A Desire for the Readymade: Duchamp's Emergency in Favor of Twice

… si tu as montée c[he]z moi, tu as vu dans l'atelier une roue de bicyclette et un porte bouteilles. J'avais acheté cela comme une sculpture toute faite. Et j'ai une intention à propos de ce dit porte bouteilles: Ecoute—Ici, à N.Y., j'ai acheté des objets dans le même goût et je les traite comme des "readymade"—tu sais assez d'anglais pour comprendre le sens de "tout fait" que je donne à ces objets. Je les signe et je leur donne une inscription en anglais. Je te donne q[uel]ques exemples: J'ai par exemple une grande pelle à neige sur laquelle j'ai inscrit en bas: In advance of the broken arm. traduction française: En avance du bras cassé… Un autre "readymade" s'appelle: Emergency in favor of twice. Traduction française possible: Danger (crise) en faveur de 2 fois.

—Marcel Duchamp to Suzanne Duchamp, January 15, 1916¹

Emergency in Favor of Twice, a long lost work Marcel Duchamp identified in the letter sent from New York to his sister in Paris in early 1916, the same letter in which he coined the term readymade, urges us to revisit the circumstances of that invention. Given the split scene it recalls, and that the original objects to which it referred were all lost, there is the sense of a missed encounter, a here and now that is irretrievable. Despite his calm tone, Duchamp was in fact dealing with something urgent. He was far away, his studio was about to be abandoned, and he now saw several pieces he had left there as integral to a newly formed concept. But the urgency existed at other levels too. At a volatile moment in the story of modernism—with abstraction having precipitated an epistemic shift, something of a crisis for age-old pictorial conventions—he sought to christen a set of objects as part of his oeuvre that refuted every possible criterion by which they could be deemed art. The titles we have for the two Parisian works retroactively categorized, Bicycle Wheel (1913–14) and Bottle Rack (1914), align with their referents, grounding their matter-of-factness. By contrast, those conceived in New York—In Advance of the Broken Arm and Emergency in Favor of Twice (both 1915)—displace the object (mainly in time). If we acknowledge the crucial role of language in Duchamp's artistic project, we cannot take the words he wrote to Suzanne lightly. With remarkable economy, the letter addressed questions of intention, naming, treatment, meaning assignment, translation, inscription, the imprimatur of the author, and sitedness of artistic creation. What, then, might we make of the linguistic-temporal crescendo: from the incidental and the circumstantial to accident and emergency?

I would like to use the concrete evidence of the 1916 document, and the abstract testimony of Emergency in Favor of Twice, as pretexts for thinking more about function in Duchamp's oeuvre: function as a general agency, and in terms of specific tensions we can readily identify, like linguistic fixation and conceptual mobility, repetition and contingency. I want to consider the latter (function) in relation to Duchamp's channeling of emergent mathematical applications of causality and chance. Having grasped their changing positions—a dance of respective relevance in the new fields of calculation—he put them to work to transform his own. Since the objects Duchamp's letter inaugurated did not exhibit the function of chance in the manner of his contemporaneous undertakings—Erratum Musical (1913), the Three Standard Stoppages (1913–14), or The Large Glass (1915–23)—his positioning of the readymades according to the desire he had for them, illuminates this generative moment in a new way. If Emergency in Favor of Twice flagged the crisis of repeating, which so concerned Duchamp, Erratum took on repetition (reproduction) as only a score can. The twice in turn recalls the three times he preferred—and exponentially activated to structure the Glass.

Around half a century hence, Duchamp delivered a short, notesy statement, "Apropos of Readymades" (1961), on a panel at the Museum...