ABSTRACT
Tzanck Check mimics precisely the visual characteristics of a personal cheque, a modern bill of exchange between two individuals or parties. Described as a drawing, the institutional quality of the overall design of Tzanck Check was thoroughly planned out by Duchamp, as is evident from the sketch he made in preparation for the work. Tzanck Check is a simulation of the everyday object, which directly references issues of personal finance and an individual’s relationship with existing economic realities. As a work it sits comfortably within the overlapping discourses of art and economics, always reminding the interested viewer of the monetarily interested qualities inherent in the treatment of the art object within modernity. If an avant-gardist aesthetic is about defining a sphere of life that escapes being measured in terms of the reductive demands of profitability, it is the functioning of economics that such a perspective attempts to resist.
