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Updating the Readymade

Wes Hill
Eyeline 90
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What is the status of the readymade today? Duchamp’s iconic and ironic discovery, roughly one hundred years ago, has reverberated in numerous ways, shifting from its radical and originary tone. Rather than being a transformative act that turns non-aesthetic objects into ideas, the contemporary readymade can be characterised as an already-aestheticised object entered into an art game which is now well established—where the politics of symbolic association and individual branding prevail. An author is still at the centre of such a gesture, but not an especially exceptional, critical or mysterious one. Although it is still up for debate which readymades are directed to which higher courts of meaning and value, above all else these objects appear today as borrowed linguistic tools. That is, a readymade might acquire new associations by being placed in new locations and configurations, but rarely is it offered as a recoding of something ‘out there’, speaking to viewers instead as if present in the space and continuous with its origins.

The term ‘readymade’ is associated more with sculpture than, say, photography. Both can involve the staging of pre-existing materials, but, for the sake of clarity, here I am interested in readymades, and ‘altered readymades’, as modes of practice that, according to Sven Lütticken, present ‘ordinary objects which serve as their own representation through alteration of context and negation of their original function’.1 In the work of contemporary artists who adopt and adapt existing objects rather than fabricate new ones, issues of materiality are entwined with issues of representation. While there are those who use the readymade as part of an historiographic turn (such as the Vietnamese-born Danish artist Danh Vō), here I will focus on... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Nina Beier, Scheme, 2014. Online organic vegetable box scheme, delivered to the gallery at scheduled intervals. Image courtesy of the artist and Croy Nielsen, Berlin.

Nina Beier, Scheme, 2014. Online organic vegetable box scheme, delivered to the gallery at scheduled intervals. Image courtesy of the artist and Croy Nielsen, Berlin.

Michael E Smith, Untitled, 2014. Whale ear-bone fossil, football. Image courtesy of the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York.

Michael E Smith, Untitled, 2014. Whale ear-bone fossil, football. Image courtesy of the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York.