Benjamin Bookler, who has
offered the most convincing
reading of the work to date,
views it as representing
Duchamp's attempt
to critically address
the institutionalization
of the avant garde, meaning
the process of acculturation
by which the transgressive
artist practices
of the early twentieth century
came to be officially validated,
categorized historically and
stylistically, reproduced
and commodified and consequently
domesticated and defanged
by museums and art galleries.
The Boix in Valise reconstructs
this system only to parody it
by self-administering the
institution acculturation
of the work, as well
as its rarefication
in the commercial art market.
The museum layout,
the reproduced status
of the art works,
and their curatorial
and pedagogical presentation
with each artwork being clearly
catalogued and identified
in terms of title,
date, and collection.
I hope you can see that.
He basically did museum
labels for everything.
These all speak to an
historical awareness
of a specific reformulized --
reformulation of the
art museum in the 1930s.
You just have to think of MOMA,
you know, which opened in 1929
and Duchamp was very upset with
MOMA because it billed itself
as a first museum of modern art.
Well Duchamp had founded with
Katherine Dryer and Anne Rae,
the [inaudible] Anonym
which they claim was the
first modern art museum
in America in 1921.
And whereas they saw their
work as being very much
against this kind of
cataloguing and, you know, isms,
describing everything
through isms.
When Art News turned
60, Duchamp sent a cable
to the editor saying
congratulations
on 60 ism packed years.
[Laughter] So, you know,
to him MOMA was all
about this explaining
of the avant garde
that he felt was the wrong
way to go, so Booker's idea is
that this is just all parody.
And we'll come back to that.
Duchamp conceptualized his
portable museum at the same time
that Andre Mallereau
was rethinking his own,
and there are numerous
similarities
between the two projects.
After reading Walter Benjamin's
seminal 1936 article on Art
in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction, Mallereau began
to consider the promising
possibilities
of transforming the museum
from a geographically
determined collection
of original art objects,
traditionally organized
by national schools as in the
Louvre, into a virtual display
of cross-referenced
photographic reproductions,
much like Google Images today.
This new model represents
a post national
and post architectural museum
since the images would be
free floating rather than,
held down through semi-permanent
collection displays.
Mallereau's museum
without walls -- sorry.
Yeah. That's right.
That's how it translates.
Mallereau's -- I guess we'd
say the museum without walls.
As it came to be known,
uprooted works of art
from their historical
geographical or temporal context
and reorganized them along
purely stylistic grounds.
In one memorable
instance, for example,
he compared a photograph
of an angel's head
from Rheims cathedral to
another of a sculpted Buddha
from the fourth century
Kandahara.
As a result, artistic
identity is subsumed
under a metaphysics of style.
As TJ Dimos has argued,
Duchamp's Boix
in Valise shares
Mallereau's system
of miniaturized reproductions,
that have been decontextualized
from any historical context.
As a mobile museum of color
reproductions contained inside a
leather valise, Duchamp's
box is thus an idiosyncratic
re-enactment of Mallereau's
museum without walls.
The major difference, however,
is that Duchamp's museum
[inaudible] is a monographic
retrospective exhibition,
something that Mallereau's
model dispenses with in favor
of thematic displays
that trace cross-cultural
and trans-historical
stylistic developments.
Duchamp's willingness
to reproduce his works
in miniature may have
stemmed from his belief
that there was nothing
inherently sacred about a work
of art, and that the idea behind
an art object was more important
than the object itself.
The obsessive attention
to detail that one finds
in the production of the
boxes also suggests a concern
to preserve the past,
while simultaneously
keeping his ideas alive
for new generations of artists.
The Boix in Valise project began
in the spring of 1935 at a time
when Duchamp was preparing
to restore the [inaudible]
by [inaudible], otherwise
known as the Large Glass,
which had been badly damaged
following its first public
exhibition at the Brooklyn
Museum of Art in 1926.
This is a -- one of the few
photographs of this work.
If you can read this dedication,
it was from Marcel Duchamp
to Joseph Cornell, at the time
that Cornell was
making the boxes.
The large glass was returned
to its owner, Katherine Dryer,
in a flatbed truck, bouncing
along the Connecticut --
the rural Connecticut roads.
Imagine that.
Two enormous panes of glass.
This work is nine feet high.
Bouncing along these
roads to her home
in West Reading Connecticut,
the two enormous panes
of glass shattered, and it
took Dryer another four years
to summon the courage to inform
Duchamp that his magnum opus,
which he had worked on from 1912
to 1923 was now completely
in pieces.
The artist decided to
laboriously glue back --
glue the broken shards
back together
and recreate the sections
that were beyond repair,
which required him to
revisit the handwritten notes
and diagrams that had prepared
the way for the large glass.
In October 1934, Duchamp
published 94 of these notes
in facsimile form in a
limited edition boxed set known
to posterity as the Green
Box, due to the color
of the felt covered
cardboard box
that houses the notes
and diagrams.
And you can see these
have no order.
There's an absolute randomness
to the nature of this.
You can just, like
the Boix in Valise,
you can just put it
together any way you want.
The notes published in the Green
Box provided an indispensable
guide to the genesis
construction and the meaning
of the work, which
could now be understood
as an allegory of
frustrated desire.
They also helped Duchamp
to lovingly conserve
and stabilize the large
glass over the course
of two months during the summer
of 1936, when he worked daily
on the task of carefully
gathering the shattered glass
fragments and fixing them back
in their original position.
"It's a job I tell you,"
he told a local journalist.
"But fun. Like doing a
jigsaw puzzle, only worse."
[Laughter] Duchamp completed
his repair of the large glass
by sandwiching the
entire assembly
between two additional plates
of glass which he mounted
in a metal frame and
installed in the library
of Katherine Dryer's Connecticut
home, and here they are together
at the end of that
two month stint.
The large glass is
now back on view.
He also took advantage of his
close proximity to the work
to recreate this huge
painting on glass in the Boix
in Valise using transparent
celluloid instead of glass
which -- I don't
have to tell you --
would have broken over time
because of the portable
nature of this.
He didn't want to
ever have this again.
So this is this very
sort of lovely celluloid
that you see through, and
you'll see it upstairs
and he recreated the [inaudible]
molds using the same technique.
Upon his return to Europe in
September 1936, Duchamp wrote
to Dryer that repairing the
large glass had been quote a
wonderful vacation
in my past life,
a vacation in past time
instead of new era.
And I would argue that he
continues this vacation
in past time when he gets
back to Paris and he,
having seen his works
in the United States.
I think part of the
reason he went to Dryer
to recreate the large glass
was to also see his works.
He wanted to make color notes.
Then he could go back to Paris
and really begin the serious
work of recreating them.
So it's not surely
no coincidence
that Duchamp began making
preparations for the Boix
in Valise in the
immediate aftermath
of both the publication
of the Green Box,
and the painstaking
reconstruction
of the large glass.
And I'll just give you one
example here of the sort
of color notes that he took
while he was in the States.
So this is a [inaudible]
enamelled.
You probably know this piece.
There was an advertisement
for [inaudible] enamel.
So imagine an S there.
And he created a sort of bar
so he could make a [inaudible]
on his friend [inaudible]
the great poet
and it's a little girl
painting a bed and he put --
I don't know if you
can see this.
He drew a reflection
of her hair but,
it's a very minimal intervention
to what was basically a
sign in a painter's shop.
It's what they call an
assisted ready-made.
And then you look
at the color notes.
And all of these kind of splashy
colors because he really wants
to recreate them
and using, you know,
the most up-to-date
way of doing it.
Now, all of these projects
-- so the Green Box,
the Boix in Valise
and the reconstruction
of the large glass, to me share
an interest in the replication
and preservation of works of
a fragile and ephemeral nature
that might otherwise have
been lost or destroyed.
They also reflect Duchamp's
thinking about the facsimile
and the nature of the
work of art in the age
of mechanical reproduction --
to borrow the title of Walter
Benjamin's famous 1936 essay.
As I shall argue, Duchamp's Boix
in Valise venture offers
a powerful commentary on
and counterpoint to Benjamin's
writings about the aura
of a work of art and it's
lost in an age of photography
and film, which as we have seen,
directly inspired Andre
Mallereau's notion
of a museum without walls.
According to Benjamin,
photography
and film represented a crisis
for painting which, as an object
for contemplative immersion,
cannot tolerate mass
viewing conditions.
The endless reproduction
of works
of art would inevitably
destroy their authority,
since the changes in human
perception necessarily happen
when technology represents
reality
in different ways would ensure
that paintings would
become ubiquitous, ephemeral
and ultimately valueless.
Benjamin analyzed [inaudible]
montage and film which had --
both have an intentionally
jarring and violent impact
on the senses of the
viewer that denies any form
of associative thought
or contemplation.
However, there is an ambivalence
in Benjamin's writings
about the aura of a work of art,
whose meaning is
not entirely clear.
On the one hand, it's lost
is celebrated as the end
of the exclusive ritual
status of an art object,
which previously belonged
in the privileged domain
of the wealthy private
collector or museum.
In favor of a popular
mass audience
that now has unprecedented
access to works of art
through photography,
postcards and other forms
of mechanical reproduction.
Yet on the other, Benjamin
mourns the disappearance
of aesthetic experience of a
unique and unrepeatable kind
that he felt would be
the inevitable result
of the mass reproductions
of paintings.
He never really explains what
the aura is for the artwork.
He gives as an analogy the idea
of being in the countryside
and seeing a mountain or the
branch of a tree and that idea
of contemplative
immersion is very important.
And I think it relates to a lot
of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer
and the idea of the
stimmung, the -- -
I think for him the aura
was a sort of sensibility
that could be lost
through endless repetition.
Unlike Benjamin, however Duchamp
refused to believe that the work
of art was capable
of having an aura.
And his rejection of
painting in favor of film
and photography during the
Dada era was a direct result
of his loss of faith
that any kind
of aesthetic contemplation was
possible especially the kind
that Benjamin yearned for.
He just saw it as a kind of
doomed nostalgic romanticism
for something that
never existed.
When asked why he
quit painting in 1918,
Duchamp responded pointedly,
my attitude towards art is
that of an atheist
towards religion.
I would rather be shot or
kill myself than paint again.
[Laughter] That's a bit extreme.
Like Benjamin, however,
Duchamp recognized
that the art object would have
a different presence in an age
of mechanical reproduction
and that it would take value
from something other
than [inaudible]
in the traditional sense.
Duchamp thus embraced the
facsimile and the copy
at the very moment that Benjamin
was lamenting their role
in diminishing the aura
of the work of art.
It should be pointed out that
Duchamp could have used faster
reproduction techniques
such as offset lithography
to make the facsimiles of his
works in the Boix in Valise,
but chose instead to use an
incredibly laborious printing
technique that gave him,
however, a far superior degree
of exactitude in terms of color.
After obtaining black and white
photographs of all the paintings
and works on paper that he
wanted to reproduce in the Boix
in Valise, Duchamp travelled
to see each work in person,
making detailed notations on
their colors and execution.
He then began making batches
of color type reproductions
that were printed in monochrome
on very large sheets of paper.
Duchamp added the necessary
colors to these black
and white images based on
his color notes, as well as,
his memory of creating
the originals.
From these hand colored
reproductions,
the highly skilled craftsmen
that worked with Duchamp
at the [inaudible] studio
in Paris, prepared a series
of watercolors that served to
establish the necessary sequence
of colors and thus the number of
stencils required for each work.
Then for each individual
shade, a proof was pasted
onto zinc foil and the
parts to be colored were cut
out of the proof and the foil
with a special knife
before the color was applied
with a flat brush.
As [inaudible] noted, it
took around eight weeks
to obtain a satisfactory
image using this process.
On average, each work reproduced
in the Boix in Valise,
so such as these,
each work contains
about 30 individual colors
all applied through --
by hand, through stencils and
then color corrected by Duchamp,
who would reject several proofs
before reaching the exact hue
that he felt most accurately
reproduced the original color
in each painting.
Unimaginable as this may seem
today, this meticulous process,
which took six years
to complete,
gave Duchamp the result he
desired, namely a series
of miniature facsimiles of
his most important works
that precisely replicated
their colors.
Multiple in number yet
singular in appearance,
these paradoxical works
transcend the facile mechanical
replication of images through
their fetishistic attachment
to the colors of the original.
No mechanical process
had yet been invented
that could rival the outstanding
quality of the colors
in these uncanny simulacra.
Yet the sheer scale
of the project
for which the artist created
some 23,000 reproductions would
have been impossible to have
been conceived before the age
of mechanical reproduction.
The concept of mass reproduction
thus becomes for Duchamp,
a new way of thinking
about the work of art.
Rejecting Benjamin's
notion of the importance
of an object is based on
its singular identity,
its uniqueness, its originality,
Duchamp instead celebrates the
plurality of copies available
through mass reproduction
as the most salient
and pervasive manifestation
of modernity.
The artist delighted in
the fact that the Boix
in Valise was not
recognized as a work of art
when it first appeared
in the early 1940s
and was even regarded as proof
that he had ceased
to be an artist.
Basically no critic could
accept this as a work of art.
It was either described
as a print edition
-- and that happened.
Or it was seen as
some sort of joke.
You know, they had
no critical language
with which to engage this.
Holding onto the notion of
the erratic original artwork,
critics simply had no
vocabulary with which to deal
with these works which
offered a profound challenge
to the accepted codes and
practices of artmaking
as they were understood
at the time.
Duchamp even submitted works
related to the Boix in Valise
to the 1940 International
Exhibition of Surrealism
in Mexico City where they
were once again ignored
by the critics.
And this is one of the
things I discovered,
actually to my horror, in doing
the research for this lecture.
Is that when we, as scholars,
look at the [inaudible]
and we think, oh the new
[inaudible] it was shown
in Mexico City.
It wasn't the [inaudible].
It was one of these.
And so a lot of -- a lot of the
exhibition histories now have
to come under scrutiny.
I found that in a letter
to Bratton and it's one
of those discoveries that
gives you a migraine.
[Laughter] It means you've
got a lot of work to do.
Ironically, the only
person, only person,
to validate these works
as works of art rather
than mere reproductions was
Walter Benjamin who noted
that strange attraction
in his diary
in the late spring of 1937.
Saw Duchamp this
morning, he wrote,
"Same cafe on the
Boulevard St. Germaine.
Showed me his painting.
Nude Descending a Staircase.
In a reduced format.
Colored by hand on [inaudible].
Breathtakingly beautiful.
Maybe mention."
Benjamin recognized
that Duchamp had managed
to blur the boundaries
between the unique art object
and the multiple in this work
whose breathtaking beauty
derived from the [inaudible]
method of applying colors,
reinstated the aura into a
mechanically reproduced work
of art and I think this is
why there may be mention point
is interesting.
Did Benjamin think of
revising that essay.
I would also mention here
-- you probably noticed.
This is a notary --
notarized postage stamp.
This is how a notary would
authenticate a work of art.
Duchamp had a public notary
authenticate a replica.
[Laughter] This is all
part of the parody.
It was not until 1941
that Duchamp began
to use the term Boix in
Valise and his decision
to place his works
inside a leather suitcase,
was almost certainly informed
by his personal circumstances
during the Second World War.
The German occupation of Paris
that began in June 1940 meant
that Duchamp was
unable to travel freely
through the occupied zone to
obtain materials for his boxes,
much of which came from
suppliers outside Paris,
especially in the
south of France.
I thought of a scheme,
he later record.
I had a friend, Gustav Kandal,
who is a wholesale
cheese merchant in Lasalle
and I asked him if he
could commission me to go
and buy cheese for him
in the unoccupied sector.
Now I'm going to
break this quote
by saying Gustav Kandal is one
of Duchamp's great
childhood friends
and this is the portrait he
made of his mother in 1912.
It's his [inaudible] phase.
Very short lived.
Only one painting.
[Laughter] This painting
horrified the mother.
[Laughter] Horrified.
She really -- she [inaudible]
she'd been impaled or something
and it led to a bit of
a rift between the two,
but it's a great work.
That has nothing to
do with this quote.
But I'm just going to
leave it on the screen.
Okay. So Gustav Kandal who was
a wholesale cheese merchant
in Lasalle and I asked
him "If I could --
if he could commission me
to go and buy cheese for him
in the unoccupied sector.
Kandal gave me a letter which I
took to the German authorities
and with that letter and
a bribe of 1,200 francs,
I got from a secretary
that famous little red
card called Ausweis
which allowed me travel by
train from Paris to Marseilles.
I thought I had to be very
careful and buy cheese
and probably give an
account of my expenses
when I crossed the border
between the two zones
but the Germans never
asked me any questions."
End quote.
In the newly conceived
Boix in Valise,
the artist's works
are reproduced
on a Lilliputian scale and
cleverly arranged inside the box
like a traveling
salesman's wares,
that's mirroring his own efforts
to gather much needed paper
and other materials for his
project which were hidden
under the cheese samples
inside a leather valise.
This is the whole key to
why he shifts from a book,
that early autobiography, the
book, the anthology, the album,
into a leather suitcase.
He leaves out the cheese,
but that's another thing.
In the spring of 1941,
Duchamp used his travel permit
as a cheese merchant to make
three trips to Marseilles
where he picked up enough
supplies for around 50 boxes
that he planned to assemble
in the United States.
Duchamp brought them to
Grenoble and shipped them
as household effects, with Peggy
Guggenheim's art collection
to New York where he would
join them in May 1942,
after spending nearly a
year obtaining the necessary
travel permits.
However, there was poignant
historical correspondence
between the fate of
Duchamp, who was able
to cross Nazi checkpoints
without drawing attention
to his artistic identity,
and that of Walter Benjamin
who escaped Paris
on June 13, 1940,
the day before the German
army entered the city,
but not before placing a copy
of the work of art in the age
of mechanical reproduction
in the Bibliotech
Nationale for safekeeping.
Benjamin had been living in
Paris as a refugee since 1933
when endangered as a Jewish
intellectual he escaped Germany
after the Nazis seized power.
The Gestapo had issued
an arrest warrant for him
in the late 1930s so he
was absolutely terrified
of this moment.
Benjamin arrived in
Marseilles in mid-September 1940
where Max Holkheimer
had arranged
to have an emergency
exit visa waiting for him
at the United States consulate.
Unfortunately, Benjamin
had failed
to obtain a French exit
visa newly required
by the collaboration
as Vichy regime,
which was relentlessly
purging its enemies
of the state at that time.
After anxiously waiting for
several days without being able
to secure the necessary travel
permits, Benjamin took a train
to the countryside near the
Spanish border and from there,
out of sheer desperation,
decided to make the
harrowing crossing across --
through the Pyrenees Mountains,
with a small group of refugees,
and enter Spain illegally.
Because of a heart condition, he
could only walk for 10 minutes
at a time and then stop
for one, yet he refused
to let anyone help him or
even carry his black leather
briefcase which contained,
he said, a new manuscript
that was more important
that I am.
After arriving in the Spanish
border town of Port Boo,
Benjamin was informed that
he would not be admitted
into the country without the
outstanding French exit visa
and was to be sent back
the following morning
to the German authorities
in occupied France.
Unwilling to accept this
fate, he committed suicide
in his hotel room on
September 26, 1940.
He was just 48 years old.
Soon afterwards, his
leather briefcase was handed
over to a court in
Figares where the contents,
including this new
manuscript, later went missing
and have never been recovered.
So I hope that like me, you'll
pause a moment this evening
as you look into
Duchamp's fabulous suitcase,
obsessively filled
with reproductions
of his life's work, and think
of Benjamin's empty leather
briefcase and the tragic loss
of one of the greatest minds
of the twentieth century.
So to conclude then, we have
seen how Duchamp's concept
of the portable museum
intersects with and responds
to Walter Benjamin's ideas
about the changing status of art
in the age of mass reproduction
and Andre Mallereau's thoughts
about art as an assembly
of meaning informed
by different voices
across time and place.
Whether by coincidence or
design, Duchamp, Benjamin
and Mallereau, all of
whom were working in Paris
in the mid-1930s,
were simultaneously exploring
the reproduction, transformation
and distribution of images
at a time when film, media,
[inaudible] photography
and technology were transforming
the culture and environment
of the city in which they lived.
Since Duchamp's own death
in October 1968, the meaning
and significance of
the Boix in Valise
within the artist's [inaudible]
has increased considerably.
It is no longer regarded
as a mere collection
of reproductions, having little
more than documentary value,
but rather as a unique
and important work
of art in its own right.
Moreover, it has been
increasingly apparent
that Duchamp's use of
replication and appropriation
to undercut accepted notions of
originality and authenticity,
was hugely important to
subsequent generations
of artists, including
the fluxes group
which responded enthusiastically
to the ideas behind the Boix
in Valise in their own flux
kicks, many of which are now
in the collection of the Hood
Museum of Art, and here's two
that are in the collection,
and we had a wonderful
exhibition last year
that just won the international
art critics' association award
for best college or
university museum exhibition.
Very nice.
In many respects, it
was the fluxes group
that carried the legacy of the
Box in a Valise into the future
and in different ways
and varying degrees,
and contemporary artists
working today have continued
to build upon the conceptual
strategies that Duchamp
so neatly and brilliantly
packed into his portable museum.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> I told you I'd
speak for 40 minutes.
That was exactly 40 minutes.
[Laughter] So we'll have
the lights up and maybe --
we've got 15 minutes
for questions
and then we'll go
get a glass of wine.
Yeah. There's a question.
Ask me...
>> [Inaudible] but you mean to
say he was doing the same thing
with reproductions [inaudible]
so then [inaudible] on a black
and white photograph
and using memories
and notes to get the colors?
[Inaudible] I mean
that is, to me,
that's incredibly interesting,
especially [inaudible]
bringing memory back
into the [inaudible].
>> I think so too.
I mean, you know, I - Mallereau
is often cited in connection
with the Boix in Valise,
but I think what a lot
of scholars have not thought
about is just how precise
these reproductions were.
I think Duchamp really saw
the challenge was it's not
about the aura.
It's about what do
you do when you're
in an image saturated
culture, but the images are not
as good as the originals.
You know, he wanted to
make a Mona Lisa that was
as good as the Mona Lisa.
And then you know he writes
[inaudible] at the bottom.
In letters L-H-O-O-Q,
which if you sound it
out in French [inaudible]
means she has a hot ass.
[Laughter] So he's both kind
of undercutting tradition.
He's like, you know,
why do artists love
this piece you know.
You shouldn't be looking
at Leonardo any more.
But then again, he's
taking it very seriously.
He took very seriously the
kind of liminal space --
what he called the [inaudible]
between the original
and the copy.
And I think that's what
challenged Benjamin
and it's clear from that quote.
I think that Benjamin
sort of saw this.
This is kind of amazing
what he did.
How do you make a
reproduction that's beautiful?
It should be ugly.
>> [Inaudible]
>> Yeah. That's a
very good question.
I've thought about that a lot.
I think if the large glass
had broken in 1918...
>> What is the question?
>> Oh. Sorry.
So the question is about the
recreation of the large glass
and why didn't he
just make another one?
You know, he's so
interested in the copy,
and he absolutely
had that option.
He had all of the drawings
and all of the notes
that he then obsessively
recreates --
I don't really have a
good answer to that.
I mean I think, in a way,
that would have been a
more complicated project.
He would have had to
have gone out and get --
got all of those --
because you know,
he doesn't do things
in half measures.
Picasso could have painted
the Bride Stripped Bare
in about two days.
Duchamp takes 11 years.
You know, it's obsessive,
obsessive, obsessive.
Yeah. I think in 1918 he
would have either said fine.
That's the status
of a work of art.
It's chance.
It's destroyed.
Throw it away.
But something changed in
him in that mid-30s moment
that was making him
think about reproduction
and in a way I wonder if it
was -- had he made a copy --
as he did with the ready-mades.
The ready-mades were
always being thrown away.
People didn't know
what they were.
I don't know.
I feel like he starts to
think about posterity.
And that's something that
I think a lot of people
who admire Duchamp don't
want to think about,
because they want Picasso
to be this artist genius who's
thinking about his reputation.
But I think in a funny
way, Duchamp did too.
He did not destroy
the large glass.
He repaired it.
That's a very different thing.
So you're picking up on
something that's thorny.
Yeah.
>> [Inaudible] What did
he do to make a living?
[Laughter]
>> It's a very interesting
question.
He was sort of a Larry Gogozian.
He became an art dealer
and we know that the --
the Boix in Valise was
incredibly expensive,
but one of the things that
he'd done was he was a friend
of Brancusi.
And he sort of became
Brancusi's agent.
And the Brancusis that are
in American museums were
often sold by Duchamp.
Duchamp was the intimator.
He had all of the
connections in the art world.
People like Walter
Aaronsberg and Katherine Dryer
and Alfred Barr, they were
forming great museum collections
and you needed a great Brancusi.
Duchamp was the intermediary
and he had a cut
and that cut paid for this.
Duchamp did not work
a day in his life.
But he found ways to do this.
And, you know, again it's
interesting because no one likes
to think of him as a
dealer but he sort of was,
but he wasn't a dealer in the
sense of driving a, you know,
Mercedes Benz and going on jets.
He was really someone
who all the money
that he would make back
into these projects
which were incredibly -- he
had full time for three years,
at the very height of this,
which I see from 1937 to 1940.
When the Nazis invade,
it's a real problem.
He's got to get out.
But he had full time --
about six workers in
this [inaudible] factory.
I mean they had never
seen anything like it.
>> What do you think
[inaudible].
I mean I'm also thinking about
the way pop art [inaudible].
>> Well, I think --
so the question is,
what did Duchamp
think about museums?
I think that he thought
that they could have
been far more radical.
I think he -- this is where
he's akin to Mallereau,
is that surely in the age of
replication and reproduction,
your displays can change.
Why do you have to have the
national schools together?
You know, that, to
him was a travesty.
I've written a paper
on how his design
for the 1938 Surrealist
Exhibition in Paris was a parody
of the things that were
happening in Germany.
You had, in '37, the
general art show,
but you also had
these exhibitions
of official German art.
So in other words, you went
to the general arts show
and you laughed at all these
grotesqueries of modern art
and then you went
and saw [inaudible]
and all the official German
artists who, of course,
were making the most
insipid crap
and Duchamp parodies
that in Paris.
So he was certainly aware
of this change in the museum
where prior to the 1930's there
was really not a great deal
of interest in modern art.
All of a sudden, museums are now
collecting it but what they have
to do is, as I said,
defang it a little bit.
They have to sort of take
the radical intentions out
and show it as traditional
artworks.
If they really allowed
these artworks to speak
for themselves, it would
actually bring into question
that whole reason to be.
And Duchamp famously said,
I doubt the word to be.
You know, he was a doubter.
He wanted to question
everything.
Why do we paint with
oil on canvas?
Can't you make a
painting on glass?
And why do we use oil paints?
Why can't we use dust.
You know, he famously let
dust settle on the glass
and then collects it
and he puts varnish
and it creates a
lovely yellow color.
I mean all of this
life is about that.
You know, he saw the
artist really as shifting
from the nineteenth
century notion of an artist
who wore a cape and it
was all in the wrist.
It was like - [background noise]
and he wanted to be, you know,
the art was in the mind.
So he said cut off your hands.
That was his advice to artists.
I don't think we say that here.
[Laughter] Any other -- yeah.
>> If this is true,
do you care to comment
on how chess replaced
art for Duchamp?
>> Duchamp was a very
great chess player.
He represented France
in the Olympic games.
[Cough] And what he said was
he came to chess too late.
I think if he had his druthers,
he would have been a chess
player from the beginning,
but he really starts around 1918
to play seriously every
day, correspondence chess.
But you may know this.
He had a very young
follower who used to go
to his studio every day
and take lessons with him
and that man was Bobby Fischer.
And if you look at
the Fischer games,
Duchamp's often in the audience.
So yeah, he was a -- chess was
something that had to appeal
to him, because he's all
about end game strategy.
You know. This is nothing but
end game strategy for him.
>> Here's another
question [inaudible].
>> I remember hearing
that Duchamp said
that when great glass broke
that it was the perfect finish
for it, that [inaudible]
until that moment.
Was that kind of acceptance,
a rueful acceptance
of the way the breakage hurt
his own gesture of originality
with the amount of time
he spent on creating it?
>> Well, there's a couple
of ways of answering that.
That's a very good
question The --
we do know that it took
Katherine Dryer four years
to tell him and she finally
tells him over dinner in Leone,
and both of them in their kind
of interviews or memoirs claim
that Duchamp was happy.
Now, part of it was he didn't
have to keep working on it.
This area is not completed.
There was going to
be a boxing match.
There was the juggler of
gravity and this whole section,
you know, was never
completed and what he said,
and you're right
about that quote,
but there's a little
bit at the end.
He said what completed it was
the symmetry of the cracks
because the cracks -- because
the paints were lying flat,
one on top of the other,
they -- oh, I went too far.
They kind of go like this,
they start at the top
and then they kind of go
round and so he sort of felt
that suddenly, the bride and the
bachelors were sort of connected
through this breakage.
It's almost like her orgasm
broke the whole thing.
[Laughter] But all right.
I will take that.
>> I'd be very interested to
know how [inaudible] started
on being a Duchamp scholar and
what initially attracted you
to him and how it
went from there.
>> My first - my Master's
thesis on Richard Hamilton,
the English pop artist who just
died and was a great mentor
to me and after I finished it,
I said to him, Sir Richard,
you know, I'm thinking
about a Ph.D. and wanted
to get your advice and
he said do it on Duchamp.
Absolutely do it on Duchamp.
And he had a great archive.
He had a Box in a Valise.
The first time I opened a Box
in a Valise was at his house
in Oxford and it blew my mind.
And, you know, he owned some
of the Green Box notes,
the White Box notes.
So that whole kind of notion
of [inaudible] was something
I was very interested in.
And Hamilton has another take
on all of this because he kind
of comes from the
industrial design side
and he was very interested
in the mechanics of this,
of the precision of all this
which he interjected
into pop art.
But, yeah, it was
really through Hamilton.
I had admired Duchamp.
I kind of thought, though, that
it had probably all been done
and that is my one advice to any
student here, it is never done.
When you scratch the surface,
it's all waiting to be done.
The writings on Picasso
and Matisse and all
of these great artists
of the twentieth century
has barely started.
If you think about
someone like [inaudible].
I mean it's almost like saying
so in the fifteenth
century we did it all.
Don't look at him again.
And think about how the changes
have happened over the course
of the centuries, of people
writing on great artists.
So it's barely started.
That's my only advice to you.
>> One more question, right.
>> Who's going to be brave?
Okay.
>> [Inaudible] Box in
a Valise, I can't help
but think how much they
look like a portable altar
and I was wondering if you
could talk to us a little bit
about whether the only thing
about Duchamp's intention for --
how much it looked like this.
Should it be set like a mini
museum [inaudible] that way
or should it be spread out as
you have in this photograph.
Did you have any
thoughts on that?
>> He definitely
wanted it spread out.
And in fact the photograph
I showed of him
in the beginning is him
demonstrating how you --
you have to -- basically
you open the lid,
and this piece folds up
so you have the beginning
and then you pull out -- these
are wings that kind of pull out.
And then you're supposed
to rearrange the
contents however you want,
but you're not supposed
to leave them in the box.
Now, the interesting thing is
that you can never show all
of the works reproduced.
So you're almost bound to
have to change the display
if you want to see
what's underneath.
But he did not want it
compressed and many museums,
when they show this, they
put it in a case like this,
and you lose the fact that it
does have this wonderful free
spirited nature.
So upstairs you'll see.
I installed it in the round.
Now, as for an altar, that's
an interesting thing because,
you know, the large glass has
often been read, you know,
through -- as a kind
of travesty, I guess,
of religious iconography,
especially Titian
and these apparition
of the Virgin images.
Or apotheosis of the Virgin.
I'm not sure about that.
I think what he really
wanted to do was
to give a sense of a museum.
These are sort of walls.
If you look at how these
are hanging, but you have
to remember, no museum at
this time would show his work.
I mean MOMA was showing
Cezanne and Van Gogh.
They were not showing
Duchamp yet.
It would really be [inaudible],
a Dartmouth graduate,
a really wonderful
curator at MOMA
who was the first curator there
to get them interested
in Duchamp.
That was in the late 60s
with the information show.
So there you go.
It can be anything
you want it to be.
But it's a great work of art.
Thank you very much.
[Applause]
