“There is no solution because there is no problem” (Roché 85).

 ? Duchamp: “There is no solution because there is no problem” (Roché 85).

9). Duchamp abandoned that definitive space, the traditional forms, limits, concerns, and materials. He went totally off the page, out of that space, allowing thought to dictate its own laws, the resultant ‘becoming’ being anything-whatever: “Take these ‘having become’ and from them make a tracing” (33). He’s interested in the appearance mainly to trace the apparition (the fact of appearing, the status as art): “In general, the picture is the apparition of an appearance” (30). The answer is not a solution (not “what makes writing good”), but a sign (what makes writing). Bartholomae’s given is a solution, “write like Pratt,” not a sign. Instead of tracing a becoming, he urges students to retrace a became

In many fields, the generic has subsumed the specific. In music, for example, various genres or periods have evolved (after Cage) into “sound” as a generic practice. Theater, music, dance, film, and visual art are often blurred into “performance.” But Composition resists being subsumed by notions like “text” or “document.” We insist on the academic as a distinction; we don’t make the passage to art-ness, to beyond-academic-writingness; only certain-styled work can count as our writing. But Duchamp, in his readymades, interrupted the easy Modernist definition: choosing a porcelain urinal, a snow shovel, a comb, a typewriter cover, anything whatever, and then announcing it as art, disrupted the entire dynamic that named only the specific, tradition-encoded as art. Happenings artists took to such a liberating gesture immediately: suddenly the world was full of potential art; as Kaprow put it, the artist suddenly “realized . . . at that moment he had enough material for endless one-man shows” (Kostelanetz Theatre 102). What Duchamp did with the readymade was to legitimate a wholly unique, untraditional situation: “you can now be an artist without being either a painter, or a sculptor, or a composer, or a writer, or an architect—an artist at large. . . . Duchamp liberated subsequent artists from the constraints of a particular art—or skill” (de Duve Kant 154). And yet the best theorists in our field—like Bartholomae— continue to try and determine those now-dissolved constraints on “art in a raw state—à l’état brut—bad, good or indifferent” (Duchamp 139).