Étant Donnés as Temporal Model: Experience, Allegory, Incarnation

Abstract Critical discourses surrounding aesthetic practice have been oriented toward how artworks function to reflect contemporaneous productive mechanisms. While incisive, this method of analysis leaves the question of already-extant artworks after the society around them is altered. When our senses are primed in new directions, does that alter the artwork historically, phenomenally, or even ontologically? And when theorizing such changes, must we always stay our contemporary? This paper investigates the posthumous installation of Marcel Duchamp, “Étant donnés,” as a test case for how particularly historically situated artworks may or may not change over time. It begins with an overview of Duchamp’s biography, and his own theories of art’s relationship to temporality (which influenced the piece’s construction). All of this, especially the biographical elements of Duchamp’s engagement with the piece, are dependent upon visceral, in-person viewing. This concludes with reflections upon the piece’s relationship to photography. Section two works with Walter Benjamin’s writing on photography and aura to produce an account of estrangement between the piece and the viewing subject induced by the historical development of viewing technology (photography, lithography, and ultimately the internet). Finally, the essay attempts to mediate these extremes with a Kierkegaard-inspired “incarnational” ontology of the art object. The art piece can be read in a fourfold model of “dependency” upon its own intangible element of experience, which is still mediated by the museum space and its appearance through time and history. It is thus constituted and re-constituted between its history and the phenomenal experience of viewing subjectivities, in real time.