French Military Paper

French Military Paper, ‘(from)’ Marcel Duchamp, is likely the very first instance of a visual artist having transformed a product of his day job – an occupation in no way related to the world of art – into a work of art. It is one of eleven documented original readymades (as Duchamp designated them, always in English) that the artist created while living in New York during 1915-1918, at the height of his production of such works, coinciding with the First World War in Europe. Among the final wartime readymades that Duchamp created, French Military Paper appears to represent the artist’s expanding conception of how he defined such works, in which he might assist, rectify, or even provoke (in his terms) the chosen object into its final state.
As Arturo Schwarz noted in his catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work, ‘Duchamp made this list’ for his captain (The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, New York, 2000, vol. II, p. 657). The sheet records the names of four military attachés in the French Purchasing Commission who arrived on 1 January 1918, and required suitable lodging during their stay in New York. The subsequent inked crossing out of the names, and the final X in red over the height of the typescript, suggest that all such considerations had been attended to, and there was nothing further to be done. Possibly contravening whatever security precautions may have then been in force, Duchamp took the document home. No other work of this kind appears in the artist’s oeuvre. It is unlike other readymades of this period insofar as Duchamp, as the typist, created it entirely himself, in the war mission office, in response to a given situation and likely to a command as well. Once removed from this utilitarian context, the document-object takes on a different reality: It becomes a record of obscure persons and presumably insignificant events past, set in its own entirely removed temporal and circumstantial environment, that is, the viewer’s perpetually streaming here and now.