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Marcel Duchamp's Boîte-en-valise: The Museum of Metamorphosis

Monte Carlo Bond

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"Artists of all times are like the gamblers of Monte Carlo, and this blind lottery allows some to succeed and ruins others." So wrote Duchamp from New York to his sister Suzanne and his brother-in-law Jean Crotti on August 17, 1952.¹Noting the resemblance between the leather suitcases used for the deluxe Boîtes-en-valise and the Louis Vuitton portes-monnaie that Duchamp would have encountered on his 1924 trip to Monte Carlo, Ecke Bonk links the self-memorializing project of the Boîte all the more firmly to Duchamp's meditations on the posterity of artists.² At the time that Duchamp issued his first series of Boîtes, readymades had scarcely appeared in public, much less received widespread recognition as art;³ in its display of three miniature replicas of readymades within a space undeniably evocative of the museum, complete with labels and frames, this gambler's suitcase contained Duchamp's bet on his own posterity.⁴ Far from simply representing this wager, however, the Boîte helped secure the recognition of Duchamp's work that it anticipated. Martha Buskirk argues that the twenty-four deluxe Boîtes-en-valise, dedicated to major museums and collectors on both sides of the Atlantic, along with the many more Boîtes in circulation, laid the groundwork for the rediscovery and celebration of Duchamp's work in the 1950s and 1960s by disseminating his little-known body of work among a public with the means to ensure its preservation.⁵

How should we square this persuasive account of the Boîte’s role in a strategy aimed at securing the institutional recognition and the museal preservation of Duchamp’s work with the skepticism that he repeatedly expressed towards the museum and its claim to preserve—with his conviction that inside or outside the museum, no matter how lucky in the lottery of posterity, “a picture dies after a few years like the man who painted it,”⁶ and the museum contains not works of art, but lifeless “art history”? To see the Boîte exclusively as a play in Duchamp’s long game, somewhere between a gamble and a chess move,⁷ would be to neglect the potential for critical insight inherent in this artwork’s figuring of the institutional legitimation that its artist seems, in spite of himself, to have aspired to. Situating the Boîte in the context of the mounting institutional acceptance of the Surrealist avant-garde in New York in the 1930s and 1940s, Benjamin Buchloh discerns in it a critical commentary on the fate of avant-garde art—albeit, in his view, a failed one.⁸ Duchamp, Buchloch suggests, not only anticipated the as-yet unrealized recognition of his readymades as art and the entry of his œuvre into the museum, but feared the petrifying, disfiguring effect of this acceptance on his work’s critical power. By meticulously mimicking the museum’s practices of collection and exhibition in the Boîte, complete with a system of labels and frames, Buchloh argues, Duchamp sought to forestall the institutional “reification”⁹ and consequent commodification of his work by anticipating and satirizing it; he concludes, however, that the Boîte resembles the object of its criticism too closely to challenge it effectively.¹⁰ Insofar as the Boîte’s status as a lavish, portable object allows it to be marketed, sold, and possessed in actual commercial transactions that collapse the necessary separation between a successful parody of art’s commodification and its target, Buchloh correctly identifies its form as detracting from its critical potential. On the other hand, however, the particulars of the Boîte’s fragile materiality make the object inadvertently capable of a critique of the museum’s ideology that Buchloh could not have anticipated, speaking too soon when he listed “preservation from decay” as one of the functions of the museum “contained” in the Boîte.¹¹