Marcel Duchamp has been for many years an intellectual stimulation for me. I admire how he kicked the art world’s butt, without even lifting his foot off the ground. I also admire his approach to life. He didn’t need much to get by. He ate a little, he never owned a car, he spent most of his time playing chess and he rejected the bourgeois life cycle of a work of art: from the artist’s studio to the bourgeois’s apartment walls, via the art show. “I don’t believe in art,” he has reportedly said, “I believe in the artist.”1 He thought of art as some kind of inner current, like electricity. To be an artist then, is to have access to the switches.

Most of us live our lives trying to either fit in or feeling as though we are misfits. We are either abiding by or fighting against the rules. Marcel Duchamp played Jenga with them, carefully subtracting them piece by piece, while testing the tipping point of the whole structure. At the end, he won. The tower did not collapse. On the contrary, his legacy solidified his ideas. The art world became full of emptiness, tuned in to the infrathin. Instead of the familiar retinal art show, Marcel Duchamp’s legacy from John Cage2 to Andy Warhol3, forced us to watch the paint dry, so to speak.

Beauty was the first Jenga piece to go. Beauty is a matter of personal taste and therefore irrelevant to art. Then, to push his luck with the Jenga game further, he removed another fundamental piece, the craft. He quit painting early on in his career, denigrating it as purely “retinal”. Busy playing chess, Marcel Duchamp produced very little. In a 1966 interview with Pierre Cabanne he admitted being more interested in the art of living than in the world of art.

I like living, breathing, better than working. […] my art would be that of living: each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral. It’s a sort of constant euphoria.4

His production was inversely proportional to the time spent on each piece. Abandoned and unfinished, collecting dust as part of their life cycle they were probably not meant to leave his studio. The Large Glass after 8 years in the making (1915-23) was irreparably damaged during a transportation accident. As for his last piece Étant donnés, the work coincided with the last 20 years of his life. Étant donnés was a secret project, revealed to the public posthumously.

I think there is a great deal to the idea of not doing a thing, but that when you do a thing, you don’t do it in five minutes or in five hours, but in five years. I think there’s an element in the slowness of the execution that adds to the possibility of producing something that will be durable in its expression, that will be considered important five centuries later.5

”Not doing a thing” was first played out with the readymade, the absolute shortcut between making and not making, art and non-art. Whereas Étant donnés is the exact opposite, a process so long that it consumes the artist until the end. For Marcel Duchamp, art’s value lay beyond its aesthetics, and its price in the stock market. Although he did make a modest living by investing in and selling some of his friends’ sculptures –notably Brancusi’s– he remained critical of the commodification of art. Art’s value, was not in the object production but in the self-actualization of the artist. “In the creative act, the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions.”6 At the end, the series of reactions that went into the work spill over from the world of art to life. They do not only give a form to an object, they transform the artist himself.

  1. Thomas Girst, The Duchamp dictionary (London; New York: Thames & Hudson, 2014). 22 ↩

  2. 4’33” ↩

  3. Empire ↩

  4. Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp. (New York,: Viking Press, 1971). ↩

  5. Marcel Duchamp et Calvin Tomkins, Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews (Brooklyn, NY: Badlands Unlimited, 2013). 45-46 ↩

  6. Marcel Duchamp, The Creative Act p. 138 ↩