A walk through a modern or contemporary art museum might make you ask: What makes one object art and another object not art? This is a question I explore in “When is a Chair Art?” I will be presenting the article in three parts over the next few weeks. Part I lays out the problem and explains my understanding of how an object becomes art. Part II tests this understanding through a study of two contemporary artists, Ai Weiwei and Roy McMakin. Both artists have exhibited ordinary chairs and other furniture items as art. In the final part, I discuss my conclusions and explain why one artist’s object, even if visually similar to another artist’s object, might gain more value as contemporary art.
“When is a Chair Art?” is a good debut article for Making & Meaning. It focuses on a question that is always in the background of my research and demonstrates my theoretical position and interdisciplinary approach. As such, the article also represents how Making & Meaning is a forum for exploring the many social mechanisms that make art what it is and give it meaning.
Whether Mr Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object.1
— Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp can be blamed for starting it all. In 1913, he combined a standard, mass-produced wood stool with the wheel and fork of a bicycle. The resulting object was his first “readymade” and once it was exhibited and recognized by the Art World it was no longer a stool and bicycle wheel, it was an artwork that we now know as the Bicycle Wheel. Duchamp repeated this act with a wine bottle drying rack (Bottlerack, 1914), a snow shovel (In Advance of a Broken Arm, 1915), and a ceramic urinal (Fountain, 1917), all of which inspired a revolutionary question that continues to haunt the making of contemporary art; when is an object art?
As Duchamp’s readymade experiments demonstrated, and institutional theories of art have since explained, objects become art not by some intrinsic quality such as beauty, truth, or significant form, but by the very fact that these same attributes are identified and given an extraordinary value by the Art World. As a cultural field, the Art World creates the social conditions for what we know as art. The institutions of this World (museums, galleries, auction houses) and its agents (artists, curators, critics, art historians) identify objects and recognize their extraordinariness. These objects are then presented to the public and disseminated as art. It is, then, the collective practices of this social world – its rituals of presentation, its theorizing, and ultimately its “consecration” as Pierre Bourdieu put it2 – that make objects into art.
Social theorists refer to this process as artification, or as ethologist Ellen Dissanayake calls it, “making something special.”3 She proposes that “making special” is a universal behavioural trait that can be found in every human society. Objects such as masks, relics, and carvings, and practices such as festivals, dances, and spiritual rituals, are all artified or “made special” and distinguished from ordinary objects and activities. Artification is the process of socially recognizing these objects and activities as “extra-ordinary” or “special.”4
Artworks, in every society, are good examples of artification. They are made special through various rituals of recognition yet serve no purpose in human survival or physical comfort. Their primary purpose is to convey social significance through their symbolism and to provoke an emotional response whether this is considered to be spiritual, aesthetic, or conceptual. Art objects, like cultural or religious rituals, are “deliberately nonordinary” and thus “special” within a given social group.5
The artification of contemporary art is no different. Sociologists, Rebecca Shapiro and Nathalie Heinich explain that art emerges as a result of a “process of processes” all of which work together to make an object recognizable as art.6 To become art, an object is “displaced” from the ordinary, renamed, and recategorized as art – or as Duchamp put it, the object is “placed” “so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title.” The object, as art, is then recognized as the singular production of an artist or group. The work is incorporated into the institutions of art through exhibitions, collections, and texts. Finally, the “special” status of the object and the artist is explained in narrative discourses and “disseminated” through further exhibitions, texts, and images.
To become art, then, a chair, for example, is “displaced” into the Art World and given a new name. The chair is no longer a chair, it is a sculpture. The sculpture is then categorized according to style, materials, and subjects which identify its position in the hierarchical world of art. The chair, as sculpture, is recognized by institutions (museums and galleries) and bought by collectors (patrons) which, in turn, confers legitimacy or a “legal status” on the object as “art.”7 Through these processes, the chair is individuated – it is no longer considered a manufactured chair with a mundane use, it is now an original work of art by a singular artist. As Shapiro notes, “separating an object from its ‘initial’ environment creates the conditions for it to be circulated, be renamed, transformed and exchanged.”8 The work and the artist (the person who proposed the chair as art) are then acknowledged by curators, presented in exhibitions, and written into history (“redefining time”). Once “intellectualized” in exhibition texts, critiques, and histories, the chair, as art, is “disseminated” through further exhibitions, texts, and images.
All of these activities together contribute to transforming a chair, or any other object, into art. The most essential activity in this “process of processes,” however, is the “discursive reinforcement and the intellectualization of practice.”9 Texts and oral narratives explain the meaning or significance of the object as art and provide the necessary justifications for why the object should be considered “special” in the first place. Such narratives must be convincing and realistic to the people who need to be convinced. As Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot explain, to be convincing - that is to present an “argument that is resistant to criticism”10 - the justifications must have some affinity or “equivalence” with the expectations of those who need to be convinced. In the Art World this means demonstrating that the work is suitably “special” according to the expectations of the particular cultural and artistic fields. The challenge then for anyone wanting to introduce a new artwork, especially ones like Duchamp’s readymades that do not visually conform to the expectations at the time, is that they must provide a convincing argument that explains why the object should be acknowledged as art.
An artist then cannot just present and declare the special status of their objects. Their work must be taken up by the institutions that matter and supported by advocates who provide the appropriate justifications and “intellectualizations” for recognizing the object as art. This is what Duchamp discovered through his various “curatorial gestures”11 as Elena Filopovic explains. From 1913 though 1917, Duchamp implemented a series of “tests” with his readymades in order to understand when an object becomes art. He produced the first readymades in his studio in Paris but while he was in New York, his sister threw them into the trash unaware that Duchamp considered them to be art. Then in 1916, he convinced the owner of the Bourgeois Gallery in New York to include a couple of his readymades in an exhibition of his paintings. The pieces, however, were placed close to the entry and coatroom and no one even recognized them as art. There was no explanatory text to help the gallery visitors recognize the objects as art and the titles of the works were never documented except for a reference to two readymades in the gallery’s exhibition checklist.
In 1917, Duchamp tried again. This time, he entered his infamous urinal, Fountain, in the annual Independent Artists Exhibition in New York. The show was not juried and anyone could submit a work for the price of the entry fee. For six dollars, Duchamp submitted Fountain anonymously under the name Richard Mutt. Some of the organizers, however, declared the object unacceptable as art. But, since they could not reject a work from an un-juried exhibition, the organizers hid the work “behind a wall partition where the public would not see it”12 and did not include the piece in the exhibition catalogue. Thus censored, Duchamp anonymously “orchestrated” his own “evidential trace.”13 Alfred Stieglitz photographed Fountain and the image appeared in the second and last edition of the satirical art journal, The Blind Man, along with an accompanying anonymous text titled, “The Richard Mutt Case.” The caption under the picture read, “The exhibit refused by the Independents” and the article provided a defence of sorts (or justification) for why an ordinary urinal might be considered art. It took several more decades before Duchamp finally admitted his authorship of Fountain and exhibited his readymades as art. This time the Art World took note and embraced these ordinary objects as “special” and as art.
Marcel Duchamp, “The Richard Mutt Case” excepted in Art in Theory: 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. New Edition, Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003): 252.
Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature edited by Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 51.
Initially, Dissanayake described the universal practice of producing art as “making special” but as her theoretical position evolved, she refined her terminology and began to use the word “artification” to refer to the foundational behaviour that leads humans to distinguish the special status of certain objects and practices. Ellen Dissanayake, “The Core of Art: Making Special,” Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies 1 (2), ([1992] Fall 2003):13-38 and Ellen Dissanayake, “Roots and Route of the Artification Hypothesis,” Avant VII, 1 (2017): 15-32. DOI: 10.26913/80102017.0101.000
Dissanayake, “The Core of Art,” 22. Ossi Naukkarinen and Yuriko Saito and others have expanded the definition of artification so that the “neologism refers to situations and processes in which something that is not regarded as art in the traditional sense of the word is changed into something art-like or into something that takes influences from artistic ways of thinking and practicing.” Ossi Naukkarinen and Yuriko Saito, “Introduction,” Contemporary Aesthetics. Special Volume: Artification 4 (2012), https://contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=635.
Dissanayake, “The Core of Art,” 20.
Roberta Shapiro and Nathalie Heinich, “When is Artification?” Contemporary Aesthetics, Special Volume 4, Artification (2012): http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=639
Shapiro and Heinich, “When is Artification?”
Roberta Shapiro, “Artification as Process.” Cultural Sociology 13,3 (2019.): 267.
Shapiro and Heinich, “When is Artification?”
Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, “The Sociology of Critical Capacity,” European Journal of Social Theory 2, 3 (1999): 364. For more on justifications see, Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, On Justification: Economies of Worth, translated Catherine Porter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006 [1991]).
Elena Filipovic, The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 76.
Elena Filipovic, Marcel Duchamp, 83.
Elena Filipovic, Marcel Duchamp, 83.
Thank for your insightful comment, Michele. And, thanks for reminding me of the Appadurai article. I read it a long time ago. Time to read it again.
You make a good point about giving a river or mountain legal rights. I think it would be similar to how some cultures view a tree, mountain, lake, or volcano as sacred. The people have made it special according to their own values and will have certain rules and conventions around how one is to treat this natural form. We could understand assigning legal rights to these natural phenomenon in the same way, as a set of rules and conventions that sustain the specialness of the object. As with art, there are always institutions and people who have the power to maintain this specialness as long as the others in the society are willing to accept the premise.
This was so interesting Marie. I really enjoyed it. It got me thinking about another person who has thought about this 'what makes things different' and that is the Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai. His paper - The Thing Itself - says a lot of this as well, including how things are categorized - as commodity or singularity. I'm sure you are familiar with this paper, but just in case: http://www.arjunappadurai.org/articles/Appadurai_The_Thing_Itself.pdf
Appadurai is a favourite of mine, and I have loved reading his papers and books.
Another thought I had was more related to my own work. This term I had the students look into the ideas of rivers and mountains having rights. (In other words, turning one thing - inanimate object, into something else - a legal person with legal powers including the right to sue). How does this happen? Or is it just symbolism? Well, someone has to speak for the rivers and mountains - someone else becomes their advocate. In the case of rivers, someone is appointed. In the case of the readymades, that was the art world that accepted it as art.
I look forward to reading part 2 next!