Marcel Duchamp L.H.O.O.Q.

Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg presents selected works by Marcel Duchamp in the Annex building of the gallery, on view in parallel with the ongoing exhibition of Robert Rauschenberg’s Japanese Clayworks. Duchamp and Rauschenberg shared a close friendship and maintained a lively artistic exchange over many years. In 1959, Rauschenberg acquired Duchamp’s Bottle Rack for his personal collection, a work Duchamp referred to as his first readymade (now in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago). For Duchamp, the ideas embodied in a work of art were of greater importance than the physical work itself. To this effect, he said: ‘A duplicate or a mechanical repetition has the same value as the original.’ When it came to incorporating unorthodox materials into his works – many of which have fetishistic associations – Duchamp was one of the most adventurous among his contemporaries.

The proximity to Duchamp’s revolutionary understanding of art is evident in Rauschenberg’s work, especially through his enduring fascination with found objects. By including everyday objects, which he called ‘gifts from the street’, he revolutionised the picture plane, expanding the boundaries of what can be considered an artwork in an ongoing dialogue between painting and sculpture, and between the artist’s hand and the mechanically reproduced image. 

Rauschenberg’s understanding of the role of the artist echoes Duchamp’s self-conception, and throughout his career he worked collaboratively with dancers, choreographers or – as for his Japanese Clayworks – with specialised craftsmen. The multi-layered influences of Duchamp’s work on Rauschenberg, however, also include direct iconographic references such as the appropriation of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (1503–19). For L.H.O.O.Q., Duchamp appended a moustache and goatee in pencil to a postcard reproduction of the iconic image – the beard suggesting that the figure was actually a man in drag. 

Rauschenberg also incorporated postcards of the Mona Lisa into his artworks, for instance for Untitled [Mona Lisa] (1952) from his series of North African Collages. In the early 1980s, while working on the Japanese Clayworks at the Otsuka Ohmi Ceramic Company factory, Rauschenberg came across reproductions of historical masterpieces from Western art that the company specialised in manufacturing, and these reproductions inspired him to create his Japanese Recreational Clayworks. He used ‘readymade’ recreations of the Mona Lisa for several works, overlaying her portrait with motifs from his own photographs and gestural brushstrokes. 

The exhibition’s title is borrowed from Duchamp’s work of the same name. L.H.O.O.Q. is a play on words; pronounced in French, the letters sound like ‘Elle a chaud au cul’, a vulgar expression that implicates a woman’s sexuality. The works presented at Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg – including two objects that he made in the 1950s and  issued in bronze editions the following decade – highlight the central role of eroticism and fetishism in the artist’s practice. Objet-Dard is blatantly phallic, while Female Fig Leaf fails to conceal the erogenous zones. This sensual, erotic dimension is indivisible from Duchamp’s radical questioning of the very nature of the artwork and the role of the artist.