Readymade

Definition

The readymade names Marcel Duchamp's act of designating mass-produced, everyday objects as artworks through displacement and choice rather than making. In Meninato's formulation, the operation "redefined the most fundamental conception of the artistic act, since the artist is no longer the one who produces the work of art; instead, he chooses it" — Roue de bicyclette (Bicycle Wheel, 1913), the wheel bolted upside-down to a stool, places attention in "the displacement of those objects… removed from its expected function." The concept's architectural force lies in its application to building elements: Duchamp's Fresh Widow (1920), a "semi-readymade" French window glazed with black leather, becomes "an anti-window," and the readymade door of Étant donnés, displaced from Cadaqués, perforated, and permanently closed, becomes "a miniature window" — in both cases a renewal of meaning "without the involvement of a formal transformation." Deprived of its conventional function, the architectural element "is confirmed as an idea, an abstract and intangible concept susceptible to innumerable variations" (Duchamp: "I could have made twenty windows with a different idea in each one"). The readymade is thus the paradigm case of appropriation as suspension from original meaning, and the origin-point of the tableau and installation art as interior-forming practices.

Key Thinkers

• (Originator, not paged — see log: Marcel Duchamp, 1887–1968; the readymade's inventor, from Roue de bicyclette (1913) through Fresh Widow (1920) to Étant donnés (1946–66). Meninato also notes, via Judovitz's Unpacking Duchamp, the "assisted readymade" variant.)
• Arthur Danto — the philosopher of the readymade's problem: how an ordinary object is "transfigured" into art by theory and the artworld when perceptually indistinguishable from its real counterpart (see his Transfiguration of the Commonplace).
• Pablo Meninato — the concept's transfer into interior-architecture theory: the readymade, with the assemblage and tableau, as "a critical lens for the emerging theoretical discourse surrounding the connected disciplines of interior architecture and adaptive reuse."

Related Concepts

• Tableau — the installation-art descendant of the readymade: the three-dimensional collage that transforms a scene "through the disparate displacement and combination of ordinary objects."
• Appropriation — the readymade as appropriation's artistic limit-case: the object drawn out of its function and "removed from its expected function" (Spuybroek's suspension from original meaning, literalized).
• Authorship — the readymade relocates authorship from production to choice and placement; the artist "chooses" rather than makes (compare Till & Wigglesworth's and HouMinn's repositioned authorship).
• Assemblage — Duchamp's assemblages generalize the readymade to combinations of objects and architectural elements, "metaphorical and allegorical associations rather than formal or spatial configurations" (Meninato). Distinct from the Deleuzian machinic assemblage.
• Everyday Architecture — the ordinary object taken seriously as the material of serious work; the readymade is the everyday object's elevation into art, the structural inverse of architecture's neglect of its own everyday production.
• Ugly and Ordinary — Venturi's "vast accumulation of standard, anonymously designed products," which Meninato reads as the readymade's architectural cousin ("use convention unconventionally").
• Adaptive Reuse — the readymade's displacement tactics (collage, displacement, fragmentation) as adaptive reuse's artistic model: redefining existing elements rather than designing new ones.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Spatial seductions (Meninato 2018) — the defining source in this wiki: the readymade's redefinition of the artistic act ("the artist is no longer the one who produces the work of art; instead, he chooses it"); Fresh Widow as "an anti-window"; Porte: 11 Rue Larrey as "simultaneously open and closed"; Étant donnés' door become "a miniature window"; and the extension of readymade tactics to interior architecture and adaptive reuse ("strategies of redefining existing elements, assuming tactics such as collage, displacement, fragmentation, or ready-made").
• The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Danto 1974) — the philosophical apparatus the readymade demands: artworks and ordinary things can be perceptually indiscernible; what makes the object art is "aboutness" and interpretation within the artworld — the theory the readymade "subtends."
• Semiocapitalism, Spectacle, Eikonomia (Bahtsetzis 2019) — Duchamp's abandonment of the economics of art (giving work away) cited as an exemplar of the semiotic "exit from within" semiocapitalism.
• Death of the architect (Berger 2018) — the readymade in the appropriation genealogy: "Marcel Duchamp's 'ready-made' urinal" listed with cubist collage and Barbara Kruger's found photos among the art practices that "unsettled our preconceived notion of things/objects and their place in time, and… shown us the creative possibilities of rendering multiple points of view and nonlinear time" — the readymade as appropriation art's canonical precedent, offered to interior architecture as part of its transferable toolbox (collage, bricolage, montage, pastiche, assemblage). See appropriation, death-of-the-author.

Open Questions

• Does the readymade transfer to architecture intact — can a building element be "chosen" into architecture the way a urinal was chosen into art, or does architecture's inhabitation (the element must still work) block the suspension that makes the readymade legible?
• Meninato's door paradox — Porte "can be always open," Étant donnés "permanently closed" — suggests two readymade registers for the discipline: the re-functionalized element and the deliberately inoperative one. Does adaptive reuse have a use for the second?
• Danto's artworld confers art-status by theory; what is the equivalent institution for the "architectural readymade" — publication, the museum of ruins, the discipline itself?
• If "the artist is no longer the one who produces the work of art; instead, he chooses it," is the adaptive-reuse architect a readymade author — and does that relocate or dissolve architectural authorship?