Kant After Duchamp

by Thierry de Duve
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. xv +
484 pp. Cloth.
ISBN 0262041510

Reviewed by Mark A. Cheetham


Thierry de Duve closes his long book with a seemingly innocent and simple claim: "I guess I am trying to understand why Marcel Duchamp was such a great artist" (462). Not all artists and historians share his judgment of Duchamp -- Robert Smithson and Clement Greenberg stand out as dissenters -- but perhaps today all those concerned with the visual arts and its theories would agree that understanding Duchamp is both necessary and anything but simple.

Indeed Kant After Duchamp is an intricate book, a collection of essays published and rethought over quite a few years that demands and rewards careful reading. That reading should begin with the arresting title. We all know that chronologically, Kant does not come after Duchamp. Yet artists, critics, and especially de Duve do re-read Kant after Duchamp's essential work with the readymade. Methodologically, then, Kant does come after Duchamp and we re-read the patterns of Modernism as they have been set by both these figures. De Duve argues convincingly that within Modernism, Duchamp forever changed specific questions about artistic quality and medium -- "Is this a good painting?" -- to generic questions: "Is this Art?" After Duchamp -- though not until the 1960s and 1970s -- one is an artist, not a painter or sculptor. And here lies one link with Kant. "What remained to be understood in Duchamp's aftermath," de Duve reasons, "was that 'this is art' continues to be an aesthetic judgment in the Kantian sense, not in the sense where it would remain a judgment of taste... but in the sense that it requires one to suppose that everybody is endowed with the faculty of aesthetic judgment" (453). "Everybody." The universality of judgment itself -- not of local or individual taste -- is at stake in a resoundingly Kantian way in recent art, which suggests that Kantian imperatives change after Duchamp but remain relevant to contemporary aesthetics and artistic practice. Put simply, de Duve shows us the importance of understanding that "the readymade is art only if you judge it as such" (381). Thus as his debts to Kant show - though with a delicious irony, given the German philosopher's lifelong attempts to make the aesthetic autonomous -- "The theory of art is not based on art. In other words, art is not autonomous" (51).

Kant After Duchamp is a very personal book that reveals de Duve's admirably passionate views as well as his hobby horses. As someone who well remembers the late 1960s in Europe, he takes the long view in these revisited essays. He is not content with the status quo in the artworld; neither is he nostalgic. He refuses to devolve his political and theoretical views into "critical theory." As for myself, de Duve writes, " I believe that archaeology, in Michel Foucault's sense, is what the times are calling for, and that the archaeologist's approach, which should aim at a postmodern reading of modernity, is concerned with both acknowledging the 'theoretical service' rendered by Duchamp's reception in the sixties and putting [Joseph Beuys'] 'everyone-an-artist-utopia' into a broader perspective" (288). For de Duve, this perspective must always be historical, not ontological, which is perhaps where he most departs from Kant the transcendentalist. What does this archaeology uncover as it "...seeks to make sense of Kantian aesthetics, in light of subsequent art history" (317)?

It is fair to say that we learn more about Duchamp than Kant, though de Duve establishes their mutual relevance with flair. His readings of Kant are excellent, and his importance here is echoed in seriously clever chapter titles that echo Kant's Critiques ("Archaeology of Pure Modernism"; "Archaeology of Practical Modernism"), but the philosopher doesn't figure in the book until almost its halfway point. Nonetheless Kant's name remains a watermark on de Duve's pages. Even when his main interest is Duchamp's Fountain and its reception, or the "readymade" status of the blank canvas within the traditions of painting, de Duve remains more Kantian than he seems to realize. A thread running through the book can be described as an historically evolutionary argument about the development of the individual (and culture) from the personal position of critic to the historian and archaeologist. So Clement Greenberg assesses painting's vaunted flatness as a critic and historian (209). Here, de Duve argues that these two functions cannot adequately be separated. But earlier in the book, he describes an evolution form one aesthetic stance to another. In a revealing observation about Hegel, for example, we read that "it becomes possible to see that the Hegelian dialectic has maintained a systematic confusion of the positions of art lover, critic, historian, and aesthetician." De Duve expressly wants to "undo the confusion wrought by Hegel" (77). Here at least, he wants (relative) autonomy among discourses on art, just as Kant the paradigmatic disciplinarian did and just as Greenberg did as he promoted mid-century Modernism's notorious signature, the proscription of media "inerspecificity" (227), which Michael Fried famously deemed theatre.

That the book reveals productive tensions between de Duve's ideas now and when he first authored these essays is a strength. He is productively inconsistent on the topic of "postmodernism," which suffers reductive dismissal early in the book and a revitalization in the later chapters. As an "historian of tradition" (40), de Duve must state his judgments clearly and controversially. We are invited to disagree with assertions such as "Newman and the sublime are dead" (343), given the remarkable resurgence of interest in "transcendental" abstraction and the Sublime in contemporary art. De Duve is forgiven these slips, especially as his is the sort of work that yields memorable gems of insight. On Joseph Kosuth, for example, we read that "it is at the conceptual level that conceptual art gets it wrong" (414). Kant After Duchamp is the product of deep and mature reflection. As such it is a credit to its author and a fitting memorial to those names that figure its title.