de ou par Marcel Duchamp ou Rrose Sélavy (La Boîte en Valise, Series G) (Schwarz 484)

Duchamp's Boîte en Valise, or portable museum, with it's pull-out standing frames displaying his Nude Descending a Staircase and other works, reproductions of The Large Glass and Nine Manic Molds on celluloid and diminutive Readymades hung in a vertical 'gallery', is the artist's own summary of his work prior to 1940. More importantly, as a readymade in its own right, it represents an important shift in the artist's philosophy: having consciously set out to repeat neither his own nor any other form of 'accepted' art, the Valises show Duchamp exactly reversing his prior stance: here he has deliberately set out to create hand-crafted copies of objects which he had already made. Presented in their neatly packaged and intricately conceived constructions, they look like manufactured art 'devices', thereby coming full circle as art fashioned out of something already designated as art.