We are here in the Portland Art Museum in the Jubilee Center for Modern and Contemporary Art
In front of Marcel Duchamp's landmark Boite-en-valise
The red box, series F
When I hear the word "valise" I think of could carry around
Like a suitcase.
Yeah.
Like a suitcase. I think my grandmother used "valise" for a suitcase
Exactly, and we use backpacks. It's a new nomenclature.
Duchamp at the end of world war one had seen in the desturction in Europe.
He was a painter, he saw his brother injured in battle and die
He came back to Paris and he said
"My work could be lost for the ages"
and he decided to reproduce everything and make his own history
His own musuem in a suitcase.
He packaged himself
Absolutely. In a new an completely unbranded way.
He reproduced a new descending staircase all of his cubist and vaguely surrealist paintings on reproductions
It's like a retrospective in a box.
Absolutely and you know the interesting thing about this box is that he updates it twice so that the
box here at the Portland Art Museum is a box that he created as an addition
For Schwartz in Italy in 1960
How many are there?
100
There are 100 boxes
In the red version
There are red, green, leather and tan versions
The earliest version is actually a Valise
A leather valise, because these are mechanically reproduced objects he had a little cottage industry
He prints a bunch of them but they never get assembled and so when Schwartz comes to him in the '60s
and says I want to do the Boite-de-valise as a real addition
Duchamp says okay I happened to have a stack of them right here. I never put them together
And so his wife Teeny sat in Paris apartment gluing the reproductions onto these black cardboard backgrounds
and little labels they had made and they created this retrospective in a box
And there is something to me that's sort of about the idea of the artist packaging himself
Selling himself, almost like a traveling salesman going around to galleries and try to get their work
There is something about that artist and the commercial environment.
As a curator I always immidiately pullback when someone introduces themselves as an artist
Because the modern artist carried slides and now they carry an iPhone with their entire work on it
Sort of like Duchamp but in the technology of today as opposed to the reproductive technology of his
age
What I find interesting and beautiful about this is the variety
Because he was both a painter and a sculptor in the sense that the ready made was a sculpture
We have the tiny verison of a urel
The entire thing was a ready made
He gave us his lifes work to that date as a ready made surrogate
For the experience. None of it is an original print in the sense of an artist pulled, plate numbered and
signed but in fact these are all mechanically reproduced
From images that may or may not have been an original work of art in the first place
What's great to me about it is this kind of embracing of mechanical reproduction
Which is sort of a thread through all of Duchamp's work
and a sort of loss of the aura of the original
Which was always a sort of issue that Duchamp confronted
You'll notive that this object is sitting not in 1929 when he first concieves it but it sits
here in the Jubit centre halfway up in the 1960-70 when America discovers his ideas
When Duchamp becomes the grandfather of pop
and of Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince and all of the artists who practice appropriation
and Sherry Levine and all of that
Absolutely and Sherry Levine who would not exist without Duchamp
And this little miniturization of them too it's like little souveniers
A little Duchamp souvenir
It's like Warhol, your little vail of the air of Paris
Right here