2. The readymades by Marcel Duchamp, which first showed up around 1911-1912, led a slumbering life until around the mid-1950s and particularly the 1960s, when they grew very popular in artistic avantgarde circles, which mainly viewed them as objects with a high iconoclast potential. By definition it involves objects chosen by the artist (rather than created) without this choice being influenced in any way by aesthetic judgment. Duchamp refers to them as rendezvous. See also : Duchamp 1975 : 49. 3. The literature on Duchamp abounds with theoretical models whereby the readymades play a central role. But each time authors seem to have ignored that the emergence of readymades as a category within the oeuvre of Duchamp is inextricably bound up with The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Nine Bachelors, Even, or The Large Glass, which is in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. 4. Philippe Van Snick first came into touch with the writings of Duchamp via the transcriptions of Richard Hamilton, available by the mid-1950s already. In 1958 Michel Sanouillet published the three first selections of notes in paperback under the title Marchand du sel. Another major moment in the reception history of Duchamp is the publication of the first substantial monograph by Robert Lebel in 1959. – Richard Hamilton, The bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even ; a typographic version by Richard Hamilton of Marcel Duchamps’s Green box, transl. by George Heard Hamilton. New York : G. Wittenborn, 1960. – Michel Sanouillet, March-
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ditions in how from the 1960s onward the heritage of Duchamp has been addressed. Countless young artists, it seemed, intuitively felt that Duchamp had managed to modify the rules of the game irrevocably, which made it possible to add a new set of options to the notion of the avant-garde. Undoubtedly, in this respect the most emblematic and successful eyeopeners were the readymades.2 The urinal, the bicycle wheel, the bottle dryer—they were admired as objects of resistance and irony. Frequently the nature of the selection that elevated them to realm of artworks seemed randomly repeated, without thereby searching for the deeper connection between Duchamp’s oeuvre and his famous objects, which philosophers and psychoanalysts also used now for the covers of their publications, as if to underscore their sudden popularity. Philippe Van Snick, however, belonged to a very small group of artists, evolving individually, who also understood that Duchamp’s readymades merely served as dice in a much more intricate game, which the master would put together during his lifetime with utmost concentration and sense of strategy.3 They were fascinated not so much by the stumbling block-effect that would guarantee the readymades a long-lasting level of indigestibility and therefore currency, but by the incredible size and ambition of Duchamp’s global project. Its contours began to be perceivable vaguely for those such as Philippe Van Snick, only after they had attentively read the Duchamp monograph by Lebel and began to roam around in the labyrinth of notes, widely available in several pocket editions for the first time.4 Essentially, the oeuvre of Philippe Van Snick cannot be grasped without this dam breach, which enabled a radically different understanding of the notion of artist as someone completely engaged in a one-time and all-encompassing project, focused on the careful design of new artistic criteria. These had become necessary because by definition the development of an oeuvre encompasses the discovery of untrodden creative territory at the same time. This is a suitable moment to point to the high level of oeuvre-bound, oeuvre-related integrity, which characterizes Philippe Van Snick as an artist. It was in the setting of the gallery of Anny De Decker and Bernd Lohaus that he first got in touch with several prominent artists who would guide the direction of the avant-gardes of the 1960s and 1970s.5 It is there that he grew acquainted with the thorny legacy marked by the initials M.D. More than four decades later, I feel, none of the rising artists of the time in Antwerp had managed to digest the art of Duchamp. Daniel Buren, after admiring Duchamp in his youth, eventually, and not without hostility, would turn himself against the master’s irksome irony. Marcel Broodthaers did not seem to have committed himself in this respect, although we do know that Joseph Beuys felt that Duchamp’s taciturnity was overrated.6 If all this for the young Van Snick must have been a highly interesting intellectual field of tension, we have no reason