## THE PROPERTY OF KNOWLEDGE  1

## David Joselit

## ABSTRACT

We can note three phases in the tradition of the readymade and appropriation since Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel of 1913. First, they include early enactments in which the readymade posed an ontological challenge to artworks through the equation of commodity and art object. Second, practices in which readymades were deployed semantically as lexical elements within a sculpture, painting, installation or projection. In a third phase, which most directly encompasses the global, the appropriation of objects, images, and other forms of content challenges sovereignty over the cultural and economic value linked to things that emerge from particular cultural properties ranging from Aboriginal painting in Australia to the appropriation of Mao's cult of personality in 1990s China. This essay considers the most recent phase of the readymade in terms of its century-long history.

## KEYWORDS

Marcel  Duchamp,  Readymade,  Contemporary  epistemology,

Property, Global contemporary art

Readymades  operate  simultaneously  as  the  appropriation  of property  and  the  generation  of  knowledge.  On  account  of  this duality,  they  afford  a  highly  efficacious  device  for  exploring postindustrial  knowledge  economies  which  are  in  the  process of eclipsing manufacturing or extractive economies globally. Its contemporary relevance  notwithstanding,  however,  this  duality was present in readymades from the start. In Duchamp's Fountain (1917),  for  instance,  commentators  often  stress  the  property dimension: the artist's choice is  identical  with  his  (or  someone else's) purchase of the readymade as property and the reassignment of its ownership (or authorship) to R. Mutt (or Duchamp). This shift remains within the terms of property, though it shifts the urinal, as the artwork Fountain , from a lumpen commodity to an aesthetic form of intellectual property . On the other hand, if knowledge is understood as the imposition of a stable categorization onto a thing, then the readymade suspends the relationship between knowledge and  property  by  superimposing  two  ostensibly  irreconcilable statuses -urinal and sculpture -on the same material object. Instead of carrying a singular meaning then, the readymade configures several  simultaneous and contradictory claims on  meaning.  We might say that the fixity of property is undone by the proliferation of cognitive properties attached to a single commodity. The true form of the readymade is thus not the object chosen, but rather the virtual configuration of epistemological claims it generates and/or 'hosts' as projections upon it.

Duchamp's  suspension  of  the  urinal's  meaning  in Fountain belongs to a European avant-garde tradition of perpetual revision or  revolution  in  the  definition  of  artworks.  In  fact,  we  might describe the avant-garde gesture as fundamentally a suspension of meaning whose epistemological effects are much more powerful than any mere formal innovation. But the conditions under which the readymade operates have changed significantly since the early twentieth century. With the rise of global contemporary art, the cognitive contradictions articulated around the readymade have shifted from a set of limited -even provincial -debates regarding the  definition  of  modern  artworks,  to  a  geopolitical  realm characterized  by  conflicts  between  cultures  and  contradictory models  of  modernity  with  their  own  epistemological  bases. In  the  paintings  of  the  Chinese  artist  Wang  Guangyi  such  as Great  Castigation  Series:  Coca-Cola of  1993,  a  socialist  realist representation of Chinese workers can function simultaneously as an icon of the history of the Communist revolution, or as a token of nostalgia for that lost heroic period for Chinese viewers. Or, for international audiences, it may function as an attractive form of Communist kitsch equivalent in its meaning to a commodity like Coca-Cola to which Wang has juxtaposed them. Such works open a field of competing local and global claims over appropriated content that moves well beyond the precincts of European modernism to a negotiation between alternate histories of modernity: the modernity of Mao's cultural revolution, for instance, versus the modernity of Coke's consumer revolution.

In order to describe these broad global strategies adequately, I believe it is necessary to trace a genealogy of the readymade (and its later appropriation) since Duchamp coined the term more than one hundred years ago. First, on account of its current ubiquity, I will contend that the readymade practice should be understood as a flexible 'technology' rather than a punctual act of rupture (as historical readymades such as Fountain are often understood).

The closest modern analogy is therefore photography, which since its invention in 1839 has assumed a multiplicity of roles vis-à-vis traditional fine art media. Photography was positioned initially as  a  challenge  to  the  media  that  preceded  it  (especially,  in  its superior mimetic capacities, to painting); as an alternative to the fine arts through its documentary and commercial manifestations; as  a  fine  art  medium  in  its  own  right,  theorized  according  to principles of medium specificity; and finally, as the generalized tool that digital photography has become, which enters into many different types of artworks without being categorized in narrow terms of medium as art photography. Similarly, understood as a technology,  the  readymade  and  appropriation  have  shifted  in their functions, while becoming as common as photography as a tool in global contemporary art. I will propose three dimensions of readymade practice, tracing them through the Euro-American canon in anticipation of their widespread globalization in the 90s. 2 They include: the readymade's ontological challenges to artworks through its equation of commodity and art object; the semantic deployment of readymades as lexical elements within artworks, and a third cultural dimension, which most directly encompasses the global, wherein appropriated objects and images, generate a pattern of claims and counter-claims on the meaning of cultural property. In actuality, as has been apparent in my discussion of Fountain , these three dimensions are all present in the readymade from the beginning, but have had varying relevance at different historical  moments  and  in  different  geopolitical  contexts.  In short, in the course of its century-long history, the readymade has established varying ratios between knowledge and property.

Thierry  de  Duve  has  influentially  argued  that  in  equating artworks with commodities Duchamp's readymades provoked a shift from the conventional aesthetic question, 'Is it beautiful?' to an ontological challenge: 'Is it art?' 3 The readymade suggests that any thing may function as an artwork if, for instance, an artist chose it, or a gallery or museum exhibits it. While such a fundamental rethinking of art's definition has had an enormous historical and philosophical legacy, its disruptive force quickly wanes after the initial shock. By now, most participants in the art world, including large sections of the general public, have adopted a very permissive definition of artworks, which fully accepts appropriated content as legitimate. But the disruptive moment is only the first step in the  readymade's operations. While the controversy surrounding Fountain did  of  course  begin  with  a  refusal  by  the  jury  of  the  New  Y ork Independents exhibition of 1917 to ratify the work as art 4 , in the face of this refusal, Duchamp countered Fountain's failed application and subsequent physical disappearance with a sustained 'publicity' effort, spanning decades, whose purpose was to keep the work alive through gossip, publication, reenactment, and refabrication. Given the fact that this work is now an icon of modern art, such efforts must be considered a brilliant success. Duchamp's readymades thus explore two sides of modern art's ontological condition both as property and as knowledge: the artwork's vulnerability as matter susceptible  to  time  is  opposed  to  the  necessity  of  sustaining  it through  discourse.  In  other  words,  the  standard  account  of  the readymade -as a form of negation accomplished by equating an art object with an ordinary commodity -is only the first step in its operations, which in a subsequent moment calls forth a profuse spectacularization of the work in order to keep its image alive or, as De Duve has it, to put it 'on the record' in the realm of knowledge.

It  is  this  latter  dynamic  of  publicity -or  discourse -that opens onto the second semantic modality  of  the  readymade  in which commodities function as the ideologically rich language of consumer society. Robert Rauschenberg's Rebus (1955) signals in its title what I mean by a semantic use of readymades, for a rebus is a sentence composed of pictures or objects -in this case readymade pictures drawn from various print sources. While such a grammar of appropriated elements was already present in Hannah Höch's pioneering photomontages from 1919 onward, as well as in Meret Oppenheim's or Salvador Dali's Surrealist objects of the mid-1930s, it was at the mid-twentieth century, and especially in Pop art, that a  strategy  of  incorporating  or  reproducing  commercial  objects as potent symbols as opposed to generic commodities, became widespread. In Andy Warhol's work, for instance, the Campbell's soup can or Coca-Cola bottle function as emblems of American Cold War economic power, possessing and even flaunting, qualities of consumer abundance through their repetition. In other words, their value as knowledge -or ideology -significantly overshadows their value as property. Warhol himself gave a brilliant, if deadpan, retrospective account of Coke's supposed egalitarianism:

What's  great  about  this  country  is  that  America  started  the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see CocaCola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. 5

The same Coca-Cola that Warhol celebrates for its ideology of egalitarianism  from  an  American  perspective  was  recognized and critiqued as an imperialist ideology  by  the  Brazilian  artist Cildo Meireles. In his Insertion into Ideological Circuits of 1970, Meireles  transferred  brief  messages  regarding  political  arrests or disappearances under the Brazilian dictatorship, as well as the slogan 'YANKEES GO HOME!' onto Coke bottles in the process of  being  recycled  back  into  circulation  through  the  prevailing deposit system in Brazil where used bottles are cleaned, refilled, and returned to the market. Because Meireles's texts were inserted as  though  they  were  part  of  the  bottle's  packaging,  they  were encountered outside of official art institutions by unsuspecting consumers seeking no more than to enjoy a bottle of Coke. Thus, while Duchamp's readymades came into being by entering into the institutions of art, Meireles's found an audience by returning to the circuits of ordinary commodities.

The  Coke  bottle  is  simultaneously  an  advertisement  for American commercial dominance and a political icon for those U.S. policies in Brazil and Latin America more broadly that abetted the  repressive  dictatorships there (as indicated by the texts that Meireles applies to bottles). A diagram of geopolitical power thus intersects -and interferes -with the circulation of a global brand. Ideology -which after all is a form of knowledge -engulfs property.

Such  questions  of cultural  property emerge  in  a  different, more global fashion in the 1980s debates around appropriation in  Australia,  which  exemplify  the  third  or  global  stage  of the  readymade/appropriation.  These  complex  debates  were contentiously inter-cultural, arising from the encounter of different models of Aboriginal and Euro-Australian knowledge as well as differential  positioning  between  a  self-consciously  'provincial' Australia and European or American art center. We can identify three broad positions that describe a field of diverse sovereign claims at stake in these debates.

## I. ABORIGINAL ARTISTS 'APPROPRIATE' THEIR OWN HERITAGE.

The inalienable rights of Aboriginal people to their ceremonial stories  of  the  Dreaming  (to  which  individual  artists  may  claim access during their lifetimes) were made alienable and sold in the form of the Aboriginal Papunya acrylic dot painting that emerged in the 1970s, as well as subsequent related practices. In this work sacred signs or configurations that should be accessible only to initiates were amended to allow them to enter Anglo-Australian and global art markets without committing a transgression. Once in circulation there, the abstraction of these paintings made them vulnerable  to  appropriation  by  Western  aesthetic  discourses, consequently diluting the cultural roots of the forms represented, or  submerging  them  altogether  within  global  Eurocentric  art discourses. Aboriginal artists' awareness and careful negotiation of the inalienable and alienable dimensions of ceremonial forms, as well as the differing contexts for their commercial and critical reception  has  been  recognized  as  a  knowing  appropriation  of traditional  knowledge.  Eric  Michaels  for  instance,  asserts  the innovation involved in translating performative ritual traditions into contemporary painting: 'These often old men and women, comparatively  isolated  in  remote  sites,  have  invented  an  art form partly by appropriating contemporary western technology and aesthetics, and I find it remarkable that they are denied full credit for extraordinary accomplishment.' 6 Aboriginal painting is thus simultaneously a self-appropriation (of 'tradition') and an appropriation of the Other (through access to the Western tradition of abstraction) -it  is  a  form  of  'property' that is deeply, if not always consensually, shared.

## II.  THE NATION APPROPRIATES ABORIGINAL CULTURE

The Australian government itself appropriated Aboriginal forms as nationalist symbols, disseminating them widely in such major international celebrations as the Australian Bicentennial in 1988 and  the  Sydney  Olympics  in  2000.  Here  Aboriginal  culture  is afforded broad spectacular exposure but not necessarily genuine political  agency.  As  Tony  Fry  and  Anne-Marie  Willis  declared in  an  important  article  of  1989,  'while  Aboriginal  people  have acquired  a  global  platform  for  the  display  of  their  work,  this does  not  constitute  a  platform  from  which  to  express  their political  aspirations. 7 Ironically,  work  by  Aboriginals  that  was once considered inauthentic because of its adoption of Western techniques  and  its  address  to  a  Western  audience  (as  a  kind of 'tourist art') was later seized upon precisely to lend a certain authenticity to Australian culture. But if the Australian government has exploited Aboriginal art to assert its values as a multi-cultural nation-state, following the Native Title Act of 1993 counter-claims were made to Aboriginal Sovereignty over traditional lands, and in some cases art constituting the visual transcription of ceremonial forms of Dreaming, analogous to those represented in Aboriginal painting, has been adduced as the requisite proof of continuous habitation in courts of law. Again, we encounter countervailing dynamics of appropriation: attempts by the Australian state to exploit Aboriginal heritage, and Aboriginal attempts to gain title to  traditional  lands  through  the  re-deployment  of  an  aesthetic vocabulary initially developed for circulation within the AngloAustralian art world (and which eventually circulated globally).

## III.  ANGLO-AUSTRALIAN CULTURE APPROPRIATES EURO-AMERICAN CULTURE.

In  the  1980s,  Australia's  own  geographically  remote  position vis-à-vis Euro-American art centers led to anxiety among EuroAustralians with regard to the derivative status of their culture, as itself a copy, or appropriation of more geographically central traditions of modern and contemporary art in the Anglophone West.  As  Meaghan  Morris  has  expressed  it,  ''the  modern'  in Australia has only marginally been understood as entailing 'the future', 'youth', 'originality', 'innovation', rupture', 'the unknown' and  so  forth.  'The  modern'  has  much  more  commonly  been understood  as  a known history ,  something  which  has already happened elsewhere , and which is to be reproduced, mechanically or otherwise with a local content.' 8 Artists like Imants Tillers and others have exploited the notion of Australia as copy in their own appropriation-oriented works.

I  have  argued  that  in  the ontological dimension,  readymades generate new knowledge by suspending conventional meanings. In the semantic dimension, commodified material such as brands are combined into rebuses. And, finally, in the cultural dimension, the  readymade  may  stage  contradictory  claims  regarding community property. As a malleable practice that is analogous to photography, the readymade has remained a compelling aesthetic tactic throughout the 20th and 21st century precisely because it can manifest the different relations that knowledge establishes withand as-property. The readymade, it seems, is the work of art in the age of postindustrial production.

- 1 This essay is drawn from my book, Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization (forthcoming, MIT Press, 2020)
- 2 Even though they do unfold chronologically to a significant extent, these modalities also overlap one another and persist past their initial moment of relevance, so that the ontological question remains, even as questions of semantics and sovereignty emerge as more prominent. This is why I prefer to think in terms of modalities, as opposed to, for instance, phases of the readymade.
- 3 'With the readymade, however, the shift from the classical to the modern aesthetic judgment is brought into the open, as the substitution of the sentence 'this is art' for the sentence 'this is beautiful.'' Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge: MIT Press, October Books, 1996), p. 302
- 4 Fountain was sent in anonymously, and thus without the official imprimatur of Duchamp, and rejected despite a policy admitting all works that had been properly submitted (by making an application, paying initiation fee and keeping up with membership dues). See Clark S. Manor, The Society of Independent Artists: The Exhibition Record 1917-1944 (Park Ridge, NJ: Noyes Press, 1984)
- 5 Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) , (New York: Harcourt Inc., 1975), 100-101
- 6 Eric Michaels, 'Post-Modernism, Appropriation and Western Desert Acrylics,' [1989] in Rex Butler, ed, What is Appropriation? An anthology of critical writings on Australian art in the '80s and '90s (Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art; Sydney: Power Publications, 1996), p. 220. I am grateful to Christopher Williams-Wynn for informing me of these debates.
- 7 Tony Fry and Anne-Marie Willis, 'Aboriginal Art: Symptom or Success?' Ibid, p. 207.
- 8 Meaghan Morris, 'Metamorphoses at Sydney Tower,' New Formations, v. 11 (Summer 1990), p. 10.