1. Gamboni, Dario, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), p. 18.Google Scholar

2. Adorno, Theodor W., Negative Dialectics, translated by Ashton, E. B. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 365.Google Scholar

3. Derrida, Jacques, Writing and Difference, translated by Bass, Alan (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 194.Google Scholar

4. Carlson, Marvin, Performance: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 123.Google Scholar

5. Amelia Jones writes: ‘The “paradox” of which de Duve writes is Lyotard's conundrum of periodization: It is postmodernism's desire to articulate itself in relation to (as superseding) modernism that exposes its investment in the drive to periodization that characterizes modernism. Yet it is precisely in this performative self-posing that postmodernism signals itself as rejecting the modern’. Jones, Amelia, Postmodernism and the En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 209Google Scholar. See also Jones, Amelia, Body Art/ Performing the Subject (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 10.Google Scholar

6. Duchamp to Arturo Schwarz cited in Jones, , Postmodernism …, p. 105.Google Scholar

7. Fountain—the ‘Buddha of the Bathroom’—icon of iconoclasm—contrives to act as a reference for conceptual artists such as Yoko Ono, Sherry Levine, Robert Gober, and Sarah Lucas.

8. For a full account of the exhibition context of Fountain, see de Duve, Thierry, Kant After Duchamp (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), pp. 89–143.Google Scholar

9. Paz, Octavio, Marcel Duchamp, Appearance Stripped Bare, translated by Phillips, Rachel and Gardner, Donald (New York: Seaver Books, 1978), p. 22Google Scholar. Quoted in Camfield, William ‘Duchamp's Fountain: Aesthetic Object, Icon, or Anti-Art’, in de Duve, Thierry, ed., The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp (Nova Scotia and Cambridge, Mass.: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and MIT Press, 1991), p. 164Google Scholar. Here Paz is following closely Duchamp's own pronouncements upon the ready-mades.

10. de Duve, , Kant After Duchamp, p. 292.Google Scholar

11. de Duve, Thierry, Au nom de l'art: Pour une archéologie de la modernité (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1989), p. 77Google Scholar. Cited in Jones, , Postmodernism …, pp. 208–9.Google Scholar

12. Jones, , Postmodernism …, p. 208.Google Scholar

13. For a more detailed discussion of speech act theory and performativity see Carlson, , Performance, pp. 56–75Google Scholar; definitions of illocutory and perlocutory speech acts appear on pp. 61–12. See also Austin, J. L., ‘Performative Utterances’, Philosophical Papers (second edition) edited by Urmson, J. O. and Warnock, G. J. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 233–52Google Scholar; and Rozik, Eli, ‘The Function of Language in the Theatre’, Theatre Research International, Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 104–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14. Greenberg, Clement, ‘Modernist Painting’ (1961)Google Scholar, in Harrison, Charles and Wood, Paul, eds., Art in Theory, 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 758.Google Scholar

15. Fried, Michael, ‘Art and Objecthood’Google Scholar, Harrison, and Wood, , Art in Theory, pp. 830–1.Google Scholar

16. In this context, it is interesting to note Austin's assertion that performative utterances are neither true nor false.

17. Graver, David, The Aesthetics of Disturbance: Anti-Art in Avant-Garde Drama (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1995), p. 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In this respect Duchamp becomes the progenitor of the self-determination of the body performed in the writings of Artaud in the 1930s, the direct art of the Vienna Actionists of the 1960s, and the performances and installations of COUM Transmissions in the 1970s and 80s. Graver's conclusions however fail to take full account of the radical negativity of Duchamp's indifference to art.

18. See Jones, , Postmodernism …, pp. 131–5.Google Scholar

19. In this context, attention should also be paid to the portraits of Duchamp by Man Ray where Duchamp appears with a star shaven into his hair or as the ambivalently gendered alter ego, Rrose Sélavy, where his identity is indeterminately performed as neither male nor female.

20. The radical laughter inherent in Duchamp's formulation of the ‘an-artist’ is closely followed by Allan Kaprow's conception of the ‘un-artist’. In his 1971 essay, ‘The Education of the Un-Artist, Part I’, Kaprow writes that, in order to overcome the outmoded category of art, it is the duty of the artist today to work against his own profession and invoke a critical laughter: ‘I would propose that the first practical step towards laughter is to un-art ourselves, avoid all aesthetic roles, give up all references to being artists of any kind whatever. In becoming un-artists … we may exist only fleetingly as the non-artist, for, when the profession of art is discarded, the category is meaningless, or at least antique. An un-artist is one who is engaged in changing jobs, in modernizing’. Kaprow, Allan, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, edited by Kelley, Jeff (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 103–4Google Scholar. Kaprow goes on to suggests the more fluid term of ‘player’ as an alternative for ‘artist’: ‘Replacing artist with player, as if adopting an alias, is a way of altering a fixed identity. And a changed identity is a principle of mobility, of going from one place to another’. ‘The Education of the Un-Artist, Part II’, pp. 125–6. Shedding, once and for all, the worn-out skin of the ‘artist’, the un-artist becomes a playful cultural nomad, constantly shifting through a series of performed (double) identities— an eternal fugitive from art.

21. There is an important structural affinity between the embodiment implied in the radical laughter of Fountain and the literal ejaculation of Duchamp, 's Paysage fautif (1946)—Google Scholar seminal fluid on Astralon, backed with black satin.

22. Kuspit, Donald, The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 140CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23. Carlson, , Performance, p. 64Google Scholar. Carlson is summarizing the discussion on the ‘radical negativity’ identified in the texts of Nietzsche, Lacan and Kierkegaard by Felman, Shoshana in The Literary Speech Act: Don Juan with Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages, translated by Porter, Catherine (Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983).Google Scholar

24. Richter, Hans, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, translated by Britt, David (London: Thames and Hudson, 1965), p. 90.Google Scholar

25. Artaud, Antonin, ‘To Marcel Dalio’, 27 06 1932Google Scholar, in Schumacher, Claude, ed., Artaud on Theatre (London: Methuen, 1989), p. 63.Google Scholar

26. Artaud's explosive quality is recognized in the biography by Barber, Stephen titled Antonin Artaud: Blows and Bombs (London: Faber and Faber, 1993).Google Scholar

27. Artaud, , ‘Van Gogh The Man Suicided by Society’, Artaud Anthology (San Francisco: City Lights, 1968), p. 158.Google Scholar

28. Artaud, , Selected Writings, edited by Sontag, Susan, translated by Weaver, Helen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 108Google Scholar

29. Artaud, , ‘Manifesto for an Abortive Theatre’,13 November 1926, in Schumacher, Artaud on Theatre, p. 32–3.Google Scholar

30. Derrida, , Writing and Difference, p. 235.Google Scholar

31. Ibid.: ‘The stage is theological for as long as it is dominated by speech, by a will to speech, by the layout of a primary logos which does not belong to the theatrical site and governs it from a distance’. p. 235.

32. Gillespie, Michael Allen, Nihilism Before Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 1.Google Scholar

33. Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space, translated by Smith, Donald Nicholson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 407.Google Scholar

34. Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book For Everyone and No One, translated by Hollingdale, R. J. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 61.Google Scholar

35. Barber, Stephen, Artaud: The Screaming Body (London: Creation Books, 1999)Google Scholar. Barber notes: ‘Artaud's work positively concerns little else’. p. 103.

36. Artaud, , ‘The Alfred Jarry Theatre’Google Scholar, in Schumacher, , Artaud on Theatre, p. 31.Google Scholar

37. Barber, , Artaud: The Screaming Body, p. 102.Google Scholar

38. Derrida, , Writing and Difference, p. 249.Google Scholar

39. Artaud, , ‘Theatre and Culture’Google Scholar, in Schumacher, , Artaud on Theatre, p. 130.Google Scholar

40. de Duve, , Kant After Duchamp, p. 292.Google Scholar