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The bottle in art (bottle in actuality too) is a loaded term ever since Duchamp's bottlerack of 1914: as perhaps the feminine counterpart in the eroticized, though unfulfilled, mechanics of Duchamp's models and machines. In this work by Duchamp, the absent bottle is implied by a residual, functional innuendo. The functional relation between the two operates as an erotic leitmotif wherein the objects' potential utility is never consummated. Without the bottle the rack is impotent; its function arrested by and subordinate to the art institutional context (and, therein, the rack's prevailing aesthetic dimension). Within Duchamp's oeuvre the realm of art always seems to be a realm of impotency; a place where things are not required to work but, if anything, to dysfunction endlessly as a form of profound entelechy.
"The choice of [the] 'readymades' was never dictated by esthetic delectation. This choice was based on a reaction of visual indifference." (Duchamp) The subsequent reaction, of course, has been to valorize the aesthetic dimension of these everyday or found objects, despite Duchamp's disavowal: for example, the formalist chorus led by Motherwell who pronounced the bottle rack among the most beautiful objects in the world produced in 1914.
To deploy the bottle as a unit of construction, as Paramour does, inevitably raises the spectre of Duchamp – who spoke for all bottles in 1914 – to which her work might relate in two ways: first in providing the supplement to the bottlerack; second in appropriating from the same everyday realm of objects (though not one but many of the same). Thus there are two given logics which might associate the bottle with Paramour's art; one functional and the other dysfunctional (