Entropy and Incarnation in the Duchamp Room: An Inquiry into Aesthetic Time

Abstract

This thesis 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). It then moves through contrasting accounts of aesthetic time from Adorno and Robert Smithson. 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 the artwork’s “translation” and “replication”—through Smithson, its “entropy.” 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.