ABSTRACT

In preparation for the 1959 exhibition Art and the Found Object, Marcel Duchamp asks Man Ray to send him the bottle-drying rack, or bottle dryer as he refers to it, which will be used as the current version of Bottle Rack. There he bought four bottle-drying racks of varying sizes, which allowed Duchamp to choose the one that most conformed to the work Bottle Rack. Through the logic of simulation, experiences of value and meaning are tied not to origineity but rather to hyperreal – Duchamp might say infrathin – interpretations based within the model. The process, as Duchamp liked to say, is necessarily fulfilled on the level of the spectator’s engagement and interpretations, which “brings the work in contact with the external world.”