Abstract
The author returns, full circle, to view the argument presented in the opening chapter of the book from an alternative perspective: within the terms of the creative act, “the art historian” brings about the artist’s consecration-identification by including his work in the established tradition. This occurs, Duchamp argues, after a temporal delay of roughly fifty years, what he terms a “rehabilitation.” The exact logic of the rehabilitation is described as a “pruning” process: a work is made to fit the given canon by being viewed through the prism of specific aesthetic criteria. What Duchamp effectively describes is the procedure outlined by T.S. Eliot, the operation underpinning the reception of Fountain, the art historian’s role in the creative act now evident one hundred years later.
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Notes
- 1.
Duchamp ultimately asks the art historian to recognize Žižek’s central theoretical point: that the real ideological dimension of one’s activity lies not in the content of the ideas or concepts being presupposed but in the constitutive blindness supporting the activity itself; the subordination of art historical practice to the workings of the aesthetic field. As was noted at the outset, to accept this point is to acknowledge an unbearable, traumatic truth, to risk dissolving the field that legitimizes one’s activity and identity. The choice Duchamp faces us with is, by definition, a difficult one: either we ignore the facts and retain the status quo or accept the “problem” as a solution, an emancipatory moment of radical revolutionary change. In truth, this liberating potential is only perceived when one’s standpoint is altered, when the art historian accepts that certain “unthought” presuppositions govern his/her activity and that, in the death of the work through its aestheticization, he/she is directly implicated.
- 2.
For a more detailed discussion of this point see Kilroy (2015).
- 3.
See Eliot (1943).
References
Duchamp, Marcel. 1973. “The Creative Act.” Session on the Creative Act, Convention of the American Federation of Arts, Houston, Texas, April 1957. In Marcel Duchamp. The Writings of Marcel Duchamp. Edited by Michael Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson. New York: Da Capo Press.
Duchamp, Marcel. 1979. Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp. Translated by Ron Padgett. London: Da Capo Press.
Eliot, T.S. 1921. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” In The Sacred Wood; Essays on Poetry and Criticism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Eliot, T.S. 1943. “Little Gidding”. In Four Quartets. Harcourt Publishing.
Kilroy, Robert. 2015. “Manet’s Selfie and the Baudelairean Parallax.” The DS Project: Image, Text, Space/Place, 1830–2015. Sinéad Furlong-Clancy (ed.). http://thedsproject.com.
Tomkins, Calvin. 2013. Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews. New York: Badlands Unlimited.
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Kilroy, R. (2018). The Art Historian. In: Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69158-9_13
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