The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp was a famous expatriate, a wanderer, living and working in Paris, NewYork, and Buenos Aires and escaping from each in turn. But exile, argues T. J. Demos in thisinnovative reading, is more than a fact in Duchamp’s biography. Exile–in the artist’s own words, a”spirit of expatriation”–infuses Duchamp’s entire artistic practice.. Duchamp’s readymadeconstructions, his installations for surrealist exhibitions in Paris and New York, and his”portable museum” (the suggestively named La boîte-en-valise ), Demoswrites, all manifest, define, and exploit the terms of exile in multiple ways. Created while theartist was living variously in New York, Buenos Aires, and occupied France during the globalcatastrophes of war and fascism, these works express the anguish of displacement and celebrate thefreedom of geopolitical homelessness. The “portable museum,” a suitcase containingminiature reproductions of Duchamp’s works, for example, represented a complex meditation–bothcritical and joyful–on modern art’s tendency toward itinerancy, whereas Duchamp’s 1942 installationdesign entangling a New York gallery in a mile of string announced the dislocated status that manyexiled surrealists wished to forget. Duchamp’s exile, writes Demos, defines a new ethics ofindependent life in the modern age of nationalism and advanced capitalism, offering a precursor toour own globalized world of nomadic subjects and dispersed experience.