Sabotage Made Simple

In 1920, Marcel Duchamp met Man Ray in New York, marking the beginning of a collaborative relationship that would continue after both artists relocated to Paris.
By early 1921, they had already co-created Belle Haleine, a modified perfume bottle
that cleverly manipulated glamour, authorship, and gender.

Later that year, their partnership took a sharper turn. In December 1921, while preparing for Man Ray’s first solo exhibition at the Librairie Six in Paris, the two artists walked into a department store and purchased a flat iron. Back at the gallery, they affixed a single row of brass tacks to its soleplate and placed the altered object on display. The result was titled Cadeau (Gift).

Though now remembered as a textbook Dada readymade, Gift was more than an
absurdist prank. It was a targeted restatement of one of the core gestures
first embedded in Morée: the undoing of function—the transformation of an
ordinary object into a site of quiet sabotage.

Coded Gestures in Gift

• Denial of Function
  The object retains its form, but its purpose is cancelled. Like Fountain before it, Cadeau (Gift) doesn't just negate use,
  it inverts it. The iron now damages the very material it was meant to smooth.


• Authorial Ambiguity (by collaboration)
  Though Cadeau (Gift) is officially credited to Man Ray, the conceptual impulse came during an afternoon with Duchamp.
  The idea bears his fingerprints—both literally and metaphorically. As with Belle Haleine, Cadeau (Gift) floats between authors,
  resisting a singular voice.

A Teaching Tool

Duchamp had already shown how function could be denied in Fountain, but Gift made it physical again. Rather than re-presenting an object as sculpture, Gift introduced a hostile modification. It wasn’t just selection—it was sabotage. It showed that the Coded Gestures could be enacted with one simple move. In doing so, it served as a conceptual primer for what Dada could be.
Not painting. Not collage. But gesture itself.