Duchamp’s Labyrinth: First Papers of Surrealism, 1942* T. J. DEMOS Entwined Spaces In October of 1942, two shows opened in New York within one week of each other, both dedicated to the exhibition of Surrealism in exile, and both represent- ing key examples of the avant-garde’s forays into installation art. First Papers of Surrealism, organized by André Breton, opened first. The show was held in the lavish ballroom of the Whitelaw Reid mansion on Madison Avenue at Fiftieth Street. Nearly fifty artists participated, drawn from France, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, and the United States, representing the latest work of an internationally organized, but geopolitically displaced, Surrealism. The “First Papers” of the exhibition’s title announced its dislocated status by referring to the application papers for U.S. citi- zenship, which emigrating artists (including Breton, Ernst, Masson, Matta, Duchamp, and others) encountered when they came to New York between 1940 and 1942. But the most forceful sign of the uprooted context of Surrealism was the labyrinthine string installation that dominated the gallery, conceived by Marcel Duchamp, who had arrived in New York from Marseilles in June of that year. The disorganized web of twine stretched tautly across the walls, display parti- tions, and the chandelier of the gallery, producing a surprising barrier that intervened in the display of paintings.1 The second exhibition was the inaugural show of Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery on Fifty-seventh Street, which displayed her collection of Surrealist and abstract art. Guggenheim gave Frederick Kiesler free rein to design *I am grateful for the support and criticism of Benjamin H. D. Buchloh and the editorial advice of Hal Foster. Thanks also to Rachel Haidu, Mary Joe Marks, Judith Rodenbeck, and Margaret Sundell for their responses to earlier versions. 1. Duchamp commissioned John Schiff to photograph the space. The catalog credits Duchamp with “his twine,” “sixteen miles of string,” though probably around one mile was used. For a documen- tary account of the show, its history and reception, see Lewis Kachur, “The New World: ‘First Papers of Surrealism,’” in Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dali and Surrealist Exhibition (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001). OCTOBER 97, Summer 2001, pp. 91–119. © 2001 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2001.97.1.91 by guest on 27 September 2021 92 OCTOBER the exhibition space. Originally a Romanian though Austrian by choice, Kiesler had practiced architecture in Vienna while connected with the Bauhaus and De Stijl avant-gardes before settling in New York in 1926. His installation for Guggenheim’s gallery was more extensive than that of First Papers. In contrast to Duchamp’s menacing barrier, Kiesler’s design went to extraordinary lengths to integrate works into a gallery space that became sculptural. In the Surrealist Gallery, frames were removed from paintings in order to produce an uninter- rupted connection with viewers. Paintings supported by wooden arms floated away from the walls, which were rendered concave. Kiesler painted the back- ground and ceiling black and the floor turquoise to darken the environment, and alternate sides of the gallery were illuminated for two minutes each, divided by a few seconds’ pause. In the Abstract Gallery, works by artists such as Kandinsky, Arp, and Mondrian were hung in midair with string. Interactive and mobile, they could be variously tilted and suspended at any height. While the two installations appear to have little in common, within the scholarship there is an all-too-quickly accepted continuity between them. It is common to read, for example, that Duchamp’s offered a model for the “transparent” relation between viewer and work of art established in Kiesler’s Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2001.97.1.91 by guest on 27 September 2021 Opposite: Marcel Duchamp. Installation for First Papers of Surrealism, New York. 1942. © 2001 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP Paris/Estate of Marcel Duchamp. Above: Frederick Kiesler. Surrealist Gallery, Art of This Century Gallery, New York. 1942. Courtesy of Frederick Kiesler Archive. Below: Kiesler. Abstract Gallery, Art of This Century Gallery. 1942. Courtesy Kiesler Archive. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2001.97.1.91 by guest on 27 September 2021 94 OCTOBER installation.2 Ultimately, this interpretive position derives from Kiesler, who claimed Duchamp’s work as a guide for his own interests in what he called “corre- alism,” or the establishment of the complete integration of artistic media, space, and viewers. “It is architecture, sculpture and painting in one,” Kiesler observed of Duchamp’s work.3 However, to claim that the two installations were similar ignores their antithetical forms and effects. While Kiesler employed string to sup- port paintings, its use minimized any physical separation between painting and viewer. This was to facilitate the transformation of paintings into what Kiesler called “eidetic images,” as if they had lost their materiality and hovered as dream images in space without physical support or frame. Kiesler’s string was the answer to his desire to negate any nonaesthetic barriers between viewer and work of art, or rather to render those barriers aesthetic. Duchamp’s string, on the other hand, acted as the maximal obstacle between paintings and viewing space. It even elimi- nated viewing areas between partitions. If Kiesler made every architectural attempt at an uninhibited “correlation” between the viewer’s perception and the aesthetic objects holding his attention, then Duchamp’s installation achieved the utter opposite by restricting visual access to the paintings, effectively dislocating objects from their visible exhibition, and subjecting the gallery space to a stub- born and disorienting labyrinth of string. To accept any continuity between the two installations, moreover, is a direct result of a failure to adequately historicize the aesthetic developments of 1942 and especially those relating to installation art. Against conventional opinion, I argue that each installation articulated a very unique response to the avant-garde’s geo- graphical, political, and historical displacement. Duchamp’s installation, far from a flippant work or a simple, Surrealist-inspired gesture, acted as a sophisticated negation of certain reactionary tendencies within Surrealism once it entered into exile. This becomes even more intelligible, in fact, through a revised comparison with Kiesler’s designs. The installations, then, represent two models, opposed but productively related, with which we might measure the historical antinomies of the avant-garde in its context of exile during World War II. By rendering the exhi- bition’s container biomorphic and fusional, Kiesler’s installation provided what 2. Cynthia Goodman suggests: “One source for the illusion of ‘transparency’ may have been Duchamp, whose concurrent installation of Surrealist art at the Whitelaw Reid mansion suspended the paintings among sixteen miles of string” (“Frederick Kiesler: Designs for Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery,” Arts Magazine 51 [June 1977], pp. 93–94). Also see her more recent “The Art of Revolutionary Display Techniques,” in Frederick Kiesler (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1989). On the relation between Kiesler and Duchamp, who first met in 1925 at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, see Jennifer Gough-Cooper and Jacques Caumont, “Frederick Kiesler and the Bride Stripped Bare” in Frederick Kiesler 1890–1965, ed. Yehuda Safran (London: Architectural Association, 1989). 3. Frederick Kiesler, “Design-Correlation: Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Big-Glass’” (1937), in Frederick Kiesler: Selected Writings, ed. Siegfried Gohr and Gunda Luyken (Ostfieldern bei Stuttgart: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1996), p. 38. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2001.97.1.91 by guest on 27 September 2021 Duchamp’s Labyrinth 95 can be seen as a compensatory “home” for a displaced Surrealism. Conversely, Duchamp’s installation enforced a “homeless” space that resonated with geopoliti- cal dislocation and refused any compensatory strategies of display. Together, they reveal the historical entwinement of the desires for the home and the insistence on a homeless reality, which defines the displaced avant-garde in 1942. In this regard, the condition of displacement suggests a new way to compre- hend developments in installation art during the war years, different from conventional art-historical genealogies that see them as solely related to the critiques of institutions and commodification; for installation, embodying the physical and ideological mediation between objects, viewers, and their surrounding space, immediately concerns issues of placement, location, and contextualization—the very issues that became sensitized and overdetermined in the context of geopoliti- cal dislocation. Once we accept the proposition that the construction of installations in 1942 was in some way more than superficially related to the artists’ own displacement, we need to ask what was at stake? How did the work of installa- tion define, analyze, negotiate, or compensate for the condition of displacement? Displacement and Mythologization Before directly addressing the installations, it is