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Review of T.J. Demos, The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp
MIT Press, 2007, 303 pp.
Bradley Bailey
Saint Louis University
In The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp, T.J. Demos builds an erudite and inventive
argument around geographical, national, and cultural exile as the generative theme
of several pivotal works by Duchamp. In addition to expressing or otherwise exhibiting the experience of dislocation and alienation, this selection of works also reflects
and engages with the tumultuous geopolitical and socio-cultural circumstances under
which they were produced. Enriched by considerable involvement with and citation
of the great critical thinkers, philosophers, and social theorists of the age (particularly the Frankfurt School), Demos conjures the image of a chameleonic artist capable
of complex shifts of location, identity, and aesthetic, which allowed access into—and
safe distance from—the avant-garde circles with which he was associated throughout
his career. Perhaps the most novel facet of this reading is that, rather than simply
reiterating that Duchamp was both supporter and saboteur of Dada and surrealism,
Demos takes the reader in thrilling detail through the carefully orchestrated operations that made such a unique and precarious position conceivable.
Demos makes it clear that his study is not intended to be a comprehensive
investigation of the application of exile to Duchamp’s entire oeuvre, but rather a
series of close readings of a strictly delineated set of enterprises that best “manifest,
define, and exploit the terms of exile” (1). Far from the “poor little floating atom” as
Ettie Stettheimer described Duchamp just prior to his 1918 flight to Buenos Aires to
evade military conscription,1 Demos characterizes Duchamp as the active agent of
his dislocation, employing radical approaches to the display of his work in the effort
to de- and/or re-contextualize it outside of the limiting parameters of the traditional
signifiers of identity, including nationality, political ideology, religion, and gender. For
Duchamp, the displacement of exile becomes less the passive result of geopolitical
instability and more the means through which he was able to maintain a continuBradley Bailey: bbaile10@slu.edu
Copyright © 2008 (Bradley Bailey). Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative
Works 3.0 Unported License. Available at http://jsa.asu.edu/

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ous state of liminality, hovering in a vague space between media, institutions, social
systems, and anything else he sought to escape or destabilize from within.
In chapter one, Demos focuses largely on Duchamp’s La Boite-en-valise
(1935-41), a collection of miniature replicas and color reproductions of a representative assortment of the artist’s work prior to 1941. Designed to be carefully arranged
within a suitcase, this “portable museum,” made possible by the use of new technologies, especially photomechanical reproduction, is emblematic of Demos’ “aesthetics
of exile” by virtue of its easy transportability and nostalgic underpinnings. These
assemblages were produced from materials that Duchamp smuggled out of occupied France, an operation that required multiple trips across enemy lines posing as a
cheese merchant. Using the motif of the suitcase as a thread, Demos expertly weaves
Duchamp’s comic tale together with the tragic story of Walter Benjamin’s suicide following his unsuccessful attempt to escape occupied territory. Benjamin left behind a
handful of personal items and a suitcase “containing complex meditations on history
and homesickness, both located within the peripatetic conditions of exile” (17). Indeed, homelessness and homesickness become in Demos’ exegesis the catalysts of creation
for both texts and objects characterized by fragmentation, collection, miniaturization,
and containment. Ultimately, this fragmentation of the artist’s identity, memory, and
body as a result of the conditions of exile is reified in La Boite-en-valise.
Perhaps Duchamp’s bold (or brash?) negotiation of Nazi checkpoints for
supplies for the “portable museum” upends the notion that Duchamp’s earlier flights
from responsibility were more a result of laziness or cowardice than anti-patriotism
or pacifism—especially in the case of his extended stay in Buenos Aires between
1918 and 1919, which provides the backdrop for Demos’ second chapter. Demos
concentrates largely on Duchamp’s Sculpture for Traveling (1918), a highly malleable
construction composed of multicolored strips cut from bathing caps, cemented together and tied to strings attached to the corners of a room, resulting in an abstract,
formless installation impeding safe and casual movement. This drive to obstruct and
re-contextualize the architectural space is, according to Demos, consistent with the
theoretical foundations of the readymade, which similarly obstructs the casual viewer
of art and recontextualizes spaces, albeit conceptually.2 The Sculpture for Traveling is literally about traveling in that it is rendered anew with each dislocation, a characteristic
of Duchamp’s own personal and artistic development that Demos traces back to the
artist’s introduction to Raymond Roussel’s Impression d’Afrique in 1912. Characterized
by the undercurrent of Duchamp’s self-avowed “spirit of expatriation” (90), or the
possibility of becoming something new through transplantation, the works from this
period are “less a being, fixed and constant, and more a ‘becoming,’ generative and

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transformative,” (106). They are defined by that which makes them indefinable.
Chapters three and four are devoted to two collaborations with the surrealists. Demos begins with an analysis of Duchamp’s contributions to the 1938 Exposition International du Surréalisme, most notably his Twelve Hundred Coal Bags Suspended
from the Ceiling Over a Stove (1938), which describes only part of an extraordinary
exhibition design that included a floor covered in dead leaves, a pool, an iron brazier,
lavish Louis XV-style beds in every corner, and the aroma of coffee wafting through
the air. This massive and certainly intimidating arrangement was clearly designed to
disorient the viewer as well as the art, which was hung beneath the coal bags on revolving doors. Like the Sculpture for Traveling writ large, this exhibition design not only
obstructed and decontextualized the familiar space of the art gallery, it presented an
environment correlated—and in some ways opposed—to the “surrealist object,” a
transcendent thing that obfuscates the capitalist drive to promote use value. According to Demos, the surrealists’ anti-capitalist position and efforts to divest themselves
of a national identity through individual sovereignty and “reciprocal love” (139-40)
were thwarted by Duchamp’s exhibition design and ominous contribution of the
coal bags, which presented “an image of art as a vacant shell of commercial form—
awaiting the institution’s stamp of artificial authenticity and value…expos[ing] the
relation between art and its institution as a form of industrial production and consumption” (149). Moreover, André Breton’s appropriation and recontextualization of
the readymade to advance the “artistic elevation and conceptual transvaluation” (151)
of the “surrealist object” was, Demos argues, frustrated by Duchamp’s efforts to
demystify the art through the exhibition design, using “borrowed revolving doors on
which to hang objects … which could not have been more direct in associating the
displayed artwork with department store merchandise” (152). 3
The many contradictions between the effect Breton possibly desired and the
reality resulting from Duchamp’s oppressive reframing of the space causes Demos
to wonder whether Breton’s choice of Duchamp was ironic. Breton may have known
very well that Duchamp would, however obliquely, reference the looming specters of
industrial production and commodity through the readymade. Perhaps Duchamp’s
suspicion of Breton’s secret capitalist sensibilities was the inspiration for Duchamp’s
design for the dust jacket of Breton’s volume of poetry Young Cherry Trees Secured
Against Hares (1946), which features the Statue of Liberty with her face cut out so
that Breton’s face, which graced the actual cover, shows neatly through the hole.
The Nazi’s tightening grip on Europe in the early 1940s eventually forced the
surrealists into exile. They reluctantly took refuge in the United States, leaving them
“internationally organized, but geopolitically displaced” (190). Breton’s emphasis on

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internationalism, which, according Demos, was a response to the hypernationalism
of the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques in Paris, was a critical
factor in his organization of the exhibition “First Papers of Surrealism” of 1942.
Duchamp’s outrageous contribution to the exhibition dominates the fourth chapter.
Sixteen Miles of String (or, more likely, one mile of string) was stretched and tangled
into a web-like display that, once again, put the viewer at a tremendous disadvantage as far as traditional forms of art viewing are concerned. As in the first chapter,
Demos skillfully locates a counterpoint to Duchamp’s chaotic disruption and decontextualization in Frederick Kiesler’s renowned exhibition design for the inaugural exhibition of Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery, which opened just two
weeks later. After acknowledging Kiesler’s oppositional use of string to hang abstract
paintings in order to “negate any nonaesthetic barriers between viewer and work of
art” (196), Demos indicates that the exhibition designs of Duchamp and Kiesler represent the polarities of the experience of exile and dislocation in surrealism. Kiesler
looks for stability and comfort in an undulating, quasi-uterine space, whereas Duchamp’s space remains insecure and uninviting. Demos concludes his exploration with
a discussion of the labyrinthine trappings of Duchamp’s use of string, and whether
or not this use of string served to advance the mythologization of surrealism, as in
Kiesler’s design, or disrupt a “mythical habitability in the space of exile” by using the
string to construct a “disorienting frame, which prohibited any pretensions … of
an unmediated unity between viewers and art objects, or between objects and their
space of exhibition” (226).
That Demos’ argument revolves primarily around the texts of a select few
critics and historians can be understood as a strength or weakness depending on the
perspective and purposes of the reader. The author is forthcoming early on about
his sources, and never suggests that his study is to be understood as the last word in
the way that Arturo Schwarz’s brilliant and indispensable (albeit flawed and clearly
incomplete) The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp attempted to be. Considering the
variegated and diverse nature of Duchamp scholarship, it no less methodologically
ambitious to limit one’s responses to the complex theoretical approaches of David
Joselit, Benjamin Buchloh, Thierry de Duve, and Rosalind Krauss, not to mention
the Frankfurt School affiliates and other philosophers alluded to earlier in this review.
Indeed, Demos’ study will undoubtedly motivate Duchamp scholars to revisit earlier
studies that investigated similar themes of transience and dislocation with a more
monographic approach, such as Dalia Judovitz’s Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit
and Jerrold Siegel’s The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp, both published in 1995.4
For a book that deals with dense theoretical content in a scholarly jargon, The

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Exiles of Marcel Duchamp has a readable flow that defies its lexical intricacy. However,
I would be hesitant to recommend this book as a first or second read to someone
still familiarizing him or herself with Duchamp, as the scope of work explained is
narrow (though the descriptions and accounts of the works discussed generally surpass those of the more traditional biographies). Rather, I believe that those already
more fluent in the work of Duchamp (or Dada and surrealism in general) who are
looking for a more focused and creative exploration of this picaresque artist’s aesthetic will be best served by this worthy contribution to the literature.

1 Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 1996): 204.
2 The most notable instance of this would be Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), though Demos delves
much deeper into these consistencies, also analyzing how the readymade defies nationalistic signifiers,
though some might argue that the snow shovel of In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915) was chosen as
the first “American” readymade, as he chose an object not produced in France.
3 Demos points to Breton’s definition of the readymade in the Dictionnaire abrégé: “Readymade:
common object promoted to the dignity of an art object by the simple choice of the artist” (151).
Duchamp’s opposition to the elevated position of the “surrealist object” was made clear by the artist and quoted by Demos (151): “My Ready-Mades have nothing to do with the objet trouvé because
the the so-called ‘found object’ is directed by personal taste. … That most of my ready-mades were
mass produced and could be duplicated is another important difference … thus avoiding the cult of
uniqueness, of art with a capital A.” Interview with Katherine Kuh, The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists (New York: Harper and Row, 1962): 90.
4 Dalia Judowitz, Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995);
Jerrold E. Seigel, The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp: Desire, Liberation, and the Self in Modern Culture
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).