Revisiting the Vanguard: Duchamp in Buenos Aires
Lori Cole
Abstract: This essay analyzes the effects of Duchamp’s nine-month visit to Buenos Aires in 1918 on his aesthetic and then examines the revival currently underway to reclaim Duchamp for Argentine art history. Duchamp selected Argentina because of its remoteness, deliberately removing himself from the artistic and political climates of Paris and New York. While in Buenos Aires Duchamp worked on the Large Glass, among other pieces, and did not involve himself with the local intellectual community, but rather spent most of his time playing chess. Duchamp refers to the place of travel in his work as a “spirit of expatriation” and his production in Argentina is characterized by an aesthetic of dislocation. His voyage of self-exile culminated in his Unhappy Readymade, in which he instructed his sister Suzanne and her husband Jean Crotti to hang a geometry textbook from their balcony in Paris and document the book’s deterioration. This transnational readymade denies the presence of the artist as creator, pushing the boundaries of reproducibility beyond Duchamp’s previous readymades, which imbued found objects with artistic value. While the Unhappy Readymade intentionally negates the art object, it also displaces Argentina, paradoxically incorporating the country into the European avant-garde circuit through this negation.
On September 19, 1918, Marcel Duchamp arrived in Buenos Aires, where he stayed for nine months. Fleeing both the war in France and the patriotism of New York, Duchamp recognized that traveling altered his artistic output, and he referred to its impact on his work as a “spirit of expatriation” (qtd. in Demos 2006: 96). Duchamp selected Argentina for its remoteness and upon reaching his destination declared, “Buenos Aires does not exist.” (qtd. in Naumann 2000: 68) This sly dismissal of Argentina reflects Duchamp’s attempt at political and artistic neutrality, as well as his deliberately elusive self- fashioning. Duchamp translated his lived geographic circulation into his artistic production. By transposing Argentina onto Paris in his Unhappy Readymade, Duchamp negates the idea of a stable creator, site, audience, or art-market value. Duchamp denied affiliation with any nation or movement, creating art that was as mobile as he was and 78 Lori Cole that like his transnational Unhappy Readymade, elided signification. Because his aesthetic of dislocation privileges the phenomenological conditions of site over any stable artistic identification, Duchamp can be read as a hinge between modern and postmodern art. Duchamp’s visit also inserts Argentina into a vanguard canon on par with that of Europe and the United States, and situates the origin of Argentine conceptualism in a national narrative. Since little material remains from Duchamp’s visit to Buenos Aires, it is necessary to rely on the artist’s correspondence, interviews, and the few works that he created in the city to piece together a critical history of his journey. Despite the scarcity of sources available for reconstructing his time in Buenos Aires, recent scholarly and curatorial activity in Buenos Aires has sought to demonstrate the centrality of Duchamp’s travels to his aesthetic development. Duchamp’s reputation as a precursor to neo-avant-garde, conceptual and pop art was established in the 1960s—roughly the same time as Argentine conceptual art emerged. Due to Argentina’s 1976 military coup and ensuing political repression, the Argentine intellectual community delayed historicizing conceptual art, and is only now reviving Duchamp as a forerunner to Argentine conceptual practice. Driving this reclamation are several scholars, collectively known as the Instituto de Marcel Duchamp en Buenos Aires (IMaDuBA), who are reevaluating Duchamp’s stay in Buenos Aires and its lasting impact on the artist and the city. Argentine art collector Jorge Helft’s extensive Duchamp holdings served as the basis for the first solo exhibition of the artist’s work in Buenos Aires, “Marcel Duchamp: a work that is not a work ‘of art,’” which was on view at the Proa Foundation from November 22, 2008 to February 1, 2009. The Proa exhibition spurred several smaller shows, events, and lectures inspired by Duchamp and organized by independent curators throughout the city.
Duchamp’s “Spirit of Expatriation”
Duchamp’s exile and correlating artistic development were unlike other avant-garde trajectories. While many Latin-American artists and writers traveled to Europe, few Europeans made the reverse trip.1 European artists displaced by World War I tended to form collective units in response to their shared dislocation in cities such as Zurich,