Readymade, Found Object, Photograph

Abstract

The 1936 Surrealist Exhibition of Objects brought together a bewildering range of items including natural objects, interpreted natural objects, incorporated natural objects, found objects, perturbed objects, readymade objects, American objects, Oceanic objects, mathematical objects, and Surrealist objects. Of the nonethnographic types listed, only the readymade and the found object still retain any currency, and the readymade can no longer be subsumed under the Surrealist umbrella. Marcel Duchamp's readymade and André Breton's found object have such different legacies that they now arguably constitute a categorical distinction. This was not so clear in the mid- 1930s when Breton could define readymades as “manufactured objects raised to the dignity of works of art through the choice of the artist.”2 Yet, even now, the terms are still often run together and used interchangeably. What I want to do in this paper is to drive a wedge between them. We will find that their distinctiveness hinges on the kind of subjective relation each assumes. They turn out to embody different aspects of the most influential account of what might be called the subjective dimension of our relation to art—Immanuel Kant's conception of the aesthetic.