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

The Cracks in the Large Glass

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1. The Cracks in the Large Glass

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The Museum of Metamorphosis
When asked how he felt about the "consecration" of his works in museums during a 1959 interview, Marcel Duchamp professed indifference. "I am not concerned," he said, "because I do not consider myself any different from the others."¹ He then proceeded to insist on the mortality of art, whether in the museum or outside it, explaining,

My real feeling is that a work of art is only a work of art for a very short period…After twenty years, an Impressionist painting has ceased to be an Impressionist painting, because the material, the color, the paint has darkened so much that it is no more what the man did when he painted it. That is one way of looking at it. So I applied this rule to all artworks, and after twenty years they are finished. Their life is over. They survive all right, because they are part of art history, but art history is not art. I don’t believe in preserving.²
For all that he claimed not to “believe in preserving,” however, Duchamp devoted years of methodical labor to a retrospective artwork that not only evinces a concern for his art’s future, but stages a reflection on his posterity within a space that mimics the museum. Commonly called the Boîte-en-valise [Box in a Suitcase], the work consists of a box slightly more than a foot in length and width that unfolds to present an upright display of labeled and framed miniature reproductions of Duchamp’s prior artworks. Duchamp produced about three hundred copies of this “portable museum,” as he himself described the Boîte in a 1955 interview³; between 1935 and 1941, he oversaw the reproduction of the sixty-nine works that he had selected for inclusion, and in the decades that followed, he and his associates slowly assembled the boxes and issued them in seven editions, the last of which was only finished in 1971, three years after his death.⁴ At once an exhibition, a self-authored catalogue raisonné in three dimensions, and a small business venture, the Boîte has perplexed generations of interpreters, dividing opinion with respect to whether, as an artwork, it transcends its complicity in projects of self-promotion and commercial gain.⁵

Meanwhile, the forces of time—whose relentless advances within museum walls Duchamp did not take lightly, judging by his many returns to the subject in his interviews⁶—have not passed over this “portable museum.” Between inner and outer lids that scrape against one another as one opens the box, plastic items that warp and emit fumes damaging to paper as they degrade, and an oilcloth miniature typewriter cover that grows sticky and may stain the wooden walls, each Boîte contains a museum at war with itself—a war apparently unforeseen by its creator.⁷ Undermining both the work’s commercial value and its apparent valorization of the museum’s power to preserve, the Boîte’s self-destructiveness elicits responses from the real museums in which it has found itself that illuminate the ways in which these institutions conceive of the art that they strive to protect. While the museum’s treatment of any physically deteriorating work of art offers indications of the notion of the artwork’s identity that it assumes, the humor of the mise-en-abîme enacted by the presence of a miniature museum within a full-scale one illustrates with particular salience the unique status, with its constraints and possibilities, that containment within this institution conveys on an object, however much that object resembles its container.
In crafting his Boîte, Duchamp favored antiquated, time-consuming processes of reproduction over the latest technologies. He had the black-and-white photographs required for the Boîte reproduced in collotype despite having just used the newer and more efficient process of offset lithography for another project,⁸ and rather than using color photography, he enlisted the services of artisans working in pochoir studios to reproduce works in color.⁹ These pochoir-colored reproductions, neither original works nor products of completely mechanical reproductive processes, occupy an ambiguous status in between artworks and mere reproductions of artworks; when the Boîte enters the museum, however, as Elena Filipovic has noted, both container and contents assume the same status as any artworks within the collection, complete with the same taboos. However much its ostentatious opening mechanism, pull-outs, and loose folders ready to be leafed through invite tactile investigation, the Boîte has greeted in public from behind glass since its earliest exhibitions, with which Duchamp himself was closely involved.¹⁰ Through its material and structural particularities, then, the Boîte calls attention from within the museum to the aura¹¹ that acceptance by this institution bestows upon an object and to the possibility of conflict between the demands of such an aura and the conditions that would permit the encounters with beholders that the form of the object anticipates.
The Boîte’s self-destructiveness brings to the fore even more saliently the notions of the artwork’s identity in conflict and in flux within the modern museum and, more specifically, within today’s museums, which increasingly enlist the help of digital technology to make their collections accessible to the public. A 2012 conservation report surveying the condition of nineteen Boîtes in eleven different institutions and private collections enumerates the features of the boxes that have proven most disruptive to what Miriam Clavir would call their “physical integrity”¹²—that is, their condition of being materially intact, each physical part appearing and operating as designed. These troublesome features include the design of the suitcases housing the deluxe Boîtes-en-valises and of the boxes housing the standard Boîtes; the oilcloth of the miniature typewriter cover readymade …pliant…de voyage [Traveler’s Folding Item]; and the plastic on which Duchamp printed reproductions of his works on glass.¹³ During the opening and closing of a standard Boîte, the inner tray of the box, fitting a bit too tightly, often rubs against the wooden frame of the reproduction of the Large Glass, suffering tears to its paper lining and continual abrasion over time.¹⁴ Though the conservation report features a section proposing reparative and preventative treatments, such interventions can only do so much. The object files on the two Boîtes belonging to the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago that I had the opportunity to consult for this project document years of similar treatments implemented to address the abrasion of the Boîte’s outer architecture and tears to its binding, yet the museum’s recent condition reports consider these interventions capable only of mitigating the erosion of the object’s structures of support that every opening of the box entails.¹⁵ Meanwhile, the reproductions of the Large Glass and 9 moules mâlic, made of the unstable plastic cellulose acetate, turn yellow, warp, and shrink so that they no longer fit in their wooden frames—a process that exposure to light (or to moisture, heat, or pollutants) accelerates.¹⁶ Even packed up in storage, however, the Boîte is not safe; as the plastic reproductions degrade, they emit an acetic acid (vinegar) vapor that damages paper, and that, in the “microclimate” of a closed Boîte, may harm the many paper-based reproductions that cannot be removed from its object’s “walls.”¹⁷ A menace to itself whether closed or open, regularly handled or stashed away, the Boîte forces the museums where it stages its mise-en-abîme to consider the ends of their practices of conservation and the losses they are willing to accept in order to prolong an artwork’s life and protect its value.

The discussion surrounding the conservation of the Boîte at the Smart Museum provides a case study in the decision-making process that the artwork’s self-destructiveness catalyzes in the museums that possess it, which must weigh their interest in keeping the work accessible to the public against their interest in keeping it as intact as possible.¹⁸ The Smart Museum acquired its first Boîte, belonging to the 1963 series, in 1983, and it proved a popular choice of artwork for up-close viewing in the Museum’s study room, a space where researchers and classes can examine works from the collection that are not on view in the galleries. In the study room, no glass separates the Boîte from its beholder; though visitors may not touch the work themselves, they may observe its architecture in motion as an approved art handler opens the box, unfurls the pull-outs, and turns over the flap in the bottom tray to reveal the reproduction of the 1914 Chocolate Grinder on its inside.¹⁹ Nevertheless, when the Museum’s condition reports identified persistent abrasion and tearing to the Boîte’s container resulting from its opening and closing, the curators felt compelled to respond by limiting—though not eliminating—such study room displays of the miniature museum.²⁰ They also considered arranging a more long-term display of the opened Boîte behind glass, and researched glass that would protect the sensitive object from too much exposure to light.²¹ Such a display would have kept the object visible to the public while minimizing the number of times it would have had to be opened and closed, and would also have avoided the menace of the toxic “microclimate” tending to arise within the closed Boîte, but the space and resources that it would have required made it ultimately impracticable.²² The curators’ concern for both conserving the physical integrity of the Boîte and keeping the opportunity to examine a Boîte up-close in the study room available to students and researchers informed the Museum’s decision in 2015 to accept the gift of a second Boîte, intended to alleviate some of the pressure on their 1963 example.²³ Still, though its purchase made it theoretically possible for the Museum to spread out the toll incurred by each display of a Boîte across two objects rather than one, given that this 1966 example shares the self-destructive tendencies inherent to all series of the Boîte, its acquisition could not resolve the dilemma.
For museums to ignore the threat to a work’s physical integrity posed by repeated handling and display of the work would seem to conflict with the museum’s commitment to preserving artworks from the ravages of time—or, at any rate, to maintaining art history in as legible a form as possible. On the other hand, if conserving an artwork requires severely reducing, if not giving up, our ability to see and touch it—its opportunity to encounter the public, without whose intervention, according to Duchamp, an artwork could not come into being as such²⁴—then what, or whom, are we conserving it for? An approach to the conservation of the Boîte that excessively privileges its physical integrity over its ability to exhibit Duchamp’s miniature œuvre and defers its encounters with a public into an indefinite future thus risks reducing it from an artwork to a prized object.

The development of digital technology has offered museums something of a respite from the bind in which the Boîte places them. Today’s museums increasingly make their collections searchable online and many of their works viewable in the form of high-quality images and videos, often conceiving of the work of making art digitally accessible, and thus accessible from anywhere, as part of the museum’s responsibility to its public.²⁵ Physically unstable artworks like the Boîte attract special attention from museums seeking to exhibit their works online through digitized collections; meticulous photographic documentation of an artwork in an unstable condition not only preserves a clear, visible record of its current state, before further change occurs, but also, when made available online, compensates for the relative inaccessibility of the physical art object in the cases of works like the Boîte, whose display exacerbates its deterioration. This very website project, for instance, is motivated partly by the Smart Museum’s interest in exploring the use of digital technology to facilitate encounters with the Boîte that do not worsen its condition. Thus, through its fragility or self-destructiveness, an artwork may catalyze projects of digital reproduction that multiply its image and diffuse it widely, assuring its preservation as a visible form if not as a material object—albeit, its preservation in the terms of the museum. Here too, however, the Boîte offers a rejoinder to the threat of ossification into “art history”: already a collection of reproductions—an exhibition offering a mediated experience of Duchamp’s œuvre—when reproduced online, the Boîte draws attention, by contrast with the forms of reproduction that it already incorporates, to the specificity of this mediated experience of an artwork. Encountering the Boîte online reminds one that to encounter an artwork online is to experience it as mediated uniformly by color photography rather than by multiple forms of reproduction (pochoir-colored collotypes; letterpress prints; three-dimensional porcelain, glass, and oilcloth replicas), as publicly visible rather than privately owned, and as immaterial rather than tangible. Thus, when placed within the institution that it imitates—behind glass, in storage, or exhibited online through photographs—the Boîte becomes more capable, and all the more so for its self-destructiveness, of making us conscious of the conditions of our encounters with artworks in the museum, material or imaginary.