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.” He then proceeded to insist on the mortality of art, whether in the museum or outside it, explaining, 

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.

However the museum may appear to preserve, even immortalize, objects that we accept as works of art, Duchamp argues, it cannot preserve them as art, because an inexorable disfigurement—here exemplified by the physical discoloration of the surface of an Impressionist painting, a relic of an old avant-garde—limits the existence of these objects as art to a brief episode in the longer history of their material survival. 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 endurance, 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 interview; 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 Duchamp’s death. Combining features of an artwork, an exhibition, a self-authored catalogue raisonné, and a small business venture, the project has proven strikingly resistant to efforts to settle on a single convincing assessment of Duchamp’s intentions in devising it or of the Boîte’s success or failure to transcend its complicity in projects of self-promotion and commercial gain.

As generations of interpreters have grappled with the Boîte’s humor and hypocrisy, the forces of time—whose relentless physical and chemical advances within museum walls Duchamp, judging by his many returns to the subject in his interviews, did not take lightly—have not passed over this “portable museum.” Constructed in wood, leather, plastic, and oilcloth as well as paper—and thus far more vulnerable to physical deterioration than a traditional catalogue raisonné composed of printed text and photographs—the Boîte has proven not merely fragile, but self-destructive: 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. 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 the work has found itself that may illuminate the way in which these institutions conceive of the art that they hope to preserve, and may clarify the role of reproductive technologies, now more often digital than mechanical, in both supporting and subverting museums’ grasps on their artworks. 

In crafting his Boîte, Duchamp favored antiquated, time-consuming processes of reproduction over the latest technologies. He had the black-and-white photographs the Boîte required reproduced in collotype despite having just used the newer and more efficient process of offset lithography for another project, and rather than using color photography, he enlisted the services of artisans working in pochoir studios to reproduce works in color. Because of the investment of time and skill on the part of the artisans that it required, the use of the pochoir process in the Boîte made the work too expensive to function as a mass-market consumer product, yet all the more alluring as a luxury good—and Duchamp actively marketed it as such, advertising it with a subscription bulletin released in the fall before the first copies’ completion and mobilizing such familiar commercial clichés as a distinction between standard and deluxe versions. Having officially titled the box with an indecisive signature, Of or By Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy, Duchamp originally referred to most of the boxes simply as Boîtes, reserving the term Boîte-en-valise for the twenty-four deluxe editions comprising the work’s first series, each of which he had planned to fit with a leather suitcase for storage and transportation.

These suitcases, Ecke Bonk notes, resemble the Louis Vuitton porte-monnaies carried by gamblers that Duchamp would have encountered on his trips to Monte Carlo casinos in the 1920s, and thus further link the self-memorializing project of the Boîte to Duchamp’s ruminations on the critical fortunes of artists, which he consistently compared to a lottery or a game of chance. Bonk cites Duchamp’s remark that “‘Artists of all times are like gamblers of Monte Carlo, and this blind lottery allows some to succeed and ruins others,’” and concludes, “For an artist who relied on the concept of hazard en conserve (canned chance), this Readymade valise—designed for big losses as well as big wins—served as the proper container for his own personal monograph.” Thus, stocked with representations of Duchamp’s things that the Boîte’s system of labels and museal architecture frame unambiguously as artworks—including readymades, which had scarcely appeared in public, much less received widespread recognition as art, at the time Duchamp released his first series of Boîtes—the valise contains Duchamp’s gamble on his own posterity. Far from simply staking a bet, however, the Boîte contributed to the legitimation of Duchamp’s work that it foresaw. Elena Filipovic argues convincingly that together, the twenty-four deluxe Boîtes-en-valise, dedicated to major museums and collectors on both sides of the Atlantic, and the many more Boîtes in circulation disseminated Duchamp’s then little-known body of work, presented self-assuredly (if playfully) as such, among a public with the means to ensure its preservation and thereby laid the groundwork for his reception in the second half of the century.

How should we square this persuasive account of the Boîte’s role in a strategy aimed at securing the institutional recognition and even, perhaps, the museal preservation of Duchamp’s work with the skepticism that he repeatedly expressed towards the museum and its claim to preserve art—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,” and the museum contains not works of art, but lifeless “art history”? To see the Boîte exclusively as a play in Duchamp’s art historical long game, somewhere between a gamble and a chess move, would be to neglect the potential for critical insight in a project that, by endowing a multiple with the form of the museum, symbolically conflates the site of the original artwork and the mobile structure through which one accesses its reproductions. Situating the work in the context of the institutionalization of the Surrealist avant-garde in New York in the 1930s and 1940s, which, he argues, Duchamp observed and commented on in the exhibition designs he produced for the group, Benjamin Buchloh discerns in the Boîte a commentary on the fate of avant-garde art—albeit, in his view, a critically impotent one. Suggesting that Duchamp would have looked beyond the as-yet unrealized recognition of his own work as art to envision his œuvre’s acceptance into the museum as its “reification,” its “subjection to ideology”—that is, its seizure by a regime of collection and classification that tells the history of art by organizing exchangeable objects—Buchloh argues that Duchamp aims to forestall this fate by anticipating and satirizing it in the Boîte. The Boîte, however, Buchloh concludes, resembles the object of its criticism too closely to challenge it, and “ends up close to the passivity and fetishization that all parodic quotations of ideology seem to imply.” In the portable valise form, Buchloh identifies an element of the Boîte that describes the institutional acculturation of the avant-garde so precisely that it enacts it: Duchamp’s art “becomes literally enshrined in a container that allows arbitrary movements in time and space, multiple ownership and privacy of possession and meaning assignment.” Insofar as the Boîte’s status as a lavish, portable object rather than an easily reproducible illustrated text allows it to be marketed, sold, and possessed in actual commercial transactions that collapse the necessary separation between a successful parody and its target, Buchloh correctly identifies its form and medium 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, who spoke too soon when he listed “preservation from decay” as one of the functions of the museum “contained” in the Boîte, could not have anticipated.
As generations of interpreters have grappled with the Boîte’s humor and hypocrisy, the forces of time—whose relentless physical and chemical advances within museum walls Duchamp, judging by his many returns to the subject in his interviews, did not take lightly—have not passed over this “portable museum.” Constructed in wood, leather, plastic, and oilcloth as well as paper—and thus far more vulnerable to physical deterioration than a traditional catalogue raisonné composed of printed text and photographs—the Boîte has proven not merely fragile, but self-destructive: 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 seemingly unforeseen by its creator.