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Painter and provocateur, quitter-of-art and player-of-chess, Marcel Duchamp aka Rrose Sélavy has long been recognized for redefining what counts as a work of art. His most prodigious legacy are the ready-mades of the 1910s, everyday objects – from bottle rack to urinal – that he nominated as art and signed. The influence of this gesture on pop art, conceptual art, minimalism, and happenings has since been called “the Duchamp effect.” But what happens for the history of art when the logic of cause and effect is undone? Duchamp too was interested in this question. His last work, Étant donnés (1946-1966), was made in complete secrecy in the very decades that inaugurated the clichés of his reception. Unveiled at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1969, the year after his death, Étant donnés seems to repudiate all that the ready-mades had come to stand for – and, at the same time, to register the effects of diverse postwar practices on Duchamp’s understanding of art. This seminar takes Étant donnés as point of departure for studying the long and multidirectional history of modernism. Artists under discussion include: Joseph Beuys, Scott Burton, Vaginal Davis, Richard Hamilton, Eva Hesse, Yayoi Kusama, Senga Nengudi, Dieter Roth, Alina Szapocznikow, Hannah Wilke. Readings span Duchamp’s writings and reception, the historiography of the avant-garde and modernism, aesthetics and affect theory, feminist and queer thought. The seminar will include at least one group excursion to visit the Arensberg Collection in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.