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  • The Paris Review

    Duchamp’s Last Riddle

    by Jillian Steinhauer Oct 18, 2017 5 minutes

    Serkan Ozkaya, We Will Wait, 2017, installation view. Photo: Brett Beyer and Lal Bahcecioglu

    By now, the story has become a legend: in 1917, artist Marcel Duchamp took a urinal, signed it with a pseudonym, and submitted it for an exhibition put on by the Society of Independent Artists—who rejected it. Fountain, as he winkingly titled the urinal, was one of his ready-mades: a manufactured object that he deemed artworks in an effort to throw off the yoke of what he called “retinal art” in favor of a more conceptual and cerebral one.

    Duchamp was good at gestures. Just six years after the controversy, he announced he was quitting the art world and would devote the rest of his life to his other passion, chess. Most people believed he had. But when he died in 1968, at the age of eighty-one, his grandest gesture was revealed: Duchamp had been constructing

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