MARCEL DUCHAMP — Please Touch: Marcel Duchamp and the Fetish, Thaddaeus Ropac, London, 2021

Issued for Thaddaeus Ropac's London exhibition Please Touch: Marcel Duchamp and the Fetish, Ely House, 37 Dover Street, London, 13 October–13 November 2021, with private view on 12 October. Single printed invitation card, 14.5 × 20.5 cm; colour reproduction to recto, exhibition details to verso.

This invitation belongs to a surprisingly late correction in the way Duchamp had been received. For decades, the familiar genealogy ran neatly through the readymade: Duchamp removes the artist's hand, privileges the idea, and opens the door to Conceptual Art. Curator Paul B. Franklin — a leading Duchamp scholar, former editor of Étant donné Marcel Duchamp and longtime collaborator with the artist's estate — went looking underneath that story. Please Touch was the first exhibition devoted specifically to the role of fetishism in Duchamp's practice. His argument was simple but destabilising: the cool cerebral Duchamp was never actually that cool. Eroticism, touch, substitution, bodily fragments, gender play, charged materials and obsessive reproduction were there all along.

The invitation gives us the evidence before we even enter the gallery. On its front is L.H.O.O.Q., Duchamp's 1919 intervention into a cheap reproduction of Leonardo's Mona Lisa: moustache, goatee, five letters and one of the twentieth century's most efficient acts of artistic sabotage. The version reproduced here relates to Duchamp's 1964 re-edition, when he returned to the image decades later and authorised it again as an edition. Original, copy, masterpiece, mass reproduction, gender and desire are already hopelessly entangled.

Then comes the title: Please Touch. That phrase reaches back to 1947, when Duchamp made Prière de toucher for the catalogue of the International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris — a foam-rubber breast mounted on black velvet and placed directly on the cover. Where museums ordinarily say do not touch, Duchamp gave the viewer an instruction to do precisely the opposite. Franklin borrowed the title because it concentrates the exhibition's argument perfectly: Duchamp's work was not simply about looking differently. It repeatedly brought vision into contact with desire, tactility and possession.

The 2021 exhibition gathered more than thirty works around five connected ideas: the readymade as fetish object; reproduction and miniature as fetish; gender play; erotically charged materials including leather, vinyl, foam rubber and fur; and Duchamp's multiplication of himself through identities such as Rrose Sélavy. Rather than replacing the conceptual Duchamp, the exhibition makes him considerably stranger.

Ropac could have illustrated the invitation with a Bottle Rack or another image that confirms the Duchamp everyone already knows. Instead, the front gives us the Mona Lisa with facial hair — a found reproduction altered through desire, gender and possession — while the reverse calmly supplies the administrative information of a London private view. Fetish on one side. Logistics on the other. Following the London presentation, Please Touch moved to Ropac's Paris Marais gallery from November 2021 into February 2022, returning the argument to the city in which so many of Duchamp's original acts of displacement had begun.

More than a century after Duchamp drew a moustache onto somebody else's masterpiece, the invitation asks us to look again — and this time, perhaps, to get a little closer. The readymade changed what art could be. Please Touch reminds us that Duchamp also cared about what art could do to the body.

Condition: very good; light handling consistent with its original function as exhibition ephemera. Securely packed; tracked UK and international shipping available.