Ready-Made Artist: The Genealogy of a Concept

Claire Fontaine is a Paris-based collective artist founded in 2004. After lifting her name from a popular brand of French notebooks, she declared herself a “ready-made artist” and went on strike. She works in neon, sculpture, painting, and text. An earlier version of this piece was published in Flash Art International 270 (January–February 2010) and has been adapted here with permission of the publisher.

1. The ready-made is an aesthetic object that has no aesthetics, or whose principle of individuation is not aesthetic. “The choice of the Ready-made,” Duchamp states in 1961, “was never dictated by some aesthetic delectation. The choice was based on a reaction of visual indifference with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste . . . in fact a complete anesthesia.”¹ In the Dictionnaire abregé du surréalisme (1938) it is stated that the ready-made is a usual object promoted to the dignity of an artwork by the choice of the artist. The artist’s dispassionate choice and the time when it takes place are the only factors that provoke the transubstantiation from the banal object to the work of art. Whatever object chosen in whatever moment by whatever singularity becomes an artwork: it’s a matter of time and potentiality.

2. In the notes on The Bride from 1915 and 1916, published in the Green Box, we can read that a ready-made is something profoundly linked to a moment, a date, an occasion; it’s like a frozen instant (Duchamp defines the 3 Standard Stoppages as “hasard en conserve,” “canned coincidence”). Ready-mades are then compared to a speech pronounced for a certain occasion, but for whatever occasion the speaker specifies, “à l’occasion de n’importe quoi mais à telle heure.”² What counts is the time of the speech, the exact date of birth of an event. The event being whatever, only its position in time will make it unique. That’s why the fetishism of the precise moment is not in contradiction with duplication and repetition: “the ready-made is nowhere unique . . . the replica of a ready-made delivers the same message.”³

3. Duchamp says, in an interview with Guy Viau in July 1960, that the ready-made “was from the beginning an invented word that I took to designate a work of art which isn’t one. In other words, which isn’t a work made by hand, made by the hand of the artist. It’s a work of art that becomes a work of art by the fact that I declare it or that the artist declares it an artwork, without there being any participation from the hand of the artist in question to make it so.”⁴ But as soon as the artist’s hand is not involved in the production of the art object, the very role and definition of an artist change. Three years later Duchamp was telling Francis Roberts that “a Ready-made is a work of art without an artist to make it, if I may simplify the definition. . . . This was not the act of an artist, but of a non-artist, an artisan if you want. I wanted to change the status of the artist or at least to change the norms used for defining an artist.”⁵

4. One possible interpretation of the facts is that Duchamp used his authority as a renowned painter and important figure of the Parisian salons to intercede for the acceptance of vulgar objects into the exclusive and fortified field of Art. Material creatures as unrefined and uncanny as Kafka’s Odradek became major artworks because they were chosen. These “things” announced a new lineage for the artwork descending directly from the head of the artist rather than from his hand, and were the citizens of an immaterial republic ruled by instinct and free association, where beauty is perfectly irrelevant.

5. The work—born from the brain—comes into the world without the help of the creative hand. The artist and the work now have a relationship deprived of intimacy and infused with irony...