THE PROPERTY OF KNOWLEDGE

We can note three phases in the tradition of the readymade and appropriation since Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel of 1913. First, they include early enactments in which the readymade posed an ontological challenge to artworks through the equation of commodity and art object. Second, practices in which readymades were de-ployed semantically as lexical elements within a sculpture, painting, installation or projection. In a third phase, which most directly encompasses the global, the appropriation of objects, images, and other forms of content challenges sovereignty over the cultural and economic value linked to things that emerge from particular cultural properties ranging from Aboriginal painting in Australia to the appropriation of Mao’s cult of personality in 1990s China. This essay considers the most recent phase of the readymade in terms of its century-long history.

then the readymade suspends the relationship between knowledge and property by superimposing two ostensibly irreconcilable statuses-urinal and sculpture-on the same material object. Instead of carrying a singular meaning then, the readymade configures several simultaneous and contradictory claims on meaning. We might say that the fixity of property is undone by the proliferation of cognitive properties attached to a single commodity. The true form of the readymade is thus not the object chosen, but rather the virtual configuration of epistemological claims it generates and/or "hosts" as projections upon it.
Duchamp's suspension of the urinal's meaning in Fountain belongs to a European avant-garde tradition of perpetual revision or revolution in the definition of artworks. In fact, we might describe the avant-garde gesture as fundamentally a suspension of meaning whose epistemological effects are much more powerful than any mere formal innovation. But the conditions under which the readymade operates have changed significantly since the early twentieth century. With the rise of global contemporary art, the cognitive contradictions articulated around the readymade have shifted from a set of limited-even provincial-debates regarding the definition of modern artworks, to a geopolitical realm characterized by conflicts between cultures and contradictory models of modernity with their own epistemological bases.
In the paintings of the Chinese artist Wang Guangyi such as In order to describe these broad global strategies adequately, I believe it is necessary to trace a genealogy of the readymade (and its later appropriation) since Duchamp coined the term more than one hundred years ago. First, on account of its current ubiquity, I will contend that the readymade practice should be understood as a flexible "technology" rather than a punctual act of rupture (as historical readymades such as Fountain are often understood).

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The closest modern analogy is therefore photography, which since its invention in 1839 has assumed a multiplicity of roles vis-à-vis traditional fine art media. Photography was positioned initially as a challenge to the media that preceded it (especially, in its superior mimetic capacities, to painting); as an alternative to the fine arts through its documentary and commercial manifestations; as a fine art medium in its own right, theorized according to principles of medium specificity; and finally, as the generalized tool that digital photography has become, which enters into many different types of artworks without being categorized in narrow terms of medium as art photography. Similarly, understood as a technology, the readymade and appropriation have shifted in their functions, while becoming as common as photography as a tool in global contemporary art. I will propose three dimensions of readymade practice, tracing them through the Euro-American canon in anticipation of their widespread globalization in the 90s. 2 They include: the readymade's ontological challenges to artworks through its equation of commodity and art object; the semantic deployment of readymades as lexical elements within artworks, and a third cultural dimension, which most directly encompasses the global, wherein appropriated objects and images, generate a pattern of claims and counter-claims on the meaning of cultural property. In actuality, as has been apparent in my discussion of Fountain, these three dimensions are all present in the readymade from the beginning, but have had varying relevance at different historical moments and in different geopolitical contexts. In short, in the course of its century-long history, the readymade has established varying ratios between knowledge and property.
Thierry de Duve has influentially argued that in equating artworks with commodities Duchamp's readymades provoked a shift from the conventional aesthetic question, "Is it beautiful?" to an ontological challenge: "Is it art?" 3 The readymade suggests that any thing may function as an artwork if, for instance, an artist chose it, or a gallery or museum exhibits it. While such a fundamental rethinking of art's definition has had an enormous historical and philosophical legacy, its disruptive force quickly wanes after the initial shock. By now, most participants in the art world, including large sections of the general public, have adopted a very permissive definition of artworks, which fully accepts appropriated content as legitimate. But the disruptive moment is only the first step in the readymade's operations. While the controversy surrounding Fountain did of course begin with a refusal by the jury of the New York Independents exhibition of 1917 to ratify the work as art 4 , in the face of this refusal, Duchamp countered Fountain's failed application and subsequent physical disappearance with a sustained "publicity" effort, spanning decades, whose purpose was to keep the work alive through gossip, publication, reenactment, and refabrication. Given the fact that this work is now an icon of modern art, such efforts must be considered a brilliant success. Duchamp's readymades thus explore two sides of modern art's ontological condition both as property and as knowledge: the artwork's vulnerability as matter susceptible to time is opposed to the necessity of sustaining it through discourse. In other words, the standard account of the readymade-as a form of negation accomplished by equating an art object with an ordinary commodity-is only the first step in its operations, which in a subsequent moment calls forth a profuse spectacularization of the work in order to keep its image alive or, as De Duve has it, to put it "on the record" in the realm of knowledge.
It is this latter dynamic of publicity-or discourse-that What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-

Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz
Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. 5 The Property of Knowledge 161 The same Coca-Cola that Warhol celebrates for its ideology of egalitarianism from an American perspective was recognized and critiqued as an imperialist ideology by the Brazilian artist does not constitute a platform from which to express their political aspirations. 7 Ironically, work by Aboriginals that was once considered inauthentic because of its adoption of Western techniques and its address to a Western audience (as a kind of "tourist art") was later seized upon precisely to lend a certain authenticity to Australian culture. But if the Australian government has exploited Aboriginal art to assert its values as a multi-cultural nation-state, following the Native Title Act of 1993 counter-claims were made to Aboriginal Sovereignty over traditional lands, and in some cases art constituting the visual transcription of ceremonial forms of Dreaming, analogous to those represented in Aboriginal painting, has been adduced as the requisite proof of continuous habitation in courts of law. Again, we encounter countervailing dynamics of appropriation: attempts by the Australian state to exploit Aboriginal heritage, and Aboriginal attempts to gain title to traditional lands through the re-deployment of an aesthetic vocabulary initially developed for circulation within the Anglo-Australian art world (and which eventually circulated globally).

III. ANGLO-AUSTRALIAN CULTURE APPROPRIATES EURO-AMERICAN CULTURE.
In the 1980s, Australia's own geographically remote position vis-à-vis Euro-American art centers led to anxiety among Euro-Australians with regard to the derivative status of their culture, as itself a copy, or appropriation of more geographically central traditions of modern and contemporary art in the Anglophone West. As Meaghan Morris has expressed it, "'the modern' in Australia has only marginally been understood as entailing 'the future', 'youth', 'originality', 'innovation', rupture', 'the unknown' and so forth. 'The modern' has much more commonly been understood as a known history, something which has already happened elsewhere, and which is to be reproduced, mechanically or otherwise with a local content." 8 Artists like Imants Tillers and others have exploited the notion of Australia as copy in their own appropriation-oriented works.
I have argued that in the ontological dimension, readymades generate new knowledge by suspending conventional meanings.
In the semantic dimension, commodified material such as brands are combined into rebuses. And, finally, in the cultural dimension, the readymade may stage contradictory claims regarding community property. As a malleable practice that is analogous to photography, the readymade has remained a compelling aesthetic tactic throughout the 20th and 21st century precisely because it can manifest the different relations that knowledge establishes withand as-property. The readymade, it seems, is the work of art in the age of postindustrial production.