Booby Traps: Cultural Critique in the Writings of Marcel Duchamp and Karen Finley

Conceptual artists who take a linguistic turn in their practice do so as a transdisciplinary intervention. Focusing on the literary approaches of Marcel Duchamp’s The Green Box (1934) and Karen Finley’s Shock Treatment (2015), this thesis examines these artists’ institutional critique by bypassing them entirely. I study these publications through a narrative lens, framing them as stories with beginnings, middles, and endings. Duchamp’s “creative act” is evident in The Green Box, a mixed-media compilation of writings, print work, and images that documents the chaos of his process and invites viewers to make their own interpretations about it. Like Duchamp, Finley has a critique of authorship: her performances and writings address the cultural norms that objectify and gender bodies. Duchamp and Finley produced texts as touchable-tangible (tactile) objects that are anti-museum projects.