Introduction
About two decades after he abandoned painting to theorize a new kind of artwork, the readymade, and twelve years after he declared his enigmatic Large Glass, over which he had labored painstakingly between 1915 and 1923, “definitively unfinished,” Marcel Duchamp devoted himself to the project of methodically reproducing his own work in miniature. Between March 1935 and January 1941, enlisting the expertise of local artisans, Duchamp oversaw the fabrication of 320 miniature replicas of each of the sixty-nine works that he had chosen to reproduce. Though he had at first planned to organize these reproductions into an “album,” by 1938, his conception of the project had expanded into three-dimensional space, and the book he had envisioned had morphed into a box, or Boîte.
Produced in about three hundred copies making up seven editions released between 1941 and 1971, this “portable museum,” as Duchamp himself called it in a 1955 interview, consists of a box slightly more than a foot in length and width that unfolds to present the reproductions it contains in an upright display complete with frames and labels. On either side of the Boîte’s reproduction of the Large Glass, its central exhibit, an adjustable wooden “pull-out” (tirette) slides out like the wing of a triptych, while below the Glass, a tray houses a file full of “loose sheets” (feuilles libres): black cardstock folders lined with photographs and reproductions of paintings that the Boîte’s handler may sift through freely.
Though its eccentric opening mechanism and movable parts seem to invite tactile exploration, the Boîte most often encounters its public today from within a glass case, immobilized in an open position—that is, if it encounters a public at all. Between plastic components that shrink and emit fumes toxic to the other reproductions and supports that chafe against each other as one opens the Boîte, such that every exhibition of the object does physical damage to it, Duchamp’s “portable museum” has proven not only fragile, but self-destructive, and knowledge of the cumulative toll of the object’s exhibition on its longevity has led some curators in museums that own a Boîte to advocate for the artwork’s withdrawal from in-person encounters with beholders. To compensate for this withdrawal, the Smart Museum, for one, has made pictures and videos of its Boîtes highly accessible on the Internet. Through its physical self-destructiveness, then, the Boîte has catalyzed a proliferation of digital reproductions of itself.
The online exhibition of images and videos of the Boîte operates a mise-en-abîme, placing yet another layer of mediation between the viewer and Duchamp’s original works, and, by making the Boîte a thing reproduced as well as a collection of reproductions, strengthening its aura as an original. This website aims not only to offer such a mediated experience of the Boîte, but to take this mediated experience and the conditions that produce it as objects of study. In the sections on “The Boîtes in Museum Collections around the World and Online,” I present a sample of the Boîtes currently held by museums and examine the ways in which these institutions exhibit their Boîtes on the Internet, briefly considering the implications of the different curatorial choices by which these museums respond to the Boîte’s particularity as an artwork that mimics the practice of curation. In my catalogue essay, I investigate the tests the Boîte poses to the museums in which it finds itself as a miniature museum, as a serial artwork produced through an eccentric combination of manual and mechanical reproductive processes, and as a box damaged by the act of opening it, before considering what museums’ responses to these challenges may reveal about the philosophy of art quietly implied by our cultural institutions and operative in our thinking about the future of artworks.
