Because of the importance of its nonvisual contextual frame, the readymade was not a purely visual phenomenon. As Duchamp told Pierre Cabanne when asked about which objects he chose, “In general one had to defend oneself against the ‘look.’ It is very difficult to choose an object because after a couple of weeks you come to like it or detest it. You have to achieve something so indifferent to you that you have no aesthetic emotion. The choice of ready-mades is always based on visual indifference as well as on the complete absence of good or bad taste.”(1) According to Rosalind Krauss, it owed something the to the photograph, or more specifically, the snapshot: “The readymade’s parallel with the photograph is established by its process of production. It is about the physical transposition of an object from the continuum of reality into the fixed condition of the art-image by a moment of isolation, or selection.”(2) In both cases, what you see is not what you get, because of the insufficiency of the decontextualized image by itself.
Duchamp’s provocations, like those of other artists in the Dadist camp, could quickly be recuperated by the ideological and commercial pressures of the institution he tried to subvert. It is now in fact commonplace to note that museums proudly exhibit the “originals” of his readymades, as indeed he himself knew they would. (3) Duchamp’s more radical gesture then was the virtual abandonment of artistic production itself after 1924 in favor of chess, a game he played with considerable success. His deliberately uncompleted Large Glass (also known as The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even), damaged in transit after its exhibition in Brooklyn in 1926, came to be seen as symbolic of this rejection. Or at least so it seemed until the posthumous installation of his remarkable Etant donnés: 1° la chute d'eau / 2° le gaz d'éclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1969, a surprising revelation that he had in fact been working on something for the previous twenty years.
Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, Martin Jay, 1993 (p.163)
Pierre Cabanne, Entretiens avec Marcel Duchamp (Paris, 1967), pp.83-84
Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde, p.206
see remarks to Cabanne, Entretiens avec Marcel Duchamp, p.139