Readymade: a problem for the definition of art. and its solution

Abstract

Did Marcel Duchamp, by introducing the idea and practice of the readymade into art, solve the problem of a new way of defining art, or did he rather create a problem that we are struggling with to this day? The readymade has an ambivalent status both in the eyes of the creator himself and his contemporary critics, such as Pierre Cabanne, Robert Lebel and his later biographer, Calvin Tomkins. The artist did not identify with Dada and the Surrealistic sense of using the readymade. For Duchamp, the readymade is an idea to overcome the crisis of art after Cubism. The redymade became the essence of his new definition of art. A further result was the Conceptual Art of Joseph Kosuth and new media, photography and film as art, as described by Rosalind Krauss in her essays on indexical art. The basis for an exemplification of the theses of the article is a case study of Józef Robakowski's photo-object entitled Colander. The photograph here was pierced with a readymade nail. This gesture of the artist towards the image was embedded in the history of art of the modernist avant-gardes. In the article, the history of the readymade was compared with another parallel history of sociological art. This trend has been studied in George Grosz and Wieland Herzfeld's Art is in Danger, Contextual and Anthropologized Art, and contemporary curatorial narrative practices. The case study, Colander, shows a relationship between storytelling and the art form. Duchamp thus both solved and at the same time created a problem for defining art.