Why Readymades? Critical Remarks on Thierry de Duve’s Aesthetics at Large (2018)
Probably no artist has been more widely or more frequently mentioned as the founder of Contemporary art than Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp was active as a painter in the first decade of the twentieth century, and, despite having proclaimed that he had abandoned art in the 1920’s, worked for twenty years until 1966 on his sculptural installation Étant donnés. The body of his work that has allegedly founded Contemporary art is his so-called ‘readymades’, which he produced in the second decade of the twentieth century. The distinctive feature of the readymade is that the work is not so much made by the artist as chosen by the artist. The object chosen is not chosen primarily for its perceived aesthetic qualities, as a Chinese scholar might choose an especially fantastic rock to display, or the Inka might position and display an especially evocative stone. Rather the object chosen is an industrial artifact—an airplane propeller, a shovel, a urinal--, which is then exhibited as an artwork by the artist-chooser. In some cases the object is exhibited without alteration, but more commonly the object is ‘assisted’ with minimal and markedly unskillful additions, as with Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ (1917), a urinal upon which Duchamp has scrawled the date and the signature ‘R. Mutt’. A standard line of thinking urges that the readymades provided the originating exemplar of Contemporary art, long avant la lettre, and that their acceptance as central instances of art altered both the implicit working ontology of the visual arts, and induced a shift in the central ideologies partially motivating and legitimating the making of art. In a series of books written in French in the 1980’s, and re-worked and published in English in the 1990’s, the Belgian art critic and theorist Thierry de Duve has given the most elaborated and celebrated version of this way of conceptualizing Contemporary art. His recent book Aesthetics at Large largely repeats his earlier account, but fleshes out the historical and social dimensions of the account, and considers some of the implications of his account for museum practice. De Duve’s account draws massively on aspects of the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment (the book’s cover proclaims that ‘Kant got it right’), and the book accordingly polemicizes against what de Duve takes to be the major alternative accounts, those deriving from the philosopher Hegel, especially the account proposed in Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory.
De Duve’s central claims with regard to recent visual art are unchanged since Kant after Duchamp. They are: 1. Duchamp’s readymades of the mid-1910’s inaugurate and mark a turning point in the history of the visual arts. With these works visual art passes from a condition wherein painting is the paradigmatic visual art, and visual works of art generally gain their status as artworks and their most distinctive meanings via the physical media that embody them. 2. Kant’s Critique of Judgment provides the full set of conceptual resources needed to explain and understand the distinctive features of the readymade and the recent visual art generally, so long as one replaces each occurrence in Kant’s text of the word ‘beauty’ with the word ‘art’, and drops Kant’s discussions of the sublime, art, and teleology. The remaining and altered fragment of Kant primarily involves his account of the pure judgment of taste and his remarks on so-called ‘sensus communis’, the faculty allegedly possessed by human beings which underlies the claim of aesthetic judgments to significance beyond the expression of personal taste. According to de Duve, both of these claims are meant to be understood as opposing some prevailing conceptualization in recent theorizing about the visual arts. The first claim opposes the idea that Duchamp’s readymades are a kind of sui generis invention with no relation to any preceding art form. De Duve counters with the claim that the readymades mark a passage from the ‘specific’ conception of visual art, wherein the claim to art status is carried by a work’s placement within a particular artistic medium (such as painting), to a ‘general’ conception wherein works as it were immediately embody their status as art within being part of a historically entrenched artistic medium. The second claim opposes, so de Duve asserts, Hegel’s refusal “to reconcile metaphysics with human finitude” (p. 117) by positing “the notion that total, absolute realization of spirit in the actual world accomplishes the ineluctable process of history itself.” (p. 116) Adorno allegedly adds an anti-Hegelian ‘wound of nihilism’ (p. 130) to this fundamentally Hegelian outlook in claiming that spirit has in fact not been realized in the modern world. De Duve claims that by contrast his approach takes up Kant’s ‘landmark achievement’ (p. 117) in reconciling metaphysics with finitude by working out the ways in which modern and contemporary art do, contra Adorno, have a right to exist as autonomous cultural practices separate from religion and a religious aim of reconciling ourselves to human finitude. (p. 138)
The recent book adds to these unchanged claims a third claim, one that primarily provides historical scaffolding to the first claim: 3. The social condition of the visual arts has shifted over the past 150 years from the system of the Beaux-Arts to that of ‘Art-in-General’ (pp. 32-33) On de Duve’s account, the Beaux-Arts system was fundamentally a political system wherein the jury of the annual Salon not only choose which works would enter the prestigious yearly exhibitions, but, through these choices and the jury’s prestige, controlled the careers of artists. As a political agency, the Beaux-Arts system overlapped, but was not identical with, the system of the fine arts, which, on the canonical account of Paul Kristeller, treated a small number of arts—painting, sculpture, music, theater, poetry, dance—as ‘fine’ arts that bore the possibilities of particularly rich and powerful meanings, as opposed to the ‘applied’ arts, such as landscape architecture or embroidery. The Beaux-Arts system collapsed with the establishment in 1884 of the Society for Independent Artists; consequently, de Duve thinks, in the absence of a central political control, “[a]nyone could proclaim himself an artist.” A immediate consequence of this, de Duve asserts, is that “[a]nything and everything had become a plausible candidate to art status,” and with his series of readymades it was Duchamp who first demonstrated this. (p. 33) The visual arts of the past two hundred years, then, occur within three periods: the pre-Duchampian period up to 1884; the Duchampian period of High Modernism, a period of “transition and incubation” (p. 37), which begins before Duchamp’s birth but whose defining achievement is the readymades; and the post-Duchampian period starting in 1964 when certain exemplary artists ‘receive Duchamp’s message’ and the readymade model and its enveloping ideologies become central to the visual arts. De Duve cites as an early example of this shift the Fluxus artist George Brecht’s claim that “anything can be art and anyone can do it.” (p. 35)
De Duve’s exposition of the second claim, that Kant’s Critique of Judgment exhaustively provides the conceptual apparatus needed to understand the basic features of Contemporary (post-Duchampian) visual art is so intricate, idiosyncratic, and implausible that I refrain here from explication. Suffice to say that de Duve follows Kant in thinking there is a basic kind of judgment (for Kant the aesthetic judgment of beauty, for de Duve the judgment that something is a work of art) that is based upon ‘feeling’, not concepts, but which nonetheless is addressed to all and so presumes agreement from others. De Duve seems to think further that each work of (presumptive) art poses the question ‘Is this art?’, and that the judgment ‘this is a work of art’ exhausts the challenge and interest presented by the work; there is no issue, de Duve thinks, of relative quality within the contemporary arts, but only of whether the work merits the appellation ‘work of art’.
Here I can only note a few basic points that express something of my dissatisfaction with de Duve’s account:
1. De Duve repeatedly states that the central and indeed unavoidable question proposed by a putative contemporary work of art is ‘Is this a work of art?’ But why is this important? The effect of one’s answering ‘yes’ is supposed to be (only?) that the proposed work joins the large set of all the other works that one has judged to be art in one’s lifetime. So what?
2. For de Duve, the judgment that something is a work of art is like a roach hotel: you can check in, but you can’t check out. De Duve never considers so much as the possibility that one might revise one’s judgment, or what sort of countervailing considerations might motivate such a revision.
3. De Duve thinks that the readymades are both central and foundational to post-Duchamp/contemporary art. How can such a view be reconciled with the evident fact of the massive centrality and stability of the practices of drawing, painting, and sculpture, cross-culturally and trans-historically, and up to the present? How can such a view be reconciled with the preeminence and evident achievement of the work of, for example, William Kentridge, who draws, animates, installs, and performs as if Duchamp never existed?
4. Why is ‘judgment’ supposed to be so central and important as to relegate other questions to insignificance? It seems to me more typical that a response to contemporary art specifically and the arts generally is rather a sustained perceptual encounter, wherein the works as it were teach the viewer what is important. The question ‘is this art?’ does not clearly arise; rather, across a vast range of the arts, the work is taken to be an artwork, and the viewer responds to saliences and tracks meanings as they emerge.
Although de Duve is unquestionably an engaging and highly intelligent writer, it seems to me that his work represents a conceptual disaster for thinking about contemporary art. Perhaps some of its value, even for those of us who reject his approach and claims wholesale, is that it is the best worked out and focused account of widespread and more typically diffuse and poorly articulated ideologies in contemporary art.
References:
Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1969)
Thierry de Duve, Aesthetics at Large: Volume 1 Art, Ethics, Politics (2018)
---Kant after Duchamp (1996)
---Pictorial Nominalism (1991)
G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on Fine Art (1975; delivered in the 1820’s)
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790)
Paul O. Kristeller, ‘The Modern System of the Arts” (1951-52) in Renaissance Thought and the Arts: Collected Essays (1980)