the art of the readymade
by graham gordon
In 1917 Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), a French-American artist, sent a manufactured enamel urinal, which he entitled Fountain and signed R. Mutt, to an exhibition in New York. He was responding to an announcement by the organizers in which they said that they were willing to consider anything for inclusion. They meant, we may suppose, that they would not confine their exhibition to either traditional or currently fashionable styles of painting and sculpture, and it is uncertain whether Duchamp was making a serious statement, or whimsically taking their announcement literally. At any rate, his 'exhibit' was rejected, understandably. By the time a later exhibition was staged, however, opinion had changed and it was thought that true open-mindedness required that Fountain be accepted. With its inclusion in the exhibition the art of the readymade was born.
Duchamp's was the first, but arguably not the most famous, example of a 'readymade'. More famous was Brillo Box by Andy Warhol (1928-87). This soap pad box is not a readymade in the literal sense, since it did not come straight from the store, though the thing exhibited looked more or less like a commercially produced Brillo box. In any case, the differences between Duchamp and Warhol are of no great consequence for present purposes. Duchamp is generally allied with Dadaism, while Warhol is usually described as a proponent of Pop art. But then Pop art is sometimes described as neoDadaism. Whatever name we use, the move is the same - to challenge conventional conceptions of art by putting readymade objects in an artistic context.
This move is not confined to visual art. A corresponding move is to be found in music, where it is associated chiefly with the American composer John Cage (1912-92). Cage invites just this comparison, in fact, by entitling one of his pieces Music for Marcel Duchamp (1947). His most famous (or infamous) 'composition', however, is 4′33″ in which a singer or instrumentalist appears on stage for four minutes and thirty-three seconds but without making any sound. Half-way through, the 'performer' turns over the pages of the 'score', and at the end of the specified time, takes a bow. The idea is that the audience, faced with a performer in a concert hall setting, will give to the accidentally occurring sounds around them, the same sort of attention that they would give to music. In this way, ordinary sound is turned into an art object for aesthetic attention. A similar phenomenon is to be found in film and dance. Warhol famously shot a film - Sleep (1963) - that consisted of nothing other than a real-time film of a man asleep for six hours. The choreographer Yvonne Rainer's Room Service MODERN ART 188 consists of a group of dancers moving a mattress in the most ordinary fashion.
The purpose in all of these examples is the same. The 'art' we have been brought up on, whether it be music, sculpture, film or dance, consists of deliberately created objects with aesthetic properties sanctioned by tradition. This means that our aesthetic awareness is confined by preconceptions about what art ought and ought not to be like. But real aesthetic awareness needs to break free of these preconceptions, and the art of the readymade enables us to do this. It thus makes possible 'the transfiguration of the commonplace' - the title of a book by the influential philosopher of art, Arthur C. Danto.
In the hardware store, the urinal and the Brillo box are part of the world of the 'commonplace'. What is it that transfigures them into artworks? One obvious difference is change of location. They have been removed from the shop and placed in the art gallery. There are two ways in which this might be thought to transfigure them. One is simply the change of place itself, and the other is the way that seeing them in this context changes our attitude to them.
Michael Craig-Martin's 'work' An Oak Tree (1973) is another example of a readymade. It can be found exhibited in London's Tate Modern. An Oak Tree consists of a glass shelf such as one might find in a bathroom. On it sits a glass of water, and below to the left is a short text that explains what Craig-Martin says the exhibit means. The shelf is so commonplace that probably a large number of people who come to see the exhibit have just such a glass shelf in the bathroom at home, possible even an identical one, since it is a readymade. At home, it is not a work of art; in Tate Modern it is. How could mere change of place bring about this difference? If the very same shelf was to be found in the washrooms of the gallery (which it may, for all I know) it would not be a work of art there. So it must be its location in the exhibition hall that is important.
Now if this were all there is to the transfiguration of the commonplace into work of art - a move from an ordinary place to a special place - it would run deeply counter to the idea at the heart of the avant-garde as we have been exploring it, because it would mean that a commonplace object becomes a work of art when the directors and curators who run such places bestow this status upon it by putting it on show in the exhibition hall. In this way, ironically, the rebellion of the avantgarde not only secures, but relies upon the approval of the very establishment it seeks to subvert. Having set out to show that there is nothing special about the art of the gallery, they have shown that it is only the gallery that matters, artistically speaking.
Its success, we might say, is its failure. Duchamp, who began the whole movement of readymades, made precisely this point: 'When I discovered readymades I thought to discourage aesthetics . . . I threw the bottle rack and the urinal in their faces and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty' (quoted in Chilvers and Osborne 1997: 172). MODERN ART 189 But if Duchamp meant what he said (for many of his utterances on these matters are contradictory), then the purpose of the readymade is not in fact to challenge and extend preconceived ideas of art. Rather, its purpose is to explode the idea of art and the aesthetic altogether. In this case the label 'art' means nothing, and art galleries, concert halls and the like should be closed down. The alternative to simple change of place is the way this re-location alters our attitude.
This is plainly the purpose of Cage's 'composition' and of Yvonne Rainer's 'choreography'. By staging their 'works' in the concert hall and the ballet theatre respectively, both of them want us to treat everyday sound and everyday movement as we treat art music and art movement. The commonplace is thus transfigured by the attitude we bring to bear upon it. What is this attitude? The answer seems obvious - the aesthetic attitude. The problem with this answer is that it invokes a concept that the arguments and analysis of Chapter 2 showed to be highly questionable. If, as George Dickie plausibly argued, 'the aesthetic attitude' is a myth, it can hardly be used to rescue the art of the readymade.
The heart of the difficulty, it will be recalled, is this. To explain what makes something aesthetic in terms of an attitude that we bring to it, is either vacuous or circular. Among all the points of view from which we consider items in our experience, there does not appear to be a psychologically distinct 'attitude' that we have reason to label 'aesthetic'. If, on the other hand, 'aesthetic attitude' is simply the attitude we ought to bring to art objects (practical disinterestedness, or whatever), then to define an art object in terms of such an attitude is circular - 'an art object is any object to which we ought to bring the attitude we ought to bring to art objects'. To the question 'But is it art?' then, the advocate of the readymade has two answers, neither of which is satisfactory.
The first - 'it is if the artworld says it is' - undermines its claim to be the art of the avant-garde. The second - 'it is if we regard it in the way we ought to regard art' - is question begging. Precisely what we want to know, and what is at issue, is whether we ought to regard readymades as art. We might try to avoid this dilemma by denying that the alternatives change of place/change of attitude are exhaustive. Another possibility is that, by changing place, the object in itself takes on new properties. This is what Danto argues in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, where he discusses both Duchamp's Fountain and Warhol's Brillo Box.
The urinal which became Fountain was mass produced, and thus shared identical properties with a great many others - whiteness, smoothness and so on. Placing it in an exhibition does not change these properties. Its whiteness does not suddenly gleam 'like Kilimanjaro' or have 'the white radiance of Eternity' (to quote Danto's faintly mocking expressions). But what it does do is make the urinal take on a new set of properties, 'properties that urinals themselves lack: it is daring, impudent, irreverent and clever' MODERN ART 190 (Danto 1981: 93-4).
The urinal in the art gallery has a wittiness that the urinal in the store lacks. That is why we are likely to smile at one and not the other. At one level, this defence of the readymade as art is plausible, but not at the right level. The properties Danto lists - impudence, irreverence and so on - are only perceptible if and because we know that there is something odd about placing a urinal in an art gallery. What makes us smile is not the urinal, but the idea of a urinal in an art gallery. Strictly, it is Duchamp's act of putting it there not the urinal itself that is impudent, irreverent, etc., just as it is his painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa (another of his famous 'works') that is daring, impudent, irreverent as the 'Mona Lisa with moustache'. One way of expressing this difference is to say that the idea of a manufactured urinal in an art gallery is novel, something original, that no one had thought of doing, and rather intriguing once it is done. Perhaps this is correct, but if it is, the aesthetic value of originality attaches not to the work but to the idea or the concept. This analysis has the advantage of signalling a further move - to readymade art's successor, conceptual art.