“A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.”
― Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Through the conception of the Fountain, Duchamp was able to push art beyond its domain of purely physical into the realm of the metaphysical. Via the placement of a readymade object, Duchamp was able to transcend and accelerate from the new less controversial, controversial abstractions of Kandinsky and the Cubists.
More importantly it lead to the dramatic alteration of art’s working ontology and definition. In stark contrast to most pieces before it, the piece lacks any emotive affect and formalist, technical values. Through the vanquishing of such precepts Duchamp was able redefine the medium into a concept that goes beyond the physical.
The medium of choice seems to transcend these definitions as it is not the psychical material of the piece that creates the art, rather it is automatically created by the socio cultural contexts that become the medium. Specifically in context of the Armoury Show, and it’s no judge no jury predicament.
Thus the work is only created when it’s placed through the connections of machines. This is reminiscent of the Deleuze and Guattari’s use of mechanic ontologies in their seminal works: Anti Oedipus and a Thousand Plateaus. They believed that things form only through a serious of connections. It’s the connections between things that give birth to identities. As a result, things don’t have an end point.
“The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouthi machine coupled to it. The mouth of the anorexic wavers between several functions: its possessor is uncertain as to whether it is an eating-machine, an anal machine, a talking-machine, or a breathing machine (asthma attacks). Hence we are all handymen: each with his little machines. For every organ-machine, an energy-machine: all the time, flows and interruptions. Judge Schreber* has sunbeams in his ass. A solar anus. And rest assured that it works: Judge Schreber feels something, produces something, and is capable of explaining the process theoretically. Something is produced: the effects of a machine, not mere metaphors.”― Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
As Duchamp ushered in the singularity of conceptual art, his work was always in a state of becoming. Due to the metaphysics of the artwork being a concept based solely on connections, the art’s affect is multifold. As time continues different machines (people) who have connected with different contexts are affected differently.
Therefore, Duchamp managed to simply deteritorialise the concept of art entirely. He transformed the colloquial understanding of art having some sort of being in essences to rather something of a becoming.
The viewer asks why it is art ? and the piece begins an unending metamorphic becoming. The art is art through it’s affect.
Sincerely,
-Anon
Navigating the Simulacrum 