Les Celibataires Memes: Spectatorship and Identity in Marcel Duchamp's "Etant Donnes"

Discussed in this short conference paper are the ways in which Marcel Duchamp’s final work, the installation piece at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, ´Etant Donnés undermines the conceptual boundary traditionally understood to separate a spectator from a work of art.  Utilizing a solid, wooden door, Duchamp’s installation physically blockades the spectator from a representational diorama, making visible this previously invisible border.   Although heightened and alert to the edge separating him from the object of representation, the viewer of ´Etant Donnés is, at the same time, aware that as a door, this border is only tenuous and may be transgressed.  The spectator’s assumption that he is himself unseen, and as such, always distinct from the object of his gaze, is, thus, undermined and likewise the binary in which, spectatorship is historically associated with heterosexual male privilege and the space of representation with the feminine.  Whereas spectatorial privilege is critiqued metaphorically by Duchamp in a preceding and closely related work, The Large Glass, in viewing ´Etant Donnés, the spectator experiences his or her own entrapment, becoming an aspect of the art object.  In this way, ´Etant Donnés, which publically emerged in 1969, is allied with contemporary works of installation and performance art such as Bruce Naumann’s Live Performance Corridor and Vito Acconci’s Seedbed.

Location: LDSOA, Room 150