I’m interested in Marcel Duchamp’s “Bottle Rack” from 1914.
“Bottle Rack” is thought to be Duchamp’s first unaltered readymade. He purchased the kitchen tool at a bazaar near Paris’s city hall and left it in his studio for several months trying to figure out what to do with it. He remarked to his sister Suzanne that he considered it a sculpture “already made,” which is where we get the term “readymade,” though Duchamp wouldn’t use that exact term himsef until “In Advance of the Broken Arm,” a snowshovel given to him by his friend Jean Crotti in 1915. Both the snowshovel and the bottle rack were subsequently lost. The bottle rack was thrown out by Suzanne and legend has it that the shovel was mistaken for a “real” shovel at a show in Chicago and used to clear the winter sidewalks during the afternoon before an opening.
With the readymades, Duchamp has removed design objects from their context as functional objects and recontextualized them as objects of art. If design and art were the same thing, Duchamp’s swap would be impossible, because these contexts would be interchangable. He shows us they are not, and usefully so. “Bottle Rack” never lost its ability to dry bottles, it simply lost its ability to be available for bottle drying or even to represent its own availability for bottle drying given its new context. In effect, Duchamp took the bottle rack out of circulation in one context and put it into circulation in another.
Why, in the case of “Bottle Rack,” did Duchamp make such a swap? He famously saw the readymades as “a form of denying the possibility of defining art.” Duchamp shows his Surrealist colors here by suggesting that art is beyond definition, but his denial of definition reverborated for Conceptual Artists as a problem in visual art created by the limits of verbal language. Where does the limit of art’s definition exist? Moreover, what happens when being an artist no longer requires you to make objects? What happens when an artist’s primary effort is instead to question the nature of art itself?
The readymades constitute Duchamp’s attempt to see objects not through their makers’ intentions but by themselves. He said, “My intention was to get away from myself, though I knew perfectly well that I was using myself. Call it a little game between ‘I’ and ‘me.’” He was trying to see the forms of these objects not through what caused them, but by their effects alone. They are being seen because they are being presented to be seen, not because they are necessarily beautiful. A bottle rack, rendered functionless as an object of design, becomes an object of art, and gains some new functions as a result. It now belongs in a museum collection, not a hardware store. We are to write about it in art history books, not in restaurant supply catalogs. And, most of all, we are now meant simply to look at it and consider what we see in front of us, both in terms of what it hides (it is phallic, threatening, spider-like), and what it so directly expresses (it is a bottle rack, nothing more).
Duchamp limited the number of readymades he released in his lifetime. To make everything a readymade—to take so many things out of their customary circulation and place them into a more rarified circulation—would not only dilute the surprise of seeing a bottle rack, a shovel, or an upturned urinal in an art gallery, it would also dilute his ability to do so. With this conscious limitation, Duchamp demonstrated a keen understanding of the art market as one that requires objects more rare than common. And in subsequent reproductions and re-reproductions of his readymades, Duchamp demonstrated an even keener understanding that even rare art objects must be widely recognized.
When a design object is sold in an art gallery, is it still a design object? What happens if it’s used as a design object afterward? What if it’s not? What happens if it is shown but not sold? What happens if it was never shown in the first place? Is it the potential of all design objects to be art objects? Is it possible for designers to create objects with this potential in mind? What about artists? And is this potential—if it does indeed exist—a worthy goal, a witty goof, or a dead end?
