T.J. Demos. The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. 320 pages. ISBN: 0262042371.

T.J. Demos's monograph on Marcel Duchamp follows contemporary models of site-specific and participatory art practices associated with Deleuze and Guattari's figure of the nomad. As its title, The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp, illustrates, the French artist was no stranger to homelessness. Narrating Duchamp's historical condition of geo-political exile from Europe (during the two World Wars) and from the United States (during the First World War for fear of foreign conscription), Demos takes Duchamp's self-diagnosed “spirit of expatriation” and extends it from the artist's lived experience to the formal operations of his art works. Drawing on the lives and work of other theorists and artists who shared Duchamp's condition of displacement during the rise of fascist regimes in Europe in the early twentieth century, Demos carefully historicizes loaded notions of nationalism and its problematic ties to the home and homeland during that time. Using a multifaceted notion of the subject's dispersal, Demos diagnoses in Duchamp's works and biography an important questioning of the categories of self and art work that serve to both reveal and endure conditions of exile that befall the artists and intellectuals that he considers in this book.

In his first chapter, Demos discusses how Duchamp's La boîte en valise (1935–1960s), a series of suitcases containing miniaturized reproductions of his oeuvre, exists in a state of homelessness. Demos reframes this important work using a playful account in which the artist posed as a cheese merchant and claimed the reproductions in his suitcase to be cheese, in order to smuggle his works across the German border. Duchamp then incorporated the suitcase, which had initially served the pragmatic purpose of transporting artworks, into the work itself. For Demos, the condition of exile is characterized by a tension between forced displacement and an unhinging of the subject from legal and national borders—the latter resulting in possibilities of artistic and subjective freedom. Demos compares Duchamp's smuggling of artworks to the tragic tale of Walter Benjamin's exile during the Second World War.¹ Using Benjamin's coupling of the biographical and the political in Berlin Chronicle as a model, Demos locates Duchamp's physical movements within the formal qualities of his work. Beyond a biographical narrative, Demos situates La boîte in terms of a double displacement of art forms: first, as the displacement of the operations of the museum (by making the institution itself portable, as well as making the artworks contained within mobile); and second, as the displacement of the operations of photography (by using photographic and commercial reproductions to stand in for the works themselves). With his innovative analysis of Duchamp's dismantling of the categories of art work and artist, and the extension of these notions to the dismantling of the subject in general, this chapter provides Demos's most insightful reading. However, the very different circumstances of Duchamp and Benjamin's exiles, and their very different responses to their respective exiles, remain under-elaborated. The celebration of Duchamp's exile in this chapter might obfuscate the real political and physical harm that comes from exile.

Demos's second chapter, which focuses on Duchamp's Sculpture for Traveling, takes us from the 1940s back to 1914, and from Europe to Buenos Aires (via New York). This piece, which was produced in New York and whose existence is only documented in photographs, is an installation of torn rubber bathing caps hung in private locations, such as Duchamp's studios. Duchamp brought this artwork with him when he left the U.S. in 1918 in order to avoid foreign conscription, and its title suggests its multi-sited existence. Demos ties the relational nature of this “sculpture,” a work which was experienced differently in each instance it was displayed, to a model of linguistic subversion that Duchamp first encountered in a contemporaneous Raymond Roussel play. Using this biographical moment of the artist's encounter with Roussel, Demos looks at Duchamp's postcards and other works that mobilize words and letters to subversive ends, arguing for a dispersal of identity through radical linguistic practices that underline the instability of language. Connecting the movement of the artwork to the instability of linguistic meaning, Demos brings out the shift between point of origin and point of reception that marks Sculpture for Traveling. This chapter also serves as a jumping-off point for the spatial concerns of art works and their installation, and the contingencies of place and display that will occupy the rest of the book.

In the final two chapters, Demos discusses Duchamp's relationship to Surrealism through examinations of Duchamp's contributions to the design of two later Surrealist exhibitions conceived under the threat of war. Analyzing the artist's hanging coal sack installation (Paris, 1938) and spider-web-like string constructions (made while “in exile” in New York, 1940), Demos illustrates how Duchamp's designs serve to spatially mark the condition of homelessness by making the spaces physically inhospitable and perceptually foreign. Situating these works alongside Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot's writings on community, as well as in relation to the conflicted status of nationalism in France in the 1930s, Demos elucidates the historical conditions and political agendas that were at stake in Duchamp's critique of both gallery display and avant-garde practices. The sensorial estrangement that Duchamp enacted in these spaces serves as a means of critiquing the mythic approach that characterizes late Surrealism, a move that was seen by many—Duchamp included—as a thorough depoliticization of the Surrealist movement. As Surrealist practices became familiar and lost their ability to shock (which Demos characterizes as the movement's establishment of a “home” in the gallery), Surrealist art works, as well as their installation, became tied to the questionable operations of fascist regimes which situated their political rhetoric within the home and the family. Demos sees Duchamp as taking aim at this association by remaking the Surrealist spaces of display un-homely. Demos's pairing of these exhibitions, and his analysis of the nature of the home in relation to them, serves to bring out the differences in the contexts of their display (homeland vs. abroad), as well as exemplifying the different manners through which various avant-gardes responded to exile.

While Demos's text adds an inventive theoretical aspect to the genre of biographical art history, its reliance on themes popular in current art, such as the effects of globalization and celebrations of migrancy, may in the end prove problematic.² Although Demos takes pains to situate these notions within the theoretical debates concerning exile in the early twentieth century, he tends to attribute a certain agency and intentionality to exile that may be more representative of contemporary critical discourses. As such, one might ask whether Demos's use of a model akin to the “nomadic narrator” in Miwon Kwon's One Place After Another aestheticizes the real political conditions of exile.³ At times, the aesthetics of exile fits too neatly with the artist's historical exile. Furthermore, Demos's structure, being thematic rather than chronological, tends to overshadow the particularities of the various historical moments of Duchamp's works. While these moments are explored specifically in each chapter, Demos subsumes them into a larger thematic of the nomadic artist's freedom of movement. In spite of these drawbacks, Demos provides a unique intervention into scholarship on Duchamp and, more broadly, into biographical art history, exploring previously untheorized objects and works, as well as situating Duchamp's works within contemporary geopolitical concerns about the status of the subject. While such a model may not work as effectively in the case of an artist such as Duchamp, Demos's criticism does provide a useful framework for contemporary concerns, and thus provides a key model for contemporary art criticism.

1. While Walter Benjamin did arrive in Spain, he lacked the proper visas to remain in that country. Unable to face the impending return to Germany, Benjamin took his own life.

2. Demos himself is a prominent practitioner of this model of criticism of contemporary art works. See “The Art of Darkness: On Steve McQueen,” in October, no. 114 (Fall 2005), and “Desire in Diaspora: Emily Jacir,” in Art Journal 62:4 (Winter 2003).

3. See Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), p. 51.