50 cc of Paris Air consists of a glass ampoule, or vial, that Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) allegedly bought from a Parisian pharmacist in 1919, requesting that the pharmacist empty the ampoule of the serum it originally contained and then reseal it. The title of the work privileges the invisible, arguably absent, content of the vessel over the physical, visible form of the glass ampoule. By asserting that the ampoule is merely a container for the artwork—50 cc of Paris air—Duchamp destabilized optical representational art and created a work of embodied nothingness. This gesture is echoed in the absence of pictorial content in Zen for Film and complicates the assumed boundary between the visible sphere of materiality and the unseen, immaterial realm. —LS

Image: Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950 (1950-134-78). © Succession Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2015.