Marcel Duchamp, Boite-en-valise, Series F, 1960 (Portland Art Museum). This video was produced in cooperation with Portland Art Museum.
Bruce Guenther: [0:00] We’re here at the Portland Art Museum in the Jubitz Center for Modern and Contemporary Art, in front of Marcel Duchamp’s landmark, “Boite-en-valise (The red box), series F.”
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:11] When I hear the word “valise,” I think of something you could carry around.
Bruce: [0:15] Like a suitcase.
Dr. Harris: [0:16] Yeah, like a suitcase. I think my grandmother used “valise” for suitcase.
Bruce: [0:21] Exactly, and we use backpack. It’s a new nomenclature. Duchamp, at the end of World War I, had seen the destruction 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.”
[0:43] He decided to reproduce everything and make his own history, his own museum, in a suitcase.
Dr. Harris: [0:51] He packaged himself.
Bruce: [0:53] Absolutely. In a new and completely unbranded way, he reproduced the “Nude Descending a Staircase,” all of his Cubist and vaguely Surrealist paintings on reproductions.
Dr. Harris: [1:08] It’s like a retrospective in a box.
Bruce: [1:11] Absolutely. 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 edition for Schwarz in Italy in 1960.
Dr. Harris: [1:28] How many are there?
Bruce: [1:29] 100.
Dr. Harris: [1:30] There are 100 boxes.
Bruce: [1:33] In the red version. There’s a green version, a leather version, and a tan version. The earliest version is actually a valise.
Dr. Harris: [1:40] It’s a real valise?
Bruce: [1:41] 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 Schwarz comes to him in the ’60s and says, “I want to do the Boite-en-valise as a real edition, Duchamp says, “OK, I happen to have a stack of them right here, I never put them together.” So his wife Teeny sat in a Paris apartment gluing the reproductions onto these black cardboard backgrounds and little labels they had made, and they created this retrospective in a box.
Dr. Harris: [2:20] There’s something to me about the idea of the artist packaging himself, selling himself, almost like a traveling salesman. Go around to galleries and try to get their work…There’s something about that sort of artist in the commercial environment to me.
Bruce: [2:40] Well, as a curator, I always immediately pull back 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.
[3:00] 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 readymade was a sculpture. We have a tiny version of a urinal…
Dr. Harris: [3:14] Isn’t this whole thing a kind of readymade?
Bruce: [3:15] Absolutely. The entire thing was already made. He gave us his life’s work to that date as a ready-made surrogate for the experience. None of it’s 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.
Dr. Harris: [3:43] Right. What’s great to me about it is that there’s this kind of embracing of mechanical reproduction, which is a thread through all of Duchamp’s work, and a loss of the aura in Benjamin’s terms, the specialness of the original, which was always a issue that Duchamp confronted.
Bruce: [4:04] You’ll notice that this object is sitting not in 1929 when he first conceives it, but it’s sitting here in the Jubitz Center halfway up in 1960, 1970, when America discovers the ideas of Duchamp, when Duchamp becomes the grandfather of Pop.
Dr. Harris: [4:25] Right. It makes sense.
Bruce: [4:26] And of Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince, and all of the artists who practice appropriation and simulacra.
Dr. Harris: [4:36] That’s right. And Sherry Levine and all of that.
Bruce: [4:39] Absolutely. Sherry Levine could not exist without Duchamp.
Dr. Harris: [4:43] This little miniaturization of them, too, it’s like little souvenirs. “Oh, you want your little Duchamp souvenir?” It’s like Warhol.
Bruce: [4:52] Your little vial of the air of Paris right here.
Dr. Harris: [4:56] How fun.
