Marcel Duchamp understood that the museum is a machine – of judgement, of framing, of power. He made works that would lodge themselves inside this machine, dripping glue into its gears. With the Boîte-en-valise (conceived 1935-1941; subsequent elaborate editions), Duchamp shrinks the museum to suitcase scale. A miniature retrospective, hand-packed with reduced-scale reproductions of his works, it is also a sly form of institutional critique: the museum as fiction, the “oeuvre” as something assembled, replicated and continually curated. A subsequent reflection is more invasive, even nasty: in Étant donnés: 1. La chute d’eau, 2. Le gaz d’éclairage (1946-1966), a wooden door pierced by two peepholes offers a fixed view onto a tableau of a sculpted naked female body, legs splayed. The work recruits the visitor into a role the museum officially denies it ever assigns: voyeur.
To choreograph this experience and the labour required to sustain it, Duchamp produced an elaborate Manual of Instructions – his most under-acknowledged masterpiece of bureaucracy. Here, institutional care becomes a condition of the work’s existence; the museum becomes part of the work’s operating system. Étant donnés makes clear that art survives through regulation, maintenance, and a continuous negotiation with power. In Duchamp’s final wager, an artwork gains force not by fitting its frame but by disturbing the system that sustains it.
—Elena Filipovic
