At times, the inexplicable whirlpool of capitalist forces wipes out grass-root workers, much like a wasteland compels agriculture to be abandoned. To Duchamp, this is an unfamiliar but essential territory to explore. Scene Five : Year 2016, Po-Chih Huang’s “Five Hundred Lemon Trees : An Organic Archive”¹³. This project revolves about the mobilization needed to revitalize farmland and liquor production, driven by the desire to support his unemployed mother and care for abandoned farmland. “Patient No. 7” (2016) was later derived from it, chronicling his father’s long-standing habit and feat of foraging wild plants to brew hallucinogenic liquor. This work is both an artistic practice and an agricultural effort to plant trees, striving to establish a brand and a commercial enterprise along the way. Although this attempt was hindered and ultimately unsuccessful, it nonetheless achieved a transvaluation of affective vitality within the realm of domestic economy. It mobilized or tightened family relations, activating the capacity to narrate life stories, the spiritual value of which commercial success cannot compete with. The term oikonomia, meaning household management, is the Latin transliteration of the ancient Greek οἰκονομία, which according to what Agamben established in “What is a dispositive ?”, has been imbued with a Christian theological meaning.¹⁴ But here in Po-Chih Huang’s work, it is the psychedelic undertones, entangled with the ecosystems of insects, animals and plants subtly invoking associations with sexuality, that compose the underlying influence behind his own specific oikonomia.¹⁵

Can art find its place in the realm of commerce ? Scene Six is the possible example of it: Year 1993, the Groningen Museum in the Netherlands held the exhibition “Business Art – Art Business”, curated by Frans Haks. In the exhibition catalog, the editor Loredana Parmesani noted art’s long-standing desire for reality. And when capitalist economy becomes the living reality, appropriating the mode of commercial operations becomes a radical method to approach it. Documents such as “trademarks, authorized invoices, and corporate laws can be integrated into the workings of art”. As a result, the artist’s autonomy lies in designing personal institutions or joint companies, while having to confront and risk the bureaucratization of the self.¹⁶ Based on the fusion of art and commerce, a loop begins to form, one that is difficult to break open. Marco Senaldi and Fulvio Carmagnola introduce the concept of complexity, borrowed the Deleuzean theory of simulacra, pointing out how artists operate on the “exchange, heterogeneity and diversity of referential systems”.¹⁷ Artists such as Philippe Cazal, who turned his signature into a trademark and treated his own name as the logo of a brand, offer an ironic critique of the ideologies behind the Society of the Spectacle, either emphasizing the ambiguity of its images, or creating advertisement with undertones of subversion or satire. Similarly, Res Ingold, who established his superfiction airlines company (Ingold Airlines), shapes the image of a commercially active business solely through its logo, advertisements and exhibitions, all to emphasize the meaning of ideas, emotions, and information conveyed by intangible forms of transportation (like aviation). Servaas Schoone’s company “Int. Fi$h Handel Servaas & Zn”, produces and sells fish-scented empty cans, continuously building and expanding activities related to this business, stepping into Baudrillard’s transaesthetics or hyperreal world of the code; Marion Baruch, with her abundant artistic vocabulary, once established a textile company under her own name called “Name Diffusion”. Repurposing fabric scraps from the textile industry into commercial products named “social fabrics”, it emphasized their emotional value, and feminist consciousness.¹⁸ So, is this Business Art, or is it Art Business ? An interesting review from an anonymous author gave it the label of “Uneconomic Art”.¹⁹

The sound of a voice hurtles towards the Ghost of Duchamp. Echoes of neoliberalism, fragments of speech on homo oeconomicus (economic man) and its related terms such, “the invisible hand”²⁰; this is Scene Seven, March 20, 1979, the sound of Foucault’s Lecture at the Collège de France : “Economics is a science lateral to the art of governing. One must govern with economics, one must govern alongside economists, one must govern by listening to the economists, but economics must not be and there is no question that it can be the governmental rationality itself. (…)”²¹. Duchamp listens, recalling Scene Six, pondering whether the artist would be this kind of governor, a “me, the state”, wielding the dual status of an “individual of supreme authority” and a “state-individual”. Or whether it would be the kind Boris Groys thought of when he said “the artist acts like a legislator, as a sovereign of the installation space”²²? All of a sudden, Duchamp leaps into the year 2005, and finds himself in Taiwan, walking into the exhibition co-curated by Manray Hsu and Maren Richter, the “Wayward Economy”.²³ This is Scene Eight, an art collective “RE-CODE.CO”, catches his eye in particular. Their artworks mirror the actions of hackers, inviting buyers to search the collective’s website to find reasonable prices for products they would like to buy, print the barcode label themselves, then visit a store in person to stick it over an in-store item, thereby disrupting the value of the merchandise. It is a game, and while it cannot sabotage the existing economic system, nor can it seize control of product pricing, it holds significance in the event that it could. As the curators explain, in response to the mainstream economy of the capital, what this curated exhibition seeks to provide is a way to reflect, intervene, resist or subvert. Its approach lies in exploring the “informal” or “shadow” economies, then creating a few “unregulated, unpredictable, parasitic and self-sustaining” forms of wayward economy from them, with the intention to establish a new relationship between artworks and audiences.²⁴ At this moment, Duchamp recalls the various manœuvres his former self carried out in the art scene, and smiles to himself. Could scene eight be the final destination for his soul?

No, it is a scene he would visit in passing, for he is quite attuned to Foucault’s perspective: “what characterizes liberal rationality is how to model government, the art of government, how to found the principle of rationalization of the art of government on the rational behavior of those who are governed.”²⁵ That is to say, it doesn’t matter whether it is the lack of governance of a “wayward economy” (as in Scene Eight), or the marketing of mainstream economics (as in Scene Six), both demonstrate that invariably, the artist lives in a condition of governance. To borrow from Philippe Cazal’s artwork and catchphrase, “The artist in his milieu”(L’artiste dans son milieu), even though this semiotic environment is his own creation, it remains attached or embedded within a system far bigger than itself. Once again the words of Foucault return in waves, seeping into Duchamp’s ears : “The subject is considered only as homo œconomicus”, while homo œconomicus doesn’t define the entirety of the subject, it can however be used to understand the economic behaviour of others …, this is also to say, homo œconomicus is the grid of intelligibility (la grille d’intelligibilité), through which “the individual becomes governmentalizable” …, homo œconomicus is “the surface of contact between the individual and the power exercised on him”, thus it is “the principle of the regulation of power over the individual”. The words still ring in his ears when Foucault reminds him once more, that homo œconomicus is “the interface of government and the individual, but this does not mean that every individual, every subject is an economic man”.²⁶ As he listens, Duchamp is brought back to the memories of his own Tzanck Check and Monte Carlo Bond… Marxism offers the solution of revolution, but Foucault cannot avoid diagnosing it as yet another pursuit of governance, albeit in a different form, one that is still tied to rationality, but a rationality which “belongs less to individual interests”, “the rationality of history progressively manifesting itself as truth”. Therefore, Marxism, in the name of historical truth, overlaps with what sovereign states and economic agents call their arts of governing, at once assisting, debating and struggling against each other, each claiming its own rationality, … thus, from this, “politics is born”.²⁷

Where does Duchamp stand? First, in a paradox of identity, calling himself by a term of his own creation, an “anartist”²⁸!

This is the self-identification of the “non-artist”, used to reject the ineffective opposition between artist and “anti-artist”. As a result in art history, Duchamp was never as obsessed with the art field as his successors and artistic heirs have been. However, the prefix “ana” seems to echo the elusive homophony of anarchism, and as well all know, he was fond of Max Stirner’s philosophical works, being deeply influenced by them. Later, Jacques Derrida, in his Spectres of Marx (Spectres de Marx), went to great lengths to advocate for Stirner long deserved intellectual recognition, mentioning how Marx benefitted from him on the matter of objects, ghosts, currencies, capital, fetichism and on the value materialized in commodities (the so-called exchange value), preceding their use value, linking this entire set of concepts back to 19^th century mysterious “Dance of The Wooden Table”²⁹. This is Scene Nine. Derrida’s seminar at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris has long been prepared for Duchamp, waiting for him to arrive. So, how do we determine Duchamp’s politics of aesthetics? It seems there is no definite answer. But in any case, as Dalia Judovitz argues, the issue of value has been, in many ways, at the heart of Duchamp’s actions.

Value, holding the power to both treasure objects and discard them as worthless; its charm, like that of a serpent, captivates people, its good and evil, fortune and misfortune, equally unpredictable. From this perspective, it could be said that the Serpent of Value, when it resembles the snake of Asclepius, the God of Medicine, the one wrapped around his staff, the Serpent of Value then evokes what is known as the Rod of Asclepius, an emblem of medicine, which inherently carries the properties of both the poison and the cure. But what if there were two snakes? In terms of the Serpent of Value, this is not incompatible; the staff of Hermes, the God of Commerce, features precisely two snakes intertwined——moreover, Asclepius himself encountered two snakes in succession, with the latter holding the antidote that revived the former, which had died earlier. Now, regarding Duchamp’s early work “Pharmacy” (1914), the postcard of a landscape he altered by adding two dots of red and green lights. Aside from the explanations related to personal travel, the reference to pigments and pharmacology, or stereoscopic experiments with complementary colors³⁰, the title of the work alludes to the decorative lights commonly seen in French apothecaries. This inevitably evokes associations with his later fabrications surrounding financial value, much like the respective symbolism of the two caducei, even though this interpretation may be done in hindsight, after the fact (après coup). To put it differently, if they were intended as such, it could be the sign of an early beckoning, waving at him.

Scene Ten : November 10, 2014. Evening. The Ghost of Duchamp arrived at the Brooklyn Navy Yard Jeff, on the night when Lady Gaga is performing a concert for her album release, which also marked the opening of ARTPOP, her collaboration with Jeff Koons. The venue is packed with a sea of ecstatic fans, tightly squeezed together with no room to move. Placed directly opposite the stage, a giant sculpture Jeff Koons designed for Lady Gaga. Duchamp wouldn’t oppose this kind of events, notwithstanding the calm composure he would maintain, and the distance he would keep from making any judgment on whether or not these events could be considered art. Rather, he would be intrigued by the music video Lady Gaga named after Warhol³¹, its narrative filled with crowds fighting, banknotes scattered on the ground, discarded litter, a fallen angel struck with an arrow, and glimpses of palaces and opulent sceneries.

In the acting of libidinal economy, we must acknowledge that Lady Gaga has no intention of crossing boundaries, but Duchamp didn’t need this kind of ostentation. As early as 1917, American writer Louise Norton praised his “Fountain” as the “Buddha of the Bathroom”, and similarly in the 1970s, Robert Smithson referred to him as “a kind of priest turning a urinal into a baptismal front”³². Duchamp as a person was reserved and measured, yet he wasn’t without a radical spirit, his attitude simply was subtle and private. Here I will conclude with two of his works, created in sequence : “Drain Stopper” (Bouche-Évier) from 1964 and “Art Medal” from 1967. The first is a ready-made, a drain stopper modified with added lead, while the second is a product cast from the former. Regarding this, we once again refer to Judovitz’s brilliant and valuable commentary : “the transformation of a drain stopper (thickened with lead) into art, and its reproductions, or rather transmutations, into coins and/or medals, attest to the expandable liquidity of art as a symbolic currency”³³. Thus, assessing Duchamp’s strategies, Judovitz points out that the stopper and the coin are two sides of the same, both possessing the function of a switch that connects to the drainage system, evoking the flushing metaphor of Fountain, and linking them to his works such as Tzanck Check, Cheque Bruno, and Monte Carlo Bond. Commenting on Duchamp’s humorous ruse, Judovitz cites Robert Lebel’s perspective, and reaches this conclusion : “the logic is more in the order of expenditure, than a rational economy based on interest”. This is to emphasize the expendability of economic value, rather than its recycling, and even less its sentimental attachment. Instead, it is a poetic gesture aimed at “the preposterousness, of a technocracy paralyzed by the very excess of its own efficiency“. Duchamp’s gesture carries this intent, to “dismantle the modern principles of both economy and art”. As for the mention of technocracy, to Judovitz, it refers to the irony of Duchamp’s father being a notary, and Duchamp positioning himself as a notary of modernity. She concludes that “Art Medal” is both “predicament and testament”, a stop-gap measure, as if “poised between an art that has lost its physical bite, and another, which can bite only because it is no longer art”, showcasing Duchamp’s “most tortuous and deliberate “will”, one whose language continues to this day to be “killingly funny””³⁴. Of course, this dismantling has an element of jouissance, but it can also be seen as an exercise in preparation for the future, one that could remain possible, even if its form is not manifest in the present situation. J.S.G. Boggs could be his comrade in battle, giving his all to the performance art of banknotes, and also being a pioneer to the concept of Bitcoin.