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On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Duchamp’s readymade, Bethan Huws conceived the exhibition On the Subject of Ready- Made or Using a Rembrandt as an Ironing Board on behalf of Daimler Contemporary Berlin. Starting by addressing the constellation of power implicit in the invitation to position herself at meta-level of the curator, the essay is devoted to a close reading of Huws’s strategies of appropriation in response to this institutional framework. Huws rejected the suggestion originally put forward by curator Renate Wiehager of depicting the reception history of the readymade concept by using examples from the corporate collection, together with one of Huws’s works to illustrate the continuance of this artistic direction. She did, however, seize upon the idea of genealogical descendancy in regard to Duchamp’s concept of the readymade. But instead of reaffirming this principle, this article argues that Huws appropriated the exhibition format and – by reactivating Duchamp’s idea of the Readymade réciproque – converted it into an artistic form.

Focusing on an internationally little-known artistic scene in Paris, the essay addresses the text-based works of artists such as Lefevre Jean Claude, Philippe Cazal, Claude Rutault, and Philippe Thomas. To what extent is their turn to ambiguity and literary methods at the end of the 1970s shaped by their sociopolitical environment? In what way can it be understood as a link between first-generation institutional critique and 1990s relational practices? Can the motif of a critique “from within” be read socially in their works – as a strategy of artistic self-positioning? Offering an alternative to a reading via the lens of literature and language philosophy, the essay understands these works as network-based, as interlinked with the local and international structures of a competitive art field.