Duchamp's Boîte-en-valise: Between institutional acculturation and geopolitical displacement

Grey Room

Volumn , Issue 8, 2002, Pages 7-37

  Demos, T J ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 67149097904     PISSN: 15263819     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/15263810260201580     Document Type: Review

References (53)

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, used by Walter Benjamin as an epigraph for "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century" (1939), in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 20
2. See Momme Brodersen, Walter Benjamin: A Biography, trans. Malcolm Green and Ingrida Ligers (New York: Verso, 1996), from which many of these biographical details are taken
3. Cited in Brodersen, 260
4. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972-1989), 385
5. cited in Rainer Rochlitz, The Disenchantment of Art, trans. Jane Marie Todd (New York: Guilord, 1996), 181
6. Adorno, 38-39
7. See also his "Reflections on Exile," Granta 13 (Autumn 1984): 159-172
8. See, for example, Homi Bhabha, who returns to Benjamin in order to theorize current postnational conditions and hybrid identity, in his title essay in Nations and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (New York: Routledge, 1990)
9. Among the growing literature on globalization that informs my argument, see Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage, 1992)
10. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000)
11. and the interview with Chantal Mouffe, "Every Form of Art Has a Political Dimension," Grey Room 02 (Winter 2001): 98-125
12. For a reading of the psychic homelessness of the Surrealists read through Freud's uncanny, see Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993)
13. For a history of the Bauhaus in Nazi Germany, see Stephanie Barron, ed., Exiles and Emigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1997)
14. investigate Duchamp's critical relation to a regressive Surrealism in "Duchamp's Labyrinth: First Papers of Surrealism, 1942," October, 97 (Summer 2001): 91-119
15. On its relation to commodification and reproduction, see David Joselit, Infinite Regress (New York: MIT Press, 1998)
16. See Joan Ockman's discussion in "The Road Not Taken: Alexander Dorner's Way Beyond Art," in Autonomy and Ideology: Positioning an Avant-Garde in America, ed. R.E. Somol (New York: Monacelli, 1997), esp. 94
17. This is discussed by Rosalind Krauss in "Postmodernism's Museum without Walls," in Thinking about Exhibitions, ed. Reesa Greenberg et al. (New York: Routledge, 1996)
18. Also see Douglas Crimp, On the Museum's Ruins (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993)
19. For a critique of Malraux's ahistorical tendencies, see E.H. Gombrich, "André Malraux and the Crisis of Expressionism," in Meditations on a Hobby Horse (1963; reprint, London: Phaidon, 1994), 78: "There is no evidence that Malraux has done a day's consecutive reading in a library or that he has even tried to hunt up a new fact."
20. For instance, Malraux compares one photograph of a sculpture of an angel's head from thirteenth-century Rheims Cathedral to another of a sculpture of a Buddha's head from fourth-century Gandhara. See Malraux, The Voices of Silence, trans. Stuart Gilbert (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 160-161
21. Malraux, The Voices of Silence, 46
22. Rosalind Krauss, "Sculpture in the Expanded Field," in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 280
23. Also see Rosalind Krauss, "Forms of Readymade: Duchamp and Brancusi," in Passages in Modern Sculpture (New York: Viking, 1977)
24. See Krauss, "Postmodernism's Museum without Walls."
25. See Curtis Cate, André Malraux: A Biography (New York: Fromm, 1997), 357ff
26. Adorno and Horkheimer, xvi
27. See Bonk, Marcel Duchamp, 20. When asked by an interviewer, "Why a suitcase? It is obviously ready to be carried off somewhere," Duchamp equivocated: "What would you consider the proper solution?"
28. Cited in Bonk, Marcel Duchamp, 172. Clearly, the "deluxe" version is also a mimicry of an advertisement model of artificial value
29. Walter Benjamin, "A Berlin Chronicle," in Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1978), 16
30. See Shoshana Felman, "Benjamin's Silence," Critical Inquiry 25, no. 2 (Winter 1999): 201-235, which expands on Benjamin's notion of history as developed in the "Berlin Chronicle," "The Storyteller," and "Theses on the Philosophy of History."
31. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Shocken, 1968), 257
32. Cited in Rochlitz, 181
33. Benjamin, "A Berlin Chronicle," 10 (emphasis added)
34. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, 220
35. Benjamin (quoting Pirandello), "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," 229
36. Benjamin, "A Berlin Chronicle," 6
37. Also see Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993)
38. Marcel Duchamp, "Notes for a Lecture, 1964," cited in Anne D'Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine, eds., Marcel Duchamp (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973), 243
39. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Noonday, 1981), 80-81
40. Siegfried Kracauer, "Photography," trans. Thomas Levin, Critical Inquiry 19 (Spring 1993): 433. Originally published in 1927, the essay was reissued by Kracauer in The Mass Ornament in 1963. Kracauer's discussion of fetishism was also informed by his own displacement. As a German Jewish refugee he was forced to leave Germany in 1933, living in exile for the rest of his life, in Paris until 1941 and then in New York until 1966. And he was aware of photography's special relation to homesickness. In an autobiographical novel, Georg, which he wrote in 1934 during his exile in Paris, the main character remembers his grandmother, just as Kracauer recalls his own grandmother through a photograph in his essay on photography. He discusses this photograph of his grandmother, who, pictured as a younger woman, is at odds with how he remembers her: "Likeness has ceased to be any help." Nevertheless, Kracauer explains that the photograph offers "a reminder of... corporal reality," and thus draws out memory-images, even if ultimately they are deeply dissatisfactory (429)
41. Benjamin views the early stages of nineteenth-century photography as maintaining an auratic quality, where practitioners "saw their task in simulating that aura through all the arts of retouching ... through which bad painters took their revenge on photography." See Benjamin, "Short History of Photography," 206-207. Roland Barthes, too, reads the coloring of photographs as fetishistic: "For me, color is an artifice, a cosmetic (like the kind used to paint corpses)." In other words, it restores the illusion of life to a dead body. See Barthes, 81
42. As Buchloh views it in "Museum Fictions."
43. Cabanne, 92-93. At the time of his 1963 retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum, what "warmed up" Duchamp's memories were not only specific works but also their arrangement. The 50cc of Paris Air, Traveler's Folding Item, and Fountain were displayed in the exact same way that the Boîte had displayed their miniature replications
44. Benjamin, "Konvolut H: The Collector," The Arcades Project, 211 (translation modified)
45. See Derrida, Archive Fever, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 91, and 10-11
46. See Buchloh, "Museum Fictions," 47. Walter Benjamin explores how in the collection "the work of art" is "shrunken to a commodity," in "Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian," in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 1993), 251
47. Susan Stewart, On Longing (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 66 and 171
48. This is a major difference between Duchamp's archive and that of Gerhard Richter, who was himself displaced twice: first after the collapse of fascist Germany and then upon leaving the East German state to come to the West in the early 1960s. The heterogeneity of archival sources in his Atlas project (the complete opposite of the monographic), which never served the needs of a mobile refugee, is of an entirely different order than Duchamp's. Nevertheless, with Richter we also witness the relation between national displacement, memory crisis, and fetishistic collection. See Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, "Gerhard Richter's Atlas: The Anomic Archive," October 88 (Spring 1999): 117-145
49. and Buchloh, Gerhard Richter: Painting after the Subject of History (Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 1994)
50. Also see Andrew McClellan, "Nationalism and the Origins of the Museum in France," in The Formation of National Collections of Art and Archaeology, ed. Gwendolyn Wright (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1996)
51. See Walter Benjamin, "Allegory and Trauerspeil," in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1985), 183-184. Further: If "In the ruin history has physically merged into the setting," then it is later up to the critical "reader" to decipher its sediments (see 177-178 and 184-185)
52. For elaborations of fascist subjectivity, see the discussions of Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, vol. 1, trans. Stephen Conway (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993)
53. and Hal Foster, "Armor Fou," October 56 (Spring 1991): 65-97