© Elizabeth Benjamin, 2015
Please Touch: Dada & Surrealist Objects After the Readymade. By Janine Mileaf, University
Press of New England, Lebanon NH, 2010, 296 pp., ISBN: 978-1-58465-882-5 (hardback)
Taking its inspiration from Marcel Duchamp and Enrico Donati’s single-breasted book jacket,
provocatively inscribed with the invitation ‘prière de toucher,’ Janine Mileaf’s study explores one of the
lesser-addressed senses – touch – in relation to the art objects of dada, surrealism and beyond.1 As
Martin Jay set out to undermine the centrality of vision in Western culture, so Mileaf offers touch as an
underappreciated yet fundamental avant-garde concern.2 Though the readymade has been a
longstanding subject of academic discussion, Mileaf shines new light on this concept, demonstrating
that although the readymade is associated historically with Duchamp, its legacy concerns much more
than the world’s most famous urinal. Please Touch offers tactility as ‘an alternative to a distanced and
totalizing visual approach to art,’ as well as a ‘coalescence of a newly valued intersubjectivity within the
avant-garde’ (3). Mileaf’s work is not only novel for its focus on tactility, but also the depth in which it
investigates the readymade’s twentieth-century progeny. The book is structured chronologically,
beginning with Duchamp and his work’s affiliation with Man Ray’s readymade objects, branching out
into connections with André Breton’s found objects, then addressing the wider legacy of the readymade,
including Joseph Cornell’s sandboxes as alternative realisations of Duchamp’s portable, miniaturised
conversions of his original works. Mileaf argues that these artists have induced an important and
enduring shift towards a tactile approach to art and culture, which culminates in Valie Export’s Touch
Cinema (1968). This final example cements the reciprocity of tactile interactions as a complete
breakdown of the traditional art gallery setting.
Having opened her text with the avant-garde catalogue that implicates the viewer in its own tactile
mischief, Mileaf takes us directly to the source in a discussion of Duchamp’s original readymades. Her
novel approach to the mundane objects selected by Duchamp elucidates his interest in taste and
corporeality. The emphasis on taste offers an instructive crossover with touch, as the former is
dependent on the latter, which adds a complexity to the selection of objects that Duchamp proclaimed
to be straightforward and toward which he apparently felt indifferent. Through the breaking down of
these claims, Mileaf reveals Duchamp’s consistent desire to both represent and critique the commodity
and eroticism. Furthermore, she identifies detailed and personal histories behind the readymades that
belie their neutrality. Mileaf argues that a full understanding of the implications of readymades such as
Bottlerack (1914) has been delayed, and through her discussion we revisit and revise their tactile (and
gustatory) significance. The author implies that an entirely different analysis of these works is to be had
and, in so doing, changes the contemporary view of these art-historical objects. Mileaf later reinforces
her opposition to the readymade as disinterested through an account of Duchamp’s own interaction
with his work, and a discussion of later artists such as Jasper Johns, whose meticulously painted objects
such as Painted Bronze (ale cans) (1960) wink at their predecessor while undermining Duchamp’s best
intentions. Indeed, as Mileaf notes, these objects are ‘anything but readymade’ (191).
Continuing her depiction of the erotic potential of and intentions behind the readymades, Mileaf evokes
the violence and reciprocity of physical contact in the work of Man Ray. Again choosing art objects that
Papers of Surrealism, Issue 11, Winter 2015
1
© Elizabeth Benjamin, 2015
are well-represented in the literature of dada and surrealism, Mileaf draws out new elements of
corporeality and the senses from these familiar works, defamiliarising and re-sensitising what we might
– to use Duchamp’s term – call ‘assisted readymades,’ primarily by insisting on their threatening nature.
As she undermines Duchamp’s politics of indifference, so too does Mileaf demonstrate that Man Ray’s
use of ‘the language of narrative to attempt to curtail the multiple effects of a work of art’ ultimately fails,
since the elaborate stories he constructs around his objects do not succeed in containing them (57).
Taking Man Ray’s ephemeral relationship with the avant-garde into consideration, however, we cannot
help but wonder if this represents not a failure but a deliberately constructed ambiguity. This is an
ambiguity that the book profits from by exploiting the confessional tone taken by Man Ray in his
depiction of his own experiences of violence in his Self-Portrait (1963) where he describes his sadomasochistic enjoyment of brutality and deviance. Mileaf’s foregrounding of this tension sheds light on a
side of this artist that is not normally discussed, which introduces an element of discomfort in the reader:
something that is undeniably tactile in its own right.
Extending both her undermining of Duchamp’s indifference and her highlighting of eroticism in the works
of Man Ray, Mileaf goes on to underline André Breton’s almost fetishistic process of selecting objects
at the marchés aux puces in Paris. Through a designation of Breton as ‘tactile flâneur,’ the author
connects the creation of surrealist objects to both the context of the flea market and the methods of the
ragpicker, which mine the hidden value of the unwanted. Mileaf contributes a romanticised back-story
to the ragpicker, adding a layer of sentiment to the apparent chance juxtapositions of surrealist art.
Paralleling its contents, the chapter wanders through a history of the tradition of the objet trouvé,
meandering back to a discussion of the senses while highlighting that ‘Breton did not specify touch’
(95). This momentary disconnect does not, however, detract from the book’s central aim: after all, even
the ‘derangement of the senses’ is multisensory. 3 Through the example of Breton, Mileaf instead draws
the discussion into the psychological relations between artist and object. Indeed, she comments that
Breton himself dismissed the possibility of indifference as claimed by Duchamp. We might further
wonder whether this was Breton excusing the failure of his ‘automatic writing’ to ever remain fully
spontaneous and unadulterated by the editing hand.
The fourth chapter maintains an interest in the surrealist juxtaposition of objects, this time through the
exhibition setting. Through this chapter Mileaf begins to highlight the political ambition of surrealism,
articulated in the journal Le surréalisme au service de la révolution (1930-33). Although the journal
presented Parisian colonial exhibitions bluntly – through photographs and brief captions – and without
the need for either explanation or ideological input, Mileaf presents several occasions on which the
surrealists objected to such exhibitions, including their own event, L’exposition anti-impérialiste: La
vérité sur les colonies (1931), co-run with the French Communist Party (PCF). The chapter does not
shy away from criticism of such events, noting an underlying fetishisation of the exotic within surrealism
itself, evidenced by the ownership and later sale of ‘tribal art’ by members of the surrealist movement.
Mileaf reconciles these two sides by noting that ‘the apparent selling-out of the movement does not
necessarily spell the evacuation of revolutionary and transgressive potential’ (134). This tangential
section is brought back round to the book’s theme through implicating the audience in tactile object
Papers of Surrealism, Issue 11, Winter 2015
2
© Elizabeth Benjamin, 2015
relations, particularly through the notion of perceptual deception. Duchamp rejoins her discussion as
his Why not Sneeze Rose Sélavy? (1921) is raised as exemplary of this tactile trickery, both through its
deceptive weight and the gustatory consequences of the realisation that the sugar cubes are in fact
made of marble.
Please Touch’s final chapter takes us from the artwork in a room to the artwork in a box, in the form of
the sandboxes of Joseph Cornell and the miniature exhibition space of Duchamp’s Box in a Valise
(1966). Mileaf describes the way in which the sandbox works of Cornell manipulate memory,
designating in this method ‘a tactile notion of interactive art – akin in its force to Breton’s theory of
objective chance’ (160), and highlights their invitation to play with and experience art. The author notes
that Cornell draws upon a thematic of the sea, which of course comes with its own multisensory
specifications, including smell and taste through the substance of salt, as well as the (imagined) tactility
of sand. Mileaf brings the discussion of the surrealist object full-circle as she compares Cornell’s
sandboxes to Hans/Jean Arp’s ‘flotsam and jetsam’ assemblages, unique in their inclusion ‘in the realm
of the surrealist object’ (167) as both Dada and non-readymade. Accordingly, the author further links
Cornell’s sandboxes back to Duchamp’s Large Glass and Bicycle Wheel (1915-23; 1913), through their
shared mesmerising qualities. Finally, Mileaf discusses Cornell’s dossier named GC 44 (1944-70), a
meandering list of objects reminiscent both of Breton’s flâneries and of Dada cut-up poems. However,
despite this shared aesthetic lineage, the way in which this dossier is described weakens its case as a
successor of the readymades, particularly through its focus on genuine nostalgia: something that the
original readymades eschewed in favour of bold statements of disconnected nonsense and abstraction.
Although Mileaf presents a novel approach to aging works that rejuvenates the subject by re-focusing
visual arts through a tactile lens, this re-centring is not always entirely convincing; despite an inevitable
dominance of the visual, the works notably call upon multiple senses, and a mixed or disrupted sensory
experience. Substitution of touch for sight seems just that: a simple switch for one sense by another.
Moreover, the focus on touch thins out as the book progresses: the first three chapters respond in a
clear and useful manner to the author’s aims, but the fourth and fifth begin to drift into other areas,
‘losing touch,’ as it were, with the central thematic structure. The fourth chapter, dedicated to surrealist
politics of exhibition, in particular explores more the ideological aims of the group as a whole and less
about the tactile qualities of the composition of their exhibitions. Mileaf states in her opening sentence
of the book’s conclusion that ‘this book has been about the ways in which things make us want to touch
them’ (189): something that the fourth (and to some extent, the fifth) chapter fail to do. Nonetheless,
allowing for tangential sections prevents the text becoming derivative or forced, which may have
become the case had this admittedly ‘lesser’ sense been insisted upon throughout.
Despite this weakness, Mileaf brings out some previously little-considered aspects of twentieth-century
art, and the legacy of the readymade in particular. It would have perhaps been more successful as a
narrative had more time been spent exploring the Dada/Neo-Dada relationship, particularly the parodic
update of artist-object relations in Johns’s practice and the painstaking way in which he ‘exaggerated
the tactility of his “things”’ (191), thereby cementing his own link with the original readymades while
testing their very definition. However, this is glossed in the conclusion which devotes a lot of space to
Papers of Surrealism, Issue 11, Winter 2015
3
© Elizabeth Benjamin, 2015
Cornell and his sandboxes. Mileaf concludes that Cornell aimed to ‘alter the course of the present
through a sensual engagement with the past’ (188), something that feels a bit flimsy in comparison with
the previous examples, and yet which is put on a level with them. The author reasserts the importance
of the tactile in the conclusion, declaring that ‘touch establishes art as polymorphous and destabilizing
yet provocative and reorienting’ (194). Yet one cannot help that by this point in the text, it is too late to
resuscitate a theme that began with such conviction. Indeed the conclusion itself is more convincing
than the final chapter, noting several different ways in which artists associated with dada and surrealism
responded to the notion of touch.
As the author points out, touch is a sense that is difficult to define and thus hard to pin down. This book
boldly lays out a response to this problematic means of perception, and is to some extent successful.
The text is written in a compelling style that responds very well to the playful nature of the medium and
its protagonists. It presents information in an accessible manner and remains relevant to contemporary
scholarship on this deliberately difficult period. Mileaf’s text is an appealing addition to the vast existing
literature on surrealism and makes a useful contribution to analyses of the surrealist object, as well as
serving as a resource for those seeking new approaches to the art object more widely. Please Touch
offers interdisciplinary interest through its engagement with a selection of objects, categories and
boundaries that themselves elude ready definition: despite its flaws, the book makes an excellent read.
Elizabeth Benjamin
University of Birmingham
1
Duchamp and Donati created a provocative 3D slip cover to the 1947 Exposition Internationale du
Surréalisme, a single false (rubber and foam) breast in the centre of the catalogue’s front cover. For
details see for example:
http://nga.gov.au/Exhibition/softsculpture/Default.cfm?IRN=189001&BioArtistIRN=8663&MnuID=3&Vi
ewID=2
2
Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: the Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century Thought, Berkeley CA,
Los Angeles CA; London: University of California Press, 1993.
André Breton, ‘Surrealist Situation of the Object: Situation of the Surrealist Object’ (1935). Trans.
Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1969, 263.
3
Papers of Surrealism, Issue 11, Winter 2015
4