Marcel Duchamp's Rrose Selavvy
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Marcel Duchamp's project is as complex, ambiguous, and rich as anything undertaken by any artist of the twentieth century. One of the most elaborate networks of meaning started by Duchamp derives from his 'performance' of Rrose Selavy, the female personification first used as a signature, mocked up in a series of posed drag photographs by Man Ray, and then persisting as an alter ego for Duchamp in many subsequent projects. The spectacle of a male artist who adopts a female persona and employs 'her' in the titles of various works, as the 'author' of other pieces, and simply as a sort of working fiction in his life raises questions of many kinds. Certainly the eroticization of the communication between artist and spectator, the performative nature of gender, the nature of the patriarchal art system and art history, and the meaning of authorship of works of art are all implicated in Duchamp's masquerade. To discuss only one facet of Rrose Selavy, therefore, taps only a small portion of the riches it contains. This essay discusses Rrose Selavy as an aspect of Duchamp's critique, or commentary, or artist's reaction to the rise of the commodity as a central fact of twentieth-century life. This entails, therefore, a description of the relationship of Rrose to the readymades which were initiated in 1913 and became a major part of Duchamp's work within the next few years. The Rrose persona, which began in 1920, falls into the category of the 'assisted' and 'semi-readymades,' m
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for example, of photographs of such works as In Advance of the Broken Arm and Hat Rack (1917) in his retrospective Boite-en-valise (1941) "and then to color them, their sepia tones rendering them 'historical'" indicates that "during the initial 'invention' of the readymades his studio was their major site of reception" (Molesworth 51). Indeed the early readymades were nearly as free to circulate back into the commodity system as 'real' objects. Nearly all the original hat racks, bottle dryers, stools, and coat racks were lost and were only replicated when the demand arose for their display in museums in the 1960s. This must, of course, have pleased Duchamp enormously. But with the emergence of the semi-readymades there was a new note in so far as they were unique works or, at least, even if they were susceptible to replication this was not planned. Nor was there much chance, at this point, that works such as the Fresh Widow were going to be left behind when Duchamp moved or thrown out by someone else.
It is noteworthy, of course, that this altered mode of production arrives along with Rrose Selavy. The custom-made Fresh Widow was copyrighted to her, the perfume bottle mock-up made by Duchamp and featuring a Man Ray portrait
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 3020
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)
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