What if Heidegger used Fountain instead of van Gogh’s Shoes to launch the Origin of a Work of Art?’
Heidegger’s reimagining of the artwork was instrumental in forcing a re-evaluation of modern aesthetic assumptions in the first half of the twentieth century. Heidegger’s theory of the origin of the work of art derives from a hermeneutic analysis of a single van Gogh masterpiece. On Heidegger’s view, the artwork provides a substantive and practical way of accessing the nature of art even if questions remain about all manifestations of the nature of art in general. This paper turns his analysis to an alternative influential artwork, Duchamp’s Fountain. I argue thatFountain presents difficulties for Heidegger’s method, some of which can be accommodated. However, the requirement to confine phenomenal engagement to the art object alone leads to problems when the object is appropriated from outside the artworld, not exhibited, and only one photograph bears witness to its existence. The prospect of broadening the focus of our attention from the art object alone to the “drama” of Fountain provides for a much richer phenomenal engagement. However, this move runs counter to a second stipulation of Heidegger’s approach – that the artist’s intentions and her performative acts in creating the object should be excluded from our engagement with the work. Duchamp’s radical move with readymades and Fountain, in particular, disarms more than Heidegger’s early post-modern conception of an artwork. It also places pressure on aesthetic theories that lack the capacity to reset ontological boundaries when deeper transformative experiences lie beyond the remit of the object alone, or when art-relevant concepts are appropriated into and out of the realm of art. Duchamp points to a richer means of engaging with artworks than the one construed by Heidegger, one that includes consideration of the relevant artmaking acts.
The making of Fountain
On the eve of the United States entering the Great War, an eccentric band of anarchists purchased a urinal for display as an artwork. Rejected by the curators, the urinal never is exhibited.1 The object itself, Fountain, by R. Mutt (fig. 1) is lost or destroyed shortly after the exhibition ended and there remains nothing for any museum to “preserve.” No artist is needed to authenticate a non-existent art object. There is no “thing” to be “conferred the status of candidate for appreciation” in Dickie’s terms.2 “Nothing to see here” is normally a vain attempt to have the public gaze averted, but what if this whole art appropriation exercise becomes one of the most significant art performances of the twentieth century?3
The Origin of a Work of Art
Nearly twenty years later, Martin Heidegger circles a pair of old shoes depicted in an oil painting by Vincent van Gogh (fig. 2). Heidegger4 leads us through a phenomenal engagement with this artwork and in so doing enunciates a theory of the origin of a work of art. Heidegger outlines how both artist and work are the co-dependent result of the art that is their source.5 He applies a metaphor linking the material reality of “earthly things” with the “world” they reveal. His method of interpretation is both multilayered and cyclic with each earth-to-world relation revealing the next.Heidegger develops his earth-to-world notion through the medium of the artwork. He starts from a position that sees the “nature of things” generally as “formed matter”.6 On this account, the formed matter of an artwork, its “thingly” nature, so to speak, comprises material things such as paint and canvas.7 Artworks do a certain kind of work in revealing the truth of how things act in the world – the van Gogh artwork itself displays its workly character in revealing a pair of peasant shoes “and nothing more.” The shoes themselves display their own workly character as equipment of the earth protected in performing their role in the world of a peasant.8 This revelation about how the shoes are “working” in the world of a farm worker brings us back to the workly character of the artwork itself. The artwork’s “work” reveals the “truth of being” for the shoes in the painting. Finally, Heidegger captures this revelation from a particular artwork and proposes, albeit tentatively, how it might be, more generally, for the workly nature of all great works of art. He concludes that art just is truth, but truth construed in a radically different way. It is the “truth of beings setting itself to work.”9 Here “beings” is read as a verb, comprising multiple dynamic actions of things over time. In the case of the van Gogh artwork, the truth of a particular “being” (i.e. the truth of the shoes doing their work), is made to “stand in the light of its being.”10 This process of engagement leads us to see what and how this “thing” (i.e. the shoes) is in the context of its world.
In this way, a work by a great artist “discloses a world” for us, revealing an endless array of possibilities that can flow from a multitude of similar phenomenal engagements with the artwork. Heidegger’s phenomenological hermeneutic analysis of a painting turned modern aesthetic theory on its head and came to be an influential forerunner of postmodern art interpretation.11
For Heidegger, modern aesthetic theory,12 popular among philosophers in the early twentieth century, views the art experience as “subjects” accessing art “objects,” through the senses (fig. 4). Artworks are the result of creative exercises that reflect the experiences of the artist.
The artist embeds these experiences in the body of the artwork and, in-turn, the artwork elicits similar experiences in the art consumer.13 Heidegger views modern aesthetics problematically in that it creates a subject/object dualism. In short, he sees modern aesthetics as making art available to be “consumed” and, along with technology, science, and culture, is part of a world trend to objectify and control the whole of reality.14 According to Heidegger, this subject-to- object view of aesthetics mischaracterises the way we actually encounter the world on a day-to-day basis. Heidegger does not deny that the subject-object view of the world forms part of the artwork experience, it is just that a richer engagement with art derives from a more fundamental phenomenal connection with things in the world.
What applies is a more complex interweaving of subjective self and objective things in the world. In our use and experience of objects, we are colonised by them directly into a unified engagement with the artwork and its contents. We become immersed in a largely unconscious process of our lived experience of those things. To understand how Heidegger sees this unified system working, it helps to reflect on the lived experience of a bike-rider.
A champion cyclist effects manoeuvres rapidly and unreflectively and only occasionally stops to think if an error has been made or a change of movement is needed. Heidegger believes an everyday notion of direct phenomenological access better reflects our encounters with artworks than the more traditional account of a subject consuming the rewards of an art object (see fig. 5). In clarifying his account of phenomenal engagement, Heidegger warns against seeing it exclusively as a phenomenal experience in which the participant is engaged with the artwork. Were this exclusively the case, the person would be unable to distinguish her being from the thing.
On the other hand, it is incorrect to see the artwork entirely in a distinct subject-to-object relation. He sees it as a kind of experience lying somewhere between or moving between a distinct subject and object stance and a total unification of the self with the artwork.15
Heidegger demonstrates his theory of phenomenal aesthetics by guiding us through a series of encounters with the van Gogh painting and its contents – “a pair of peasant shoes and nothing more.” 16
But then, we are made to see the way the shoes are shaped and presented, and what the shoes are as essential equipment for a wearer, a person who toils on the earth. The shoes are understood, both in themselves and in their relationship to all the other things in the world they suggest. You can see the “truth” of the shoes encountered in the artwork because you have experienced it directly through the art of the painting. Heidegger’s phenomenological method provides a novel combination of lived experience and hermeneutic analysis which describes and interprets the lived experience. Moving back and forth between these two modes of thought, he takes us in ever widening circles encountering individual things as resources of the earth, and how they work and relate to the people who work with them. These parts reveal the whole and the world is seen in the work of art and, in turn, the whole discloses the truth in the parts (e.g. the shoes). Three kinds of “work” are relayed here; the woman using the shoes as equipment as she toils in the field, the work of the artist through the artwork bringing to life the world of the shoes and the woman, and the works done by great artists who, through their art, disclose a seemingly unlimited number of new ways of seeing the true nature of everyday things.
If Fountain was Heidegger’s chosen artwork
Heidegger’s theory of a work of art had one artwork as its guiding source. But what if Heidegger chose Duchamp’s Fountain rather than van Gogh’s Shoes as his starting point? A theory of the origin of an artwork should be robust enough to cover a work that perhaps more than any other provided the grounds for changing what we understand art to be. Could Fountain launch Heidegger’s theory?
This paper will review Heidegger’s theory employing Duchamp’s Fountain as the subject artwork. It will proceed by first clarifying why focusing on Heidegger’s theory and Duchamp’s Fountain is important. It will then attempt to answer four questions that this encounter raises. It will show that the theory is found wanting in some key respects. Finally, it will conclude that the identified limitations of Heidegger’s theory apply to other approaches which share Heidegger’s commitment to a fixed ontology for artworks and the exclusion of performative acts in the making of an artwork.
Why Heidegger’s theory?
Heidegger’s theory was a seminal influence in early post- modern art criticism. It helps explain artwork contributions that extend beyond the Kantian notion of “disinterested pleasure,”17 thereby opening up the possibility that great art will reveal new knowledge, and novel ways of seeing. This, in turn, shows how the creation of artworks can contribute in a profound way to how individuals and communities see themselves and provide a major impetus for the evolution of culture. Heidegger’s “Origin of the Work of Art” became an important base for other philosophers including existentialists Jean Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty and later post-modern theorists such as Hans Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Derrida, and Emmanuel Levinas, all of whom repurposed Heidegger’s approach into their own interpretations of aesthetics.18 Many current theorists share with Heidegger an understanding that the revelatory or affective art experience derives from an engagement with the artwork and the artwork alone. Extrinsic features including artistic intention, social relations to the artwork, and art interpretation, may be excluded as not constitutive of the artwork itself. Some highly influential theories also share with Heidegger a respect for standard ontological boundaries regarding the chosen communication medium – whether it be painting, novel writing, drama, or poetry, these media are viewed as determinately distinct forms. Perhaps, most tellingly, the prospect that an object, concept, or material may be transferred in to or out of the artworld entirely by the design or intention of its maker, collaborator, or appropriator necessitates a fluidity in ontological boundaries that is beyond the countenance of Heidegger and like theorists. These two features, intrinsic features confined to the artwork and media boundaries around artmaking, prove crucial to this analysis. Proceeding to test Fountain against Heidegger’s theory arguably has implications for a broader group of contemporary art theories.19
Why Fountain?
Repurposing “found” or manufactured objects as artworks was an early twentieth century innovation that created a paradigm shift in philosophy of aesthetics.Fountain and similar “readymades” are credited with influencing the development of many later innovations including pop art, op art, conceptual art, minimalism, performance art, and art-reflexive or self- referencing artworks.20 Fountain is unique among repurposed objects because Fountain has doubtful provenance and was lost or destroyed soon after being rejected for exhibition. A background such as this provides a uniquely poor platform for an art object by itself to provide rich aesthetic or revelatory value. There are numerous critical assessments of why Fountain played a significant role in twentieth century art.Most of these accounts fall broadly into two camps. Firstly, there is a focus on the object as anti-art, a disruptor mocking the hallowed institutions of art including the veneration of great artworks, the artist as genius, and the status of art professionals as supreme arbiters of taste.21Fountain is simply “chosen” for admiration in the artworld when it is otherwise indistinguishable from hundreds of identical objects, mass-produced for their instrumental bathroom value. The very idea that a work with such a tenuous claim to artworld status should be presented as such establishes “mockery” as part of the artist toolkit. On this view, Fountain is a seminal source for many later art disruptors.
Second, Fountain references the concepts, planning and collaborative actions that brought into viewFountain ’s transformative nature. The simple act of choosing an object, together with the subsequent associated collective actions that made it art, expanded our concepts of what art can be. Art becomes fundamentally conceptual and not merely “retinal” like so much art that went before it. Van Weeden claims that in choosing Fountain as a work of art, Duchamp recasts the space that art occupied – everything could be art.22 Artworks and artmaking are no longer distinct. They occupy a continuum of relations wherein artmaking acts are seen as the principal output and artworks themselves can be a window revealing these acts. Artwork and art acts are juxtaposed on a level playing field. Moreover, Fountain affirms that artmaking can be as straight-forwardly simple as selecting an object or concept as art. This makes the artworld the province of whoever deems what they do as “art”; no hierarchies involved; we all get to interpret and judge what is good and bad art.
Artists have available to them an unlimited range of ideas, materials, and audiences to choose from in the making of their art.23 In Roberts view the cognitive, cultural and political tenor of twentieth and twenty first century art is reshaped by Fountain so that we are now all “post-Duchampians.”24
A promising prospect
The idea of applying Heidegger to Fountain has some promise of bearing fruit. Duchamp and Heidegger had much in common in their construal of art. First, they both reject the notion that an artwork harbours aesthetic features gifted to the viewer through the senses. Heidegger rejects modern aesthetic theory on these grounds and Duchamp rejects “retinal” or visually-appealing art,opting instead for art that engages the mind. Second, both see engaging with an artwork as opening a multiplicity of revelations and interpretations. For Heidegger engaging is an in-the-moment experience for the individual with the work, a “presencing” that does not exhaust the world of meanings.25 This enables each individual engagement (for different people and different times) to produce a multiplicity of phenomenally grounded revelations.26 And for Duchamp, “aesthetic relativity” situates artworks as nodes in a relational web comprising multiple meanings.27
So with this promising beginning the paper will review key features of Heidegger’s model through the prism of Fountain.
Applying Heidegger’s theory of art to Duchamp’s Fountain
While Heidegger described a phenomenal engagement with one particular artwork, he intends his theory to apply to how we might engage with other great works of art. Engaging in this way with a work of art involves at least four relevant criteria implied or explicitly entailed by Heidegger’s model. These can be expressed as a list of questions needing answers:
1. What kind of thing is the “artwork” or object under study? First, we need to settle on the work’s ontology or decide on exactly what kind of thing the artwork is. This first step seems a trivial one for conventional art; the artwork just is the painting, or sculpture, etc., before you. However, Fountain is anything but conventional. Is it art, plumbing, or something else?
2. Is there a singular creative agent behind the making of the work? This second key feature follows from Heidegger’s assumption that each great work of art requires a singular great creator to realize and illuminate profound and unique truths about things in the world through their art.
3. What counts as “earth” in the creation of Fountain? This third question involves fundamental resources (“the earth”) being “worked” to create and inform how things are in the world?
4. Does Fountain stand as an artwork, in its own right, without relying on the artist’s intentions or performative acts in its appreciation? Finally, to be consistent with Heidegger’s model, whatever experiences or revelations arise will stem from a direct engagement with the artwork unsullied by anything external to the work.
Does Heidegger’s model for the creation of an artwork work for Fountain? If so, our phenomenal encounter will need to answer these questions.
What is the nature of Fountain?
Urinal as art object
If art is the origin of the artwork and of the artist, but no art object remains for our gaze, then we will need to rely on a photograph of the original by Alfred Stieglitz.28 Resting on a plinth, the object is transformed just enough so that its abstract form can be appreciated. It soon becomes clear that the thing depicted is a male urinal.
It is called Fountain and it is signed “R Mutt.” Before it was transformed for exhibition, the urinal was designed and produced to be restroom equipment and not a work of art. Whoever was the original designer is not the “artist” here. The urinal itself is transformed in the most meagre of ways – turned on its side with the inlet facing the viewer so it suggests a fountain. It is named, signed, submitted for exhibition, and rejected. There is not enough artistry here to call the “transformer” an artist either. No artwork and no artist should mean, at least in Heidegger’s terms, that this is not art. But whatever happened in the New York Spring of 1917 changed twentieth century art. Finding the “art” in this puzzle necessitates a different path to the one taken by Heidegger with van Gogh’s Shoes.
Fountain as drama
No object remains and the collaborators are long since dead so the story of the Fountain is sketchy and uncertain. However, what is known is that it has a beginning, a middle, an end, and a very long epilogue. It also has “dramatis personae,” an “auteur” of sorts. There is no art object, but there is a mildly vulgar prop around which the drama unfolds. The story has atmosphere, a backstory, it is riddled with puns.
There is not the space for a full exegesis ofFountain as drama or as a succession of performative acts. Doing so would reveal a cast of larger-than-life characters, a famous photographer, a most interesting director and the no-rules- barring-entry exhibition curators who broke their only rule by excluding Fountain from being exhibited.29
The drama would explain the quixotic quest of Dada to get a mad world to abandon the brutal logic of war on the eve of young Americans signing up for service to the background lyrics of “Johnny get your gun”.30
It would show that Duchamp’s play most probably has not ended. The long epilogue may show that, as he promised,31 Fountain really is for future generations.32
It would appear the urinal, taken as artwork in and of itself, leads to a lean reading; a dead-end. But znderstanding Fountain as a collaborative drama does have the potential to “disclose a world” in the way Heidegger would recognise. Duchamp himself adopted a deliberatively performative stance with regard to his artmaking and its reception by the public:
“You’re on stage,” he explains, “you show off your goods”; right then you become an actor; one accepts everything, while laughing just the same. You don’t have to give in too much. You accept to please other people, more than yourself. It’s a sort of politeness.33
Moreover, Fountain is invested with that polysemic potential that Heidegger sees as a necessary ingredient of great art.34 Is it a pun for “taking a piss” or a crypto-feminist plot for “taking the piss” out of men? Is it art, not art, neither or both; a real case of a true contradiction?35 Even the Fountain- as-drama reading bifurcates into a man-story with artist Joseph Stella, Walter Arensberg art critic, and Duchamp planning the “Fountain play” prior to Duchamp’s execution36 and a less told under-story with Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven, Louise Norton, Katherine Dreier, and Beatrice Wood playing leading roles37 with Duchamp as ally.. Rival narratives only add to the dramatic potential. If we do accept Fountain as drama for a Heideggerian analysis, this move is still problematic for his theory on a number of fronts. This leads us to the next important question.
Is there a single creative agent behind the making of the work?
While not ruling out collective acts, Heidegger’s project suggests he had in mind that a great artwork was the product of a single great creator uniquely realising her vision through the act of artwork creation. But with Fountain, there is no singular artist to take the mantle of greatness that Heidegger seems to assume is required for artworks to be imbued with the necessary transformative qualities. In Fountain, it would appear a collective of creative talents worked collaboratively, arguably, under the direction of Marcel Duchamp although there remain doubts concerning who exactly played what role in the Fountain drama.38 Removing the stricture of artist as sole creative agent does not affect the overall project dramatically. It means we accept that collective creativity can sometimes be transformative as well. Heidegger at least acknowledged that the “createdness” of the work was to be seen as distinct from the greatness of the singular artist:
The emergence of createdness from the work does not mean that the work is to give the impression of having been made by a great artist.39 In moving forward then, we tentatively have Fountain being read as drama with a collective of creative players. But how might we construe Heidegger’s earth-to-world relation which proves so crucial in his origin of an artwork?
What counts as “earth” in the creation of Fountain
Construing Fountain as drama and assuming a collective process of creation does not fully address the problem of applying Heidegger’s model to this iconic creation. A third hurdle for Fountain as drama relates to the earth-to-world metaphor. Heidegger enlists a variety of “world-forming” material resources that normally count as “earth.” While the urinal is certainly “material,” we have shown that it is an inadequate source for what Fountain becomes. In the case of van Gogh’s Shoes, the connections Heidegger makes between earth and world via the constitutive materials of the artwork and the relations of the shoes to the peasant’s work40 provide a rich account of how a great artwork can be culturally transformative. Contrasted with this rich account for ‘Shoes’, the physical object of the urinal by itself tells us little about how ‘Fountain’ comes to be a major catalyst in changing twentieth century art. In the case ofFountain then, what counts as earth? What can be the constitutive source for the “thingness” of no-thing? The construal for earth needs to be extended to, somehow, accompany the ‘Fountain’ performance. This includes the formative ideas that lead to the playing out of “Fountain as drama”; or, at least, the available records of what is said and done to enact those ideas as the basis of a plan to acquire a ready-made, display it, reject it, etc. Heidegger provides us with a clue in his discussion of poets using words inhe way artists use pigment:
To be sure, the poet also uses the word — not, however, like ordinary speakers and writers who have to use them up, but rather in such a way that the word only now becomes and remains truly a word.41 In fact, Heidegger says that the defining feature of all great works of art is found in “poesis” or their poetic nature of bringing important things into being:
All art, we learn from “The Origin of the Work of Art,” is essentially poetry, because it is the letting happen of the advent of the truth of what is. And poetry, as linguistic, has a privileged position in the domain of the arts, because language, understood rightly, is the original way in which beings are brought into the open clearing of truth, in which world and earth, mortals and gods are bidden to come to their appointed places of meeting.42 The constitutive origins of words are phonemes, and phonemes as physical acoustic artefacts may qualify as the “earth” of poetry. But what about the succession of performative acts at the heart of the “Fountain drama”? The earth could be seen here also as residing in the non-verbal signs and symbols of the actions of the players coupled with these same “acoustic artefacts” informing what is said. With this account of earth, the emerging “artwork” can be seen as the drama derived from performances of the players transforming acoustic artefacts with their utterances and the signs and symbols manifest in their actions revealing a world; a Fountain world.This brings us to the final question.43
Does Fountain stand as an artwork without relying on the artist’s intentions or performative acts in its appreciation?
So far, we have seen that with some significant adjustments Heidegger’s phenomenal aesthetics can be made to work for Fountain. But a final hurdle remains for his construal. Heidegger is strongly of the opinion that the artwork and the artwork alone should be the focus of our phenomenal engagement:
Where does a work belong? The work belongs, as work, uniquely within the realm that is opened up by itself. For the work-being of the work is present in, and only in, such opening up.44 Moreover, Heidegger emphasises that this engagement should be considered as it is and not be narrowed by its creator:
The thrust that the work as this work is, and the uninterruptedness of this plain thrust, constitute the steadfastness of the work’s self-subsistence. Precisely where the artist and the process and the circumstances of the genesis of the work remain unknown, this thrust, this “that it is” of createdness, emerges into view most purely from the work.45 For Heidegger, direct phenomenal engagement with the artwork requires the undivided attention of the person. Taking into account the artist’s opinions and constitutive actions count as distractions to this primary purpose.
How does Fountain challenge this position? As we have seen, if Fountain is to be read in a manner that exposes us to its full revelatory potential, then it must be interpreted beyond the physical object itself. Reframing Fountain as drama provides such a rich reading. A consequence of this move is that the contents of the artwork necessarily comprise narratives of what the actors do and say. In this regard, it is difficult, if not impossible, to separate the art; that is, the performative acts themselves from the opinions of the actors/artists.
As an example, Louise Norton writes an article in the Blind Man magazine shortly after Fountain’s rejection.46 Her article is both artist opinion and also a key step in a later chapter of the Fountain drama; making it a necessary part of the artwork-drama itself. Problematically for Heidegger’s theory, the performative acts of the artists must be included because they are constitutive of the artwork as drama and contradictorily not included to meet Heidegger’s stipulation of excluding the artist’s opinion. Separating this kind of opinion destroys or obscures the very work itself.
The problem of excluding the artist’s “opinion” and other key constitutive elements from the analysis extends to artworks generally. Access to Shoes suffers from being confined to a hermeneutical analysis of the painting itself. What if a work identical to the van Gogh masterpiece were produced by a forger simply copying the original stroke by stroke? Would we be in error if a phenomenal engagement with the copy means we imbued the shoes with the “earth and toil of the peasant”? Our only means of knowing the copy’s status derives from evidence of the faker’s performative acts in making the forgery – evidence, possibly, only available externally to the painting.
But surely the problem of conflating interpretative opinion with the composition can be addressed by finding a way of distinguishing acts that are part the creators’ critique of their art from those that are part of the art act performance simpliciter? In other words, why not place a boundary around artmaking performative acts and separate these from interpretations that lie outside the artmaking acts? The problem is that “Fountain-play” is not a formally framed orthodox “play” like a Shakespeare play with clear boundaries between the play and the play’s creation. Constitutive acts of the players are no less important than the object created. Duchamp would see other boundaries being blurred as well; the “spectator’s role” after the objects’ creation becomes equally informative of what the work is.47 Fountain has no such clear boundaries. All the creative acts connected to the Fountain drama are both acts of creation and performance with no clear limits of time, space or characters.
Opting for a “Neo-Heideggerian” solution
We have shown Heidegger’s theory provides an inadequate response to Fountain unless four important questions integral to his approach, can be addressed. So why not just “bite the bullet” and accept some adjustments to Heidegger’s theory to enable Fountain to be accommodated? This move has the advantage of preserving the core innovative feature of the theory – hermeneutical phenomenology. Heidegger’s artwork methodology helps explain the revelatory potential of engaging with an artwork while avoiding the subject/object dualism that Heidegger roundly criticises. While adopting a substantially modified “Neo-Heideggerian” theory of the origin of an artwork is plausible, the move creates something like the problem of the old kitchen broom – the one that has three replacement handles and four new heads. It really isn’t the same broom. In addition, the revised theory is lacking an adequate explanatory account for any of the relaxed criteria – for example, how should we understand performative acts of multiple players undertaken over different times and places as the “work” of art when Heidegger’s account is confined to engaging with a single art object ostensibly at one sitting. Even in its expanded “Neo-Heideggerian” form, Heidegger’s original analysis lacks the epistemic resources to accommodate this move and it is therefore lacking in the required explanatory narrative to enable a robust account of Fountain.
Conclusion
Heidegger’s phenomenal hermeneutics was instrumental in forcing a re-evaluation of modern aesthetic assumptions in the early twentieth century. Heidegger’s theory of the origin of the artwork is born from a hermeneutic analysis of a single van Gogh masterpiece. This essay turned his analysis to another great artwork – perhaps the most influential work of the twentieth century – Fountain. While Heidegger’s method can accommodate some hurdles thrown up byFountain , the requirement to confine phenomenal engagement to the art object alone leads to problems when the object has such limited potential as an influential work of art. The prospect of broadening the focus of our attention to the drama of Fountain provides for a much richer phenomenal engagement. However, this move runs counter to a second stipulation that the artist’s intentions/opinion and performative acts in making the art should be excluded from our engagement with the work. Adjusting Heidegger’s theory to better accommodate works like Fountain also fails.
This paper focused on the capacity of a single early post- modern theory of art to explain a singular work. However, the two key limitations that defeat Heidegger’s theory also limit similar theories, particularly those approaches that privilege the intrinsic features of the artwork but exclude the actions of artmakers, collaborators and appropriators. It also places pressure on aesthetic theories that lack the fluidity to reset ontological boundaries when the richer revelatory experience is found beyond the exclusive remit of the object alone.
This theory limitation would be of minor consequence if it applied to a singular exception – Fountain. But as we have seen, Fountain is only the first in a long succession of art making practices characterised by repurposing or appropriating objects, concepts, and styles into the world of art from elsewhere. Heidegger’s “Origin of the Work of Art” and like theories are restricted in their capacity to reveal the rich potential of Fountain’s innovative progeny, the very progeny that have helped to define current art practice. Figures
Figure 1: Fountain – Marcel Duchamp
1917 Photo – Alfred Stieglitz Retrieved from http://academics.smcvt.edu/gblasdel/slides%20ar333/webpages/m. %20duchamp,%20fountain.htm
Figure 2: Shoes Vincent van Gogh, 1886 Oil on canvas, 38.1 cm x 45.3 cm van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)
Figure 3: Heidegger’s Hermeneutic cycle applied to van Gogh’s painting. Heidegger employs a series of connected earth-to- world relations to understand the origin of an artwork. ‘Things’ like shoes and artworks are ‘formed matter’. Van Gogh’s painting reveals shoes and, in turn, their ‘being’ brings into being the working life of the woman. This very process illuminates the workly character of a particular artwork and, tentatively, for Heidegger, the true nature of all great works of art.
Figure 4: The modern aesthetic model of art requires a subject/object dichotomy between the subject and artwork.
Figure 5: Heidegger’s alternative model for engaging with an artwork
Notes:
1 Robert Kilroy, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain: One Hundred Years Later, 2017 ed. (Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates: Palgrave Pivot, 2017), 51. 2 George Dickie, “Defining Art,” American Philosophical Quarterly 6, no. 3 (1969): 254. 3 Kilroy, 1. 4 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, Translations and Introduction by Albert Hofstadter, Perennial Library (New York ; Sydney : Harper & Row, 1975, c1971., 1975), 15-86. 5 Ibid., 17. 6 Ibid., 26.
7 Ibid., 19. 8 Ibid., 33. 9 Ibid., 35. 10 Ibid., 35. 11 Iain Thomson,Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 65-77. 12 The modern aesthetic tradition that Heidegger criticises had its origins in the eighteenth century through the writing of a number thinkers, the Earl of Shaftesbury and Immanuel Kant, prominent among them. Modern aesthetic theory held that beauty existed in things independent of humans. In the ‘Critique of Judgement’, Kant emphasised that judging the ‘taste’ of an object requires the subject to adopt a state of disinterest to enable the experience of delight derived from the object to be fully appreciated. Jerome Stolnitz, “On the Significance of Lord Shaftesbury in Modern Aesthetic Theory,”The Philosophical Quarterly (1950-), no. 43 (1961). https://doi.org/10.2307/2960120; Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement (Oxford University Press, 2005), 37. 13 Thomson, 47-51. 14 Martin Heidegger and William Vernon Lovitt, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, Harper Torchbooks: Tb 1969 (New York [etc.] : Harper and Row, 1977., 1977), 116; Thomson, 45. 15 Heidegger, 25. 16 Ibid., 33. 17 Kant, 41. 18 Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting (University of Chicago Press, 1987); Hans Georg Gadamer and Robert Bernasconi,The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays (Cambridge University Press, 1986); Leonard Lawlor and Ted Toadvine, The Merleau-Ponty Reader (Northwestern University Press, 2007), 69-84, 241-82, 351-78; Emmanuel Lévinas and Seán Hand, The Levinas Reader (B. Blackwell, 1989), 129-65; Paul Ricoeur, “Aesthetic Experience,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 24, no. 2-3 (04/01/ 1998); Jean-Paul Sartre, Essays in Aesthetics, Essay Index Reprint Series (Books for Libraries Press, 1970). 19 Arguably, Ricoeur, Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer are theorists who fall short in these respects. Paul Ricoeur emphasizes the singular character of the ‘work’ as crucial in engaging with art. He alludes to the significance of the frame of a painting in separating the work from its background. In so doing, it provides us with a window on the world of the painting. He finds contemporary notions of appropriation, for example ‘a chair being placed on a platform’, troubling for art. Ibid.Ricoeur, 30. Merleau- Ponty argues the authenticity of a painting can only be judged by examining the painting and ‘if the counterfeiter succeeded in recapturing not only the processes but the very style of the great Vermeers he would no longer be a counterfeiter’. See Lawlor and Toadvine, 261-62. Gadamer comes closer to realizing the fluidity in art boundaries with his idea of the ‘play’ in artworks and how spectators are not excluded from joining in the ‘play’ suggested in the work. See Gadamer and Bernasconi, 24. On the other hand, Gadamer understands works of art as being ‘set free’ and ‘released from the process of production because it is, by definition, destined for use’ Ibid., 12. Duchamp’s ‘Bottle- rack’ is viewed through the object’s determinate character in suggesting the effect it once produced Ibid., 25. The performative acts of the appropriator are not needed here to fulfil Gadamer’s account of the ‘Bottle-rack’.
20 William A. Camfield and Marcel Duchamp, Marcel Duchamp, Fountain (Houston Fine Art Press, 1989), 88; Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp : A Biography , 1st ed. ed. (H. Holt, 1996), 455-56. 21 Allan Antliff, “The Making and Mauling of Marcel Duchamp’s Ready-Made,” Canadian Art 23, no. 1 (Spring2006 2006): 57; Camfield and Duchamp, 42; Kilroy, 48. 22 Dirk van Weelden, “Black Coffee. Marcel Duchamp’s Pataphysical Sensism,” Relief: Revue Électronique de Littérature Francaise, Vol 10, Iss 1, Pp 70-76 (2016), no. 1 (2016): 71. https://doi.org/10.18352/relief.925. 23 If ‘Fountain’ does lead us to a greatly expanded construal of art, it also increases uncertainty concerning the boundaries of art. Where should I draw the line between what is and is not art? Of course, contesting the boundaries of art did not begin with Duchamp. Resolving the art status of borderline works may be a less rewarding exercise than finding the pathway that reveals the revelatory potential of any given work despite its status as art or something else. 24 John Roberts, “Temporality, Critique, and the Vessel Tradition: Bernard Leach and Marcel Duchamp,” Temporality, Critique, and the Vessel Tradition: Bernard Leach and Marcel Duchamp,” 6, no. 3 (2013): 256. https://doi.org/10.2752/174967813X13806265666618. 25 Iain Thomson, “Heidegger’s Aesthetics,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2010). 26 Heidegger, 81. 27 van Weelden, 71. 28 Mystery surrounds even this one photograph with some claiming it is not all it seems. See Rhonda R. Shearer, “Why the Hatrack Is and/or Is Not Readymade : With Interactive Software, Animations, and Videos for Readers to Explore,” Tout-fait 1, no. 3 (2000). 29 Paul Franklin, B., “Object Choice: Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain and the Art of Queer Art History,” Oxford Art Journal 23, no. 1 (2000). 30 Lyrics from the popular song ‘Over There’ by George M Cohen. 31 Camfield and Duchamp, 142. 32 Duchamp in a talk titled ‘The Creative Act’ acknowledges the role of the spectator as collaborator in art-making: “All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and ‘ interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.” 33Kilroy, 84. 34 Thomson, Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity, 69. 35 Damon Young and Graham Priest, “It Is and It Isn’t,” Aeon 2018 (2017). 36 The story of ‘Fountain’ is a collection of narratives arising from actions by members and associates of the Society of Independent Artists. Alfred Steiglitz is credited with the one known photograph of ’Fountain’ taken shortly after its rejection from the exhibition, and Walter Arensberg, art critic and collector, who together with Joseph Stella and Marcel Duchamp arguably planned the exhibition of ‘Fountain’. Marcel Duchamp himself may have ‘directed’ much of the execution of the ‘Fountain play’ Camfield and Duchamp, 20-43. 37 There is a significant body of evidence that the women collaborators played a far greater role in Fountain’s creation than has been historically acknowledged. Beatrice Wood, the ‘Mama of Dada’ along with Henri-Pierre Roche and Duchamp edited the Blind Man which provided narrative for the ’ Fountain’ story. Louise Norton’s article in the Blindman “Buddha of the Bathroom,” The Blind Man1917. played a seminal role in making what ’Fountain’ eventually became particularly given the object’s early disappearance and continuing uncertainty surrounding its origins. Katherine Dreier was the first to offer the ‘originality objection’ against ‘Fountain’ but subsequently became an advocate for the Society of Independent Artists to rescind their rejection of the work, Camfield and Duchamp, 28-32. Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven is credited, by some, as being the real creator of Fountain. See, for example, Irene Gammel,Baroness Elsa : Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity : A Cultural Biography (Cambridge, Mass. ; London : MIT, c2002., 2002); Julian Spalding and Glyn Thompson, “Did Marcel Duchamp Steal Elsa’s Urinal?,” Art Newspaper 24, no. 262 (2014). Gammel. Spalding and Thompson. However others have disputed this claim. See Thierry de Duve, “The Story ofFountain : Hard Facts and Soft Speculation,” Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 28, no. 57/58 (01// 2019): 42. 38 Anne Sejten, “Art Fighting Its Way Back to Aesthetics: Revisiting Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain,” Journal of Art Historiography 15, no. 2 (2016): 3-4. 39 Heidegger, 63. 40 Ibid., 30-36. 41 Ibid., 46. 42 Ibid., 73. 43 Including the words and actions of all those with a part to play in the making of ‘Fountain’ as drama does not exclude the role of the object i.e. the urinal itself. It remains a central defining point of reference – one that the ‘Fountain’ players continually reference as the drama unfolds. In a certain sense, the urinal becomes a ‘prop’ essential to the drama. 44 Heidegger, 40. 45Ibid., 63. 46Norton, 5-6. 47Camfield and Duchamp, 142. Bibliography
Antliff, Allan. “The Making and Mauling of Marcel Duchamp’s Ready-Made.” Canadian Art 23, no. 1 (Spring2006 2006): 56-60.
Camfield, William A., and Marcel Duchamp. Marcel Duchamp, Fountain. Houston Fine Art Press, 1989. de Duve, Thierry. “The Story of Fountain: Hard Facts and Soft Speculation.” Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 28, no. 57/58 (01// 2019): 10.
Derrida, Jacques. The Truth in Painting. University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Dickie, George. “Defining Art.” American Philosophical Quarterly 6, no. 3 (1969): 253-56.
Franklin, Paul, B. “Object Choice: Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain and the Art of Queer Art History.” Oxford Art Journal 23, no. 1 (2000): 25.
Gadamer, Hans Georg, and Robert Bernasconi. The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays. Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Gammel, Irene. Baroness Elsa : Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity : A Cultural Biography. Cambridge, Mass. ; London : MIT, c2002., 2002.
Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought, Translations and Introduction by Albert Hofstadter. Perennial Library. New York ; Sydney : Harper & Row, 1975, c1971., 1975.
Heidegger, Martin, and William Vernon Lovitt. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Harper Torchbooks: Tb 1969. New York [etc.] : Harper and Row, 1977., 1977.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgement. Oxford University Press, 2005. Kilroy, Robert. Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain: One Hundred Years Later. 2017 ed. Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates: Palgrave Pivot, 2017.
Lawlor, Leonard, and Ted Toadvine. The Merleau-Ponty Reader. Northwestern University Press, 2007.
Lévinas, Emmanuel, and Seán Hand. The Levinas Reader. B. Blackwell, 1989.
Norton, Louise. “Buddha of the Bathroom.” The Blind Man, 1917, 2.
Ricoeur, Paul. “Aesthetic Experience.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 24, no. 2-3 (04/01/ 1998): 25-39.
Roberts, John. “Temporality, Critique, and the Vessel Tradition: Bernard Leach and Marcel Duchamp.” Journal of Modern Craft 6, no. 3 (2013): 255-66. https://doi.org/10.2752/174967813X13806265666618.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Essays in Aesthetics. Essay Index Reprint Series. Books for Libraries Press, 1970.
Sejten, Anne. “Art Fighting Its Way Back to Aesthetics: Revisiting Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain.” Journal of Art Historiography 15, no. 2 (2016): 15.
Shearer, Rhonda R. “Why the Hatrack Is and/or Is Not Readymade : With Interactive Software, Animations, and Videos for Readers to Explore.” Tout-fait 1, no. 3 (2000): 10.
Spalding, Julian, and Glyn Thompson. “Did Marcel Duchamp Steal Elsa’s Urinal?”. Art Newspaper 24, no. 262 (2014): 59-59.
Stolnitz, Jerome. “On the Significance of Lord Shaftesbury in Modern Aesthetic Theory.” The Philosophical Quarterly (1950-), no. 43 (1961): 97. https://doi.org/10.2307/2960120.
Thomson, Iain. “Heidegger’s Aesthetics.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2010): n/a.
———. Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity. Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Tomkins, Calvin. Duchamp : A Biography. 1st ed. ed.: H. Holt, 1996. van Weelden, Dirk. “Black Coffee. Marcel Duchamp’s Pataphysical Sensism.” Relief: Revue Électronique de Littérature Francaise, Vol 10, Iss 1, Pp 70-76 (2016), no. 1 (2016): 70. https://doi.org/10.18352/relief.925.
Young, Damon, and Graham Priest. “It Is and It Isn’t.” Aeon 2018 (2017).
Acknowledgement
The author would like to thank the Australasian Association of Philosophy Conference and the University of Melbourne Philosophy Post-Graduate Colloquia participants for helpful suggestions on early drafts of this paper.
Photographic Masquerades: The Readymade Femininity of Greta Garbo and Marcel Duchamp
Always the vamp I am, always the woman of no heart. – Greta Garbo 1
Nowadays, this may be all very well – names change with the times – but Rrose was an awful name in 1920. – Marcel Duchamp 2
Click to enlarge
Illustration 1: Greta Garbo Illustration 2: Marcel Duchamp as Mata Hari, 1931 as Rrose Sélavy, 1921 Let us compare two photographs… The first is of Greta Garbo as Mata Hari, one of several from a series of publicity stills of the movie star taken in 1931 by Clarence Sinclair Bull. In this particular image Garbo’s hands are posed on the white fur of her collar, which, pressed suggestively against her cheeks, frames the mysterious beauty of her face; half hidden in shadow and with a notably seductive arch of her eyebrows, her eyes stare boldly out of the picture. A large ring on her left hand calls attention to her ambiguous marital status, allowing for the possibility that any viewer could possess her. It is important to remember that Garbo, in the words of Roland Barthes, “belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy.” 3 The ecstatic beauty of Garbo’s face in this image is at once captured and produced by the medium of the photograph, which represents a space of simulation in which the reality of the movie star can be said to truly exist.
The second photograph, taken by the Surrealist photographer Man Ray, pictures the artist Marcel Duchamp posturing as his female alter ego Rrose Sélavy. This image, referred to as Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy, is visually quite similar in composition and pose to that of the Garbo photograph, except Duchamp uses the standard feminine props to photographically invert his gender. Interestingly enough, Duchamp tells us that his first idea “was to take a Jewish name,” but he considered the possibility of changing sex as “much simpler.” 4 Richly dressed in dark furs and a geometrically patterned hat, Rrose’s fingers arch in a feminine gesture as she holds the fur collar close to her exposed face. On her right hand is a simple wedding band that, in European fashion, mates her to her male counterpart Duchamp. Rrose is in this way created as a readymade woman that is constructed out of readymade elements, Duchamp’s body and Germaine Everling’s hands. Through the strategic implementation of readymade femininity, Rrose is brought to life in New York in 1920. Her reality is quite literally sustained within the frame of the photograph, which demonstrates, as we argue, the readymade nature of gender positions.
Duchamp’s use of femininity in this photographic sex-change is a direct extension of his famous artistic readymades, in which (often mass-produced) objects are chosen rather than created by an artist to be art. Fountain (1917), for example, is a urinal purchased from a lavatory supply store, one of a series of virtually identical objects within a commercial line of products, which could be easily replaced by another with little to no difference in the object itself. The only feature that distinguishes this artwork from the other urinals in the series is the signature of R. Mutt, Duchamp’s pseudonym for this piece. As Duchamp makes clear in his discussion with Pierre Cabanne, the readymade is based within object- relations: “It’s difficult to choose an object, because, at the end of fifteen days, you begin to like it or to hate it. You have to approach something with an indifference, as if you had no aesthetic emotion. The choice of readymades is always based on visual indifference and at the same time, on the total absence of good or bad taste.” 5 Prominently included in a list of Duchamp’s readymades, Rrose exists as a photographic – a readymade medium par excellence – manifestation of the already existing language or signifiers of femininity. According to Judith Butler, “femininity is an ideal which everyone always and only ‘imitates.’ Thus, drag imitates the imitative structure of gender, revealing gender itself to be an imitation.” 6 Duchamp’s imitation of femininity in his pose as Rrose is in this way an imitation of the imitation of femininity as a cultural discourse of gender, a discourse that Garbo also participates in with her own imitation of the feminine.
In addition to the remarkable similarity in the respective poses of Garbo and Duchamp (or Rrose), the photographs also share a visual psychology that, as Moira Roth points out, is astonishing similar in terms of their “beauty and remoteness: staring out of their photographs, with their hands idly protecting them, they both project an image of utter aloofness. In both portraits there is an impenetrable impassivity.” 7 It is the photograph as a major site of the production of femininity that we argue is the basic subject of both Garbo’s and Duchamp’s portraits and, more significantly, it is their apparent playing with the productive capacity of the photographic medium that allows them to perform a masquerade.
1. In “Womanliness as a Masquerade,” the psychoanalyst Joan Riviere makes the point that womanliness can “be assumed and worn as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it.” 8 Yet it is this possession of masculinity or masculine traits that made Garbo such an attractive public figure, not the least of which is due to her deep voice and the questions surrounding her sexual orientation. There is a dramatic contrast between Garbo’s photographic eroticism, a quintessential visual representation of the female film star, and her active challenge to the strict understanding and even performance of gender identity. Throughout her career Garbo highlighted the ease with which cultural conceptions of gender and sexuality can be manipulated. Through her masquerade of masculinity and her homosexual tendencies, Garbo lays claim to the masculine characteristics that at the time were outside the realm of most women’s experience – and in this way she appropriates a certain amount of power with her pose.
This power is evident in Garbo’s direct gaze in the Mata Hari photographs, since it is still rare today to see an eroticized feminine figure challenging the viewer with such a bold look. A comparison can be made between the gaze of the courtesan in Édouard Manet’s Olympia , confronting the viewer with the power of a woman as a sexual subject that looks back, and the gaze of Garbo. Manet’s painting is still discussed as controversial for the simple fact that cultural presentations of eroticism do not make room for the female gaze and, more specifically, women’s active acceptance and employment of their own sexuality. In her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey points out, In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that can be said to connote to-be-looked-at- ness.9
While Garbo is set up as an erotic feminine figure to be looked at in the Mata Hari publicity still, she undermines the traditional presentation of women as passive by powerfully looking back at the viewer. Whereas Bull’s photograph of Garbo is specifically intended to produce a feminine consumer object (through photography and film) that is womanly , it is clear that Duchamp’s Rrose is not attempting to be a woman but instead is trying to bring into dialogue the cultural signifiers of man and woman through Rrose. Although constructed and staged using similar readymade feminine props and poses as those employed in the image of Garbo, Rrose remains obviously not a woman – or at least can be seen as an intentionally fake woman. Yet Rrose is no longer strictly a man either, the photographic medium allowing Duchamp to perform both genders simultaneously. Poised in a feminine masquerade Duchamp can be seen taking on the cultural qualities that are considered “feminine” or “womanly.” As Amelia Jones states: “It is because Duchamp and Man Ray constructed Rrose Sélavy through photographic conventions that draw directly from cultural codes constructing femininity in relation to commodification that the images can be said to subvert these inexorable effects of the advertisement’s production of femininity.” 10 Duchamp’s masquerade as Rrose, similar to Garbo’s photograph as Mata Hari, draws upon the methodology and processes of popular culture advertisements, specifically the manner in which femininity as a social category is constructed or assembled through the production of imagery.
This complex relationship between Duchamp the “man” and Rrose the “woman” performed by the “man” is made evident in the works title: Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy. Duchamp sets up his name in a typographical pairing with Rrose, in a typical surrealist game where words are seen asmaking love with words, in this case “Marcel Duchamp” poetically making love to “Rrose Sélavy” and vice versa. Hence, for Duchamp, it is possible to unhinge his gender through a reinvention of his name and play with other matings of meaning. This multiplicity of meanings is most evident in the wordplay of Duchamp’s chosen name Rrose Sélavy , which is an elaborate double pun in French: “eros c’est la vie,” eros that’s life, and/or “arroser la vie,” drink it up, celebrate life.
Duchamp uses the photograph as what he terms an inframince or infrathin medium. 11 Through this quality of the photograph, he both is and is not Rrose Sélavy, is and is not a woman. This inter-distinction is reflected in the use of the term “and/or” to negotiate the relation between Duchamp and Rrose, connecting them through the “and” while at the same time separating them through the “or.” Jones even suggests that this and/or is a mating device in which Duchamp and Rrose “are related by way of aninframince asymmetry (incongruence) carried through all of Duchamp’s productions: Duchamp and/or Rrose Sélavy, bride and/or bachelors, man and/or woman, viewer and/or viewed.” 12 The photograph functions as a means of visually positing such inframince visual relationships through the materialization of the image as a simulation or representation. “In the photographic process it’s not a question of considering the world as an object, of acting as if it was already there as an object, but of making it become an object, in other words, of making it become other,” Jean Baudrillard states. 13 In this way, Duchamp’s relationship with Rrose Sélavy is an infra-thin coupling of sexual identity that is accomplished strictly within the representational space demarcated by the photograph.
Duchamp’s use of the advertising industry’s strategies of producing femininity can be seen as a parody of gender differentiation. But, as Jones asks: What are the specific codes of femininity the Rrose Sélavy images parody? Here it is worth turning to studies in the history of photography that have linked nineteenth- and early- twentieth-century representations of women to the massive expanse of consumer culture and concomitant developments in photographic technology and the mass media. Since its origins around 1840, photography has developed a special relationship to both the commodity and femininity. 14 We can readily see this relationship in theMata Hari photograph in which Garbo is presented as a commodity object of the film industry, embodying the fantasy of femininity that Hollywood sells. In images of Garbo, the relationship between commodity and femininity is made explicit: she is the object of desire who seduces spectators who seek to consume her image. Garbo the fetishized movie star exists only as a product of this system of signification. Similarly, Rrose is “also highly seductive, having been photographed with portrait conventions used in advertisements and celebrity photos of the time, conventions used for eroticizing the female image to sell commodities or the female herself as a commodity.” 15 As an extreme example of this same system of cultural signification, Rrose exists as a representation defined through the readymade modes of femininity she exhibits, yet without the relation to any “real” womanly presence. In other words, Rrose represents all of the signifiers used in the photographic commodification of femininity without a bodily or “real” referent.
In Belle Haleine (1921) Duchamp uses the star power of his alter-ego to sell perfume under the readymade labelBelle Haleine (Lovely Breath), Eau de Voilette, which bears the authorizing signature of RS: Rrose Sélavy. But like the signifiers that constitute the feminine, this perfume bottle is only the surface appearance of what is actually an empty shell. This work consists of a readymade Rigaud perfume bottle originally labeled Eau de Violette (Violet water), which Duchamp slightly alters to say Eau de Voilette (Veil Water) and uses the reversed R of the Rigaud label to create the initials of Rrose Sélavy. Rrose, like many other celebrity figures, is pictured – a photograph of her, again taken by Man Ray, graces the custom cut label affixed onto the crystal surface – as the embodiment of feminine beauty on a perfume bottle, a commodity object advertised as a key element in the cultural production of the feminine. Duchamp’s Belle Haleine can in this way be seen as a parody of the conception of purchasing a readymade product the sole purpose of which is the production of womanliness.
As a cultural readymade, Butler reminds us, “femininity is an ideal which everyone always and only ‘imitates,’” and Duchamp’s imitation of the feminine or womanly through Rrose, his act of transvestitism, reveals the imitative structure of gender itself as a product. 16 Photography is also based upon imitation and therefore reinforces the imitative qualities of Duchamp’s act. “Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise,” Susan Sontag notes, “in the very creation of a duplicate world, of a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision.” 17 What is the duplicate gendered role that Duchamp is creating? The answer appears to lie in the masquerade of representation: the interchangeable signs of gender, the poses and its props, that constitute the erotic play of femininity that Duchamp and Garbo engage in.
2. Let us consider in more detail the significant similarities between the photograph as an imitative form and the notion of the readymade. This overlap is particularly apparent when considering the representation or masquerade of femininity as a cultural readymade, which significantly uses eroticism to hide sexuality both in terms of the physical body and the power dynamics that accompany gender constructions. Eroticism, according to Duchamp, becomes a tool to reveal “things that are constantly hidden – and aren’t necessarily erotic.” 18 In this way, Rrose’s erotic traits are largely the result of the photographic medium that quite literally hides the reality of what is pictured, turning all that it captures into a readymade image. This, stated simply, is the power of the photograph that reveals the masquerade hidden within life, showing us not what we see but rather what we want to see.
As Garbo and Duchamp demonstrate in different ways, femininity is a culturally transmitted and easily purchased readymade language, one that can be used by anyone who wants to participate in the production and/or reproduction of its qualities. This aping of the masquerade of femininity by Duchamp illustrates the construction of the feminine self that Susan Bordo describes as a manifestation of social control of women: “With the advent of movies and television, the rules for femininity have come to be culturally transmitted more and more through standardized visual images. As a result, femininity itself has come to be largely a matter of constructing[…] the appropriate surface presentation of the self.” 19 Bordo’s observations can readily be seen in the ready-made or standardized visual images that constitutes Duchamp’s work and also the whole of the industrial world; the ready-made is tangible in all aspects of modern life, including the objects of femininity that are used to create a surface illusion of what it is to be a woman. Rrose bears the photographic surface presentation of a woman because she, paradoxically, visually reproduces all the signifiers of femininity without having to physically embody them as a reality. In the hyperreality of the photographic image – which generates real models without origin or reality 20 – there is a level of perfection that cannot be achieved outside its simulated frame. It is therefore no coincidence that photography is the primary means through which femininity as a readymade cultural object is produced and communicated.
The use of readymade femininity is most evident in the popular culture use of film or publicity stills, which function as fetishistic objects that stand in for the hyperreal movie star. In photographic film stills produced by the film industry, John Ellis states: The star is tantalizingly close and similar, yet at the same time remote and dissimilar. Further, the star is a legitimate object for the desires of the viewer in so far as the star is like the viewer, and an impossible object for the desire of the viewer in so far as the star is extraordinary, unlike the viewer. There is a complicated game of desires that plays around the figure of the star: every feature in it is counteracted by another feature. The male and female star can be desired by either sex, yet that desire has access to its object only on condition that its object is presented as absent. Desire is both permitted and encouraged, yet knows it cannot achieve any tangible form of satisfaction, except the satisfaction of looking.14
The desire exhibited by Garbo and Duchamp is permitted and encouraged through the mode of still image presentation, the tangible photographic object achieving a hyperreal eroticism that is not possible outside the illusionism of this frame. There is a complicated game of desire being played out within the photograph of Greta Garbo as Mata Hari, a tantalizing closeness resulting from her tightly cropped face that makes her a legitimate object for the desires of spectators. The Hollywood publicity still is not simply a means of promoting and selling films, it is also an active site within modern culture for the production of feminine desire based upon the spectator’s ability to experience this erotic encounter as an act of (visual) consumption, with women being the primary object of this envisioning desire.
Using the conventions of the publicity photograph readily seen in the Garbo image, Duchamp disappears as a subject in order to recreate himself as an object: the photographic Rrose. The photographs of Garbo and Rrose use the seductive gaze of womanliness to create masks that are adorned with readymade signifiers of femininity such as the furs and rings that accentuate their overtly feminine postures. Suchclassic props, as Barthes refers to those objects that “constantly make the unveiled body more remote,” function as a powerful means of making “the living body return to the category of luxurious objects which surround men with a magical décor.”22 This effect in fact is a key purpose of the publicity still, which is a fetishistic object that distinctly separates the erotic representation from any physically reality. Garbo, considered from this perspective, is a model produced through the processes of photographic image creation that is created without an original “Garbo” – Greta Gustafson being simply the feminine prototype from which Garbo the international icon was formulated. Stated differently, Garbo the movie star is a hyperreal construction that exists through the reproducibility of photographic technology, which makes her become or disappear into the object of the photograph.23 But, whereas Garbo is transformed into an object through the photograph, Duchamp uses the photograph to make the object of Rrose around which there is literally no reality: Rrose is purely hyperreal (infrathin).
The paradox of the movie star is that, in the case of Garbo, the spectator’s experience of eroticism is based on a pretense of the possibility of a real encounter with the object of the image, namely Greta Gustafson. Duchamp forgoes this possibility, instead basing Rrose’s eroticism in the readymade cultural signifiers that are used to produce femininity as a hyperreal state. Rrose is in this way not a photographic representation of feminine eroticism but rather exists as an object of the erotic female stripped bare of any pretense or mask of real or authentic subjectivity.
Georges Bataille points out that it is through objects that we first flirt with sexuality, the photographic object being a key example. He observes: We thus achieve awareness only by condemning and by refusing to recognize our sexual life. Eroticism is not the only thing to be brushed aside: we have no direct awareness of anything within us that cannot be reduced to the simplicity of things, of solid objects. In the first instance we are clearly conscious only of things, and anything less sharply defined than a physical object is not clearly perceived at first. It is only later that analogy provides us with concepts not possessing the simplicity of a solid object.24
Duchamp is masking the illusion of his gender identity with another mask, one constructed through the significations of femininity with which he as Rrose adorns himself. This dual identity, being both the male Duchamp and the female Rrose, is made possible by the hyperreal space of the photograph, which allows him to escape the physical genital reality of maleness or femaleness and to propose an infra-thin gender position based on the realities of the masquerade.
3. In Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy , the figure of Rrose is a play of feminine parts that collectively contribute to the creation of a gender and identity while at the same time making us aware of this constructed nature. For example, the fragmented signifiers of the “real” woman’s hands, the fur collar, the hat, the wig, the made-up face of Duchamp all function as parts in an elaborate cultural masquerade. These fragmented effects, however, are visually resolved in the medium of photography, through which the real and/or masquerade is brought into dialogue. Duchamp’s pictorial cross-dressing as Rrose, however, embodies the fragmented process of gender signification as a means of parodying the production of sexual and gender identity. This embracing of the fragmentation of femininity as a cultural product or commodity allows for multiple meanings and, as evidenced in his photograph, opens up possible perspectives that cannot exist in gender roles as they are culturally constituted.
Unlike Garbo’s penetrating gaze, which visually seduces us into her image, Duchamp’s look is drowsily seductive and suspiciously evasive. Rather than an overt sexuality that invites the possibility of an erotic encounter, Duchamp presents a mysterious sexuality that, although playing with the signifiers of femininity, calls our attention to the fact that he is a man masquerading as a woman. In fact, this masquerade is made even more clear by the signature in the lower right corner of the photograph that reads lovingly Rrose Sélavy, alias Marcel Duchamp. Here Duchamp presents the full complexity of this pictorial representation: Duchamp is named as the alias of Rrose and/or Rrose is the alias of Duchamp. More generally, masculinity is presented as a masquerade of femininity and/or femininity is a masquerade of masculinity. Femaleness, according to Bordo, is an artificial constitution the rules of which are learned “directly through bodily discourse: through images that tell us what clothes, body shape, facial expression, movements, and behavior are required.”25 Garbo, although born a woman, was not born feminine and, just like Rrose, has to pose in order to achieve this feminine state. What Duchamp makes obvious with the readymade feminine character of Rrose is that bodily discourse is regulated through a complex network of already existing cultural conceptions of gender and sexual identity, with femininity in particular being powerfully enacted through consumerist enterprises – the film industry representing a key example – that sell the image of the feminine.
Gender and sexuality are projected onto subjects and objects alike, functioning as symbols and signs that subvert and conceal the complex and convoluted reality of identity as a lived state. Identity becomes a floating category, a game to be played by social subjects. As Riviere states in response to her use of “womanliness” as a category: “The reader may now ask how I define womanliness or where I draw the line between genuine womanliness and the ‘masquerade’. My suggestion is not, however, that there is any such difference; whether radical or superficial: they are the same thing.”26 Duchamp draws upon this indifference between genuine womanliness and the “masquerade,” that Riviere highlights, in the (photographic) creation of Rrose, who, at her most basic level, exists as an active questioning of the strictly binary view of gender in modern culture. Both Garbo and Rrose exist through a play with the culturally constructed and disseminated nature of gender, which in both cases supersedes any physical or bodily reality.
On this point, therefore, we can recognize a key distinction between the two photographs. In Garbo as Mata Hari – as well as in most if not all publicity stills – the expression of gender functions through an assumed reality that is projected onto the image, with viewers assuming the persona of “Garbo” to be the same as the person named Greta Gustafson; it is the possibility of this fantasy becoming a reality that is at the heart of these erotic images. The same is not true for Rrose, who exhibits readymade gender signifiers not as a prelude to the real but instead to accentuate the unreality of performed gender roles. In Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy, Duchamp pictures a coming together of the polar categories of male and female in order to produce an ambiguous and dialogic eroticism only possible in the object of the photograph.
1 Greta Garbo, quoted in Alexander Walker, Garbo: A Portrait (New York: Macmillan, 1980), 11. 2 Marcel Duchamp to Pierre Cabanne,Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp , trans. Ron Padgett (Cambridge: Da Capo Press. 1987), 64. 3 Roland Barthes, Mythologies , trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 56.
4 Duchamp to Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, 64. 5 Duchamp to Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, 21. 6 Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 145. 7Moira Roth, “Marcel Duchamp in America: A Self-readymade,” in Difference / Indifference: Musings on Postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage (Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 1998), 20. 8 Joan Riviere, “Womanliness as a Masquerade,” in Formations of Fantasy, ed. Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan (New York: Methuen, 1986), 39. 3 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 837. 10 Amelia Jones, Postmodernism and the En-gendering of Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994: 168. 11 Duchamp never directly defines the term “infrathin.” Instead, he presents examples of how it functions. As he writes in one of his notes: “infrathin separation – better/ than screen, because it indicates/ interval (taken in one sense) and/ screen (taken in another sense) – separation has the 2 senses male and female.” Marcel Duchamp,Marcel Duchamp, Notes , ed. and trans. Paul Matisse (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1980), np. 12 Jones, Postmodernism and the En-gendering of Marcel Duchamp, 95. 13 Jean Baudrillard, “The Art of Disappearance,” inJean Baudrillard: Art and Artefact, ed. Nicholas Zurbrugg (London: Sage Publications, 1997), 30. 14 Jones,Postmodernism and the En-gendering of Marcel Duchamp, 164. 15 Jones, Postmodernism and the En-gendering of Marcel Duchamp, 147.
16 Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 145. 17 Susan Sontag,On Photography (New York: Picador, 1977), 52. 18 Duchamp to Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, 88. 19 Susan Bordo, “From Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York: Norton, 2001), 2366. 20 Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 2. There is a comparison to be made between Baudrillard’s concept of the hyperreal and Duchamp’s idea of the infrathin, both of which define a form of simulation as model. 21 John Ellis, Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video (London: Routledge, 1992), 98. 22 Barthes, Mythologies, 85. 23 Baudrillard, “The Art of Disappearance,” 30. 24 Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights, 1986), 161-162. 25 Bordo, “From Unbearable Weight,” 2366. 26 Riviere, “Womanliness as a Masquerade,” 39.
Duchamp with Lacan through Žižek
Duchamp’s Legacy
As we approach both the fiftieth anniversary ofMarcel Duchamp’s death and the centenary of his most famous “readymade” it would appear that not a lot more can be said about the man and his work. And yet, most scholars would agree that, since Duchamp’s passing and the subsequent emergence of the enigmatic Étant Donnés, the reception of his oeuvre has become highly problematized. As Benjamin Buchloh notes in one of the most recent publications directly addressing this issue, the “near total silence” which has surroundedÉtant Donnés attests to the fact that Duchamp’s oeuvre has “fallen short of its actual historical potential.” (1)
In an effort to break this silence and move beyond the impasse in question, many scholars have taken Étant Donnés as a point of departure for the reassessment of the Duchampian project. Through the peephole, this re-reading has involved an assessment of the erotic dimension of Duchamp’s work, primarily on the basis of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Some of the most important research in this area has been undertaken by two of the most prominent scholars in the field, Thierry de Duve and Rosalind Krauss. Krauss, for her part, was one of the first to explore the precise connections between Lacan and Duchamp when, in a chapter entitled “Notes on the Index” from her seminal 1986 work The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, she uses Lacanian theory to unlock the mysteries of the Large Glass. First, she develops Lacan’s notion of the “mirror stage”: how the “child’s self- identification through his double” allows for the movement from “a global undifferentiated sense of himself towards a distinct, integrated notion of selfhood.” (2) She then uses this concept to read the Large Glass as a ‘‘split self-portrait” which – through the emphasis placed on certain syllables in the title La MARiée mise à nu par ses CELibataires, même – displays a “self-projected as double.”(3)
This analysis is extended further in her 1994 work,The Optical Unconscious, where she again differs to Lacan – through reference, this time, to his “L schema” apparatus – in order to put forward an “alternative” reading of modernism.(4) Indeed, it is not difficult to recognize the Lacanian co- ordinates which frame Krauss’s thesis regarding Etant Donnés: that, at the peephole, “vision is demonstrably hooked up to the mechanism of desire” so that the viewer as voyeur becomes a “carnal being trapped in the searchlight of the Other’s gaze […] a self that exists on the level of all other objects of the world.”(5) It is ultimately by recourse to Lacanian theory that she can argue that, in the Duchampian field, “nothing […] breaks the circuit of the gaze’s connection to its object or interrupts the satisfaction of its desire.”(6) In his 1991 work Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade, Thierry de Duve calls for a parallel approach to the relationship between psychoanalysis and art history – what he terms a “heuristic parallelism” (7) – which uses Lacanian theory to read the work of art in terms of dream analysis. First, he examines how the development of Lacan’s conceptual apparatus takes place through a close reading of Freud’s approach to dream analysis. From this theoretical standpoint, de Duve then interrogates Duchamp’s oeuvre using the Freudian method, arguing that Duchamp discovered “a truth that has long been familiar to psychoanalysis,” namely, that “the practice of painting has something to do with sublimation.” (8) Like Krauss, de Duve does not attempt to hide the fact that his analysis of Duchamp is supported by Lacan’s conceptual apparatus, declaring that Duchamp’s “definition of the Real was strictly that of Lacan.”
(9)
One can conclude, then, that Krauss and de Duve’s respective readings of Duchamp’s work are governed by a common grounding in Lacan’s conceptual apparatus. However, it should be remembered that, as with the history of psychoanalytic studies of art, there is also a long and well-established tradition of psychoanalytic interventions into the Duchampian field, of which Krauss and de Duve’s Lacanian stances are simply the most recent examples. As Paola Magi has recently noted, the range of perspectives which make use of psychoanalysis in assessing Duchamp’s work is wide and varied: from Lebel’s brief intimations on the possible connection between the clinical setting and the Large Glass, to Schwartz’s thorough examination of the lIbidinal forces at work in Duchamp’s oeuvre , to the different interpretations put forward by Ulf Linde, Maurizio Calvesi, and Octavio Paz.(10)
A surprising omission from this list is the name of Jean Francois Lyotard, whose 1977 work Les Transformateurs Duchamp, written at a pivotal moment during the rediscovery of Duchamp’s work in France, paved the way for all subsequent appraisals of Duchampian eroticism.(11)Of course, one should also make reference to the many rigorous interpretations of Duchamp’s work offered by Lacanians themselves: for example, Jean Copjec’s suggestion that Duchamp may have in some way understood the aesthetic object as a form of sublimation;(12)or Badiou’s recent claim that thepsychoanalytic aspect of Duchamp’s work is “another story” which “is probably the contradictory destiny of the most important part of modern art.” (13)
What, in my view, separates Krauss and de Duve from other scholars in the field is the extent to which they have applied Lacanian theory to Duchamp’s work; they have, I would argue, gone the furthest in integrating Lacan’s conceptual model into the field of Duchamp Studies, as an established methodological tool. The necessary predominance of this specific Lacanian line of enquiry was given an increased level of credibility in 1987 when, to mark the one hundredth anniversary of Duchamp’s birth, the Philadelphia Museum of Art reissued the Bulletin that had been devoted to Étant Donnés in 1969. It was this publication which, by foregrounding the connection between Duchamp’s final work and a series of preparatory etchings produced in 1968 entitled The Lovers, caused the Lacanian connotations in Étant Donnés to reverberate. It was firstly deemed to be highly significant that one of the sketches was taken directly from Gustave Courbet’s 1861 painting Woman with White Stocking. Even more important, however, was the fact that another seemed to directly indicate the influence of Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde – a painting which, at the time Duchamp was working on the etchings, was in the possession of none other than Lacan himself. The significance of this curious set of circumstances was again underlined as recently as 2009 when, in the catalogue released to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Étant Donnés installation in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the precise nature of the link between Duchamp, Courbet, and Lacan was further clarified. According to Michael Taylor, Duchamp most likely saw L’Origine du Monde in late September 1958, “when he and his wife were invited to dine with the Lacans at their apartment at 3 rue de Lille in Paris.” (14) Thierry Savatier goes as far as to suggest that Lacan deeply admired Duchamp and that it was therefore “inconceivable that he would not have brought the painting to Paris for this important rendez-vous”.(15)
While this new evidence adds weight to de Duve and Krauss’s Lacanian interventions, I would argue that it also brings to light a number of important questions which remain unanswered by Duchamp scholars. The first point worth noting is how the relationship between The Lovers and Étant Donnés, while strengthening the validity of a psychoanalytic reading, also brings into focus the specific dilemma which art historians faced when the preparatory sketches were first discovered; namely, the fact that the direct, unambiguous reference to Courbet fundamentally undermines all the criteria according to which Duchamp’s work had for so long been judged and evaluated. How, as Calvin Tomkins asks, can we account for the fact that Duchamp was explicitly claiming as an influence over his last major work an artist who he had previously criticized “for setting art on its exclusively ‘retinal’ course’,” the very attitude against which he was seen as reacting?(16)Krauss’s answer to this question appears insufficient since, by insisting on the distinction between the eroticism of Duchamp’s later works and the earlier “cerebral Duchamp” who rejected “the world of material sensations” in favour of “the world of ideas,” she simply holds in place the very categories which the Courbet/Lacan question forces us to re-examine. (17)
If we choose to interrogate this interpretative aporia a little further, we begin to see that its roots lie in the paradoxical nature of the relationship between the Large Glass and Étant Donnés, the two diametrically opposed centre-pieces of Duchamp’s visual output. For almost fifty years, scholars have struggled to adequately explain what is at stake in the overlapping dimensions of openness and closure which penetrate each work: one is a blatantly figurative installation which remains fixed at a limited viewpoint; the other is a frustratingly inaccessible form whose opacity is counteracted by its transparency, the simple fact that the viewer is free to walk around it. This obvious feature was identified by Anne d’Harnoncourt as early as 1969, a year after Duchamp’s death, in what was the first critical appraisal of the work; and yet, to this day, several issues raised by d’Harnoncourt’s initial response remain unresolved. For example, her description of Étant Donnés as “the alter ego of The Large Glass” raises a very important question for Duchamp scholars: if we are to understand Étants Donnés as a “mise-en-scène” of theLarge Glass’s implicit “erotic content,” then how do we account for the role of the viewer-come-voyeur positioned in the space mapped by the “Glass”? If the allegorical content of the “Glass” is rendered visible in Étants Donnés – so that the “Bride” can be seen lying on a mass of twigs and the “brick base” of the “Bachelor” machine is “echoed in the inner brick wall and the outer brick doorway” – then what is the precise “allegorical” role of the viewer located at the peephole? (18)
What this apparent dichotomy leads us to is the fundamental impenetrability of the Large Glass itself. As Tomkins has noted, there is no getting away from the fact that, for almost one hundred years, nobody has come to fully understand the work. The reality is that, despite the transparency of its support, the forms in the Large Glass remain opaque: although each element has a name, it is impossible to move beyond the work’s purely formal qualities – its status as a Large Glass – and identify specific motifs. The “conceptual” interpretation which appears to overcome this obstacle is here undermined by Duchamp’s insistence that the Large Glass has “no theoretical substratum,” that “fundamentally, there are very few ideas.” (19)If, as has been generally accepted, theGlass ’s “anti- retinal” status marks it as a work of “conceptual art” then why does Duchamp continuously emphasize the importance of its formal dimension: the various “technical problems” concerning the support, the colour, the “rehabilitation of perspective” based on “dimensions,” etc.? (20)On the whole, such efforts to account for the dilemma the work presents have been undone by their own acute cynicism: despite openly dismissing as naive those readings which attempt to unlock the mysteries of the Glass, scholars continue their own efforts to excavate the secrets the work contains. The fact remains that, in the face of assertions that meaning is impossible to decipher, the Large Glass’s impossible status continues to exert a fascinating hold.
The basic premise of this paper – and the central argument in my doctoral thesis, Marcel Duchamp: Resolving the Word/Image Problematic, Afterthought – is that this set of obstacles persists because the dominant Lacanian interventions into the Duchampian field remain limited in their theoretical scope. The reason for this, I claim, is that such readings rely heavily on what Slavoj Žižek has called “the distorted picture of Lacan as belonging to the field of ‘post- structuralism’.”(21)Thus, my hypothesis is that, in order to answer the above questions and build on Krauss and de Duve’s work, one must continue their Lacanian analysis of Duchamp’s oeuvre from a Žižekian perspective. That is to say, in order to account for the fundamental lacuna in Duchamp scholarship and properly address the problematic nature of his reception, one must revisit the 1958 encounter between Lacan and Duchamp on rue de Lille with Žižek as a companion.
It is worth noting here the significance of recent remarks made by Hal Foster on the subject of Duchamp’s legacy. In an essay entitled “What’s Neo About the Neo Avant Garde” Foster appears to be one of the first scholars to advocate the need for a specific Žižekian reading of Duchamp as part of a broader psychoanalytic understanding of the avant-garde tradition. Through a critique of Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde, he examines the paradoxical nature of the avant- garde’s reception and offers a precise description of Žižek’s revised interpretation of Lacan when he affirms the importance of “rigourous” re-readings which take the form of a “radical” return. The problem with this approach, I claim, is that it does not perform the particular reading it calls for: by narrowing his focus to an analysis of the neo avant-garde Foster overlooks what precisely is at stake in Žižek’s “return” to Lacan. In doing so, he obscures the precise “symptomatic” nature of the avant-garde tradition in general and Duchamp’s “readymade” in particular.(22)
In order to address this limitation I will engage in a Žižekian reading of Duchamp that accounts for the revolutionary nature of Žižek’s re-reading of Lacan. The aim, in short, is to bring together Duchamp with Lacan via Žižek: to re-habilitate the psychoanalytic core of Duchamp’s work by re-examining it through the prism of Žižek’s revised interpretation of Lacanian theory: namely, his attempt to articulate how Lacanian theory, rather than belonging to the tradition of post-structuralist thought, represents a “radical break” with this tradition and as such should be viewed as one of the most “radical contemporary versions of the
Enlightenment.” (23)
At the same time, this revised Lacanian reading of Duchamp sets the scene for an important encounter, over the Lacanian threshold, between Duchamp and Žižek. Not only does Žižek allow Duchamp’s work to become readable in a new and interesting way, his conceptual apparatus also re-coordinates the parameters of the Duchampian field, redefining them for the concerns of visual culture in the twenty-first century. In short, Duchamp’s work begins to operate as a crucial iconological tool in a re-defined critique of ideology; a matrix enabling us to locate contemporary ideological phenomena operating on the visual (aesthetic-iconological) plane. This may have important implications for avant-garde scholarship in particular and the discipline of art history as a whole: a reading of Duchamp (via Žižek) on the basis of Lacanian theory opens up a radical revision of the historical avant-garde in which an alternative understanding of modern art becomes possible. One is thus directly responding to Alain Badiou’s assertion on the urgency of telling “another story” about the work of Duchamp in order to re-engage with “the most important part of modern art.”(24)What this “other story” both entails and engenders is a re-habilitation of art history to its psychoanalytic foundations and, ultimately, the emergence of a new mode of disciplinary exchange which moves beyond the “parallel” approach offered by Thierry de Duve. (25)
With regard to the broader implications of these claims, the current paper should be viewed as the first step in contributing to a paradigmatic shift in the field of Duchampian scholarship, an effort to bring about what Žižek has defined as a Copernican revolution: instead of seeking to overcome the persistent obstacles which Duchamp’s work continues to present by “adding complications and changing minor premises”.(26)within the terms of the established interpretative framework, I am calling for a fundamental change in the foundations of this basic framework itself, a new paradigm of Duchamp studies which fully recognizes the revolutionary kernel of his work. (27) Through Žižek, Duchamp’s oeuvre will be opened up to a Lacanian-Hegelian heritage where – against the standard “post-structuralist,” “postmodern” (“conceptual”) reading of his work – he is located in a lineage of rationalism alongside figures such as Kant, Hegel, Freud, and Marx. It is only in this way that the deafening silence surrounding the man and his work can be shattered so that, to the sound of broken Glass, the emancipatory potential of his project can become fully realized. Two sides of a Coke ad: The Duchampian title and the Lacanian signifier.
When searching for a place to begin such a radical re-thinking of Duchamp’s project it helps to consider Duchamp’s own point of departure, the genesis of his major work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. “It’s not the bride itself,” he famously declared, “it’s a concept of a bride that I had to put on the canvas one way or another,but it was more important that I should have thought of it in words, in terms of words, before I actually drew it.”(28) With this statement, Duchamp reminds us that the Large Glass’s impenetrability is rooted firmly in a distinct and original use of language: the indecipherable nature of the allegory the Glass is said to represent, namely, the story of “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors.” Although acknowledged as the tale of an erotic encounter, the extremely cryptic nature of the hand-written notes through which the story itself is told ensures that a clear reading is always blocked. Thus, given that a full understanding of the visual dimension of Duchamp’s work is not complete without unlocking the meaning of these notes – or, more specifically, by identifying their precise signifying logic, what Charles Cramer has loosely defined as a particular Duchampian “syntax” – it is here that the focal point of this paper resides. (29)
Our analysis of the visual dimension of Duchamp’s oeuvre will therefore begin by focusing on the system of language that supports it. Adding an increased theoretical rigour to Cramer’s analysis, my basic thesis is that the notes are the most complex and extreme form of what Žižek terms the “poetic act of naming,” an elaborate system metaof qua signifierassociations rooted in a fundamental psychoanalytic understanding of language. In what remains of this paper, I will argue that, in his use of words, Duchamp literally follows the basic rule of psychoanalysis to the letter (à la lettre)In Žižekian terms, he grounds “the irreducible gap between the enunciated content and the act of enunciation that is proper to human speech.” (30) Or, to Duchamp’s own words, he gives palpable presence to the “art-coefficient,” the “gap […] between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed.” (31)
Of the many statements Duchamp makes on the subject of language, one of the more curious was offered in the recently published “afternoon interviews” with Calvin Tomkins. Discussing how a painting comes to acquire a mystical aura, he explains that “an object is an object, a three-dimensional form, but words are taken and repeated.”(32) Duchamp then elaborates on his point by drawing on an example from the world of advertising: “Like publicity. All along it’s the same thing, “Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola.” After a while magic appears around Coca-cola […] maybe in fifty years, if nobody speaks of Coca-Cola again, it will disappear.” (33) It is with this strange analogy that one begins to notice an interesting overlap between Duchamp and Žižek. The first point worth noting is how, with these comments, Duchamp returns to a point made in an earlier interview undertaken fifty years after the rejection and subsequent celebration of his Nude Descending a Staircase. In conversation with Francis Steegmuller, he declared that, if the painting’s “infamy” has lasted fifty years, then “there’s more to it than just the scandal.” When pressed to elaborate (“what else is there?”) he responds as follows: “There’s It” – “It?” – “It. Whatever has no name.” (34) Further contextualization of this point can be found in his assertion that the “Nude” scandal was ultimately rooted in a basic misunderstanding on the part of his colleagues (and brothers) in the Puteaux group of the painting’s title. In another statement focusing on the central issue in question, Duchamp explains that “they thought it was too much of a literary title, in a bad sense–in a caricatural way.” (35) It is the same misunderstanding, he maintains, which contributed to the subsequent scandal the work provoked at the New York Armory Show in 1913: “what contributed to the interest provoked by that canvas was its title.”(36) In short, one can conclude that, by referring to a Coke ad in order to demonstrate the general function of language in sustaining the aura surrounding the work of art, Duchamp is effectively highlighting the specific role of the title in his own work.
The crucial point is that, in one of those unique intellectual analogies which have become the hallmark of hisWritings , Žižek also uses an advertisement for Coca-cola to elucidate his own particular theoretical understanding of language. In doing so, his analysis displays a striking overlap with Duchamp’s comments: from his Lacanian perspective, the “magic” described by Duchamp is articulated as an effect of the act of naming whereby the “‘spirit of America’ (the cluster of features supposed to express it)” is “condensed in Coke as its signifier, its signifying representative.” Furthermore, Duchamp’s specific reference to the “it” which persists in the “Nude” – the “whatever has no name” – is formulated by Žižek as the “impersonal it” or surplus-X of the commodity-form, that “unattainable something” which is “in Coke more than Coke.” (37)
The Coke ad can therefore be viewed as the point at which an encounter between Žižek and Duchamp might be said to take place: for Duchamp, the ad demonstrates the particular status of titles in his work and the more general function of language in relation to the work of art; for Žižek, it is used to exemplify the Lacanian logic of the signifier and show how it diverges radically from post-structuralist theory. It is through the coke ad, then, that it becomes possible to undertake a new reading of Duchamp’s titles on the basis of Žižek’s re-reading of Lacan’s conceptualization of language. Conversely, by further exploring the implications of this overlap one engages in a psychoanalytic reading of Duchamp’s oeuvre which functions, at the same time, as a Duchampian reading of psychoanalysis. In other words, it might be argued from a uniquely psychoanalytic viewpoint that Duchamp’s work provokes a new understanding of the signifier, a shift from a post-structuralist to a Lacanian notion which, by opening up the radical break Žižek speaks of, ultimately contributes to a re-evaluation of Lacanian theory.
The Lacanian signifier and the Žižekian name
How, then, might we draw out the Lacanian connotations suggested by this curious parallel between Duchamp and Žižek? In this section, my aim is to sketch the theoretical background to Žižek’s “Coca-Cola remarks” in order to specify where his reading of Lacan diverges from post-structuralist theorists such as Krauss and de Duve. In turn, I will use this distinctly Žižekian perspective to offer a new way of understanding Duchamp’s use of titles. The elucidation of Žižek’s theoretical apparatus will thus be followed by a close, formal analysis of Duchamp’s work.(38)
The central argument being put forward is that Žižek’s Coca- Cola reference, by demonstrating the psychoanalytic logic of language, allows us to re-read Duchamp’s work in terms of what Žižek terms “the dogmatic stupidity” of the signifier. Žižek’s basic point is that, as a signifying structure, the advertising image is not constituted as a field of representation – it does not come to represent the “spirit of America” – until it is supplemented by the label “Coke.” It must be remembered that, as a name, the label “Coke” has no meaning; it is fundamental empty, its function is purely structural: as such, it acts as what Žižek calls a “reflexive marker” (39) or unifying feature: a registered trademark which, by supplementing the advertising image, constitutes it as a totality. It is this operation – referred to by Lacan as a “quilting” process – which allows the interplay between visual-verbal elements to generate the ad’s central message. This occurs when the empty label “Coke” acquires the status of a sign: that is, it comes to explicate the meaning generated by the advertisement. The shift from empty name to sign takes place through a simple inversion whereby “coke” comes to designate the field it supplements; that is to say, the question “What does ‘Coke’ mean?” is given an answer: “Coke is [‘the Spirit of America’].” The process is complete when the sign “Coke” becomes a signifier, a stand-alone label with its own significance: when “Coke” takes the place of the advertising image by functioning as metaa qua signifierreplacement for its central message. In other words, the sentence “Coke is [‘the spirit of America’]” simply shifts to “this object–a Glass bottle or red tin can–is ‘the spirit of America’ [because it is a bottle/can of Coke].”
The crucial point worth emphasizing is that, as a signifier, the label “Coke” does not represent or bring to mind the concept created by the ad: despite its apparent wealth of significance – its status as a signifier – it remains an empty name or trademark which, through a metaqua signifieroperation, simply stands in for the concept it is seen to “represent”; in this sense, the ad should simply be understood as the “missing representation”(40).whose place is held by the label inscribed on the tin can or Glass bottle. It is this shift in perspective which allows us to grasp Žižek’s basic argument: the signifier does not designate an object from a distance (or, the label “Coke” does not point to the contents of the Glass bottle or tin can); rather, it is inscribed into the object, onto its surface, as the empty name holding the place of the missing representation (the advertisement).
This is what Žižek means by the “dogmatic stupidity” of the signifier: the fact that a name is no more than a tautological, performative element which, rather than calling to mind a particular signified-idea, represents its lack. What conceals the signifier’s “stupidity” is a fundamental formal inversion, a reversal in causality, through which the object- referent is misrecognized as containing the signified content designated by its name: the red can orGlass bottle is believed to contain a set of particular properties because it is a can or bottle of Coke; in short, the object is viewed as the physical embodiment of the “spirit of America”. This is what Lacan termed the retroactive production of meaning: the way the missing representation – the advertising image and all the significance it carries – magically “stays behind” in the object as its “immanent essence,”(41) as the impersonal “it,” that magical aura which cannot be named because it is merely an effect of naming. (42)
It is the “dogmatic stupidity of the signifier,” Žižek maintains, that is overlooked in the post-structuralist conception of language. In Žižek’s reading, the post- structuralist perspective makes two basic theoretical claims. The first assertion is that “the relation of the subject to the world of objects is mediated through language” and, consequently, the objective world is no more than the “imaginary effect-illusion of the signifier’s play” which must therefore be abandoned to the “infinite self-interpretive play of language.”(43) This “self-referential” conceptualization of language, Žizek argues, is based on a clearly defined theory of the signifier: that language is “the place of auto- reflexive movement” in which metonymy is given “logical predominance” over metaphor.(44) Thus, in the post-structuralist reading, the signifying chain functions, at its most fundamental level, as a “decentered network of plural processes” in which meaning is constantly sliding along the signifying chain. (45)
According to Žižek, it is on the basis of this particular understanding of language that Derrida criticizes Lacan for giving primacy to metaphor over metonymy. For Derrida, Lacan localizes the central lack in the signifying chain in a single (Master) element thereby stemming the differential flow which corrupts the closed nature of the signifying field. For Žižek, this critique betrays a misunderstanding of the notion of Lacan’s notion of the signifier: how, for Lacan, the signifier does not represent a lack but incarnates – takes the place of – a lack. Žižek’s point is that such an understanding of the signifying process, by giving primacy to the metonymical relations between signifier, misreads the distinctly metaqua signifierstatus of the signifier as defined by Lacan. It is for this reason that Žižek insists on the distinction between the post-structuralist understanding of the signifier and the psychoanalytic version put forward by Lacan. While the Derrida’s conceptualization of language remains rooted in the Saussurean tradition, Lacan’s represents a radical break with this tradition: it inverts the fundamental principles of Saussure’s semiotics by submitting them to a Freudian reading.
It is this precise theoretical error which, I claim, Krauss and de Duve fall victim to in their “Lacanian” interrogations of Duchamp. While both thinkers claim to use the Lacanian notion of the signifier to examine Duchamp’s Writings, it is clear that their analysis is based on a post-structuralist mis-reading of Lacan. Krauss, by equating the Lacanian signifier with Jakobson’s concept of the “shifter,” over- simplifies Lacan’s radical Freudian interpretation of linguistic theory. The result is a distinctly Derridean reading of Lacan in which Duchamp’s notes are seen to display a “strategy of infecting language itself with a confusion in the way that words denote their referents”; in line with the self-referential conception of language, she argues that the notes “upset the balance of meaning” through an “outrageous formalism” which, by causing confusion, grounds the logic of the shifter such that “form begins to erode the certainty of content.” (46)
De Duve, as I have noted, examines Lacan’s theory of the signifier through a close reading of Freud’s dream analysis in order to argue that, in his titles, Duchamp’s “definition of the Real was strictly that of Lacan.” (47)The problem is that this thesis is rooted in what Žižek calls “a fundamental theoretical error” regarding the analysis of dreams. In mapping the structure of a dream onto a work of art de Duve overlooks Freud’s basic point: that the “essential constitution of the dream”(48) is not its “latent content” but the mechanism of displacement and condensation which transforms this content into “the form of the dream.” As a consequence, his analysis obscures thepsychoanalytic dimension of Lacan’s theory of the signifier, as it is articulated by Žižek, thereby overlooking what is at stake in Duchamp’s titles.
On the whole, it would appear that de Duve’s particular understanding of the Lacanian signifier is governed by the very formal inversion which, according to Lacan, conceals its true workings. For example, from the assertion that the word assumes its fundamental form “when the signifier has no other signification than its own being as a signifier” (49) we can see that the basic (Saussurean) notion of the signifier is retained; in other words, de Duve’s reflexive recognition of the signifier’s status qua signifier (that the signifier signifies itself) is supported by the assumption that the signifier is a material representative of a signified-idea (that it signifies). Beneath his claim that language is reduced to a basic “zero-degree” level of “nothingness,” to “the realm of non-language,” when “words ought to ‘forget’ that they have referents,”(50) it is not hard to detect the central tenant of post-structuralist theory: the notion that language is a self-reflexive system, that “there is no pure- object language.” (51)
One might even go as far as to argue that, beyond Krauss and de Duve, it is the Derridean rather than Lacanian understanding of language that has served as the dominant interpretative framework through which Duchamp’s Writings have been received. Indeed, is it not the post-structuralist conceptualization of language which, to date, has framed our understanding of the notes in Duchamp’s “Green Box”? In accordance with the theoretical principles described above, it has been widely acknowledged that the notes have a “cryptic, absurd” dimension which is rooted in the fact that they are “unanalyzable by logic.” It is assumed that the notes are “simply impossible to fathom,” that they have “no meaning whatsoever” and are simply examples of Duchamp’s humorous word-play, his ironic poeticism.(52) What all of this ultimately bears witness to is the fundamental contradiction which penetrates the current state of Duchamp scholarship. To paraphrase Žižek’s words, this (post-structuralist) insistence on a type of ironic poeticism is ultimately affected: that is, the whole effort to reinforce the idea that Duchamp’s Writings are “caught in a decentered network of plural processes,” the constant attempts “to evade the theoretical form,” mask a fundamental fact: that at the root of what is being said “there is a clearly defined theoretical position which can be articulated without difficulty.”(53)
The Duchampian title and the Žižekian name
How might Duchamp’s homology between the Coke and the “Nude” acquire new meaning against this theoretical background? To put the question another way, how does the overlap between Žižek and Duchamp allow us to read the Duchampian title on the basis of the Lacanian signifier? In order to closely examine the status of the title in the “Nude” – a task I have undertaken in more detail elsewhere(54) – it is perhaps best to focus on the 1911 painting which served as its preparatory work: Sad Young Man on a Train (Jeune homme triste dans un train). The most striking aspect of this painting – a detail, it must be said, which is all too often overlooked by art historians – is the fact that “the sad young man” mentioned in the title is nowhere to be seen in the image in question. Duchamp’s reduction of the visual motif to a precise configuration of points, lines and planes ensures that the viewer inevitably struggles desperately to identify any recognizable content. He himself underlined this point when he said that “the object is completely stretched out, as if elastic” (55) so that, in the painting, “there isn’t much of the young man, there isn’t much of the sadness, there isn’t much of anything in that painting except […] a repetition of schematic lines.” (56)
What Duchamp achieves in this painting, I claim, is the dissolution of the illusion which conceals the true workings of the title, its true status as a (Lacanian) signifier: namely, the perspectival error according to which the title’s representational content is (mis-)perceived as being inherent to the object (the painting). The effect of such an operation manifests itself, I would argue, in the very acute feeling of discomfort which accompanies the viewing of the work: the way the viewer, standing perplexed before an explicitly opaque surface, is forced to ask in vein: “Where is the man indicated in the title?”(57) Indeed, is it not this very simple yet direct question which lies at the root of the art historical debate surrounding “Sad Young Man,” the continued attempts to decipher the work’s title and subject matter? What the question “where is the man on the train?” reveals is a basic misconception regarding the title’s actual function and status. In other words, the assertion made in the catalogue entry for the work, that the title expands upon “the simple description of the figure for (or of) a nude, by also designating it – as if with a subtitle – ‘Jeune homme triste dans un train’,”(58) is made on the assumption that the title has the status of a sign; that it somehow points to (or designates) the content of the painting from an objective distance.
Could it be possible to argue, then, that many Duchamp scholars have, to date, made the same error as Duchamp’s colleagues in the Puteaux group? Just as the hanging committee misunderstood the title’s “literary” status, so too have scholars missed the basic fact that the “subtitle” Sad Young Man on a Train is not a sign at a distance from the painting but a sentence [“sad-young-man-on-a-train” or “JEUNE-HOMME- TRISTE-DANS-UN-TRAIN”] inscribed onto the surface of the picture? This alternative reading is given weight when we consider Duchamp’s decision to directly paint the name of the work in block capitals, a procedure he goes on to repeat with the “Nude” (“NU-DESCENDANT-UN-ESCALIER”) and all his subsequent works thereafter. The most explicit example of this is, of course, the sentence which Duchamp literally inscribed in black paint on the back of the lower panel of the Large Glass: LA MARIÉE MISE À NU PAR/SES CÉLEBITAIRES, MÊME/Marcel Duchamp/1915-1923/inachevé. Through this explicit act of inscription Duchamp is doing much more than simply emphasizing the title’s role in the painting; he is foregrounding the fact that the title functions not as a sign (in the Saussurean sense) but as a type of signifying structure, a verbal inscription which is part of the picture, on the same level as the visual inscriptions. This might well have been what was meant by his insistence that “I always gave an important role to the title, which I added and treated like an invisible colour.” (59) This is also why it is Žižek who appears to offer the most precise description of the Duchampian title when he writes:
In this case the relation between the picture and its title is not the usual one whereby the title corresponds simply to what is depicted […] Here the title is, so to speak, on the same surface. It is part of the same continuity as the picture itself. Its distance from the picture is strictly internal, marking an incision into the picture. (60)
The basic point is that, in Duchamp’s titles, we encounter the Žižekian re-conceptualization of Lacan’s master signifier in its purest form.(61) Given that the title [“sad-young-man-on-a- train,” “JEUNE-HOMME-TRISTE-DANS-UN-TRAIN”] cannot be said to designate or represent the motif in question, one can logically conclude that the man on the train is the central absence around which the picture is constructed: the motif is, in Žižekian terms, the missing representation for which the title is a metaqua signifiersubstitute. The title is only part of the painting in so far as it fills the central hole in the painting. It should therefore be understood not as a sign but as a signifying structure – an inscription – which holds the place of that which is lacking; namely, the scene whose exclusion is the condition which constitutes the painting as a field of representation. Duchamp even suggests as much when, in response to the question “is the man you?”, he admits that “of course the sad young man on the train is myself.” However, he immediately qualifies this statement by referring not to the painting but to “the occasion of a train trip I took from Paris to see my family in Rouen […] in October 1911” when the idea of the painting came to him.(62) He is here referring to the actual scene – the missing representation – which is nowhere to be seen in the work; the scene is significant because it marks the important point in Duchamp’s development: when he came upon “the idea of using the movement as one of the elements” of a painting. (63) It is in this way that the title of the work functions as a master signifierpar excellence: it does not call to mind or represent the idea of the sad young man; rather, it is inscribed into the field as the element which holds the place of that which is lacking. It is the reflexive marker which constitutes the painting as a totality (as a field of representation) by holding the place of a central void.
The “Lacanian” logic of Duchamp’s titles becomes even more evident when we consider the rapid development of his work before and during his stay in Munich. During this period, his titles clearly take on an even more explicitmeta qua signifierstatus: “Two Nudes, One Strong and One Swift,” “The King and the Queen Traversed by Nudes at High Speed,” “The King and the Queen Traversed by Swift Nudes,” “The King and the Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes,” “Virgin No. 1,” “Virgin No. 2,” “The Passage from the Virgin to the Bride.” In this series of works, the effect produced in “Sad Young Man” is driven to its extreme limit: the fact that the motifs are nowhere to be seen merely emphasizes the workings of the title, its status as what might be (retroactively) termed a Lacanian signifier. The procedure finds its most acute formulation in Duchamp’s final work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even: it is only when we recognize that the name “Bride” clearly does not point to any identifiable object in the picture (“Where is the ‘Bride’ designated by the title?”) our attachment to the “painting’s” content is disrupted and our attention is drawn to the title itself, to the act of inscription as a signifying operation. It becomes immediately clear that the word “Bride,” rather than pointing to the opaque forms in the picture, functions instead as the element holding the place of a missing representation, the central emptiness around which the picture is constructed.
The problem, however, is that this Žižekian (Lacanian) dimension of Duchamp’s work remains obscured by the fact that the current misunderstanding of the precise role and status of Duchamp’s titles is supported by a fundamental error in perspective. The viewer continues to see the title The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even as a sign designating the Large Glass, despite the fact that Duchamp constantly drew a division between the two.(64) Due to an excessive investment in the work’s representational content, a belief that the signified-content produced by the workings of the title somehow persists as the intrinsic or immutable essence of the object, the true logic of the title is obscured. It is this excessive movement beyond the purely phenomenal qualities of the Large Glass, which accounts for the work’s magical aura, the power of fascination which, to this day, it continues to exert. By aesthetically fetishizing the object, we miss Duchamp’s basic point that “afterward there is no mystery – it’s a pure logical conclusion.” (65)
Once again, de Duve appears to fall into this trap when, in reflexively acknowledging the role of the title, he reveals the underlying assumption supporting his argument that, rather than taking the place of what is clearly absent from the painting, the title represents a certain signified-idea. What comes to the fore in his insistence that “the woman is so obvious in Duchamp’s works, openly announced in their titles: Virgin, Bride, Stripped Bare, and so on” is, I maintain, a fundamentally post-structuralist conceptualization of language which is completely opposed to the Lacanian position he purports to adopt. Despite claiming to read Duchamp’s work on the basis of Lacan’s notion of the signifier, it is clear that de Duve, to use Žižek’s terminology, still finds reason to retain the mask of the Saussurean sign: he sees content as that which is “announced” by the title; the title designates a “real referent”; it “expresses” and “proclaims” its signified.(66)
It could be argued that Duchamp, in his efforts to foreground the status and role of his titles, was actively taking this perspectival error into account in advance. Indeed, if we focus on the evolution of the visual plane of his work, we can see how he may have been attempting to break the viewer’s excessive attachment to the object-referent (the painting): his progressive reduction of the image to no more than compositional arrangement of lines on a flat, opaque surface, is aimed at reinforcing an obstacle blocking the viewer’s engagement with representational content. However, it is also important to note how the increased distortion of the motif in Duchamp’s work runs directly parallel to an increased emphasis on the literary (metaphorical) nature of his titles. By reducing the motif to a set of opaque forms forming part of a specific point-to-point configuration, Duchamp breaks the viewer’s misplaced investment in the painting’s content; the crucial point is that he does so in order to underline the fact that the painting is a fundamentally symbolic mechanism. By staging a distortion in the field of visual representation – an obstacle between the viewer-subject and the painting- object – he draws attention to the signifying structure which supports the field itself: how, in effect, it is the workings of the title which provoke the viewer’s frantic search for an identifiable motif. It is only when we read the sentence “sad- young-man-on-a-train” that we attempt to move beyond the opacity of the work’s appearance towards what Erwin Panofksy called the world of “artistic motifs.” (67)
The development of Duchamp’s style could thus be viewed as a repeated effort to reinforce this effect by reducing the operation to its fundamental structure: “reduce, reduce, reduce was my thought – but at the same time my aim was turning inward, rather than toward externals.”(68) The point of culmination is, of course, the Large Glass where the effect is driven to its most extreme point: “And later, following this view, I came to feel that an artist might use anything – a dot, a line, the most conventional or unconventional symbol– to say what he wanted to say. The “Nude,” in this way, was a direct step to the Large Glass.” (69) In front of the Glass we are left with no option but to subtract all excessive investment in the object’s representational content, all fascination with the work’s magical “it.” In doing so, we make the crucial step toward “regions more verbal”: we shift our perspective away from the object and towards the symbolic (“conceptual”) inscription that supports the visual (“retinal”) field.
Such a perspectival shift allows for a radical definition of Duchamp’s notion of “movement.” Consider, for instance, his strange insistence that, in “Sad Young Man,” there are “two parallel movements corresponding to each other”: “first, there is idea of the movement of the train, and then that of the sad young man.” (70) The question which must be asked is this: why, if Duchamp is referring to the painting’s representational content, does he say that the movement of the train comes before that of the man when, normally, the identification of the motif (“man”) would logically come before that of the idea (“train”)? It is only by subtracting our fascination with the painting’s content – by giving up all attempts to identify the “man” and the “train” – that the answer becomes evident: the only conditions under which the movement of the “train” can come before that of the “man” is if Duchamp, rather than referring to the object-motif, is actually speaking about the effects of signification created by the title, the fact that, in the chain of signifiers [“sad-young-man-on-a-train”], “train” is the last element.
From our Lacanian-Žižekian viewpoint, it is the “movement” triggered by the title – the viewer’s movement beyond the surface of the painting, his efforts to overcome the obstacle posed by the image of a figure broken into a series of converging lines – which concerns Duchamp. In other words, he is not referring to the movement of the man or the train but that of the viewer: he or she who falls into the trap (illusion) of reaching beyond the work’s physical appearance in an attempt to grasp some identifiable motif. It can thus be argued that the title generates the viewer’s movement beyond the realm of the painting’s purely formal co-ordinates,a frantic search for “movement” in the painting. (71)
Based on this revised understanding of Duchamp’s notion of “movement,” one might argue that his work gives physical form to the what Lacan termed the retroactive production of meaning: the way the signified (the meaning created by the title) “stays behind” in the object (the painting) because it is produced retroactively, created “après-coup”; that is, when the chain of (signifying) elements in the title has been supplemented, supported, and “quilted” by the intervention of an empty name. This operation becomes explicit if we focus closely on the precise working of the title in “Sad Young Man”. Note how it is only with the last word in the title (train) that the relations between the words which precede it become fixed, and meaning is retroactively produced. “Train,” in other words, plays the role of the pure signifier: the reflexive marker which supplements and unifies the series [“sad-young-man-on-a”] chain thereby constituting it as a field within which metonymical relations between words begin to operate. In other words, it is only with the last word that the relations between the words in the chain are fixed and meaning is created; it is only with the last word that the “movement” of the viewer on the visual plane is generated.
Duchamp himself suggests as much with the curious remark that “the young man is sad because there is a train that comes afterward.” (72) The choice of the term “afterward” draws our attention to the fact that the word “train” comes after the series “sad-young-man.” This, in turn, underlines the position of the word “train” within the chain of signifiers and emphasizes the fact that meaning is produced after the sentence is unified by the last element. Similarly, in the Large Glass it is clear that meaning is produced retroactively; that is, when one reaches the end of the sentence. This is why it is Lacan who offers a perfect description of the work’s title through what he called “the diachronic function of this button tie” at the level of the sentence: “insofar as a sentence closes the signification with its last term, each term being anticipated in the construction by the other terms and, inversely, sealing their meaning by its retroactive effect.” (73) In short, it is the last term – the addition of the adverb “même” – which seals the sentence and totalizes the chain which precedes it by grounding the metonymical relations between the words in the chain. As with the word “train,” “même” functions as a Lacanian signifier par excellence, the purest form of the “the dogmatic stupidity proper to the signifier as such.”(74) As Duchamp explains:
Words interested me; and the bringing together of words to which I added a comma and “even,” an adverb which makes no sense, since it relates to nothing in the picture or title. Thus it was an adverb in the most beautiful demonstration of adverbness. It has no meaning. This “antisense” interested me a lot on the poetic level, from the point of view of the sentence….In English, too, “even” is an absolute adverb; it has no sense. All the more possibility of stripping bare. It’s a “non-sense.” (75)
It is important here to note Duchamp’s insistence thatSad Young Man on a Train “already showed my intention of introducing humour into painting, or, in any case, the humour of word play: triste, train…‘Tr’ is very important.”(76)
In Žižekian terms, the “tr” is the crucial feature which grounds the empty, self-reflexive nature of the title, the status of the title as a pure signifier. This operation reaches its most extreme point when the “tr” of train is replaced by the word “même” and the performative, tautological dimension of the signifier, is exposed. This effort to openly stage the performative (metaphorical) and, ultimately, tautological dimension of language also gives new meaning to what Duchamp refers to as the “literary” use of the title, or the poetic use of words: “titles in general interest me a lot […] at the time, I was becoming literary. Words interested me […].”(77) However, he maintains that, while his work might be called “literary,” his use of words is “not entirely literary”: it was “much deeper than literary” because “it’s using words, but then everything that uses words is not necessarily literary, as you know.” (78) Duchamp was referring here to “the poetic aspect” of the words, the way in which the common assumption that a word simply pointed to an object was fundamentally challenged: “I wanted to give ‘delay’ a poetic sense that I couldn’t even explain. It was to avoid saying ‘a Glass painting,’ ‘a Glass drawing,’ ‘a thing drawn on Glass,’ you understand?”(79) For Duchamp, “poetic words” are the opposite of words which have an “essential concept”; they are, he explains, “words distorted by their sense” (80) which create “an explosion in the meaning of certain words” so that “they have a greater value than their meaning in the dictionary.”(81) What this explosion ultimately calls attention to is “the intellectual side of things,” to the symbolic-conceptual dimension of the object, to “regions more verbal.”(82)
It is at this point that the full weight of the parallel between Lacan and Duchamp is felt. What is significant is the way Duchamp’s statements on poetry have very close resonances with Lacan’s and Žižek’s claim that the poetic act of naming ultimately displays what can, retroactively, be termed a psychoanalytic understanding of language: an attempt to name the “unnameable X” in the object through “tautological pseudo- explanations”(83) which themselves ground the tautological nature of the naming process itself. Indeed, is it not a “certain systematic and deliberate use of the signifier as such”(84) that becomes apparent in Duchamp’s series of puns? By reducing language to the zero-level of a tautology, does a pun not openly stage the “poetic” dimension of language, the dogmatic stupidity of the signifier?
While the answers to these questions are beyond the scope of this paper it is worth repeating that, for Lacan, the act of staging the logic of the signifier finds its purest form in the poetic act of naming. This is his point in Seminar VII when he discusses the importance of the technique adopted in the phenomenon of courtly love within the context of the psychoanalytic process. It is thus significant that Duchamp consistently relates his approach to the use of titles to the poetic tradition: “it was the poetic aspect of the words that I like […] it was really poetic, in the most Mallarméan sense of the word, so to speak.”(85) The Duchampian notion of “humour” – as with the term “movement” – can thus be fundamentally redefined along Lacanian lines. Directly echoing Lacan’s description of the “amusing side” of courtly love – which “has perhaps no other cause than the semantic confusion produced’ by the use of metaphor” (86) – Duchamp continuously refers to his use of titles in terms of humour: it was, he notes, “amusing to try.”(87)
The crucial concluding point is that, while the encounter between Duchamp and Lacan in front of Courbet’s L’Origine du monde remains the only corroborating evidence to support the direct influence of Lacan over Duchamp and vice versa, the fact remains that Lacan developed his theory of the signifier through an analysis of the very source from which Duchamp’s radical use of titles emerged – that is, a particular poetic understanding of language that can, after the fact, be understood through a psychoanalytic lens. From this departure point Duchamp’s oeuvre and Lacan’s theoretical apparatus open themselves up to the possibility of radical transformation whereby, to cite the mediator of the message, both thinkers “may simultaneously redeem themselves, shedding their old skins and emerging in a new unexpected shape.”(88)
Notes
1. Benjamin Buchloh, introduction to The Duchamp Effect: Essays, Interviews, Round Table, ed. Martha Buskirk and Mignon Nixon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 4
2. Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 197.
3. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde, 202.
4. Krauss leaves the reader with little doubt as to the extent of her debt to Lacan when, in the opening chapter of The Optical Unconscious, she outlines the specifics of her theoretical position. Her argument begins with the thesis that modernism is a fundamentally visual field in which the “the fundamentals of perception,” the opposition between figure/ground and not-figure/not-ground, are constantly maintained (Ibid., 14). To demonstrate this point she maps the topology of modernism onto the structuralist graph developed by the Klein Group and asks: how does one trace an “alternative history, one that had developed against the grain of modernist opticality” (Ibid., 20), one that rose out of modernism to “defy its logic”? (Ibid., 21). The task Krauss sets herself, in other words, is to trace an opposing trend in modernism, one which instead of being “contained by the terms of visual perception” (Ibid., 14) functions as a “statement of this containment” (Ibid., 15). What Krauss attempts to identify is a shift in which the opposition figure/ground is both preserved and cancelled, an inversion in the fundamentals of perception which unveils “the structure of the visual field as such” (Ibid., 15), what she calls “vision as a form of cognition” (Ibid., 16). In order to map the logic of this counterhistory, Krauss locates what she sees as its practical and theoretical poles: it is Duchamp’s decision to give up work on the Large Glass, she ventures, which indicates a possible starting point; and it is Lacanian psychoanalysis which marks a conceptual foundation. She writes: “The theorists of this refusal were Bataille and Breton, Caillois and Leiris, with in the background, Freud. And in the foreground, Dali linked through one arm and Caillois through the other, there was Lacan. Lacan, it struck me, provided the key to this refusal, a way of giving it a name” (Ibid., 22; my emphasis).
5. Ibid., 112.
6. Ibid., 112. Krauss’s arrives at this statement by way of supplementing the semiotic graph used by the “structuralists” with Lacan’s L schema: a model which shows the subject “as an effect of the unconscious” (Ibid., 23). This move allows Krauss to map the figure/ground axis in the visual logic of modernism onto Lacan’s conceptual categories (the ego, the object, the subject and the Other) thus providing theoretical justification for the counterhistory which frames her analysis of Duchamp’s late work. It is Lacan’s shema, she writes, which “displays the diagnol, mirroring relationships” lacking from the structuralist graph, the co-ordinates which “map the way the ego identifies with its object.” There is, she definitively declares, “no mistaking it” (Ibid., 23).
7. Thierry De Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 4.
8. De Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, 31. In the book’s opening chapter, which is entitled ‘Art and Psychoanalysis, Again?’ and is framed by a quotation from Lacan, de Duve presents an overview of the long tradition in psychoanalytic readings of art and asks: “of what use can psychoanalytic interpretation be in the constitution of a historical ‘narrative’ récit of art?” His response, much like that of Krauss, is clear and definite: “the time at which the question is being asked must be explicit: that time is today” (Ibid., 1). He is equally unambiguous when he explains that his attempt to bring the two “incommensurable historicites” (Ibid., 5) of art and psychoanalysis into a parallel relation – a method which, he claims, is unlike “applied psychoanalysis” and “psychoanalytic aesthetics” in that it neither presupposes a strict adherence to Freudian doctrine nor burdens itself “with any equally a priori critical suspicion” (Ibid., 7) – is made on the basis of a simple hypothesis: that the “truth-function that Duchamp’s work […] brings to light” resonates with the fundamental premises of Lacanian theory. He writes: “And behind these artistic and theoretical resonances one hears the voice of Lacan, who, more than anyone, authorized this sort of reading and established it, epistemologically. This is what interests me here. One will soon see the important place I reserve for Lacan in the exercise of parallelism that follows” (Ibid., 8-9; my emphasis).
9. De Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, 78-9. He arrives at this analysis through his heuristic parallelism: an “explicit point-by-point comparison” (Ibid., 67) between Duchamp’s Munich painting The Passage from Virgin to Bride and Freud’s famous “injection dream”. The crucial point worth emphasizing here is that this comparison relies on Lacan’s specific reading of the dream in question, such that de Duve’s interpretation of Duchamp’s work is ultimately vectored through the lens of Lacan’s conceptual categories, the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary (Ibid., 69).
10. Paola Magi, Treasure Hunt with Marcel Duchamp (Milan: Edizioni Archivio Dedalus, 2011), 11.
11. Indeed, it is to Lyotard’s topological analysis of the specular “dispositif” at work in Étant Donnés that Krauss refers in her own Lacanian reading of the work. Similarly, de Duve cites Lyotard’s 1969 essay on the “Principal Trends in the psychoanalytic Study of Artistic and Literary Expression” as the most recent moment of “breaching” in the history of post-Freudian aesthetics, to which de Duve responds by asking “what use can we make today of the relation of psychoanalysis to art?” Situating his own contribution within this tradition and in relation to Lyotard’s work he writes: “the method that I propose here has bully broken with an attitude of reciprocal deconstruction that characterizes the second-to-last moment of the double breaching of art and psychoanalysis, as narrated in Lyotard’s 1969 essay. If my method produces any results, they should remain valued even if a later breaching of the Freudian corpus carries the relation of art to psychoanalysis to yet unsuspected shores.” De Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, 2-3, 7.
12. Joan Copjec, editorial for “Aesthetics & Sublimation”, Unbr(a): A Journal of the Unconscious 1 (1999): 4.
13. Alain Badiou, “Some Remarks Concerning Marcel Duchamp,” The Symptom 9, (2008)
14. Marcel Duchamp: Étant Donnés, ed. Michael R. Taylor (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2009), 112.
15. Thierry Savatier, L’Origine du monde: Histoire d’un tableau de Gustave Courbet (Paris: Bartillat, 2006), in Taylor (ed.), Marcel Duchamp, 127.
16. Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1996), 460 17. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, 108.
18. Anne d’Harnoncourt and Walter Hopps, Etant“ Donnés: 1. La chute d’eau; 2. Le gaze d’éclairage: Reflections on a New Work by Marcel Duchamp,” Philadelphia Museum of Art Bulletin 64, nos. 299-300 (April-September 1969): 6-41.
19. Marcel Duchamp, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett (London: Da Capo Press, 1979), 25.
20. Duchamp, Dialogues, 38.
21. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 2008), xxx.
22. Hal Foster, “What’s New About the Neo Avant Garde,” The Duchamp Effect: Essays, Interviews, Round Table,, ed. Martha Buskirk and Mignon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 5-32. For a full elaboration of this thesis see Robert Kilroy, Marcel Duchamp: Resolving the Word/Image Problematic, Afterthought, unpublished doctoral thesis, Department of French, School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies, Trinity College Dublin, 2014.
23. Žižek, The Sublime Object, xxx.
24. Badiou, “Some Remarks ConcerningMarcel Duchamp,” 2008.
25. For a full elaboration of this point see Robert Kilroy, “Re-Framing the Real: Duchamp’s Readymade as a Lacanian Object,” in Preservation, Radicalism and the Avant- Garde Canon, ed. Rebecca Ferreboeuf, Fiona Noble, and Tara Plunkett (London: Palgrave Macmillon, 2016), 133-152. See also Robert Kilroy, “Facebook: The Central Place of the Lacanian Clinic,” Lacunae: APPI International Journal for Lacanian Psychoanalysis Vol. 3, no. 11 (2015): 1–22.
26. Žižek, The Sublime Object, vii.
27. This assertion is based on the following statement made by Žižek in the updated preface to his seminal 1989 work The Sublime Object of Ideology: “When a discipline is in crisis, attempts are made to change or supplement its theses within the terms of its basic framework – a procedure one might call ‘Ptolemization’ […] But the true ‘Copernican’ revolution takes place when, instead of just adding complications and changing minor premises, the basic framework itself undergoes a transformation […] the question to ask is always: is this truly a Copernican revolution, or merely a Ptolemization of the old paradigm?” Žižek, The Sublime Object, vii.
28. Marcel Duchamp in interview with Richard Hamilton and George Heard Hamilton, “Marcel Duchamp Speaks,” BBC – Third Program (series: Art, Anti-Art, ca. October 1959); issued as an audio tape by William Furlong (ed.), Audio Arts Magazine, Vol. 2, no. 4 (1976). For full audio see http://www.tate.org.uk/audio-arts/volume-2/number-4.
29. Charles Cramer, “Duchamp from Syntax to Bride: Sa Langue dans sa Joue,” Word & Image 13, no. 3 (July- September 1997): 279-303.
30. Slavoj Žižek, How to Read Lacan (London: Granta, 2006), 18. 31. Marcel Duchamp, “The Creative Act,” Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michael Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (New York: Da Capo Press, 1973), 139.
32. Calvin Tomkins, Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews (New York: Badlands Unlimited, 2013), 62.
33. Ibid., 62.
34. Marcel Duchamp in Francis Steegmuller, “Duchamp: Fifty Years Later,” Show 3, no. 1 (February 1963): 2,. in Thierry De Duve,Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade, trans. Dana Polan, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 191.
35. Duchamp, Dialogues, 83.
36. Ibid., 44.
37. Žižek, The Sublime Object, 106.
38. I have elsewhere discussed how this particular aspect of Žižekian theory relates to Duchamp’s work in The“ Sublime Object of Iconology: Duchampian Appellation as Žižekian Interpellation,” Seachange: Art, Communication, Technology, International Online Journal (Montreal: McGill University, 2016). I argue that a Žižekian reading of Duchamp’s titles allows us to rethink Duchamp’s oeuvre as a radical form of ideology critique. For the purposes of this paper, however, my intention is to elaborate a Lacanian/Žižekian reading of Duchamp’s titles in more detail, by examining them outside their broader relation to the ideological parameters of the aesthetic field. In the bibliography I have included some works by Žižek which, although not directly cited, are included because they are germane to my brother arguments concerning Duchamp’s project. It is in The Fragile Absolute or Why is the Christian Legacy worth fighting for? (London: Verso, 2008), for example, that Žižek makes direct reference to Duchamp in the context of a distinctly Lacanian reading of the avant-garde tradition. It is the curious nature of his assessment of Duchamp – the fact that he overlooks what, according to his own theoretical framework, he should have been able to see – which I take as a departure point for my re-reading of Duchamp. It is in this way that my Žižekian reading of Duchamp functions primarily as a Duchampian reading of Žižek, an interrogation – via the Duchampian lens – of the aesthetic-iconological foundations of Lacanian thought, the very co-ordinates lacking from Zizek’s apparatus. A substantial elaboration of this argument is the subject of my forthcoming book entitled Duchamp with Zizek: Towards a Word/Image Parallax.
39. Slavoj Žižek, Interrogating the Real, ed. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2006), 186.
40. Žižek, The Sublime Object, 178.
41. Ibid., 113.
42. Ibid., 113. For a full elaboration of how, through Duchamp, the act of naming functions as a critique of the ideological structure of the aesthetic field see Kilroy, “The Sublime Object of Iconology” (2016).
43. Ibid., 177. 44. Ibid., 177, 172.
45. Ibid., 174, 172.
46. Krauss, Modernist Myths, 200.
47. De Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, 78-9.
48. Žižek, The Sublime Object, 5.
49. De Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, 125. While beyond the scope of this paper, it is worth noting here how this inherent limitation in de Duve’s reading of Lacan comes to manifest itself as an obvious contradiction in his ‘parallel’ approach: the fact that his efforts to escape the ideological pitfalls of the psychoanalytic position – its status as “an indecisive and even highly troubling epistemology” (Ibid., 3) – are undermined by the indecisive and highly troubling nature of the parallel method itself. De Duve maintains his approach affords him a critical distance towards the ideological tendencies inherent in a psychoanalytic study of art: “To put the problem this way is to ask what role ideology plays in art and in psychoanalysis and to imagine that ideology varies in an inverse relation to the truth function of art and analysis” (De Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, 3). In other words, the “heuristic parallelism” provides a model which ensures that one remains “attentive to the truth-function that is at work in the two fields” (Ibid., 4). However, the very admission that “of course, as ‘parallel’ as my reading will be, I cannot help applying to Duchamp Freudian concepts (or others, Lacanian in particular)” (Ibid., 7) testifies to an obvious discrepancy between theory and practice, between what he claims to be doing and what he is actually doing. In the face of all rigorous attempts to avoid psychoanalytic essentialism, there is no getting away from the fact that he falls into the very position he seeks to escape. What this contradiction ultimately underlines is the significance of Žižek’s thesis regarding ideology, arrived at on the basis of his re-reading of Lacanian theory: that ideology functions not at the level of concepts (what people think they are doing) but in the form – or “socio-synthetic dimension” – of their activity (what they are actually doing). One might argue it is this paradox – what Žižek terms the “enlightened false consciousness” of postmodern scepticism – which governs the current paradigm in Duchamp Studies: that is to say, despite all efforts on the part of scholars to take into account “the distance between the ideological mask and the reality,” at the level of what one is doing one “still finds reason to retain the mask.” Žižek, The Sublime Object, 173-4, 15, 26, 28.
50. Ibid., 127.
51. Žižek, The Sublime Object, 177.
52. See Tomkins, Marcel Duchamp, 6, 4, 3.
53. Žižek, The Sublime Object, 173-174.
54. Here I will provide a more nuanced version of the analysis of the “Nude” which appears in The“ Sublime Object of Iconology” by focusing on the work that precedes it, Sad Young Man on a Train (1911).
55. Duchamp, Dialogues, 29. 56. Duchamp in Tomkins, Duchamp, 76.
57. I can claim to have had personal experience of this phenomenon when, as an intern at the museum where Duchamp’s painting is held, I was repeatedly asked the same question by perplexed visitors: “where is the man on the train?” This question serves as the departure point in the aforementioned paper, “The Sublime Object of Iconology,” when it is discussed in relation to a curious joke made by Žižek in which he demonstrates the Lacanian logic of the signifier through reference to a viewer’s experience of a painting in a gallery.
58. Angelica Zander Rudenstine, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1985).
59. Tomkins, Duchamp, 51.
60. Žižek, The Sublime Object, 179.
61. This thesis is expanded in Kilroy, The“ Sublime Object of Iconology” where it serves as the basis for a re-reading of Duchamp’s readymade in terms of Žižek’s revised notion of ideology.
62. Tomkins, Marcel Duchamp, 76.
63. Duchamp, Dialogues, 130.
64. Is this not his aim when splitting the work into visual and verbal poles? He writes: “I wanted the album to go with the ‘Glass,’ and to be consulted when seeing the ‘Glass’, as I see it, it must not be ‘looked at’ in the aesthetic sense of the word. One must consult the book, and see the two together. The conjunction of the two things entirely removes the retinal aspect that I don’t like. It is very logical.” Duchamp, Dialogues., 42-3. By continuously grounding the text-image disjunction Duchamp calls attention to the fact that the visual (“retinal”) is governed by a symbolic (“conceptual”) structure, a point which is further underlined by the distinctive way he chooses to name each work: The Large Glass and The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.
65. Duchamp in Tomkins Duchamp, 211.
66. De Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, 31-32.
67. Erwin Panofsky,Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York and London: Harper and Row, 1972), 5.
68. Duchamp, Writings, 124-5.
69. Duchamp, Writings, 124-5.
70. Duchamp, Dialogues, 29.
71. This the central claim in “The Sublime Object of Iconology”: that the “Nude” can be understood as the point where this movement becomes eroticized, when the frantic search for content becomes sexualized through the transformation of the motif from man to female object. Thus, when de Duve asserts that, with Duchamp’s Munich works, “erotic themes enter his work and never leave,” he misses the basic point that the themes in question are not “in the work” but are an effect of the title; thus, one could say that the eroticism in question is present at the very level ofde Duve’s own activity: his own (mis-)recognition of erotic themes; his own movement beyond the opaque surface of the painting to the realm of representational content. See de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, 31.
72. Duchamp, Dialogues, 29.
73. Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York and London: Norton & Company, 2006), 682.
74. Žižek, The Sublime Object, 103.
75. Duchamp, Dialogues, 40.
76. Ibid., 29.
77. Ibid., 40.
78. Duchamp with Hamilton, Audio Arts Magazine. Op. cit. note 28 above.
79. Duchamp, Dialogues, 40.
80. Ibid., 88-9.
81. Ibid., 16. 82. Duchamp, Writings, 141.
83. Slavoj Žižek, Less Then Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso. 2012), 943.
84. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York and London: Norton & Company), 148.
85. Duchamp, Dialogues, 40.
86. Lacan, Seminar VII, 150.
87. Duchamp, Dialogues, 29.
88. Žižek, The Sublime Object, viii.
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On “The Creative Act”
On “The Creative Act”
Julian Jason Haladyn
With art … the finitude of the sensible material becomes a support for the production of affects and precepts which tend to become more and more eccentred with respect to preformed structures and coordinates. Marcel Duchamp declared: “art is a road which leads towards regions which are not governed by time and space.” – Felix Guattari (1)
In his polemic text “The Creative Act,” Marcel Duchamp describes the act of creating art as consisting of a dialogue between the two poles (as he terms them) of the artist – the creator of the work – and the spectator, or more generally the posterity – the person or people who experience the work. For Duchamp, both of these subject positions are necessary in order to create a work of art, which must be seen to involve not just the making of the work but also its reception. This relationship is described most clearly in the concluding paragraph of the text, where he states: “the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act” (2). This understanding of art undermines the privileged position typically accorded the artist within modernity, who is most often perceived as the singular creator or “genius” behind great works of art. By suggesting that artists actively depend on the contributions of viewers in order for their work to be completed, Duchamp directly challenges the authority of artists over their art – and, by extension, the modern conception of art based upon this vision of the “genius” artist.
At the heart of Duchamp’s short text is, I propose, a fundamental questioning of the accepted parameters of the artist-viewer relationship that emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century with the modern conception of art and the museum. Whereas prevailing modernist theories assume the artist to be a position of privilege, marking a distinct perspective on the world that is the basic expression of their uniqueness or “genius” – a perspective that defines everything the artist produces precisely because it is produced by the artist – Duchamp’s vision of art is fundamentally based upon the relational interactions or dialogues of viewer and artwork, with the artist’s participation being mediumistic. “If we give the attributes of a medium to the artist,” he tells us, “we must then deny him the state of consciousness on the esthetic plane about what he is doing or why he is doing it” (3). Duchamp clarifies this position in an interview with Pierre Cabanne, where he states:
I believe very strongly in the “medium” aspect of the artist. The artist makes something, then one day, he is recognized by the intervention of the public, of the spectator; so later he goes on to posterity. You can’t stop that, because, in brief, it’s a product of two poles – there’s the pole of the one who makes the work, and the pole of the one who looks at it. I give the latter as much importance as the one who makes it. (4)
Rather than creating an artwork that is experienced by a spectator after it is completed, in Duchamp’s description the artist is positioned as a medium that produces works of art only with the participation of the spectator and, more important, the posterity (multiple spectators in multiple contexts) that historically recognizes the work as art. What Duchamp proposes is a dialogic artist-viewer relationship that is predicated on a psychological and affective transference, an important term he uses to describe the interaction between artist and spectator – and, in the more historical interpretation, between the past and present – through the material presence of the art object.
The purpose of my present text is two-fold. First, to argue for the significance of “The Creative Act” within modern artistic and cultural discourse, specifically examining Duchamp’s act of defining the relational subject positions of the artist and spectator that form the basis for his theory of art – which, I propose, can be applied to a more general consideration of the psychology of modern subjectivity. Second, to analyze Duchamp’s use of the word “transference” when he defines the workings of the creative act and to situate this Duchampian transference, a psychological notion based on subjective dialogue, in relation to the psychoanalytic understanding of the term. In this way my analysis approaches “The Creative Act” psychologically, considering the text primarily as a statement on art, not as an esoteric practice or discipline but rather as the basis of and material for a continuing artistic dialogue that takes place through the artist-artwork-viewer relationship.
Creating the Creative Act
It may be helpful to begin by outlining the circumstances in which Duchamp wrote and presented “The Creative Act,” an aspect of the text that is often overlooked. As one of only a few documents in which Duchamp clearly describes his understanding of the process of creating art – one might even say his philosophy of art – it is important that we consider the (practical) development of this text especially as it relates to and even reflects his practice as an artist.
In 1957, Duchamp was invited to give a talk at the American Federation of the Arts Convention in Houston, Texas. His acceptance of this invitation was likely motivated at least in part by the fact that the exhibition Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Marcel Duchamp was on view at The Museum of Fine Arts of Houston during this convention. Organized by James Johnson Sweeney, director of the Guggenheim, where the show was first presented, this exhibition brought together works by Duchamp and his two brothers – hence, it is often referred to as the “Three Brothers” exhibition. As Calvin Tomkins suggests, Duchamp was no doubt encouraged by Sweeney and “may have felt under some obligation to help promote” the exhibition (5). The show was of considerable importance to Duchamp, who actively participated in its planning as well as the design of the catalogue. His talk would in this way greatly aid in promoting the “Three Brothers,” the opening of which (on the evening of April 3) was included on the schedule of activities for the convention (6). Duchamp presented his paper on the morning of April 5 as part of a panel discussion that included Professor William Seitz (Art History, Princeton University), Professor Rudolf Arnheim (Psychology, Sarah Lawrence College), and Gregory Bateson (anthropologist). The topic for this panel was the creative act, with the title being directly adapted by Duchamp as the title of his paper – which was published in Art News the same year.
The approach that Duchamp takes in “The Creative Act” builds upon and extends his earlier theories of the role of the artist in society that he discussed at the Western Round Table on Modern Art, which took place at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1949 (7). Duchamp proposes two key ideas during the four sessions of the roundtable.
The first is the concept of what he terms the esthetic echo, which he compares to the notion of aesthetic taste:
Taste gives a sensuous feeling, not an esthetic emotion. Taste presupposes a domineering onlooker who dictates what he likes and dislikes, and translates it into beautiful and ugly when he is sensuously pleased or displeased. Quite differently, the “victim” of an esthetic echo is in a position comparable to that of a man in love or of a believer, who dismisses automatically his demanding ego and helplessly submits to a pleasurable and mysterious constraint. While exercising his taste, he adopts a commanding attitude, when touched by the esthetic revelation, the same man, almost in an ecstatic mood, becomes receptive and humble.… the man of taste trusts his pre-established likes and dislikes. The man who gets the esthetic shock – it’s a shock – is not master of himself. He submits and becomes humble (8).
The distinction Duchamp is suggesting between taste and the esthetic echo hinges on a question of the spectator’s subjective will, specifically whether or not an artwork is viewed passively or actively. Most people, according to Duchamp, respond to an artwork in a manner that generally conforms to preconceived interpretations, which often consist of culturally accepted opinions or shared perspectives (uncritically) reproduced by the viewer; this is what is meant by taste – which for Kant allows people a common means of judging and making communicable their subjective responses within a larger community. With taste, therefore, will is not a necessary component since one’s initial response of like or dislike is trusted. To experience the esthetic echo, however, the spectator must give up any commanding attitude over the artwork and actively be willing to engage in a dialogue with it, creating receptiveness beyond the mere apprehension of the work. Here Duchamp envisions the act of viewing as the possibility of using one’s will to create meanings that are not given.
The second major idea that Duchamp introduces at the 1949 roundtable is his belief that the artist and artwork must be treated as separate, a notion that – even after the Poststructuralist critique of the author – remains challenging to this day. Responding to a discussion about the artist’s recognition of when a work is complete, Duchamp adds: “We don’t emphasize enough that the work of art is independent of the artist. The work of art lives by itself and the artist who happened to make it is like an irresponsible medium. No artist can say at any time ‘I am a genius. I am going to paint a masterpiece.’ That is not done” (9). In this articulation of the artist as an irresponsible medium we can see the starting point for the main themes of “The Creative Act,” in which Duchamp presents a more focused argument for the mediumistic (as he terms it) quality of the artist and, by extension, his conception of the artwork as a creative experience that is distinct from the person who created it – a distinction that he leaves for the spectator to reconcile. For Duchamp, the artist cannot be responsible for what becomes of the artwork – how it may be interpreted or understood, whether it is appreciated or not – once it is sent out into the world, not unlike the idea that a medium such as paint or marble is not responsible for a painting or sculpture produced out of its materials.
It is important to note that Duchamp’s proposed view of the artist as an irresponsible medium is not simply an abstract theory but instead emerged directly out of his own experience as an artist. As Tomkins points out, there existed for Duchamp a “notable gap between his own intentions and the end results” of his various artistic projects, the eventual significance of which, from an art historical perspective, has little to nothing to do with Duchamp’s intentions – what W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley characterize as “the intentional fallacy” (10). This gap can be seen in the events surrounding his painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), which, after its scandalous success in the 1913 “International Exhibition of Modern Art” or (as it is better known) the “Armory Show” in New York City, represented a key turning point in his career. When this same painting was submitted a year before to the 1912 Salon des Indépendants it was regarded so poorly that his brothers, on behalf of the organizers, asked him to change the painting, which he instead withdrew from the exhibit – the entire demoralizing event precipitated his trip to Munich from June to October. Even after the work’s subsequent inclusion that same year in an exhibition of Cubist work at Galerie Dalmau in Barcelona and the “Section d’Or” exhibition in Paris, the painting was still not considered to be of much artistic importance in comparison to the innovativeness of his contemporaries. The American response to Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 was a surprise to Duchamp, who would not realize his own success as an artist until his visit to New York in 1915 – a status he did not experience in France until much later and arguably never to the extent as in the United States (11). What was the difference between the painting that was “refused by the Indépendants” and “didn’t cause a stir” at Galerie Dalmau or in Section d’Or and the painting that became the succès de scandale of the Armory Show (12)? Through this discrepancy, Duchamp experienced first-hand how irresponsible his intentions as the work’s creator were in its reception.
On its most basic level, “The Creative Act” is Duchamp’s recognition and articulation of this gap between the artist’s intentions and the end result of the work as experienced by the spectator (and posterity). He defines the experiential discrepancy between these positions as the personalart coefficient, which can be seen “in the chain of reactions accompanying the creative act” in which we can witness “the relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed.” He continues: “To avoid a misunderstanding, we must remember that this ‘art coefficient’ is a personal expression of art ‘à l’état brut,’ that is, still in a raw state, which must be ‘refined’ as pure sugar from molasses, by the spectator” (13). The emphasis on the spectator’s role as refiner of the raw artistic product of the artist serves to clarify the distinction Duchamp is highlighting, particularly in terms of understanding different receptions of a work of art by different groups of people – and, as was the case with Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, to radically different ends. (No one interpretation is correct or incorrect, according to Duchamp, although he makes it clear that posterity provides what he calls the final verdict.) From his own experience as an artist Duchamp recognized that judging works of art is ultimately and almost exclusively the responsibility of the spectator, with the artist becoming a type of medium out of or through which the work is created (14). The different and even contradictory responses elicited by an artwork represent the overdetermined nature of the creative act, which, as Duchamp came to see it, necessarily involved a dialogic relationship between the artist (as medium) and spectator through the work of art.
The significance of Duchamp’s conception of the artist as mediumistic cannot in my opinion be overemphasized, especially when considered not just a theory of art but also a theoretical critique of modern notions of authorship – and the modern subject more generally. In fact, with “The Creative Act” Duchamp anticipates the Poststructuralist interrogation of the author performed most powerfully in Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” and Michel Foucault’s “What Is an Author?” (published in 1967 and 1969 respectively). Let us therefore examine “The Creative Act” in relation to two key areas of overlap: first, Barthes’ and Duchamp’s critical shifts in focus from the authority of the author to that of the reader-spectator; second, the manner in which Foucault and Duchamp divide or split the role of the “author” and “artist” (respectively) to challenge the perceived unity given to the author-artist position in modernity. In addition to explicitly connecting Duchamp’s analysis of the artist with the examinations of the author performed by Bathes and Foucault, an important goal of this comparison is to locate Duchamp’s ideas within the larger critical investigation of the author question that pervades twentieth century discourse, a category of inquiry in which (surprisingly) “The Creative Act” is not typically examined.
The Birth of the Reader-Spectator
In “The Death of the Author,” Barthes questions the significance of the author’s role in understanding or approaching a text. His critique focuses on the manner in which the author is used as a given in the reading of a text, treated as the natural origin or source that the reader is supposed to uncover in order to experience the “true” meaning of the work. “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing,” Barthes tells us (15). Earlier in the essay he notes that this overt focus on the author as a key interpretive position is a distinctly modern way of examining texts, pointing to (but not explicating) the history of interpretation that pre-dates the nineteenth century. M. H. Abrams describes this development in his influential The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition:
The pragmatic orientation, ordering the aim of the artist and the character of the work to the nature, the needs, and the springs of pleasure in the audience, characterized by far the greatest part of criticism from the time of Horace through the eighteenth century…. Gradually, however, the stress was shifted more and more to the poet’s [author’s] natural genius, creative imagination, and emotional spontaneity, at the expense of the opposing attributes of judgment, learning, and artful restraints. As a result the audience gradually receded into the background, giving place to the poet himself, and his mental powers and emotional need, as the predominant cause and even the end and test of art. (16)
It is this shift of orientation from audience to author that Barthes objects to, proposing a form of reversal in which it is the author who is required to recede into the background of a text, giving place to the audience or readeras the predominant cause and even the end and test of art. Or, as Barthes dramatically proclaims in the final statement of his essay, “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author” (17).
In spite of the forcefulness of his title, the main target of Barthes’ critique is not strictly speaking the role of the “author” (as writer or creator of a text) – a role that he necessarily participates in and even celebrates and enjoys throughout his writing – but rather with the excessive privileging of the author’s authority over the text. At no point is this “death” equated with the elimination or disappearance of the author position, in theory or practice; what disappears is the privileged autonomy associated with the role of the author in modernity. Barthes replaces the designation “author” with what he terms the scriptor, which, although it excludes the “passions, humours, feelings, impressions” – that is, the personal or subjective qualities of the writer – typically associated with the Romantic vision of the author (as genius or author-god), still maintains a similar position in relation to the text (18). Even a cursory examination of his substitution of “scriptor” for “author” demonstrates this overlap since, quite literally, scriptor is the Latin word for a writer, scribe, or author; beginning in his 1953 Writing Degree Zero, Barthes uses this alternative categorization to describe the act of writing in which the writer can no longer claim presence within what is written. He is therefore not removing or killing the author, as commentators often claim (19), but instead is proposing an understanding of authorship that is again more akin to a pre- nineteenth century orientation that privileges the reader’s relation to the text. In the most extreme interpretation, Barthes’ scriptor is an author reduced to the function of a scribe or copyist that merely re-produces texts by drawing upon an immense dictionary of existing or ready-made cultural material, as a result of which there is no claim to personal expression or originality.
Here we can see a direct parallel between Barthes’ conception of the author as scriptor and Duchamp’s description of the artist as medium. In both cases there is an active de- privileging of the modernist authorial relation between the author-artist and their work, which is replaced by a renewed focus on the reader-spectator’s authority in disentangling, making sense of and even completing the text. This is made clear by Duchamp’s assertion that the spectator contributes to the creation of a work of art byinterpreting its inner qualifications; and by Barthes, who in S/Z states: “What is at stake in literary work (in literature as work) is making the reader no longer a consumer but a producer of a text” (20). For Duchamp and Barthes the role of the reader-spectator is vital to addressing theauthor question, the critical evaluation of which depends upon understanding a text not just as the product of an author-artist but also, and more important, as a social space or language (textual or visual) that invites engagement (present and future).
The specific position granted the reader-spectator in relation to the text, however, is quite different in each of their two accounts. On the one hand, Duchamp argues that the spectator (or posterity) is responsible for the final evaluation and interpretation of what an artist creates, locating spectators within the creative process by making them the determining factors – particularly through the shared experience of multiple spectators – in the social and historical constitution of a work of art. As he states: “The creative act takes another aspect when the spectator experiences the phenomenon of transmutation; through the change from inert matter into a work of art, an actual transubstantiation has taken place, and the role of the spectator is to determine the weight of the work on the asthetic scale” (21). The power of the Duchampian spectator is in this way directly based upon an aesthetics of subjective judgment, with individual spectators being called upon to interpret and share what they experience. On the other hand, Barthes clearly disavows the manifestly subjective aspects of the reader (as person) and instead proposes the birth of a position that quite literally structures the received text, which is experienced most fully by readers who deny their own (as well as the author’s) pathological interest in order to engage with the text in- itself. According to Barthes:
The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted. (22)
Barthes’ reader occupies the fundamental position in which the multi-dimensional aspects of a text are givenunity , the result not of an individual reader’s subjective experience but rather the act of being the text’s destination. The distinction between “The Death of the Author” and “The Creative Act” can in this way be summed up as follows. While Barthes depersonalizes the role of the reader-spectator, which he declares is withouthistory, biography and most significantly psychology, Duchamp celebrates the subjective abilities of reader-spectators to engage in a personal dialogue with a text, deciphering it through acts of individual judgment.
On an historical level, it is important to acknowledge the fact that “The Death of the Author” was first published in the 1967 double issue of the American journal Aspen, no. 5/6, designed and edited by Brian O’Doherty. In place of a traditional bound publication, O’Doherty produced a white box containing a series of loose texts (in the most general sense of the term), a format that, as he – or, more accurately, his pseudonym Sigmund Bode – writes, “constitutes a test for the reader” (23). Translated into English by Richard Howard, Barthes’ text was printed as an eight-inch square pamphlet that also included essays by George Kubler and Susan Sontag. While planning Aspen, no. 5/6, O’Doherty contacted Barthes about contributing to the project:
Barthes was in Philadelphia at that time and he came to New York to talk about the project. He got it immediately. My notion that art, writing etc., was produced by a kind of anti- self that had nothing to do with whoever “me” was, an excellent preparation for our conversation. He said “I think I may have something for you.” When “The Death of the Author” arrived, I knew it was revolutionary. (24)
Written (at least in part) for Aspen, no. 5/6 – with the more often cited French version appearing the following year in the journal Mantéia – Barthes’ text reflects the critical issues of authorship that are enacted through the dialogic interplay of materials in this box. The significance of Barthes writing “The Death of the Author” for this project is heightened when we consider that it appears alongside an audio recording of Duchamp reading “The Creative Act” (presented on one of several records found in the box). Given O’Doherty’s overall interest in Duchamp and his work, as well as the obvious parallels between Aspen, no. 5/6 and Duchamp’s Box-in-a-Valise (1935-41), it is more than likely that Barthes was (or became) aware of “The Creative Act” when he wrote “The Death of the Author.”
Questioning the Author-Artist
Following in the wake of Barthes’ text is the presentation of Foucault’s influential lecture “What Is an Author?” at the Collège de France in 1969, which he published as an essay the same year in Bulletin de la Société Français de Philosophie. Similar to “The Death of the Author,” Foucault’s essay confronts the overt privileging of the author’s authority over the text within modernity. But where Barthes focuses on articulating a death or disappearance of the author in order to refocus discussion on the significance of the reader – formulating a type of either/or – Foucault actively draws attention back to the (admittedly) problematized authorial position or function, examining what he terms theauthor- function:
It is obviously insufficient to repeat empty slogans: the author has disappeared; God and man died a common death. Rather, we should re-examine the empty space left by the author’s disappearance; we should attentively observe, along its gaps and fault lines, its new demarcations, and the reapportionment of this void; we should await the fluid functions released by this disappearance. (25)
Here we see a subtle acknowledgement of Barthes’ text, which Foucault critiques by inferring that the “death of the author” is an empty slogan. While accepting the basic premise that the author (in the modernist sense) is no longer at the center of a given text or group of texts, this disappearance for Foucault is not the end of the author question but instead represents his point of departure for examining a simple yet vital problem: what is it that occupies the position once reserved for the author? No longer the end and test of art (to borrow Abrams’ description), the term “author” has become an open question in relation to the text that is understood at one and the same time as the author’s and not the author’s – a contradiction that Foucault makes clear from the outset he recognizes in his own writing, grounding his analysis in a subjective framework.
This problematic can be described quite simply as a splitting of the author into two distinct roles: the individual who is responsible for the actual creation of a specific text and the authorial identity that, typically associated with a name, is used to designate the role of the text’s creator. In the first case we are talking about an individual who makes (physically and/or conceptually) a text, the author as person – for example, the “Michel Foucault” who wrote “What Is an Author?” among other texts, who was born in 1926 and died in 1984. In the second case we are referring to the functioning persona associated with the text, the “figure who is outside and precedes” the text and yet the “text apparently points to” – the “Michel Foucault” whose name, no longer tied to the life of the individual, historically authenticates “What Is an Author?” (26). Foucault’s concept of theauthor-function critically references this historical persona, what in Lacanian terms can be called the real author that gives authority and unity to a text on the level of history, a position that must be regarded as separate from the reality of the author who happens to have written the text. It is the often assumed correlation between these two roles, if not the outright and unquestioned belief in their similitude, that Foucault challenges through his examination of “the ‘author’ as a function of discourse,” a rational entity constructed around the (judicial) need for authority within modernity (27).
The division of the authorial position into personal and functional roles serves to highlight the inherent contradiction in the modern conception of the author-artist. If a person – and here we need to remember the consistent modernist claims (including Duchamp’s) that everyone can be or is an artist – were to actually embody and enact all of the qualities associated with the designation “author” or “artist,” this combination of (psychological) demands would foster what can only be described as a schizophrenic subjectivity. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari articulate a vision of this (irrational) entity in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia: “The schizophrenic is the universal producer. There is no need to distinguish here between producing and its product” (28). Interestingly enough, the framework of the book reflects this approach, which Foucault in his preface notes is informed “by seemingly abstract notions of multiplicities, flows, arrangements, and connections” that are best read and understood as an “art” (29). Such a play with language, in which contradictions are embraced rather than avoided or resolved, raises serious questions about the authority of the author-artist and by extension the authenticity or autonomy of the text as a source of (intrinsic) meaning.
In different but complimentary ways, Foucault and Duchamp each enact this playfulness by approaching language – which we will consider for now in the restricted sense of written language – not as a transparent medium of expression but rather as an open discursive space that is, as Foucault poetically writes, “an attempt to exhaust language” (30). We see this particularly in the authors Foucault chooses to focus on, which prominently include Friedrich Hölderlin, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Raymond Roussel – Duchamp notably sharing an interest in Roussel – as well as in the development of his archaeological method of analysis that, stated simply, treats language as a stratified space into which we candig . Duchamp’s use of language similarly serves not to clarify or describe but rather to carry the mind “towards other regions more verbal”; while specifically addressing the short texts he often inscribed on his readymades, this statement also speaks to his propensity for giving works complex or (to use Guillaume Apollinaire’s term) intellectual titles as well as his general interest in notes and puns (31). In both Foucault’s writing and Duchamp’s artistic practice, language – and here I propose we can extend its parameters to include not just written or spoken but also visual language – is an opportunity to make visible the contradictory functioning of the author-artist, a conflicted position that remains defined by its pathological need to exceed or even transcend itself (as seen throughout avant-garde practices).
For Duchamp, the schizophrenic quality of the modern author- artist is, as stated earlier, not just a theory but rather represents a philosophy of art developed directly out of his first-hand experience as a practicing artist. While the catalyst for Duchamp’s critique of the (privileged) role of the artist is likely the radically different responses to Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, it is the invention of the readymade that most powerfully manifests his critical perspective. To begin with, the term “readymade” should not be treated as a rigid artistic categorization that is seen as unifying all artworks under its banner but instead must, I propose, be understood as describing a (particularly modern) theoretical or philosophical artistic discourse (32). This is precisely why, as Thierry de Duve tells us, Duchamp’s “readymades are easily annexed by the deconstructionists as a proof of irrelevance or obsolescence with regards to the notion of authorship” – and why the art historical treatment of the readymade as an artistic (rather than philosophical) gesture ironically serves to strengthen the authorial role of the artist, of Duchamp’s in particular (33). The challenge posed by Fountain (1917), for example, is not simply the fact that it questions the categorical space of “art” but rather that, by taking the authority of the author-artist – and the institutionalization of this authority – too seriously, it makes visible inherent contradictions in the modernist discourse of art. Through the artist’s act of choosing an already-made and undifferentiated object, the readymade functions as “art” because it is, in Foucaultian terms, strategically situated in the breach separating the two roles of the author-artist, within the space opened by art historical discourse – the object, in this case a urinal, being experienced at one and the same time as a priori and a posteriori. (Or, following Deleuze and Guattari, as a lack of distinction between producing and its product .) We can even go so far as to call the readymade a schizophrenic form of art that is consistently involved with its own conflicted and contradictory character, a condition inaugurated through an exaggerated split between the psychology of the artist as (absent) person and the artist as a functioning discursive presence (as medium).
Here the overlap between Foucault’s conception of the author- function and Duchamp’s arguments for the mediumistic qualities of the artist can be seen most notably in their shared critique of the assumed singular or immediate unity attributed to the position of the modernist author-artist. “The author,” according to Foucault, constitutes a principle of unity in writing where any unevenness of production is ascribed to changes caused by evolution, maturation, or outside influence. In addition, the author serves to neutralize the contradictions that are found in a series of texts. Governing this function is the belief that there must be – at a particular level of an author’s thought, of his conscious or unconscious desire – a point where contradictions are resolved, where the incompatible elements can be shown to relate to one another or to cohere around a fundamental and originating contradiction. (34)
This forced unity, which results from a failure to distinguish between the author as person or individual and the author as author-function, is a means of establishing the vision of a complete and autonomous discourse that is at one and the same time supported by and serves to demonstrate a stable site of subjectivity within modern culture. By arguing that the author is a function of discourse – rather than the other way around – Foucault undermines the perceived unity and authority of the “author” (or “artist”), which, rather than referring to a real individual, becomes a space that “simultaneously gives rise to a variety of egos and to a series of subjective positions that individuals of any class may come to occupy” (35). Without its unifying principle, however, the author-artist becomes little more then a mediumistic being that, as Duchamp notes, is not conscious of what is being created or why – a task that is instead entrusted to the reader-spectator, whose role is to accept or judge the “social value” of an artist-author’s work (36). This is a key consequence of giving the attributes of a medium to the author-artist: recognizing that the person who creates a text cannot occupy the author-function and therefore should be treated as separate from their work.
Duchampian Transference
The question becomes: if the artist is not wholly responsible for the creation of art, but is dependent upon the spectator’s engagement with the work, what is the means by which these two positions are able to fulfill the creative process? Duchamp similarly asks, if the artist “plays no role at all in the judgment of his own work, how can one describe the phenomenon which prompts the spectator to react critically to the work of art? In other words, how does this reaction come about?” His answer is quite significant: “This phenomenon is comparable to a transference from the artist to the spectator in the form of an esthetic osmosis taking place through the inert matter, such as pigment, piano or marble” (37). Of particular interest is his use of the term “transference” to describe the process of exchange between artist and spectator through the object of the artwork. This word choice can be read in two different but not mutually exclusive ways: first, the common usage in which one is referring to the act of transferring something and, second, the psychoanalytic understanding that describes the psychological process by which feelings, emotions, and even memories are unconsciously transferred or projected from one person onto another, typically an analyst in the clinical setting. (And, given his propensity for puns and other playful forms of using language, it is likely that both meanings are being employed simultaneously.) The aim of this final section is to consider the implications of Duchamp’s notion of transference within the process of the creative act, specifically as it relates to and extends the psychological and affective territories of psychoanalytic thought. Before considering this Duchampian transference – as I describe his particular approach – it is important that we first establish a basic understanding of transference as a concept.
“What are transferences?” Sigmund Freud writes in Dora:An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, “They are new editions or facsimiles of the tendencies and phantasies which are aroused and made conscious during the process of the analysis; but they have this peculiarity, which is characteristic of their species, that they replace some earlier person by the person of the physician” (38). Published in 1905, this early formulation proposes transference as a form of resistance to the analytic process on the part of the person being analyzed (the analysand), with the working through of the transference – by making oneself conscious of feelings or emotions rather than projecting them – representing a (potential) breakthrough in the analysis. An often-cited example is when patients transfer feelings of love onto their analyst, thereby stopping the analytic process until such time that this love can be recognized as belonging to a different object; this moment of conscious realization is for Freud a (if not the) cornerstone of psychoanalytic practice. Since its introduction, the concept of transference has continued to explore and extend as a tool of analysis and, more significantly for our purposes, as a more general operation that Melanie Klein suggests is evident “throughout life and influences all human relations” (39). It is through this expanded understanding of transference as a relational phenomenon applicable to everyday human relations that the concept, no longer restricted to the clinical setting, is able to be used as a vital concept for addressing the intersubjective exchanges that take place throughout modern life – with the relation of the author- artist and reader-spectator being a particular subset of this form of cultural analysis.
In the fourth chapter of Postmodernism and the En-gendering of Marcel Duchamp, Amelia Jones discusses Duchamp’s work through a psychoanalytic consideration of his (uncertain and chaotically eroticized) author-function, emphasizing the way his work plays out the relational qualities of transference through the creative exchange between artist and spectator via the artwork – which she treats as analogous to the clinical relationship of the analyst and analysand. Her (admittedly Lacanian) description of “transference” provides a valuable perspective on how we can approach Duchamp’s use of the term: “transference – this site where the struggle for meaning takes place via the spoken or written text that ‘represents’ the subject under analysis – is also the psychic site where both the analyst and analysand are constituted, in relation to each other, as meaningful subjects” (40). This definition characterizes transference as anenunciative space, both representational and psychic, in which the subjective struggle for meaning is articulated through two interconnected relationships. The first is the relation of the reader- spectator to the text being examined, with the reader- spectator performing a role similar to that of an analyst and the text being the subject under analysis. The second is the relation of the reader-spectator to the author-artist, with the author-artist in this case playing the role of analyst to the reader-spectator that is now in the position of the analysand.
Jones clarifies the workings of these two relationships by discussing, in a notably psychoanalytic tone, how she (as a spectator) personally functions within these relational positions when viewing the work of Duchamp. As the interpreter of his artworks, Jones notes that she is “the analyst and Duchamp is the narrative I produce from his enunciative ‘symptoms’ as meaningful.” Yet, as she continues:
I am also his analysand, subject to his texts, and he is my ego ideal. I transfer my desires and unconscious wishes onto him as authority – identifying with him so as to produce myself as full. The fantasy “Duchamp” promises to take the place of the lack for me, even as I “master” him through analysis. I interpret his works, yet they are always already interpreted by his own selections, the “secondary revisions” of enunciative production…. I make the attempt to master him so I can submit myself to his mastery: We are, so to speak, in a reciprocal dialectic of analytic transference. (41)
In this manner Jones reads her encounter with his work as a dual act of relational subjection in which she at one and the same time is constituted by and constitutes Duchamp’s work, a process that she directly compares to analytic transference. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that Jones re-frames the parameters of the transference relationship using Duchamp’s notion of the creative act. As she reveals through her analysis, the creative transference enacted in the artist- artwork-spectator relation is based within a series of interdependencies that are analogous to those found in the analyst-analysand relation of psychoanalytic transference; this correlation, far from drawing a mere parallel between discourses, actively demonstrates a fundamental discursive overlap on the inter-subjective or relational level.
This overlap may also account for Duchamp’s subtle but significant presence in the writings of Guattari, where the readymade serves (schizophrenically) as both exemplar and foil to his aesthetic theories. We see this particularly in his aesthetic paradigm, a re-envisioned form of analysis in which the psychology of modern subjectivity is examined through an aesthetic (rather than scientific) lens, a methodology that for Guattari, as Stephen Zepke observes, begins with the readymade – making “Duchamp the harbinger of a re-vitalized creative act” (42). Treated as both aesthetic and political, the readymade is seen as a language of creative enunciation that functions through an authorial and psychological refrain, privileging not the “origin” of a particular act, event or object but rather the complex subjective affects and emotions – what Guattari describes as a constellation of universes – that result from the relational interactions that the readymade facilitates. Here again we see evidence of the shared territory between clinical and cultural transferences, with art representing a key modern form of subjective creativity that Guattari actively incorporates into the realm of psychology on both theoretical – through his critical re- thinking of psychoanalysis – and practical – through his work as an analyst – means. For this reason his conception of transference is quite telling: no longer conceived as a dual relation between two subjects, Guattari views transference as (at minimum) a triangular relation that also includes a mediating object that functions as an ambiguous medium (43). Is not the readymade the ultimate (creative) expression of a mediating object?
Jones also employs the readymade as a major instance of transference within Duchamp’s work, although for her it is the artist’s signature (in whatever form it takes) that is the ultimate site of the transferential relation. The urinal that Duchamp used in Fountain, for example, was part of a series of mass-produced objects that, at the time, could be found in commercial lavatory supply stores, meaning that it could be (and was) easily replaced by another of its kind with little to no difference in the overall experience of the work. The presence of a signature is therefore at odds with the inherent repeatability of a machine-made urinal, with the contradictory result of producing an individualized object that is multiple or manifold. By signing a urinal (one of many) with the pseudonym R. Mutt Duchamp makes the spectator’s relationship with the work a blatantly self-conscious and problematic one by destabilizing, on the one hand, the assumed unity of the work of “art” and, on the other hand, the perceived singularity of the artist’s act of creation – with the artist, in Foucault’s terms, functioning as simultaneously the internal function of the work’s creation that precedes the urinal and the external figure to which Fountain points. It is the ability of the readymade, as a literalnew edition or facsimile of an already-existing object, to call attention to the arbitrariness of the author-artist’s discursive authority over the artwork that is its most challenging and dangerous quality. The instability of Duchamp’s authorial “I,” which the indexical signature of the “artist” stands in for, is in this way transferred via the art object to the spectator so that, as Jones states, his “shifting ‘I’ enforces an unstable intersubjective exchange, an ongoing process of transference” (44). Rather than a singular event, the creative act is here seen as the product of a recurrent and ongoing repetition – another key aspect of psychoanalytic transference (45) – with the readymade making obvious the continual transferential process, active but not recognized in all works of art, by which an object is constituted and reconstituted as “art” by each consecutive spectator who (with the help of the artist’s author-function) recognizes it as such.
For Duchamp the artist’s role in the creation of an artwork is a means rather than an end, the last analysis being reserved for the evaluative and interpretive acts of the spectator and, more generally, the posterity (of art history). To understand Duchamp’s conception of transference therefore requires us to appreciate his vision of art as a psychological process of dialogue, one that does not stop when the artist has completed the artwork or even when it is placed within an institution of display, but continues on to include the reception and interpretation of the work on the social level. “Don’t say that the artist is a great thinker because he produces it,” Duchamp tells Calvin Tomkins. “The artist produces nothing until the onlooker has said, ‘You have produced something marvellous.’ The onlooker has the last word on it” (46). What we see in Duchamp’s proposed creative act is therefore not just a relation of artist and spectator or spectator and artwork, but rather involves a networking of the three. To return to Jones’ description of “transference,” it is the dialogue among the permutations of the two relationships she outlines – the manner in which the reader-spectator’s analysis of the text (and by extension the author-function) is also the site where the reader-spectator and author-artist connection is constituted or made (historically) real – that most closely articulate the dynamics of Duchampian transference as described in “The Creative Act.”
Within the text we find an invaluable clue to help us contextualize, both personally and historically, Duchamp’s approach to the artist-artwork-spectator relation. Following his introduction of the two poles and his proposed attribution of the ontological status of “medium” onto the position of the artist, he calls upon T. S. Eliot’s words from “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (written in 1919) to describe what he sees as the split roles of the artist: “The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material” (47). Eric Cameron points to the fact that this is Duchamp’s only direct quotation of a critic, making it imperative that we take this reference seriously – particularly since, in spite of the perceived polarity between his vision of art and Eliot’s, Duchamp was obviously able to see in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” something of the conflicted character of the modern position of the “artist” that spoke to him, positively or negatively, about the (most often) unacknowledged realities of creating works of art (48). In addition to the above quoted characterization of the artist, we also find in Eliot’s essay two key ideas that parallel aspects of the creative act as Duchamp describes the process.
The first concerns the depersonalization of the artist, a process of “continual self-sacrifice” or “extinction of personality” that Eliot suggests is a necessary progression by which the mind of a mature artist becomes “a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations” (49). His use of the word “medium” is especially significant given the importance of the term in Duchamp’s text. For Eliot, the expression of a (great) artist is based not on personality but rather the ability to escape one’s self, to function as a medium – with much of the term’s religious connotations – through which (great) works of art are created. We can see in this depersonalized vision many of the qualities that characterize Duchamp’s notion of the artist as a mediumistic being, with one overriding distinction. Whereas Eliot clearly believes in the artist’s privileged position, which the role of medium as a genius-like state beyond the individual serves to maintain, Duchamp’s proposal of giving the artist the attributes of a medium directly undermines the artist’s authority over the work precisely because of the disconnect between the person (who suffers) and the mind (that creates). In other words, while Eliot uses the term “medium” to describe a condition of higher (objective) authority that the author- artist achieves through the sacrifice of the personal – which, as he suggests, turns art towards a condition of science – for Duchamp the role of “medium” defines – through a (playfully) pseudo-scientific description – the unawareness or, as he worded it in the 1949 roundtable,irresponsibility of the author-artist in terms what is created and why. “The artist doesn’t count. He does not count. Society takes what it wants,” Duchamp tells Tomkins in no uncertain terms (50).
The second idea in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” that is of interest to us is Eliot’s suggestive scientific analogy in which he describes the functioning of the author-artist as catalyst, specifically comparing the process of creating art to a chemical reaction. We are invited to consider the action that takes place when oxygen and sulphur dioxide “are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nonetheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected; has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged” (51). The filament of platinum, necessarily active without either being depleted or leaving a trace of itself in the final product, represents for Eliot the ideal mind of the author-artist in the creative act. As he makes clear in the lines following this analogy – those quoted by Duchamp – the ideal or perfect author-artist results from the separation of the affects of personality from the (de-personalized) expression of the mind that, like the platinum, creates without leaving a trace of its self. We can easily apply the basic parameters of Eliot’s use of this analogy to Duchamp’s arguments for a creative act that is no longer defined by the authorizing presence of the artist (as the end and test of art), although, unlike Eliot, Duchamp would never claim that the work possesses notrace of the artist. For Duchamp, the artist’s personal intentions and desires (the “series of efforts, pains, satisfactions, refusals, decisions”) are irrelevant to the artwork’s final realization, which, like the created sulphurous acid, must be understood and judged as distinct from the artist (as person) that created it. The reason for this is because “the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions” that, especially in terms of aesthetic choices, cannot be considered fully self-conscious and therefore must not be treated as the singular source of and for the work’s meaning (52). In this manner, while the artist (as author-function) is the catalyst for the artwork, the actual realization of a work of art can be accomplished only through the transferential process of the creative act.
This last point brings up an important distinction that should be made between Eliot’s use of this analogy and our present consideration of it in relation to Duchamp’s text. By focusing exclusively on the filament of platinum and what its function has to say about the mind of the author-artist Eliot overlooks the remaining elements involved in this chemical reaction, thereby leaving out most of the relational interactions beyond the central figure of the author-artist. In this respect, Duchamp can be seen as taking this analogy more seriously than Eliot by considering not just the catalyst, which is only the first pole in Duchamp’s equation, but also the two gasses – the oxygen and sulphur dioxide roughly coinciding with the spectator and the artwork in its raw state – that combine to form a new acid – sulphurous acid again roughly standing in for the final realization, accomplished by the second pole of the spectator, of a work as “art.” The complex relational process that we see in the formation of this new acid can in this way be used to help describe or illustrate, in quasi- scientific terms, the transmutation that takes place when inert matter becomes a work of art – a process that is for Duchamp determined through an (aesthetic) act of transference.
Let us now examine the functioning of Duchampian transference through an (imagined) encounter with the readymade, in this case Bicycle Wheel (1913). To begin with, we know from Duchamp’s numerous accounts that this object began not out of an active intention to make an “artwork” but rather for the personal curiosity and pleasure of attaching the wheel from a bicycle to the top of a wooden stool, in order to have something to play with in his studio. The truthfulness of his claims – in a manner that strangely reflects Freudian psychoanalysis – are irrelevant, since what is important is not his real actions or intentions but rather his framing and interpreting of himself through what he chooses (consciously or unconsciously) to say or not say. In fact, his conception of the personal art coefficient is based within this type of discrepancy, noting the psychological and affective differences between what an artist intends to create (the unexpressed but intended) and what is actually created (the unintentionally expressed). Thierry de Duve’s describes the art coefficient as “Duchamp’s Freudian (even Lacanian) witty and ironic redefinition of the romantic self,” which presents as a “measurable ratio between repressed or failed intentions, idiosyncrasies and preferences on the one hand, and the return of the repressed, Freudian slips and failed acts on the other – in other words, the ratio between (disgusted) ‘taste’ and (ridiculous) ‘genius’” (53). Therefore, it is not Duchamp’s intentions when creating Bicycle Wheel that are of interest to us but rather his conceptual and material act(s) of creating this (aesthetic) object that, regardless of whether it is “good” or “bad,” exists as art in a raw state. The following illustration – which I have loosely based on the visual language of Coffee Mill (1911) – describes the basic subjective mechanism of Duchamp’s relation to the readymade.
What exists at the completion of this first pole, which is the end of the artist’s personal contribution to the creative act, is the work of art in a raw state that Duchamp proposes is the “inert matter” through which the (creative) transference occurs. The second pole of the creative process begins when the spectator encounters this raw artwork – in our current example, when we stand in front of the artistic construct that is Bicycle Wheel. It is the role of the spectator to (aesthetically) refine the work by, on the one hand, reacting critically to what the artist presents – experienced as what Duchamp calls an aesthetic osmosis from artist to spectator through the artwork – and, on the other hand, (actively) judging the work as perceived and interpreted from the position of the spectator that is notably disconnected from the work’s creator. Here we can recognize the shift in the role of the artist’s relation to their work. While Duchamp initially created Bicycle Wheel, once this work entered the outside world its connection to the person “Marcel Duchamp” is replaced by an association with the “Marcel Duchamp” that exists strictly as a function of art historical discourse – a contradictory existence as that is at once a presence and absence, which I have illustrated by (following Derrida) putting the term “artist” under erasure.
It is the author-function of Duchamp (and not the real person) that we in fact engage with when viewingBicycle Wheel, a reality of the artist’s position – as a mediumistic being that is denied a state of consciousness on the aesthetic plane – that consequently leads to the realization that the artist- artwork-spectator relation is not unidirectional (emanating from artist). Rather, the functioning of the transference as Duchamp describes it necessarily involves two interdependent and dialogic creative actions. In the first we see a linear transfer from the artist through the artwork to the spectator and on to posterity, whereas in the second the critical (and answerable) response of the spectator is transferred onto the work of art, which in turn impacts the cultural understanding of the artist’s author-function and therefore the posterity of both the artist and the work (54).
This dynamic vision of the act of artistic creation therefore hinges on an artwork’s capacity to affect the spectator, who emerges – or, in Barthes term, is born – through an active participation in the transference process. Since it is the spectator who is tasked with completing the work that the artist begins, with actually making the historical work of art, we must acknowledge the (subjective) authority of the spectator’s look as a catalyst for these relational interactions. As Duchamp tells Tomkins: “The onlooker is part of the making of the painting but also exerts a diabolical influence by looking alone,” which he stresses is a “transcendental” action through which spectator’s “change the physical image without knowing it” (55). Here we can recognize the full extent of Duchamp’s theory, which aims not only to fundamentally question the assumed authority of the author- artist but also to establish a vision of art that has no definitive beginning or end. The creative act exists in and through the dialogic relations of Duchampian transference, as the spectator gets caught up in the repeated and repeatable relations that the artwork engenders.
References
1. Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis, An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 100-101.
1. Marcel Duchamp, “The Creative Act,” The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (New York: Da Capo, 1973), 140.
1. Duchamp, “The Creative Act,” 138.
1. Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 1987), 70.
1. Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (New York: Owl Books, 1996), 396. 2. In her Masters thesis on “The Creative Act,” Lauri Nelson reproduces several key documents related to Duchamp’s text including the schedule for the A.F.A. convention (appendix 6), the January 1957 draft of “The Creative Act” (appendix 5), and the “Biographical Sheet” that Duchamp filled out for the convention, in which he refers to himself as a “freelance artist” (appendix 3). See Lauri G. Nelson, “This Kind of Circus, all in Cordiality”: Marcel Duchamp’s Speech “The Creative Act,” M.A. Thesis (Houston: Rice University, 1994), 1104-120. This document is available online at: http://scholarship.rice.edu/bitstream/handle/1911/ 13872/1360084.PDF?sequence=1
1. This roundtable was organized as a means of confronting the question of the state of art in the mid-twentieth century, bringing together a number of prominent individuals in fields related to art. In addition to Duchamp, the participants were George Boas, Gregory Bateson (who would also be on the panel with Duchamp at the American Federation of the Arts Convention in 1957), Kenneth Burke, Alfred Frankenstein, Robert Goldwater, Darius Milhaud, Andrew C. Richie, Arnold Schoenburg (who could not attend but instead provided a statement), and Frank Lloyd Wright. The roundtable consisted of three official sessions, with an unofficial session added at the end.
1. Marcel Duchamp, et al., The Western Round Table on Modern Art [Transcript of Proceedings], ed. Douglas MacAgy (San Francisco: San Francisco Art Association, 1949), 44c. This transcript is available online on UbuWeb at: http://www.ubu.com/historical/wrtma/transcript.htm . It should be noted that Duchamp starts off the roundtable discussion with a statement markedly similar this the one I have quoted, although his wording is a bit less concise. In this first version he connects the esthetic echo to the lack of an adequate definition of art, stating: “We also imply that art cannot be understood through the intellect, but is felt through an emotion presenting some analogy with a religious faith or a sexual attraction – an esthetic echo.” Duchamp, et al., The Western Round Table on Modern Art>, 5a.
1. Duchamp, et al., The Western Round Table on Modern Art, 30a.
1. Tomkins, Duchamp, 397. For a discussion of “the intentional fallacy,” see W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954).
1. This discrepancy between the reception of his work in America and France is, Miriam Jordan and I argue, a key motivating factor in Duchamp’s decision to establish the major collection of his artwork at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. See Miriam Jordan and Julian Jason Haladyn, “The Posthumous Exile of Marcel Duchamp” [Errata Series pamphlet] (London: Blue Medium Press, 2013).
1. Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, 31; 45.
1. Duchamp, “The Creative Act,” 139.
1. In a particularly compelling exchange at the 1949 roundtable, Gregory Bateson and Frank Lloyd Wright respond to Duchamp’s statement that the artwork is independent of the artist: Bateson: Now, Mr. Duchamp, what you are saying is that the artist is the picture’s way of getting itself painted. That is a very serious and reasonable thing to say, but that implies that in some sense, the work of art exists before it is there on canvas. Duchamp: Yes; it has to be pulled out. Bateson: Which is on its way out. Wright: All right, gentlemen you can put it at that end too, if you want to, but no work of art is ever going to rise higher than the artist. Duchamp: Who is great, the work or the man? Duchamp, et al., The Western Round Table on Modern Art, 31a.
1. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Image – Music – Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 147.
1. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 20-21.
1. Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 148.
1. Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 147.
1. See, most notably, Harvey Hix, “Morte D’Author: An Autopsy,” Iowa Review 17.1 (Winter, 1987): 131-150 and Sean Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992). There are two key exceptions to this reading: William Gass, “The Death of the Author,” Salmagundi 65 (Fall 1984): 3-26 and Molly Nesbit, “What Was an Author?” Yale French Studies 73 (Everyday Life, 1987): 229-257.
1. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 4. 2. Duchamp, “The Creative Act,” 139-140.
1. Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 148.
1. This quotation is taken from the contents page of Aspen, no. 5/6, where O’Doherty presents a lengthy quote from his pseudonym Sigmund Bode’s 1928 (fictitious) book Placement as Language. Andrew Stafford has adapted Aspen, no. 5/6 for the web, presenting the box as a series of twenty-eight numbered items that include, in addition to the box itself, printed material, records, a reel of super-8 film and several (small) artworks. See: http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen5and6/index.html
1. Phong Bui and Brian O’Doherty, “In Conversation: Brian O’Doherty with Phong Bui,” Brooklyn Rail (June, 2007): http://www.brooklynrail.org/2007/06/art/doughtery (accessed April 26, 2013). It is interested to note that, in a letter to Brian O’Doherty dated October 29, 1967, Barthes apologizes for the brevity of the text and expresses “his hopes that it would be acceptable and ‘in sufficient harmony with the issue.’” Quoted in Gwen Allen, Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), 57.
1. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980), 121.
1. Foucault, “What Is an Author?” 115.
1. Foucault, “What Is an Author?” 124. Foucault briefly describes the emergence of this form of authorship “when a system of ownership and strict copyright rules were established (towards the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century) that the transgressive properties always intrinsic to the act of writing became the forceful imperative of literature.” Foucault, “What Is an Author?” 124-125. For an extensive discussion of the legal aspects of theauthor question see Nesbit, “What Was an Author?” For a more general analysis of “What Is an Author?” see Adrian Wilson, “Foucault on the ‘Question of the Author’: A Critical Exegesis,” Modern Language Review 99.2 (2004): 339-363
1. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 7.
1. Michel Foucault, “Preface,” in Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, xii.
1. Michel Foucault, “The Father’s ‘No’,” Language, Counter-memory, Practice, 86.
1. Marcel Duchamp, “Apropos of ‘Readymades,’”The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, 141. This text is of a talk he gave in 1961 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
1. Such an approach, while not explicitly argued for, is at least intimated by Octavio Paz in his essay “The Castle of Purity.” When discussing the readymade, he notes that the “wealth of commentaries on their significance … shows that their interest is not plastic but critical or philosophical,” with Paz later in the text referring to Duchamp’s gesture as “a philosophical … game more than an artistic operation.” Octavio Paz, Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare, trans. Rachel Phillips and Donald Gardner (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1990), 22; 28.
1. Thierry de Duve, “Authorship Stripped Bare, Even,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 19/20 (1990/1991): 235.
1. Foucault, “What Is an Author?” 128. Foucault explores this issue inThe Archaeology of Knowledge; see, most notably, chapter 1, “The Unity of Discourse,” 23-33. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Routledge, 2003).
1. Foucault, “What Is an Author?” 131.
1. Duchamp, “The Creative Act,” 138.
1. Duchamp, “The Creative Act,” 139.
1. Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 107.
1. Melanie Klein, “The Origins of Transference,” Melanie Klein: Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963 (London: Vintage, 1997), 48. In a more recent iteration, Jean Laplanche proposes that “maybe transference is already, ‘in itself’, outside the clinic” and that “perhaps the principle site of transference, ‘ordinary’ transference, before, beyond or after analysis, would be the multiple relation to the cultural, to creation or, more precisely, to the cultural message.” Jean Laplanche, “Transference: Its Provocation by the Analyst,” Essays on Otherness (New York: Routledge, 2005), 222.
1. Amelia Jones, Postmodernism and the En-gendering of Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), 113.
1. Jones, Postmodernism and the En-gendering of Marcel Duchamp, 114.
1. Stephen Zepke, “The Readymade: Art as the Refrain of Life,” in Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New ed. Simon O’Sullivan and Stephen Zepke (New York: Continuum, 2008), 33. While Zepke’s treatment of the readymade is admirable, his dialectic distinction between a Duchampian “conceptual” version and a Guattarian “affectual” version, particularly in relation to his claim that the readymade is re-made by Guattari (and Deleuze) “against Duchamp,” does not hold up – and, I would add, is not supported by Guattari’s treatment of Duchamp – since the readymade as Duchamp conceived it is already a ground for a modern form of art based within an (affective) act of becoming for the spectator. Zepke, “The Readymade,” 35.
1. Félix Guattari, “The Transference,” The Guattari Reader, ed. Gary Genosko (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 63.
1. Jones, Postmodernism and the En-gendering of Marcel Duchamp, 133. 2. Jacques Lacan’s discussion of transference is particularly helpful here, since it can also be applied to a reading of the readymade. As he states: “If transference is only repetition, it will always be repetition of the same missed experience.” Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 143. Considered in relation to Lacan’s statement, the readymade can be seen as repeated and repeatable moments of transference that, as Duchamp makes clear, are constituted within and through the relational gap between artist and spectator. “What art is in reality is this missing link, not the links which exist,” Duchamp tells Arturo Schwarz, noting that art is no what we see: “art is the gap.” Quoted in Dalia Judovitz, Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 135.
1. Calvin Tomkins, Marcel Duchamp: Afternoon Interviews (New York: Badlands Unlimited, 2013), 31.
1. T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921), 48. Lawrence Steefel informs us that in a 1961 personal discussion Duchamp said he “feels that Eliot’s essay presents his own feelings as well or better than he himself has ever done in writing.” Lawrence D. Steefel Jr., “Dimension and Development in The Passage from the Virgin to the Bride,” in Marcel Duchamp in Perspective, ed. Joseph Masheck (New York: Da Capo Press, 2002), 97 n15.
1. Eric Cameron, “Given,” inThe Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp, ed. Thierry de Duve (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 1. In the discussion that follows this text (see pages 31-39) Rosalind Krauss takes particular issue with the connection being made between Duchamp and Eliot, which not only betrays her understanding of Duchamp but also cannot be supported by anything in his practice. Marjorie Perloff explores this topic in her essay “Duchamp’s Eliot: The Detours of Tradition and the Persistence of Individual Talent” – originally published in T. S. Eliot and the Concept of Tradition, ed. Giovanni Cianci and Jason Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) – available online at: http://marjorieperloff.com/stein-duchamp-picasso/d uchamps-eliot/
1. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 47; 48.
1. Tomkins, Marcel Duchamp: Afternoon Interviews, 30.
1. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 48.
1. Duchamp, “The Creative Act,” 139.
1. Thierry de Duve, Kant After Duchamp (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 319-320.
1. In psychoanalytic terms, this back-and-forth relation of artist and spectator involves not just transference but also a countertransference, which in the clinical setting describes the analyst’s act of projecting (unconscious) feelings or emotions onto – and most often in response to – the analysand. I have intentionally avoided bring up this second term because, following the logic of Guattari’s view of transference, I believe the act of counter-transference is already contained within the transference dynamic. Particularly for our present discussion, although I do believe this holds true generally, distinguishing between these two forms of transferential relations denies the necessarily dialogic nature of the psychological interactions being described.
1. Tomkins, Marcel Duchamp: Afternoon Interviews, 60-61. Duchamp uses Nude Descending a Staircase as an example of what he means, noting that it went from a scandalous painting to a boring one “by being looked at too much.” Five Small Things about L.H.O.O.Q.
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Figure 1 Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q.
Attempting to recall exactly when in 1919 the L.H.O.O.Q. had been made, Marcel Duchamp himself offered two different dates: in conversations with Sidney, Harriet and Carroll Janis in early 1953, he mentioned December;(1) in conversations with
Pierre Cabanne in June 1966, October.(2) Either date—October 1919 or December 1919—may be the right one. From early August to December 27, 1919, Duchamp resided at avenue Charles-Floquet (Paris 7e), in the home of Francis Picabia and Gabrielle Buffet (the latter pregnant with Picabia’s fourth child, who was born on September 15). Picabia had been living for some time (days or weeks) in rue Émile- Augier (Paris 16e) with Germaine Everling, his mistress, who was also pregnant by him (their child was born January 5, 1920).(3) This particular situation (two places of residence, two pregnant women, etc.) would indicate that during this nearly five-month stay there were few, and perhaps no contacts between Duchamp and Picabia (except, in all likelihood, towards the end of the stay), and may explain why L.H.O.O.Q. was not published in issues 9 (November 1919), 10 (December 1919), or 11 (February 1920) of 391, Picabia’s journal, but rather as a Picabia version entitled Tableau dada par Marcel Duchamp in issue 12 (March 1920).(4) Michel Sanouillet argues that “Picabia wrote to ask him [Duchamp] for authorization to ‘redo’ a Mona Lisa for 391, and the authorization was naturally granted. But Picabia, who had only a vague memory of Duchamp’s work, contented himself with drawing the moustache.”(5) In fact, Picabia simply redid “L.H.O.O.Q.,” the inscription that would become the title of the readymade.(6) He also wrote these initials vertically and without periods on one of his own canvases, Le double monde, dated [December] 1919, which was exhibited on stage by André Breton during the First Friday of (the journal) Littérature, January 23, 1920, the first Dada manifestation in Paris.(7)
2
Owing to its title (Tableau dada par Marcel Duchamp), for many years the Picabia version passed for the original. Along with an enlarged replica (done in late January or early February 1930),(8) the original was not displayed until March 1930 in Paris in an exhibition titled La peinture au défi and with an important preface by Louis Aragon. For a poet, novelist and critic like Aragon, a readymade was not, from that time on, merely an industrial object removed from its context and divorced from its utilitarian function. 3
It must be pointed out that the colour reproduction which is the basis of the work was not a postcard, despite what so many people have stated verbally or in writing.(9) A glance at the back of the reproduction, published by Arturo Schwarz in 1969 in the 1st edition of his catalogue, shows that it is not arranged in the usual way, with one space for the address and stamp (at right), and another for the “message” and the caption of the illustration (at left). The reproduction has been inscribed by Duchamp with a technical indication (in pencil) on how to photograph the picture on the front and, later, above this indication, with an official declaration in the presence of a notary (in ink) stating that it is indeed the original.(10) The only trait shared by the small palimpsest— writing on writing —on the back and the picture on the front is the lead [in French: mine] pencil markings (additions of the moustache and goatee)(11) on the Mona Lisa’s face [in French: mine]. But where did Duchamp obtain this colour reproduction? The most likely explanation, as he mentioned to the Janises in 1953, is that he purchased it in a boutique near the Louvre, in the rue de Rivoli, which sold inexpensive copies of reproductions of the museum’s masterpieces, a popular practice in all large cities with major museums. It should also be recalled that in April 1911 Leonardo’s highly celebrated work, painted in the early sixteenth century, had been stolen from the Louvre (and not recovered until December 1913). Since it was believed to have disappeared or been destroyed, massive quantities of colour reproductions were distributed during these years or immediately afterwards, including photographs both intact or touched up, some in postcard format.(12) As well, there was undoubtedly an awareness that 1919 was the 400th anniversary of the painter’s death. These two events (the perhaps irremediable loss and the anniversary) come into play in Duchamp’s choice. When Duchamp sent a letter (New York, May 9, 1949) to his friend Henri-Pierre Roché asking him to purchase a vial of serum—become the vial of Air de Paris—to replace the one, currently broken, he had brought back from Paris in late December 1919 for his friends Louise and Walter Arensberg, he wrote:
Could you go into the pharmacy on the corner of rue Blomet and the rue de Vaugirard (if it’s still there,that’s where I bought the first ampoule) and buy an ampoule like this one: 125 c.c. and of the same measurements as the drawing […]
—If not rue Blomet, somewhere else—but, as far as possible, the same shape and size, thanks.(13)
A glance at a map of Paris shows that there is no corner of Blomet-Vaugirard, since these streets (15e) run parallel to each other! I use this example to demonstrate that a specific indication, even on the part of the author, may quite simply be inaccurate, even erroneous. And so it was for L.H.O.O.Q., postcard. And when Duchamp, in “Apropos of Myself” (1962-1964), describes this colour reproduction as “a cheap chromo,” it must be pointed out that in French as in English, chromo is the abbreviation of chromolithographie, “image lithographique en couleur” (Petit Robert I), and chromolithograph “a color print produced by chromolithography” (The American Heritage of the English Language). In French, however, chromo, now a masculine (and no longer feminine) form, has a pejorative sense: “toute image en couleur de mauvais goût” [any colour print in bad taste]. This added meaning, which highlights the notion of taste, introduces an aesthetic, even artistic, note; such is not the case in English, where cheap, in this example, signifies “of poor quality,” but particularly “inexpensive.”(14) 4
When, during his 1966 conversations with Cabanne, Duchamp spoke of Picabia and L.H.O.O.Q., he used the opportunity, if I may say so, to add:
Another time, Picabia did a cover for 391 with the portrait of Georges Carpentier, the boxer; he and I were as much alike as two drops of water, which is why it was amusing. It was a composite portrait of Georges Carpentier and me.(15)
During the summer of 1923, Georges Carpentier went to Picabia’s home in Tremblay-sur-Mauldre, the little village where the artist had been living since 1922. Picabia did a profile of the boxer, who even signed the portrait. When Picabia, over a year later, decided to put this portrait on the first page of the last issue of 391 (issue 19, October 1924), he crossed out Carpentier’s signature incompletely (it can still be seen under the cross-out markings) and added “Rrose Sélavy / by Picabia”.(16) Accordingly, if, by contiguity, this “composite portrait” likewise designates L.H.O.O.Q., Duchamp’s 1961 statement makes sense:
The curious thing about that moustache and goatee is that when you look at it the Mona Lisa becomes a man. It is not a woman disguised as a man; it is a real man, and that was my discovery, without realizing it at the time.
In 1919, a woman (Mona Lisa in L.H.O.O.Q.) is also a man, just as in 1920-1921, a man (Marcel Duchamp as Rose, then Rrose, Sélavy) is also a woman. 5
Without actually entering into an interpretation of the famous readymade, one notes, nonetheless, that the 400th anniversary of Leonardo’s death may have been not only a trigger (as an anniversary), but also a constraint (as a set of numbers), with the 4 indicating that only four letters could be used, and the 00 suggesting that one of them—which must be an O—be reduplicated.(18) As can be seen afterwards as well, these four letters (as Duchamp states in “Apropos of Myself”) are in alphabetical order—H, L, O, Q—in the name of the street (cHarLes-flOQuet) where he lived at the time. But they are also in the name of the process at the basis of this reproduction, which is cHromoLithOgraphiQue. And I note that in New York the name of the notary chosen by Duchamp, whose signature on December 22, 1944 certified that the work was the original (“This is to certify that this is the original ‘ready made’ L H O O Q Paris 1919”),(19) was Elsie Jenriche.(20) How can we fail to see that she was there because of her name as well (which, by this fact, is a metatextual reference to one of the issues in the work), a mix of I in English or Ich in German and of else, and that the issue of “gender” (jenre, another way of spelling genre) comes into play, since else rhymes with the feminine (elle: La Joconde, La Gioconda), which in turn rhymes with the masculine L(: Leonardo, Louvre), she having become a he! Finally, if we trace a vertical line at a right angle to the top of the work and passes it through the centre of the moustache, it becomes clear that, owing to the angle of the face, the line runs alongside the nose, at left, of the female—and now also male—figure and arrives “down below” (as Duchamp would say in 1961), exactly between “L.H.” and “O.O.Q.” This reduplication of the O is indicated once again. Notes
1. Still unedited, the conversations with the Janis family (Sidney, the father, Harriet, the mother, and Carroll, the son) occurred on the occasion of Duchamp’s preparation of the catalogue and hanging of the exhibition Dada 1916-1923 at the Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, April 15 – May 9, 1953. In the integrated chronology of the catalogue Joseph Cornell / Marcel Duchamp… in resonance, catalogue of the exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, October 8, 1998 – January 3, 1999, and at the Menil Collection, Houston, January 22 – May 16, 1999 (Ostfildern-Ruit: Cantz Verlag, 1998), 277, Susan Davidson, without mentioning her information source, gives the month of December 1919.
2. Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, translated by Ron Padgett, introduction by Robert Motherwell, preface by Salvador Dali, appreciation by Jasper Johns (New York: Da Capo, 1971), 62.
3. It was a day after the meeting of André Breton, who had been invited there, and twelve days before Tristan Tzara arrived there to live on January 17, his stay coinciding with the start of what Michel Sanouillet called “Dada à Paris”; see his general survey, Dada à Paris (Paris: Pauvert, 1965). The seat of the “MoUvEmEnT DADA, Berlin, Genève, Madrid, New York, Zurich,” according to the letter paper with this heading, was now in Paris. Furthermore, I notice the following coincidence (which was perhaps not a coincidence in 1919, considering the state of knowledge on Leonardo’s work): when Duchamp was in Paris that year, Picabia’s two women (his wife and mistress) were pregnant with sons; when, in the spring of 1503, Francesco del Giocondo commissioned Leonardo to paint a portrait of his wife, she had already given him two sons (in May 1496 and December 1502). See Daniel Arasse, Léonard de Vinci. Le rythme du monde (1997; Paris: Hazan, 2003), 388-89. The rhyme, here, is in between Mona Lisa [Joconde] and fertile [féconde].
4. To Cabanne, Duchamp says Tableau dada de [sic] Marcel Duchamp.
5. Michel Sanouillet, Francis Picabia et «391» (Paris: Losfeld, 1966), II: 113. Volume I is a facsimile edition of 391 [1917-1924] expanded with various unedited documents (Paris: Losfeld, 1960). Since Duchamp had been in New York since January 6 and no 12 of 391 did not appear (Sanouillet specifies) until the end of March, one might assume that Duchamp, interviewed by Schwarz,The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Abrams, 2nd edition, 1970), 476, only dimly recalled the circumstance: “My original did not arrive in time, and to delay the printing of391 no further, Picabia himself drew the moustache on the Mona Lisa but forgot the goatee.”
6. I say “the inscription that would become the title of the readymade” since, in the poster-catalogue of the exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery, Duchamp wrote:”La Joconde, postcard with pencil.” In Marcel Duchamp (London: Trianon Press, and New York: Grove Press, 1959), Robert Lebel first uses the inscription as the title. In The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Abrams, 1st edition, 1969), Arturo Schwarz first indicates the exact dimensions of the readymade: 19.7 x 12.4 cm. (7 ¾ x 4 7/8 in.). 7. The two O’s in “L H O O Q,” themselves in the centre of two other O’s shaped like strings forming 8’s, or propeller blades, but without an axis, soft and bent by the wind, are equally—and doubly—the O’s of “dOuble” and “wOrld” [mOnde]. The small gap at the top left in one of these other O’s is matched only by the small gap in the À of “À DOMICILE” [at home], another inscription, and by the small addition—the tail—of the Q in “L H O O Q.” One way of creating an ironic coincidence between mathematical speculations (topOLOGY) and commercial speculations (delivery “à domicile“, that is, at home [AU LOGIS]).
8. “I made, just before leaving Paris, a Mona Lisa, for Aragon […] / Man Ray has the 1st Mona Lisa”, letter from Duchamp to Jean Crotti, Villefranche-sur-mer, February 6, 1930, in Affectionately, Marcel : The Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp, edition by Francis Naumann and Hector Obalk, translation by Jill Taylor (Ghent and Amsterdam : Ludion Press, 2000), 171.
9. Three examples: Duchamp himself in 1953 (see note 6); Ecke Bonk, Marcel Duchamp: The Box in a Valise. Inventory of an Edition (New York: Rizzoli, 1989), 241; Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996), 221.
10. I note that Duchamp never used a postcard in subsequent replicas.
11. In the original French version of this article I use the plural, as did Duchamp in April 1942, when he indicated in ink at the bottom of the model of one of Picabia’s two versions (that reproduced in 391): Moustaches par Picabia / barbiche par Marcel Duchamp.” In French, the singular and plural are used indifferently for certain words, for example: ciseau and ciseaux (two blades), pantalon and pantalons(two legs), moustache and moustaches (two cheeks or, simply, two sides of the face). Furthermore, I note that the indication, inscribed by Picabia on two lines pencilled vertically to the right of the reproduction, begins with two liaisons—the one starting the 1 of “1 cliché” on the first line, and the other starting the s of “sans” on the second line—which are matched only by the tips of the moustache! For a reproduction with commentary, see Francis Naumann, The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, catalogue of the exhibition at Achim Moeller Fine Art, New York, October 2, 1999 – January 15, 2000. If, in fact, Arp came into possession of these two versions during his trip to Paris in April 1942, his meeting with Duchamp (they had known each other since 1926) could only have taken place in the non- occupied zone of southern France (in Grasse where Arp lived or in Sanary where Duchamp was living before his departure for the United States on May 14th).
12. See the two postcards dated 1914, reproduced in Roy McMullen, Mona Lisa: The Picture & the Myth (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1975).
13. Affectionately, Marcel, 272.
14. This is, moreover, Michel Sanouillet’s translation of this passage: “un chromo […] bon marché“, in “À propos de moi-même,” Duchamp du signe (Paris : Flammarion, 1975), 227. Naumann follows exactly the same train of thought: “an inexpensive chromo-lithographic color reproduction”, The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 10.
15. Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, 63.
16. See Michel Sanouillet, Francis Picabia et “391,” 166. One can see (391, 127) Carpentier’s signature and Picabia’s addition under some of the typewritten lines printed at the bottom of the page.
17. Herbert Crehan, “Dada,” Evidence (Toronto), no. 3 (autumn 1961).
18. These two O’s also evoke, by means of the rhyme “O.” / water [eau], the mountain lake and the plains lake in the Mona Lisa, respectively at the top right and a little farther down left of the landscape dominated by the loggia where Lisa, the model, is. And what about the winding road that leaves the plains lake, and which is echoed in the tail of the “Q” (calligraphied by Duchamp)?
19. A presentative sentence in another, the referent of “This” (This, as in “This is my Body” or in “This is a work of art”) being cataphoric (that is, it follows the pronoun): in the first case, it is “the original ‘ready made’;” in the second, it is the entire proposition that shapes the first case.
20. In a short article titled “Desperately Seeking Elsie: Authenticating the Authenticity of L.H.O.O.Q.‘s Back” (Tout-Fait, New York, vol. I, no. 1, December 1999), Thomas Girst informs us that this lady was a public stenographer at the Hotel St. Regis, New York, from 1943 to 1945. An exit Marcel Duchamp and Jules Laforgue
An exit Marcel Duchamp and Jules Laforgue Pieter de Nijs I ntroduction In 1887, the then famous actor Coquelin Cadet published an illustrated book called Le Rire. The illustrations were made by Eugène Bataille. One of these, showing Leonardo’s Mona Lisa smoking a pipe, can be regarded as a direct predecessor of Marcel Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q (1919). Bataille, better known as Sapeck, was an important member of the Incohérents, a group of artists who from 1882 on organized several exhibitions as alternatives for the official Salon. Parodies of famous pieces of art, political and social satire, and graphical puns were at the root of these exhibitions. Like their literary counterparts, who adorned themselves with such fantastic names as Hydropathes, Hirsutes, Zutistes, and Jemenfoutistes, the activities of the Incohérents were mainly aimed at ridiculing the official art world.The painters, writers, journalists, and cartoonists who participated in the activities of these artistic groups generally convened in the cabarets artistiques that sprang up in Paris in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, first on the rive gauche, in the Quartier Latin, later in Montmartre. Most of them published their work in the illustrated newspapers and magazines that appeared after the abolition of press censorship in 1881 and the emergence of new and faster (photomechanical) printing. These newspapers offered many writers and artists new opportunities to provide for their livelihood and to bring their work to the attention of a wider audience.
The activities of groups like the Hydropathes and the Incohérents have long been seen solely as a means to “shock the bourgeois” (épater le bourgeois), as joking-for-joking’s- sake. The attitude pervading much of their work was being described as fumisme: a mocking of official values and societal norms through biting satire, puerile humor, and practical joking. In recent years though, this view has made way for a more serious approach, in which their work is being linked to that of the avant-garde movements of the 1920s and 1930s. (1)
Apart from that, it is easy to overlook the links that existed between the groups of artists and writers that gathered in the so-called cabarets artistiques of Montmartre, and the artists and writers who are nowadays considered as the founders of modern art and literature. Cabarets such as the Chat Noir attracted Hydropathes-poets and -novelists such as Charles Cros, Alphonse Allais, and Jules Lévy, along-side with singers like Jules Jouy and Maurice Mac-Nab and actors like Coquelin Cadet. But more established poets such as Jean Moréas, Léon Bloy, and Paul Verlaine were also regular visitors, and the same goes for Gustave Kahn and Jules Laforgue. Moréas is considered to be the “founder” of symbolism. Novelist Léon Bloy, an ardent catholic (though he detested the catholic church and its institutions), was one of the sharpest polemicists of his time, mixing his high-pitched sentences with sneers and curses. Verlaine, of course, was the exemplary poète maudit . Kahn allegedly was the inventor of “free verse,” in which the tight rules, rhythm, and end rhyme of romantic poetry was abandoned to give way to assonance and internal rhyme. And Jules Laforgue made his first literary friends amongst the Hydropathes around 1880. He too has a claim to the invention of “free verse.”
The poems, songs, and monologues that were performed or recited in the cabarets combined social criticism with irony and self-mockery; the language used was a mix of popular or vulgar words and sentences, full of argot and newly formed words, paired-off with unconventional rhyme and poetical structures. In the poems of – nowadays generally acknowledged – writers such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry, Gustave Kahn, and Jules Laforgue (to name a few) – experimental innovations can be found that are similar to the nouvéautés in the poems and songs that were performed in the cabarets. (2) The ideas of these poetic innovators mixed more or less perfectly with those of the poets and singer-performers of the Montmartre cabarets.
In this article, I want to point to a link that can be established between the work of the artists who lived and worked in Montmartre at the end of the nineteenth century and that of Marcel Duchamp. The work of Jules Laforgue can be seen as a part of that link. I will try, on the one hand, to show what Jules Laforgue owed to the Hydropathes and other “proto- Dada” groups in his attempts to renew poetry and, on the other hand, to discuss the way he influenced Duchamp, who around 1911-1912 was looking for a way out of the artistic deadlock he felt he was trapped in. I will also try to show that Duchamp translated parts of what Laforgue did on a poetic level to the visual arts.
Duchamp has stressed the importance of several writers for the development of his ideas. He never concealed his admiration for Raymond Roussel and Jean-Pierre Brisset. He loved the humorous stories of Alphonse Allais and looked upon Alfred Jarry as a sympathetic soul. And he also positively referred to Jules Laforgue: “I liked Laforgue a lot, and I like him even more now,” he told Pierre Cabanne in 1967. (3) Duchamp never really explained what it was that made him like the work of Laforgue. In my opinion though, Laforgue’s work was of more importance for the development of Duchamp’s ideas than he himself acknowledged.
Jules Laforgue
Laforgue is generally seen as a representative of the decadent movement within Symbolism, which by 1880 had adherents among many young authors. The Decadents combined pessimism with black humor, self-mockery with irony. Their poems and novels clearly demonstrate a tendency towards literary innovation. Jules Laforgue (Montevideo 1860 – Paris 1887) was the second of eleven children. In 1877 his mother died of a miscarriage. When his father decided to return to his hometown of Tarbes, Jules remained behind in Paris. He tried to write in order to earn a living. In 1881, he got a job as the personal reader of Empress Augusta of Prussia, and he moved to Berlin. There he worked on a series of poems called Les Complaintes. In the first months of 1885 Laforgue completed the stories that would later appear under the title Moralités légendaires . In 1886, he meets a young English woman, Leah Lee, and in December of that same year they marry. The couple settled in Paris. There Laforgue is forced to stay in bed because of his neglected health. While still looking for a publisher for a new book of poems and for his Moralités Légendaires on 20 August 1887 he dies of tuberculosis. (4)
Melancholy and celibacy
In his poems Laforgue again and again turns to the same motifs, melancholy and celibacy being the leading themes. Autumn is the blackest season, the moon is to be preferred to the sun and the sound of a distant piano brings about melancholic reflections on the sad future of young girls who will end up in the bourgeois trap of marriage. Marriage itself is often the theme of a poem (“Complainte des formalités nuptials,” “Complainte des bons ménages”), as is the life of the bachelor (“Célibat, célibat, tout n’est que célibate,” “Complaintes des crépuscules célibataires”). And looking at the score of poems in which Sundays are being described as days of boredom, Laforgue seems to have seen Sunday as the day par excellence for thoughts of spleen and melancholy (5). Though he constantly emphasizes the loneliness and melancholy of the bachelor – the “pauvre jeune homme” – Laforgue’s poems and prose clearly speak of a preference for celibacy and for the bachelor state. He also proclaims rather peculiar ideas about women, love, or a relationship. His ideal seems to have been “love at a distance,” an unfulfilled or sterile love. In Saison, one of his unfinished novels, the protagonist is dreaming about his ideal woman: “The type of the adorable, the only beloved, for me is the English woman (…) she is the only kind of woman that I cannot undress (…) My imagination remains sterile, frozen, has never existed, and has never brought me down. She has no sexual organs for me, I cannot think of it, could never have thought of it (…). All the others are bitches (…).” (6) In his wife Leah Lee, Laforgue apparently found the representative of his ideal woman, or the ideal of what he named “the third sex”: Lee was very skinny and very English, with her red hair, dark eyes, her baby figure, her timid nature and sophisticated, delicate mannerisms.
Moralités Légendaires
Besides poems Laforgue also produced some “prose poems.” These Moralités légendaires are rather humoristic. Their humoristic effects rest for the greater part on the ironic way Laforgue deals with his literary examples and with the symbolist stereotypes they contain. A good example is the “moral tale” Laforgue devotes to Salome. In symbolist literature this supposed daughter of the Jewish king Herod is often depicted as the epitome of the staggeringly beautiful, mysterious, sensual, and perfidious Goddess-Demon, who seduces men, only to plunge them into misery. As such she was portrayed by painters like Moreau, Redon, Regnault, and Beardsley, and described by Flaubert (inHerodias , 1877), Oscar Wilde (Salome, 1891-1893), and Mallarmé (Hérodiade, 1898). Laforgue’s Salomé leans firmly on Flaubert’s Herodiade. But although he remains close to Flaubert’s text, which he sometimes paraphrases literally, Laforgue scoffs at Flaubert, for example with his preoccupation with historical accuracy (Flaubert relied on earlier historical sources, such as those of Flavius Josephus). The same goes for Flaubert’s style – so often praised. Laforgue sprinkles his story with ironic and anachronistic details. Herod Antipas is called Emeraude- Archetypas (Hérode = E(me)raude). (7) Iaokanaan (John the Baptist) – a strong personality in Flaubert’s story – is nothing more than a unsuccessful writer (a “malheureux publiciste” or “écrivassier” , i.e., a potboiler or hack writer). Laforgue’s story is not set in Biblical Palestine, but on one of the White Esoteric Iles (“Iles Blanches Esoteriques”), where even the noise of an express train is heard. In the palace Herod’s guests, “sur la scène de l´Alcazar” (i.e., a music hall), are being entertained by circus and vaudeville performers, including musical clowns with a street organ, an ice skater, and trapeze artists. Laforgue’s Salome, with her exaggerated manner of dress and childish acts, is almost a caricature, a mockery of the symbolist femme fatale. At the same time she seems to embody Laforgue’s female ideal: she hardly has any hips and breasts (“deux soupçons de seins”) and is more shy than tempting, indeed almost innocent (a “petite Immaculée-Conception”) – and much less a sex object than the Herodias (i.e. Salomé) of Flaubert. One of the other Moralités légendaires, Hamlet ou les suites de la piété filiale, deals rather effectively with another “hero” of Western literature. Hamlet obviously is one of Laforgue’s favorite plays and Hamlet one of his most beloved characters. (8) In literature, Hamlet is often portrayed as the prototype of the moon-sick melancholic, always hesitating and not able to act when he is called upon. Laforgue’s Hamlet though has nothing to do with Shakespeare’s melancholic dreamer. Although the sentences and statements of Laforgue’s Hamlet are reminiscent of Shakespeare (“Stabilité! Ton nom est femme”; “Mais ne plus être, ne plus y être, et ne plus être”), they remain an echo. Laforgue’s Hamlet hardly suffers from the fact that his father was murdered; instead he dreams of becoming a celebrated playwright. He is nothing more than a downright fool, who is proud of his clumsy choruses, as is demonstrated by the verse he recites: “Il était un corsage/et ron ron et petit pa ta pon/il était un corsage/qu’avait tous ses boutons.” (9) Parody
Laforgue was one of the first poets who, at the end of the nineteenth century, felt that the existing modes of expression for the poet were obsolete and that there was a need for new ways of poetic expression. Parody for him was an important means to break away from existing literary conventions and poetical registers, and to introduce a new poetic language and innovative literary structures. Parody was an important instrument of fumisme and formed a significant part of the language of the cabarets artistiques. As Mary Shaw underlines in her essay on the literature of Montmartre, parody served a dual purpose: “Parodical markers generally signify breaks (…) with literary traditions at the same time that they forge links for initiated readers with a network or other contemporary, subversive, avant-garde texts.” (10) Using parody Laforgue rewrote and overwrote the “legendary stories” that served him as models. The distorted quotations from, and allusions to, classic writers (Shakespeare, Flaubert) contribute heavily to the parodical character of Laforgue’s stories.
Popular language
Laforgue’s poems and prose show the same characteristics as the songs, poems, and monologues that were presented in the cabarets artistiques. They are an often absurd blend of classical poetic language, nonsense rhymes and colloquial patches, peppered with exclamations, shouts and quotations from street and cabaret songs. (11) “Complainte du pauvre jeune homme” for instance sets off with the caption “Sur l’air populaire: Quand le bonhomm’ revint du bois” (a song also known as “Le Bucheron de Bresse”). In the poem Laforgue reverts to practices used by singers and poets in the cabarets artistiques: a repetition of words or lines (the line “Quand ce jeune homm’ rentra chez lui” is used twice), elision (homm’ instead of homme) and the use of nonsense or nursery rhyme (“Digue dondaine, digue dondon”). (12) The rhyme in Laforgue’s poetry and prose often rests on comparable sound effects. Typical is his frequent use of assonance and alliteration – which especially in free verse are important forms of rhyme. A few examples from Moralités légendaires. In the first b and s are repeated: “Dans un coin obscur d’une tribune, Hamlet dont nul jamais ne s’ inquiète, assis sur un coussin, observe la salle et la scène par les baies de la balustrade” (Hamlet). The second example centres on the repetition of the f/v-sound, the c and the l, with the “o” as a resounding vowel: and: “Et sur cette folle petite ville et son cercle de collines, le ciel infini dont on fait son deuil, ces éphémères féminines ne sortant jamais, en effet, sans mettre une frivole ombrelle entre elles et Dieu” (Miracles des roses). Sound for Laforgue is seemingly more important than significance: “Que je vous baisotte les mains, ô Kate, pour cette etiquette’ Hamlet( ); “unique titre de Tétraque”; “une salle jonchée de joncs jaune jonquille” (Salomé). (13)As was the habit in the cabarets, Laforgue frequently reverts to popular expressions and exclamations, to argot and vulgar words (s’en ficher, s’engueuler). He invents new words or verbs (angeluser or ventriloquer, voluptuer, massacrileger) and uses mots-valises or port-manteau words to intensify the sense of the emotions he wants to convey (crucifiger as a speaking combination of crucifier and figer; éternullite as an – again very expressive – combination of éternité and nullité; violuptés as a combination of volupté and viol; ennuiverselles from ennui and universelles). In addition to “modern” words or (often incongruous) combinations (thermomètre, rails, capitaliste, laminé, transatlantiques bercails, spleens or ennuis kilométriques) he sprinkles his poems with non-poetical, technical, biological or medical expressions (polype, apoplectique, spectroscope, télescope, plasma or chlorose, to denote the pallor of unhealthy adolescent girls). (14) Duchamp and Laforgue
For Duchamp getting acquainted with the work of Laforgue was of special importance for the development of his ideas. To Cabanne he stated that he especially liked Laforgue’s short stories, not just because of their humor, but also because they were something completely new: “I’m not acquainted with Laforgue’s life. […] That didn’t interest me enormously. But the prose poems in Moralités légendaires, which were as poetic as his poems, had really interested me very much. It was like an exit from Symbolism.” (15) Without any doubt it was especially the parodical character of the Moralités légendaires that appealed to Duchamp. Besides that he must also have picked up some of the innovative aspects of Laforgue’s poetry that were linked to the artistic climate in Montmartre.
Duchamp in Montmartre
Duchamp came to live in Montmartre in 1904, with his brother Raymond in the rue Caulaincourt. Their elder brother Jacques Villon lived in the same street. Even though the Duchamp brothers associated themselves with other painters, e.g. in the Société Normande de Peinture Moderne, and showed their work on “alternative” exhibitions like the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne, in Montmartre they spent most of their time in quite different circles, in the company of illustrators and cartoonists. Like them, the brothers of Duchamp earned their money primarily by producing cartoons for Parisian humoristic journals. According to Duchamp there was little or no contact between them and the artistic avant- garde: “Remember that I wasn’t living among painters, but rather among cartoonists. In Montmartre, where I was living, rue Caulaincourt, next door to Villon, we associated with Willette, Léandre, Abel Faivre, Georges Huard etc., this was completely different; I wasn’t in contact with the painters at that time.” (16) Although they were working as commercial artists, Duchamp’s brothers had not given up hope to be recognized as serious artists. Duchamp on the other hand had no clear goal. He tried his luck at the exam for admittance to the École des Beaux Arts and failed, attended some of the classes at the Académie Julian, but confessed later he preferred to play billiards at a local café, and evaded a three year conscription in the army, posing as an ouvrier d’art and learning the art of print-making in an atelier in Rouen.
Duchamp had been drawing domestic scenes, portraits of family members or friends and everyday scenes of passers-by or street strollers from early on. After his return to Montmartre and following the example of his brothers, he produced another series of drawings and cartoons, often with the relations between men and women as a theme. A good example is Sundays (Dimanches, 1909): a fairly common scene of a young man, pushing a baby carriage, with next to him his wife, again heavy with child. The plural in the title not only refers to the endless repetition of dreary Sundays with their common family scenes, but also to the cycle of the seemingly joyless repetition this marriage is subject to. Dimanches could very well echo Laforgue’s melancholic poems about dreary Sundays. Some of the cartoons Duchamp produced were published in humoristic magazines such as Le Rire and the Courrier français and were shown at the Salons des Humoristes that were organized from 1907 on. The captions of these cartoons are full of sexual innuendo and show that Duchamp had a keen eye for puns and double entendres. (17)
An “intellectual” artist
Thoug h he picked up painting again around 1907, Duchamp’s ideas, in no way, fitted in with the usual pattern of a “serious” artist. He went rapidly through successive stages of the new movements in painting – Fauvism, “Cézannism” – as if he couldn’t decide what style suited him. In 1911, he painted the first works that show the influence of Cubism. He also participated in discussions about Cubism with his brothers and other painters of a cubist group that had formed around the painters Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger. But he did not stick to Cubism, either. He was searching for an art that differed fundamentally from what had been produced up to the 1910s. As he stated later, painters until then had exclusively focused on “retinal” effects. In the course of the nineteenth century the “physical” side of painting had increasingly been emphasized, which had resulted in a one-sided production of “pleasant” or “attractive” images of art, solely appealing to the senses. According to Duchamp, art had thus lost its “intellectual” (religious, historical, or literary) content. Even new movements such as (Neo)Impressionism, Futurism, or Cubism were mainly producing “physical” paintings. Duchamp deliberately searched for other ways: “I wanted to get away from the physical aspect of painting. […] I was interested in ideas – not merely in visual products. I wanted to put painting once again at the service of the mind.”(18) The decisive breaking point is well-known. In March 1912, Duchamp planned to show his freshly painted Nu descendant un escalier at the Salon des Indépendants, together with other members of the cubist group. Gleizes and Metzinger disapproved of the direction Duchamp had taken with hisNu and asked Duchamp’s brothers if they could persuade Duchamp to remove his “moving” nude. (19) This incident proved to Duchamp that the painters milieu, even that of the avant-garde, had little to offer to him. He therefore sought his inspiration elsewhere. Duchamp had a clear mind for innovation, both in the field of the visual arts and in the fields of science, language, and literature. The cartoons he produced were proof of his interest in language, in the possibilities of wordplay and puns, corresponding with the products of cartoonists and writers who moved around in the artistic circles of Montmartre. (20). And although he did not read a lot, his literary favorites were the more experimental symbolist authors such as Mallarmé . Duchamp’s attitude was quickly assessed as “intellectual” and “literary,” but that did not bother him. “I felt that as a painter it was much better to be influenced by a writer than by another painter,” he stated. (21)
Although his literary favorites were to be found among the more “difficult” symbolist writers, Duchamp (as he stated to Pierre Cabanne) preferred authors who offered an exit from symbolism. Like Raymond Roussel and Jean Paul Brisset (two authors Duchamp admired because of their “insane imagination”). Laforgue evaded the prevailing taste: he offered Duchamp the exit he was searching for. Duchamp must have been receptive to Laforgue’s ironic tone and the way this “decadent-symbolist” author exploited and ridiculed symbolist stereotypes. And more than Laforgue’s obvious themes (melancholy about human existence in the light of eternity, celibacy, unattainable love, and – almost consequently – sterility), Duchamp recognized the irony in the way Laforgue turned melancholy and self-pity into (black) humor. Besides that he must have felt attracted to the way Laforgue transformed common language into poetry, to his frequent use of dissonant words or expressions in a poetic context and to his extravagant titles: “But perhaps I was less attracted by Laforgue’s poetry than by his titles. ‘Comice agricole,’ when written by Laforgue, becomes poetry.” (22)
The full title of the poem Duchamp refers to reads “Complainte du soir des comices agricoles” (“Complaint of the Evening of the Agricultural show”). (23) Laforgue’s poem describes the depressing behavior of farmers and their ladies, who have great difficulty giving themselves over to dancing and fun. The poet therefore dresses up in melancholic thoughts about the human race and the planet it is living on: “Oh Terre, ô terre, ô race humaine, / vous me faites bien de la peine.” (O Earth, o human race, it is quite a pain you give me.”) Apart from the poetic effects of assonance and alliteration (co-co- co) the title of the poem is rather unusual. Nobody normally associates a farmers fair (“comice agricole”) with melancholy or other poetic feelings. Laforgue reverts quite happily to the use of such dissonances. Apparently, this use of dissonance attracted Duchamp too.
Motion instead of emotion
In 1911 Duchamp decided to illustrate some of Laforgue’s poems. The drawings bear the same titles as the poems, all from Laforgue’s first bundle Le Sanglot de la Terre (published posthumously in 1901): Médiocrité, Sieste éternelle, and Encore à cet astre (though the drawings bear the indication “12” and “13” they all date from 1911).(24) Remarkably enough, the content of Laforgue’s poems seem to
have little or no direct connection with the subject Duchamp chose to depict in his drawings. Sieste éternelle shows a section of a piano keyboard, possibly referring to the verse: “Et comme un piano voisin rève en mesure/je tournoie au concert rythmé des encensoirs.” (“And like a piano close by that dreams in scales / so I move around on the rhythmic concert of the incense burners”). In Laforgue’s Complaintes the piano is often used as a signal of wistful longing. In “Complainte des pianos qu’on entend dans les quartiers aisés,” for example, the poet is strolling through a rich residential area. Through the windows of the houses he hears the sound of endless rows of scales that are being practiced by young girls. The gray and boring life of these girls, who are all eagerly looking forward to a future lover, leaps to his mind, and he imagines how the monotonous life of these young girls eventually and inevitably will pass into the meager routine of married life. Duchamp’s drawing, however, doesn’t convey anything of these melancholic thoughts. It leaves the viewer in the dark as far as its
meaning is concerned. Médiocrité shows something that looks like a steam locomotive with wagons trailing behind. In Laforgue’s sonnet such a machine is nowhere to be found. Laforgue deplores the mediocrity of most people, who toil and slave endlessly and without joy, and suspect nothing of the nullity (the éternullité) of the planet Earth in light of eternity. The only possible connection between poem and drawing is the last line of the poem (“Combien même s’en vont/Sans avoir seulement visité leur planète”; “How many take their leave/without even having visited their planet”).This line could have brought Duchamp the idea of a train – and possibly the idea of motion, instead of emotion. Encore à cet astre (“Once more to this star”; to be understood as an address to the sun) gave Duchamp the idea for Nu descendant un escalier (Nude Descending a Staircase, 1911):
The idea of the Nude came from a drawing which I had made in 1911 to illustrate Jules Laforgue’s poem Encore à cet astre. I had planned a series of illustrations of Laforgue’s poems, but I only completed three of them. […] In the drawing Encore à cet astre the figure is, of course, mounting the stairs. But while working on it, the idea of the Nude, or the title – I do not recall which – first came to my mind. (25)
Duchamp’s drawing again doesn’t contain much of which Laforgue is speaking. The poem reads as an imaginary dialogue between the sun and the people on earth. The sun (for Laforgue often a symbol of a dying force) expresses its contempt with those damned animated puppets (“pantins morphines”) down there on Earth. The earthlings, however, challenge the sun and point to its damned fate: it is at the end of its strength, its beams will inevitably grow cold, and it will be the laughing stock of the other stars. They, however, even if they are young, “die of health.”
In Duchamp’s drawing we see a floating head, as a sort of reference to Odilon Redon, between two figures. On the left a (apparently) female figure, naked from the waist down, surmounted by a cylindrical shape; on the right another (male? female?) figure, climbing a flight of stairs. (26) The pronounced teeth of the floating head could be taken as a reference to one of the lines in the poem (“Toi seul claques des dents”; “Only you clack your teeth”). Graphically, there is a connection with two earlier (realistic) nudes Duchamp drew, rather unusually sitting or resting on a ladder. (27) Maybe Duchamp got the idea of setting a (rudimentary or puppet-like) nude in motion, walking on a flight of stairs, from Laforgue’s description of the sun high up in the sky, talking to human puppets down below. Be that as it may, Duchamp probably drew more inspiration from the idea of movement (up-down) in Laforgue’s poem, than from its actual (emotional, i.e. melancholic) content.
Duchamp´s drawings after the poetry of Laforgue signify an important turning point in his work and thinking. As indicated, around 1911 Duchamp was searching to break free from the art of tradition, but also from the work of Cézanne and the Fauves, which until then had served him as an example. He experimented with techniques he had taken from Cubism, but was also inspired by the art of Symbolism – a symbolism embodied in paintings such as Buisson (The Bush, 1910-1911). When asked about the title of this painting, Duchamp stated he added the title (Buisson) “as an invisible color.” (28) He felt he needed “ a raison d’être in a painting that was different from the visual experience,” as a means of “giving a work that contained no anecdote an anecdotal element.” (29) “A poetic title for a painting was an anathema in the Fauves period, and was dismissed as literature,” he stated later. (30) In symbolist art such a “suggestive” title was not unusual. (31) By giving paintings such as Buisson symbolic titles, Duchamp tried to lend these rather traditional nudes (they are more or less Fauvist nudes) a meta-realistic touch, purely because he felt the need to step away from their being too realistic. The next step would even lead him away from the idea of giving his paintings “symbolist” titles. He started experimenting with setting his subjects in motion. Encore à cet astre must have played a central part in this development. About the genesis of this drawing Duchamp explained to Cabanne: “(the origin is) in the nude itself. To do a different nude from the classic reclining or standing nude, and to put it in motion.” (32) Motion (or the suggestion of motion) as a subject thus was becoming more and more important, and certainly more important than emotion.
Melancholy?
In December 1911, Duchamp painted Jeune homme triste dans un train (Sad Young Man in a Train) and, in the same month, the first study for Nu descendant un escalier . Michel Sanouillet has suggested that Jeune homme triste dans un train was based on a lost sketch, belonging to the series of illustrations to poems of Laforgue that Duchamp had planned to do. According to Sanouillet the original title of Jeune homme triste dans un train would have read Pauvre jeune homme M: “precisely the name of one of Laforgue’s Complaintes.” The Laforgue poem Sanouillet refers to tells the sad but hilarious story of a young man who finds out his wife has left him for another, laments his fate, and in despair finally cuts his throat. (33). If Sanouillet is right about Duchamp’s first idea for a title, the M would have given his painting a personal touch (M being an indication for ‘Marcel’). Unfortunately, there is no M in the title of the Laforgue poem. (34) Several interpreters (Arturo Schwarz, Lawrence D. Steefel, Jerrold B. Seigel, John Golding) have tried to link Jeune homme triste dans un train to Duchamp’s melancholic mood at the end of 1911 and have suggested that this painting could point to an influence from Laforgue’s poems. (35) John Golding for instance sees something of the “bleak, quizzical despair” in Duchamp’s painting which characterizes the Laforgue poem. Duchamp’s painting is what he calls a “mood painting”: “The Nude Descending is in no way a tragic painting (…). Yet the debt to Laforgue exists in the sensation or pervasive melancholy which the canvas transmits.” (36). According to Golding the relationship between Jeune homme triste dans un train and Nu descendant un escalier is reinforced by the fact that Duchamp painted black borders in both paintings. Duchamp himself, however, always rejected a “melancholic” interpretation of Jeune homme triste dans un train. He acknowledged that the painting was a self-portrait (a pipe, hardly visible, should be an indication), but when Robert Lebel asked him if the black borders are to be seen as an atmospheric sketch of his mood at that moment, Duchamp with his usual aplomb stated that “the black frames in Jeune homme triste only served to bring the painting back to the right dimensions.” (37) It is rather unlikely that Duchamp intended Jeune homme triste dans un train to be “a mood painting.” If he had wanted the title to be read as a reference to an autobiographical fact and as an indication of a melancholy mood he could indeed have added the “M” Sanouillet is referring to. Duchamp himself particularly stressed the role of thetrain-triste alliteration in the title: “The Sad Young Man on a Train already showed my intention of introducing humor into painting or, in this case, the humor of word play: triste, train. […] The young man is sad because there is a train that comes afterward. ‘Tr’ is very important.” (38) In other words, Duchamp chose the word “triste” (sad) because it worked beautifully with “train,” or better because the word “train” trails after, entraînes the word “triste.”
Dissonances
As his early drawings and cartoons show, and as is evident in his work after 1911, Duchamp was very aware of the possible use of “literary” (or poetic) effects in his search for an art that differed from traditional art. Duchamp had always been interested in word games and was trained in the use of calembours and words with double meanings. It could not have escaped him that Laforgue regularly made use of the humorous and ironic effects of dissonant words and expressions in his poems. The irony and humor in Laforgue’s poems mainly resides in the collision of two traditionally opposing verbal registers: on the one hand, the (traditional) poetical register, and on the other, the register of spoken language and language used in new areas of communication. His poetry takes its ironic character primarily from the dissonances between these two different linguistic sources. And Duchamp must have noticed that he could do something similar in the visual arts. In the titles of his work after 1911, Duchamp sometimes falls back on the same effects as Laforgue. When asked about the word “vite” in the title of Le roi et la reine traversés par des nus vites (The King and Queen Traversed by Swift Nudes, 1912), Duchamp stated that this word amused him, because at that time it was new and modern, and was only used in sports, e.g. as an indication for a cyclist, a racing driver or an athlete: “if a man was ‘swift,’ he ran well.” (39) Titles like Jeune homme triste dans un train , Deux personnages et une auto (Two Characters and a Car, 1912), Le roi et la reine entourés des nus vites (The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes, 1912), Le roi et la reine traversés par des nus en vitesse (The King and Queen Traversed by Nudes at High Speed, 1912), or Le roi et la reine traversés par des nus vites (The King and Queen Traversed by Swift Nudes, 1912) with their unusual dissonances (a combination of a word deriving from the world of mechanics or sports and from more traditional registers), definitely have Laforgian traces. And the title of Duchamp’s 1914 drawing Avoir l’apprenti dans le soleil (To Have the Apprentice in the Sun), in which we see a bicyclist frantically working his way up a slope, would not have seemed out of place amongst the titles of Laforgue’s poems.
Assonance and alliteration
In addition, Duchamp must have noted that in his (free) verse and his prose Laforgue frequently made use of alliteration and assonance as a remplaçant for more conventional rhyme. As is obvious from his statement about the word play “triste/train” Duchamp was sensitive to such literary effects. He was without any doubt amused by the tonal qualities of the work of Laforgue, for instance, by the (alliterative and assonant) effects of choruses such as “digue dondaine, digue dondon” or the use of assonance and elision (bonhomm’) in poems like “Complainte du pauvre jeune homme” – lines and words that referred to the popular song the poem is based upon, echoing the practices used in the cabarets artistiques. Talking about the poetry of Mallarmé, Duchamp stated that it wasn’t so much the content or the construction of the verses that attracted him, but the “sonorité” – the sound. For Duchamp Mallarmé’s poetry was primarily a “poésie audible” (poetry to be listened at): “Since I don’t completely understand him [Mallarmé], I find him very pleasurable to read for sound, as poetry that you hear,” he said to Cabanne. (40) In his works after 1911, Duchamp frequently fell back on the poetical effects of alliteration and assonance. A title such as Le roi et la reine traversés par des nus vites derives its poetic effect from the repeating of the “r” and the “a”; in La Mariee mise à nu par ses célibataires, même , the “m” is repeated, as it is in Neuf Moules Mâlic ( mâlic being a neologism). (41) In naming the different parts of The Large Glass , Duchamp made use of similar effects. Témoins oculistes is another example of a neologism, and assonance is present in titles such as Glissière contenant un moulin à eau en métaux voisins (“eau” rhyming on “métaux” and “o”), and alliteration in Dynamo désir or in L’Enfant-phare. Moreover, Duchamp, especially in later ready-mades, frequently fell back on the humoristic power of mots-valises or port-manteau words (Fresh Widow, La Bagarre d’Austerlitz).
The influence of Laforgue
In Nu descendant un escalier Duchamp united a principle he borrowed from Laforgue: to bring together two elements (nude – staircase) that in traditional terms do not mutually “rhyme.” He added a novelty of his own, namely the liberation of the nude from her traditional frameworks: he painted a moving nude instead of a stationary nude, a nude that “descends,” instead of reclining or standing. It is this idea of motion or movement – not in an emotional sense, but in an intellectual sense – that he developed in several works after 1911, culminating in La Mariee mise à nu par ses célibataires, meme (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, 1915-23) and in his ready-mades. In these works, he concentrated not on a pictorial (static) scene, but on a mental idea, using the artwork as a means to convey the idea of a world in motion, a constant flux or a coming-and-going of appearances. Duchamp picked up another idea from Laforgue. In his poems, Laforgue often attributes life to lifeless objects or abstractions, thereby augmenting the ironic quality of his poems (See, for example,“Complainte du foetus de poète,” “Complainte du vent qui s’ennuie la nuit,” and “Complainte des débats mélancoliques et littéraires”). Similar (Laforgian) irony speaks from phrases and titles for parts of La Mariee mise à nu par ses célibataires, meme, such as Handler of gravity (Manieur de gravité, also named Tender of Gravity – Soigneur de gravité – or Juggler of gravity – Jongleur de gravité ). Here Duchamp plays on the double meaning of the word gravity: weight or gravitation on the one hand, and seriousness on the other. The irony is of course present in the idea that you can “juggle” with gravity – an idea Duchamp illustrated in his concept of objects “made of a substance of oscillating density,” such as the Hook or the Chariot in the Big Glass (42) – or that you can tend to (“take care of,” or “look out for”) gravity. The same goes for the attribution of human emotions to some of the mechanical devises in The Large Glass (a chariot with a “slow” or “celibate life,” a motor with “a desire center”).When it comes to the intrinsic themes that Duchamp might have found in the work of Laforgue, it is not so much the theme of melancholy but another theme that jumps out. Laforgue frequently refers to his dislike of bourgeois marriage, especially where sex is concerned as a mere means to acquire offspring. Instead of “love in the service of reproduction” as the above quotation about his perfect English girl illustrates, Laforgue finds the ultimate ideal in selfless, sterile love. Duchamp in his turn repeatedly and emphatically manifested his aversion to marriage as a social institution and his preference for the status of the bachelor. Duchamp’s early drawings are not only interesting because of the combination of text and image and the use of calembours or sexual innuendo in the captions, but also because of their themes. Many of these early drawings provide an ironic view on the concerns of courtship, the period of engagement, and the routine of married life. (43) They can thus be seen as an early ruling against (civil) marriage and as a celebration of the state of bachelor (or – for that matter – of unmarried cohabitation). His drawing Dimanches can be seen as an early manifestation of this conviction. The theme of his La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même seems to be partly based on the same idea of (sterile) love; on the idea of the fundamental impossibility of the union of bachelor and bride, even though they mutually undergo the effects of desire for the other. Where Duchamp speaks of the Large Glass as a “negation of the woman,” it was the negation of the woman as a wife/mother he focused upon, as the person who assists in the continuation of social life and the (mechanical) producing of social individuals over and over again. (44) That is not to say that Duchamp’s work can be interpreted as an expression of the “eternal” opposition between the masculine and the feminine, which is the theme of many symbolist works of art. Duchamp does not tackle the (eternal) male-female opposition, but his work does challenge the opposition husband vs. wife/mother.
It could well have been the introduction of popular material in a poetic context, the use of newly formed words and the playing on their incongruity (this diversion from traditional poetical standards) that put Duchamp on the trail of comparable methods to undermine existing codes and registers in the visual arts. Laforgue was one of the first modern poets who used words that stem from such non-poetical arsenals as trade, (natural) science, traffic, slang and popular songs. With his introduction of neologisms and non-poetical words and phrases he gave an example of increased lexical and linguistic choices for the poet. Laforgue’s idea of using dissonances in order to pervert the traditional poetic language has a clear counterpart in the work of Duchamp, both in his early work and in his ready- mades. As is the case with Laforgue, Duchamp reverted to a process of dissociation: he isolated words (or sounds) and objects from their habitual (grammatical, logical) context and presented them in another context. By painting simple and everyday objects, such as Coffee Mill or Chocolate Grinder, he introduced mechanical devices as legitimate subjects for art works. This practice eventually gave way to simply “choosing” ordinary objects and, by giving them a poetic (often ambiguous) title, elevating them to genuine art works In( Advance of the Broken Arm, Trébuchet/Trap). With his genuine ready-mades – Fountain being the most famous – he went one step further. By isolating an ordinary object – a urinal – from its normal context (the public restroom) and by introducing it in a surrounding where it is definitely out of place (the gallery or museum) he expanded the artistic methods and materials and took them to until then uncharted realms.
Conclusion
Laforgue was one of the first modern poets who demonstrated an ambivalent-melancholic attitude towards language and poetry. Thus, in “Complainte des Blackboulés” it is said that “she” (a “coeur rose”) has spat on the Arts and the poet. In the poem a poet complains about the fact that art is mocked and attacked – while Laforgue himself is doing nothing different, by mocking all that has been seen as sacred in poetry. It is a melancholic attitude, because the poet realizes that there is little else to do, that writing has become a ridiculous, pointless activity – “Ah! Qu’est-ce que je fais, ici, dans cette chambre!/Des vers. Et puis, après?”(“Ah, what am I doing sticking around indoors! Verse. And then, what after that?”, Complainte d’une autre dimanche) – but that he can do nothing else. Laforgue hides behind the ironic nonchalance with which he ridicules poetry, rhetoric, literary themes or motifs – but he still writes poetry! In that sense he distinguishes himself from the pranksters, who were also to be found amongst the Hydropathes and other Fumistes. Where some of these poet- singers were aiming to ridicule Literature – as an example of what was called “the established order” – Laforgue was looking for an answer to the question which way poetry could go, while rejecting the path of traditional rhetoric or of legendary themes. The work of Laforgue may in many respects be similar to that of the Fumistes, the difference is in what Laforgue aimed at. He was not aiming at the joke “for the joke’s sake.” Or, in the words of Grojnowski: “Se voutant à la quête d’une manière ‘clownesque’, il inaugure une esthétique de la disparate où, selon ses propres termes, les dictionnaires ‘se brouillent’.” (45). Duchamp recognized and appreciated the irony of Laforgue, which is akin to his “ironie d’affirmation,” with a slight but important difference; unlike Laforgue there is, in the case of Duchamp, no question of black vision or melancholy. He approaches his subjects in a “dry” and “neutral” way. Instead of a well-established, traditional style, Laforgue sought a new style of his own, an idiolect, a language offering space to the everyday, spoken word – a style that is not only related to the style of the authors who frequented the Parisian cabarets artistiques and that of innovative authors such as Mallarmé, but can be regarded as a harbinger of the style of modern writers such as Céline and Queneau. It is this ambivalent attitude – rejecting the (old) poetry but simultaneously seeking a way to save poetry by looking for new ways – that Duchamp has in common with Laforgue. Duchamp is not so much the Dadaist, who only rejects. He is much more like Laforgue, someone who is “looking for a way out” – looking for new ways for the arts to go in a changing society. That is what is behind Duchamp’s judgment about the work of Laforgue: “It was like an exit from symbolism.” Laforgue helped Duchamp to find his way out in his “ironisme d’affirmation,” in his Large Glass, and in his readymades. Notes:
1. Daniel Grojnowski, talking about the Incohérents, has pointed out that their activities can be interpreted as being a sort of proto-Dada. ‘Une trentaine d’années avant que n’éclatent les scandales provoqués par la jeunesse de l’après- guerre, qui, vers 1920, a transformé de manière sans doute irréversible notre perception de l’œuvre, les Incohérents ont, pour une bonne part, inventé ‘dada’ avant la lettre, sans avoir trouvé […] la reconnaissance qui aurait consacré leurs recherches. En somme, ils ont formé une avant- garde sans avancée, une provocation artistique sans prise qui, faute de s’être imposée, demeure un simple objet de curiosité.’ Daniel Grojnowski, Aux commencements du rire moderne. L’esprit fumiste (Paris: Corti, 1997), 255-256.
1. It is impossible to discuss the “literature of Montmarte” here in full. For a more extensive view see: Mary Shaw, “All of nothing? The Literature of Montmartre,” in Philip Dennis Cate and Mary Shaw, eds., The Spirit of Montmartre. Cabarets, Humor, and the Avant-Garde, 1875-1905(Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 1996. See also: Charles Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Epoque. Entertainment and Festivity in Turn-of-the-Century France (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985); Harrold B. Segel, Turn-of-the-century cabaret. Paris, Barcelona, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Cracow, Moscow, St.Petersburg, Zurich (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). In French: Daniel Grojnowski, Aux commencements du rire moderne. L’esprit fumiste (Paris: Corti, 1997) ; and André Velter, Les Poètes du Chat Noir (Paris: Gallimard, 1996).
1. Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1979), 29-30.
1. For a brief biography of Laforgue in English see: Jules Laforgue, Poems , Trans. Peter Dale (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 2001 [1986]).
1. Des fleurs de bonne volonté, for instance, contains thirteen poems with “Dimanche” in their title, for a total of 56 poems.
1. “Le type de l’adorable, de l’aimée unique, pour moi est par exemple l’anglaise […]. Elle est la seule race de femme que je ne parvienne pas à déshabiller. […] Mon imagination reste stérile, gelée, n’a jamais existé, ne m’a pas dégradé […] Elle n’a pas pour moi d’organes sexuels, je n’y songe pas, il me serait impossible d’y songer. [ …] Toutes les autres sont des chiennes.” Feuilles volantes , in: Jules Laforgue, Oeuvres Complètes , Vol. 3 (Lausanne: L’Age des Hommes, 2000), 960-961.
1. A typical Laforgian play-on-words. The first part of the name refers to the preference Flaubert puts on sparkling gems, the second part is an ironic reference to the – supposedly – “archetypal” character of Herod.
1. Laforgue often reverts to quotes from Shakespeare’s Hamlet , using them as a motto for his poems. In Des Fleurs de bonne volonté , eleven out of 56 poems have a motto taken from Hamlet . He uses these quotes regularly in connection with other recurring themes that for him represent melancholy: Sundays, moonlight, sterility, autumn.
1. This refrain, echoing the practices of the cabaret artistique, is taken from a French nursery song: “Il était un’ bergère’/Et ron et ron, petit patapon/Il était un’ bergère/Qui gardait ses moutons/Ron, ron/Qui gardait ses moutons.
1. Cate and Shaw, 128. Laforgue´s “L’Hiver qui vient” is a good example of this dual objective. “What is often overlooked, however, is that this poem, far from emerging as a work of solitary genius, exemplifies a general context of innovation,” says Shaw (Cate and Shaw 1996, 129). The title of the poem echoes the beginning of a poem by Raoul Ponchon from the Album zutique (1871): “V’la l’hiver et ses guenilles/Un’saison qu’est emmerdant!”, (with the characteristic elision “V’la” instead of “Voila”) and the opening lines of Jehan Rictus’ “L’Hiver” (from Les Soliloques du Pauvre, first performed in cabaret Les Quat’z’Arts in 1895): “Merd’! V ’là l’Hiver et ses dur’tés/V’là l’moment de n’plus s’mettre à poils.” And the first word of Rictus’ poem again raises an echo: of the first word of Jarry’s Ubu Roi namely, the play that knew its premiere a year after Rictus first performed his poem.
1. Two other examples. “Complainte de cette bonne lune” sets off with a variant on the popular song “Sur le pont d’Avignon” and “Complainte de Lord Pierrot” with an adaptation of the more well-known “Au clair de la lune”: “Au clair de la lune/Mon ami Pierrot/Filons en costume/Présider là-haut!/Ma cervelle est morte/Que le Christ l’emporte/Béons à la Lune/La bouche en zéro (…).”Typical in this last poem is the combination of the moon (lune) with Pierrot. Pierrot is, next to Hamlet, the character who for Laforgue embodies the theme of melancholy. In late nineteenth century literature, Pierrot served as the epitome of the melancholic: he is the enemy of the sun, and – consequently – a lunatic.In 1882 Laforgue borrowed the title of one of Adolphe Willette’s famous Pierrot cartoons, Pierrot fumiste, for a play of his own. The Pierrot of Laforgue mocks marriage and wedding nights and proclaims a love that must remain sterile. Notwithstanding he marries. On his wedding night he smothers his bride with kisses, but otherwise doesn’t touch her, and goes to sleep. The next day she is still a virgin. The same thing happens every night. As the months pass, what the family mistook for delicacy becomes cause for concern. The doctor who is finally brought in warns Pierrot that others could rob him of what he despises in his wife. Pierrot then brutally assails her and sets off immediately afterwards – not as someone who has failed, but as someone who punishes his wife: she has spurned true love and exchanged it for the profane sexual act. For Pierrot fumiste see: http://www.laforgue.org/Pierrot.htm
2. The lines “digue dondaine, digue dondon” refer to a popular song from the operetta Les Cloches De Corneville by Robert Planquette, that is supposed to suggest the ringing of church bells: “Digue, digue, digue, digue, digue dong/Sonne, sonne, sonne, sonne, sonne dong/Digue, digue, digue, digue, digue donc/Sonne, sonne, sonne donc, joyeux carillon.” The singer Jules Jouy referred to the same song in his “Le Reveillon des Gueux.” See: Segel, 37-38 and http://kropot.free.fr/JJouy.htm#GUEUX To give an example of a Chat Noir poem with similar characteristics, some lines from “Faculté des sciences du Chat Noir” by Alphonse Allais: “(Air connu): L’azote est un gaz bien malain/Dans l’quel on n’peut pas vivre/Il se trouv’ dans l’air le plus sain/C’est pas lui qui enivre,/Il n’a pas le moindre action,/La faridondaine, la faridondon,/Il empêche la vie/Biribi/A la façon de Barbari, mon ami. ” See: André Velter, Les Poètes du Chat Noir (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 124-125.
1. More examples in: Daniel Grojnowski, Jules Laforgue et l’originalité (Neuchatel: Edition de la Baconnière, 1988), 230-234. Duchamp uses similar phonetic principles in his puns: “Abominables fourrures abdominales”; “Nous livrons à domicile: moustiques domestiques (demi-stock)”; “Daily lady cherche démêlés avec Daily Mail”; “Paroi parée de paresse de paroisse.” See:The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1973), 105-119.
1. For an extensive review of the lexical and linguistic aspects of Laforgue’s prose and poetry see: Jacques-Philippe Saint-Gérand, “Jules Laforgue: Les Complaintes, ‘où Saint-Malo rime avec Sanglots et Bocks avec Coq.’ Éléments de mise en perspective grammaticale et stylistique.” On: http://projects.chass.utoronto.ca/langueXIX/laforg ue/etude.htm
1. Cabanne, 30.
1. Cabanne, 22.
1. E.g., Femme Cocher (Woman Hack Driver, 1907), At the Palais the Glace (1909), Future Mother-in-law (1909), Nuit Blanche (Sleepless Night, 1909), Vice sans fin (Endless Vice, 1909) and Chamber Music (1910). See: Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Delano Greenidge Editions, 1997), volume 2: no’s 102, 144, 146, 150, 155 and 173). The pun in Femme cocher rests on the (homophonic) ambiguity of the title: femme cocher/femme couché (woman coach driver/woman who is making love); the running meter of the coach in front of an hotel and the indication 6969 on the lantern on the coach are allusions to the activities the coach driver and her client are involved in. 2. The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, 125.
1. The question remains what Gleizes and Metzinger may have incited to reject Duchamp’s Nude. For the Cubists the painted object functioned as an ‘anchor’ for the sum of (sensory ) experiences. Duchamp had reduced the object – in this case the nude – to a transient flux. But perhaps there was still another reason for their refusal. Gleizes and Metzinger seem to have thought that Duchamp’s Nude wore a too literary title for a cubist painting. The title would have reduced the painting to a caricature. Funny enough Duchamp’s brothers suggested him to at least change the title of his painting, but that was utterly impossible: Duchamp had painted the title directly on the canvas. The title was, in other words, an integral part of the work.
1. Michel Sanouillet has rightly pointed out the importance of what he calls the ‘popular tradition’ for a good understanding of Duchamp’s ideas: “What sets Duchamp apart [from contemporary avant-garde artists] (…) is the fact that he was led to move in a particular milieu, among the journalists, cartoonists, and artisans of Paris, more than among the fashionable painters and men of letters. Thus he kept close to a French oral tradition that manifests itself in a thousand different ways in the life of the average Parisian: argot, vulgar words, “in” jokes, puns, the language of pamphlets, ads, almanacs etc.” Michel Sanouillet, “Marcel Duchamp and the French Intellectual Tradition”: Anne d’Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine, eds., Marcel Duchamp (New York: Museum of Modern Art, Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1989 [1973], 53.
1. The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, 126.
1. The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, 124.
1. In his notes Duchamp refers to the Large Glas as a “machine agricole” or “instrument aratoire” (an “agricultural machine”). See: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, 44.
1. Apparently, Duchamp wasn’t very precise when it came down to signing and dating the drawings. In the case of Encore à cet astre, for instance, he only the added the indication ‘13’ with the caption ‘très cordialement´ when he offered the drawing to F.C. Torrey.
1. The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, 124. In his conversations with Cabanne Duchamp states that he made about ten drawings, but he suggests to ignore where even the three that are known have gone to. See The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, 30.
1. As has been suggested, the relation between drawing and poem could be found in the similarity between the French word astre (star) and the English stare/stair . See for instance: B. Bailey, “Once More to this Staircase: Another Look at Encore à cet Astre,” Tout Fait, The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal, 2, No. 4. For me, it seams unlikely that Duchamp intended such a relation, considering that he mastered the English language only after 1915, during his stay in the United States.
1. See Schwarz, vol. 2: no’s 109 and 110.
1. “The presence of a non-descriptive title is shown here for the first time. In fact, from then on, I always gave an important role to the title which I added and treated like an invisible color.” Duchamp, in: d’Harnoncourt and McShine, 249. 2. In a letter of 1951 to Mary Ann Adler, quoted in d’Harnoncourt and McShine, 249.
1. In a letter to Bill Camfield, quoted in Jennifer Gough-Cooper and Jacques Caumont, Ephemerides on and about Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Sélavy, 1887-1968 , Palazzo Grassi, Venice (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993), entry for 25-4-1961. 2. Compare for instance Odilon Redon’s works with titles such as Les origins, Esprit de la fôret or La folie, Gustave Moreau’s Les Voix or Félicien Rops’ Parodie humaine .
1. Cabanne, 30.
1. The first stanza of the poem reads: “Quand ce jeune homm’ rentra chez lui (2x)/Il prit à deux mains son vieux crâne/Que de science était un puits!/Crâne/Riche crane/Entends tu la Folie qui plane/Et qui demande le cordon/Digue dondaine, digue dondon.” (this last line 2x).
1. Michel Sanouillet, “Marcel Duchamp and the French intellectual tradition,” d’Harnoncourt and McShine, 50. It is interesting to note that this misreading of Laforgue’s title pops up almost everywhere in the Duchamp-literature. Even Calvin Tomkins, who sacrifices two pages of his Duchamp 1996 biography to Duchamp’s interest in Laforgue (he rightly stresses the point that Duchamp “had a particular liking for the prose narratives that Laforgue calles Moralités legendaires” , amongst which Hamlet was Duchamp’s favorite), fails to see that the title of Laforgue’s poem reads simply ‘Complainte du pauvre jeune homme’. See: Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997), 89-90.
1. See Schwarz, 109-111; Lawrence D. Steefel, Jr. ” Marcel Duchamp’s Encore à cet Astre : A New Look,” Art Journal 36, no. 1 (1976): 23-30; Jerrold Seigel, The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp: Desire, Liberation, and the Self in Modern Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 59-60. Schwarz suggested that Duchamp’s melancholy was afflicted by the marriage of his favorite sister Suzanne. His suggestion that Duchamp was in love with his sister is more funny than probable.
1. John Golding, The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (New York: Viking Press, 1973) [London, Penguin Books, 1972], 25.
1. “en réalité, la bordure noire du Jeune homme triste, m’a surtout servi à cadrer le tableau pour la mettre à son échelle (…).” Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp (Paris: Belfont, 1985 [1959], 122-123. Duchamp moreover added black borders to his first version of The Chess Players too.
1. Cabanne, 29.
1. Cabanne, 36.
1. Cabanne, 105. In French this statement is more heavily emphasized: “[…] j’ai beaucoup de plaisir à le lire au point de vue de la sonorité, de la poésie audible.” See : Pierre Cabanne, Marcel Duchamp, ingénieur du temps perdu (Paris: Belfond, 1977 [1967]), 183-184.
1. The addition of the adverb même in the title La Mariee mise à nu par ses célibataires, même has given rise to a lot of explanations: did Duchamp aim at the – homophonic – “m’aime”, did he want to refer to himself (through a double M [M M or (e)m(e)-(e)m(e)]? Or did he just like the alliterating effect of the “m” in the title, as an echo of Laforgue’s “bonhomm’ “? In answering Otto Hahn about the meaning of “même” Duchamp explained: “Même doesn’t refer to anything. It has a sense of poetic affirmation. As Breton says, humour of affirmation. Neither denigration nor a joke, but humour which amplifies. Somewhat the ‘Ha, ha’ of Jarry.” Marcel Duchamp, interview with Otto Hahn, L’Express , 23 juli 1964. Cited in: Jennifer Gough-Cooper en Jacques Caumont, Ephemerides on and about Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Sélavy , 1887-1968 (Exhibition catalogue Palazzo Grassi, Venice: april-july 1993) (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993), entry for 23 juli 1964.
1. “the Hook (…) is made of a substance of oscillating density. This hook therefore has an indeterminate, variable and uncontrollable weight” and: “The chariot is emancipated horizontally. It is free, of all gravity in the horizontal plane.” The Writings of Marcel Duchamp , 61 and 57.
1. One is reminded of the “jeu de massacre”, the fairground game Duchamp referred to in an interview with Richard Hamilton and George Heard Hamilton: “The idea came probably from the fairs, the country fairs in France at least, were you have a wedding scene. And you have big balls that you throw at the heads of the bride and the bridegroom and the guests (…).” Quoted from: Marcel Duchamp: An Interview by Richard Hamilton in London and George Heard Hamilton in New York (London: Audio Arts, 1975); also on: http://ubumexico.centro.org.mx/sound/duchamp/inter views/Duchamp-Marcel_George-Hamilton- Interview_1959.mp3
1. When questioned by Cabanne about his marriage (his first, in 1927) and the qualification of his “Large Glass” as a “negation of woman”, Duchamp stated: ‘It’s above all a negation of woman in the social sense of the word, that is to say, the woman-wife, the mother, the children, etc. I carefully avoided that, until I was sixty-seven.. Then I married a woman who, because of her age, couldn’t have children. (…) One can have all the women one wants, one isn’t obliged to marry them.” See: Cabanne, 76 2. Grojnowski, Aux commencements du rire modern, 94
Opposition and Sister Squares: Marcel Duchamp and Samuel Beckett.
Opposition and Sister Squares: Marcel Duchamp and Samuel Beckett. Andrew Hugill
Bath Spa University, UK.
Abstract
This article explores the personal and artistic relationship between Marcel Duchamp and Samuel Beckett. It examines the biographical evidence for a connection between the two men and in particular focuses on chess. It explores some apparent evocations of Duchamp, both as a man and as an artist, in writings such as Murphy and Eleuthéria. It suggests that some key aspects of the dramatic structure, staging, and dialogue in Endgame derives from Beckett’s awareness of the peculiar endgame position described in L’opposition et les cases conjuguées sont réconciliées (Opposition and Sister Squares are Reconciled) by Duchamp and Halberstadt. To reach a detailed understanding of this argument, it sets out an expository account of a typical chess position and its accompanying terminologies from the book, then applies those to the play itself. Paris in the 1930s
Samuel Beckett first encountered Marcel Duchamp in Paris during the 1930s. Something of the familiarity of their relationship may be deduced from this casual remark in a letter to George Reavey, written in 1938:
I am halfway through a modified version in French of Love and Lethe. I don’t know if it is better than the English version or merely as bad. I have 10 Poems in French also, mostly short, When I have a few more I shall send them to Éluard. Or get Duchamp to do it. (ed. Fehsenfeld and Overbeck, 2009, 645).
‘Love and Lethe’ was one of the stories in More Pricks Than Kicks (Beckett, 1934, 85-100) and the poems were later to be published as part of a set of twelve as ‘Poèmes 38-39’ (Beckett, 1946, 288-293). In 1932, Beckett had translated several of Paul Éluard’s poems for This Quarter (Éluard, 1932, 86-98). By 1935 Reavey was in the process of preparing a new collection, entitled Thorns of Thunder, in which he intended to reprint these translations, with some more besides (ed. Fehsenfeld and Overbeck, 2009, 296-297). However, since these new translations were due at a time when Beckett was struggling to complete Murphy, he was obliged to refuse to take on Éluard’s ‘La Personnalité toujours neuve’ (A Personality Always New), declaring that he was ‘up to [his] eyes in other work’ (Ibid. 330). He lamented to Thomas MacGreevy in a letter dated 9 April [1936]: ‘Murphy wont move for me at all. I get held up over the absurdest difficulties of detail. But I sit before it most day of most days.’ (Ibid. 331). Some relief from the pressures of writing Murphy came from playing chess. Marcel Duchamp seems to have been an occasional opponent during this period. Deirdre Bair cites Kay Boyle, Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, Josette Hayden, and an anonymous Irish writer and friend of Beckett, in recording that:
Beckett knew Duchamp throughout the 1930s in Paris,
having met him at Mary Reynolds’ house. Beckett frequented the cafés where the best players congregated, as did Duchamp, and he followed the chess column that Duchamp occasionally wrote for the Paris daily newspaper Ce Soir (Bair, 1980, 393). James Knowlson similarly recounts a conversation with Beckett in which he declared that he ‘played chess occasionally with Marcel Duchamp’ (Knowlson, 1996, 289). Although this statement is placed within a chapter covering the period 1937-39, there is little doubt that the acquaintance between the two artists preceded those dates. Mary Reynolds, who had begun her long- term relationship with Duchamp in 1926 (a love affair that only came to an end with her death, with Duchamp at her side, in 1950), welcomed both of them into her house in Montparnasse: The 1930s marked a period of tranquillity, contentment, and artistic achievement for [Mary] Reynolds. Her relationship with Duchamp had settled into a comfortable intimacy. Her creativity and binding production were at their highest levels. She held an open house almost nightly at her home at 14, rue Hallé, with her quiet garden the favored spot after dinner for the likes of Duchamp, Brancusi, Man Ray, Breton, Barnes, Guggenheim, Éluard, Mina Loy, James Joyce, Jean Cocteau, Samuel Beckett, and others. (Godlewski, 2001, 12).
It is therefore no surprise to find Beckett writing with complete confidence in 1938 that Duchamp would pass the poems to Éluard, who in turn would be willing to assist in getting them published. Murphy
Duchamp steered a studiously idiosyncratic course through Parisian intellectual life, continuing the line of Dada yet somewhat distant from it, actively involved in Surrealism yet managing to avoid becoming too close to Breton’s group. Nevertheless, in 1938 he designed the Second Surrealist Exhibition at the Galérie des Beaux-Arts. Beckett, similarly, ‘shared in the thrilling atmosphere of experiment and innovation that surrounded Surrealism’ but kept his distance ‘largely because, … they were distinctly cool, if not actively hostile, to Joyce’s own ‘revolution of the word’ (Knowlson, 1996, 107). Murphy reflects this sense of detached engagement. The celebrated chess game in which Mr Endon methodically moves his pieces out, then moves them back to their starting positions, irrespective of Murphy’s own moves, is both dadaistically absurd and surreal, while at the same time fitting neither of those descriptors exactly. The detached and remorseless logic of Mr Endon himself, whose chess-playing is described as his ‘one frivolity’, also seems somewhat Duchampian in character:
Endon was a schizophrenic of the most amiable variety, at least for the purposes of such a humble and envious outsider as Murphy. The langour in which he passed his days while deepening now and then to the extent of some charming suspension of gesture, was never so profound as to inhibit all movement. His inner voice did not harangue him, it was unobtrusive and melodious, a gentle continuo in the whole consort of his hallucinations. The bizarrerie of his attitudes never exceeded a stress laid on their grace.
There are other seeming echoes elsewhere, for example, Neary’s avowal ‘To gain the affections of Miss Dwyer even for on short hour, would benefit me no end’, which is similar in both content and cadence to the title of Duchamp’s small glass of 1918: To be looked at (from the other side of the glass) with one eye, close to, for almost an hour. Katherine S. Dreier, who was often referred to as “Miss Dreier”, owned the small glass at this time. Chapter Six, which is devoted to the split between Murphy’s mind and his body, reminds one of Duchamp’s finding a way out of ‘retinal’ painting and into conceptual art and thence to chess. Duchamp famously sought to put art at the service of the mind and eschewed the physicality of ‘retinal’ painting, by adopting a ‘neutral’ style, by eliminating backgrounds from his work, by removing evidence of the artist’s hand, and finally by giving up the making of art altogether. His celebrated pursuit of the beauty of aesthetic indifference, expressed most strongly in the readymades, was also a quest for freedom: from taste, from the art world, from choice. He consciously worked within the concept of liberty that this afforded him, describing himself as a Cartesian whose ideal was the logic of chess:
Chess is a marvelous piece of Cartesianism, and so imaginative that it doesn’t even look Cartesian at first. The beautiful combinations that chess players invent – you don’t see them coming, but afterward there is no mystery – it’s a pure logical conclusion (Tomkins 1998, 211).
Beckett also made a link between indifference and freedom in Murphy:
The freedom of indifference, the indifference of freedom, the will dust in the dust of its object the
act a handful of sand let fall – these were some of the shapes he had sighted, sunset landfall after many days. While the indifference described here is not exactly the same as Duchamp’s aesthetic indifference, the sense of freedom that indifference brings, a resignation of the will in favour of an apparently insignificant move, leads us once again to their shared enjoyment of chess. Here the chess is metaphorical rather than literal Cartesianism, and tinged with Beckettian sadness and a sense of futility. The game culminates in Murphy’s resignation, both in the chess sense and in a ‘transcendental sense of disappointment’, as he realises that he is incapable of achieving Mr Endon’s hermetic detachment. The image of a head amidst scattered chessmen conjures up Duchamp’s various studies for his painting, Portrait of Chess Players: Following Mr Endon’s forty-third move Murphy gazed for a long time at the board before laying his Shah on his side, and again for a long time after that act of submission. But little by little his eyes were captured by the brilliant swallowtail of Mr Endon’s arms and legs, purple, scarlet, black and glitter, till they saw nothing else, and that in a short time only as a vivid blur, Neary’s big blooming buzzing confusion or ground, mercifully free of figure. Wearying soon of this he dropped his head on his arms in the midst of the chessmen, which scattered with a terrible noise. Mr Endon’s finery persisted for a little in an after-image scarcely inferior to the original. Then this also faded
and Murphy began to see nothing, that colourlessness which is such a rare postnatal treat, being the absence (to abuse a nice distinction) not of percipere but of percipi. The final sentence is a reference to the famous maxim usually attributed to Bishop Berkeley: esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived). This is itself an immaterialist reversal of the Cartesian cogito. The absence of self-perception which Murphy achieves is an ironic ‘abuse’ of the stinction between the two. When he awakes from his trance, Murphy finds that Mr Endon has wandered off and is pressing light-switches in the corridors of the lunatic asylum in a way that seems haphazard but is in fact determined by an a mental pattern as precise as any of those that governed his chess. All this leads to Murphy’s death. Soon after he has become a warden at the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat, he procures, with the help of the poet, Ticklepenny, the garret of his dreams. It is an attic with a single skylight that is isolated from the rest of the house. Its only drawback is that it lacks heating. While Murphy is out, Ticklepenny rigs up a contraption whose Duchampian characteristics are uncanny, consisting of a radiator that must be connected to the gas by glass tubing that flows from a WC on the floor below.
He described how he had turned it on in the WC and raced back to the garret. He explained how the flow could only be regulated from the WC, as there was no tap at the radiator’s seat of entry. The linking of water and gas occurs throughout Duchamp’s work, most notably in La Mariée mise à nu par ses Célibataires, même (The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, even) (1915-23), better known as the Large Glass. The Green Box of 1934, which contains all the notes that accompany the Large Glass, states: ‘Given 1. the waterfall 2. the illuminating gas’ (Sanouillet and Peterson, 1975, 27). The precise derivation of this is made clear with the ‘imitated readymade’ of 1958: a facsimile of plaques attached to certain Parisian apartment blocks, with which Beckett would have been very familiar, which read: ‘Eau et Gaz à tous les étages’ (Water and Gas on every floor). The connection between the two is continued thematically and representationally in Duchamp’s posthumous installation Étant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau / 2° le gaz d’éclairage (Given: 1 The Waterfall, 2 The Illuminating Gas) (1946-1966). Thus the WC resembles the Bachelor Machine, powered by a waterfall, regulated by a ballcock (in the Glass it is a bottle of Benedictine) which rises and falls by means of a hook arrangement (just as the jet is turned on by a double chain and ring). The connecting tubes function like the capillary tubes of the lower domain of the Glass. The radiator, with its apparent defiance of ignition, suggests the cool Bride whose desire magneto (coils) has to be excited before she becomes aroused/hot. The skylight evokes the Moving Inscription, allowing Murphy to look out at the stars (i.e. the Milky Way). The Illuminating Gas, powered by the Waterfall, animates the whole and brings warmth to the garret.
And what of Murphy and his imminent doom? We are already aware of his status as confirmed bachelor. We are also aware of the intensity of his longing to achieve the Endon state. Murphy resembles one of the nine ‘shots’ drilled through the Large Glass: a foreign body in the purity of the Bride, a hole in a pane of glass, a nothingness within a nothing. As he returns to the quarters of the male nurses (who, of necessity, all live below the garret) he strips bare. He leaves behind his uniform (in Duchampian parlance, his ‘malic mould’) and becomes undiluted, uncontained Gas. This loss of form and identity is shown by his inability to conjure up any images. He has become as transparent as the Glass which surrounds him. Seated in his rocking-chair (whose motion apparently resembles that of the Glider) he perceives the radiator (the Bride) before penetrating the Glass, shot through to ‘…the freedom of that light and dark that did not clash, nor fade nor lighten except to their communion.’
The consequent fireball seems to be more orgasm than apotheosis, more petit mort than Big Bang. Murphy confirms the volatile nature of the gas of which he becomes a part in his Duchamp-like proposition that ‘Chaos’ is the etymological origin of the word ‘Gas’. Now, ironically, the WC is ‘lit by electricity’, just like the Large Glass depicted in the drawing Cols Alités of 1959. The causalité that leads from Endon to the shattered skylight is the same that leads from opening move to checkmate.
Of course, none of these parallels is supported by any corroborating evidence, either in Beckett’s correspondence, or Duchamp’s writings, or in the critical literature. Yet, it does seem curious that, at a moment when chess dominates the novel, such Duchampian resonances should appear. Perhaps it is merely a matter of a certain zeitgeist which Duchamp and Beckett both succeeded in capturing, or perhaps it goes deeper than that. What is beyond doubt, however, is that the two men were about to begin a brief but meaningful association in which chess was the driving force.
Arcachon, 1940
In June 1940, the Nazis occupied Paris. Duchamp had already decided, following the fall of the Netherlands in May, to flee to the small seaside town of Arcachon on the Bay of Biscay, southwest of Bordeaux. Beckett and his partner Suzanne Descehevaux-Dumesnil (of whom he was ‘dispassionately’ fond) also fled Paris, first to Vichy and eventually joining Duchamp in Arcachon. Accounts vary somewhat as to the extent of the presence of Mary Reynolds in Arcachon during this period. According to James Knowlson, it was ‘thanks to her kindness and generosity’ that the couple were able to find a room and, with the help of a loan from Valéry Larbaud, then to rent a house overlooking the sea: the Villa Saint-Georges, 135 bis Boulevard de la Plage (Knowlson, 1996, 300). Susan Glover Godlewski, on the other hand, reveals that despite the best persuasive efforts of Marcel Duchamp, Reynolds stubbornly refused to leave Paris, reluctantly spending no more than perhaps a month’s vacation in Arcachon (Godlewski, 2001, 15). She certainly stayed in Paris throughout the war and was an active member of the Résistance. In a letter to her brother, dated August 7th 1941, she said that she spent much time ‘tracking down food and [giving] unorganized aid’ (Ibid. 15). This ‘aid’ was resistance work, for which she was later narrowly to avoid execution.
Whatever the truth, at some point the two couples were joined by a third, the painter Jean Crotti and his second wife, Duchamp’s sister, Suzanne. The main pastime of the three men was playing chess. Beckett was ‘delighted to find that, in one move, he had acquired two new chess partners.’ (Knowlson, 1996, 301). They played regularly in a seafront café. Crotti and Beckett seem to have been fairly well matched, but Duchamp, who was a leading chess master, was, according to Beckett, ‘always too good for him. Yet he said this with the quiet satisfaction of knowing that he had played against someone of that calibre.’ (Haynes and Knowlson, 2003, 13). Both men shared an enormous admiration for the great players, as this incident in Arcachon demonstrates:
Once when Duchamp and Beckett were playing chess together, Duchamp pointed out, to Beckett’s great excitement, that the world chess champion, Alexander Alekhine (a chess genius, according to Beckett) had just walked in. (Knowlson, 1996, 301). It is not hard to imagine that both would have agreed with Duchamp’s assertion to the New York State Chess Association banquet in 1952 that ‘the chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chess-board, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem … I have come to the personal conclusion while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists’. Portrait of Chess Players
So what did they talk about, these two masters of the art of silence? Unfortunately no record of their conversations exists, but we may assume that it was mostly fairly casual and probably focused on the game in hand, or perhaps current affairs, or maybe life in Paris. Chess players tend not to talk during a game, although in a non-professional setting such as this that rule may be somewhat relaxed. Perhaps Duchamp, as an advanced player, gave Beckett a little tuition, if only in the form of post-game analysis. Beckett was always keen to learn more about chess and Duchamp had already published (in 1932) his book on endgames L’opposition et les cases conjuguées sont reconciliées (Opposition and Sister Squares are reconciled), co-authored with Vitaly Halberstadt. They would certainly have enjoyed remaining quiet, but it is also rather inconceivable that they would not have discussed at least some aspects of their artistic work. Perhaps they talked about the extent to which chess was such an important force for them both. For Duchamp, it was ‘the imagining of the movement or the gesture that makes the beauty, in [chess]. It’s completely in one’s gray matter.’ (Cabanne, 1971, 18-19). It is often stated that he gave up art for chess on his return to Paris in 1923, and it is certainly true that playing chess dominated his existence from that time (despite the secret work on the posthumously revealed installation Etant Donnés). However, it is also clear that, for Duchamp, there was little distinction between art and chess. It was ‘a logical, or if you prefer, a Cartesian constant’ that was highly important to someone who famously wished to put painting ‘at the service of the mind’ (Sanouillet and Peterson, 1975, 125).
Duchamp began playing chess as a child and its presence in family life was depicted in the 1910 painting La Partie d’échecs (The Chess Game), which shows his two older brothers at the board while their wives take tea. Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon were the subjects once again of the Portrait de joueurs d’échecs (Portrait of Chess Players) of 1911, but Duchamp’s style had already moved on from the earlier influence of Cézanne to a reinterpretation of Cubism that was to culminate later the same year in the Nu Descendant un escalier (Nude Descending a Staircase). Duchamp commented:
I painted the heads of my two brothers playing chess, not in a garden this time, but in indefinite space … This particular canvas was painted by gaslight to obtain the subdued effect, when you look at it again by
daylight.’ (d’Harnoncourt and McShine, 1973, 254). This ‘subdued effect’ reflects Duchamp’s growing concern with removing the superfluous elements from his work. In successive pieces, the background was eliminated, becoming flat black in the Broyeuse de Chocolat (Chocolate Grinder) of 1913 and transparent by the time of the Large Glass. As it moved towards the condition of the chessboard, Duchamp’s art lost anything that might be considered immaterial to the ‘game’ that was being played. (Etant Donnés finally reinstated the background, but ironically, and on a chessboard floor). Thus it acquired a certain rigour that entirely befitted his desire to achieve an aesthetic indifference that is closer to mathematics than the decorative arts. The readymades, ‘found’ objects that most epitomised this indifference, also contained allusions to chess, most notably in Trébuchet (Trap)(1917), which consists of a coat rack nailed to the floor, its four hooks uppermost. The title is a reference to this equally spiky, yet salutary, chess position (Figure 1):
Figure 1: Le Trébuchet (The Trap) If Black is to play, he wins the opposing pawn by:
1. … f4-e3
2. b5-c5 e3-e4. It would be wrong to play
1. … f4-e4 because of
2. b5-c5! and White wins the pawn.
During his period in Argentina in 1918-19, Duchamp designed his own chess pieces and a set of rubber stamps that could be used for playing postal chess. It was also during this sojourn, socially isolated as he was in Buenos Aires, that he became so obsessed with the game that he decided to turn professional. In 1920 he joined the Marshall Chess Club in New York, and by 1923 he was participating in his first major tournament, in Brussels. In 1925, he designed the poster for the French Chess Championship in Nice. In 1931, following a tournament in Prague, he became a member of the committee of French Chess Federation and its delegate (until 1937) to the International Chess Federation. In 1932, in what was probably the best performance of his chess career, he won the Paris
Chess Tournament. In the same year, he saw Raymond Roussel playing chess at a nearby table in the Café de la Régence, but he did not have the courage to introduce himself. The influence of Roussel on the Large Glass has been well documented (Henderson 1998) and the presence of his poetic method (derived from plays on words) may be detected throughout Duchamp’s oeuvre, including the readymades and the alter ego Rrose Sélavy. Along with Alfred Jarry and Jean-Pierre Brisset, Roussel provided much of the literary underpinnings of Duchamp’s art. The fact that Roussel was also a leading chess player, who had published a celebrated solution to the difficult mate with a Bishop and a Knight alone, explains Duchamp’s nervousness at the encounter.
Duchamp took part in his last major international chess tournament in 1933, in Folkestone, England, but continued to play correspondence chess, serving as captain of the French team, in which role he remained undefeated.
Beckett shared Duchamp’s passion for chess, if not his playing ability. He (Beckett) was inspired by his uncle Howard, who had the rare distinction of having beaten Capablanca (later to become world champion) during an exhibition match in Dublin before the First World War (Knowlson, 1996, 9). Beckett also greatly admired Capablanca, whose extremely lucid playing style and influential books emphasized the importance of the endgame as the essence of chess. Beckett played enthusiastically during his schooldays and at university and, as we have seen, throughout his life, never losing an opportunity for a game. He had an extensive library of chess books, and explicitly based certain aspects of his writings on the game, most notably, of course, in Murphy and Endgame, although allusions to it appear as early as 1929 in the short story ‘Assumption’.
Opposition and Sister Squares are reconciled
L’opposition et les cases conjuguées sont reconciliées was published in Paris and Brussels (Editions de l’Echiquier, 1932) in a limited edition. Few copies were sold, and Francis M. Naumann records that, late into his life, Duchamp “kept most of the edition in a closet, giving copies away to friends whenever he thought the gift appropriate” (Naumann and Bailey 2009, 22). The book’s design and its use of chess terminologies are both somewhat unusual for a chess textbook, and clearly resonate with themes in Duchamp’s artwork. So, for example, the illustrations frequently divide the chessboard across the middle using a dotted line as a ‘hinge’, self-consciously echoing the division of the Large Glass into two panels. To compound the allusion, eight of these ‘hinged pictures’, as Duchamp called theLarge Glass (Sanouillet and Peterson, 1975, 27), are printed on transparent paper so that they may be folded to make the two principal domains correspond exactly. Here we see one variation of the instruction that was eventually to be included in the Green Box of 1934: ‘develop the principle of the hinge’.
The chess argument depends on two well-known properties that become highly important in the endgame, but Duchamp’s choice of terminologies may have had a wider significance than just their chess usage. His preference for the term ‘sister’ squares (in English) over the more commonly used ‘corresponding’ squares may be a nod towards Suzanne.The term ‘opposition’, while it does not figure much as a word in Duchamp’s notes, nevertheless occurs throughout his work as a theme, as is best exemplified by the relationship between Bride and Bachelors, in the two panels of the Glass, which are then ‘reconciled’ by the operations of that imaginary technology. The word ‘domain’ occurs particularly in the Green Box with reference to the two panels of the Glass. The ‘passage’ of the White King from secondary to principal domain echoes the passage of the Virgin to the Bride (as depicted in the canvas of that title of 1912). The principle of the opposition in chess is as follows: Figure 2: The Opposition
In Figure 2, with White to play, Black ‘has the opposition’ in both cases. a6 – a8 is direct opposition, whereas g2- g8 is distant. This is due to the rule which prevents Kings from occupying adjoining squares. The King which has the move is obliged to give ground. Figure 3: Virtual Opposition
Likewise, in Fig. 3, the two Kings are in ‘virtual opposition’, because they occupy two diagonally opposed squares of the same colour which are at the corners of a rectangle. To reach a full understanding of how all this might have influenced Endgame requires a knowledge of Duchamp and Halberstadt’s book. What follows is an illustrative account of one of the positions used by the authors to illustrate their thesis. The position was composed by Emmanuel Lasker and Gustavus Charles Reichelm, and first published in the Chicago Tribune in 1901, and is still occasionally used today. Figure 4: Lasker-Reichelm, 1901
In Figure 4 it is immediately clear that the pawns are unable to move. It also becomes evident that the White King can penetrate the Black position via two (and only two) squares: b5 and g5. Should he succeed in occupying either of these two squares (with or without the move) the White King will capture a black pawn (a5 or f5), thereby enabling him to promote his own pawn to a Queen on the eighth rank to win the game. The two squares b5 and g5 are called the ‘pole’ squares
(X and O, respectively). To prevent White’s King from occupying g5, Black’s King must arrive at g6 on the move after White’s reaches h4, forcing him to retreat. White, therefore, must reach h4 whilst Black is still at e8 or e7 (i.e. he is two files ahead of Black). Likewise, to prevent White from occupying b5, Black must occupy a6 or b6 on the move after White’s to c4. However, if Black chooses a6, White will be two files ahead in a race to the other pole and so Black can only prevent penetration on b6. Figure 5: Routes
Figure 5 shows that there is not a single minimum route between the two threats for either King. One square of White’s minimum route has a unique correspondent on Black’s minimum route, namely d3 (to c7). Thus, if White moves c4-d3, Black replies ….b6-c7, and will arrive at g6 in time to prevent White from occupying O (g5). The related squares d3 and c7 are the ‘sister squares’. The pairings b6 and c4, and g6 and h4 are also sister squares. Figure 6: Sister Squares
Once these sister squares have been observed, corresponding blocks may be built up: the ‘principal domains’. In Figure 6, the squares C only touch on A and B. Likewise D to A and C, and so on. The two rectangles formed by the squares B thru G are the principal domains of the White and Black Kings. The squares A are the decisive positions of the Kings at pole X, and are therefore not strictly part of the principal domains. The two domains have the property of ‘superposition by folding’ along the hinge a5-h5. For the coincidence to be perfect, one must move the Black domain one square to the right. This fact enables us to establish a law of heterodox opposition for this position: a7 and b3 (squares D) are in heterodox opposition because the two squares are equidistant from the hinge and on right hand neighbour files. Thus the general formula for heterodox opposition in the principal domains is as follows: without the move, the White King has the heterodox opposition when he occupies, on a right hand adjacent file to the file occupied by the Black King, a square of opposite colour to that occupied by the latter.
Let us suppose that the White King occupies b2 (i.e. square F in his principal domain) and he has the heterodox opposition to Black (who has the move) positioned on his own F (a8). The authors examine three possible replies for Black: 1) 1. … a8- a7; 2) 1. …a8-b7; 3) 1. …a8-b8. Of these, the second rapidly transmutes into the first.
1st Variation, after 1. …a8-a7
b2-b3 (White retains the heterodox opposition and the threat of reaching A in one move)
2. …a7-b7 (forced to remain one square from A)
3. b3-c3 (still has heterodox opposition and threat on A)
3. …b7-c7 (forced. If he plays b7-a7, White will have the two file advantage to O)
4. c3-d3 (still has heterodox opposition and threat on A)
4. … any (Black is now forced to abandon his control of A, as any move to the left will give White a two file advantage to O. White now occupies A and wins).
2nd Variation
Becomes 1st Variation, e.g.
1. …a8-b7
2. b2-c3 etc.
3rd Variation, after 1. …a8-b8 2. b2-c2 (takes the heterodox opposition)
2. …b8-c8 (to keep White King as far as possible from A)
3. c2-d2 (retains the heterodox opposition)
3. …c8-d8 (Black cannot turn back because White will gain the two file advance. The first variation showed that …c8-c7 would be a win for White)
4. d2-c3 (White breaks the opposition, threatening to reach A in one move)
4 …d8-c7 (forced to protect A)
5. c3-d3 (reverting to the first variation, and White wins).
It is clear, therefore, that White must enter his principal domain on a square which gives him the heterodox opposition, or which does not permit Black to take it.
Figure 7: White’s Secondary Domain
In Figure 7 the dashed letters indicate the extent of the White King’s secondary domain. As we have seen, he must pass from this domain into his principal domain either by taking the heterodox opposition, or by moving onto a square which does not allow Black to take it. Thus, in Figure 7, White cannot play to b2 (F) on the first move, because Black would take the heterodox opposition by moving to a8 (F). Therefore, the best White can do is 1. al-bl (C’-D’), thereby taking the secondary heterodox opposition (on file adjacent to the right and square of opposite colour). If Black replies 1. … a7-b7 (avoiding F and E which would allow White to enter his principal domain with the heterodox opposition, at the corresponding sister square), then White must play 2. bl-cl (D’-C’), retaining the secondary heterodox opposition.
Now Black must avoid squares F, E, G, which would allow White to enter his principal domain as before, so he plays 2. … b7- c7 (C-B).
White, as before, can only retain the secondary heterodox opposition, and must play 3.cl-dl (C’-B’).
Black cannot now play to C, E or A, because White will have the two file advantage to pole O. If he goes to c8 (G), White will enter his principal domain at d2, with the heterodox opposition, and win as we have seen. Black must play to the d file (the solution is the same for 3. …c7-d7 as 3. … c7-d8).
Now the White King can breach the opposition, by entering his principal domain at c2 (E), thereby preventing Black from taking the heterodox opposition at his sister E, and simultaneously threatening to reach c4 (A) in two moves. Black must remain on the d file, since a move to G or B would enable White to take the heterodox opposition in the principal domain.
White replies 5. c2-c3 (E-C), remaining in breach of the opposition and threatening to reach A in one move.
Because of this, Black is forced to play 5. … (d)-c7 (C-B).
We have already seen how White will win once he has taken the heterodox opposition in the principal domain (e.g. 6. c3-d3).
The authors conclude their investigation into this position by giving a drawing variation, in order to show how ignorant play by White can ruin his chances of a win. In such a variation, Black is satisfied to take and hold the heterodox opposition, preventing penetration of his position.
Returning to the position of Figure 7 (the original position), let us assume that White foolishly plays 1. al-b2 (C’-F).
As Black has the move, he takes the heterodox opposition in the principal domain by playing 1. …a7-a8 (D-F). If the White King moves about in the principal domain, Black will follow him, always keeping the principal heterodox opposition, and will accompany him, one file behind, if he attempts to reach pole O. That is a draw. If White returns to al (C’), Black can take the secondary heterodox opposition in reverse at b7 (C).
From this, it is clear that White must leave the a-file on his first move (in the original position) and never return to it. An opening move of 1. al-a2 would lead to a draw, since Black would take the secondary heterodox opposition in reverse with the reply 1. …a7-b8 (D-E), leading to a drawn game.
In conclusion, it will be observed that the most Black can hope for is a draw. Given accurate play by White, Black can only succeed in delaying the progress of events.
Eleuthéria The first appearance of chess in Beckett’s theatrical works occurs in the suppressed play Eleuthéria (1947). Towards the end of Act III, an ‘audience member’ delivers the following speech to the Glazier:
… if I’m still here it’s that there is something in this business that literally paralyzes me and leaves me completely dumbfounded. How do you explain that? You play chess? No. It doesn’t matter. It’s like when you watch a chess game between players of the lowest class. For three quarters of an hour they haven’t touched a single piece. They sit there gaping at the board like two horses’ asses and you’re also there, even more of a horse’s ass than they are, nailed to the spot, disgusted, bored, worn-out, filled with wonder at so much stupidity. Up until the moment when you can’t take it any more. Then you tell them, So do that, do that, what are you waiting for, do that and it’s all over, we can go to bed. It’s inexcusable, it goes against even
the most elementary know-how, you haven’t even met the guys, but it’s stronger than you, it’s either that or a fit. There you have pretty much what’s happening to me. Mutatis mutandis, of course. You get me? (Beckett, 1995, 143-44).
It is this sense of frustration and despair, deriving from the inevitable decline of a chess game first identified in Murphy, but exaggerated at the hands of the idiot players (amongst whom, one suspects, Beckett might have numbered himself) who represent us all as we fail to grasp the hopelessness of our situation, that is a theme in much of Beckett’s work. The Cartesian mechanisms of chess always demand that choices are made; choices that gradually run out until, in the end, win or lose, there remain no more. Duchamp declared: ‘in art I came finally to the point where I wished to make no further decisions, decisions of an artistic order, so to speak’ (Judovitz, 2010, 109). Beckett applied the same principle to life itself.
It is interesting to note that the chess-playing protagonist of Eleuthéria is called ‘Victor’, which was the nickname given to Duchamp by Henri-Pierre Roché (the author of Jules et Jim), a close personal friend since before World War I. Roché’s unfinished novel of 1957, entitled Victor (Duchamp), is a character study. Caroline Cros observes:
The main character, Victor (Duchamp), is almost entirely absent throughout the book, yet Patricia (Beatrice [Webb]) and Pierre (Henri-Pierre [Roché]) are both utterly fascinated by him – ‘There is no danger since we both love him’ – and speak of him incessantly
(Cros, 2006, 45).
This is essentially the scenario of Eleuthéria, in whichVictor is more often absent than present, yet is the main topic of conversation amongst the other characters. He constantly evades giving an account of himself, yet exerts a powerful influence, effectively ‘playing’ the other characters like chess pieces. Challenged by the Glazier, he says: VICTOR: I look out for my welfare, when I can.
GLAZIER: Your welfare! What welfare?
VICTOR: My freedom.
GLAZIER: Your freedom! It is beautiful, your freedom. Freedom to do what?
VICTOR: To do nothing.
It was Roché who wrote the following summary of Duchamp and Halberstadt’s book: There comes a time toward the end of the game when there is almost nothing left on the board, and when the outcome depends on the fact that the King can or cannot occupy a certain square opposite to, and as a given distance from, the opposing king. Only sometimes the King has a choice between two moves and may act in such a way as to suggest he has completely lost interest in winning the game. Then the other King, if he too is a true sovereign, can give the appearance of being even less interested, and so on. Thus the two monarchs can
waltz carelessly one by one across the board as though they weren’t at all engaged in mortal combat. However, there are rules governing each step they take and the slightest mistake is instantly fatal. One must provoke the other to commit that blunder and keep his own head at all times. These are the rules that Duchamp brought to light (the free and forbidden squares) to amplify this haughty junket of the Kings (Lebel, 1959, 83). Endgame
Ruby Cohn recounted Beckett’s own description of the scenario of Endgame, which seems to echo Roché’s text: Hamm is a king in this chess game lost from the start. From the start he knows he is making loud senseless moves. That he will make no progress at all with the gaff. Now at the last he makes a few senseless moves as only a bad player would. A good one would have given up long ago. He is only trying to delay the inevitable end. Each of his gestures is one of the last useless moves which put off the end. He’s a bad player (Cohn, 1974, 152).
Deirdre Bair cites an unnamed Irish writer and friend of Beckett who ‘feels that any interpretation of Fin de partie must begin with the influence of Marcel Duchamp’ (Bair, 1978, 393). The contention in the present article is that this influence goes deeper than just the basic predicament described by Roché and Cohn, and is the result of Beckett’s awareness of Duchamp and Halberstadt’s book, or at least of the endgame position it contains. While Dirk Van Hulle has confirmed that the book is not among those in Beckett’s extant library, “that does not necessarily imply that he didn’t read Duchamp’s book, because Beckett gave away many of his books to friends” (private email to the author, 5.7.13). Since Duchamp himself gave away copies of L’opposition… it is possible that Beckett received one and passed it on. Or it is equally possible that, given their circumstances in Paris and Arcachon, the book was never actually given to Beckett, but Duchamp explained its contents to him. Either way, its unique characteristics may be detected in the structuring of the drama, in the staging, and in some key points of dialogue. The endgame position itself is, as Duchamp himself pointed out, ‘so rare as to be nearly Utopian’ (Cabanne, 1971, 78). It almost has the status of a philosophical proposition of great theoretical purity. It is full of ironies, indeed of potential horrors. This is not just any endgame: it is the endgame to end all endgames.
The frustrations of the position described above finds expression in the way in which Black (Hamm) haphazardly delays and thwarts White (Clov). Identification of these two characters with their respective chess colours is made easy by the symbolic attributes of both: Hamm is blind, hence unaware; in a wheelchair, hence restricted; wearing dark glasses, hence ‘black’; Clov is knowing, mobile, and very frustrated.
Both the structure and content of the play echo this delayed peculiarity. Beckett’s response is poetic yet formal: the state of a player at the end of a long game. Hamm and Clov themselves represent both players and pieces (the Kings) and the whole play takes place at the next-to-end of the dramatic structure, which so strongly resembles the phases of a game of chess.
Hamm is desperate for the end of the game, yet unable to comprehend the geometry of the position: ‘Enough, it’s time it ended, in the refuge too. (Pause) And yet I hesitate, I hesitate to… to end.’
His opening cri de coeur resembles Duchamp’s note in the Green Box: ‘given that…. ; if I suppose I’m suffering a lot…’:
Can there be misery (he yawns) loftier than mine? No doubt. Formerly. But now? (Pause) My father? (Pause) My mother? (Pause) My … dog? (Pause) Oh I am willing to believe they suffer as much as such creatures can suffer. But does that mean their sufferings equal mine? No doubt.
Duchamp’s quasi-mathematical (“given that…”) statement of supposed suffering is matched by the detached, even bored (“he yawns”), self-observation of Hamm, whose similarly quasi- mathematical qualities are revealed most clearly in the French: “Mais est-ce dire que nos souffrances se valent? Sans doute.” The play is set in a location by the sea, one where the outside world has crumbled away to nothingness. This setting is reminiscent of Arcachon and Europe under the Nazis. The opening description of the stage set and Clov’s actions establish the Duchamp/Halberstadt position. Grey light is reflected from the surface of a chessboard. The two windows represent the two poles of the position. This is confirmed later in the play when Clov looks through both windows and describes the scene for Hamm’s benefit: ‘Light black. From pole to pole.’ (‘Light black’ also describes the alternation of white and black squares).
The two ashbins, homes of Nagg and Nell, symbolize the immobile and redundant pawns. A picture with its face turned to the wall seems perhaps to echo Duchamp’s abandonment of painting for chess. When Clov removes the picture and replaces it with an alarm clock, the echo rings louder, since, from the audience’s point of view, the clock is seen from the side, a disposition which has a source in the Green Box:
The Clock in profile and the Inspector of Space
Note: When a clock is seen from the side it no longer tells the time.
Beckett extends this examination of a clock’s properties by having his characters listen to its alarm, as if it were a piece of music:
(Enter Clov with alarrn-clock. He holds it against Hamm’s ear And releases alarm.They listen to it ringing to the end. Pause.) CLOV: Fit to wake the dead! Did you hear it?
HAMM: Vaguely.
CLOV: The end is terrific!
HAMM: I prefer the middle.
Notice that Hamm’s ineptitude extends even to the simplest act of listening, whereas Clov is well able to appreciate the change from activity to inactivity. Hamm prefers the cover and confusion of ceaseless activity, just as he would have preferred the multiplicity of choices in the middle-game which has ended. Clov’s opening movements and actions serve not only to map out the position, but also tell us that he understands it, since it is he who opens the curtains on the windows and looks through them. It is as though we are seeing enacted the thought-processes of the White player, as he analyses the position using Duchampian geometry. His opening speech makes clear the facts of his position, i.e. that he is waiting for Hamm/Black to move to a suitable square, enabling him (Clov) to enter his principal domain either with or in breach of the opposition.
I’ll go now to my kitchen, ten feet by ten feet – by ten feet, and wait for him to whistle me. (Pause) Nice dimensions, nice proportions, I’ll lean on the table, and look at the wall, and wait for him to whistle me.
The kitchen, therefore, is White’s secondary domain, as the squareness of its outline suggests, and Clov is watching the wall not through boredom, but in anticipation of the moment when he will be able to penetrate it (i.e. into his principal domain) and win. The whistle is Hamm’s signal that he has ‘moved’, and occurs at several points throughout the play. We must imagine a scenario of White constantly retaining the heterodox opposition, in response to the haphazard but successful delaying moves of Black. As we have seen in the third of the winning variations of the Lasker-Reichelm position, a point must come when White is able to enter his principal domain in breach of opposition. It is at the penultimate whistle that this finally occurs and Clov is suddenly free to move – to ‘go’ – and to win. Hamm’s opening speech confirms this, and establishes him as a bad player who should have given up a long time ago. The act of wiping his glasses, pointless as it is for a blind man, suggests the absurdity of his optimism. The ensuing dialogue begins the cataloguing of the extraordinary relationship between the two characters, which finds its parallel in the minds of two chess-players. Each is dependent upon the other for his very existence, and some degree of union is achieved (via the chessboard), yet simultaneously they are engaged upon a struggle of mutual destruction. In this particular instance, the blind Hamm is aware of impending doom, but plays entirely by his feelings, whereas Clov, unable, due to his suppressed exasperation, to pity Hamm (suppressed by necessity since this is, after all, a game of chess), plays logically (‘I love order. It’s my dream’), hampered, indeed crippled, by Hamm’s lack of understanding. If Hamm understood, he would perceive that Clov also understood, and would resign forthwith. The relationship is summed up by the idée fixe:
HAMM: (anguished). What’s happening, what’s happening?
CLOV: Something is taking its course.
Clov, of course, cannot afford to reveal his knowledge to Hamm, even if such a thing were possible.
A further curious exchange acquires significance in the light of Duchamp:
HAMM: Why don’t you kill me?
CLOV: I don’t know the combination to the larder.
The larder would be set into the wall of the kitchen. If Clov could gain access to it, there might be a quick way through the wall (i.e. from his secondary to his principal domain), but, of course, it is Black/Hamm who is preventing this solution (and thereby his own rapid death). He seems to sense this fact later, when ingenuously he promises to give Clov the combination (itself a chess term), a promise which, as Clov well knows, he cannot fulfil except by accident. This exchange is followed by references to bicycle wheels which yet again call Duchamp to mind, and reminiscences of the recent middle-game, with its knights and pawns, of whom Nagg and Nell (who ‘crashed on our tandem and lost our shanks’) are two. During his conversation with them, Hamm reveals the depth of his feelings, confirming that he has ‘a heart in his head’ (a serious handicap for a chess player) and almost succeeds in eliciting our pity. He spoils everything with his cry: ‘My kingdom for a nightman.’
‘Nightman’ is a portmanteau-word containing the notion of a knight (i.e. a horse), black in colour (night) which will end the game in Black’s favour. As Hamm follows this futile wish with a desperate move, our suspicions of his inadequacies are confirmed. So desperate is he, in fact, that he takes comfort simply from the change of square (accomplished in the realm of the imagination, with the stage invisibly becoming the new square), and has Clov push him around its boundaries and back to the centre, straightening up fussily as a distracted chess- player (while saying ‘j’adoube’) might do with his King.
Clov quickly realises that the new move has not presented the winning opportunity (‘If I could kill him I’d die happy’) and, exasperatedly, has to help Hamm by looking through the two windows once again, but this time with a telescope. Since they describe the telescope as a ‘glass’, and they consider the view from two separate panes, one is once again unavoidably reminded of Duchamp. The blue sea and sky seen through one window, and the earth colours through the other, suggest the ‘Bride’ and ‘Bachelor’ panels of the Large Glass. The telescope also seems to owe something to the iconography of the Large Glass. Clov observes the audience through it, with the comment: ‘That’s what I call a magnifier.’ Duchamp included a maginfiying lens in the small glass To be looked at (from the other side of the glass) with one eye, close to, for almost an hour, and intended to include one in the Large Glass, in the position eventually occupied by the Mandala.
Clov’s lack of pity for Hamm becomes more understandable as the play proceeds; indeed, we share his frustration. In tones of whining, threatening bombast Hamm prevaricates, delays and digresses. In the end, he makes a complete fool of himself, wildly predicting that Clov will lie down, like a resigning King. Hamm is even hoping to Queen a pawn, that is to say, Mother Pegg, whose death he will not believe.
The culminating folly is his attempt to move with the aid of the gaff, an attempt which fails, and fails again towards the end of the play when he makes a last effort to understand the position. It is at this point that the spectre of Duchamp appears, in a form resembling Mr Endon:
HAMM: I knew a madman once who thought the end of the world had come. He was a painter – and engraver. I had a great fondness for him. I used to go and see him, in
the asylum. I’d take him by the hand and drag him to the window. Look! The sails of the herring fleet! All that loveliness! (Pause) He’d snatch away his hand and go back into his corner. Appalled. All he had seen was ashes. (Pause) He alone had been spared. (Pause) Forgotten. (Pause) It appears the case is… was not so…unusual.’
In chess terms Hamm’s long speech seems to be a description of the careless play in the preceding middle-game, which has led to his present predicament. It would appear that, at some point one of Black’s Knights left a pawn unguarded. We have already heard that the place is full of corpses (i.e. taken pieces) and now Hamm moves once more, still aware of the hopelessness of his position, and still unable to understand it:
I’ll soon have finished with this story. (Pause) Unless I bring in other characters. (Pause) But where would I find them? (Pause) Where would I look for them? (Pause). He whistles. (Enter Clov.) Let us pray to God.
This move appears to mark a turning-point in the drama. Clov seems more confident. His feet have stopped hurting. He is beginning to put things in order. He is cool with Hamm who, in his turn, is still more desperate, as he perceives that at last he is losing. A pawn dies. Hamm parades his area, ‘sees’ the pole points, senses his defeat, but still cannot understand the position. He contemplates resigning (by lying down), but cannot, clinging foolishly to some hope:
Perhaps I could push myself out on the floor. (He pushes himself painfully off his seat, falls back again.) Dig my nails into the cracks and drag myself forward with my fingers. (Pause) There I’ll be, in the old refuge, alone against the silence and..(he hesitates).. the stillness. If I can hold my peace, and sit quiet, it will be all over with sound and motion, all over and done with.
Instead, he moves again – disastrously. This penultimate move, then, is the one in which Whlte enters his principal domain in breach of opposition and, as we saw in the Lasker-Reichelm position, must win. The final exchanges between Hamm – and Clov serve to point up the absurdity of the position and, once again, the difference in play between Black and White: HAMM: Do you know what’s happened?
CLOV: When? Where?
HAMM: (violently) When! what’s happened? Use your head, can’t you? What has happened?
CLOV: What for Christ’s sake does it matter?
HAMM: Before you go…(Clov halts near door)… say something.
CLOV: There is nothing to say.
HAMM: A few words…to ponder…in my heart.
CLOV: Your heart!
Coda
On the 10th January 1958, Marcel Duchamp and his wife Teeny attended the theatre in New York. In a letter to Henry McBride, he noted: ‘We saw, and loved, Endgame of Beckett.’ (Caumont and Gough-Cooper, 1993, 10-12 January).
References
Adorno, Theodor W. (1982) “Trying to Understand Endgame,” New German Critique, 25, pp. 119-150
Bair, Deirdre (1980), Samuel Beckett: A Biography, London: Picador.
Beckett, Samuel [1934] (1994), More Pricks Than Kicks, New York: Grove Press.
Becket, Samuel [1938] (1994), Murphy, New York: Grove Press.
Beckett, Samuel (1946), ‘Poèmes 38-39’, Les temps Modernes, 2.14, pp. 288-293.
Beckett, Samuel [1947] (1995), Eleuthéria, New York: Foxrock.
Beckett, Samuel [1957] (1976), Endgame, London, Faber.
Caumont, Jacques and Gough-Cooper, Jennifer (1993),Marcel Duchamp, London: Thames and Hudson.
Cabanne, Pierre (1971), Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, London: Thames and Hudson.
Cohn, Ruby (1974), Back to Beckett, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Cros, Caroline (2006), Marcel Duchamp, London: Reaktion.
Éluard, Paul (1932) [Selected Poems], (Tr. Samuel Beckett), This Quarter 5.1, pp. 89-98. d’Harnoncourt, Anne and McShine, Kynaston (1973),Marcel Duchamp, Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Fehsenfeld, Martha Dow and Overbeck, Lois More (eds.) (2009) The Letters of Samuel Beckett Volume I: 1929-1940, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gontarski, S. E. (ed.) (2010) A Companion to Samuel Beckett. London: Wiley/Blackwell.
Haynes, John and Knowlson, James, (2003) Images of Beckett, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Henderson, Linda Dalrymple (1998),Duchamp in Context, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Judovitz, Dalia (2010), Drawing on Art: Duchamp and Company, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Knowlson, James (1996), Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, London: Bloomsbury.
Lane, Richard (ed.) (2002)Beckett and Philosophy, Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Naumann, Frances M. and Bailey, Bradley (eds.) (2009), Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess, New York: Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, LLC.
Reavey, George (ed.) (1936), Thorns of Thunder: Selected Poems of Paul Éluard, (Tr. Samuel Beckett, Denis Devlin, David Gascoyne, et al.), London: Europa Press and Stanley Nott.
Restivo, Giuseppina (1997), ‘The Iconic Core of Beckett’s Endgame: Eliot, Dürer, Duchamp’, in Engelberts, Matthijs (ed.) Samuel Beckett: Crossroads and Borderlines. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 111-124.
Roché, Henri-Pierre (1959), ‘Souvenirs de Marcel Duchamp’, in Lebel, Robert (ed.) Sur Marcel Duchamp, New York: Grove Press, pp. 79-87. Sanouillet Michel and Peterson, Elmer (eds.) (1975), Marchand Du Sel: The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp,London: Thames and Hudson.
Schwarz, Arturo [1969] (2001) ,The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp. New York: Delano Greenidge.
Shattuck, Roger and Watson Taylor, Simon (eds.), (1965) Selected Works of Alred Jarry, London: Methuen, 1965.
Shenk, David (2006), The Immortal Game: A History of Chess, London: Doubleday.
Tomkins, Calvin (1998) Duchamp: A Biography. London: Random House.
Wood, Beatrice (1976), Oral history interview with Beatrice Wood, available at http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-inte rview-beatrice-wood-12423 (accessed 15 January 2012).
Notes
I. Duchamp’s column was published every Thursday from 1937 to the outbreak of war. Ce Soir was edited by Louis Aragon.
II. The shapes of the three Inscriptions in the Cinematic Blossoming of the Bride were created by suspending meter squares of delicate gauze or lace above a radiator (also in front of an open window), photographing the resulting movements in the rising heat, and carefully transcribing their outlines onto the Glass.
III. It should perhaps be put on record at this point that, in a conference on ‘Art and Chess’ at the Tate Gallery, London, in 1991, Mme. Teeny Duchamp, the artist’s widow, insisted that Marcel Duchamp had never played chess with Samuel Beckett. Quite what the motivation was for this denial is unclear, but the abundant evidence, however anecdotal, seems to contradict Teeny completely. She was herself a keen chess player, and had first met Duchamp in 1923. She married Pierre Matisse in 1929, and renewed her acquaintance with Marcel only in 1951, when they were married.
IV. Despite this history, Duchamp’s highest chess level was only Master (rather than Grandmaster). Out of nineteen tournament matches played between 1924 and 1933, his record was one win, eleven losses and seven draws.
V. In 1933, Duchamp translated Eugene Znosko-Borovsky’s book on chess openings into French, as Comment il faut commencer une partie d’échecs. This study of the other end of a chess game rather complements his own publication on endgames.
VI. Note that I have used the English, algebraic, square- naming chess notation, as opposed to the piece-naming system used by the authors.
VII. Roché began calling Duchamp ‘Victor’ after a dinner in New York on January 22nd, 1917 (Caumont and Gough-Cooper 1993, 21-22 January).
VIII. Further correspondence between the present author and Deirdre Bair has failed to reveal the identity of this ‘Irish writer’. IX. In his famous essay on Endgame, Adorno suggests that Hamm’s name refers to a castrated Hamlet, with the consequent associations of melancholy and blackness.
X. This note, in turn, originates in Alfred Jarry’s Gestures and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician: ‘Why should anyone claim the shape of a watch is round – a manifestly false proposition -since it appears in profile as a narrow rectangular construction, elliptic on three sides; and why the devil should one only have noticed its shape at the moment of telling the time? – Perhaps under the pretext of utility. But a child who draws the watch as a circle will also draw a house as a square, as a facade, without any justification…’ (Shattuck and Watson Taylor, 1965, 193).
Belle Haleine: Eau de Voilette [Beautiful Breath: Veil Water], 1921
click to enlarge Belle Haleine: Eau de Voilette [Beautiful Breath: Veil Water], 1921 Assisted readymade: Rigaud perfume bottle with label created by Duchamp and Man Ray, bottle 6” (15.2 cm) high, in an oval, violet-colored cardboard box, 6 7/8 x 4 7/8 inches (16.3 x 11.2 cm); inscribed on gold label attached to the back of the box: Rrose / Sélavy / 1921
Belle Haleine: Eau de Voilette [Beautiful Breath: Veil Water] is the amusing title Marcel Duchamp gave to a work of art that he made—with the assistance of Man Ray—in the spring of 1921. At first glance, it appears to be little more than an ordinary perfume bottle, although readers of French might confuse it with a mouth wash, which, if consumed, would give them, as the label indicates, belle haleine [beautiful breath]. We now know that in order to produce this work, Duchamp appropriated an actual bottle of perfume issued by the Rigaud Company of Paris in 1915 for “Un air embaumé,” the name given to the most popular and best-selling fragrance the perfumery had produced in its sixty-five year history. Advertisements for this product feature a scantily clad female model holding a bottle of the perfume below her nostrils, click to enlarge Figure 1 Advertisement for Un Air Embaumé, Rigaud Perfume, La Rire no. 88 (9 October 1920) the essence of the liquid rendered visible as an undulating, ribbon-like shape floating through the air. The model is shown taking a deep breath, her eyes closed and head tilted slightly back, as if to suggest that the scent possess the qualities of an aphrodisiac, rendering powerless all who inhale its intoxicating vapors. It may have been precisely these qualities that attracted Duchamp to this particular brand of perfume, for he wished to draw attention to the woman whose features are depicted on the bottle, his newly introduced female alter-ego: Rose Sélavy.
Rose Sélavy was born by self-procreation in 1920. Duchamp—who was then living in New York and who, for years, had harbored a personal and professional disdain for entrenched, academic systems within the world of art—sought to establish an entirely new artistic identity. Just as he had invented the pseudonym of R. Mutt three years earlier (when, in 1917, he boldly submitted a white porcelain urinal to an art exhibition with infamous results), this time he wanted something more permanent, an alternative persona through which he could hide his true identity while continuing to function as an artist. “The first idea that came to me was to take a Jewish name,” he later explained. “I was Catholic, and it was a change to go from one religion to another! I didn’t find a Jewish name that I especially liked, or that tempted me, and suddenly I had an idea: why not change sex? It was much simpler. So the name Rrose Sélavy came from that.”1 The name Rose Sélavy not only succeeds in changing gender, but, to a somewhat lesser extent, the Jewish identity he originally desired. Sélavy is a close phonetic equivalent of Halévy, a common Jewish name in France. Moreover, in America the name Sélavy could be pronounced “Say Levy,” but of course the most obvious pun is with the French phrase “c’est la vie” [that’s life].2 Almost immediately, Rose was credited with the production of works of art, such as Duchamp’s Fresh Widow—a miniature French window with its panes covered by black leather (Museum of Modern Art, New York)—which, on its support, is inscribed in bold uppercase letters: “COPYRIGHT ROSE SELAVY 1920.”
Although Rose Sélavy was already functioning as an artist, it was not until the winter of 1920-21 that Duchamp decided that she should become visibly manifest, so he enlisted the services of his friend and colleague Man Ray to help take pictures of himself in drag. click to enlarge
Figure 2 Man Ray, Portrait of Rose Sé lavy, 1921, New York, negative Estate of Man Ray, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris copy print from Jean-Hubert Martin, Man Ray Photographs [London: Thames & Hudson, 1981]))
He printed one of the pictures he had taken of Rose Sélavy and closely cropped the head into an ovoid format, which he placed atop a symmetrical design in black ink meant to fit within the wing-like, decorative shapes that emanate from the base of the Rigaud perfume bottle. He then carefully wrote the word BELLE in ascending letters on the left side of the label, followed by the word HALEINE descending on the right. Below that, he wrote Eau de Voilette in an expressive italic font, underneath which appear the letters “RS,” the initials of Rose Sélavy (the “R” rendered backwards, its lower branch responding to the flourish given to the seraph atop of the letter “S”). At the base of the label appears the locations where, presumably, the perfume would be sold—New York and Paris—two city centers that Duchamp traversed frequently during these years (indeed, he probably purchased the bottle during a trip to Paris in 1919). A photograph of the layout was reduced in size to fit the small format of the perfume bottle, whereupon the resultant print was then carefully glued to its surface. The finished product made its first public appearance on the cover of New York Dada, a single-issue magazine edited by Duchamp and Man Ray that was released in April 1921. click to enlarge
Figure 3 Man Ray, Label for the Belle Haleine, 1921, gelatin silver print, 8 13/16 x 7 inches (The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles).
The bottle was placed in the center of the cover and surrounded by a seemingly endless repetition of the type- written words “new york dada april 1921” printed in lower-case letters and positioned upside-down in an exceptionally small font that ran to the edges of the cover, the whole cast, appropriately, in a reddish, rose-colored hue.
Exactly whose idea it was to reproduce this bottle on the cover of New York Dada is unknown, but we do know that, at the time, both Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp had hoped that the Dada movement—which had originated in Europe and spread quickly throughout various European capitals—would continue to broaden its scope internationally. In a metaphorical sense, then, the artists may have equated the ability of a fragrance to permeate its surroundings with the convention-defying capabilities of Dada to influence all the arts. Unfortunately, however, at the time the Dada movement was in the process of breathing its last breath, for within a matter of years, it would be replaced by Surrealism in Paris, while the artists in New York either left for Europe or retreated to more conventional forms of artistic expression. The seed of Dada would eventually germinate, but only about a half century later, when a group of young artists in London, New York and Paris became aware of Duchamp’s work—particularly the readymades—and immediately recognized its radical aesthetic implications. Ironically, this scenario reinforces a possible alternate reading to the words “un air embaumé,” which translates literally as “perfumed air,” but which, in English, could also be read as “embalmed air.” Indeed, it has recently been observed that the box in which the perfume was packaged—which was preserved and is intended to be part of the final work of art—is curiously shaped like a coffin.3 Like a mummy enwrapped in cloth and preserved for eternity, it would seem that today—with the artist’s uncontested influence on the development of contemporary art—Duchamp’s bottle of perfume has finally been opened, allowing for the diffusion of an alluring spirit that virtually everyone can now readily detect. click to enlarge
Figure 4 New York Dada, April 1921, cover. Private Collection, New York
Rigaud was the perfect fragrance for Duchamp to have selected. Not only was it a known and popular French brand of perfume, but its exotic qualities—which the firm emphasized in all of its advertisements—was an ideal fragrance for the somewhat vulgar and lascivious Rrose to endorse. In an advertisement that appeared in Harper’s Monthly, it is implied that Un Air Embaumé was a scent that originated in an unspecified Arab country located somewhere in the Middle East; it depicts a harem girl gesturing toward a peacock with one hand, while she uses the other hand to hold back a curtain revealing the interior of a darkened boudoir. click to enlarge Figure 5 Advertisement for Un Air Embaumé, Rigaud Perfume Company, Harpers Monthly, December 1919. Collection Francis M. Naumann, New York
There, a couple inclines on a bed, while a gold bottle of Rigaud floats mysteriously above their heads, glowing in the darkness like an apparition. Another advertisement that appeared in several American fashion magazines shows a woman seated in her dressing room, visible to viewers through an open curtain door.
“A peep into the boudoir of any much sought-after woman,” the caption reads, “will usually reveal some RIGAUD odeur as the real secret of her power to fascinate men.” In small print at the bottom of the page, the advertisement informs prospective buyers that, if purchased for yourself or as a gift, the fragrance is assured to have an enduring effect. “Un air embaumé is one of the most loved of Rigaud odeurs. It is the type of rare fragrance that a woman clings to devotedly for many, many years.” click to enlarge Figure 6 Advertisement for Rigaud Perfume, New York fashion magazine, ca. 1920-21. Collection Douglas Vogel, New York
In June of 1921—a few months after the appearance of New York Dada—Duchamp returned to Paris, where, later in the year, he signed a large painting by Picabia entitled L’Oeil cacodylate (Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris) with the name Rrose Sélavy, spelling the name Rrose for the first time with a double-r. Later he said that this was required, for, as he explained, “the word ‘arrose’ demands two R’s.”4 Clearly Duchamp intended to evoke a pun on the word “eros,” for Rrose Sélavy is a homonym for the phrase “eros c’est la vie” [eros, that’s life]. Although less often acknowledged, the double-r might also have been derived from the French verb arroser, which means to wet or moisten, an appropriate word considering the obviously erotic connotations of perfume, which the manufacturer wanted users to think offered one of the first elements of attraction in any successful amorous encounter. Duchamp later signed the box of his perfume bottle with the name Rrose Sélavy (using the double-r), and gave it to Yvonne Chastel-Crotti, the ex-wife of his former studio-mate in New York, Jean Crotti (a Swiss- born painter who had married Duchamp’s sister Suzanne), a woman with whom Duchamp had had his own brief amorous encounter in 1918.5 The bottle remained in Yvonne Crotti’s possession throughout her life, and although it had been included in a group show of collage in Paris in 1930, it was shown for the first time within the context of Duchamp’s work in an exhibition organized by the Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery in New York in 1965.6 It was there that the object was first identified as an “assisted readymade,” indicating that—as with all other readymades—the object itself already existed, but required some alteration, that is to say, assistance on Duchamp’s part in order to bring it into being as a work of art. That assistance resulted in having created one of the most provocative works of art ever made, a simple bottle of perfume whose liquid long ago evaporated, but whose essence, to be sure, will continue to influence artists long into the future.
This text was first published as the entry on Duchamp’s Belle Haleine: Eau de violette in the sales catalogue Collection Yves Saint Laurent et Pierre Bergé, Christie’s Paris, 23 February 2009, lot no. 37.
Notes: 1 Pierre Cabanne, Interview with Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. by Ron Padgett (New York: Viking Press, 1971), p. 64.
2 The similarity to Halévy was pointed out by Ellen Landau, and is reported in Bradley Bailey, Duchamp’s Chess Identity, doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University, 2004, n28, p. 107; see also Bradley Bailey, ” Rrose of Washington Square: Marcel Duchamp, Fanny Brice, and the Jewish Origins of Rrose Sélavy ,” Source XXVII, no. 1 (Fall 2007), p. 41.
3 As suggested by Rhonda Roland Shearer in Bonnie Jean Garner, “Duchamp Bottles Belle Greene: Just Desserts for his Canning,” Tout-Fait, issue 2 (2000): www.toutfait.com. For the double reading of the title, see also Steven Jay Gould’s contribution to this article: “From the Bitter Negro Pun to the Beautiful Breath Bottle.”
4 Cabanne, Dialogues with Duchamp, p. 65.
5 Arturo Schwarz claims that this work was “signed after 1945,” although he provides no explanation for why the signature was applied at this time (see Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp , 3rd revised and expanded edition [New York: Delano Greenidge, 1997], vol. II, cat. no. 388, p. 688).
6 NOT SEEN and/or LESS SEEN of/by MARCEL DUCHAMP/RROSE SELAVY 1904-64, Cordier & Ekstrom, Inc., New York, 14 January – 13 February 1965, cat. no. 71. At the time of this show, Yvonne Crotti was living in London (her last name changed by married to Lyon), and it was probably through Duchamp’s assistance that the work was sold (at the time, Arne Ekstrom, proprietor of the gallery, was actively acquiring works by Duchamp for the Mary Sisler Collection). The 1930 show that included his Belle Haleine / Eau de Violette was Exposition de Collages, organized by Louis Aragon for the Galerie Goemans, Paris, March 1930; Duchamp was also represented by Pharmacy , an example of The Monte Carlo Bond, and two versions of the L.H.O.O.Q.(see Jennifer Gough-Cooper and Jacques Caumont, “Ephemerides on and about Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Sélavy 1887-1968,” in Pontus Hulten, ed., Marcel Duchamp, exh. cat., Palazzo Grassi, Venice, 1993, entry for 02/06/1930).
Marcel Duchamp – Spring, 1911 – Where it All Begins
Early in 1911, at the age of 24, Marcel Duchamp painted a relatively small painting (25 7/8 by 19 3/4 inches, oil on canvas) he called Young Man and Girl in Spring. 1 This painting is also identified as Spring, which is how the painting is referred to throughout this paper. A larger version (58 5/8 x 19 3/4 inches, oil on canvas) followed. This second version was exhibited at the 1911 Salon d’Automne in Paris.2 Although no photograph of the entire second painting is known to exist, part of it is visible—now repositioned horizontally—as the background of Duchamp’s Network of Stoppages of 1914.
What follows is an analysis of the first version of Spring and its role in Duchamp’s larger creative output. Some of my ideas, as well as my interpretations and conclusions, draw on the large and ever-growing body of scholarly literature on Duchamp. However, my observations and ideas are shaped by my perspective as a practicing artist. Quite intentionally, I have tried to follow the logic of Duchamp’s creative process and his artistic decision-making strategies from the standpoint of his being a visual artist. I offer what follows in that spirit.
In this paper, I explore the possibility that Spring contains pre-figurative elements of Duchamp’s final magnum opus, Étant donnés (Given: 1º The Waterfall, 2º The Illuminating Gas), created between 1946 and 1966. That a small, sketchy painting made thirty-five years earlier could be seen as a study for the confounding, elaborate installation that is Étant donnés may strike readers as somewhat improbable. Nevertheless, through careful scrutiny of Duchamp’s artwork and the many notes he made, it is my opinion that very early on—Duchamp planned and prepared for the major works he would eventually produce. I acknowledge that this process is highly unusual, that most artists develop their styles over a period of time, with any one piece or style representing a point on a trajectory of development and maturation. It is well known Marcel Duchamp used ideas he had formulated years before their actual implementation. As Michael Taylor observes: “The pseudoscientific title of Etant donnes has its source in a note first published in 1934 known as the Green Box: “Etant donnes 1° la chute d’eau / 2° legaz d’eclairage.”3
Part I Although it is uncharacteristically rough in execution, Spring is a fully realized composition(Fig. 1). click images to enlarge
Figure 1 Spring (Young Man and Girl in Spring), 1911. Oil on canvas, 25 7/8 x 19 3/4 in. (65.7 x 50.2 cm.). Israel Museum of Art, Jerusalem
The artist apparently deemed this painting important enough to offer it as a wedding present to his favorite sister, Suzanne, who married a Rouen pharmacist, Charles Desmares, on August 24, 1911. On the back of the canvas Duchamp wrote, “A toi ma chere Suzanne —Marcel” (“To my dear Suzanne —Marcel”).4 Perhaps due to the painting’s uncharacteristically loose, expressionistic execution, some scholars assert that Spring is merely a loose study. However, the existence of an India ink and charcoal study for the female figure of Spring,also dated 1911 and titled Standing Nude (Fig. 2), adds weight to the argument that Spring is an autonomous work, not a preliminary sketch. 5 click images to enlarge Figure 2 Standing Nude, 1911. India ink and charcoal on paper 24 5/8 x 18 7/8 in. (62.5 x 47.8 cm.). Collection of Silvia Schwarz Linder and Dennis Linder, Milan
The two versions of Spring can be seen as the final symbolic allegorical group of works that Duchamp began painting in April 1910 with Portrait of Dr. Dumouchel. The others in this group include The Bush (1910), Paradise (December 1910–January 1911), The Baptism (1911), and Draft on the Japanese Apple Tree (1911).
Spring is an allegorical painting set in a landscape of tree forms. Most prominent in the composition are the two elongated, up-reaching figures, which occupy the frontal plane and extend from the lower to upper margins of the painting on both sides.
Both figures are delineated by black contour lines. On the left is a female nude; on the right is a male whose genitals are obscured by a thong-like covering. The back of the female’s head is visible as a cap of dark hair; except for her chin, her face is blocked by the closer arm, which, like her other arm, is thrust upward toward a canopy of leaves. Both of the female’s arms are rendered twice(Fig. 3), visually suggesting waving limbs. This depiction of sequential positions in space essentially constitutes Duchamp’s original attempts to paint a figure in motion a year before his two versions of Nude Descending a Staircase, of 1912. click images to enlarge
Figure 3 Detail of fig. 1, Spring: arms of female figure, marked to indicate “waving” motion
The male figure extends his right arm into the tree leaves. His other arm is bent above his faceless head, the hand in a fist. The feet are roughed in. Just below his feet is a patch of ochre that is deeper in tone than the field of ochre dominating the lower right quadrant. It is in this area Duchamp signed the work in block letters followed by an 11, signifying the year of its production, 1911.
The top of the painting is filled with a canopy of tree leaves defined at its lower edge by angled black lines.6 The central area of the canopy is yellow, with an uneven upper band of white pigment suggesting sunlight streaming from above. Surrounding these leaves and the slender black tree trunk is a section of lightened blue. The black line of the tree trunk doubles as the center indentation of an unmistakable heart shape, which occupies most of the composition. Leading Duchamp scholar Francis Naumann, in his essay on Spring, was the first to notice this large geometrically simplified shape for a human heart.7 The bottom V shape of the heart passes behind the lower torsos of the two figures. The left outline of the swelling V doubles as the thin, curving trunk of a tree or sapling. Its leaves or blossoms extend from the left behind the female’s lower back. The shape and hue of these leaves, along with the bent trunk, recall the tree form in another painting by Duchamp in 1911, Draft on the Japanese Apple Tree (Figs. 4 and 5). This can be seen as an early example of Duchamp’s recycling of pictorial content from one piece to another, a practice examined in the pages that follow. click images to enlarge Figure 4 Figure 5
Draft on the Japanese Apple Tree, Marcel Duchamp, 1911, oil on canvas, 24 X 19 11/16″, collection of Dina Vierny, Paris. Detail from fig. 1 – Bent tree form outlined.
In the area at upper – far left, behind the pink-budded tree, is another tree with a simple, straight black trunk. Over a dark green area are about a dozen daubs of white, red, and green that help define the tree’s form. On the right side, surrounding the upper torso of the male figure, are circular shapes outlined in black which I believe were meant to represent trees. These are less realized than those on the left side and are not painted in.
The center of the entire composition and consequently at the center of the heart shape, is a circle whose circumference is energetically and repeatedly drawn with black crayon or oil pastel. Within this circle is rendered a small, pinkish figure, whose back is positioned to roughly align with the black tree trunk of the central tree. Head tilted to the left, its face, like the two nude figures, is featureless. One leg is straight down, while the leg on the right is raised and bent downward at the knee. One arm is extended, and the other arm is not visible.
This overdrawn circle also loops down in ovoid strokes that cut across the profile head of a fourth human figure, also with a featureless face. The legs of this figure appear to be folded in a kneeling position and are partially cropped by the arced line of the heart outlined on the right. A coat with tails can be interpreted, draped over the kneeling figure’s shoulders.8
Located toward the top left of the kneeling figure is a series of round shapes, modeled in pink/red and white. Small jots of black seem to indicate tree trunks, possibly an allusion to a small grove of trees, executed almost like a child’s simplistic rendering of “lollipop trees” complete with short, vertical black jots for trunks. Interspersed with the pink/red colors are similar shapes in grey. Their uniform size, combined with a stacked symmetry of placement, is not convincingly organic in nature. The staggered symmetry of these uniform-sized boulder shapes is akin to the appearance of brick wall construction. Even the hue is reminiscent of the color of bricks. This aspect creates some ambiguity in their appearance. Other shapes, more loosely formed, are found to the right of the kneeling figure’s profile.
The V point of the prominent heart shape outline in combination with the two figures’ straight legs approximates the letter M. (Fig. 6) This is the first example of Duchamp’s embedding one of his initials into his works, a practice he would continue throughout his career. click images to enlarge Figure 6 Detail of fig. 1, Spring: outline of M shape.
Part II Spring is noteworthy in several ways. Its two leaping figures are overtly exuberant and make this Duchamp’s most expressionistically emotional painting. Positioned on either side of the composition, streamlined and elongated to extend over most of the vertical dimension of the work, they create a framing device for the encircled central figure. That their faces are without features supports their function as a formal device, although without diminishing their symbolic intent.
The forceful circles drawn repeatedly around the central figure in the outlined heart shape visually emphasize the importance of this element, especially the circle’s placement in the middle of the composition. On close examination, the rough quality of line points to the use of oil pastel or crayon applied over thick, dried oil paint, not to the blending-in that is usual in oil painting. In other words, these circles were drawn over the composition after it was painted (Fig. 7). Perhaps Duchamp came to realize that he could achieve a visceral effect by “roughly” circling this centrally placed element. In any case, it is clear that his intention was to emphasize this part of the painting. click images to enlarge Figure 7 Detail of fig. 1, Spring: crayon lines circling the central figure
Considering the relatively long time oils take to dry, it is conceivable that the painting was completed before the attributed date of early 1911. If this is the case, it would not be the first time Duchamp mistakenly dated one of his works.9
That being said, I would like to comment on Arturo Schwarz’s interpretation regarding the possible intent behind the figure enclosed within a circle as representing Mercurius in a bottle The figure of Mercurius (Mercury) was a commonly used alchemical image symbolizing the universal agent of transformation.10 Schwarz illustrates an eighteenth-century woodcut for visual comparison (Fig. 8). click images to enlarge Figure 8 Anonymous, Mercurius in a Bottle. Woodcut engraving for J. C. Barchusen’sElementa chemiae, Leiden, 1718.
Duchamp addressed his interest in alchemy on a variety of occasions He responded to biographer Robert Lebel’s question about his connection to the subject with the following statement: “If I have practiced alchemy it was in the only way it can be done now, that is without knowing it.”11
While some art historians agree on this interpretation, like most matters concerning Duchamp’s creations, other viewpoints abound. Both Naumann and Duchamp biographer Calvin Tomkins reject Schwarz’s alchemy theory in favor of the notion that Spring can be read as an affirmative statement about marriage.12 Naumann suggests that the figure in the globe is possibly prophetic of the married couple’s newborn-to-be.13
A different perspective is expressed by another Duchamp biographer, Alice Goldfarb Marquis, and art historian Jerrold Seigel, both of whom believe there is not one figure but “several dancing figures” in the circle.14 Pierre Cabanne, another expert and a personal friend of Duchamp’s, says of the central circle in Spring that it contains “ill defined forms.”15
An unusual, if not perplexing, interpretation of this circle comes from philosopher and art historian Thierry de Duve. In his book Pictorial Nominalism, de Duve acknowledges other interpretations of the orb, including Schwarz’s alchemy comparisons and Maurizio Calvesi’s reference to vessels in Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (ca. 1500). De Duve’s opinion is that it could well be inspired by the small circular convex mirror in Jan van Eyck’s Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and His Wife Giovanna Cenamani, or The Arnolfini Wedding Portrait (1434).16 However unique a theory, especially because of the wedding connection, it seems an unlikely source considering that the famous convex mirror in van Eyck’s painting reflects the images of three figures, the bride and groom as well as the painter himself, none remotely resembling the singular figure in the orb.
At this point, an examination of the specific emblem Schwarz identified is warranted. In 1718, Leiden chemistry professor Johann Conrad Barchusen had a series of seventy-eight emblems engraved, titled Elementa chemiae, which are meant to allegorically represent the specific process of alchemical transmutation known as “the wet way,” as opposed to the shorter process called “the dry way.”
The Mercurius emblem that Schwarz chose as comparable to the central figure in Spring is close to the end of Barchusen’s sequence, at number seventy-five. The caption for this emblem has been translated as follows: “After much suffering and torment I was resurrected large and pure and immaculate.”17 The sentiments associated with Barchusen’s Mercurius do not mesh in an illustrative sense on any level, alchemical or otherwise, in terms of celebrating newlyweds.
I would like to offer another observation on this small figure, however unconventional, along with a different general point of view about Spring. The positioning of the legs—one straight, one bent and the only visible arm outstretched and extended within a small patch of bright paint directly above a small black line where the hand would appear—are uncannily familiar.
These forms, including a head-like shape tilted to the left, very closely approximates the reclining nude holding a lantern in Étant donnés With this visual correspondence in mind, the circle can be understood as an allusion to a peephole placed in the center of the figurative framing devise through which a scene is viewed, a vantage point consistent with his final creation. In addition but possibly just coincidental, the yellow linear device in Spring, which extends vertically below the outstretched arm on the right, might be seen as a visual symbol of a waterfall.(Fig. 9) click images to enlarge
Figure 9 Detail of fig. 1, Spring: outline of central figure in relation to the nude and other elements in Étant donnés
The repetitive, roughly drawn lines that drop down to include the kneeling figure form a shape that is roughly comparable to the opening in the brick wall of Étant donnés.(Fig. 10) click images to enlarge Figure 10 Étant donnés (Given: 1.The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas), 1946–66, view through the door of the installation. Mixed media. Philadelphia Museum of Art.
The representation of a kneeling figure had lasting importance for Duchamp. In 1967 he produced eighteen drypoint etchings which are included in the second volume of Arturo Schwarz’s Complete Works, The Large Glass and Related Works. Half of these were devoted to The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, while the other half formed a suite called The Lovers.
Of the latter, one print depicts a female figure kneeling as if in prayer; significantly, it is titled The Bride Stripped Bare. Besides the obvious connection with the full title for the The Large Glass, (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even), the drawing creates a full-circle connection with the first work of Duchamp’s to bear this title, a drawing produced in 1912 while he was in Munich. These 1967 prints were some of Duchamp’s last artworks, created before the public was made privy to the Étant donnés installation, which, as he had specified, happened only after his death. Whatever his intentions, it is noteworthy that Duchamp in his final days would return to the theme of kneeling/prayer imagery first addressed in depth in his early allegorical paintings, many of which depicted figures in this position.
Let us return to the meaning of the two leaping figures in Spring. In the first comprehensive catalog of Duchamp’s work Robert Lebel speculates that the painting is a response to the loss of the youthful closeness of his siblings: “Both his brothers were married and his sister wedded a pharmacist from Rouen in 1911: these were just so many assaults upon the ties of childhood for one who was to remain so long the “ bachelor.”18
I believe the most original supposition as to what inspired Spring is offered by Alice Goldfarb Marquis in her biography of Duchamp, Marcel Duchamp: Eros, C’est la vie. Prior to painting Spring in early 1911, Duchamp had a relationship with a model, Jeanne Serre, who is believed to be one of the figures represented in the 1910 paintingThe Bush. This relationship produced Duchamp’s only child, born February 6, 1911. Marquis believes it is possible that the birth of this child, named Yo, and the end of the affair might be the actual inspiration for Spring.19
Schwarz and Cabanne share the opinion that the two reaching figures represent Suzanne and Marcel, Schwarz insisting that Marcel was opposed to the wedding. And while these bordering figures may or may not be Duchamp’s primary focus for Spring, they are clearly presented as symbolic of something—seen in the pair’s action of reaching upward.
The specific, emotive body language is another thing that separates this painting from Duchamp’s other allegorical works of 1910–1911. Those paintings are obscure in their symbolism. The glowing hand in thePortrait of Dr. Dumouchel is inexplicable beyond, perhaps, referring to this doctor’s “miraculous curative powers”; the relationships between the couples in Paradise, The Bush, and Baptism are all seemingly symbolic in intent, and yet they are stubbornly ambiguous. The odd, Buddha-like figure in Draft on the Japanese Apple Tree is bafflingly arcane.
The essay Schwarz wrote for The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp describes the Spring figures’ arms “lifted to the sky in a Y-shaped figure.”20 Actually, the arms of the two figures do not form the shape of any letter, much less Y, as they reach up into the leaves of the tree. However there is a Y shape drawn in the space between the figures’ arms.(Fig. 11) click images to enlarge
Figure 11 Detail of fig. 1, Spring: outline of Y shape.
This constitutes the top connection of the two orbs of the linear heart shape while doubling as the image of the centrally placed tree trunk. Returning to the small encircled figure, we see that not only is it placed in the painting’s center, but it is also at the center of the heart shaped symbol. Surely the symbolic metaphor of something being “central to one’s heart” would not escape Duchamp’s attention in this time frame. In writings about Spring, one often encounters interpretations of the purpose for the upward stretch of the two figures. Are they reaching for fruit from the Tree of Life, or perhaps the apple in the Garden of Eden? No, there is no discernable fruit of any kind in this painting. (The absence of fruit makes sense in view of the title Spring, whenfruit is not mature and ripe for picking.)
The top center of the canvas is a discernibly lighter yellow/white than the green abstracted “leaves” on either side. In other words, strong sunlight is clearly suggested as it filters through the tree leaves. I propose that the two figures are enacting, allegorically, the act of “reaching for the sun.”
Duchamp addressed the subject of the sun at least two other times. In 1911, the same year Spring was conceived, Duchamp illustrated several poems by Jules Laforge, one of which is Once More to This Star, also translated as Another for the Sun. Jerrold Seigel offers this synopsis of the poem: ”The sun exchanges insults with the earthlings it threatens to warm no longer . . . once the old waning star has died.”21 Another example is a simple drawing from 1914 entitledTo Have an Apprentice in the Sun. On a sheet of music staff paper, it depicts a figure struggling uphill on a bicycle. Duchamp believed it noteworthy enough to include it in his first compilation of reproductions of significant works, known as the Box of 1914.
Part III After painting the two versions of Spring Duchamp switched gears stylistically and executed notes, works, and studies that culminated in The Large Glass, as well as his final painting in 1918, Tu m’.Duchamp began developing his ideas through extensive note-taking for future projects. The late Walter Hopps, who was responsible for organizing Duchamp’s first retrospective in the United States, provided a succinct analysis for the overall import of these notes: “Although they were not published until 1934, some of the notes in The Green Box date back to before 1915 [the year] when Duchamp started fabricating The Large Glass. These notes are the complete scheme for and the literary form of The Large Glass, which is itself like a circuit diagram or even cybernetic abstraction. In Étant donnés, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even becomes a strange and magical three-dimensional tableau, and Duchamp’s magnum opus is now complete: a work that exists in conceptual, diagrammatic, and figurative form.”22
It is conceivable that after he realized the Large Glass and Tu m’—in effect crossing them off his “to do” list—Duchamp gave himself the rest of his life to actualize his third and final pre-planned major project. In doing so he freed himself to pursue other interests that would occupy him over the years: the “production” of a variety of readymades,his close involvement with the presentation of ground-breaking art exhibitions which radically challenged accepted practices, and of course the pursuit of his lifelong fascination with the game of chess. The notion that he planned out his entire artistic output before its execution can be compared to the method of a superior chess player, who has the capacity to figure out his moves and strategies well beforehand. Most significantly, this mode of operation would grant him the one thing he claimed to value over all else: personal freedom.
Another look at Network of Stoppages—Duchamp’s 1914 painting produced over the second version of Spring— is warranted in order to understand his creative process.(Fig. 12) click images to enlarge Figure 12 Network of Stoppages, 1914. Oil and pencil on canvas, 58 5/8 x 77 7/8 in. (148.9 x 197.7 cm.). Philadelphia Museum of Art.
It is revealing how several different projects dovetailed in one another. Put another way, in quick succession, different projects were manifest in a single work. With his pre-existing notes for The Large Glass (its dimensions, the “capillary tubes” element, and the premise for 3 Standard Stoppages, in particular) this was not a matter of having one epiphany after another. This was the application of pre-formulated thought born of copious note-making.
In 1913 Duchamp had developed his first schematic plans for The Large Glass. A year later, the experiment in his notes on The Idea of Fabrication would culminate in the production of three ruler/templates called 3 Standard Stoppages. This information and these devices would be applied to Network of Stoppages. Black bands of paint were applied to both sides of the second Spring, producing a space that is exactly half- scale of The Large Glass’s dimensions. The three constructed Stoppages templates were used to create theNetwork of Stoppages in a configuration that would later serve two functions for The Large Glass: the small circles were inserted throughout the array of curved lines that indicated an aerial view of the placement of the nine “bachelors” (also known as Malic Moulds). The linear design is also the first rendition of the Large Glass’s “capillary tube” element, the series of lines incised into Large Glass which traverse the forms that constitute the bachelors/Malic Moulds. Here we have a total of six interlocking projects that evolve into one another with a common goal in mind: the second version of Spring; 3 Standard Stoppages templates; Network of Stoppages painting, which includes The Large Glass in half- scale dimensions, the positioning of the bachelors, and the first version of the capillary tubes.
In relation to his later work, Spring can be chronologically positioned. If it is not the first-draft study forÉtant donnés, it is at least a premonition of some of the most important visual elements central to this last work: a reclining figure, one arm raised and holding aloft what I perceive to be a lit lantern near a waterfall, as glimpsed through a peephole that must be viewed through an opening in a constructed brick wall. The cloaked kneeling figure in Spring represents the voyeur, a well-known subject of interest to the artist. In fact, the classic pose of a voyeur is a person crouching or kneeling in order to spy through a keyhole. Because Étant donnés must be viewed through two peepholes, the viewer is essentially transformed into a voyeur—one who takes in a scene privately.23
Another general visual interpretation of Spring symbolically situates it in a time/space continuum, an allusion to the eventual realization of Étant donnés. The two border figures are situated on the green and yellow circular shapes formed by the negative space on either side of the large outlined heart symbol, in other words, “hills.” Viewed thus, the circle/peephole with the small figure can beperspectively construed as being far off in the distance. We know that at the time he painted Spring, Duchamp was interested in allegory and symbolism and was sufficiently intrigued by Symbolist poetry to do a series of illustrations based on poems by Symbolist poet Jules Laforgue. Perhaps symbolically this circle/peephole device illustrates something taking place in the future—“over the hills and far away”—at a time when Duchamp planned to actually construct theÉtant donnés installation.
Based on the belief that Spring is in fact the first study for Étant donnés and that it was executed even before studies for The Large Glass had commenced, perhaps its intention as merely a wedding gift is an oversimplification of Duchamp’s more serious concern. Knowing its long-range significance, he could have given it to his favorite sister for safekeeping. I believe Duchamp intentionally inscribed only his sister’s name to emphasize her sole ownership if the marriage did not work out. (If this were the case, it proved to be a wise move and is an example of Duchamp’s astute forward thinking; the marriage ended in divorce seven years later.) Through the course of Duchamp’s life and extensive travels, many works of his were lost, yet Suzanne still had this painting in her possession at the time of her death in 1963.
Spring was never included in any version ofBoîte-en- valise,the purpose of which was the presentation (at small scale) of all of the works he believed of import in his career. One other major work, Étant donnés, was left out, for the reason that only after he died, as per his instructions, was it to made be known. Thus, it seems appropriate that because his last, secret masterpiece would have to be absent from his portable museum, the first painting, Spring, that led to it was excluded as well.
With these observations in mind, it is my assertion that Marcel Duchamp’s intent was to conclude his artistic career by coming full circle back to his original study, Spring. His artistic interests and aspirations remained true to his early allegorical works, which had, in fact, eclipsed his earlier forays into landscape and portraiture. The allegorical works were his first truly original expressions.Spring is representative of his study for his ultimate allegory—Étant donnés.
I believe that his major works, beginning with Spring in 1911, along with 3 Standard Stoppages and the readymade concept, were planned out in the mind and in his notes in a concentrated period of time before their execution by several years and even decades later.
Granted, it is almost incomprehensible that an artist so early in his career could possibly have schemed, organized, and internalized such an intense cavalcade of interrelated artworks or made plans to unfurl future creations over the course of his lifetime. On the other hand, the incomparable and ever-elusive Marcel Duchamp was possibly the only artist who could attempt and pull off such a timed-release, sustained process of creation.
© copyright 2008 Kurt Godwin. All rights reserved.
§ My thanks to Francis M. Naumann for his support and encouragement and to my editor, Julia Moore, for helping me craft this article.
Notes
1 Spring was painted in Neuilly, France. Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, second rev. ed. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1970): 426
2 Francis M. Naumann, The Mary Sisler Collection. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1984: 172. In 1914 Duchamp applied black paint over the original left and right margins of the painting and rotated it counterclockwise 90°. The most recognizable image is that of a female nude, seen on her back because of the rotation. The rest of what remains of the painting is blurred, as if by a wash of thinned paint. The details, which must have been quite clear originally, are now mostly unrecognizable. The “recumbent” female figure is the exception. She appears to be more fully realized in detail than the woman in the first Spring.
3Michael Taylor, Marcel Duchamp – Etant donnes,(Philadelphia Museum of Art Publishing Department, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: 2009), 23
4 After Suzanne died 1963, Spring came into the possession of the New York City art gallery Cordier & Ekstrom and then was bought for the Mary Sisler Collection. Duchamp scholar Arturo Schwarz collection acquired it from Sisler and in time donated it to the Israel Museum of Art, where it is today. Schwarz notes that the painting was relined in the 1960s, covering over the inscription. Arturo Schwarz, Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp Rev. and expanded paperback edition (New York: Delano Greenidge Editions, 2000): 546.
5 This drawing study is almost the exact same size as Spring, measuring 25 5/8 x 18 3/4 inches. The simple contour of the nude is so closely copied at the same scale that it is not inconceivable that it was used as a direct transfer for the painting. The figure is allegedly a model named Reina who appears in a similar pose in an engraving by Duchamp’s oldest brother, Jacques Villon (Schwarz, 2000: 546.)
6 Although it is often asserted that there is fruit of some sort in this tree depiction, none in fact is represented. The title of the work specifies spring.
7 Naumann, Sisler Collection: 139.
8 That Duchamp would depict a kneeling figure is significant. With the exception of the Portrait of Dr. Dumouchel, the first painting in his allegorical style, there are kneeling figures in all of Duchamp’s allegorical works. Further, in 1910, the same year of the Dumouchel portrait, he produced four pen-and- ink drawings, all titled Study for Kneeling Nude.
9 Speaking with Pierre Cabanne about the illustration he made for Jules Laforgue’s Once More to This Star, Duchamp stated, “I had put a stupid date below, 1912, when it had been done in November 1911, and I dedicated it to [F. C.] Torrey in 1913. When you compare the dates, you say, ‘that’s impossible.’ An amusing mess.” Pierre Cabanne,Conversations with Marcel Duchamp (New York: Da Capo Press, 1971): 46.
10 Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, second rev. ed. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1970): 238.
11 John F. Moffitt, Alchemist of the Avant-Garde: The Case of Marcel Duchamp (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003): 9.
12 Rudolf Kuenzli and Francis M. Naumann, eds., Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1989): 25, and Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996): 53.
13 Francis M. Naumann, The Mary and William Sisler Collection (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1984): 138.
14 Alice Goldfarb Marquis,Marcel Duchamp: The Bachelor Stripped Bare (Boston: MFA Publications, 2002: 59, and Jerrold Seigel, The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp: Desire, Liberation, and the Self in Modern Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1995): 34.
15 Pierre Cabanne, Duchamp & Co., trans. Peter Snowdon (New York: Rizzoli Publications, 1997): 34.
16 Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991): 53.
17. Alexander Roob, The Hermetic Museum: Alchemy & Mysticism (Cologne, Germany: Taschen, 1997): 145.
18 Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, 1st American ed. (New York: Paragraphic Books, 1959): 6.
19 Calvin Tompkins, Duchamp: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996): 45.
20 Schwarz, 1970: 90.
21 Seigel: 34.
22 Walter Hopps, Susan Davidson, Ann Temkin. Cornell/Duchamp. . . In Resonance (Stuttgart, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 1998, and New York: D.A.P. Distributed Art Publishers, 1999): 75.
23 In his book Ingres: Erotic Drawings, art historian and critic Stephane Guegan includes a section devoted to Ingres and voyeurism. The chapter concludes, in part, with the following statement: “The theme of the vulnerable, reclining woman, viewed from the front or back, left other traces, often of a passably licentious aura, among the drawings Ingres bequeathed to his birthplace. On one is written: ‘One who looks in at the door.’ This confirms Ingres’ calculated voyeurism, more subtle than is sometimes thought.” Stephane Guegan, Ingres: Erotic Drawings (Paris, Flammarion, 2006): 59. The subject of Ingres’ interest is noteworthy in relation to Duchamp’s. Included in Duchamp’s final series of etchings, The Lovers, he paid homage to a few artists he apparently held in high esteem. One print is based on a work by Rodin, another on a Courbet. But he must have had particular admiration for Ingres, for he based two compositions on paintings by the older master. A New Look: Marcel Duchamp, his twine, and the 1942 First Papers of Surrealism Exhibition
The First Papers of Surrealism exhibition, which opened on October 14, 1942 at the Whitelaw Reid Mansion in midtown Manhattan, was both historic and peculiar. As heralded by Newsweek magazine, First Papers of Surrealism was the “biggest all-surrealist show ever seen in the United States.”(1) It announced the arrival of Surrealism’s most celebrated artists, many of whom had recently left Europe to avoid the war. The exhibition’s title, in fact, alluded to the documents some artists had needed during their travels. In addition, First Papers of Surrealism benefited the Coordinating Council of French Relief Societies, a wartime charity organization.(2) In such ways, the show was a very serious event, a product of and a response to the tumultuous political environment of the early 1940s. click to enlarge
Figure 1 Title page, First Papers of Surrealism catalogue, 1942. Philadelphia Museum of Art.
But First Papers of Surrealism was an equally whimsical affair, a playful reordering of the gallery experience. At the show’s opening, as children ran around and played catch, several hundred feet of twine, hung by Marcel Duchamp, festooned the primary exhibition space.(3) This installation—hereafter referred to as his twine, the original title given by the First Papers of Surrealism catalogue (Fig. 1)—acted as something of a veil.(4) It partially masked the room’s ornate Gilded Age architecture, as well as some of the paintings on display.(5) Though certainly unorthodox, this installation was not without precedent. At the 1938 Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in Paris, a taxicab carrying snail-covered mannequins was parked near the gallery’s entrance, coal bags were suspended from the ceilings, and the lights were dimmed so that visitors needed flashlights to see.(6)
In the First Papers of Surrealism exhibition, Duchamp’s twine created an intriguing environment through an economy of means. Yet for all the simplicity of the installation’s material, visitors were left uncertain of his twine‘s significance. As perhaps expected, the installation elicited a variety of interpretations. For Elsa Schiaparelli, one of the exhibition’s coordinators, the twine was something of a guide, “directing visitors to this and that painting with a definite sense of contrast.”(7) Edward Alden Jewell, the New York Times art critic, focused on the installation’s functional effects, reporting that, “[the twine] forever gets between you and the assembled art, and in so doing creates the most paradoxically clarifying barrier imaginable.”(8) Some visitors, such as Harriet and Sidney Janis, on the other hand, opted for more metaphorical interpretations. They believed the installation represented the complexity of understanding contemporary art, writing that Duchamp’s use of twine “symbolized literally the difficulties to be circumvented by the uninitiate in order to see, to perceive and understand, the exhibitions.” (9)
Duchamp himself never provided any explicit interpretation of his twine. Instead, he tended, like Jewell, to stress more his twine’s functional value than its symbolic meaning. He believed that the installation was more transparent than opaque, saying in a 1953 interview: “It was nothing. You can always see through a window, through a curtain, thick or not thick, you can see always through if you want to, same thing there.”(10) In recalling the frustration some of the other participating artists felt forhis twine, Duchamp was unsympathetic. He doubted why “Some painters were actually disgusted with the idea of having their paintings back of lines like that, thought nobody would see their paintings.”(11)
That Duchamp was keen to downplay, even deny, the obstructing quality of his twine is especially interesting, because that aspect has been the one most emphasized since First Papers of Surrealism closed on November 7, 1942. The installation has generally been discussed in terms of separation and dislocation; the twine deemed a dividing barrier, or what T.J. Demos calls “the maximal obstacle between paintings and viewing space.”(12) This approach to the exhibition sets into motion a series of conflicts—installation versus paintings, paintings versus viewers, viewers versus installation—and has provided further opportunity to contextualize the exhibition within the political, social, and economic tensions of World War II. As Duchamp’s statements suggest, however, conflict was not the intended product of his twine. click to enlarge Figure 2 John Schiff, his twine at First Papers of Surrealism (South view), 1942. Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Figure 3 John Schiff, his twine at First Papers of Surrealism (North view), 1942. Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Looking at a photograph of the First Papers of Surrealism installation taken by John Schiff (Fig. 2), it is easy to see why his twine might be interpreted as an obstacle between viewer and art. The twine crisscrosses back and forth across the photograph’s frame, making the gallery and the art on display appear inaccessible. This photograph, moreover, is the best known and most consistently cited record of First Papers of Surrealism, which might explain the prevalence of this interpretation. Photographs, however, can be misleading, and Schiff’s is no exception.(13) Though the photograph suggests a separation between the viewer—in this case Schiff—and the art, Duchamp’s twine installation was more permeable and the art on display more accessible than many believe it to have been. The essay to follow will clarify these misconceptions through a detailed study of the First Papers of Surrealism photographs and of the architecture of the gallery space itself, with the ultimate goal being a more complete and accurate conception of the exhibition’s design.
The aforementioned photograph by Schiff is reproduced, along with another installation shot (Fig. 3), in Lewis Kachur’s book Displaying the Marvelous, the most comprehensive study of First Papers of Surrealism to date.(14) The same two photographs are also reproduced in Robert Lebel’s Marcel Duchamp.(15) These photographs constitute the most comprehensive visual record of the exhibition and of his twine. Combined, they show the gallery in its near-entirety by presenting the room from opposite ends; one photograph looks north, the other south. They do not show the gallery from a single vantage point, nor were they “taken from the center” of the room, as Kachur has described them.(16)
To determine where Schiff’s photographs were taken and what they represent, it is necessary to visualize the architecture of the gallery itself. For the sake of clarity, this essay is accompanied by an interactive floor plan of the space (Fig. 4).(17) Approximately 54 feet long by 25 feet wide, the room sits on the second floor of the Reid Mansion’s southern wing (Fig. 5). On the gallery’s west side, situated directly above Madison Avenue, there are three windows. The north and south ends each have two windows, which overlook the mansion’s courtyard and Fiftieth Street, respectively. Even though the gallery windows were covered during the exhibition, their locations are betrayed by light reflecting off the floor and are thus easily discernable in Schiff’s photographs. These same photographs do not show the gallery’s entrance, which was located at the middle of the east wall. They instead show only the ornate molding around the doorway, the entrance itself being hidden by the temporary partitions set up for the exhibition. click images to enlarge
Figure 4 Figure 5
First Papers of Surrealism gallery plan, 1942, Design by the author, 2006. New York Palace Hotel (formerly the Whitelaw Reid Mansion), New York, 2006. Photograph by the author.
These partitions, each situated perpendicular to the nearest wall, allowed the Surrealists to increase the hanging space. As illustrated in the floor plan, there were ten such partitions: five ran the course of the west wall; two were placed at the north end; and three sat along the east wall. At the south end was a small stage with a piano on it. (Though they did little to change the gallery’s layout, there were also six temporary partitions set parallel to and directly against the walls, presumably used to avoid putting holes in the room’s original wood paneling.) On the whole, his twine was restricted to the ceiling space and the gaps between neighboring partitions—the main exception to this rule being the space between the two partitions flanking the entrance. There, a lack of twine allowed visitors to enter. The interior of the gallery was also free of twine and thus open to ambulation. Carroll Janis, the son of Harriet and Sidney Janis and one of the children present at theFirst Papers of Surrealism opening, confirms these details, recalling that “there was free access down the center of the large room, with ‘partitioned niches’ on either side.”(18)
A close examination of Schiff’s photographs makes it is possible to recreate where he stood when shooting. These vantages, which are marked on the accompanying floor plan, have also been recreated in two included photographs (Figs. 6-7).(19) Because the view of the room’s southern end shows the stage that was set up there, the view of the northern end must have been taken from somewhere in the vicinity of this platform. Duchamp used hardly any twine in that area, so the photograph taken from the south (the north view) is without foreground obstructions. This photograph in turn shows that its counterpart, the south view, was taken from between the partitions at the opposite end of the room. As twine was strung across these partitions, the photograph taken there (the south view) represents the gallery as an area closed-off by a web of intersecting lines. The photograph is therefore deceptive, as the space beyond the twine was actually open and easily accessible. click images to enlarge Figure 6 Figure 7
L’Orangerie room at the New York Palace Hotel (South view), 2006. Photograph by the author. L’Orangerie room at the New York Palace Hotel (North view), 2006. Photograph by the author.
In addition to providing information regarding the layout of First Papers of Surrealism, these photographs highlight the artificiality, or perhaps theatricality, of Schiff’s process. Kachur has described the photographs as being “as straightforward as possible,” but while that claim might hold true for the north view, it is hardly the case with the south.(20) Because of the twine’s layout, photographing the north view would have required little more than standing near or atop the stage. Photographing the south view, however, would have entailed a more involved process. To get this shot, Schiff had to stand behind the twine running between the northernmost partitions. If Duchamp’s installation was indeed a physical barrier, then Schiff’s task would have been quite demanding. But regardless of how easy or difficult the twine was to circumvent, the photographs are nonetheless carefully orchestrated.
Specifically, Schiff’s photographs and the means by which they were taken emphasize and demonstrate the permeability of Duchamp’s installation at First Papers of Surrealism. Even the south view, the one mostly obscured by his twine, nonetheless provides a relatively clear view of the exhibition. Moreover, the photographs actually seem to encourage the practice of looking through his twine. They ask the viewer to acknowledge the installation, the gallery space, and art beyond. It is something of a looking game: focus on the twine; focus on the gallery; focus on the art. The game repeats as the viewer continues through the exhibition. Becoming more accustomed to the environment, the viewer may realize that the relationship between the three entities is more a fluid partnership than a one-sided competition. Schiff’s photographs suggest this sort of dynamic interaction with the twine; in their staging, they actually document that experience. click to enlarge
Figure 8 Max Ernst’s Le Surrealism et la Peinture behind twine at First Papers of Surrealism , 1942. Newsweek, 26 October 1942.
Throughout the rest of the First Papers of Surrealism records and materials, the concept of seeing through his twine, of allowing Duchamp’s installation to somehow mediate the viewing experience, is consistently reiterated. A photograph from Newsweek (Fig. 8), for instance, shows Max Ernst’sLe Surréalisme et la Peinture (1942) behind his twine. In this case, the photograph’s small field of view limits the ability to locate either the camera’s vantage point or the placement of Ernst’s painting (though the work does appear to hang on one of the six partitions set parallel to and directly against the gallery walls). More importantly, the Newsweek photograph demonstrates how easily one could have viewed the painting despite the presence of the twine. Arnold Newman, another photographer to take pictures of theFirst Papers of Surrealism installation, took at least two photographs of his twine, both of which include Duchamp. In one (Fig. 9), the artist looks out coyly from behind his twine; in the other (Fig. 10), he stands beside his 1913 Cimetière des Uniformes et Livrées (or Network of Stoppages, as it is known in English). In both photographs, his twine functions as a framing device, something to be recognized but not focused upon. click images to enlarge
Figure 9 Figure 10
Arnold Newman, Marcel Duchamp, 1942. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Arnold Newman, Marcel Duchamp behind his installation of “sixteen miles of string,” 1942. Zabriskie Gallery website. click to enlarge
Figure 11 Marcel Duchamp,” First Papers of Surrealism catalogue, 1942. Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Since the geometric painting to Duchamp’s right in the second photograph by Newnam also appears in Schiff’s south view, Cimetière des Uniformes et Livrées must have hung on the partition between the middle and northernmost windows of the west wall of the gallery. The vantage point of Newman’s photograph, in turn, would have been just north of the gallery’s center.(21) This point is also marked on the included floor plan. That Duchamp was posed beside this particular painting is not a coincidence. Cimetière des Uniformes et Livrées, which was fully reproduced in the exhibition catalogue (Fig. 11), is a layering of imagery derived from other paintings and drawings, the top level being the synapse- like forms of 3 Standard Stoppages (1914), made by dropping meter-long threads from a height of one meter onto a horizontal surface.(22) In other words, Newman’s photograph shows a painting behind twine of a painting behind twine. A more reflexive image could hardly be imagined. Duchamp may well have collaborated with Newman on setting up the photograph. Duchamp’s designs for theFirst Papers of Surrealism catalogue emphasize permeability and the process of looking through. On the front cover is an image of a wall pocked with bullet holes through which Duchamp punched five actual holes (Fig. 12), while on the page facing Sidney Janis’s foreword to the catalogue, the artists participating in the exhibition are listed so that their names collectively create the shape of a keyhole (Fig. 13), again referencing the process of looking through.(23) The back cover is a detailed image of Swiss cheese (Fig. 14).(24) By emphasizing the transparency of his twine, Newman’s photographs reiterate the iconography of the catalogue. If Duchamp did not actively collaborate with Newman in creating the compositions of the photographs, they are nonetheless very much in keeping with the central idea of theFirst Papers of Surrealism installation and catalogue. click images to enlarge Figure 12 Figure 13 Figure 14
Front Cover, First Papers of Surrealism catalogue, 1942. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Artists names in keyhole, First Papers of Surrealism catalogue, 1942. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Back Cover, First Papers of Surrealism catalogue, 1942. Philadelphia Museum of Art.
The Newman photograph of Duchamp besideCimetière des Uniformes et Livrées also shows that twine was strung only from the edges of each partition on the sides closest to the middle of the gallery. Each partition, moreover, was set not directly against the wall but out by two or three feet. Such a layout would have made possible a navigable corridor ringing parts of the gallery’s east, north, and west walls. The corridor would have allowed passage around the gallery’s perimeter and entrance into the niches between facing partitions. The existence of such channels, however, is somewhat speculative. When asked, Carroll Janis could not confirm their presence, but nor could he deny the possibility that they had been there, writing, “I do not recall any corridor running around the back of the niches – but I wasn’t looking for it either!”(25) If there was not a continuous walkway, some other means of passage through his twine must have been present. How else could Schiff’s and Newman’s photographs be explained? Janis claims to “[not] recall any real access into the niches,” though he counters that, “the string had a certain fragile character…one could have slipped under at certain points.”(26) Jewell, whose account may be more reliable given his age at the time and the nature of his job, provides a more convincing description. He reports that “intrepid” visitors could “reach closer proximity [to the paintings] by means of certain strategically placed apertures.”(27) This statement, beyond verifying the existence of openings in his twine, indicates that such “apertures” were intentionally created for the express purpose of accessing the partitioned niches. In Schiff’s north view of First Papers of Surrealism, such an opening appears to exist between the partitions perpendicular to one another at the gallery’s northwest corner. Close to the gallery’s north end and to the spot where Cimetière des Uniformes et Livrées hung, this opening was likely the one used by Schiff when he shot his south view of the exhibition and by Duchamp when he posed for Newman.
Just how many people actually chose to traverse the skeins of the First Papers of Surrealism installation is uncertain. Duchamp and Schiff count for at least two, and perhaps there were more. But even if only a few visitors were “intrepid” enough to pass through the installation, the possibility for such passage is a reminder that his twine was far less an impediment than commonly believed. Moreover, for those who did not physically navigate the installation, his twine arguably did more to enhance the paintings on display than it did to obscure them. “It was,” as Janis writes, “a fantastically interesting see-through construction, which transformed the gallery space into an unforgettable experience.” Contrary to his parents’ interpretation, Janis believes the twine actually “helped explicate the new art.”(28) click to enlarge
Figure 15 First Papers of Surrealism catalogue, 1942. Philadelphia Museum of Art.
That Duchamp’s installation at the First Papers of Surrealism exhibition would be concerned with new, intriguing, and even playful methods of looking at art is not surprising. Experimenting with sight was for Duchamp a lifelong preoccupation. A work like To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass), with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour (1918) predates the exhibition and demonstrates an early example of how Duchamp chose to engage the practice of looking. Concurrent with First Papers of Surrealism—and less than nine blocks away—at Peggy Guggenheim’sArt of This Century gallery, Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise (1935-41) was on display through the peephole of a web-like apparatus.(29) Some years later, Duchamp would begin work on Etant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau, 2° le gaz d’éclairage (1946-66), a piece that summarizes many of the artist’s diverse interests but is above all about the act of looking through. Since the First Papers of Surrealism catalogue includes a reproduction of Duchamp’s In the Manner of Delvaux (1942) (Fig. 15), a collage showing a fragmented view of a female nude, Etant donnés, may have already been on Duchamp’s mind.(30) The use of certain other imagery in the catalogue—bullet holes, Swiss cheese, a keyhole—only furthers the likelihood of that possibility. To what extent Duchamp himself would have related these or other works to the First Papers of Surrealism installation is uncertain. From a material point of view, he may have considered his twine to be more akin to 3 Standard Stoppages or With Hidden Noise (1916), as both those works involve string. Compositionally, he may have found more in common with Sculpture for Traveling (1918), another temporary work, which involved stretching parts of a bathing cap to different walls of a room. In truth, different aspects ofhis twine might resonate equally with many different works by Duchamp, and likewise there may be many ways to interpret the installation beyond the artist’s oeuvre alone. But analysis of that variety has never been this essay’s goal. The primary concern has always been the reexamination of theFirst Papers of Surrealism texts, photographs, and space. Ashis twine no longer hangs, having existed for not even a month, this documentary material is of utmost importance. By synthesizing as much of this information as possible, the hope has been the achievement of a more concrete understanding of the exhibition’s design and of the role his twine played there.
Notes
1. “Agonized Humor,” Newsweek, 26 Oct 1942, 76.
2. Ticket prices were listed as $1.10 for the opening preview and $.50 thereafter, as noted by Edward Alden Jewell in “Surrealists Open Display Tonight,” New York Times, 14 Oct 1942, from ProQuest Historical Newspapers the New York Times (1851-2003) .
3. At the request of Duchamp, Carroll Janis, the son of Sidney and Harriet Janis, and friends ran around and played ball in the galleries. The performance tickled some of the adult visitors and frustrated others. In Lewis Kachur’s Displaying the Marvelous (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), Kachur explains the children’s activities in a section called “Vernissage Consacré aux Enfants Jouant, à l’Odeur du Cèdre,” 195-7.
4. André Breton and Marcel Duchamp, First Papers of Surrealism (New York: Coordinating Council of French Relief Societies, Inc., 1942). As news of the installation spread, Duchamp’s handiwork soon acquired the catchy nameSixteen Miles of String. See, for instance, Robert Coates, “The Art Galleries, Sixteen Miles of String,” New Yorker, October 31, 1942, 72; Alfred M. Frankfurter, “The Passing Shows,”Art News: November 1-14, 1942, 24. This moniker, however, is misleading, as no such length was ever used; moreover, it is unnecessary when compared to the simpler title originally given in the exhibition catalogue: “his twine.” This phrase appears on the catalogue’s title page, alongside other basic information regarding the show. The same page also credits the “hanging” to André Breton, who indeed helped coordinate the exhibition. Thus, although “his twine” may also be understood as wordplay on “his twin,” a reference to the friendship between Duchamp and Breton, that interpretation is certainly secondary to the phrase’s purpose as a title credit.
5. Built in 1884 by McKim, Mead & White, the mansion was originally intended for railroad tycoon Henry Villard. Bankruptcy forced Villard to give up possession of the property, selling it to Whitelaw Reid, then editor of the New York Tribune. Today, the estate is part of the New York Palace Hotel, which calls the wing where the 1942 exhibition was held the Villard Mansion. See Christopher Gray, “Streetscape/Madison Avenue Between 50th and 51st Street; A Landmark 6-Home Complex in Dark Brownstone,” New York Times, 21 Dec 2003, from ProQuest Historical Newspapers the New York Times (1851-2003). 6. This exhibition is addressed in Kachur’s Displaying the Marvelous and Alyce Mahon’s Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 1938-1968 (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005), among others.
7. Kachur, 179.
8. Edward Alden Jewell, “‘Inner Vision’ and Out of Bounds,” New York Times, 18 Oct 1942, from ProQuest Historical Newspapers the New York Times (1851-2003).
9. Harriet and Sidney Janis, “Marcel Duchamp, Anti-Artist,” View 5, no. 1 (March 1945), 18. Arturo Schwarz makes a similar interpretation in his The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1969), 515.
10. Duchamp quoted in Kachur, 183
11. Ibid., 189-90.
12. T. J. Demos, “Duchamp’s Labyrinth: First Papers of Surrealism, 1942,” October (Summer 2001), 94.
13. Interestingly, the reception of his twine is strikingly similar to that of Duchamp’s Fountain, 1917. In both cases, photographs have been the primary means for seeing the original work. That is of course true with his twine, a temporary installation seen only by gallery visitors. Fountain also no longer exists, although replicas are on display at several museums, in particular the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Even before the original was lost, however, Fountain was for years known largely through Alfred Stieglitz’s 1917 photograph of the work. Stieglitz’s photograph exaggerated the formal qualities of Fountain, prompting critics to respond with overly aesthetical interpretations of the readymade. Yet time has shown that Fountain is more an ironic and provocative critique of art than an objet d’art per se. As this study explains, Schiff’s photograph of his twine suggests a more imposing, impassible installation than in reality. For more on the reception of Fountain, see William Camfield, Marcel Duchamp: “Fountain” (Houston: Menil Foundation, 1989), particularly pages 13-60.
14. Kachur, 176, fig. 4.3; 180, fig. 4.5.
15. Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1959), plates 111a and 111b.
16. Kachur, 168.
17. The floor plan was drafted by the author according to measurements taken at the gallery. The placement of the partitions and the stage have been determined as best as possible according to the photographs by Schiff and Newman.
18. Carroll Janis, letter to the author, 31 January 2007.
19. The gallery, part of the New York Palace Hotel (see note 5), is now called L’Orangerie and is a meeting/banquet hall. I visited the L’Orangerie room on November 7, 2006, coincidentally the sixty-fourth anniversary of the First Papers of Surrealism closing. Despite some renovations to the ceiling and the installation of some modern fixtures, the room seems to have changed little since 1942. At the New York Palace Hotel, I took a series of digital photographs and videos to document my visit. In particular, I tried to recreate the photographs taken by Schiff and Newman, which have been included here along with an exterior shot of the mansion.
20. Kachur, 187.
21. Ibid., 176, image caption 4.3, indicates this work as one by Robert Motherwell. It is not, however, El Miedo de la Obscuridad (1942), the Motherwell work reproduced in the First Papers of Surrealism catalogue. That it is even by Motherwell seems questionable. Kachur also identifies in this photograph works by Paul Klee, Ernst, Marc Chagall, Alexander Calder, and Pablo Picasso. In the other photograph by Schiff, reproduced on page 176, Kachur identifies works by Picasso, Yves Tanguy, René Magritte, Giorgio de Chirico, and Jean Arp.
22. For an animated illustration of how the works combine into a single whole, see Greg Alvarez’s video at http://www.marcelduchamp.net/stoppages.php.
23. It was actually Duchamp himself who fired a gun at the wall. See Martica Sawin, Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 222-6.
24. A debate has arisen regarding this cheese, particularly what exact type is shown. See Stephen E. Hauser, “Marcel Duchamp Chose Emmentaler Cheese (1942),” Tout-Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal, Issue 3, 2003 (27 November 2006). 25. Janis letter.
26. Ibid.
27. “Surrealists Open Display Tonight.”
28. Janis letter.
29. Kachur, 202.
30. Thomas Singer claims in “In the Manner of Duchamp, 1942-47: The Years of the ‘Mirrorical Return,’” Art Bulletin 86, no. 2 (June 2004) 346-69 that the origins of Etant donnés can be traced to In the Manner of Delvaux. His analysis, however, does not closely consider the work’s reproduction in the First Papers of Surrealism catalogue. Furthermore, while the conclusion drawn by Singer is correct—that the collage relates to Etant donnés—his argument is confusing. His study overemphasizes the importance of infrathinness, forgery, and mirrors, but does not discuss the striking visual similarities between a peephole and the cropping of In the Manner of Delvaux as it is reproduced.
A Problem With No Solution
click to enlarge Figure 1 Julien Levy Gallery’s Exhibition Announcement for Through the Big End of the Opera Glass, 1943 In 1943, Marcel Duchamp was asked by the gallery owner Julien Levy to design the announcement for an exhibition to be called “Through the Big End of the Opera Glass.”(1) As the title implies (adapted, as it was, from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass), the show was to feature unusually small-scale work. Years later, Levy explained that the idea for the exhibition came from having seen an example of Duchamp’s valise, in which the artist had packed miniature reproductions of his work into a portable suitcase.(2) The show was to include not only work by Duchamp, but by two other artists as well: the French Surrealist painter Yves Tanguy, and the American collage and assemblage artist, Joseph Cornell. Within the announcement (Fig. 1), Duchamp reproduced a black-and-white layout by Cornell featuring the titles of Cornell’s work printed in a variety of expressive type faces surrounded by a collage of images referring to them, while Tanguy was represented by a drawing of one of his characteristically biomorphic three-dimensional shapes, accompanied, in this particular instance, by an opaque black shadow that curiously overlaps it. click to enlarge Figure 2 Marcel Duchamp, Cupid, Collection of the Honorable Joseph P. Carroll For his own contribution, on the back cover of the announcement Duchamp provided the image of a cupid with a stretched bow and arrow in his hands, but the figure is inexplicably reproduced upside down, for the artist’s signature—which is oriented legibly—streams off to one side at the level of the cupid’s head. At first glance, knowing that Duchamp often appropriated imagery for whatever purpose was required—in the fashion of culling images readymade—one might easily conclude that the cupid was clipped from some printed source and collaged into this position. However, the original layout for this announcement was recently discovered among the effects of Julien Levy, and it is now known that Duchamp painstakingly drew the cupid himself in pen and ink (Fig. 2). It is likely that he took the time to render this image because he could not find the reproduction of a cupid fixing his arrow in this precise direction, a detail that, as we shall soon learn, is critical to his intent, for the significance of the cupid’s aim can only be understood when the announcement is unfolded and fully opened. Figure 3 Detail of Julien Levy Gallery’s Exhibition Announcement for Through the Big End of the Opera Glass, 1943The paper stock Duchamp selected for this ephemeral publication was a translucent sheet folded in quadrants, forming a booklet. The first thing the recipient would have seen upon removing the announcement from its envelope was the title page, providing the name of the exhibition, its dates and its location. Upon opening the booklet, he would find Cornell’s layout opposite Tanguy’s drawing, and, on the back cover, Duchamp’s cupid. Closer examination of the cupid would reveal that something is printed on the opposite side of the paper: below Duchamp’s signature, in red ink, one can faintly read the words: “White to Play and Win” (Fig. 3). To chess enthusiasts, this phrase can mean only one thing: one is being presented with a chess problem to solve in which white is instructed to move first and eventually go on to win the game. Indeed, just above it, one can discern the faint outline of a chess board with pieces in various positions, printed, like the writing below it, on the opposite side of the sheet. If, at this point, someone is compelled to unfold the sheet and examine the opposite side, Duchamp provided additional instructions: “Look through from other side against light.”
For those already familiar with Duchamp’s work, these words might well bring to mind the elaborate title that he gave to a work on glass from 1918: To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour (The Museum of Modern Art, New York). The comparison may not have been a simple coincidence of wording, for if an attempt were made to solve the chess problem, even grand masters would likely need more than an hour to solve it. If we follow Duchamp’s instructions and “look through from the other side against light,” we will see the layout of a chessboard from the proper position (with a white square in the lower right corner), each player with a king, a pair of pawns, and a single rook. We will also see the cupid he drew on the other side, the arrow from its bow pointing down the white knight’s file (or “B” file in algebraic notation), suggesting that the next best possible move for White would be to advance its pawn. One who studies this endgame problem at any length, however, would determine that this move would not attain a win for white. Indeed, virtually any move by white seems to result in a draw, even though there are a few compelling scenarios that—until properly analyzed—give the false impression that white has a chance to win (see analysis in boxed insert).
AN ANALYSIS OF DUCHAMP’S ENDGAME PROBLEM AN EXCHANGE WITH LARRY EVANS Diagram A
Diagram BAt first glance, the endgame chess problem that Duchamp devised (see Diagram A) gives the impression that White could play and win, for White has a pawn on the seventh rank and a quick promotion would seem inevitable. Black has two isolated pawns that could also advance, but they are farther from promotion and look as though they could easily be attacked by White’s rook. The following scenario seems plausible, as was suggested to me thirty years ago by international grandmaster Larry Evans:(I)
1. White Black 2. Ke4! h4 3. Kd5 h3 4. Kc6 h2 5. Rg7+ Kf3 6. Rh7 Kg2 7. Kc7 Rxb7+ 8. Kxb7 h1=Q 9. Rxh1 Kxh1 10. Kc6 f5 Kd5 and wins (see Diagram B) Diagram C
Diagram D
Diagram E This variation, however, misses a possible move for Black, one that would not only extend play, but would eventually result in a draw.(II) After the white king moves to c7 (the sixth move), the pieces are in the position and shown in Diagram C.
At this point, Black is forced to move his rook (otherwise, the white king will capture it on its next move). If he captures the white pawn and checks white’s king at the same time, the result will be a win for White (as Evans demonstrated above). But if Black moves his rook to g8 (6. … Rg8), he is in a far better position. There, if White promotes on the next move, he can capture the promoted piece (as indicated in Diagram D).
On the very next move, the white king will capture the black rook. The white rook will then capture the black pawn when it promotes, and the black king will, in turn, take the white rook, leaving a pair of kings and isolated pawns on each side of the board, a position that results in a draw.
There is another scenario that would allow White to continue play even further. After 6. … Rg8, if White does not promote his pawn on the 7th move, but, rather, advances his other pawn one square forward (7. b6, in the direction indicated by the Cupid’s arrow), play would continue as follows:
7 … h1=Q 8 Rxh1 Kxh1 9 b8=Q Rxb8 10 Kxb8 f5 draws Diagram F
Diagram G In this position, it may appear that White will win, since his pawn seems closer to promotion. When played out, however, this leads to Diagram G (discussed below), resulting in another book draw. A number of other possible scenarios were later suggested by Larry Evans. In the initial position, he strongly encouraged investigation of moving the white king to e3, or advancing the trailing pawn to b6 (as suggested in Duchamp’s design by the direction of the Cupid’s arrow).(III) This latter suggestion (1. b6) eventually transposes to Diagram E. Following the strategy that I had proposed—of Black moving his rook to g8—Evans also suggested that White promote right away on b8, followed by a black rook capture (thereby eliminating White’s pawn that was threatening to promote). White’s king would then capture the black rook on b8, followed by the promotion of Black’s pawn, which would, in turn, be captured by the white rook. The black king would then capture the white rook, leaving the position found in Diagram F. If we compare the final positions in Diagrams E and F, we discover that they are very similar and transpose into each other. They both lead to Diagram G, which ends in a classic draw (as explained below). In position F only, the white pawn would queen, leaving the black king protecting a pawn that is about to promote (see Diagram G). The position leads to perpetual check, or stalemate.
The way a stalemate is achieved (from Diagram G) is that White starts a series of checks leading to the following position: White Kc7, Qg4 (check); Black: Kg2, f2. Then after … Kh1, Qf3+ Kg1, Qg3+, Black does not protect his pawn with … Kf1 (because then the white King steps back up the board, followed by a series of checks and King moves again, leading to eventual mating position), but instead plays … Kh1! Then if the white Queen takes the pawn with Qxf2, it is a stalemate; but meanwhile, Black is threatening to promote. So White has to give perpetual check or allow stalemate.(IV) The way a stalemate is achieved (from Diagram G) is that White starts a series of checks leading to the following position: White Kc7, Qg4 (check); Black: Kg2, f2. Then after … Kh1, Qf3+ Kg1, Qg3+, Black does not protect his pawn with … Kf1 (because then the white King steps back up the board, followed by a series of checks and King moves again, leading to eventual mating position), but instead plays … Kh1! Then if the white Queen takes the pawn with Qxf2, it is a stalemate; but meanwhile, Black is threatening to promote. So White has to give perpetual check or allow stalemate Figure 4 Black & White photograph of Larry Evans playing chess with Marcel Duchamp (Larry Evans is on the left and Marcel Duchamp is on the right)Larry Evans—who had played chess with Duchamp on more than one occasion (Fig. 4)—was sufficiently intrigued by this problem that he graciously accepted my request to publish it in his monthly column in Chess Life & Review.(V) At the time, I offered a $15 reward for its solution, not realizing that I would be inundated with responses, a number of which came from prison inmates who demanded immediate payment of the reward. Phone calls from several of these individuals were all the intimidation I needed to send checks, even though none of their solutions were actually convincing. The most thoughtful and detailed responses came from regular readers of Chess Life & Review, specialists in endgame strategy who proposed a variety of intriguing possibilities, all hoping that theirs was the ultimate solution (although I do not believe that any of them actually were). I have since subjected this problem to the most powerful computer programs available to me, and no solution has yet been found. I am now all the more convinced that this is a problem that cannot be solved. Duchamp has given us, in effect, a problem with no solution.(VI) I. In an effort to solve this problem, I wrote to E. B. Edmondson, then executive director of the American Chess Federation. He passed on my inquiry to Larry Evans, who responded to me in a letter dated June 2, 1976.
II. I presented these alternatives to Mr. Evans in a letter dated June 4, 1976.
III. Letter from Evans to the author, June 5, 1976.
IV. The analysis of this final position was generously provided by Allan G. Savage, author of Reconciling Chess: a Marcel Duchamp Sampler(Davenport: Thinkers’ Press, 1998), and who is in the process of writing the fourth volume of the series published by Moravian Chess, The Chess Biography of Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), which is scheduled for publication in 2008.
V. “Larry Evans on Chess,” Chess Life & Review (October 1976), p. 580.
VI. I have provided copies of the present analysis to several experienced chess players: Jennifer Shahade, Ralph Kaminsky, Allen G. Savage and Malcolm H. Wiener. These individuals are familiar with standard chess analyses and, although they agree with my general conclusion (that the problem has no solution), they believe my analysis to be redundant and—in comparison to professional analyses— somewhat amateurish. Nevertheless, I am grateful to all of them for having taken the time to review my text, and for having provided various recommendations for its improvement.
The rigor and intensity of this endgame problem stands in sharp contrast to the means by which Duchamp presents us with a hint of its solution: a cupid aiming his arrow toward the ground (or into the sky, if we consider that the cupid is presented upside-down). Cupid is, of course, the mythological god of love, and his arrow is usually aimed in the direction of an amorous target; a direct hit can cause the recipient to fall deeply and blindly in love. Knowing this, and knowing that when Duchamp designed this brochure he had recently met and fallen in love with Maria Martins— a Brazilian sculptor, married with three children, and in almost every respect, unattainable—one is tempted to speculate that Duchamp might have had a personal situation in mind when he decided that a cupid should indicate the path to follow in pursuing a solution to this vexing problem. Duchamp was well known for having said: “There is no solution, because there is no problem.”(3) In the end, the problem that he faced with Maria Martins was insurmountable, demonstrating that in both chess and life— and perhaps in art as well—there are, indeed, problems without solutions.
Notes
This article first appeared in The Sienese Shredder no. 1 (Winter 2006-2007), pp. 180-87. At the time when it appeared, I was unaware of the fact that Grandmaster Pal Benko had published an analysis of this same endgame problem, concluding—as I did—that there was no solution (see “Duchamp Solved!?,” Chess Life [August 2005], p.588). I am grateful to Ralph Kaminsky for having drawn this article to my attention.
1. The date of this exhibition has been given variously, as either 1943 or 1948. Julien Levy consistently gave the date as 1943 (see his autobiography, Memoir of an Art Gallery [New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977], p. 309, as well as the reference contained in the following note). For reasons that are unclear, however, in all editions of his otherwise reliable catalogue raisonné of work by Marcel Duchamp, Arturo Schwarz gives the date as 1948 (see The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp [New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1969], cat. no. 329, page 523; revised and expanded edition [New York: Delano Greenidge Editions, 1997], cat. no. 530, p. 793, and descriptive bibliography 71, page 904). The date of 1943 cannot be challenged, however, for the show was reviewed in The New York Times on December 12, 1943 (I am grateful to Ingrid Shaffner for bringing this citation to my attention).
2. See the statement provided by Julien Levy for a brochure published on the occasion of “Through the Big End of the Opera Glass II,” a recreation of the original 1943 show at the Joan Washburn Gallery, New York, February 15 -March 12, 1977 (the brochure contained a facsimile reprint of the original fold-out catalogue).
3. This comment seems to have been quoted for the first time in Harriet and Sidney Janis, “Marcel Duchamp: Anti- Artist,” View, series V, no. 1 (March 1945), p. 24; it is repeated again in Winthrop Sargeant, “Dada’s Daddy,” Life, vol. 32, no. 17 (April 28, 1952), p. 111.
Fig. 1-3, © 2008 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. Authorization to publish this article was provided by the author, Francis M. Naumann and The Sienese Shredder. Cinq petites choses à propos de L.H.O.O.Q.
1
click to enlarge
Figure 1 Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q.
Tentant tardivement de préciser quand, en 1919, a été “fait” L.H.O.O.Q., Marcel Duchamp fournira deux dates: au début 1953, dans ses entretiens avec Sidney, Harriet et Carroll Janis, il dira décembre(1) ; en juin 1966, dans ses entretiens avec Pierre
Cabanne, octobre(2) .
Ceci, autant en regard des faits rapportés que de la lecture qu’on peut en faire, n’est pas sans conséquence.
Du début août au 27 décembre 1919, en effet, Duchamp habite, avenue Charles-Floquet (Paris 7e), chez Francis Picabia et Gabrielle Buffet (cette dernière enceinte d’un quatrième enfant de lui, qui naît le 15 septembre). Picabia, lui, a emménagé depuis quelques jours ou semaines déjà rue Émile- Augier (Paris 16e), chez Germaine Everling, sa maîtresse (également enceinte de lui, et dont l’enfant naîtra le 5 janvier 1920(3)). Il faut déduire de cette situation particulière que, durant ce séjour de presque cinq mois, les contacts Duchamp-Picabia n’ont été que très épisodiques, sinon inexistants (sauf, selon toute vraisemblance, vers la fin du séjour), cela permettant d’ “expliquer” pourquoi L.H.O.O.Q. n’est pas publié dans les n 9 (novembre 1919), 10 (décembre 1919) ou 11 (février 1920) de 391, la revue de Picabia, mais bien, dans une version Picabia intituléeTableau dada par Marcel Duchamp(4) , dans le n 12 (mars 1920). Michel Sanouillet ajoute sur ce point une précision: “Picabia lui demanda par lettre l’autorisation de “refaire” uneJoconde pour 391, autorisation qui fut naturellement accordée. Mais Picabia, qui n’avait conservé de l’oeuvre de Duchamp qu’un souvenir imprécis, se borna à dessiner la moustache(5).” Picabia, en effet, ne reprend sur le coup que “L.H.O.O.Q.”, l’inscription qui deviendra le titre du readymade(6), l’inscrivant à son tour, verticalement et sans les points, sur l’une de ses toiles, Le double monde(7), datée de [décembre] 1919 et exhibée sur scène par André Breton lors du Premier vendredi de (la revue) Littérature, le 23 janvier 1920, première manifestation de Dada à Paris.
À cause de son titre (Tableau dada par Marcel Duchamp), la version Picabia passera pour l’original pendant plusieurs années, cet original n’étant montré pour la première fois qu’en mars 1930 à Paris, en même temps qu’une réplique agrandie (faite fin janvier ou début février 1930(8)), lors de l’exposition intitulée La peinture au défi et préfacée par Aragon.
Pour un poète, romancier et critique comme Aragon, un readymade n’est pas, dès cette époque, qu’un objet industriel, déplacé de son contexte et détourné de sa fonction utilitaire. 3
Il faut préciser que la reproduction en couleur qui en est la base n’est pas une carte postale, malgré que tant de gens l’aient dit ou écrit(9). Il n’y a qu’à regarder le verso, publié par Arturo Schwarz dès 1969 dans la 1re édition de son catalogue, pour constater qu’il n’y a pas le dispositif habituel de la carte postale avec la place pour l’adresse et le timbre (à droite), pour le “message” et la légende de l’illustration (à gauche), mais plutôt, par Duchamp, telle indication technique (au crayon) sur comment photographier le recto, et, plus tard, par dessus la précédente, telle déclaration officielle devant notaire (à l’encre) comme quoi il s’agit bien de l’original(10). Ce petit palimpseste, au verso, n’ayant d’égal, au recto, que cette mine (de crayon ajoutant les moustaches et la barbiche(11)) sur la mine (de la Joconde).
Mais où Duchamp s’est-il procuré cette reproduction en couleur? Le plus vraisemblable, comme il le raconte aux Janis en 1953, est qu’il l’a achetée dans quelque boutique installée près du Louvre, rue de Rivoli, afin de vendre à bon marché telle ou telles reproductions des grandes oeuvres de ce musée, façon de faire bien connue dans toutes les grandes villes où il y a d’importants musées. Faut-il rappeler qu’en avril 1911 le déjà très célèbre tableau de Léonard, peint au début du XVIe siècle, a été volé au Louvre et que, parce qu’on pouvait le croire disparu ou détruit (il ne sera retrouvé qu’en décembre 1913), on en a massivement diffusé, durant ces années ou immédiatement après, diverses reproductions couleur, photos retouchées ou non, dont certaines au format d’une carte postale(12). Sans doute sait-on également qu’en 1919 c’est le 400e anniversaire de la mort du peintre. Il est fait allusion à ces deux événements (telle perte peut-être irrémédiable et tel anniversaire) dans le choix de Duchamp. Quand Duchamp demande par lettre (New York, 9 mai 1949) à son ami Henri-Pierre Roché d’aller acheter une ampoule de sérum – devenue ampoule d’Air de Paris – pour remplacer celle, actuellement cassée, qu’il a rapportée de Paris, fin décembre 1919, à ses amis Louise et Walter Arensberg, il écrit:
Pourrais[-]tu aller dans la pharmacie qui est au coin de la rue Blomet et la rue de Vaugirard (si elle existe encore, c’est là que j’avais acheté la première ampoule) et acheter une ampoule comme celle-ci: 125c.c. et de la même dimension que le dessin […] — Si pas rue Blomet ailleurs, mais autant que possible la même forme, merci.(13)
La simple consultation d’un plan de Paris nous indique tout de suite qu’il n’y a pas de coin Blomet-Vaugirard, ces deux rues (15e) étant parallèles! Je rappelle cet exemple pour indiquer qu’une indication précise, même venant de l’auteur, peut être tout simplement inexacte, voire erronée. Ainsi en est-il de L.H.O.O.Q., carte postale.
Et quand Duchamp, dans “Apropos of Myself” (1962-1964), décrit cette reproduction en couleur comme étant “a cheap chromo”, il faut préciser qu’en français comme en anglaischromo est l’abréviation de chromolithographie “image lithographique en couleur” (Petit Robert I), chromolithograph “a color print produced by chromolithography”(The American Heritage of the English Language). En français, cependant, chromo, maintenant au masculin (et non plus au féminin), a un sens péjoratif: “toute image en couleur de mauvais goût”. Ce sens supplémentaire, qui met en scène le goût, fait intervenir la question esthétique, voire artistique, ce qui n’est pas le cas en anglais, cheap signifiant dans cet exemple “of poor quality” (dont la reproduction est de mauvaise qualité), mais surtout “inexpensive” (qui est bon marché(14)). 4
Quand Duchamp, dans ses entretiens de 1966 avec Cabanne, parle de Picabia et de L.H.O.O.Q., il en profite, si je puis dire, pour ajouter:
Une autre fois Picabia a fait une couverture de 391 avec le portrait de [Georges] Carpentier; il me ressemblait comme deux gouttes d’eau, c’est pour cela que c’était amusant. C’était un portrait composite de Carpentier et de moi.(15)
Cette autre fois, c’est l’été 1923, quand Georges Carpentier, le boxeur, est venu chez Picabia, au Tremblay-sur-Mauldre, le petit village où il habite depuis 1922, et que ce dernier a fait son portrait de profil; le boxeur, alors, a même signé le portrait. Quand Picabia, plus d’un an plus tard, a décidé de mettre ce portrait en première page du dernier numéro de 391 (n 19, octobre 1924), il a barré incomplètement cette signature (qu’on peut lire sous la rature) et a ajouté “Rrose Sélavy / par Picabia”, frappé après coup par la ressemblance entre Carpentier et Duchamp (dont Sélavy est le pseudonyme depuis 1920)(16). Duchamp ne faisant qu’entériner, en 1966, cette “interprétation” de Picabia.
De la même façon, si, par contiguïté, ce “portrait composite” désigne aussi L.H.O.O.Q., il faut en déduire que Duchamp rappelle, en 1966, sa déclaration de 1961 à propos de ce readymade:
La chose curieuse à propos de cette moustache et de ce bouc est que, lorsque vous regardez le sourire, Mona Lisa devient un homme. Ce n’est pas une femme déguisée en homme, c’est un vrai homme; voilà ma découverte, sans qu’à l’époque je le réalise.(17)
En 1919, une femme (La Joconde dans L.H.O.O.Q.) est aussi un homme comme, en 1920-1921, un homme (Marcel Duchamp en Rose, puis Rrose, Sélavy) est aussi une femme.
5
Sans vraiment entrer dans l’interprétation du célèbre readymade, il peut néanmoins être remarqué que ce 400e anniversaire a pu être non seulement un déclencheur (en tant qu’anniversaire), mais aussi une contrainte (en tant que chiffraison), le 4 disant qu’il ne faut utiliser que quatre lettres, les 00 suggérant que l’une d’elles, qui doit être un O, soit redoublée(18). Ces quatre lettres, comme Duchamp le dit dans “Apropos of Myself”, étant, comme on peut ici aussi le constater après-coup, dans l’ordre alphabétique – H, L, O, Q – dans le nom de la rue (cHarLes-flOQuet) où il habite alors. Mais aussi dans le nom du procédé à la base de cette reproduction: elle est cHromoLithOgraphiQue.
Et il me plaît de constater qu’à New York la notaire choisie par Duchamp et qui, signant, certifie, le 22 décembre 1944, qu’il s’agit de l’original (“This is to certify that this is the original “ready made” L H O O Q Paris 1919”(19) ), se nomme Elsie Jenriche(20): comment ne pas voir qu’elle est là aussi parce qu’elle a ce nom (qui, de ce fait, revient métatextuellement sur l’un des enjeux de l’oeuvre), mixte de “je” (I en anglais ou Ich en allemand) et d’”autre” (else), et qu’il y est question de “genre” (jenre), else rimant avec le féminin (elle: La Joconde, La Gioconda) qui rime avec le masculin (L: Léonard, Louvre), elle étant devenu il!
Enfin, si l’on trace une ligne verticale à angle droit avec le haut de l’oeuvre et qu’on passe par le centre des moustaches, on voit bien que, à cause de l’angle du visage, on longe le nez, à gauche, du personnage femelle et désormais aussi mâle et qu’on arrive, “down below” (comme dira Duchamp en 1961), exactement entre “L.H.” et “O.O.Q.”. Ce redoublement du O est alors, une fois de plus, désigné. Notes
1. Toujours inédits, les entretiens avec la famille Janis (Sidney, le père, Harriet, la mère, et Carroll, le fils) ont été faits à l’occasion de la préparation, par Duchamp, du catalogue et de l’accrochage de l’exposition Dada 1916-1923 à la Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, 15 avril-9 mai 1953. Dans la chronologie intégrée du catalogue Joseph Cornell / Marcel Duchamp… in resonance Joseph Cornell / Marcel Duchamp… in resonance, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 8 octobre 1998-3 janvier 1999, et The Menil Collection, Houston, 22 janvier-16 mai 1999, Ostfildern-Ruit, Cantz Verlag, 1998, p. 277, Susan Davidson, sans dire d’où elle tire cette précision, retient également le mois de décembre.
2. Pierre Cabanne, Entretiens avec Marcel Duchamp, Paris, Belfond, 1967, p. 114.
3. C’est un jour après la rencontre d’André Breton, invité là, et douze jours avant que, le 17 janvier, Tristan Tzara n’arrive là pour y habiter, ce séjour coïncidant avec le début de ce que Michel Sanouillet a appelé “Dada à Paris”: voir sa somme, Dada à Paris, Paris, Pauvert, 1965. Le siège du “MoUvEmEnT DADA, Berlin, Genève, Madrid, New York, Zurich”, dit le papier à lettre qui arbore cet en-tête, est maintenant à Paris. Par ailleurs, je note la coïncidence (qui n’en était peut-être pas une en 1919, étant donné l’état des connaissances sur l’oeuvre de Léonard): lorsque Duchamp est à Paris cette année-là, les deux femmes (l’épouse et la maîtresse) de Picabia sont enceintes de garçons; lorsque Francesco del Giocondo, au printemps 1503, passe une commande à Léonard pour qu’il fasse un portrait de son épouse, celle-ci lui a déjà donné deux garçons (en mai 1496 et en décembre 1502). Voir, autre somme, Daniel Arasse, Léonard de Vinci. Le rythme du monde [1997], Paris, Hazan, 2003, p. 388-389. La rime, ici, dans les deux cas: Joconde / féconde.
4. À Cabanne, Duchamp dit Tableau dada de [sic] Marcel Duchamp.
5. Michel Sanouillet, Francis Picabia et “391”, tome II, Paris, Losfeld, 1966, p. 113. (Le tome I est, en fac- similé, la réédition de 391 [1917-1924] augmentée de divers documents inédits, Paris, Losfeld, 1960.) Duchamp étant à New York depuis le 6 janvier et le no 12 de 391 ne paraissant (précise Sanouillet) qu’à la fin mars, on peut penser que Duchamp, interviewé par Schwarz (The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, New York, Abrams, 2e édition, 1970, p. 476), se souvient erronément de ce qui s’est passé à l’époque (je retraduis): “Mon original n’est pas arrivé à temps et, afin de ne pas retarder indûment l’impression de391 , Picabia a dessiné lui-même la moustache sur la Mona Lisa mais a oublié la barbiche.”
6. Je dis “l’inscription qui deviendra le titre du readymade” car, dans le catalogue-affiche de l’exposition chez Sidney Janis, Duchamp écrit: La“ Joconde, postcard with pencil”. Ce n’est qu’à partir du premier catalogue de l’oeuvre duchampienne, celui de Robert Lebel Sur( Marcel Duchamp, Paris, Trianon Press, 1959), que ce readymade aL.H.O.O.Q. comme titre. Et ce n’est qu’à partir du catalogue Schwarz (Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, New York, Abrams, 1re édition, 1969) qu’on a les dimensions exactes dudit readymade: 19.7 x 12.4 cm ou 7¾ x 4⅞ pouces. 7. Les deux O de “L H O O Q”, eux-mêmes au centre de deux autres O qui ont la forme de ficelles formant des 8 ou encore la forme des pales d’une hélice, mais d’une hélice sans axe et molle, courbée par le vent, sont également – et doublement – les O de “double” et de “monde”. Le petit manque, en haut à gauche, dans l’un de ces autres O n’a d’égal, en bas à droite, que le petit manque dans le À de “À DOMICILE”, une autre inscription, et que le petit supplément – la queue – du Q de “L H O O Q”. Façon de faire coïncider ironiquement spéculations mathématiques (topologie) et spéculations marchandes (livraison “à domicile”, c’est-à-dire au logis).
8. “J’ai fait juste avant de quitter Paris une Joconde pour Aragon […] / Man Ray a la 1ère Joconde” (lettre de Duchamp à Jean Crotti, Villefranche-sur-mer, 6 février 1930, dans Affectionately, Marcel. The Selected Correspondance of Marcel Duchamp, édition de Francis Naumann et Hector Obalk, traduction de Jill Taylor, Gand et Amsterdam, Ludion Press, 2000, p. 171).
9. Trois exemples: Duchamp lui-même en 1953 (voir note 6); Ecke Bonk, Marcel Duchamp, The Box in a Valise. Inventory of an Edition, New York, Rizzoli, 1989, p. 241; Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp. A Biography, New York, Henry Holt and Company, 1996, p. 221.
10. Faut-il ajouter que Duchamp, dans les répliques ultérieures, n’a jamais utilisé une carte postale.
11. J’utilise ici le pluriel, comme Duchamp en avril 1942 lorsqu’il indique à l’encre, au bas de la maquette de l’une des deux versions Picabia (celle qui est reproduite dans 391), “Moustaches par Picabia / barbiche par Marcel Duchamp”. En français, on dit indifféremment, par exemple, ciseau et ciseaux (car il y a deux lames), pantalon et pantalons (deux jambes), moustache et moustaches (deux joues ou, simplement, deux côtés au visage). Je note par ailleurs que l’indication technique, inscrite par Picabia sur deux lignes au crayon verticalement à droite de la reproduction, commence par deux liaisons – celle qui amorce le 1 de “1 cliché” sur la première ligne et celle qui amorce le s de “sans” sur la deuxième ligne – qui n’ont d’égal que l’extrémité des moustaches! Pour une reproduction et des commentaires, voir Francis Naumann, The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, catalogue de l’exposition chez Achim Moeller Fine Art, New York, 2 octobre 1999-15 janvier 2000. Si le voyage à Paris fait par Arp en avril 1942 est bien celui durant lequel il entre en possession de ces deux versions, la rencontre Arp-Duchamp (qui se connaissent depuis 1926) ne peut avoir lieu qu’en zone inoccupée (à Grasse où habite Arp, à Sanary où habite Duchamp, avant le départ de ce dernier pour les États-Unis le 14 mai).
12. Voir les deux cartes postales, datées 1914, reproduites dans Roy McMullen, Les grands mystères de la Joconde [1975], traduction d’Antoine Berman, Paris, Éd. de Trévise, 1981, p. 223.
13. Affectionately, Marcel, ouvr. cité, p. 272.
14. C’est d’ailleurs la traduction, par Michel Sanouillet, de ce passage: “un chromo […] bon marché” (“À propos de moi-même”, dans Duchamp du signe, Paris, Flammarion, 1975, p. 227). Naumann emprunte exactement la même voie: “an inexpensive chromo-lithographic color reproduction” (The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, ouvr. cité, p. 10). 15. Pierre Cabanne, Entretiens avec Marcel Duchamp, ouvr. cité, p. 115.
16. Voir Michel Sanouillet, Francis Picabia et “391”, ouvr. cité, p. 166. On peut voir (391, ouvr. cité, p. 127) la signature de Carpentier et l’ajout de Picabia sous quelques-unes des lignes imprimées en caractères typographiques au bas de la page.
17. Herbert Crehan, “Dada”, Evidence, Toronto, n 3, automne 1961. Je traduis.
18. Ces deux “O.” ne sont pas sans évoquer aussi, par la rime “O.” / eau, le lac de montagne et le lac de plaine dans le célèbre tableau, respectivement en haut à droite et un peu plus bas à gauche dans le paysage dominé par la loggia où est le modèle, Lisa. Et que dire du chemin sinueux venant du lac de plaine, répercuté dans la queue du “Q.” (calligraphié par Duchamp)?
19. Une phrase présentative dans une autre, le référent de “This” (Ceci, comme dans “Ceci est mon corps” ou dans “Ceci est une oeuvre d’art”) étant cataphorique (c’est-à- dire qu’il suit le pronom): dans le premier cas, c’est “the original “ready made””; dans le second cas, c’est l’ensemble de la proposition formant le premier cas.
20. Dans son bref article, ““Desperately Seeking Elsie”. Authenticating the Authenticity of L.H.O.O.Q.’s Back” (Tout-Fait, New York, vol. I, n 1, décembre 1999), Thomas Girst nous apprend que cette dame, installée à l’Hotel St. Regis, New York, de 1943 à 1945, est une sténographe publique. The Bachelor Stripped Bare by Cabri Geometre, Even
1.1. The Bride stripped bare by her Bachelors, even
The Bride stripped bare by her Bachelors, even commonly known as The Large Glass (or simply The Glass) is the masterwork of Marcel Duchamp, and it is also one of the most representative and influential works of art of the 20th century. Duchamp spent several years completing his project, but the work was left unfinished in 1923. The actual execution of the work starts in 1915, but the first ideas date back to the Summer of 1912.
Duchamp planned each detail of this complex work, and left a huge corpus of notes, sketches, and blueprints, documenting not only his intentions and the desired final outcome, but also the different executive techniques for each single part of the Glass. These notes were published by Duchamp himself in three main collections.
The first one, edited in 1914, commonly known as The 1914 Box (Fig. 1) (because of the Kodak box containing the reproductions of the originals) contains sixteen notes and drawings; the second collection, dated 1934, is known as The Green Box (Fig. 2) (because of the green color of its binding) and contains a larger group of notes and sketches; finally, the third collection, named A l’infinitif but commonly known as The White Box, (Fig. 3) edited in 1966, contains for the most part a quantity of notes regarding mathematical speculations on the fourth dimension, directly related to the Glass and other works. Duchamp asserted that this huge apparatus of notes must be considered an integral part of the Glass. click to enlarge
177. Ibid. 464.
178. Ibid. 397.
179. Retallack, 110.
180. Tomkins 124.
181. Tomkins 250.
182. Tomkins 5.
183. Fetz, Kunst in der Stadt 2 x.
184. Tomkins 397.
185. Peter Gena and Jonathan Brent, A John Cage Reader (New York: C.F. Peters Higgins, 1998) 22.
186. Kostelanetz 65.
187. Ibid. 65.
188. Ibid. 111.
189. Ibid. 129.
190. Ibid. 115.
191. Info about Etant donnés found in the Internet: https://www.freshwidow.com/etant-donnes2.html
192. Tomkins 419.
193. Roth 80.
194. Cage, Silence (Afternote to his “Lecture on Nothing“) 126.
195. Ibid.
196. Tomkins 226.
197. Fetz, Kunst in der Stadt 2 x.
198. The bibliography contains some books I have not cited in the paper itself – it is a mixed collection of books that have been piling up in my shelves in the course of writing…most of whom were quite helpful
Die Lust am Sehen Marcel Duchamps „Étant donnés“: zwischen der Skopisierungs des Begehrens und der Feminisierung des Bildraumes click to enlarge
Figure 1 Figure 2 Marcel Duchamp, Étant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau 2° le gaz d’eclairage [Given:1. The Waterfall/ 2. The illuminating Gas], 1946-66. Assemblage, verschiedene Medien, ca. 242,5 cm hoch, 177,8 cm breit, 124,5 cm tief, beinhaltet: alte hölzerne Tür, schwarzer Samt, Ziegelsteine, hölzerne Tafel, Schweinehaut ausgedehnt über eine Metalarmatur und anderen Materialien (um ein weibliches Mannequin zu bilden) menschliches Haar, eine Gaslampe (Bec-Auer Art), Reisig, Aluminium, Eisen, Glas, Linoleum, Baumwolle, Lichtbirne, Leuchtstofflicht, Scheinwerfer, Elektromotor, (Philadelphia Museum of Art) [Innenaussicht und Außenaussicht]
Das letzte große Werk von Marcel Duchamp führt auf exemplarische Weise eine wortwörtliche Überblendung von weiblichem Körper und Bildraum vor. Dieses Merkmal wurde als entscheidend für die geschlechterproduzierenden Techniken westlicher Bildproduktion identifiziert und ist aus diesem Grunde unter einer geschlechterorientierten Kritik der „Skopisierung des Begehrens” zu analysieren. Wie Linda Hentschel(1) in ihrer aufschlussreichen und prägnanten Studie von Beziehungsmustern zwischen der Geschichte optischer Apparate, der Techniken des Sehens und der historisch bedingten Geschlechterkonstruktionen dargelegt hat, geht diese für das Verständnis westlicher Bildtradition grundlegende Feminisierung des visuellen Raumes mit einer Sexualisierung des Sehens einher, die eine aktive Erziehung zur Schaulust herantreibt. Der männliche Betrachter wird dem Bild-Raum gegenüber positioniert, wie gegenüber dem anderen Geschlecht.(2) Dieses Phänomen wird, Hentschel zufolge, im Aufkommen sowohl des vermeintlich wissenschaftlichen Systems der zentralperspektivischen Vermessung des Raumes als auch in der später einsetzenden Technik des binokularen Sehens manifest. Nun, da beide Techniken in “Étant donnés” (Figs. 1 and 2) medial und medienreflexiv eingesetzt werden und weil auf Frauen anspielenden Metaphern Duchamps gesamtes Werk durchlaufen, soll im Anschluss an die Argumentation Hentschels, Duchamps Stellungsnahme diesbezüglich beleuchtet werden.
Figure 3 Albrecht Dürer, Der Zeichner des liegenden Weibes, 1538, Holzschnitt, 7.5 x 21.5 cm
Als beispielhafte Darstellung des Albertinischen Fensters wurde von Hentschel auf Albrecht Dürers Holzschnitt “Der Zeichner des liegenden Weibes” (1538) (Fig. 3), der Illustration zu dessen Traktat der “Unterweisung der Messung”, verwiesen. Der Holzschnitt zeigt zum einem, wie der Künstlerblick durch ein Raster hindurch auf das verdeckte weibliche Genital gerichtet ist, und zum anderen den ebenfalls durch den zentralperspektivischen Apparat ermöglichten Betrachterblick in illusionistische Raumtiefe. In der optischen Auflösung der materiellen Oberfläche sollte der Bildträger einem geöffneten Fenster gleichen. Die perspektivistische Konstruktion investierte dadurch in die illusionistische Tiefe des Bildraumes, indem sie die Flächigkeit der Leinwand negierte und sie als Fensteröffnung verstand. In Dürers Bild wird aber ein Zeichner dargestellt, der eine perspektivische Abbildung einer Frau anfertigt, die sich dem (männlichen) Betrachter halbnackt und mit geöffneten Beinen vor einer Landschaft darbietet. Dürers Holzschnitt liefert damit der geschlechterforschenden Kunstwissenschaft einen Beweis dafür, dass die zentralperspektivische Apparatur in Zusammenhang mit der Genese eines voyeuristischen Blickes gesehen werden sollte. Der optisch systematisierte Raum bringt immer als Objekt des Begehrens den Wunsch nach Kontrolle des männlichen Künstlers/Betrachters auf dem unendlichen und in der Interpretation von Hentschel feminisierten Raum zum Ausdruck. Dürers Maschine exemplifiziert, nach Hentschel, wie die geschlechterspezifische Sexualisierung des Raumes durch Sehapparaturen vollzogen wurde sowie wie diese Feminisierung des visuellen Raumes durch spezifische Weiblichkeitsinszenierungen vorangetrieben wurde. Wie die Autorin bemerkt, verläuft der “Auszug des Mannes aus dem erotischen Bild” im Laufe des 16. Jahrhunderts parallel mit dem “Einzug der Zentralperspektive in das Bild”.(3)
Dürers Holzschnitt wurde oft als ikonographische Quelle des “Étant donnés” nicht zuletzt aufgrund der offensichtliche Ähnlichkeit des Bildmotivs erwähnt. “Étant donnés” vollzieht die Lenkung des Wahrnehmungsaktes durch die Fixierung auf einen bestimmten Sehwinkel und durch die Eingeschränktheit des Blickfeldes wobei dem Betrachter der Standort seines rezeptiven Aktes genau vorgeschrieben wird. Die Erschließung des Werkes ist buchstäblich ,nur’ durch die radikale Einhaltung des perspektivisch korrekten Standpunktes möglich. Anne d’Harnoncourt, die die Installation des Ensembles im Philadelphia Museum of Art beaufsichtigte, erläuterte Duchamps Absicht folgendermaßen: “He was extremely interested in the limitations of points of view, so that he really controlled completely what a viewer could see.”(4)Das Werk steckt den Blickpunkt exakt durch zwei alte und schäbig aussehende Gucklöcher ab, die direkt zum Genitalbereich der Puppe führen. Mit dem Rekurs auf die Ikonographie des perspektivischen Sehausschnittes greift Jean Clair ein zentrales Thema von Duchamp auf, um die voyeuristischen Inhalte in der Tradition abendländischer Kunst hervorzuheben(5) wobei Stauffer die subversive Geste hervorhebt: “Dies ‘Starren auf ein Loch’, unter Aufwendung ‘geistiger’ Hilfsmittel, das die abendländische Kunst seit der Renaissance auszeichnet, hat Duchamp in seinem letzten Werk (“Gegeben sei…”) auf fast grausame Weise parodiert.”(6)
Die dem “Étant donnés” zugeschriebene Obszönität resultiert aufgrund sowohl der spezifischen Präsentationstechniken, als auch der verheißungsvollen Inszenierung des verhüllten, geheimnisvollen Spektakels. Eine Untersuchung der eigentlichen Szenerie im Inneren des Ensembles kann ebenfalls zeigen, dass die eingesetzte visuelle Sprache bewusst gegen die vorgeschriebene Distanzierungsmechanismen des traditionellen akademischen Aktes verstößt. Die visuelle Einrahmung, die den weibliche Körper optisch fragmentiert und ihn wie aus dem Bildraum ausgeschnitten erscheinen lässt, das optische Fokussieren auf Körperöffnungen durch das bewusste Einsetzen zentralperspektivisch exakter Messungen, das Verhältnis von minimaler Narration und maximaler Sichtbarkeit, all dies sind Merkmale, die bereits als “pornographische” Mechanismen in der Kunst etwa von Courbet und Manet identifiziert wurden.(7) Diese ‚obszönen’ Präsentationstechniken verdeutlichen, dass die kritische Stellungsnahme Duchamps, sowohl der Feminisierung des Bildraumes als auch der zentralperspektivischen Systematisierung der Wahrnehmung gilt. Beiden Themen wurden exemplarisch in seinem Grossen Glass nachgegangen und finden in seinem letzten Werk eine entscheidende Weiterentwicklung.
In „Étant donnés“ ist einerseits der Anklang an eine traditionsreiche Theorie in der Geschichte der Kunst, die seit dem florentinischen Neoplatonismus den erotischen mit dem wissenden bzw. dem künstlerischen Blick verbindet(8)evident, und andererseits das kritische Thematisieren der „voyeuristische Struktur der modernen Kultur“(9) einleuchtend. Den letztgenannten Standpunkt hat Duchamp selbst oft in seinen Äußerungen, beispielsweise gegenüber bei Cabanne, gegen die „Beschauer-Gesellschaft (sic!)“ (10)vertreten. Das zentrale Thema der abendländischen Kunst, seit der Erfindung der Zentralperspektive, die der Repräsentation der Welt als Projektionsfläche, scheint im Werk Duchamps eine weitere Fortsetzung im Kontext des Erotizismus(11)zu finden, indessen die Erkundung des Sehens sich mit der Interpretation des Betrachtens (seitens des Künstlers oder des Rezipienten) als Begehren verbinden. Diese Skopisierung des Begehrens sollte im Kontext seines Erotizismus-Diskurses als grundlegend für die gesamte Repräsentations- und Bildtheorie des Künstlers, die in ihrer permanenten Rekontextualisierung immer als quasi psychoanalytischer Kommentar fungiert. Molderings bemerkte, dass das Wort ,Projektion’ bei Duchamp nicht nur wortwörtlich zu nehmen, sondern zugleich im psychoanalytischen Kontext zu deuten sei. Dieses zum Teil psychoanalytisch ausgerichtete, repräsentationskritische Denkmodell ist auf Raumwahrnehmungen und dessen ideologischen Fundamente ausgerichtet. Damit avancierte Dürers „Türlein“ zum Symbol der ,sexualisierten’ Malerei selbst, wobei Bildraum als Ort des visuellen Penetrierens verstanden wird, eine Tatsache, die mit Rekurs auf Lacans visuelle Theorie weiter nachgegangen wird.
Entscheidend ist, dass die Reduktion der Wahrnehmung auf einen perspektivisch festgelegten Ausschnitt der Wirklichkeit und die daraus folgenden „sexuellen“ Implikationen im Falle des „Étant donnés“ mit Blick auf die Manipulation des Betrachterkörpers überprüft wird. Folglich wird der Status des Betrachters als Voyeur nicht konzeptuell behauptet oder narrativ erklärt, sondern für den Betrachter körperlich erfahrbar gemacht.(12)Die dem „Étant donnés“ zugeschriebene Obszönität resultiert durch die Produktion akuter, ziemlicher realer, körperlicher Empfindungen, die nicht zuletzt durch das in diesem Sinne ,pornographische’ Einsetzen binocularen Techniken erfolgt, die der zusätzlichen Strategie des Verhüllens, der Verbergens hinter der Tür verhelfen. Dieses Einverleiben des Sehens wird nun als obszön empfunden, da die binokulare Blickinszenierung des Duchampschen Ensembles, das Gesehene zu nah an dem Betrachter selbst rückt. Duchamps Spiel mit der ,obszönen’ Natur des Sehens ist als Kritik an das entkörperlichte, distanzierten und sublimierte Selbstverständnis der zentralperspektivischen Repräsentierens zu deuten.(13) click to enlarge Figure 4 Anomym, Frankreich, um 1860
Der Hinweis auf das Stereoskop als Vorlage für das „Étant donnés“ ist auch auf der Ebene des Bildmotivs von Bedeutung.(14) Bekanntlich wurden Stereoskope gegen Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts zunehmend für die Präsentation obszöner Szenen verwendet. Die Intimität dieses Apparates machte diese neue technische Vorrichtung zum Synonym für erotische oder pornografische Bildlichkeit. Ein Vergleich der Braut des „Étant donnés“ mit den Stereoskop-Fotokarten (Fig. 4) des 19. Jahrhunderts, die sogar kopflose oder fragmentierte nackte weibliche Figuren mit geöffneten Beinen oder nackte Frauen vor idyllischen Landschaftskulissen zeigen, beleuchtet diese wesentliche zusätzliche Übereinstimmung.(15) Dies unterstützt die These, dass Duchamp mit seinem letzten Werk der Frage, wie die Feminisierung des medialen Raumes mit der Sexualisierung des Sehfelds einhergeht.
Kritik an den surrealistischen Weiblichkeitsinszenierungen Duchamps Kritik an am malerischen Repräsentationsparadigma sowie der Sehdispositive, die dieses unterstützt haben, konzentriert sich auf die Rolle der Frau als Motiv. Diese wurde oft in der Forschung in seiner individuellen Mythologie der Braut identifiziert und entsprechen interpretiert.(16) Da jedoch „Étant donnés“ das Motiv des erotischen weiblichen Körpers mit einem Erotisieren des medialen Raumes verbindet, sollte die Frage aufgestellt werden, inwiefern Duchamp in diesem Werk eine Kritik der männlich konnotierten Sehapparate und Repräsentationsmedien liefert, und ob er diese Kritik in einem konkreten historischen Kontext ansiedelt. Das Problematisieren des Frauenmotivs und der Bildfindung, wie Breton in den theoretischen Auseinandersetzungen um die surrealistische Bildästhetik fixierte, scheinen in dem Werk Duchamps eine differenzierte und zum Teil kritische Fortsetzung zu finden. Um diesen Zusammenhang weiter nachzugehen, soll eine Auseinandersetzung mit Beispielen surrealistischer Ikonographie folgen, die als ikonographische Vorlagen zu „Étant donnés“ identifiziert wurden. click to enlarge
Figure 5 Umschlag der Zeitschrift, La Révolution Surréaliste No. 1, (1. Dez. 1924)
Der Rolle der Frau wird durch eine auf dem Umschlag der Zeitschrift „La Révolution Surréaliste No. 1“ (1. Dez. 1924) (Fig. 5) gedruckte Fotografie deutlich. Die Zeitschrift sollte das surrealistische Programm ins Bild setzten. Das Foto zeigt eine vor der Schreibmaschine sitzende Dame (Simone Collinet-Breton), flankiert wird sie von einer Gruppe männlicher surrealistischer Künstler. Robert Desnos hält eine kleine Kiste in der Hand, in die Simone Collinet-Breton direkt hinein schaut. In dieser theatralischen mise-en-scène fungiert die Kiste als Symbol des verschlossenen Unterbewussten, das laut der Surrealisten durch das Verfahren der „écriture automatique„ geöffnet werden sollte. Sie ist aber zugleich ,Pandora-Kiste’, die den männlichen Künstlern von einer Frau übermittelt wurde; ihr Inhalt ist unvorhersehbar und vermutlich gefährlich. Die weibliche Figur verkörpert als Geberin genau die Position von Gott und Mensch zugleich, wobei sie aber zugleich auf die Gefährlichkeit dieser Gabe verweisen soll. Eine Rolle, die in der vielfältigen surrealistischen Metamorphose der Frau als femme fatale ins Bild gesetzt wurde. Doch zugleich symbolisiert die Frau das Verfahren selbst der „écriture automatique„ in ihrer passiven Rolle als mechanischer Schreiber, ebenfalls eine beliebte ikonographische Quelle surrealistischer Kunst. Für die Surrealisten bekommt das Weibliche eine entscheidende symbolische Funktion als Medium zum Empfang des Unbewussten und gleichzeitig als Automaton, welche diesen Empfang in Zeichen umsetzen kann, wobei das wichtigste Medium dieser Umsetzung das fotografische Verfahren ist.
Der Fotoapparat wurde von Breton als die Ikone der „ écriture automatique“ bezeichnet.(17) Die schwarze Kiste in der Hand von Desnos ist also nicht nur ein Symbol für die Büchse der Pandora, sondern auch eine Metapher für die dunkle Kammer. Doch entscheidend ist, dass die Ikone der surrealistischen Bilderfindung mit dem Symbol der zum Automaton stilisierten Frau gleichgesetzt wird.(18) In der sechsten Ausgabe der gleichen Zeitschrift (1. Okt. 1927) wird diese Idee nochmals aufgegriffen und radikalisiert. Auf dem mit „L’ écriture automatique“ betitelten Umschlag wird eine an dem Schreibpult sitzende Frau dargestellt, die in ihrer weibliche Verführungskraft die Funktion des Schreibautomaten übernimmt.(19) Die Frau in beide Fotografien ist sowohl mit dem Prozess der Bilderfindung als auch mit den Mitteln dessen Fixierung, also einer Schreibmaschine oder einem Fotoapparat etwa, gleichzusetzen. click to enlarge
Figure 6 René Magritte, Je ne vois pas la [femme] cachée dans la forêt, 1929, Photomontage, in: La Révolution Surréaliste No. 12 (15. Dez. 1929)
Auf die symbolische Funktion der Frau als Bild sowie auf das Moment der Täuschung, das damit verbunden ist, verweist auch das in der zwölften Ausgabe von „La Révolution Surréaliste No. 12“ (15. Dez. 1929) abgedruckte Photomontage „Je ne vois pas la [femme] cachée dans la forêt“ (1929) von René Magritte (Fig. 6). In dem Bild flankieren die fotografischen Porträts von sechzehn männlichen surrealistischen Künstlern, die ihre Augen geschlossen halten, das Bild eines im Dunkel stehenden weiblichen Aktes. Die Behauptung „ich habe die versteckte [Frau] im Wald nicht gesehen“ kann sich auf die in der Abbildung anwesenden Personen beziehen. In diesem – surrealistisch – inszenierten Akt der Verweigerung des Sehens wird jedoch die ambivalente Funktionalisierung des Symbols ‘Frau’ eindeutig. Die Frau kann offensichtlich nur Quelle der Inspiration für den Surrealisten sein, solange sie unsichtbar bleibt. Ist der Satz gleichzeitig auf den realen Betrachter bezogen, widerspricht die tatsächlich stattfindende Wahrnehmung – der Betrachter sieht ja eine Frau – der Bedeutung des simultan gelesenen Satzes. Die abgebildeten Personen befinden sich also im Stadium des Inspirationsempfanges, während der Betrachter in seiner Funktion als Zeuge prinzipiell von dieser ‘Epiphanie’ ausgeschlossen wird. Repräsentation ist zugleich Täuschung. Tatsächlich wird von Magritte das Motiv der Frau ausgewählt, um mediumspezifische Repräsentationsproblematiken, also um den Wirklichkeitsgrad illusionistischer Malerei und figurativer Abbildung im Kontext des fetischisierend- begehrenden Blickes, zu erörtern.(20) Alle diese Beispiele surrealistischer Weiblichkeitsinszenierungen zeigen, dass Repräsentationen des weiblichen Körpers einer symbolischen Funktion zugeordnet werden, wobei diese über den Prozess der Bilderfindung, die Medialität des Kunstwerks und die Rolle des Künstlers Aussagen macht. Die surrealistische Inszenierung des weiblichen Körpers weist über die erotische, fetischistische oder einfach phantastische Ikonographie hinaus und kündigt ästhetische und mediumstheoretische Reflexionen an.(21) click to enlarge Figure 7 Man Ray, Coat Stand, 1920, Silbergelatinabzug, 41 x 28,6 cm (Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris)
Figure 8 Man Ray, Retour à la Raison, 1923, Silbergelatinabzug, 18,7 x 13,9 cm (The Art Insitute of Chicago)
Exemplarisch für diese These steht das Werk von Man Ray, der in seiner Motivfindung sich wesentlich dem fragmentierten oder deformierten weiblichen Körper des surrealistischen Frauenautomats bedient: In der Fotografie „Coat Stand“ (1920) (Fig. 7) werden Teile des weiblichen Körpers durch mechanische Prothesen und das Gesicht durch eine grotesk lächelnde Maske ersetzt. Aber auch naturalistische Aktfotografien wie „Kiki Nude (Kiki de Montparnasse)“ überraschen durch die an einen Torso erinnernde optische Einrahmung des Objektivs.(22) Der deformierte weibliche Körper fungiert als Symbol der Formerfindung bei Man Ray, an der Stelle, an der am radikalsten mit dem fotografischen Verfahren umgegangen wird. „Das Primat der Materie über den Gedanken“ (1929) zeigt einen liegenden weiblichen Akt, der dort, wo er am Boden aufliegt, auseinander rinnt und sich an den Rändern zu verflüssigen scheint. Der Eindruck der Körperauflösung verdankt sich dem photochemischen Prozess der ,Solarisation’. Durch die zusätzliche Belichtung des Negativs im Entwicklerbad verformen sich die Konturen auf dem Negativ, das anschließend in der Entwicklung diesen verfremdeten Bildeindruck erzeugt. Repräsentation des Bildes wird bei Man Ray fast ausschließlich mittels des Frauenmotivs thematisiert. Man Rays „Return to Reason“ (1923) (Fig. 8) zeigt ebenso den Torso einer weiblichen Figur (Lee Miller) in einer solchen Position, dass das Licht ihren Körper streift und dadurch gleichsam mit dem Hintergrund verschmilzt. Das Verschwinden oder die Auflösung des weiblichen Körpers, der gleichsam sich in Licht verwandelt oder in einen anderen Aggregatzustand übergeht, wurde im Kontext des fotografischen Mediums thematisiert, wobei Formerfindung mit dem Eingriff auf die Materialität des Negativs gleichgesetzt wird.
Man kann in dem künstlerischen Programm etwa von Man Ray erkennen, dass figurative Abbildungen des weiblichen Körpers der programmatischen Kritik des Surrealismus an der bildlichen Repräsentation schlechthin dienen. Mit der Auflösung des weiblichen Körpers im Bild, wird zugleich tendenziell die Auflösung des Bildes selbst als Repräsentationssystem thematisiert, ein Thema, dass in Bretons Konzept der „kompulsivischen Schönheit“ aufgeht. Bretons surrealistische Dogmen des Wunderbaren und der konvulsivischen Schönheit, werden in diesem Zusammenhang nicht nur als poetische Metapher, sondern auch als diejenige Instanzen, die „Erfahrung von Realität als Repräsentation“ ermöglichen, gedeutet.(23) Sie stellen konkrete Ent- und Rekontextualisierungsstrategien dar, die in Bildkompositionen und Verfahren der Bildherstellung aufgehen. Demnach sind genau diese Strategien und nicht die von formalen bzw. piktorialen Inhalten abgeleiteten Begriffe, die der augenscheinlichen visuellen Heterogenität der surrealistischen Kunstproduktion als einheitliche Bewegung zum Erkennen geben. Bilderfindung im Surrealismus wurde, nach Krauss, unter drei Kategorien zusammengefasst: Mimikry, das Stillstellen von Bewegung und der gefundene Gegenstand, die in formaler und zugleich thematischer Hinsicht das strukturale Prinzip surrealistischer Fotografie darstellen.(24) Diese konzentrieren sich zum einen in den Einsatz fotografischer Bildmanipulationen in der Dunkelkammer, wie die Mehrfach-Belichtungen, Überlagerung von Negative, Solarisationen, Brûlage-Techniken, die Verwendung von Negativ-Abzügen oder kameralosen Bilder und zum anderen in die spezifische Wahl des Motivs, dessen optische Einrahmung durch das Objektiv, die verzerrende Perspektive oder den Einsatz verfremdeter Beleuchtung.(25)
Im folgenden soll nun die Frage ausführlicher beleuchtet werden inwiefern „Étant donnés“ als paralleler jedoch kritischer Entwurf zur surrealistischen Repräsentationstheorien im Rahmen einer indexikalischen Lesart des Werkes aufzufassen sei.(26) Sofern nun surrealistischer Automatismus, so wie dieser von Breton theoretisch fixiert und in der fotografischen Bilderfindung der 1930er zum Ausdruck gebracht wurde, im Kontext von Repräsentationskritik verstanden werden kann, bleibt die Frage, ob jener dekonstruierte Wahrnehmungsautomatismus, der in „Étant donnés“ aufgeht, surrealistische Ästhetik affirmiert oder negiert. Nach Bretons surrealistischem Diktum der kompulsiven Schönheit, die durch die indexikalische Funktion des fotografischen Zeichens festgehalten werden kann, wäre Duchamps Spiel mit der ,obszönen’, subjektiven und körperbezogenen Natur des Sehens selbst als Kritik am entkörperlichten und idealisierten Selbstverständnis der surrealistischen Imagination, zu deuten. Dass wiederum hieße, dass Bretons Erkunden der Schönheit einem visuellen Penetrieren des feminisierten Bildraum gleichkäme, nicht weil dieses Erkunden, wie bis jetzt angenommen, das Frauenbild durch skurrile Weiblichkeitsinszenierungen, als kastrierende oder fetischisierte Instanz manipuliert, sondern weil es Sichtbarkeit per se, unhinterfragt vertraut. Diese These wird im Folgenden unter Berücksichtigung der Lacanschen Theorie des Visuellen ausgeführt.
Das Bild als libidinöse Maschine – Der anamorphotische Erotismus click to enlarge
Figure 9 Gustave Courbet, L’ Origine du monde, 1866, Öl auf Leinwand, 46 x 55 cm (Musée d’Orsay, Paris)
Die Skopisierung des Begehrens scheinen nicht nur der zentrale Themenbereich von Duchamps Kunst zu sein, sondern bildet auch die Grundpfeiler des Lacanschen Systems. Inwiefern Duchamp mit den Theorien Lacans vertraut war, kann nicht mit Sicherheit gesagt werden, obwohl der Psychoanalytiker wahrend der 1930er Jahre in den Kreisen der Surrealisten verkehrte und theoretisch in regem Austausch mit Mitgliedern der Gruppe stand.(27) Man muss jedoch davon ausgehen, dass auch seine persönliche Freundschaft zu Duchamp zu einem wechselseitigen Einfluss wesentlich beigetragen hat. Es scheint, dass das im Besitz Jacques Lacans befindliche Gemälde Courbets „L’ origine du monde“ von 1866 (Fig. 9), das vielfach als ikonographische Quelle der Bildfindung Duchamps erwähnt wird, auf emblematische Weise diese geistige Verwandtschaft dokumentiert.(28)
Das nachträglich als „Ursprung der Welt“ betitelte Bild von Gustav Courbet ist ein kleinformatiges Gemälde, das perspektivisch einen weiblichen Unterleib umrahmt und den Blick auf eine unverstellte, lebensgroß dargestellten Vagina richtet. Wie für solche Motive nahe liegend malte Courbet es in privatem Auftrag, was schon recht eindeutig für Pornographie spricht. Das Interesse und die Aufmerksamkeit, die dem Bild entgegengebracht werden, findet ihren Ausgang weniger in der direkten pornographischen Zurschaustellung des weiblichen Körpers, sondern auch darin, dass das Bild versteckt blieben musste. Die Chronik der Aufbewahrungsorte des Gemäldes und die Tatsache, das es die meiste Zeit seit seiner Entstehung 1866 unsichtbar geblieben erzeugt kulturtheoretische Reflexionen, die dieses Spiel um Sichtbarkeit und Unsichtbarkeit mit sich bringen.(29) Das Bild galt bis 1995 als verschollen und war nur als Reproduktion bekannt. Zusätzlich wurde es in an seinem ursprünglichen Ausstellungsort immer verhüllt aufbewahrt, um neugierige Blicke auf das Gemälde zu versperren. In seinem letzten, privaten Aufbewahrungsort, Lacans Landhaus, hing es hinter einem von dem Dichter André Masson speziell zu diesem Zweck verfertigten „Panneau-masque“ (1955), eine Vexierzeichnung, die durch das Nachziehen der Umrisse des weiblichen Körpers entstand, und somit auch als Hügellandschaft gelesen werden konnte.
Unter Berücksichtigung, dass Courbets erotisches Werk, unter anderem das Bild „Frau mit weißen Strümpfen“ (1861) als direkte ikonographische Quellen des Spätwerks von Duchamp anzuführen sind(30) und der individuellen Thematik Duchamps im Kontext seiner Braut-Mythologie, die ebenfalls um Sichtbarkeit und Nicht-Sichtbarkeit kreist, kann behauptet werden, dass „L’ origine du monde” bzw. die Geschichte seiner Ver- und Enthüllungen dem Künstler bekannt war. Obwohl nicht mit Sicherheit gesagt werden kann, ob und wann Duchamp das Gemälde und das Panneau von Andre Masson, das Courbets Gemälde verhüllte, bei Lacan gesehen haben hat, verführt diese Annahme dazu, Parallelen in der Rhetorik der Verhüllung zwischen den Präsentationsumständen des „L’ origine du monde” und „Étant donnés“ zu ziehen. Zuallererst spielt Massons Panneau auf einen Maskierungseffekt an. Die Hügellandschaft, die durch das Nachzeichnen der Torsokonturen entstand, hat die Funktion eines Schleiers übernommen, der den erotisierenden Charakter des Körperfragments enthüllt, wobei es Körperöffnungen zu verhüllen vorzugeben vermag. Dieser Zustand des ambivalenten visuellen Entzug und des Übergangs des Körpers zum Landschaftsbild ist auch motivisch bei „Étant donnés“ vertreten. Zugleich scheint das visuelle Hindernis der Holztür auf der Verhüllung der Ansicht auf das Gemälde von Courbet in Lacans Landhaus anzuspielen. Auch die bereits erwähnten „pornographischen“ Mechanismen, wie die visuelle Einrahmung, die den weiblichen Körper optisch fragmentiert und ihn wie aus dem Bildraum ausgeschnitten erscheinen lässt, das optische Fokussieren auf Körperöffnungen durch das bewusste Einsetzen zentralperspektivisch exakter Messungen, das Verhältnis von minimaler Narration und maximaler Sichtbarkeit, sind Merkmale, die beide Werke verbinden. Diese Parallelen lassen darauf schließen, dass sowohl bei Lacan und Duchamp ähnliche theoretische Interessen vorliegen.
Skopisierung des Begehrens – Lacans Blick als „objet a“
Die geistige Verwandtschaft zwischen Lacan und Duchamp besteht in einer analogen Denkhaltung, hinsichtlich des Blick- Bild- Diskurses, der für die philosophische Avantgarde französischer Provenienz in den 50er und 60er Jahre symptomatisch ist.(31) Die Lacansche Theorie von Sehen basiert auf einem grundlegend antipodischen Verhältnis zwischen versprachlichter Signifikantenkette und dezentriertem, gleichsam ent- subjektiviertem Subjekt.(32) Sie kulminiert in einer Reihe von vier Seminaren, die Lacan 1964 gab und neun Jahre später von seinem Schwiegersohn Jacques-Alain Miller in der Schriftensammlung „Die Vier Grundbegriffe der Psychoanalyse“ in dem Kapitel „Vom Blick als Objet Klein a“ publiziert wurden. Lacans bemerkenswertes Verknüpfen von Auge und Blick stellt einen Versuch dar, sowohl eine Repräsentationstheorie, was ein Bild sei, zu entfalten, wie auch einen Diskurs der Perzeption und des Begehrens, so wie dieser in seinen früheren Vorträgen über das Spiegelstadium aufscheint, zu einer Ontologie zu erweitern.(33)
Wie bei Sartre und Merleau-Ponty resultiert Lacans Theorie aus der Verflechtung von Blick und Körper, deren antipodisches Verhältnis er aus der Dialektik eines intersubjektiven Blickes abzuleiten suchte. Nun macht Lacan geltend, dass dieser Blick „ein von mir auf dem Feld des Anderen imaginierter Blick ist.“(34)Die Reflexivität des Blickes bzw. Angeblicktwerdens bedarf im Unterschied zu Sartre keines aktiven Gegenübers. An dieser Stelle müsste man die Dialektik des Auges und des Blickes der von Lacan beschriebenen, autobiografischen Szene der Sardinenbüchse entfalten, um die scheinbar paradoxe Analogie der Lacanschen These zu verdeutlichen, nämlich dass der Blick immer der Blick des Anderen ist, der – verschoben – von mir aus sieht, wo ich zu sehen meine. In dem, was wir sehen, steckt immer ein Punkt, von dem aus uns das Bild – also der von uns als Bild wahrgenommene, visuelle Abschnitt des Sichtbaren – selbst ansieht, eine Stelle, an der wir selbst schon in das Bild eingeschrieben sind. Das ist die primäre subjektivierende Funktion dieses merkwürdig inkarnierten Blickes, so wie dieser in der Lacanschen Blickökonomie dargestellt wird. „Von Grund aus bestimmt mich im Sichtbaren der Blick, der im Außen ist.“(35) Lacan begreift in seiner Blickökonomie den Blick als das Objekt klein a im Feld des Sichtbaren.(36) Lacan bettet den Begriff des dezentrierten Subjekts in eine „Dialektik des Begehrens“ ein (Subversion du sujet et dialectique de désir dans l’inconscient freudien, 1966).(37) An Freuds Theorie des Wunsches anknüpfend, siedelt Lacan die Operation des Begehrens in einer strukturellen Umkehrung des Wunsches nach der Präsenz des begehrten Objektes an.(38)Das gespaltene Subjekt wird also nach Lacan immer in Korrelation zu einem Objekt gedacht. Es handelt sich dabei um Lacans berühmtes „objet petit a“ (von dem französischen Wort autre), das die Lücke der symbolischen Struktur, die das Subjekt ist, schließt. Dieses „kleine a“ kann ein bloßer Anschein sein (das Objekt ist völlig gleichgültig und seine Bedeutung nur autoreflexiv); es kann als Rest, Überbleibsel des Realen fungieren, oder eine stumme Verkörperung eines unmöglichen Genießens sein.(39)
In dieser Unmöglichkeit, Bedürfnis und Begehren in Einklang zu bringen, drückt sich nicht nur ein „Seinsmangel“ des Menschen aus; sondern in seinem differentiellen Verweisen auf den Anderen bleibt dieses Begehren der symbolischen Ordnung des Unbewussten unterworfen. Wir sind zu einer Art ständigem symbolisierenden Begehren verurteilt. Zu Menschen haben wir nur insofern ein Verhältnis, als wir sie mit einer phantasmatischen Stelle, d.h. mit einer Stelle der symbolischen Struktur identifizieren – wir verlieben uns in eine Frau, insofern sie den phantasmatischen Zügen der Frau entspricht.(40) Dieses Begehren unterliegt nicht nur den metonymischen Verschiebungen innerhalb der Signifikantenkette, sondern ist selbstreflexiv. In den Worten von Slavoj Žižek: „Das Begehren ist also immer ein Begehren des Begehrens.“(41)
Lacans Theorie lässt sich durch seine grafischen Schemata jener Reflexivität des Blicks verdeutlichen. Ausgehend von der Präsenz eines vorhandenen Objektes entwirft Lacan sein erstes lineares Schema vom „geometralen Sehen“, das über das „Bild(image)“ führend in einem „Geometralpunkt“ mündet. Es handelt sich dabei um die bekannte Sehpyramide, mit deren Hilfe die Verortung des Blickes, bzw. die Systematisierung des Raumes stattfindet. Der Fluchtpunkt sollte den Augenpunkt entsprechen; wobei die Konstruktion des Augenpunkts die jeweils dargestellte Welt auf den Sehenden zu zentrieren hatte. Die Perspektive galt einfach als eingewandte Optik und Geometrie und gab vor, ein Abdruck des Netzhautbildes und damit Analogon des Auges zu sein. Der traditionelle Diskurs über die Optik reflektiert die Unmöglichkeit, eine konkrete Unterscheidung zwischen dem geometrisierenden, scheinbar objektivierenden Sehen einerseits, und der tatsächlichen, physiopsychologisch erklärbaren visuellen Wahrnehmung andererseits, treffen zu können. Dieser Diskurs unterstellt, nach Lacan, die Konstitution eines Subjektes, das genau auf die Konstruktion des ideellen Systemraums angewiesen ist. Er begreift die Perspektive als eine ideologisch gestiftete Stellungnahme zur Welt, die nur deshalb als natürliche erscheinen kann, weil sie historisch zur Gewohnheit wurde.
Für die abendländische Tradition des zentralperspektivischen Repräsentationssystems – Albertis Sehpyramide – das nicht nur zum Prototyp für das Erzeugen von Tafelbildern wurde, sondern als Inbegriff des objektivierten Bildes auch maßgebend für unser alltägliches Verständnis von sichtbarem Raum gilt, ist nur ein senkrechter Sehschnitt der Sehpyramide legitim bzw. nur ein daraus konstituiertes, sehendes Subjekt möglich. Lacans Entwurf schließt an die in den Kreisen französischen Denkens wiederholten Kritik an der Vorstellung eines transparenten, stabilen Individuums, welches nicht nur eine Trennungslinie zwischen Sehendem und Gesehenem propagiert, sondern darüber hinaus die Vorherrschaft und vermeintlich Kontrolle des Subjekts über seine Objekte festlegt. Das zweite grafische Dreieckschema, das Lacan benutzt, um diesmal das System des „visuellen Raumes“ zu konstruieren, operiert in umgekehrter Richtung zu den vorangegangenen und geht von der Existenz eines „Lichtpunktes“ aus, der sich über den „Schirm (écran)“ zum „Tableau“ hin ausbreitet.(42) Dieses Schema exemplifiziert diese Kritik an das zentralperspektivische System als ideologisches System und gilt als schematische Grundlage des subjektiven, verkörperlichten Sehens. Der „Schirm (écran)“ dient als Projektionsfläche des Lichtpunktes und funktioniert wie ein dazwischen geschaltetes Hindernis, dessen Schatten auf dem Tableau fehlt. Versteht man „écran“ als Projektionsfläche in psychoanalytischem Sinne, wäre der Schutzschirm unsere subjektive Vorstellung von der Realität, die immer eine Projektion mit beschützender Funktion bleibt. Das Interessante an Lacans Untersuchungen ist, dass er zwei Traditionen der Bildlichkeit miteinander verbindet, nämlich den Diskurs um die Konstruktion der geometrischen, nach den Regeln der Zentralperspektive konstruierten Optik, in die die Kartesische Tradition der Subjektbildung, die sich auf dem Verständnis des Sehens als individualisiert und verkörperlicht gründet, aufgeht. Eine dritte Graphik jedoch, die Lacan „dem tatsächlichen Funktionieren des Registers des Sehens“ nennt, entspricht dieser Konfrontation. Hier hat Lacan die zwei vorherigen Dreiecke überlappend zusammengesetzt, um die Verflechtung von diesen zwei Operationen zu verdeutlichen. Durch das chiasmische Überlappen der zwei Flächen ergab diese neue Abbildung, in der die mittleren Abschnitte beider Dreiecke, vom „Bild (image) / Schirm“ eingenommen wurde. Auf der Linie rechts kommt die Spitze des ersten Dreiecks zu liegen, der Geometralpunkt des cartesianischen Subjekts, das Lacan hier mit „Subjekt der Vorstellung“ bezeichnet. Aus der Linie links kommt die Spitze des zweiten Dreiecks zu liegen, der Lichtpunkt des Sehfeldes, das nun mit „Blick“ bezeichnet wird. Interessanterweise verbindet Lacan hier das „Bild(image)“ mit dem „Schirm (écran)“, wobei der Gedanke suggeriert wird, dass jedes Bild, obgleich ob als Repräsentation oder als Seheindruck immer eine Projektionsfläche (immer im doppelten Sinn) bleibt. Dieser Projektionsfläche vermittelt zwischen den entsubjektivierten Blick und dem skopisierten Subjekt. click to enlarge Figure 10 Hans Holbein der Jüngere, Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve (Die Ambassadoren), 1533, Öl auf Eichenholz, 207 x 209.5 cm (National Gallery London)
Vergleicht man die zwei vorherigen Schemata mit dem dritten des Chiasmus, so wird die Position des Subjektes näher definiert. Es ergibt sich, dass das Subjekt der Vorstellung zwischen Geometralpunkt und dem peripheren Tableau situiert ist. Versteht man diese Gleichung als Beschreibung der Akt des Sehens, würde es bedeuten, dass das Subjekt der Vorstellung immer innerhalb eines von weiteren Sehpunkten abgesteckten Sehfeldes befindet und deswegen nie in der Spitze einer auf das Auge hingerichtete Sehpyramide positioniert sein kann. Das Subjekt ist immer außerhalb des Sehfeldes seines eigenen Blickes. Lacan greift auf Merleau-Ponty, der die traditionelle Unterscheidung zwischen sehendem Subjekt und sichtbarem Objekt durch die Einsicht in die Leibhaftigkeit des Sehens in Frage stellte, und ein Subjekt konstruierte, das nicht auf das Sehvermögen beschränkt: es ist für sich selbst, für „andere“ und für „anderes“ sichtbar.(43)Umgekehrt ist für Merleau-Ponty das Sichtbare dem Sehenden nicht nur passiv ausgesetzt. Der Sehende ist vielmehr derjenige, durch den sich das Sichtbare selbstbezüglich realisiert und sieht. Er spricht vom einem Sehend-Sichtbaren und einem Sichtbar- Sehendem.(44) In diesem Sinne ist das Lacansche Sehfeld als ein System ineinanderverflochtenen, labyrinthischen Sehpyramiden, die von Objekten, in dem Sinne Sehend- Sichtbaren zusammengesetzt wird.(45) Lacan exemplifizierte seine Theorie in seiner idiosynkratischen Lesung der anamorphotischen Darstellung.(46) Für ihn ist das zentralperspektivische System nur ein Sonderfall des Sehens, das wie ein allgemeines Verfahren zur Erzeugung von Anamorphosen gedacht wird, und nicht umgekehrt: „Ich bin nicht einfach jenes punktförmige Wesen, das man an jenem geometralen Punkt festhalten könnte, von dem aus die Perspektive verlaufen soll. Zwar zeichnet sich in der Tiefe meines Auges das Bild/ tableau ab. Das Bild ist sicher in meinem Auge. Aber, ich bin im Tableau.“(47)
Lacan negiert die konventionell Gewissheit des immer wieder als transparent und stabil gedachten Individuum, es besitze Meisterschaft und Kontrolle über die Objekte. In seiner Interpretation des Gemäldes „Die Ambassadoren“ von Hans Holbein (Fig. 10) wurde dieses vom dominierenden cartesianischen Blick regierte Sehen, durch ein anderes herausgefordert, das durch den verzerrten Schädel an der Unterseite der Leinwand ausgedrückt wurde, ein Schädel dessen natürliche Form nur durch einen schiefen flüchtigen Blick vom Rand des Gemäldes wieder optisch hergestellt werden könnte. Solch ein Gegenstand, den Lacan mit solchen surrealistischen Bildern wie die weichen Uhren Dalis verglich, drückte eine andere Art des Sehens aus und konstituierte ein anderes Subjekt. Der anamorphotische Schädel ist im unpersönlichen, diffusen und unzentrierten Sehen, das vom Gemälde diktiert wird zu finden, anstatt als Bild im phallischen Auge des geometrisierten Subjektes. Nach der Aufführung von Jay, „[…] the eye is that of the specular, Cartesian subject desiring specular plenitude and phallic wholeness, and believing it can find it in a mirror image of it self, whereas the gaze is that of an objective other in a field of pure monstrance.”(48) Dieser für das Lacansche Denken grundlegende Unterschied zwischen Sehen und Ersatzsehen, das das geteilte Lacansche Subjekt definiert, wird noch zu erklären sein.
Duchamps anamorphotisches Dispositiv – „ein Scharnierbild machen“
Es stellt sich zunächst die Frage, ob das Duchampsche Sehdispositiv von „“Étant donnés“ diese grundlegende Dissymmetrie von Sicht und Blick(49) als körperbezogene Vorrichtung, als Inszenierungsmechanismus der Wahrnehmung, medial umsetzt. Das Sehdispositiv von „“Étant donnés“ operiert wie ein Lacansches Bild (image)/Schirm, das/der als kontinuierliches ,Spiegeln’ zwischen Blick und Subjekt, den Sehenden immer wieder auf die Grenzen seines eigenen subjektkonstituierenden ,Erblicktwerdens zurückwirft. Duchamp konstruiert ein Sehdispositiv, eine Synthese aus Camera Obscura und Stereoskopik, um jene der klassischen, illusionserzeugenden Dispositive (das Gemälde, die Fotografie) zu dekonstruieren. Es soll nochmals betont werden, dass die Besonderheit dieses Werkes genau in der Art seiner Ausführung besteht. Sie ruft einen spezifischen Wahrnehmungsmodus hervor. Es handelt sich um eine Plastik, die als ,Gemälde maskiert ist, und um ein Gemälde, das keine materielle Präsenz hat. Es entsteht durch die Eingrenzung des Sehausschnittes und ist nicht permanent sichtbar, sondern nur dann, wenn seitens des Betrachters eine Intention besteht, das Werk zu sehen, also durch die Gucklöcher zu blicken. Es ist das einzige ,Gemälde, das nicht gleichzeitig von mehreren als einen Betrachter gesehen werden kann. Also ein Bild, das, wie schon erwähnt, direkt an die leibliche Präsenz eines Performers/Betrachters. Der Betrachter Duchhamps Werk befindet sich gewissermaßen in der Position des Malers – wie bei den berühmten Zeichenmaschinen der Renaissance.(50) Er produziert selbst das Bild, weil es allein vom individuellen Bildeindruck zusammengesetzt wird.(51)
Das Entstehen dieses Bildeindruckes bzw. das Vermögen des Betrachters, ein Bild zu sehen, hängt ausschließlich von der Logik der Sichtbarkeit ab. „Étant donnés“ funktioniert wie ein erweitertes trompe l’oeil. Um ein Bild zu sehen, muss man die perspektivisch korrekte Stellung vor den Gucklöchern der Tür immer einhalten. Duchamp zeigt mit diesem Trick, ganz im Sinne Lacans, dass das Albertinische Fenster einen Sonderfall der Anamorphose darstellt und enthüllt dadurch die verdeckten peripheren Momente der Sichtbarkeit. Man kann nie beim Blicken durch die Gucklöcher seinen eigenen Körper sehen. Die Einsicht der Leibhaftigkeit des Sehens ist konstitutiv für die Ununterscheidbarkeit zwischen sehendem Subjekt und sichtbarem Objekt. So kann ich beim Betrachten nie meiner selbst gewahr werden. Die (wahrgenommene) Realität bleibt marginal. Man kann aber auch sagen, dass Wahrnehmungsraum und repräsentierter Raum deckungsgleich werden. Der Betrachter ist beim Betrachten im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes im ,Tableau’ und wird gewissermaßen von dem zu betrachtenden Objekt erblickt.
Schließlich sei noch auf eine weitere Analogie zwischen Duchamp und Lacan hingewiesen. Für beide befindet sich das Bild ständig in Zustand des Entziehens. Wenn Lacan das Sehen (bzw. das Erblicktwerden) als Objekt klein a bezeichnet, gelangen wir weiterhin zum bedeutungsgenerierenden Komplex des Phallischen. Lacan bestimmt in seiner Theorie den Phallus als das Symbol des „Seinsmangels“ schlechthin. Phallus ist der „Signifikant ohne Signifikat”(52), dieses Symbol steht paradigmatisch für die Wirkung der Signifikantenkette auf den Sinn (das Signifikat), es verkörpert die Instanz des Bedeutungsschaffens. ”Die Zeichensetzung des Phallus ist gleichbedeutend mit der Schöpfung der symbolischen Realität; durch sie erlangt das Seiende für ein Subjekt Sinn und Bedeutung. […] Die Gewalt des Phallus besteht in der Unterwerfung und Verbuchstäblichung des Realen.“(53)Doch jeder Versuch, den Phallus zu repräsentieren, also ein Bild zu machen, kehrt die Richtung des Bedeutens um. Michael Wetzel hat eine Interpretation der Bildtheorie Lacans mit Blick auf den Kontext des Phallischen unternommen. Der gesamte Komplex des Phallischen, des ”Zeichenmachers der symbolischen Ordnung” besteht demnach nur in diesem Spiel von An- und Abwesenheit im Bild, in dieser vermeintlichen Präsenz, dem Wissen, dass der Phallus nur im Bild ist und dabei als Fetisch auftaucht. ”Wenn niemand den Phallus hat, alles aber Phallus sein kann, so gilt dies nur unter der Bedingung des ontologischen Status der Bilder. Denn was das Verführerische der Bilder ausmacht, ist ihr Entzug.“(54) Es ist dann grundsätzlich das, was sich uns entzieht und das nur in seinen Ersatzformen existiert. Um die Lacansche Terminologie zu benutzen, jedes realisierte Bild oder Seheindruck hat den Status eines Ersatzes, also ist als „kleines a zu verstehen, das als
Symbol des phallischen Mangels.(55)
Bringt man in Erinnerung das dritte Lacansche Schema, „das tatsächliche „Funktionieren des Registers des Sehens“, stellt man fest, dass in der Graphik der Blick zwischen Objekt und Lichtpunkt situiert ist. Das ist in Lacans Geometrie nachvollziehbar, da der Blick immer dem Lichtpunkt des Objektes erfasst. Folgt man jedoch diese Logik, wird deutlich, dass der Blick andere Teile des Objektes außer Acht lässt, da er sich primär auf den Lichtpunkt konzentriert. Diese graue Zone des Sehens wurde in Lacans Theorie als „Skotom“(56) beschrieben, ein der menschlichen Natur inhärentes Prinzip der Verkennung.(57) Blinde Punkte, deutete Lacan an, sind unheilbar. Der Blick kann das Objekt (das Gesicht der Geliebten, eine Sardinenbüchse, die in der Sonne spiegelt oder ein Tafelbild) insofern nur partiell erfassen, und als solches bleibt jedes Sehen einer phantasmatischen Zustand verhaftet. Das Auge ist das des skopischen, Kartesischen Subjekts, das vollkommen visuelle Erfassbarkeit der Realität und ‘phallische’ Gesamtheit wünscht und immer glaubt diese in einem Ersatzbild zu finden. Sehen ist für das geteilte Lacansche Subjekt nur im Zustand seines Entzuges möglich.
“Étant donnés“, als Sonderfall einer anamorphotischen Momentaufnahme demonstriert den phallischen Blick, der mit Kartesischen skopischen Regeln deckungsgleich ist. Duchamp hat diese Eigenschaft des Bildes – jedes Bild ist ein verschleiertes Bild, ein Bild im Zustand des Entzuges, und zugleich ein kastrierendes Dispositiv – in seiner Medialität bewiesen und dadurch in seiner Absicht, durch Illusion zu verdecken, entlarvt. Der perspektivische Fluchtpunkt, der Nullpunkt der Sichtbarkeit dieses dioramatischen Environments ist (nach konkreten Berechnungen bei dem Montieren des Ensembles) der körperliche Verweis auf die Sexualität. Er ist der inkarnierte Blick des imaginierten Anderen, der – verschoben – von mir aus sieht, wo ich zu sehen meine.(58)Und damit wären alle Betrachter, einschließlich Breton gemeint. Die ,männlich’ dressierten Betrachter, genießen als unverschämte Voyeure im stillen und dunklen Auditorium ein kinematografisches Schauspiel und werden zugleich, nach Lacans Worten, von ihm mit einem Schnappschuss “foto-grafiert.“(59) In Wirklichkeit ist die absolut hyperrealistische Szene von „Étant donnés“ eine leere, blinde Wand, ein Bild im Zustand des Entzuges. Es gibt nichts zu sehen. Da, wo man meint zu sehen, klafft nur der Abgrund der Inszenierung des Blickes selbst auf. Re- Präsentieren bedeutet eigentlich, ein Absentes präsent zu machen. Durch modifizierte Wahrnehmungsoperationen, die vom Künstler/ Sehmaschinen- Konstrukteur einkalkuliert wurden, wird bei „Étant donnés“ das Re- Präsentieren zum Präsentieren. Es handelt sich im Grunde um eine Umkehrung der zeitlichen Abfolge. Absent ist nicht die darzustellende Wirklichkeit. Sie ist immer da, verborgen hinter der Tür. Absent ist die bereits dargestellte Wirklichkeit. Sie bedarf der Mitarbeit des Betrachters, um ,enthüllt’ zu werden. Die Darstellung ist ,nur’ während des Wahrnehmungsaktes für den subjektiven Betrachter und nur für ihn existent. Repräsentierte Zeit und Zeit der Repräsentation sind deckungsgleich.
Das „Étant donnés“ wurde als der letzte Akt der Moderne bezeichnet. Man kann aber genauso gut sagen, dass wir es hier mit dem letzten Bild zu tun haben. Durch die immer wieder „verzögerte, mediale Rekonstruktion des Blickes als Bild, die der Partizipation des Betrachters bedarf, findet diese quasi Fetischisierung des Blicks statt, die Entblößung des (phallischen) Begehrens nach dem Sehen selbst. Wenn Lacan das „Geheimnis der Psychoanalyse so formuliert, dass ”es keinen Geschlechtsakt gibt, [darum] aber die Geschlechtlichkeit”(60), scheint er Duchamps These von der Kunst als einem nie als realen Akt vollzogenen Erotismus, eine Verzögerung im Glas, zu bestätigen. Duchamp hatte im Kontext verschiedenartiger Diskurse (die Nichtübereinstimmung von dreidimensionalem und vierdimensionalem Raum, die Mann- Frau- Polarität, die Divergenz von „apparence“ und „apparition“, die Diskrepanz von Sehen und Haptischem) immer auf den unmöglichen „Koitus durch eine Glasscheibe hindurch“(61)hingewiesen. Was Freud in seiner 1922 Essay „Das Medusenhaupt“ schreibt, scheint die Situation von „Étant donnés“ zu umschreiben.(62) Die Frau hält in apotropäischer Geste den Blick des Betrachters selbst empor (gaz = gaze = Blick), petrifiziert den immobilen Betrachter im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes, demonstrierend, dass jedes Sehen ein Phallus ist (phaos = Licht> phalos = leuchtendenes Objekt > phallus).
Duchamps Nackte ist fragmentiert und kastrierend; sie ist augenblicklich und bleibt für immer verhüllt, weil sie eben auf dem unüberwindbaren eigenen Narzissmus des Betrachters gründet. Es existiert nur der kastrierende Blick auf die phallusartige, lichtreflektierende Gaslampe und der narzisstische Blick auf die Oberfläche eines fließenden Wassers, dessen Strömung die Gestalt des optischen Reflexes mit sich fortreißt. Nochmals: „Gegeben ist: als erstes der Wasserfall und als zweites das Leuchtgas. Und doch eröffnet diese Kunst unendliche Möglichkeiten, und spornt unsere Suchabsichten nach der luziden, nackten Wahrheit an.
ANMERKUNGEN
1. Hentschel, Linda, Pornotopische Techniken des Betrachtens: Raumwahrnehmung und Geschlechterordnung in visuellen Apparaten der Moderne, Marburg 2001.
2. Hentschel (wie Anm. 1), S. 30. 3. Hentschel (wie Anm. 1), S. 29.
4. Harnoncourt, Anne d’; Hopps, Walter (Hrsg.), Reflections on a New Work of Marcel Duchamp, Philadelphia Museum of Art Bulletin 64, nos. 299-300 (April-September 1969), 6-58, Nachdruck, No. 2, 1987, S. 11.
5. Clair, Jean Marcel Duchamp ou le grand fictif, Paris 1975, S. 157f.
6. Serge Stauffer, in: Stauffer, Serge (Hrsg.), Marcel Duchamp, Die Schriften, Zürich 1981, S. 37.
7. Hentschel (wie Anm. 1), S. 64f.
8. Paz, Octavio: Nackte Erscheinung. Das Werk von Marcel Duchamp, Berlin 1987.
9. Molderings, Herbert, Marcel Duchamp, Parawissenschaft, das Ephemere und der Skeptizismus, Frankfurt a.M.; Paris 1983, S. 73.
10. Cabanne,
11. Vgl. Duve, Thierry de, Pikturaler Nominalismus. Marcel Duchamp. Die Malerei und die Moderne, München 1987, S. 113.
12. Wie Wilfried Doerstel betont: „Dies war auch die herausgearbeitete Voraussetzung und Form der Duchampschen symbolischen Form, dass Täuschung real vollzogen wird, dass die rezeptiven Tätigkeiten, deren Charakter und Bedingungen vermittelt werden sollen, tatsächlich durchzuführen sind, um sie dabei in ihrer Verlaufsform vermittelt zu bekommen. Erfahrbar gemacht wird bei der Duchampschen symbolischen Form der Charakter der kulturellen Tätigkeit, nicht nur der Blickwinkel oder das Ergebnis von Interpretation. […] Die Erfahrung des Betrachters bezieht sich, außer auf die materiellen Täuschungsmittel, allerdings offensichtlich nur auf sich selbst als der Quelle des Blicks, als dem Ursprungsort der Konstituierung.“ Doerstel, Wilfried, Augenpunkt. Lichtquelle und Scheidewand; die symbolische Form im Werk Marcel Duchamps unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Witzezeichnungen von 1907 bis 1910 und den Radierungen von 1967/68, Köln 1989, S. 261.
13. Vgl. Krauss, Rosalind E.: The Optical Unconscious, Cambridge, Mass.; London 1993, S. 111.
14. Krauss (wie Anm. 13), S. 133f.
15. Vgl. Ramiréz, Juan Antonio, Duchamp. Love and Death, Even, London 1998, S. 240.
16.Joselit, David, Infinite Regress, Marcel Duchamp 1910-1941, Cambridge, Mass.; London 1998; Paz (wie Anm. 8). Von Readymades und “Asstricks”
Der folgende Beitrag erscheint unter gleichem Titel in einer Publikation des Staatlichen Museums Schwerin, siehe: Marcel Duchamp, Cantz: Ostfildern, 2003 (bearbeitet von Gerhard Graulich, Kornelia von Berswordt-Wallrabe, Markus Dauss, Sabine Fett, Kornelia Röder, etc.
Das von der Künstlerin Rhonda Roland Shearer und dem Harvardprofessor Stephen Jay Gould 1998 begründete, gemeinnützige Art Science Research Laboratory (ASRL), New York, verfügt über die weltweit grösste Privatsammlung der Werke Marcel Duchamps. Ausgehend von seinen Notizen und Interviews, Duchamps Lektüre des französischen Mathematikers Henri Poincaré(1) sowie von der Wissenschaftstheoretie zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts und Überlegungen zur vierten Dimension, versuchen Shearer und Gould unter anderem die Non- Existenz der meist nur noch auf alten Photographien erhaltenen, originalen Readymades als Massenprodukte nachzuweisen,(2) Objekte, die sich erheblich von den späteren, allgemein bekannten Editionen unterscheiden.(3) Neben den Werken Marcel Duchamps liegt daher der Ausstellungs- und Sammelschwerpunkt von ASRL bei der Präsentation (im Sinne einer prä-musealen Wunderkammer) bzw. Archivierung von Firmen- und Versandhauskatalogen, Pissoirs, Kleiderhaken Schneeschaufeln, Vogelkäfigen und vielen weiteren Gebrauchsgegenständen, sofern diese Ähnlichkeit mit Duchamps Readymades aufweisen und in der Zeit ihrer Entstehung hergestellt wurden.
Ein rein kunsttheoretischer Ansatz wird dabei durch die intensive Arbeit am Objekt erweitert, oft unter Miteinbeziehung von bzw. der Kollaboration mit u.a. Physikern, Mathematikern, Dermatologen und Ex- Fotospezialisten des CIA. Im ASRL arbeiten Kunsthistoriker Seite an Seite mit 3D-Graphikern und Webdesignern, die ihrerseits sowohl deren Ergebnisse graphisch umsetzen und online publizieren helfen als auch Duchamps Werke im Computer einer genauen Analyse unterziehen.
Seit Dezember 1999 erscheint mit ASRLs non-profit “Tout- Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal”(www.toutfait.com) die erste interdisziplinäre Multimedia-Zeitschrift zu einem Künstler der Moderne und seinem Umfeld. Neben Artikeln von international renommierten Kunsthistorikern und Duchampforschern sowie Studenten und Künstlern werden schwer zugängliche Quellentexte veröffentlicht, bedeutende Sammlungen vorgestellt sowie auf aktuelle Ereignisse verwiesen. In den ersten vier Ausgaben publizierte “Tout-Fait” weit über 100 Beitrage, ausschliesslich Erstveröffentlichungen und viele davon zweisprachig. Im folgenden werden neue Forschungsergebnisse zu drei in der Schweriner Sammlung befindlichen Werke Duchamps vorgestellt.
Kamm, 1916/1964 click to enlarge
Abb. 1 Marcel Duchamp, Kamm, 1916
“3 oder 4 Höhentropfen haben nichts zu tun mit der Wildheit – Feb. 17 1916 11 Uhr vormittags”.(4) Die Inschrift auf dem Rücken des Kamms von 1916 (Abb. 1) gibt das genaue Datum und die Uhrzeit an, so wie es Duchamp in einer Notiz über die Readymades in der “Grünen Schachtel” von 1934 festgelegt hat. “Datum, Stunde, Minute, natürlich auf dem Readymade eintragen, als Information”.(5) Was Duchamp hier beabsichtigt, ist “eine Art Rendezvous”: Um jegliches ästhetische Urteil bei der Auswahl zu vermeiden, beabsichtigt er, die Readymades zu “präzisieren”, indem er sie “vormerkt”. Was für ein Gegenstand auch immer sich “mit genügender Frist”(6) zur vorgegebenen Zeit in Duchamps Nähe einfindet, wird zum Readymade erklärt und dementsprechend beschriftet.
Keine zwei Wochen zuvor, am 6. Februar 1916, schickt Duchamp einen wenig Sinn ergebenden, auf vier Postkarten getippten Schreibmaschinentext an das Sammlerehepaar Walter und Louise Arensberg. Auf der Rückseite hat er den Titel vermerkt: “Rendezvous vom Sonntag 6. Februar 1916 um 1 Uhr ¾ Nachmittags”. “Kamm” wie “Rendezvous”, in ihrer Entstehung nur elf Tage auseinanderliegend, scheinen sich penibel genau an Duchamps zwischen 1911-1915 entstandene Readymade-Notiz zu halten. Von den 100 Fragen, die Serge Stauffer von Zürich aus am 24. Juli 1960 an Marcel Duchamp im spanischen Cadaques schickt, befasst sich Frage 39 mit dem Schreibmaschinentext für die Arensbergs. Stauffer muss davon ausgehen, dass es sich hier um ein Readymade handelt: “Auf welche Art haben Sie den Text für ‘Rendezvous vom 6. Februar 1916’ gefunden?”(7) Die Antwort Duchamps vom 6. August 1960 fällt so knapp wie überraschend aus: “Ich habe ihn nicht gefunden – sondern geflissentlich gemacht während mehrerer Wochen” (8).
Dem gegenüber wird Duchamps “Kamm” auch weit mehr als 80 Jahre nach seiner Entstehung als reines Readymade klassifiziert(9), dass einzige, das im Original erhalten blieb und im Philadelphia Museum of Art ausgestellt ist. Dieser Ur-Kamm unterscheidet sich erheblich – wenn auch nicht auf den ersten Blick – von der Reproduktion aus dem Jahr 1964 (Abb. 2). Denn vergleicht man die Anzahl der Zähne des Kamms von 1916 mit den im Rahmen der Readymade-Edition von Marcel Duchamp und dem Mailänder Galeristen Arturo Schwarz entstandenen Kämmen, so stellt man fest, das ersterer über 55 bzw. 57 Zähne verfügt, die Edition dagegen nur über 53 bzw. 55 Zähne(10). “Die Kämme ordnen nach der Anzahl ihrer Zähne”(11), schrieb Marcel Duchamp in seinen 1934 publizierten Notizen in der “Grünen Schachtel”. Auf weiteren, erst posthum veröffentlichten Zetteln, weist er in seinen Bemerkungen zum Inframince mehrmals auf die feinen Unterschiede von nur scheinbar identisch aussehenden Objekten hin, selbst dann, wenn diese aus der gleichen Gussform stammen(12). Was der Stahlkamm von 1916 und die Edition von 1964 tatsächlich gemeinsam haben, das ist neben dem Material die Inschrift “Chas F. Bingler / 166 – 6th Ave. N.Y.” sowie zwei zu den Aussenrändern parallel liegende Aussparungen auf der Breitseite des Objekts. Die beiden kreisrunden Löcher weisen das Readymade aber als Assisted Readymade bzw. Semi-Readymade aus, da es Teil eines grösseren Gebrauchsgegenstands gewesen sein muss. Entweder die Löcher dienten Schrauben, die den Kamm über eine Metallschiene an einem Holzgriff befestigten(13)(Abb. 3)oder sie waren für zwei dünne Metallstäbe vorgesehen, die ihrerseits zwischen drei und sechs gleichartige Kämme zusammenhielten und ebenfalls in einen Griff mündeten (Abb. 4a und 4b). In beiden Fällen kann man kaum mehr von einem Hundekamm sprechen (14). In den damaligen Warenhauskatalogen wurden diese Modelle unter “Cattle Comb” bzw. “Curry Comb” geführt und in ihrer Nutzung ausschliesslich zum Striegeln von Pferden oder zum Auskämmen von Rinderfell angeboten. click to enlarge
Abb.2 Marcel Duchamp, Kamm, 1964
Abb. 3 Modell eines “Cattle Comb”, aus: Hardware World, November 15, 1920, S. 184 (Detail)
click to enlarge
Abb. 4B
Abb. 4A Verschiedene Modelle eines “Curry Comb”, aus: Wholesale Hardware and Associate Lines, New York, Nashville: H.G. Lipscomb & Company [Warenkatalog], 1913 [Achtung: fuer Abb. 4 ebf. ein Detail zur Auswahl]
Bezüglich der Inschrift des Kamms, “Chas F. Bingler / 166 – 6th Ave. N.Y.”, lässt sich feststellen, dass bis 1915 unter der angegebenen Adresse tatsächlich ein gleichnamiger Messerschmied (“Cutler”) in Manhattan zu finden war, der uns ein Jahr später laut New Yorker Telefonbuch als Charles F. Bingler, “Cutler and Grinder, Importer and Manufacturer of Cutlery” wieder begegnet, mit nur leicht veränderter Adresse: 182, 6th Avenue. (15) Das Problem ist nur, dass Melvin J. Bingler, einziger Sohn von Chas F. Bingler, ganz und gar nicht davon ausgeht, dass das Geschäft seines Vaters jemals Kämme herstellen liess. (16) Bingler war vor allem für seine Rasiermesser bekannt (17) und stellte ausserdem Scheren, Messer und Schreinerwerkzeug her. Von Chas F. Bingler konnten Privatkunden zudem jederzeit Produkte individuell anfertigen lassen, was sich sowohl der überschaubaren Grösse des Betriebes sowie der Tatsache, dass Produkte nie in allzu hoher Anzahl hergestellt wurden, verdankt.
James Joyce soll im Scherz über Duchamps “Kamm” gesagt haben, dass seine dicken Zähne “Finnegans Wake”, den hochkomplizierten Nachtroman des irischen Schriftstellers, zu entwirren vermögen. (18) Die vielen Fragen, die der Kamm von 1916 bei genauerem Hinsehen aufwirft, können bei allen verbleibenden Ungereimtheiten zumindest determinieren, auf welche Weise und mit wieviel Vorsicht bei der Untersuchung weiterer Objekte aus Duchamp’s Oeuvre vorgegangen werden sollte. (19)
Pariser Luft (50 cc), 1919/1964(20)
Im Januar 1968 teilt Salvador Dalí in seiner gewohnt hyperbolischen Schreibweise mit, dass “Duchamp König sein könnte, wenn er anstatt der ‘Schokoladenreibe’ eine ‘Heilige Ampulle’ hergestellt hätte, das einzigartige, göttliche Readymade, um sich selber damit zu salben. Duchamp hätte dann in Rheims gekrönt werden können.” (21) Seitdem der heidnische Begründer des Frankenreiches, Clovis I., aufgrund der vereinten Kräfte seiner Frau und des Bischofs zum Christentum übertrat und schliesslich um 500 n. Chr. in Reims zum König geweiht wurde, war die “Heilige Ampulle” fester Bestandteil der Krönungszeremonie in Frankreich. (22) Ursprünglich in Form einer kleinen, bauchigen Phiole mit gestrecktem Hals, gestaltete sich das Aussehen der “Heiligen Ampulle” ab dem 16. Jahrhundert abwechslungsreicher. (23) Im Musée des Antiquités von Rouen – der Stadt, in der Duchamp zur Schule ging, seine Eltern bis 1925 wohnten und er 1968 im Familiengrab beigesetzt wurde – befinden sich zwei kleine solcher Flakons (Abb. 5), die im 18. Jahrhundert zum Bewahren von Weihwasser hergestellt worden sind und Duchamps der gängigen Überlieferung nach in einer Pariser Apotheke für “Pariser Luft” (Abb. 6) erworbenem Glasbehältnis weitaus ähnlicher sehen als jedweder um 1919 hergestellte pharmazeutische Gegenstand.(24) Übrigens nicht nur die “Heilige Ampulle” wurde bei Krönungszeremonien eingesetzt. Duchamps beschrifteter “Kamm” von 1916 erinnert an weitere bei diesem Ritual oft verwendete Objekte: Kämme, meist aus Elfenbein bzw. “wertvollem Metall gefertigt und mit biblischen Zitaten oder anderem verziert” (Abb. 7).(25) click to enlarge
Abb. 5 Zwei “Heilige Ampullen”, ca. 1750, Hoehe: 35 mm (Fotografie: Yohann Deslandes, Musées Departementaux de la Seine-Maritime, Musée des Antiquités, Rouen, 2000)
Abb. 6 Marcel Duchamp, Pariser Luft, 1919
Abb. 7 Kamm aus den roemischen Katakomben, aus: Henry John Frasey, “The Use of the Comb in Church Ceremonies,” in: The Antiquary XXXII (January/December 1896), S. 312-316, 313.
click to enlarge
Abb. 8 Marcel Duchamp, Pariser Luft, 1964
Bleibt die Form von Duchamps “Pariser Luft” zumindest zweideutig, so enthält auch der Titel dieses Objekts, dessen Status als letztes, eigentliches Readymades Duchamp in einem Interview von 1959 bestätigt, (26) ein weiteres Rätsel. Die verschiedenen Versionen von “Pariser Luft”, entstanden zwischen 1919 und 1964 (Abb. 8), unterscheiden sich in ihrem Volumen und werden doch alle mit demselben Fassungsvermögen benannt: 50 cc. Bei einer genauen Untersuchung stellt man fest, dass keine Version tatsächlich genau die angegebenen fünfzig Kubikzentimeter Luft enthält. (27) Was vorerst als intelligenter Dada-Scherz durchgehen mag, das fügt sich in der Gesamtbetrachtung von “Pariser Luft” zu einem noch trickreicheren Ganzen. Denn auch die Existenz dieses Readymades als massenhaft produzierter Gebrauchsgegenstand muss nicht nur aufgrund der Nähe zur “Heiligen Ampulle” in Frage gestellt werden. Von seinem Frankreichaufenthalt bringt Duchamp 1919 “Pariser Luft” dem Sammlerehepaar Louise und Walter Arensberg aus Paris mit, wo ein Apotheker die mit Flüssigkeit gefüllte Ampulle aufgebrochen, geleert und wieder zugeschweisst haben soll. Zu beachten ist dabei aber, dass Apotheker zu dieser Zeit meist ausgebildete Glasbläser waren. (28) Und als Duchamp 30 Jahre später seinen Freund Henri-Pierre Roché darum bittet, ihm aus Paris eine möglichst ähnlich aussehende Ampulle zuzusenden (während seinem Aufenthalt bei den Arensbergs in Kalifornien musste Duchamp feststellen, dass “Pariser Luft” von 1919 zerbrochen war, weswegen er Roché unmittelbar um Ersatz ersuchte), dann ist wahrscheinlich, dass Roché dieses zweite Readymade von “Pariser Luft” ebenfalls herstellen liess. (29) click to enlarge
Abb. 9 Marcel Duchamp, Weibliches Feigenblatt, 1961
Auf dem gleich unterhalb des Glashakens angebrachten Typenschild des Originals von 1919 befindet sich ausserdem vor der Bezeichnung “Sérum Physiologique” ein Asterisk: *. In der Sprachtypologie bedeutet der kleine schwarze Stern, dass es sich bei dem ihm folgenden Wort um eine erschlossene, nicht schriftlich belegte Form handelt. Zudem wird der Asterisk verwandt, um in einem gegebenen Kontext Wörter zu unterscheiden, deren Herkunft bzw. Gebrauch unklar bleiben. In Duchamps posthum veröffentlichten Notizen taucht der Asterisk gleich zweimal als Wortspiel auf, als “Asstricks” (deutsch etwa “Arschtricks”), wobei sich der gesamte Titel von “Pariser Luft” ausgerechnet auf der Rückseite einer wichtigen Bemerkung zum Inframince wiederfindet. (30) Soviel der Asterisk über den Readymade-Charakter von “Pariser Luft” preisgeben mag, soviel Aufschluss können die “Asstricks” vielleicht über ein späteres Objekt Duchamps zu geben, sein “Weibliches Feigenblatt” (Abb. 9)von 1950/1961.
Weibliches Feigenblatt, 1950/1961 click to enlarge
Abb. 10A
Abb. 10B
Marcel Duchamp, Gegeben sei: A. Der Wasserfall / B. Das Leuchtgas,1945-1966 (Innen- und Aussenansicht)
Als Marcel Duchamp erstmals sein “Weibliches Feigenblatt” 1953 in der New Yorker Rose Fried Gallery ausstellte, konnten die Rezensenten natürlich noch nicht ahnen, dass es neben drei weiteren erotischen Objekten auf die vom Künstler geheim gehaltene und erst nach seinem Tod im Philadelphia Museum of Art ab 1969 öffentlich ausgestellte Installation “Gegeben sei: 1. Der Wasserfall/ 2. Das Leuchtgas” (1945-1966) (Abb. 10A und 10B) (31)verwies. Die New York Times sprach von “bizarren Artefakten” und Arts & Decoration beschrieb das “Weibliche Feigenblatt” als “aus Gips, dreieckig [und] très femelle“. (32)Duchamp indes arbeitete zu dieser Zeit bereits an seinem letzten Hauptwerk und das “Weibliche Feigenblatt” sollte sich retrospektiv als deutlicher Hinweis auf den wichtigsten Bestandteil dieses letzten Hauptwerks herausstellen: die markant entblösste, kahlrasierte wie geöffnete weibliche Scham als zentraler und am hellsten ausgeleuchteter Fluchtpunkt von “Gegeben sei…”. click to enlarge
Abb. 11 Marcel Duchamp, Weibliches Feigenblatt, 1961 (Computergraphik von Yong Duk Jhun/ASRL, 2000)
Aber ist das “Weibliche Feigenblatt” tatsächlich als positiver Gipsabdruck der Vulva des weiblichen Torso von “Gegeben sei…” bzw. als Abdruck eines lebenden Modells anzusehen, wie das Francis M. Naumann in seiner Besprechung des Werks wiederholt aufführt? (33) Dieser Auffassung läuft allemal die Eintragung zum “Weiblichen Feigenblatt” in Richard Hamiltons Katalog zur grossen Duchamp-Retrospektive von 1966 in der Londoner Tate Gallery entgegen: “[E]in enigmatisches Objekt, scheinbar ein Abdruck der weiblichen Scham, tatsächlich aber handgefertigt.” (34) Des weiteren hat Thomas Zaunschirm schon 1983 Zweifel bezüglich der anatomischen Korrektheit des “Weiblichen Feigenblatts” angemeldet. (35) Bei soviel kursierender Unklarheit konnte im Sommer 2000 bei zahlreichen Versuchen des Art Science Research Laboratory mit Gipsabdrücken weiblicher Geschlechter (36) zu folgendem, verblüffendem Ergebnis gelangt werden (37) : Das ASRL in Form der 1961 gefertigten Bronzeversion vorliegenden “Weibliche Feigenblatt” ist geschlechtsspezifisch nicht eindeutig zuzuordnen. Die Ausbuchtung der in der Mitte des Objekts vertikal verlaufenden Linie stellt einzig das Perineum dar, also den zwischen unterem Vulvaansatz (bei der Frau) bzw. Skrotum (beim Mann) und After befindlichem Damm (Abb. 11). Dass Duchamp bei seinem “asstrick” mit den Geschlechtern spielt mag bei einem bis ins Mark ambivalenten Künstler nicht verwundern, der die Mona Lisa mit Oberlippen- und Kinnbärtchen versieht (“L.H.O.O.Q.”, 1919), über Jahre ein weibliches Alter Ego namens “Rrose Sélavy” für seine Werke verantwortlich zeichnen und sich wiederholt in Frauenkleidern ablichten lässt (1920, 1921). Bei der fortschreitenden Entschlüsselung von “Gegeben sei…” und den sich auf dieses Werk beziehenden Arbeiten und Notizen darf bis hin zum Torso seiner letzten Installation aller Voraussicht nach mit weiteren androgynen Überraschungen gerechnet werden. Notes
[1] Zu diesem Themenkomplex fand Ende 1999 ein von ASRL organisiertes, dreitägiges Symposium an der Harvard University statt, “Methods of Understanding in Art and Science: The Case of Marcel Duchamp and Henri Poincaré”, 5.-7. November 1999.
[2] In Europa bleibt diese Hypyhese weniger umstritten als in den USA. Der Kunsthistoriker Thomas Zaunschirm meldete schon in seiner 1983-1986 erschienenen Buchtrilogie zu Duchamp Zweifel an (siehe v.a sein “Bereites Mädchen Readymade”, Klagenfurt: Ritter, 1986) .”[D]ass es sich bei Duchamps Readymades um individüll geformte Objekte handelt”, hält auch die deutsche Kunsthistorikerin Monika Wagner nach einem Besuch bei ASRL im Oktober 1999 durchaus “für möglich” (siehe Monika Wagner, “Das Material der Kunst: Eine andere Geschichte der Moderne”, München: C.H. Beck, 2001, S. 305, FN 38). Und für Jean Clair, den Duchampexperten und Direktor des Pariser Musée Picasso, war es Shearer, die mit ihrer Forschung seine ehemalige “Leidenschaft für Duchamp wieder neu entfacht hat” (persönliche Widmung in: Jean Clair, “Sur Marcel Duchamp et la Fin de l’Art”, Paris: Gallimard, 2000, Archiv ASRL).
[3] Seit 1997 sind in der internationalen Presse eine grosse Anzahl von Artikeln über ASRL erschienen (u.a. in Artnews, New York Times, SZ- Magazin), sowie Dutzende Beiträge von Mitarbeitern des ASRL, u.a in Science,Nature und Science News. Für eine bibliographische Auswahl der Titel, siehe
[4] Die Übersetzung aus dem Französischen aus: Serge Stauffer, “Marcel Duchamp: Die Schriften”, Zürich: Theo Ruff, 1994 (1981), S. 191.
[5] Ibid., S. 100.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid. S. 283.
[8] Ibid.
[9] “Ready made” ist der Titel, mit dem Duchamp den “Kamm” in seiner ab 1941 gefertigten “Schachtel-im-Koffer” benennt. Zum Teil auf Duchamps eigenen Klassifizierungen beruhend, unterscheidet Francis M. Naumann im Glossary zu seinem Buch “Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (Ludion/Abrams: Ghent/New York, 1999) zwischen insgesamt sechs Typen von Readymades: “assisted readymade, imitated rectified readymade, printed readymade, readymade (or ready-made), rectified readymade, semi-readymade” (S. 298-299).
[10] Die verschiedene Zählweise ergibt sich aus der Möglichkeit, die zwei breiteren, gebogenen Abschlusszapfen des Kamms am linken und rechten Ende den eigentlichen “Zähnen” hinzuzurechnen oder nicht. So oder so, der Unterschied zwischen der Anzahl der Zähne des Originalkamms und den Kämmen aus der späteren Edition (sowie dem signierten, von Ulf Linde 1963 für das Moderna Museet in Stockholm angefertigten Kamm) bleibt stets Zwei.
[11] Stauffer, “Schriften”, S. 99.
[12] Siehe Notizen 18 und 35 in Paul Matisse (Hrsg.), “Marcel Duchamp, Notes”, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1980, o. S. Notizen 1-46 fassen Duchamps Gedanken zum “Inframince” bzw “Infradünnen” zusammen und sind für eine Theorie der Readymades unerlässlich.
[13] Siehe Kirk Varnedoe, Adam Gopnik (Hrsg.), “High & Low: Modern Culture and Popular Art”, New York: Abrams, 1990, Ausst.-Kat. (The Museum of Modern Art), S. 274, Abb. 76.
[14] In einem Vortrag vom 24. November 1964 im City Art Museum of St. Louis, Missouri, spricht Duchamp ausdrücklich von einem Hundekamm; siehe Stauffer, “Schriften”, S. 243.
[15] Molly Nesbit und Naomi Sawelson-Gorse haben in ihrem Aufsatz “Concept of Nothing: New Notes by Marcel Duchamp and Walter Arensberg” (in: Martha Buskirk, Mignon Nixon (Hrsg.), “The Duchamp Effect: Essays, Interviews, Roundtable”, MIT: October, 1996, S. 131-176) zürst auf die historische Authentizität Chas F. Binglers hingewiesen (siehe v.a. die Fussnoten 44 und 45, S. 151, 152). Ich beziehe mich hier auf die Eintragungen im “New York City Directory 1915 (A-M)”, NY:NYPL (Microfilm Zan G 67, reel 64), S. 332 sowie im “New York City Directory 1916 (A-M)”, NY: NYPL (Microfilm Zan – 67, reel 68), S. 272. [16] Diese und die folgenden Aussagen beruhen auf einem Telefongespräch mit Melvin J. Bingler (Getzville, New York), 7. April 2000.
[17] Die Sammlung des Art Science Research Laboratory, New York, verfügt über ein Rasiermesser mit dem Aufdruck “Chas F. Bingler” (der Firmenname ist ebf. auf dem Etui vermerkt).
[18] Als Duchamp 1937 den Umschlag der Zeitschrift “Transition” (New York, Winter 1937, Nr. 26) mit einer Abbildung des “Kamms” versah, hat Joyce sich laut seiner Verlegerin Sylvia Beach ihr gegenüber dementsprechend geäussert (vgl. Arturo Schwarz, “The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp”, New York: Delano Greenidge, 1999, S. 744).
[19] Nur in den ersten zwei Auflagen seines Werkverzeichnisses, “The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp” (New York: Abrams, 1969, 1970), geht Arturo Schwarz in seiner Eintragung zum “Kamm” auf eine weitere Notiz Duchamps aus der “Grünen Schachtel” ein, die mit “Sept. 1915” unterschrieben ist und damit dem Bingler- Objekt nur fünf Monate vorausgeht. In dieser Notiz erwähnt Duchamp einen Kamm mit abgebrochenen Zähnen, der die Möglichkeit birgt, als “proportionale Kontrolle” (S. 461 [meine Übersetzung], von Stauffer aus dem Französischen als “proportionale Leitung” übersetzt; siehe “Schriften”, S. 99) – und im folgenden paraphrasiert Schwarz den übrigen Teil der Notiz – “für andere Objekte bzw. als Ausgangspunkt für andere Schöpfungen” (S. 461 [meine Übersetzung] genutzt zu werden. [20] Die folgenden Beobachtungen zu “Pariser Luft” fassen einige der zuerst im Dezember 1999 in “Tout-Fait” veröffentlichten Ergebnisse zusammen; siehe Thomas Girst und Rhonda Roland Shearer, “‘Paris Air’ or ‘Holy Ampule’?”, in: “Tout-Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal” 1, 1 Articles (December 1999)
[21] “L’Échecs, C’est Moi”, in” Pierre Cabanne, “Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp”, New York: Da Capo, 1987, S. 13-14 [meine Übersetzung]. Schon in seinem Gemälde von 1965 – Salvador Dalí in the Act of Painting Gala in the Apotheosis of the Dollar, in which One may also Perceive to the Left Marcel Duchamp Disguised as Louis XIV, behind a Curtain in the Style of Vermeer, which is but the Invisible Monument Face of the Hermes of Praxiteles– hat Dalí Duchamp als französicshen Sonnenkönig dargestellt. Duchamp selbst spielte 1957 in Hans Richters Film “8×8” einen schwarzen König und trug anlässlich der Feierlichkeiten zu seinem 70. Geburtstag eine grosse Krone auf dem Kopf. Mindestens drei frühe Werke Duchamps (alle von 1912) tragen,vom Schachspiel ausgehend, das Wort “König” im Titel.
[22] Zur Geschichte und Legende der “Heiligen Ampulle” siehe Patrick Demouy, “Du Baptême du Sacre”, in: “Connaissance des Arts” 92 (1996), S. 7-9.
[23] Siehe Jacqueline Bellanger, “Verre: D’Usage et de Prestige. France 1500-1800”, (Paris: Éditions de l’Amateur, 1988); Etienne Michon, “La Collection d’Ampoules à Eulogies du Musée du Louvre,” Mélang. Archeol. Hist. 12 (Rome, 1892), S. 183-201. Diese Quellen verdanke ich den Hinweisen von Virginia Wright and Rosalind S. Young, Corning Museum of Glass, New York.
[24] Laurence Flavigny, Konservatorin am Musée des Antiquités, Rouen, konnte keine Auskunft darüber geben, seit wann die Phiolen Bestandteil in der Sammlung des Museums sind. Rhonda Roland Shearer hat schon früh auf die materielle Unmöglichkeit eines medizinischen Infusionsbehältnisses mit Glashaken hingewiesen; siehe Rhonda Roland Shearer’s “Marcel Duchamp’s Impossible Bed and Other ‘Not’ Readymade Objects: A Possible Route of Influence From Art to Science”, Part 1, in: “Art & Academe” 10, 1 (Fall 1997), S. 26-62. Dem widerspricht Dr. Tobias Else, Hamburg, in seinem Leserbrief an “Tout-Fait”: siehe “‘Infusion Ball’ or ‘Holy Ampule'”? Tobias Else responds to ‘Paris Air or ‘Holy Ampule?’ (with a reply by Rhonda Roland Shearer)”, in: “Tout-Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal” 1, 2 Letters (May 2000) < https://www.toutfait.com/issues/issue_2/Letters/else.htm l.Else zeigt auf, dass vor allem ein von Maurice Boureau 1898 entwickelter “Infusionsball” aus Glas Duchamps “Pariser Luft” sehr ähnlich ist, und gleichfalls, wie auf Duchamps Typenschild ausgezeichnet, “Sérum Physiologique” enthielt, die Bezeichnung für eine einfache Sodium-Chlorid-Lösung. Die grosse, im Art Science Research Laboratory, befindliche Sammlung pharmazeutischer Glasampullen beherbergt kein Duchamps “Pariser Luft” entfernt ähnliches Objekt, deren Existenz gleichfalls von Prof. Gregory Higby, School of Pharmacy, University of Wisconsin, ebenso vehement bestritten wird (aufgezeichnete Telefonnachricht vom Sommer 1998, Archiv ASRL).
[25] Henry John Frasey, “The Use of the Comb in Church Ceremonies,” in: “The Antiquary” XXXII (January/December 1896), S. 314, 312-316.
[26] siehe Serge Stauffer (Hrsg.), “Marcel Duchamp: Interviews und Statements”, Graphische Sammlung Staatsgalerie Stuttgart/Edition Cantz, 1992, S. 75.
[27] Die im November 1999 im Art Science Research Laboratory durchgeführten Tests ergaben für die Schwarz Edition von “Pariser Luft” aus dem Jahr 1964 ein Volumen von 123 cc; für die insgesamt etwa 300 Miniaturversion der verschiedenen “Schachteln” sowie der “Schachtel-im-Koffer” wurden 35 cc festgestellt. Die “Pariser Luft” von 1949 und jene von 1963 wirken etwas kleiner als das Original von 1919, dass gleichfalls einen voluminöseren Bauch als die Edition von 1964 aufweist (an diesen drei Versionen konnten keine Messungen vorgenoimmen werden).
[28] siehe Fax von Virginia Wright, Corning Museum of Glass, New York, 27. April 1998 (Archiv ASRL); ebenso W.A. Shenstone, “The Methods of Glass Blowing and of Working Silica in the Oxy-Gas Flame”, London: Longman’s, 1916, S. 7; hier wird ein ein Gasbrenner für kleine Arbeitsräume aufgeführt (ähnliche Bücher waren in Frankreich zu dieser Zeit wohlbekannt).
[29] siehe Duchamps Brief vom 9. Mai 1949 an Roché, in: William Camfield, “Marcel Duchamp: Fountain”, Houston: Houston Fine Arts Press, 1989, S. 76. Am 29. Mai schreibt Duchamp abermals an Roché und bittet ihn erneut darum, sich bzgl. “Pariser Luft” an die von ihm in seinem ersten Brief angegebene Grösse (125 cc) zu halten, da Roché ihm zwischenzeitlich empfohlen zu haben scheint, doch einfach eine Miniaturversion aus der “Schachtel” zu verwenden (siehe Ecke Bonk, “Marcel Duchamp: The Box-in-a-Valise”, New York: Rizzoli, 1989, S. 202). Wahrscheinlicher, als dass Roché nach vorerst vergeblicher Suche und drei Jahrzehnte später in Paris eine der (als Massenprodukt womöglich non-existente) Version von 1919 ähnliche Ampulle für “Pariser Luft” aufzutreiben vermag, ist die Möglichkeit, dass Roché die “Pariser Luft” von 1949 bei der Glasbläserei Obled herstellen liess. Diese befand sich unweit von Duchamps Atelier und war bei der Herstellung der Miniaturversionen von “Pariser Luft” für die “Schachtel” involviert (Ibid.).
[30] Siehe “Marcel Duchamp, Notes”, 1980, Notizen 217 und 235; auf dem Verso von Notiz 32 befindet sich die Notiz “50 cent. cubes d’air de Paris” (im Buch nicht reproduziert). Zu Duchamps Wortspiel “Asstricks” fällt André Gervais in seinem “La raie alitée d’effets: Apropos of Marcel Duchamp”, Québec: Hurtubise, 1984, S. 242, folgendes ein: “asstricks: tours du cul, arse et attrapes, trucs cul(s) lent(s), etc.” In einer e-mail an den Autor vom 6. Dezember 1999 weist Gervais auf die vielen Asteriske in einem anderen Werk Duchamps hin, der Manuskriptseite “The” von 1915.
[31] Zur Vordatierung von Duchamps aktiver Arbeit an “Gegeben sei…” um ein Jahr, siehe Thomas Girst, “Duchamp’s Window Display forAndré Breton’s Le Surréalisme et la Peinture (1945), in: “Tout-Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal 2, 4 Articles (January 2002)
[32] “Marcel Duchamp/Francis Picabia”, Rose Fried Gallery, NY, 7. Dezember, 1953 – 8. Januar 1954; bzgl. der Rezensionen siehe Stuart Preston, “Diverse Facets: Moderns in Wide Variety”, in: The New York Times. December 20, 1953, sect. 10, S. 11 [meine Übersetzung] sowie James Fitzsimmons, “Art”, in: Arts & Decoration, February 1953, S. 31 [meine Übersetzung].
[33] Siehe Francis M. Naumann, “The Mary and William Sisler Collection”, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1984, S. 214 sowie Naumann, “Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art”, S. 171.
[34] Siehe Ausst.-Kat. “The Almost Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp” (Tate Gallery, London, 18. Juni – 31 Juli 1966), S. 10 [meine Übersetzung]. In einem Telefongespräch mit dem Autor vom 29. Juni 1999 bestätigte Richard Hamilton erneut seine Feststellung von 1966: In einer Unterredung zwischen Hamilton und Duchamp habe sich der Künstler darüber gewundert, wie man davon ausgehen könne, dass er eine Frau der Prozedur eines solchen Abdrucks unterziehen würde und machte mit seinen Daumen und Zeigefinger eine modellierende Geste, um Hamilton zu erklären, wie “Weibliches Feigenblatt” tatsächlich entstanden sei.
[35] Siehe Thomas Zaunschirm, “Marcel Duchamps Unbekanntes Meisterwerk”, Klagenfurt: Ritter, 1986, S. 138 (mit der Abbildung des Gipsabdrucks eines weiblichen Geschlechts: “Bisherige Interpretationen haben kritiklos Duchamps Angaben übernommen, doch selbst dabei bleibt das meiste rätselhaft”.
[36] Hierfür stellten sich im v.a. die jungen amerikanischen Collegestudentinnen Tracy Berglund und ihre Freundin Nancy Hankins bereitwillig zur Verfügung.
[37] Im folgenden fasse ich u.a. die Ergebnisse von ASRL und Rhonda Roland Shearer zusammen, die erstmalig am 21. November 2000 bei Shearers Vortrag “This is Not a Vulva Mold (and Other Discoveries Regarding How and Why Duchamp’s Readymades Are Not Readymades)” im Bard College, Annendale-on-Hudson, NY, präsentiert wurden.
Abb. 1, 2, 6, 8, 9, 10A, 10B, 11 ©2003 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. All rights reserved.
(Ab)Using Marcel Duchamp: The Concept of the Readymade in Post-War and Contemporary American Art
The following article is published in two parts within the exhibition catalogue for “Aftershock: The Legacy of the Readymade in Post-War and Contemporary American Art,” Dickinson Roundell, Inc., New York, May – June 2003”*
In a 1961 interview with Katherine Kuh, Marcel Duchamp, when asked about his readymades, let it be known that the concept behind those objects might be “the most important single idea to come out of my work.” (1) In June 1967, the self-proclaimed “an-artist”(2) – anticipating his final departure a mere sixteen months hence (“Quite simply, I am waiting for death”) – elaborated on his concept of the readymade: “Ultimately, it should not be looked at… It’s not the visual aspect of the Readymade that matters, it’s simply the fact that it exists.… Visuality is no longer a question: the Readymade is no longer visible, so to speak. It is completely gray matter. It is no longer retinal.” When pressed by his interviewer about the paradox of the readymades having “ended up being ‘consumed’ in museums and exhibitions, and sold as art objects” (particularly in light of the editions produced by the Galleria Schwarz in Milan in 1964), Duchamp replied:
“There is an absolute contradiction, but that is what is enjoyable, isn’t it? Bringing in the idea of contradiction, the notion of contradiction, which is something that has never really been used, you see? And all the more since this use doesn’t go very far. If you make an edition of eight Readymades, like a sculpture, like a Bourdelle or you name it, that is not overdoing it. There is something called “multiples,” that go up to hundred and fifty, two hundred copies. Now there I do object because that’s getting really too vulgar in a useless way, with things that could be interesting if they were seen by fewer people. There are too many people in this world looking. We have to reduce the number of people looking! But that’s another matter.” (3)
To “reduce the number of people looking” echoes an early note by Marcel Duchamp, “Limit the no. of rdymades yearly (?).” (4) This comment, first published in the Green Box of 1934(Fig. 1), was most likely written between 1911 and 1915, during the period of the first readymades, such as the Bicycle Wheel (1913) (Fig. 2) and the Bottle Dryer (1914) (Fig. 3).(5) As he was never keen on showing them publicly, early on they may have functioned as works of private contemplation (not unlike Descartes’ famous piece of wax or William of Occam’s razor), responses, perhaps, to his note of 1913: “Can one make works which are not works of ‘art’?” (6) Accordingly, with the exception of one single New York exhibition in 1916, the readymades were unknown outside his small circle of friends and family until the 1940s. We should bear in mind that even the urinal entitled Fountain (Fig. 4) –– submitted not under Duchamp’s name, but under the pseudonym “R. Mutt” –– was rejected for display at the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in 1917. Throughout his life Duchamp often declined to participate in exhibitions, especially when his readymades were involved. The Bicycle Wheel, for example, was not shown until 1951, and even then as a replica of the lost original. Duchamp is thus to be believed when he says that the readymades “were a very personal experiment that I had never intended to show to the public.” (7) click images to enlarge
Figure. 1 Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (aka the Green Box), 1934 Figure.2 Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel, 1913
Figure. 3 Marcel Duchamp, Bottle Dryer, 1914
Figure. 4 Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917 click to enlarge Figure 5 Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, 1912
As for their actual number, Duchamp once spoke of thirty to thirty-five, though today only about a third of them are known. (8) Many objects qualifying as readymades –– mentioned in his notes and in early accounts by Charles Sheeler, William Carlos Williams, and Edgar Varèse –– were never realized or are lost without a trace. In any case, their limited number, and the fact that at least a few of them are unaccounted for, strongly suggest that they were indeed the “personal experiment” that the an- artist described. Duchamp sought from the beginning to assure that his choice of objects would be limited in order to avoid redundancy, an inevitable consequence if a larger number of original readymades had been produced. In the 1930s Duchamp declined an offer from the Knoedler Gallery in New York, whose director offered him a substantial sum if he would continue to produce the works for which he was most famous (such as the Nude Descending a Staircase of 1912) (Fig. 5). “It would force me to repeat myself. I will not even envisage this possibility. I value my independence too much.” (9) Despite the temptation, Duchamp kept the readymades out of the fray and, accordingly, they remained virtually unknown.
Duchamp’s refusal to have the readymades treated as works of art led him to claim that “for a period of thirty years nobody talked about them and neither did I.” (10) His often-pronounced aesthetic indifference towards these objects also excluded the possibility of their appearance in large numbers, as that would have allowed for taste to infiltrate his “experiment.” In later years, to maintain this indifference despite their newly acquired fame, Duchamp –– always worried about the unavoidable aesthetics of patina –– thought of swapping them for newer mass-produced objects, replacing, for example, the Bottle Dryerwith a plastic bucket. (11) click to enlarge
Figure 6 Marcel Duchamp,Boîte-en-Valise, (open; edition started in 1941)
Outside of his notes in the Green Box, his private correspondence, and the miniatures and photographic reproductions in the Boîte-en-valise (which premiered in 1941) (Fig. 6), (12) Duchamp did not publicly mention the readymades until 1945. (13) In fact, the sole definition of the readymade published under Duchamp’s name, in 1938 –– “an ordinary object elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist” –– turns out not to have written by Duchamp but by André Breton. (14)
All of the above can only hint at the intricacies of Duchamp’s early concept of the readymade and the many misreadings that followed. From the immediate post-war period until today, Duchamp’s readymades have been all too often taken as carte blanche for “anything goes,” mere nihilistic or iconoclastic gestures based on the belief that, generated by the choice of the artist, it is only the changing of the context (i.e. a urinal at a plumbing-fixture store vs. Fountain at a gallery) through which an ordinary object is transformed into a work of art. (15) Misreading Duchamp of course, is what the ambivalent an-artist himself must have anticipated and, to a certain extent, encouraged, as Dieter Daniels observed:
Whenever other artists embrace the principle of the Readymade, the idea becomes completely detached from the historical objects and begins a life of its own. In so doing, it illustrates in the best way possible Duchamp’s dictum that it is the viewer who makes the pictures. The continued artistic influence of the Readymade may therefore be understood only as a permanent redefinition of its meaning. (16)
Duchamp’s continuing fame, and his influence on a younger generation of artists, were unexpected: it took some time before it was established that “this whole bloody, revolutionary, contradictory century has basically been a big Duchampian-Beckettian burlesque.” (17) His own attitude towards his heirs seemed to be, at best, one of aloofness (of the same sort he had earlier professed towards Dada and Surrealism), and, at worst, frustration, as was articulated to the Dadaist Hans Richter:
This Neo-Dada, which they call New Realism, Pop Art, Assemblage, etc., is an easy way out, and lives on what Dada did. When I discovered the ready-mades I sought to discourage aesthetics. In Neo-Dada they have taken my readymades and found aesthetic beauty in them, I threw the bottle-rack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty. (18)
There is a problem with this infamous quote, however. Hans Richter asserted that it came straight from a letter written to him by Duchamp in 1961. Only years later did he admit that those words were not Duchamp’s. Richter had sent Duchamp this paragraph for comment, writing: “You threw the bottle rack and the urinal into their face…,” etc. Duchamp simply scrawled: “Ok, ça va très bien” into the margins. (19)
In fact, the an-artist’s overall assessment of the new movements spreading all around him (and to which, to a certain degree, he owed his enormous renaissance) was, though disengaged, much more sympathetic than Richter’s misleading quote would suggest. In 1964, Duchamp, though unmoved by Pop artists’ sense of humor and choice of material, made the following favorable comments:
Pop Art is a return to “conceptual” painting, virtually abandoned, except by the Surrealists, since Courbet, in favor of retinal painting… If you take a Campbell soup can and repeat it 50 times, you are not interested in the retinal image. What interests you is the concept that wants to put 50 Campbell soup cans on a canvas. (20)
From the 1950s on, Duchamp’s influence on the American art scene has grown precipitously. Beginning in 1942 he lived permanently in New York, and his presence was undoubtedly a factor in the numerous exhibitions that were held in this country in succeeding years. (21) In 1952 Life magazine honored his continuing presence as “Dada’s Daddy” in a ten-page photo spread, (22) and by the mid-50s some of his readymades were permanently installed in American museums. Robert Motherwell made a significant contribution toward a Duchamp renaissance with the publication of the anthology The Dada Painters and Poets (1951), in which he characterized the Bottle Rack as at once a “sculpture” and an “anti-art and consequently dada gesture,” concluding, “it is evident, thirty-five years later, that the bottle rack he chose has a more beautiful form than almost anything made, in 1914, as sculpture.” (23) The game was on, and it certainly didn’t please everyone, least of all the Abstract Expressionists.
In 1957, Barnett Newman voiced his displeasure with the Whitney Museum of American Art, particularly with Robert Motherwell’s contribution to a catalogue for the memorial exhibition of Bradley Walker Tomlin. In a letter to John I. H. Baur, the Whitney’s director, Newman accused Motherwell of “smear and slander,” stating that he wanted to “make clear that if Motherwell wishes to make Marcel Duchamp a father, Duchamp is his father and not mine nor that of any American painter that I respect.” (24) Four years earlier, in a similar tirade against the Museum of Modern Art, he had insinuated that Duchamp’s works in that institution merely added to its “popularizing role of entertainment,” and asserted “that the American public… seeks more from art than just gadgets.” (25) In 1952, he confirmed that the “gadgets” of his scorn were indeed the readymades: “Marcel Duchamp tried to destroy art by pointing to the fountain, and we now have museums that show screwdrivers and automobiles and paintings. [The museums] have accepted this aesthetic position that there’s no way of knowing what is what.”(26) This was precisely the view of Clement Greenberg, the preeminent art critic of America’s post-war era. Greenberg attacked the tendency to produce art without the guidance of aesthetic judgment, a factor many artists wanted to do away with “in the hope, periodically renewed since Marcel Duchamp first acted on it fifty-odd years ago, that by dint of evading the reach of taste while yet remaining in the context of art, certain kinds of contrivances will achieve unique existence and value. So far, this hope has proved illusory.” (27) With the advent of “Assemblage, Pop, Environment, Op, Kinetic, Erotic, and all the other varieties of Novelty Art” (28) –– all movements, that is, which were more or less indebted to Duchamp – Greenberg bemoaned not only the passing of Abstract Expressionism but of “authentic art values.” (29) These movements were fulfillments of “Duchamp’s dream of going ‘beyond’ the issue of artistic quality.” the “real failure of Pop art,” on top of its “easiness,” was its “vulnerability to qualitative comparisons,” something Duchamp had supposedly initiated in his “‘transcending’ the difference between good and bad in general.” (30) It follows that at the heart of this confusion are the readymades in their three-dimensionality, a spatial “coordinate that art has to share with non-art.” (31) That Greenberg saw the readymade as belonging to the history of painting rather than to that of sculpture clearly evolved from these observations. (32)
On the other end of the spectrum, it was Duchamp himself who spoke out vividly against the movement heralded most by Greenberg:
The recent examples of Abstract Expressionism clearly show the ultimate in the retinal approach begun by Impressionism. By “retinal” I mean that the aesthetic pleasure depends almost entirely on the impression on the retina, without appealing to any auxiliary interpretation… The young artist of tomorrow will refuse to base his work on a philosophy as over-simplified as that of the “representative or non-representative” dilemma. (33)
In the field of art theory, similar opposing voices made themselves heard. To give but one example: early on, New York’s young and infamous art critic Gene Swenson rejected the tradition that linked everything from Cubism to Color Field painting and instead proposed a different trajectory declaring Dada and Surrealism the ancestors of Pop. In 1966, he curated the exhibition “The Other Tradition” at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art. According to the catalogue, the show’s declared goal was “1) seeing certain twentieth-century works of art which have been overlooked or neglected by art historians, and 2) suggesting alternative intellectual’ rather than formal ways of dealing with this art.” Swenson’s checklist is topped off by four contributions from Duchamp, leading him to ask: “How much longer will we rest content with our defective and infectious critical tools and our academic standards? How many more times can we see the words ‘picture plane,’ ‘modernism,’ ‘crisis,’ new,’ and ‘literary’ without flushing?” (34)
Swenson was reacting to a paradigmatic shift in American art, and many young artists were enthralled to find out that Duchamp’s newly discovered oeuvre spoke to their own strategies of subverting what came before them. He was simply “in the air,” (35) as Bruce Nauman put it. John Cage began lecturing on Duchamp at Black Mountain College (starting in 1952) as well as at the New School of Social Research (1956-58), to a new generation of artists that included Robert Rauschenberg, George Brecht, Alan Kaprow, Al Hensen, Dick Higgins, and Jackson McLow. George Segal remarked that “Marcel Duchamp had a revived life through John Cage.” (36) In 1958 Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns went to see the Duchamp collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Years before, during the War years, Joseph Cornell had befriended Duchamp in the course of his collaboration on the latter’s Boîte-en-valise. Yet to comprehend fully the scope of Duchamp’s deep appreciation by post-war generation and contemporary American artists as well as the influence he wielded over them –– especially with his readymades –– nothing serves the purpose better than to hear it in their own words (37) :
Robert Motherwell
“I would say that one of the most astonishing things in my lifetime as an artist is his prominence. Thirty years ago, if somebody had said to me, ‘he may become the major the major influence on the art scene,’ I’d have said: ‘You’re out of your mind,’ and most of my judgments were quite accurate then.”
– Vivien Raynor, “A Talk with Robert Motherwell,” Art News, vol. 73, no. 4 (April 1974). p. 51, quoted in: Dieter Daniels, “Marcel Duchamp: The Most Influential Artist of the 20thCentury?,” in: Museum Jean Tinguely Basel (ed.) Marcel Duchamp, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2002 [exh. cat.], pp. 37-40, pp. 25-33, p. 25.
Barnett Newman
I want particularly to make clear that if Motherwell wishes to make Marcel Duchamp a father, Duchamp is his father and not mine nor that of any American painter that I respect.”
– in a letter to John I. H. Baur, October 20, 1957, quoted in John P. O’Neill (ed.),Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990: p. 208.
George Segal
“Marcel Duchamp had a revived life through John Cage.” – cited by Wouter Kotte,Marcel Duchamp als Zeitmaschine/Marcel Duchamp als Tijdmachine, Köln, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König, 1987: p. 86, n. 236.
John Cage
“It is astonishing how very much Marcel Duchamp makes others creative” – cited by Serge Stauffer in: Thomas Zaunschirm, Bereites Mädchen Ready-made, Klagenfurt: Ritter, 1983, p. 10., quoted in: Marcel Duchamp: The Most Influential Artist of the 20th Century?,” p. 27. “Say it’s not a Duchamp. Turn it over and it is.”
– “26 statements Re Duchamp” (1969), in: Susan Hapgood, Neo-Dada: Redefining Art 1958-62, New York: The American Federation of Arts, 1994 [exh. cat.], p. 137.
Nam June Paik
“Marcel Duchamp has already done everything there is to do – except video…only through video art can we get ahead of Marcel Duchamp.”
– interview with Irmeline Lebeer, in:Chroniques de l’art vivant, nr. 55 (February 1974), p. 35, quoted in: “Marcel Duchamp: The Most Influential Artist of the 20th Century?,” p. 27. Robert Morris
“The Readymades are traditionally iconic art objects”
– “Notes on Sculpture 4: Beyond Objects” (1969), in: Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds.), Art in Theory: 1900-1990. An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Oxford and Cambridge, MA: 1992, vol. 2, p. 872, quoted in: “Marcel Duchamp: The Most Influential Artist of the th20 Century?,” p. 30.
Joseph Kosuth
The event that made conceivable the realization that it was possible to ‘speak another language’ and still make sense in art was Marcel Duchamp’s first unassisted Readymade. With the unassisted Readymade, art changed its focus from the form of the language to what was being said…This change – one from ‘appearance’ to ‘conception’ – was the beginning of ‘modern’ art and the beginning of conceptual art. All art (after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature) because art only exists conceptually.”
– “Art after Philosophy” (1969), in: Art in Theory: 1900-1990. An Anthology of Changing Ideas, p. 844, quoted in: “Marcel Duchamp: The Most Influential Artist of the 20thCentury?,” p. 30.
Allan Kaprow
“[Duchamp] deliberately stopped making art objects in favor of little (ready-made) hints to the effect that you could pick up art anywhere you wanted. In other words, he implied that the whole business of art is quite arbitrary”
– “Interview with Allan Kaprow,” Allan Kaprow, Pasadena: Pasadena Art Museum, 1967 [exh. cat.], p. 8, quoted in: John Tancock, “The Influence of Marcel Duchamp,” in: Anne d’Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine (eds.), Marcel Duchamp. A Retrospective Exhibition, Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1973 [exh. cat.], pp. 160-178, p. 171.
“His readymades… are radically useful contributions to the current art scene. If a snow shovel becomes a work of art by simply calling it that, so is all of New York, so is the Vietnam war, so is a pedantic article on Marcel Duchamp… The Readymade is a paradigm of the way humans make and unmake culture. Better than ‘straight’ philosophy and social science, a good Readymade can ‘embody’ the ironic limits of the traditional theory that says reality is nothing but a projection of mind or minds. ”
– “Doctor MD”, in: “A Collective Portrait of Marcel Duchamp,” quoted in: Anne d’Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine (eds.), Marcel Duchamp. A Retrospective Exhibition, Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1973 [exh. cat.], pp. 204-205, p. 205. “I think we all learned from… Duchamp. A key feature was discreetness, a timing and a restraint that many of us didn’t learn well enough. Duchamp was personally very helpful to us, no question… both practically and intellectually.”
– interview with Susan Hapgood, quoted in:Neo-Dada: Redefining Art 1958-62, p. 116.
Vito Acconci
“Did this film [Conversions of 1971] record a process parallel to the multivalence between Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Sélavy? ”
“Yes. ” – interview with Robert Pincus Witten, “Vito Acconci and the Conceptual Performance,” in Artforum, vol. 10, nr. 8 (April 1972), p. 49, quoted in: John Tancock, “The Influence of Marcel Duchamp,” p. 178.
William T. Wiley
“What we can learn from Marcel Duchamp is the same message from any artist who has made his presence manifest in the form of personal achievement: is essentially that we do not have to follow his example. Yet should we find in his example a path that interests us we should trust ourselves enough to follow that path as long as it is possible without an overabundance of human misery”
– “Thoughts on Marcel Duchamp,” in: Brenda Richardson, Wizdumb: William T. Wiley, Berkeley: University Art Museum, 1971, p. 42, quoted in: “The Influence of Marcel Duchamp,” p. 173.
Paul Pfeiffer
“Somewhere I read a statement by Duchamp to the effect that his art was intended as a destroyer, specifically of identity. I find that really inspiring. Putting a mustache on Mona Lisa makes a pretty basic point about the fluidity of identity and the depths to which gender, race and nationality are encoded into vision. I’m interested in multiple meanings and a kind of ambiguity that frustrates any attempt to pin it down.” – Linda Yablonsky, “Making Microart that can Suggest Macrotruths,” in: The New York Times, December 9, 2001, p. 39.
Richard Pettibone “My response to Duchamp hasn’t changed at all in the last 34 years. His work is just as beautiful. Being a visual artist I feel that it’s very important what things look like & in spite of all that talk about chance & giving up taste, etc. Duchamp’s work is still drop dead gorgeous.”
– letter to Francis M. Naumann, August 1997, quoted in: Francis M. Naumann, Apropos of Marcel. The Art of Making Art after Duchamp in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, New York: Curt Marcus Gallery, 1999 [exh. cat.], p. 13.
Sanford Biggers
“Duchamp’s readymades are now aesthetically and formally pleasing, though they were controversial for their time and opposed the conventions… I also follow the idea of keeping the form as one of the most important elements but also feel strongly about challenging prescribed notions in art theory. The fact that I am the creator or author of these pieces also adds to how these pieces are interpreted by art theory.” – Lauren Wilcox, “ Transformation and Tradition: Interview with Sanford Biggers,” in:Tout-Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal, vol. 2, nr. 4, Art & Literature (January 2002)
Elaine Sturtevant “[Duchamp’s] concern with trying to redefine what we consider art was a very big factor in terms of my own work.”
– Francis M. Naumann, Apropos of Marcel. The Art of Making Art after Duchamp in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, New York: Curt Marcus Gallery, 1999 [exh. cat.], p. 22.
Claes Oldenburg “[Duchamp] was certainly on the scene. But I believe that the sort of thing I was into, which really was about the very gritty aspects of the Lower East Side, was very remote from Duchamp.”
– interview with Susan Hapgood, in: Neo-Dada: Redefining Art 1958-62, p. 124.
“Yes, he was a historical figure.”
– interview with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (1985), quoted in: Martha Buskirk and Mignon Nixon (eds.), The Duchamp Effect. Essays, Interviews, Round Table. Cambridge, MA: MIT/October, 1996, pp. 33-36, p. 33. [(originally published as “Three Conversations in 1985: Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Robert Morris,” in: October 70 (Fall 1994).]
George Brecht “The difference between a chair by Duchamp and one of my chairs could be that Duchamp’s chair is on a pedestal and mine can still be used.”
– Henry Martin, An Introduction to George Brecht’s Book on the Tumbler on Fire, Milan: Multhipla Edizioni, 1978, p. 71, quoted in: Neo-Dada: Redefining Art 1958-62, p. 27.
“I read somewhere, quite a while ago, that an interviewer asked: “How does it feel now, Mr. Duchamp, that everyone knows your name?” And Duchamp answered, “My grocer doesn’t.”
– “Notes on the Inevitable Relationship GB-MD (If there is one)” (1973), quoted in: Anthony Hill (ed.), Duchamp: Passim. A Marcel Duchamp Anthology, Langhorne, PA: G+B Arts International, 1994, p. 167.
Andy Warhol “Well, yeah, we saw him a lot, a little bit. He was around. I didn’t know he was that famous or anything.”
– interview with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (1985), in: The Duchamp Effect. Essays, Interviews, Round Table., pp. 37-45, p. 37.
Jasper Johns
“Duchamp’s wit and high common sense (“Limit the no. of rdymades yearly”), the mind slapping at thoughtless values (“Use a Rembrandt as an ironing board”), his brilliantly inventive questioning of visual, mental and verbal focus and order (the beautiful Wilson-Lincoln system, which was never added to the glass; ‘lose the possibility of identifying … 2 colors, 2 laces, 2 hats, 2 forms’; the vision of an alphabet ‘only suitable for the description of this picture’) inform and brighten the whole of [the Green Box].”
– “The Green Box,” Scrap (December 23, 1960), p. 4, in: Joseph Masheck (ed.), Marcel Duchamp in Perspective, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1975, p. 111.
“Marcel Duchamp, one of this century’s pioneer artists, moved his work through the retinal boundaries which had been established which had been established with Impressionism into a field where language, thought and vision act upon another.… The art community feels Duchamp’s presence and his absence. He has changed the condition of being here.”
– “Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968),” Artforum, vol. VII, nr. 3 (November 1968), p. 6, in:Marcel Duchamp in Perspective, 1975, p. 147. “The ready-made was moved mentally and, later, physically into a place previously occupied by the work of art.”
– quoted in Wouter Kotte,Marcel Duchamp als Zeitmaschine/Marcel Duchamp als Tijdmachine, Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König, 1987, p. 84 (footnote 203). Donald Judd
“Duchamp invented several fires but unfortunately didn’t bother with them.… The work Duchamp does have is of course highly interesting, but it’s a mistake not to have developed it. His work and his historical importance are different things. It’s to other people’s credit to have developed his or related ideas… The roto- reliefs and the ready-mades and assisted ready-mades are fine.”
– “Marcel Duchamp and/or Rrose Sélavy,” Arts Magazine, vol. XXXIX, nr. 6 (March 1965), pp. 53-54, in: Marcel Duchamp in Perspective, p. 121.
Robert Smithson
“I see Duchamp as a kind of priest of a certain sort. He was turning a urinal into a baptismal front… In other words, a Readymade doesn’t offer any kind of engagement. Once again it is the alienated relic of our modern postindustrial society. But he is just using manufactured goods, transforming them into gold and mystifying them.
– Moira Roth, “Robert Smithson, an Interview”, Artforum, vol. XII, nr. 2 (October 1973), p. 47, in:Marcel Duchamp in Perspective, pp. 134-137, p. 136.
William N. Copley
“If Marcel Duchamp ever died, his phoenix Rrose Sélavy lifted herself from the remains of the past that the former had desecrated by putting an ink-moustache on the Mona Lisa, thus creating a present for himself and all of us in which nouns like ‘art’ and ‘poetry’ melt into a single word.”
– “Art is not Furniture”, in: Alfred M. Fischer and Dieter Daniels (eds.), Übrigens Sterben Immer die Anderen. Marcel Duchamp und die Avantgarde seit 1950, Köln: Museum Ludwig, 1987 [exh. cat.], p. 283 (translated from the German).
Mike Bidlo
“Many artists have spent significant energies exploring his legacy”
– The Fountain Drawings, Zurich/New York: Bischofberger/Shafrazi, 1998 [exh. cat.], p. 54.
Joseph Cornell “I believe that surrealism has healthier possibilities than have been developed. The constructions of Marcel Duchamp who the surrealists themselves acknowledge bear out this thought, I believe.”
– letter to Alfred Barr, 13 November 1936, quoted in: Anne Temkin, “Habitat for a Dossier,” in: Polly Koch (ed.), Joseph Cornell/Marcel Duchamp…in resonance, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 1999 [exh. cat.], pp. 79-93, p. 87.
Robert Rauschenberg
“[Duchamp’s] recognition of the lack of art in art and the artfulness of everything, I think, is probably his most important contribution.”
– transcribed from the film Rebel Ready-Made: Marcel Duchamp (BBC, June 23, 1966), quoted in: Francis M. Naumann, Marcel Duchamp. The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, New York: Abrams, 1999, p. 294.
“Marcel Duchamp is all but impossible to write about. Anything you may say about him is at the same time untrue, but when I think of him I get a sweet taste in my body.”
– “A Collective Portrait of Marcel Duchamp,” p. 217.
Yoko Ono
“drink an orange juice laced with sunshine and spring and you’ll see Duchamp.”
– “A Collective Portrait of Marcel Duchamp,” p. 215.
Jason Rhoades
“Duchamp for me is like L. Ron Hubbard. He’s a slippery figure who keeps popping up.”
– Russell Ferguson, “Given: 1. The Caprice, 2. The Ferrari,” in: Parkett, No. 58 (2000), pp. 122-125, p. 123.
Hannah Wilke
“To honor Duchamp is to oppose him… The issue that remains, was Duchamp trying to control his own death by killing art while he was still alive – aesthetic impotence for the sake of survival… Objecting to art as commodity is an honorable occupation that most women find it impossible to afford. Is this ready maid, having collected many of the readymades now in Oldenburg’s Ray Gun Wing owned by Peter Ludwig, owed an equal share for her part in the collaboration? Could commodities but speak, they would say; Our use, value may be a thing that interests men… In the eyes of each other we are nothing but exchange values.”
– “I Object. Memoirs of a Sugar Giver”, in:Übrigens Sterben Immer die Anderen. Marcel Duchamp und die Avantgarde seit 1950, pp. 263-271, pp. 269,270.
Arakawa & Madeline Gins Managing to position objects to hold their own in relation to that which ubiquitously happens along and even to redirect it, using very-adjusted and less- adjusted ready-madeinsertions into symbolizing power, an inchoate emanating-out ready-made in its own right, to convey and express enough and more than enough, M. D. changed the history of expression (read symbolizing) and redefined (artistic) purpose — two remarkable achievements.
– e-mail to the author, February 7, 2003.
Ed Ruscha
“If [Duchamp] hadn’t come along, we would have needed to invent him.”
– interview with Robert L. Pincus, October 30, 1990, in: Robert L. Pincus,” ‘Quality Material…’: Duchamp Disseminated in the Sixties and Seventies,” in: Bonnie Clearwater (ed.), West Coast Duchamp, Miami Beach: Grassfield Press, 1991, pp. 87-101, p. 100.
“What do you think is Duchamp’s most significant contribution?”
“That he discovered common objects and showed you could make art out of them.”
– interview with Elizabeth Armstrong, June 17, 1994, in: The Duchamp Effect. Essays, Interviews, Round Table., pp. 55-56, p. 55.
Bruce Connor
“I still feel that he dealt with enigmas and arbitrariness in the world with a sharp analytical mind.” – interview with Elizabeth Armstrong, June 9, 1994, in: The Duchamp Effect. Essays, Interviews, Round Table., pp. 57-59, p. 57.
Vija Celmins
“I was greatly influenced by Duchamp, if only indirectly, by questioning what painting is – and should be.”
– interview with Robert L. Pincus, March 26, 1991, in: ‘Quality Material…’: Duchamp Disseminated in the Sixties and Seventies,” p. 88.
Sherrie Levine “I was very surprised when I saw my first Fountain. When I made the decision to cast the urinal, I was thinking primarily about Duchamp, but the finished high polish bronze sculpture more readily evoked Brancusi.”
– interview with Martha Buskirk, May 13, 1994, in: The Duchamp Effect. Essays, Interviews, Round Table., pp. 177- 181, p. 179.
Louise Lawler
“[T]o me, Duchamp signaled a ‘bottle rack’ (who uses that?), a weird looking urinal, and a lot of pictures of him smoking and enjoying the sun with other people.…]n fact, all the readymades are interesting-looking things now, and their normalcy is gone. …This discussion of Duchamp seems a good opportunity to express my discomfort with too much referencing of authority that is restrictive, rather than enjoying the work’s ‘kindling’ effect and use.”
– interview with Martha Buskirk, May 20, 1994, in: The Duchamp Effect. Essays, Interviews, Round Table., pp. 183- 186, pp. 183, 186. “Duchamp’s fetishization gets on my nerves.”
– e-mail to the author, February 2, 2003.
Chris Burden
“He was definitely a formative figure for me… In an age of Cal Arts and Jeff Koons, Duchamp is a different role model”
– interview with Robert L. Pincus, September 26, 1990, in: “ ‘Quality Material…’: Duchamp Disseminated in the Sixties and Seventies,” pp. 98, 100.
John Baldessari
“There is a serious unseriousness going on… I see a kinship there, I feel I understand what [Duchamp’s] about.”
-interview with Moira Roth, January 6, 1973, in: ‘Quality Material…’: Duchamp Disseminated in the Sixties and Seventies,” p. 88.
Clyfford Still
“Few men could better exemplify the antithesis of my work than Marcel Duchamp.”
– “Letter to the Editor,” Artforum (February 1964), quoted in Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp. A Biography, New York: Henry Holt, 1996, p. 438.
William de Kooning
“And then there is that one-man movement, Marcel Duchamp – for me a truly modern movement because it implies that each artist can do what he thinks he ought to – a movement for each person and open for everybody.—”
– “What Abstract Art Means to Me,” Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, vol. 18, nr. 3 (June 1951), p. 7.
Shigeko Kubota
“Are we dancing still on the gigantic palm of Duchamp, thinking it is a big continent and ocean?”
– “Twenty Questions About My Work,” quoted in: Zdenek Felix (ed.), Shigeko Kubota. Video Sculptures, 1981 [exh. cat.], p. 51.
Jeff Koons
“You can look at Marcel Duchamp… Everything comes back to the ability of the artist to be able to communicate, to focus.
– “Jeff Koons. I have my finger on the eternal,” interview with Andrew Renton, in: Flash Art, vol. XXIII, nr. 153 (Summer 1990), pp. 110-115, quoted in: Thomas Zaunschirm, Kunst als Sündenfall. Die Tabuverletzungen des Jeff Koons, Freiburg: Rombach, 1996, pp. 7-20, p. 16.
“My process of distancing myself from subjective art continued through the late ‘70’s, which included exposure to Marcel Duchamp. He seemed the total opposite of the subjective art I had been immersed in. It was the most objective statement possible, the readymade. I loved that aspect and started doing my first inflatables.”
– interview with Alan Jones, in: Temaceleste, nr. 88 (November/December 2001), pp. 34-39, p. 36.
Bruce Naumann
“The kind of questions important to Duchamp were absorbed and circulated. Many people dealt with them and thought about them. In this regard he certainly was an influence.”
– interview with Lorraine Sciarra (1972), quoted in: Christine Hoffmann (ed.), Bruce Nauman. Interviews 1967-1988, Amsterdam: Verlag der Kunst, 1966, pp. 66-87, p. 69 (translated from the German).
“He leads to everybody and nobody”.
– “A Collective Portrait of Marcel Duchamp,” p. 211.
It is obvious what Barry Schwabsky meant when he reviewed the Arturo Schwarz’s revised edition ofThe Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp in 2001: “Duchamp’s work is so deeply encoded in the fabric of contemporary art that I’m tempted to keep this book not with other art monographs, but on the ready-reference shelf next to Roget, Bartlett, and Merriam-Webster: Duchamp is to a great extent, our vocabulary.” (38) The an-artist quickly had become the Über-father par excellence, creating an anxiety of influence some felt was too overpowering. (39) Particularly within the American context.
Duchamp’s significance as originating father is generally seen to be identical to the significance of the readymades in relation to postmodernism. As paternal, theological origin, Duchamp is the readymades and the “readymades Duchamp” comes to signify postmodernism.… Duchamp has become a powerful authorizing function by which works produced by contemporary artists claim nepotistic validation as begotten by the Duchampian seed. (40) Today, with the concept of irony co-opted and empty gestures of shocking for shock’s sake(41) held in high regard (with no one within the art world ever offended), many artistic strategies add up to nothing more than a “conformity of refusal.” (42) Could it be that the readymade – just one decade short of its 100th birthday – is finally losing its disruptive potential? (43) Maybe so, if its concept is only interpreted as an excuse for “anything goes” or the mere provocative gesture declaring anything to be art via a change of context. Duchamp himself had already noticed as much when he allowed his readymades to be turned into an edition precisely at that moment in the early 1960s when they had become celebrated icons and art-world commodities. Nowadays, it is not enough simply to appropriate formally the an-artist’s work. Every artist borrowing Duchamp’s highly charged visual vocabulary walks a fine line between creating a token pastiche (an art-world inside joke based solely on recognizing affinities) and intellectually engaging the ideas surrounding the work.
Duchamp –– except for his fleeting fame at the Armory Show of 1913, caused by the succès de scandale of the Nude Descending a Staircase–– had the luxury of being unrecognized as a major artistic force until he had reached his sixties. Left to himself, far away from the spotlight and thus from any system’s intricacies of interdependence, he could proclaim himself to be nothing but a “breather,” being mostly (and somewhat wrongfully) known for having abandoned all artistic activity from the mid-20’s on. Besides his many artist friends and a few wealthy patrons, Duchamp lived completely detached from the art world as we know it. He carefully kept himself independent, seeing to it personally that his works would end up grouped together with a few collectors and museums. Later in life, Duchamp thought the contemporary art market responsible for the impossibility of young artists truly to concentrate on what they were doing. He came to lament the perpetually increasing tide of attention, of dealers, galleries, collectors, critics, and exhibitions, turning art into an “over-developed exoteric”: By that I mean that the general public accepts and demands too much from art, far too much from art; that the general public today seeks aesthetic satisfaction wrapped up in a set of material and speculative values and is drawing artistic output towards an enormous dilution.
This enormous dilution, losing in quality what it gains in quantity, is accompanied by a leveling down of present taste and its immediate result will be to shroud the near future in mediocrity.
In conclusion, I hope that this mediocrity, conditioned by too many factors foreign to art per se, will this time bring a revolution on the ascetic level, of which the general public will not even be aware and which only a few initiates will develop on the fringe of a world blinded by economic fireworks. The great artist of tomorrow will go underground. (44) Underground, the artist would examine whole new ways of expression to subvert the overall status quo of the art world in all of its wide-ranging aspects. In a 1922 survey by Alfred Stieglitz regarding the status of photography as a form of art, Duchamp had answered: “You know exactly how I feel about photography. I would like to see it make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable. There we are.” (45)< Today, installation and video art are ever on the rise, figurative painting yet again en vogue (with often surprising results), and the idea of a single work of art often substituted for the impact of a whole group of them or an environment. More than ever, artists “on the fringe” (geographically and ethnically) make themselves heard. (46) As a critique of biotechnology, some artists are using new materials such as DNA, treating the body as a readymade. click to enlarge
Figure 8 Marcel Duchamp, Étant Donnés(inside and outside view), 1946-1966
It remains to be seen how these strategies will eventually play out. An interesting aspect pertaining to Duchamp’s oeuvre is a renewed interest in his last major work,Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas (1946-1966) (Fig. 8), Étant Donnés for short. in a recent interview, Björk, Iceland’s Queen of Pop, declaring Duchamp a “genius,” expressing awe for the Étant Donnés: “And then he created an artwork, when he was already very old, when everyone thought he’d already be over with, and this artwork changed completely the 20th century.” (47) For the New York photographer Gregory Crewdson, “it’s extraordinarily photographic, to the point of looking through an aperture at a frozen moment in time. It’s everything I want from an art piece. It’s haunting, mysterious, troubling, beautiful, heightened, disturbing.” (48) Looking through two peepholes drilled at eyelevel into a massive wooden door in a separate room at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the viewer becomes aware of a 3-D multimedia assemblage depicting the partly hidden body of nude woman (with a prominently displayed, shaved vulva) lying on a bed of twigs and clutching a gas burner in front of atrompe l’oeil landscape with a running waterfall and clouds made of cotton. Duchamp had secretly worked on Étant Donnés for twenty years. It was revealed only after his death in the summer of 1969. (49) After seeing the an-artist’s last work, Hannah Wilke, another artist greatly inspired by him, asked: “Did Dr. Duchamp (MD) disguise with dignity or despair the destruction, degeneration, and denigration of the maimed model of mortality – Mother?” (50) Since Socrates, asking questions often proves more beneficial and generates more creative energy than trying to provide that one right answer. Duchamp himself was not always right, of course. In 1961, for example, he predicted that “in five or six years, no one would talk about [the readymade] anymore.” (51)Throughout his late interviews in the sixties, he often pointed out that he was mostly interested in an audience fifty or a hundred years hence. Thirty-five years after his death, that audience is ever-growing.
Notes
* Parts of this essay were presented as a lecture entitled “Marcel Duchamp, Stephen Jay Gould and the End of ‘Anything Goes’,” on 15 June 2002, on the occasion of a symposium held during the run of a Duchamp exhibition at the Museum Jean Tinguely, Basel, Switzerland. I thank Francis M. Naumann for suggesting the title, drawing my attention to various sources and providing copies of some articles while my Duchamp library was being shipped from New York to Munich. 1. Katharine Kuh, The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists, New York, Harper & Row, 1962: p. 92.
2. In a 1959 interview, Duchamp coined the sobriquet “an-artist” for himself, a pun on anarchist – while dismissing the term “anti-artist” as someone who would depend on his opposite too much in order to exist (and would thus still be as much of an artist as the one without the prefix “anti-“); from an an interview with George Heard Hamilton and Richard Hamilton, “Marcel Duchamp Speaks,” BBC – Third Program (series: Art, Anti- Art, ca. October 1959); issued as an audio tape by William Furlong (ed.), Audio Arts Magazine, vol. 2, nr. 4, 1976 (London). I thank André Gervais for providing me with the source of Duchamp’s first mention of “an- artist.”
3. “Marcel Duchamp Talking about Readymades” (Interview by Phillipe Collin, 21 June 1967), in Museum Jean Tinguely, Basel (ed.), Marcel Duchamp, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2002 [exh. cat.]: pp. 37-40.
4. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (eds.), The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, New York, Da Capo, 1989, p. 33.
5. In his Marcel Duchamp. The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (New York, Abrams, 1999) Francis M. Naumann differentiates between “assisted readymade,” “imitated rectified readymade,” “ printed readymade,” “ readymade (or ready-made),” “ rectified readymade,” and “semi-readymade” (pp. 308-309), not to mention the “reciprocal readymade,” as discussed in one of Duchamp’s notes in his Green Box: “Use a Rembrandt as an Ironing Board,” (in The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, p. 32), a remark that may well have inspired Robert Rauschenberg to do his Erased de Kooning (1953) and Jasper Johns to use Duchamp’s small bronze Female Fig Leaf for a surface imprint (albeit almost undetectable) on his painting No (1961). Throughout this essay, I concern myself with the “unassisted readymade.”
6. Naumann 1999, p. 74.
7. Anonymous, “Artist Marcel Duchamp Visits U-classes, Exhibits at Walker,” Minnesota Daily, 22 October 1965.
8. Dieter Daniels, Duchamp und die Anderen. Der Modelfall einer künstlerischen Wirkungsgeschichte in der Moderne, Köln: DuMont, 1992, p. 205.
9. Duchamp, cited in Arturo Schwarz,The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, New York: Delano Greenidge, 2000, p. 68.
10. “Marcel Duchamp Talking about Readymades,” interview with collin, 1967, p. 40.
11. Werner Spies, Max Ernst, Collagen, Köln: 1988, p. 23.
12. It has been argued that only with their documentation within the Boîte -en-Valise did Duchamp take the significant step of both defining the readymades as a clearly defined group of works (deciding which ones he would include when starting to work on the Boîte around 1936) and placing them within the context of art (Duchamp und die Anderen. Der Modelfall einer künstlerischen Wirkungsgeschichte in der Moderne, p. 217).
13. Hector Obalk, The“ Unfindable Readymade,” in: Tout-Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal, vol. 1, no. 2, (Articles)
14. Hector Obalk, “The Unfindable Readymade,” (as confirmed by André Gervais).
15. George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic. An Institutional Analysis, Ithaca and London, Cornell UP, 1974: pp. 38-39.
16. Dieter Daniels, “Marcel Duchamp: The Most Influential Artist of the 20th Century?,” in Museum Jean Tinguely Basel (ed.), Marcel Duchamp: p. 29.
17. Brooks Adams “Like Smoke: A Duchampian Legacy,” in: Christos M. Joachemides and Norman
Rosenthal, eds., The Age of Modernism. Art in the 20th Century, Ostfildern: Hatje, 1997 [exh. cat.], p. 321. In this regard, see also Pontus Hulten’s remark (in Pontus Hulten, ed., Marcel Duchamp, Milano: Bompiani, 1993 [exh. cat.], p. 19): “ If, in 1953, somebody had said that forty years later [Duchamp’s] work would be considered more important than Picasso’s, that person would have been looked on as a madman. Et pourtant…”
18. Duchamp, in Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, New York, McGraw Hill, 1965: pp. 207-208.
19. Hans Richter, Begegnungen von Dada bis Heute, Köln, DuMont: pp. 155ff.
20. Rosalind Constable, “New York’s Avant- garde, and How It Got There,” cited in Jennifer Gough- Cooper and Jacques Caumont, “Ephemerides on and about Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Sélavy, 1887-1968,” in Pontus Hulten, ed., Marcel Duchamp, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1993, entry for May 17, 1964.
21. Among the important shows of Duchamp’s work in the late 40s and early 50s were those at the Sidney Janis Gallery, the Rose Fried Gallery, and the Julien Levy Gallery, New York, as well as various exhibitions at the Yale University Art Gallery. Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of this Century was already displaying his works in the early 40s, and in 1957, the Guggenheim Museum launched a major travel exhibition of the three Duchamp brothers, entitled “Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Marcel Duchamp.”
22. Sargeant Winthrop, “Dada’s Daddy: A New Tribute is Paid to Duchamp, Pioneer of Nonsense and Nihilism,” in: Life, vol. 32, no. 17 ( 28 March 1952): pp. 100-110.
23. Robert Motherwell, ed.,The Dada Painters and Poets. An Anthology, Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1989: xxiii. Other significant English-language publications on Duchamp before 1960 include Marcel Duchamp: From the Green Box (New Haven, The Readymade Press, 1957; 25 notes translated by George Heard Hamilton and published in an edition of 400), Robert Lebel’s widely available monograph Marcel Duchamp (New York, Grove Press, 1959), and Richard Hamilton’s typographic version of all of the Green Box notes in The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (London and Bradford, Percy Lund, Humphries & Co., and New York, George Wittenborn, 1960).
24. Newman, in John P. O’Neill (ed.), Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990: p. 208.
25. Newman, in O’Neill 1990: p. 39.
26. Newman, in O’Neill 1990: p, 247. Newman went on to suggest that MoMA should “put on an exhibition of machine guns.” It bears notice that in September 1999, when the New York gallery owner Mary Boone presented Tom Sach’s “Haute Bricolage,” in which firearm paraphernalia were displayed and 9-millimeter bullets were placed in a bowl for visitors to take home, she was briefly arrested by the police for the illegal distribution of live ammunition.
27. Greenberg, “Avant-Garde Attitudes: New Art in the Sixties,” in John O’Brian, ed.,Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4., Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993, p. 293.
28. Clement Greenberg, “Recentness of Sculpture,” in O’Brian 1993, p. 252. 29. Donald B. Kuspit, Clement Greenberg: Art Critic, Madison: The university of Wisconsin Press, 1979, p. 114.
30. Greenberg, “Avant-Garde Attitudes: New Art in the Sixties,” in O’Brian 1993: pp. 301-2.
31. Clement Greenberg, “Recentness of Sculpture,” in O’Brian 1993: p. 254.
32. See Thierry de Duve, Clement Greenberg: Between the Lines, Paris: Dis Voir, 1996 as well as hisRésonances du Readymade, Nîmes 1989, p. 132 (referred to in Dieter Daniels, “Marcel Duchamp: The Most Influential Artist of the 20th Century?,” p. 31.)
33. Marcel Duchamp, “Where Do We Go From Here?,” address to a symposium at the Philadelphia Museum College of Art, March 1961, in Anthony Hill, ed., Duchamp: Passim. A Marcel Duchamp Anthology, Langhorne, PA: G+B Arts International, 1994, p. 89. Duchamp seems to have had an unfavorable opinion of Abstract Expressionism’s major player, Jackson Pollock. According to Thomas B. Hess, Duchamp “complained” to him that Pollock “still uses paint, and we finished that… [Pollock] never will enter the Pantheon!” (Hess, “J’accuse Marcel Duchamp,” in Joseph Masheck, ed., Marcel Duchamp in Perspective, Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, 1975: p. 120). Duchamp had declared painting dead with his last oil on canvas, Tu m’ from 1918. In regard to Pollock, there is yet another anecdote worth telling: In 1945, Peggy Guggenheim called in Duchamp and David Hare to deal with a crisis involving a twenty-foot-long mural by Pollock. The mural was too long for the space it had been commissioned to fill, in the entrance hall of Guggenheim’s apartment. Duchamp coolly advised cutting eight inches off one end. According to Hare, “Duchamp said that in this type of painting it wasn’t needed” (Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography, New York, Henry Holt, 1996: p. 362).
34. Scott Rothkopf, “Banned and Determined,” in Artforum, vol. 40, no. 10 (Summer 2002): p. 144.
35. John Tancock, “The Influence of Marcel Duchamp,” in Anne d’Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine, eds.,Marcel Duchamp. A Retrospective Exhibition [exh. cat.], Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1973: p. 174.
36. Segal, cited in Wouter Kotte,Marcel Duchamp als Zeitmaschine/Marcel Duchamp als Tijdmachine, Köln, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König, 1987: p. 86, n. 236.
37. Marcel Duchamp’s influence was not limited to the acknowledgment of his readymades. His The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelor’s, Even (a.k.a. theLarge Glass, 1915-23) (Fig. 7) proved equally inspiring to many artists. As this exhibition focuses on the impact of the readymades on the post-war and contemporary American art scene, click to enlarge Figure 7 Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (a.k.a. the Large Glass), 1915-23 his influence on European artists since the 1940s is not discussed (from Arman, Gianfranco Baruchello, Joseph Beuys, Guillaume Bijl, Marcel Broodthaers, Hans Haacke, Richard Hamilton, Thomas Hirschhorn, Ilya Kabakov, Martin Kippenberger, Piero Manzoni, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Daniel Spoerri, André Thomkins, Jean Tinguely and Ben Vautier to the “Young British Artists,” many artists come to mind – and those, of course, of other parts of the world). A more complete list of quotations by post-war American artists would also include statements from Bill Anastasi, Michael Asher, John Armleder, Richard Artschwager, Matthew Barney, Jim Dine, Mark Dion, Brian O’Doherty, Robert Gober, Al Henson, Eva Hesse, Dick Higgins, Ray Johnson, Mike Kelley, Ellsworth Kelly, Edward Kienholz, Alison Knowles, Barbara Kruger, Les Levine, Roy Lichtenstein, Glenn Ligon, George Maciunas, Walter de Maria, Allan McCollum, Paul McCarthy, Tony Oursler, Richard Prince, Charles Ray, Larry Rivers, James Rosenquist, Andres Serrano, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, Haim Steinbach, Paul Thek, Wayne Thiebaud, Robert Watts, Tom Wesselman, Emmett Williams, Fred Wilson, and Christopher Wool. In a recent statement, Laurence Weiner – believing that his answer would come to late to be acknowledged in the survey – denied any influence Duchamp might have had on his work: “I seemed to have missed the deadline, which is as close to being Duchampian as I hope I’ll ever be” (fax to the author, February 3, 2003). Jeanne-Claude, speaking for Christo, also saw no connection between her husband’s work and Duchamp: “When he showed his Bicycle Wheel, he did not do anything to it. With Christo it is the opposite, starting with his early works in the 50’s.” (telephone conversation with the author, February 1, 2003). One should keep in mind that the Duchamp effect is not only limited to the visual arts. He has inspired many works of literature, and – starting with John Cage – many minds of the music world (among them Merce Cunningham, David Bowie, Bryan Ferry, Grant Hart, REM, Beck, and Björk).
38. Schwabsky, in “Coffee Table: Barry Schwabsky and Andy Grundberg on Art and Photography,”Bookforum, vol. 8, no. 2 (Winter 2001): p. 42.
39. Regarding Duchamp’s overpowering influence, three examples come to mind: Joseph Beuys’ 1964 performance Das Schweigen des Marcel Duchamp wird überbewertet (The Silence of Duchamp is Overrated) andVivre et laisser mourir ou la mort tragique de Marcel Duchamp (To Live and Let Die or the Tragic Death of Marcel Duchamp), also of 1964, a series of eight canvases by Gilles Aillaud, Eduardo Arroyo, and Antonin Recalati. More recently, Peter Saul painted Pooping on Duchamp (1996).
40. Amelia Jones, Postmodernism and the En- gendering of Marcel Duchamp, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 8, 14.
41. On the issue of Duchamp and concepts of taste and disgust, see the argument between Jean Clair, “Duchamp at the Turn of the Centuries” (a translated excerpt from his Marcel Duchamp et la fin de l’art, Paris: Gallimard, 2000), in: Tout-Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal, vol. 1, no. 3 (Winter 2000), News, and Arthur C. Danto, “Marcel Duchamp and the End of Taste: A Defense of Contemporary Art,” in: Tout-Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal, vol. 1, nr. 3 (Winter 2000), News,
42. I have borrowed the phrase from the title of an article by Peter Bürger, “Der Konformismus der Verweigerung. Anmerkungen zur Neo-Neo-Avantgarde,” in: Texte zur Kunst, vol. 12, no. 48 (December 2002): p. 165.
43. Since 1997, the artist Rhonda Roland Shearer and her husband, the late Stephen Jay Gould, have raised havoc, at least within the discipline of art history, by arguing that Duchamp did not select his objects, but fabricated them himself, or altered early studio photographs depicting the original readymades, now mostly lost, see the transcriptions of their conference Methods of Understanding in Art and Science: The Case of Duchamp and Poincaré, November 5-7, 1999 and Rhonda Roland Shearer, “Why the Hatrack is and/or is not Readymade,”Tout-Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal, vol. 1, nr. 3, Multimedia (December 2000). Their hypotheses seem to revive some of the readymade’s upsetting possibilities. 44. “Where Do We Go From Here?” (1961), in: Duchamp: Passim. A Marcel Duchamp Anthology, p. 89.
45. The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, p. 165; originally published in Manuscripts, No. 4 (New York, December, 1922).
46. For a scathing examination of the contemporary art world’s mechanisms (while holding up the figure of Duchamp as an important predecessor), see Bedri Baykam, Paint and the Post-Duchamp Crisis. The Fight of a Cultural Guerilla for the Rights of Non- Western Artists and the Empty World of the Neo-Ready- Mades, Istanbul: Literatür, 1994. An excerpt follows: “The West, which is moving anyway more and more into the ‘multi-cultural art world,’ behaves as if it was doing a favor to the East and South. This is definitely wrong and no ‘favor’ is needed. In fact they are only starting to pay the interest of years of constipation and prejudiced blockheadedness. They are also trying to bring a fresh breath to their once again bored art world, which is sinking in an unspoken crisis generated paradoxically by the ever-growing importance of Marcel Duchamp, provoking lost generations working on pasticheideas” (p. 212); “At this moment, Marcel Duchamp’s timeless, a-national, ambiguous, ready-mades and concepts, interpretable in 1000 different ways, come as handy and as opportune as water in the desert, although in its new variations the humor and witty sarcasm of Marcel, of course, is not present” (p. 303).
47. Björk, from an interview Thomas Venter, in “Der Look Passiert Nicht,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 27 August 2001 (translated from the German). 48. Dodie Kazanjin, “Gregory Crewdson. Twilight Zone,” Vogue (May 2002): p. 300.
49. The appearance of the Etant Donnés after Duchamp’s death came as a complete surprise to most, contrary to many later accounts. John Canaday, reviewing the work for The New York Times, wrote that it was “very interesting, but nothing new, ” just “an entertaining invention that has arrived a bit late to make a sensation.… For the first time, this cleverest of 20th- century masters looks a bit retardaire. Edward Kienholz, as the major specific example, has gone so far beyond the spent and sterile slickness of this final Duchamp work that he makes Duchamp look like Bouguereau” (“Philadelphia Museum Shows Final Duchamp Work,” in The New York Times, July 7, 1969. Warhol, in 1971, is the first artist on record to be inspired by Duchamp’s last work, while contemplating an idea for a gallery show consisting only of binoculars with which the visitors would have to find the actress/artist Brigid Polka performing in the window of a faraway building: “It also has to do with the same thing Duchamp was doing [inEtant Donnés], looking through a box [sic]. Sex…in the window…Oh, that would be nutty. That’s just the kind of thing you’d want to see with binoculars-some perversion, right? Somebody jerking off. Brigid could be the art. She could stand in the window.” (David Bourdon, Warhol, New York: Abrams, 1989, pp. 315-316; the quotation is from a telephone conversation between Bourdon and Andy Warhol in June 1971. I thank Ms. Yona Backer for drawing this source to my attention).
50. “I Object. Memoirs of a Sugar Giver”, in: Übrigens Sterben Immer die Anderen. Marcel Duchamp und die Avantgarde seit 1950: p. 270.
51. “Marcel Duchamp Talking About Readymades,” p. 40.
Fig. 8 ©2003 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. All rights reserved.
Die Frage der Schaufenster: Marcel Duchamps Arbeiten in Schaufenstern
Es ist Robert Lebel als grosse Weitsicht zuzuschreiben, dass er bereits 1959 in seinen Werkkatalog zu Duchamp die drei in den 1940er Jahren unter Leitung von Duchamp entstandenen Schaufenster aufnahm (1). Ein viertes entstand 1960–ganz passend–anlässlich der Veröffentlichung von Lebels Monographie. Gleichwohl steht eine ausführliche Auseinandersetzung, wie sie vielen anderen vermeintlich marginalen Werken Marcel Duchamps besonders seit den 1990er Jahren zuteil geworden ist, bezüglich dieser Arbeiten noch am Anfang (2). Ein Blick auf die stetig wachsende Duchamp-Literatur lässt vermuten, dass dieser Zustand nicht sehr viel länger anhalten wird. In den folgenden Ausführungen wird versucht, anhand einiger speziell auf Schaufenster bezogener Aussagen Duchamps selbst und anhand der Analyse der insgesamt vier Schaufenster, die unter Anleitung Duchamps entstanden sind, ein genaueres Verständnis davon zu erlangen, warum sich dieser oftmals in der Kunstgeschichtsschreibung als elitär verstandene Künstler einem scheinbar so profanen Medium widmete. click to enlarge
Abb. 1 D.F.: Konfisserie E. Gamelin, Rouen, Rd., ca. 1900, Bibliothèque Municipal Rouen. Aus: Ausst.-Kat. Joseph Cornell/ Marcel Duchamp . . . in Resonance. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Ostfildern
Abb. 2 Duchamp, Marcel: La Mariée Mise à Nu Par Ses Célibataires, Même (Das Grosse Glas), 1915-23, Öl, Blei, Folie, Bleidraht und Staub zwischen zwei Glasscheiben, 277,5×175,8cm (inkl.), Philadelphia Museum of Art, Katherine S. Dreier Bequest, 1953, S. 361. Aus: Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (3. überarb. und erw. Aufl.), New York 2000, S.361.
Als erste fruchtbare Periode in Duchamps Werk werden allgemein die Jahre 1911 bis 1913 angesehen. Damals entstanden die letzten Gemälde, die ersten Ideen zum GrossenGlas und eine Reihe Notizen, die teilweise erst in Bezug auf spätere Werke Bedeutung erlangen würden. Für das Jahr 1913 ist überliefert, Duchamp sei bei einem Spaziergang durch Rouen beim Blick in das Schaufenster des Konfektionärs Gamelin auf eine Schokoladenmühle aufmerksam geworden. Das Schaufenster ist in einem Stich überliefert (Abb. 1) (3). Rückblickend sagte Duchamp von der Entdeckung der Schokoladenmühle: “Das war tatsächlich ein sehr wichtiger Moment in meinem Leben. Ich musste damals grundlegende Entscheidungen treffen” (4). Mit dem Motiv der Schokoladenmühle verband Duchamp seine stilistische Loslösung vom Kubismus und eine Hinwendung zu “architektonischer, trockener Ausführung”, einer Methode, die Hand-Schrift des Künstlers ausschliessen sollte (5). Vielleicht war dies der Moment, als Duchamp beschloss, er wolle lieber “Fenstermacher”
(Fenêtrier) als Maler sein (6). Die Begegnung mit der Schokoladenmühle im Schaufenster war darüber hinaus von Bedeutung für den Künstler, weil sie ihn veranlasste, dieses Gerät als ein zentrales Motiv in sein erstes Hauptwerk, das Grosse Glas (1915-23), aufzunehmen (Abb. 2). Dort erhielt die Schokoladenmühle den Platz in der Mitte der unteren Scheibe neben den Junggesellen. In gewisser Weise ist sie also zurück in ein Schau-Fenster überführt worden, nachdem Duchamp sie zunächst aus dem Geschäftskontext gelöst hatte. In ihrer immer noch lesenswerten Analyse vonEtant Donnés(1946-1966), Duchamps zweitem Hauptwerk, hatten bereits 1969 Anne d’Harnoncourt und Walter Hopps bemerkt:
Duchamps erstes Fenster ist sein bestes: Das Grosse Glas ist weniger ein Bild als ein enormes Fenster, das auf den ständigen Fluss von Leben rundherum blickt. Umgekehrt kann man sich die Motive (images), die eingeritzt oder auf die Oberfläche geklebt sind, vorstellen als Projektionen von Gegenständen in einem zugegeben ungewöhnlichen Schaufensterraum dahinter. Aufgrund des sich ständig verändernden Umraums der Vorbeigehenden, die begleitet werden von ihren Hoffnungen, Ängsten, Wünschen, erschafft dasGlas ständig von neuem eine brillante Synthese der ‘Aussenwelt’ und der Innenwelt der Imagination (7).
Die Geschichte des Motivs der Schokoladenmühle unterstreicht die Deutung desGrossen Glases als Schaufenster, als Projektionsfläche von Waren und Gegenständen ‘dahinter’ (8)Duchamp selbst trug den kommerziellen Zusammenhang an die Schokoladenmühle wieder heran, indem er in seinen dem Glas zugesellten Notizen, der Grünen Schachtel, Bezug auf sie nahm. Dort sprach er zunächst die erotischen Aspekte an, die mit dem Rotieren und dem Genussmittel verbunden waren (“der Junggeselle zerreibt seine Schokolade selber”). Sowohl dem Mechanismus der Mühle, als auch der Betrachtung von Schaufensterauslagen wird damit eine mögliche auto- erotische Dimension zugeschrieben. Zudem beschreibt Duchamp die Mühle auch als Ware: “kommerzielle Formel, Fabrikmarke, kommerzielles Schlagwort wie eine Reklame auf ein kleines, bunt gefärbtes Glanzpapier geschrieben (ma ausführen lassen in einer Druckerei)xxx dieses Papier auf den Artikel ‘Schokoladenmühle’ geklebt” (9)Folglich überführte er die Mühle selbst in den Warenstatus (Article), wohingegen sie in dem Schaufenster des Konfektionärs noch das Produktionsmittel für die Ware gewesen war. Es ist Ausdruck der in Duchamps Werk häufig sichtbaren Ironie, dass es merkwürdigerweise die Übernahme des Motivs in das Kunstwerk war (nicht etwa seine im ersten Schritt erfolgte Isolation aus dem kommerziellen Zusammenhang), die diese Transformation der Schokoladenmühle bewirkte.
Auf das Jahr der Entstehung von Zeichnung und Gemälde zur Schokoladenmühle, 1913, hat Duchamp auch eine Notiz datiert, die Bezug nahm auf Schaufenster und etwas mehr über die Vorstellungen verrät, die Duchamp damit verband:
Die Frage der Schaufenster. Das Verhör der Schaufenster über sich ergehen lassen. Die Forderung des Schaufensters. Das Schaufenster, Beweis der Existenz der äusseren Welt. Wenn man das Verhör der Schaufenster über sich ergehen lässt, spricht man auch seine eigenes Urteil Verurteilung aus. Die Wahl ist tatsächlich hin und zurück. Aus dem Verlangen der Schaufenster, aus der unvermeidlichen Antwort auf die Schaufenster, beschliesst sich die Fixierung der Wahl. Keine Versessenheit ad absurdum, den Koitus durch eine Glasscheibe hindurch mit einem oder mehreren Objekten des Schaufensters verbergen zu wollen. Die Strafe besteht darin, die Scheibe zu durchschneiden und darüber Gewissensbisse zu haben, sobald die Besitznahme erfolgt ist. q.e.d. (10)
Diese Stelle wird in der Literatur zu Duchamp häufig zitiert, meist jedoch metaphorisch ausgedeutet oder auf das Grosse Glas bezogen (11). Eine kurze Besprechung des Textes für sich genommen scheint daher sinnvoll, um etwas über Duchamps frühe Haltung zu Schaufenstern herauszufinden.
Die Metaphorik des Textes war–das ist bisher unbemerkt geblieben–die einer Gerichtsverhandlung. Der Passant vor dem Schaufenster wurde nicht als passiver Beobachter beschrieben, sondern zugleich als Angeklagter, Anwalt, Richter und Verurteilter in einem juristischen Verfahren. Er wurde ins Verhör genommen, musste Beweise liefern, seine eigene Verurteilung aussprechen, eine Strafe auf sich nehmen. Das Schaufenster war zugleich Ankläger (Verhör), Beweismaterial (äussere Welt), Anlass des Verbrechens (Verlangen), Opfer (Koitus durch eine Glasscheibe) und Strafmittel (Gewissensbisse). Die Art des Vergehens schien sexueller Art zu sein, zugleich im Geschlechtsakt mit den Waren sowie in der Exhibition desselben zu bestehen. Das Schaufenster befreite den Passanten von der Pflicht, den Geschlechtsakt verbergen zu müssen. Es lud ihn zu offenem Verkehr ein, forderte ihn geradezu zu gewaltsamem Eindringen auf. Das Gesetz, auf den dieser Prozess sich stützte, so muss der Leser schliessen, deutete sich in einer Moral an, die unterschwellig mitschwang, die aber gerade durch den ersten Satz explizit “in Frage” gestellt wurde, und im letzten (quod erat demonstrandum) nach einer noch ausstehenden Begründung verlangte. Die Frage, die Schaufenster für Duchamp aufwarfen, lautete, wie diese Moral zu rechtfertigen sei, die Sexualität und auch das “Lecken an den Schaufenstern” (lécher les vitrines, so der französische Ausdruck für ‘Schaufensterbummeln’) zum Vergehen machte. Konnte die Begierde, die durch eine erotisch aufgeladene Ausstellung beim Betrachter ausgelöst wird–sei es im Schaufenster, sei es durch eine attraktive Frau, oder womöglich auch durch Kunst – verurteilt werden? Gerade die Ubiquität dieser Phänomene macht eine abfällige Moral fast absurd. Wenn Duchamp das Schaufenster als Metapher für erotisches Begehren verwendete, so betonte er damit die Allgegenwärtigkeit dieses Affekts: Er kann durch jeden Menschen und jedes Objekt hervorgerufen werden.
Eine Übertragung von Duchamps Szenario auf das Konsumverhalten angesichts von Warenauslagen liegt nahe. Herbert Molderings hat diesen Aspekt durch Analogie zu Walter Benjamin zugespitzt so formuliert: “Auch Duchamp sprach nicht zu den Waren, aber die Waren hatten begonnen, zu ihm zu sprechen” (12). In Duchamps Text wird der Passant angesichts der Waren hinter der Scheibe von dem Verlangen überfallen, diese zu besitzen und zu erwerben. Kaum hat der den Kauf-Akt vollzogen, überkommt ihn Reue. Doch selbst soweit diese Auslegung in Duchamps Sinn gewesen sein mag, unterliegt auch sie seinen Bedenken gegenüber landläufigen Moralvorstellungen. Duchamp war kein Moralist. Seine eigene Skepsis äusserte er nicht als Anklage, sondern wie in dem Schaufenster- Text von 1913 durch subtiles Infragestellen. Die Beispiele der von ihm gestalteten oder mitgestalteten Schaufenster belegen, dass seine Sichtweise auf Schaufenster sich nicht auf die Fragen nach Schuld, Verführung, Sühne beschränkte (Fragen, die sowohl auf Sexualität als auch auf Konsum angewendet werden können). Die ‘Befragung der Schaufenster’ durch Duchamp gestaltete sich vielschichtiger.
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Abb. 3 Duchamp, Marcel: Tür für Galerie “Gradiva”, 1937, Paris, Photographie. Aus: October, Jg. 69, 1994, S. 122.
Abb. 4 Duchamp, Marcel: Tür für Galerie “Gradiva”, 1937, Paris, Photographie. Aus: Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (3. überarb. und erw. Aufl.), New York 2000, Nr. 455, S. 743a.
Eine erste Berührung mit der Gestaltung einer Ladenfront hatte Duchamp noch in Paris gehabt. Bei dem 1937 erteilten Auftrag für die Tür von Bretons Galerie Gradiva handelte es sich, wie bei allen späteren Schaufensteraufträgen, um einen Freundschaftsdienst Duchamps. Dies bedeutete jedoch keineswegs, dass er den Wünschen oder Vorstellungen seiner Freunde entsprach, auch wenn er ihnen auf den ersten Blick oftmals entgegenkam. Die Tür für die Galerie Gradiva wies diese künstlerische Autonomie auf, die Duchamp sich nicht nur für die ‘wichtigen’ Werke vorbehielt. Photographien der Tür zeigen eine Öffnung in Form einer Silhouette zweier eng zusammenstehender Personen (Abb. 3 und 4). Antje von Graevenitz hat diese Öffnung als Initiations-Passage gedeutet, mit der Besucher den Heilungsprozess von Jensens Protagonisten nachvollziehen solle (13). Breton selbst schrieb in Bezug auf den Namen ‘Gradiva’, er bedeute auch die, welche “die Schönheit von morgen [sehe], welche den meisten Menschen noch verborgen” bliebe (14). Das Eintreten in die Galerie, in der natürlich Kunst von Surrealisten ausgestellt war, sollte nach Bretons Vorstellung den Besucher dieser Schönheit näher bringen und – wie in Jensens Geschichte – einen Beitrag zum Aufdecken des seelisch Verborgenen beim Betrachter leisten.
Es gibt einige formale Hinweise, dass Duchamp mit seiner Tür andere Absichten verfolgte. Die in die Scheibe geschnittene Silhouette deutet zwei Personen an, wobei die grössere die kleinere zu dominieren, fast zu erdrücken scheint. Die beiden sind sehr nah aneinander gerückt, wobei es so aussieht, als lege die grössere der kleineren einen Arm um die Schulter und schaue die kleinere Figur an, die den Kopf etwas wegneigt (15). Wenn es sich hier also um ein Liebespaar handelte, dann stand das ungleiche Machtverhältnis ganz eindeutig im Vordergrund, und die Nähe der beiden, die in der Literatur (und vermutlich von Breton selbst) oft als Innigkeit gedeutet worden ist, war bei Duchamp eher eine Betonung dieses Missverhältnisses. Duchamp unterlief damit Bretons romantische Interpretation (ohne ihm offen zu widersprechen) und blieb zugleich näher an der Geschichte Jensens, denn hier unterwarf der Protagonist die geliebte Frau seinen Vorstellungen, liess sie zu einem Kunstobjekt (dem Relief) werden. Polemisch könnte man behaupten, gleiches geschehe in einer Galerie mit Kunst. Sie wird einem Massstab ausserhalb ihrer selbst, dem kommerziellen, unterworfen; sie wird die Gradiva im Sinne Duchamps: eine Ware. So gesehen war diese Tür als Warnung Duchamps an die Besucher zu verstehen, nicht die Sache selbst zu übersehen, nicht die Kunstwerke mit ihrem Warenwert zu verwechseln. click to enlarge Abb. 5 Duchamp,Marcel: Schaufenster für La Part du Diable von Denis de Rougemont, 3. Februar 1943, Brentano’s, Fifth Avenue New York, Photographie. Aus: Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (3. überarb. und erw. Aufl.), New York 2000, Nr. 489, S. 768.
1943 übernahm der ‘Fenstermacher’ Duchamp in New York einen Auftrag für eine Schaufensterauslage (Abb. 5). Auch diesmal handelte es sich um einen Gefallen für einen Freund. Die von den Surrealisten bewunderte Schrift Der Anteil des Teufels von Denis de Rougemont war 1942 bei Brentano’s aufgelegt worden und sollte nun in einem Schaufenster der Filiale an der Fifth Avenue ausgestellt werden. Da Rougemont selbst keine Idee für die Auslage hatte, wandte er sich an Breton, der vorschlug, Duchamp zu konsultieren. Wie aus dem Tagebuch von Rougemont hervorgeht, riet dieser, “die Decke aus offenen, an den Griffen herabhängenden Regenschirmen zu machen” (16). Auf der Photographie sind die Regenschirme allerdings nicht zu sehen. Duchamp vergrösserte das von seinen Freunden geäusserte Unverständnis dieser Idee dadurch, dass er kryptisch hinzufügte: “Die Frauen werden es verstehen”(17). Die Idee mit den Regenschirmen unter der Decke war Duchamp bereits früher gekommen. Er hatte sie für die Surrealisten-Retrospektive 1938 in Paris verwenden wollen anstelle der Kohlesäcke, die dann tatsächlich zum Einsatz kamen. Regenschirme waren nach dem Bericht von Henri-Pierre Roché angesichts der schwierigen Wirtschaftslage damals nicht aufzutreiben gewesen (18). Duchamp scheint jedoch bereits in Paris aus seiner Idee kein Geheimnis gemacht zu haben, denn Salvador Dalí benutzte im folgenden Jahr Regenschirme in dieser Weise in seinem Pavillon Dream of Venus auf der New Yorker Weltausstellung (19). Hatte Duchamp folglich gemeint, die modebewussten New Yorker Frauen, die 1939 in Scharen zu Dalís Pavillon geströmt waren, um das Werk des surrealistischen Modepapstes zu bewundern, würden sich daran erinnern können? So sie es taten, musste ihnen Duchamp als Plagiator von Dalís Idee erscheinen – eine ironische Verkehrung der tatsächlichen Schuldigkeiten.
Für den Hintergrund des Schaufensters für Rougemonts Buch zeichnete Kurt Seligmann verantwortlich, der neben okkult anmutenden Graffiti auch die Tarotkarte XV abbildete, die ausser dem Bezug auf das Buch auch als Vorbote eines späteren Schaufensters Lazy( Hardware) gesehen werden kann, das ebenfalls unter der Ägide von Duchamp entstand. Ansonsten befanden sich noch zahlreiche exotische Skulpturen in der Auslage, die zwischen die ausgelegten Bücher gestellt waren. Mag sein, dass Breton die Abb.n in seinem New Yorker Lieblingsgeschäft, bei dem Antiquitätenhändler Julius Carlebach, entliehen hatte(20). Die Auslage zog trotz ihrer Exotik keine grössere Aufmerksamkeit auf sich (21). Keines der vier Schaufenster, an deren Erstellung Duchamp Teil hatte, fand in der Presse Erwähnung, obwohl es zumindest einmal zu einem kleinen Skandal kam. click to enlarge Abb. 6 Duchamp, Marcel: Lazy Hardware, Schaufenster für André Bretons Arcane 17, 19.-26. April 1945, Gotham Bookmart, E. 57th St. New York, Photographie (Maya Deren), Philadelphia Museum of Art, Marcel Duchamp Archive. Aus: Ausst.-Kat. Joseph Cornell/Marcel Duchamp in Resonance. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Ostfildern 1998, S. 250, n. 148.
Dieser entzündete sich an dem berühmtesten der Schaufenster, an deren Gestaltung Duchamp beteiligt war. Dasselbe Buchgeschäft wie zuvor, Brentano’s an der Fifth Avenue, ermöglichte 1945 eine Auslage für die Buchpräsentation von Bretons Schrift Arkanum 17. Das Geschäft sah sich jedoch aufgrund von (in der Überlieferung nicht spezifizierten) Protesten der Women’s League bereits am ersten Tag der Installation gezwungen, die Auslage wieder zu entfernen, woraufhin sie in den Gotham Bookmart in eine nahe gelegene Querstrasse verlegt werden musste (Abb. 6) (22). Die Auslage, wie sie uns aus Photographien an ihrem zweiten Standort bekannt geworden ist, bestand aus verschiedenen Beiträgen. Duchamp hatte eine kopflose Schaufensterpuppe beigesteuert, die einen Wasserhahn am Bein hatte und in eine knappe Schürze gekleidet war. Auf einem Etikett wurde dies als Lazy Hardware (Träge Eisenwaren) betitelt. Von Duchamp stammte auch eine Flasche, die zuvor schon als Motiv für eine Titelseite der Surrealisten-Zeitschrift View gedient hatte (Abb. 7). Der von Breton und Duchamp hochgeschätzte junge Maler Roberto Matta Echaurren hatte ein surrealistisches Plakat mit dem Schriftzeile “arcane 17” angefertigt (Abb. 8). Matta hatte zudem für Bretons Buch vier Tarotkarten entworfen, die im Schaufenster präsentiert wurden, indem mehrere Exemplare des Buches an den entsprechenden Stellen aufgeschlagen wurden (Abb. 9). Schliesslich wurde das Cover des Buches samt eines Portraits des Autors sowie einer Schreibfeder in einem seesternförmigen Tintenfass zu Füssen des Mannequins gezeigt. Das Schaufenster ist in mindestens vier verschiedenen Aufnahmen festgehalten worden, von Duchamp bei der Arbeit an dem Mannequin gibt es eine (Abb. 10, 11-12) (23). click to enlarge
Abb.7 Duchamp, Marcel: Titelseite für View, März 1945. Aus: Charles Henri Ford (Hg.), View. Parade of the Avant-Garde. An Anthology of View Magazine (1940-47), New York 1992, o.S. 4. Douglas R. Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (New York, Basic Book, 1979)
5. Teuber M. R. “Perceptual theory and Ambiguity in the Work of M. C. Escher against the background of 20th Century Art”, , in H. S. M. Coxeter, M. Emmer, M. L. Teuber, R. Penrose (ed.) M. C. Escher: Art and Science, (North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1986)
6. Giunti, R. “Una linea ondulata lievemente vibrante. I ritmi della natura nell’opera di Paul Klee”, Materiali di Estetica No. 2, (2000)
13. Giunti R. “Paul Klee on Computer. Biomathematical models help us understand his work” in M. Emmer (Ed.) The Visual Mind 2, (The MIT Press, Cambridge MASS, in print)
14. Tony Phillips “The topology of Roman Mozaic Mazes” in M. Emmer (Ed.) The Visual Mind (The MIT Press, Cambridge MASS, 1993).
15. D. J. Wright, Dynamical Systems and Fractals Lecture Notes,
17. J. Clair, Duchamp at the turn of the Centuries, ToutFait Journal, Issue 3.
18. Giunti R. [1], p. 13,<>
19. Shearer R. R. [11]
20. Penrose L.S., Penrose R. “Impossible Objects: a Special Type of Visual Illusion”, Brit. Journal of Psycology, vol. 49, 1958
21. Giunti R. “Analysing Chess. Some deepening on the concept of Chaos by Klee”
22. Indeed, Klee gradually passed from a first conception, where things are mechanically enchained to each other in a rigid, linear successions, with a well defined cause-effect relation (look at the drawing Parade on the track, 1923) Fig. 45 to a final conception where each thing is connected with each other in a complex network, and causes and effects are not clearly distinguished: look at the pedagogical sketch (sketch 18). Its caption is says: «Building of an higher organism: the assembling of parts viewing at the overall function». click to enlarge
Figure 45 Paul Klee, Parade on the track, 1923
Sketch 18 Pedagogical sketch by Klee The framework of Soaring is just the first important achievement of such a creative course, which will lead in the late works to the theme of morphogenesis.
23. Shearer R.R. “Examining Evidence: Did Duchamp simply use a photograph of “tossed cubes” to create his 1925 Chess Poster?” Tout-Fait Journal, issue 4,
25. Giunti R. [21]
26. Shearer R. R. “Why the hatrack is and/or is not Readymade: with interactive software, animations and videos, for readers to explore”, Tout-Fait Journal, Issue 3,
27. Kauffman S. At Home in the Universe. The Search for the Law of Self- Organization and Complexity(Oxford University Press, 1995)
28. Carrouges M. Les Machines célibataires (Arcanes, Paris, 1954)
29. Clair J. Marcel Duchamp ou le grand fictif (Galilée, Paris, 1975)
30. Rosen, S. M. “Wholeness as the Body of Paradox”. 1997
31. Hedrich R. “The Sciences of Complexity: A Kuhnian Revolution in Sciences?” Epistemologia XII.1 (1999)
33. The essay is contained in: Klee P. Das Bildnerische Denken (Basel: Benno Schwabe & Co., 1956)
34. P. Klee, Tagebücher von Paul Klee 1898-1918 (Köln:Verlag M. Dumont Scauberg, 1957), note 636, 1905
Figs. 1-2 ©2003 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. All rights reserved.
Wittgenstein Plays Chess with Duchamp or How Not to Do Philosophy: Wittgenstein on Mistakes of Surface and Depth
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Figure1 Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) click to enlarge
Figure. 2 Marcel Duchmap,Opposition and Sister Squares are Reconciled,1932
According to my Wittgenstein CD(1), there are 181 tokens of the word “chess” and its cognates (such as “chessboard”) in the Blackwell published works of Wittgenstein. We begin, however, with the French/American artist and chess master Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). Duchamp, co-wrote a magisterial chess book titled:Opposition and Sister Squares are Reconciled.(2) (Fig. 2)The special subject of this specialist’s book is King and Pawn endings. One of the simpler positions Duchamp analyzes is: (Diagram 1) click to enlarge
Diagram 1
Black’s temptation is to swoop in (with 1 … Ke4, as in (Diagram. 2)) and attack the White Pawn. But, as Duchamp explains:
It would be wrong to begin with 1 … Ke4, [as in (Diagram. 2)] because of 2 Kc5 (Diagram. 3) and White would win the P[awn]. This manoeuvre is known as “trébuchet”. (3) click images to enlarge
Diagram 2 Diagram 3 Black’s only move now is to retreat to one of the squares marked with a “K” in(Diagram. 4), allowing White to snatch the pawn(Diagram. 5)and go on to win. Black’s first, obvious, aggressive, materialistic (but unreflective) move, going straight to the undefended pawn, turns out to be a kind of suicide. (Taking one’s time would have done the trick.) click images to enlarge
Diagram 4 Diagram 5 Tolstoy wrote that “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Is this the same for mistakes? Is each one a mistake in its own way? 1 … Ke4 is not, I would think, the same kind of mistake that Oedipus made when he married Jocasta (although both involve regicide). What kind of mistake is 1 … Ke4? Why would anyone make this move? What might tempt or compel someone here? Chess, after all, is not baseball; it is not as if the lights were too low, or Black lost the pawn in the sun. In a book titled How Not to Play Chess, Duchamp’s friend Grandmaster Eugene A. Znosko-Borovsky wrote:
The great privilege of our game is that there is nothing hidden; everyone can see all that is on the chessboard, and, what is more, no piece can remain unnoticed. It is necessary only to be able to see […](4)
Another grandmaster friend of Duchamp, Larry Evans, continues our theme in a book titledThe 10 Most Common Chess Mistakes … and how to avoid them!:
After all, everything is open and above-board. The element of deception is at a minimum, and there are no closed hands, as in bridge.(5)
This might seem familiar to some of you, even to those of you who don’t read esoteric chess literature. It might remind you of remark 129 of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations:
The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something–because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him.–And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.
Or of this early claim in The Blue Book:
This kind of mistake recurs again and again in philosophy; e.g. when we are puzzled about the nature of time, when time seems to us a queer thing. We are most strongly tempted to think that here are things hidden, something we can see from the outside but which we can’t look into. And yet nothing of the sort is the case. It is not new facts about time which we want to know. All the facts that concern us lie open before us. [BB: p. 6](6)
Or from remark 89 of the Investigations:
We want to understand something that is already in plain view. click to enlarge
Figure 3 Marcel Duchamp, Trébuchet, 1917/1964 Figure 4 Max Ernst, The Hat Makes the Man, 1920
Let us go from one kind of Duchampian trébuchet to another. Consider these two images:
Marcel Duchamp’s Trébuchet (Fig. 3) Max Ernst’s The Hat Makes the Man(7)(Fig. 4)
The first, Duchamp’s Trébuchet, is a photograph of a 1964 reproduction of a lost 1917 readymade. The second is Max Ernst’s mixed media work from 1920: cut-and-pasted paper, pencil, ink and watercolor on paper. The first has all the initial appearances of an ordinary, store-bought coat and hat rack, whereas the second looks alien and bizarre (in the 1930s English of theBlue and Brown Books: queer; in Freud’s German: unheimlich, uncanny.). This contrast between thefamiliar and the unfamiliar interested Wittgenstein throughout his career, and plays a central role in examining our subtitled theme of Wittgenstein on mistakes of surface and depth. I want to ask you to indulge me and perform a Wittgensteinean experiment (which I will take advantage of later). While studying these two images, ask yourself: what do you experience when you look at them; in particular, do you have a feeling of familiarity? In order to force the experiment, before studying these images read the following from Wittgenstein’s Brown Book: 24. Let us now go back to the idea of a feeling of familiarity, which arises when I see familiar objects. Pondering about the question whether there is such a feeling or not, we are likely to gaze at some object and say, “Don’t I have a particular feeling when I look at my old coat and hat?” (p. 180)
In this thematic neighborhood Wittgenstein’s philosophical language often employs metaphors that are aesthetic or come from the arts: looking at pictures, going to the movies, listening to music. My use of the two artists’ coat and hat racks is partly designed to make more transparent what Wittgenstein achieves philosophically with his use of these metaphors. In one of the most explicit statements of his own methodology, Wittgenstein writes that
–I wanted to put that picture before him [that is: us], and hisacceptance of the picture consists in his now being inclined to regard a given case differently: that is, to compare it withthis rather than that set of pictures. I have changed his way of looking at things. […] [PI: 144](8)
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Figure 5 A duck/rabbit image Wittgenstein’s philosophical goal is not to produce theories or theses, but to change our way of looking at things, to change our way of seeing the world. (My reading moves into the center of Wittgenstein’s methodology his discussions of Jastrow’s duck/rabbit image.(Fig. 5))(9) My strategy in this paper is to make Duchamp’s and Ernst’s works of art emblems for two distinct ways of changing the way we see the world. For ease of reference, I will label Duchamp’s way the “surface” way, and Ernst’s the “depth” way. I see Duchamp and Wittgenstein in alliance here. If Ernst needs a philosophical depth companion, let’s give him Vulgar Freudianism. Duchamp’s and Wittgenstein’s way, the “nothing is hidden”(10) way, appeals to what is before our eyes. Ernst’s work, by contrast, appeals to depth, to a structure hidden beneath the surface.(Fig. 6) click to enlarge
Figure 6 Pictures on the left showing (from left to right) René Magritte, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Man Ray, attending Bill Copleys exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, line up holding a copy of the exhibition catalogue, in which announces “Tremendous Deliriums”; on the right, Ernst turns around with his head down, while Duchamp poses his fingers at, and Man Ray raises his cane as if to strike him. Photograph by Ed van der Elsken, 1966.
In order to clarify what I mean by the “depth” way, let us now look more deeply at The Hat Makes the Man. If you had a feeling of unfamiliarity, or eerie strangeness, when looking at it before, part of the reason might be the German words in the corner: none of them are capitalized. There is a remark on this phenomenon in Wittgenstein’s Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 1:
RPP I 1087. German nouns printed in lower-case letters in certain modern poets. A German noun all in lower-case letters looks alien; to recognize it, one has to read it attentively. It is supposed to strike us as new, as if we had seen it now for the first time.–(11)
If that is not enough, in the Ernst work the words are a portmanteau of the made up, the nonsensical and the rare: a bit like a Teutonic Lewis Carroll poem: Jabberwocky, jawohl.(12) A transcription of Ernst’s Germanic words are(13): bedecktsamiger stapel-mensch nacktsamiger wasserformer (“edelformer”) kleidsame nervatur auch umpressnerven!
Half these words are not really German. Nervatur is a specialized scientific term for a pattern of nerves or veins, andbedecktsamiger and nacktsamiger are rare scientific terms. We(14) might translate the phrase: angiospermous stack- man gymnospermous waterformer (“nobleformer”) flattering nervation also !transpressnerves!
The American Heritage College Dictionary, Third edition, Houghton Mifflin, 1993, informs us of the meaning of the rare terms: angiosperm n., A plant whose ovules are enclosed in an ovary; a flowering plant. gymnosperm n., A plant, such as a cycad or conifer, whose seeds are not enclosed within an ovary.
And, for those whose college biology is receding: ovule n., A minute structure in seed plants, containing the embryo sac and surrounded by the nucellus, that develops into a seed after fertilization.
Both German scientific nouns are direct translations of the Greek scientific terms; if English worked the same way, then “angiosperm” and “gymnosperm” would be “coveredseed” and nakedseed”.
Combining the words and the image, we can see that the work is partly a meditation on what is hidden and what is unclothed, and that Ernst has uncovered for us a coveredseed. This is a picture of a nerve system, and Ernst is portraying an underlying skeletal or nerve structure.
Let us now add the (linguistically) unproblematic French below the German:
(c’est le chapeau qui fait l’homme) (le style c’est le tailleur)
And the translation:
(the hat makes the man) (style [the manner, the tone of the man] is the tailor) (15)
The unproblematic French gives us the wonderfully complicated further point that it’s style all the way down! If we add that “chapeau” is also an old slang word for condom,(16) then the covering of seed and the image itself become spectacularly complex. Ernst was both a student of philosophy and of psychiatry; if ever a picture called for a Freudian interpretation, even a vulgar one, it is this.
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Figure 7 Marcel Duchamp, Photograph of Duchamp’s Studio, 1916-1917
Ernst has taken the familiar sight of a man and a hat and, going beneath the surface, made it unfamiliar. In contrast, Duchamp has taken a supposedly familiar, ordinary object, and defamiliarized it by a change in location and status. (The change is what Russell and Bradley would have called a change in external relations.) Duchamp’s Trébuchet is areadymade: a genre that Duchamp invented and named. The idea, or, perhaps, more accurately, the propaganda, is to take a found object – often a mass produced manufactured object; a familiar, repeated object – and turn it into a work of art, perhaps by signing it, perhaps by placing it in a museum. The legend is that in 1917, while an expatriate from the European war, Marcel Duchamp purchased a coat rack, nailed it to the floor of his New York City apartment,(Fig. 7) and then named this new work of art: “Trébuchet“. The Ernst and Duchamp works have this in common: both take the familiar and then make it unfamiliar: it is the way they make it unfamiliar that is different. Putting the art works aside for a moment, as a way of further illustrating the differences between the ways of depth and surface, let us go back to the question of what makes us go wrong, what leads us to mistake? Familiarly, one side answers “deception” – whether psychological, social, or political: there is something hidden that needs to be uncovered; we need to leave our usual, surface haunts for the unfamiliar, where the truth lies. (Sometimes the theory is thatidentifying the deception accomplishes the uncovering of the truth.) As in the Ernst work all is not what it appears: in order to understand the men before our eyes, we have to go down to their underlying structure. Wittgenstein, on the contrary, says in theInvestigations “…For what is hidden, for example, is of no interest to us” [PI: 126](17) and:
361. In order to climb into the depths one does not need to travel very far; no, for that you do not need to abandon your immediate and accustomed environment. [RPP I]
To go down into the depths you don’t need to travel far; you can do it in your own backgarden. [CV p. 57](18)
Or, from a draft of the forward to Philosophical Remarks:
I might say: if the place I want to reach could only be climbed up to by a ladder, I would give up trying to get there. For the place to which I really have to go is one that I must actually be at already.
Anything that can be reached with a ladder does not interest me. [CV: p. 10]
Going from one kind of scripture to another, I am reminded of G-d’s directions to Moses in Deuteronomy 30 11-14:
“Surely, this Instruction which I enjoin upon you this day is not too baffling for you, nor is it beyond reach. It is not in the heavens, that you should say, ‘Who among us can go up to the heavens and get it for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it?’ Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say: ‘Who among us can cross to the other side of the sea and get it for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it?’ No, the thing is very close to you, in your mouth, and in your heart, to observe it.”
It is perhaps now time to summon the old self- referential joke: there are two kinds of people in the world – those that divide kinds of people into two and those who do not. We should not confuse the surface/depth dichotomy with another one: those who see the world as problematic and those who do not. It is hard to imagine a philosopher (as opposed to, say, a politician) in the unproblematic camp.
Let us, then, quickly eliminate the vulgar interpretation that attention to the surface means simple common sense and that the world is uncomplicated and unproblematic. [Ross Perot’s voice and accent are in the background, saying: “It’s really all very simple.”] Both the surface skaters and the depth divers see the world as bubbingly complicated. Both believe we are inclined (at least at times), to see the world wrong. Both believe that the world as it strikes us requires a great deal of analysis – but they locate the complications in different places, give different accounts of where and how we go wrong, and engage in different kinds of analyses.(19) Where are we now? In the context of our surface/depth dichotomy we have an overlapping and crisscrossing [PI: 67] of various themes: how to make a mistake, what is hidden, what lies open to plain view, and, lurking [hidden!?] in the background, the continual debates on Wittgenstein’s alleged quietism: the accusation that philosophy requires not investigation but renunciation.(20) The central texts of Wittgenstein’s alleged quietism are, of course,Investigations 124-6, where Wittgenstein writes that “Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language […] [i]t leaves everything as it is […] Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. […]”)(21)
Let us begin to unravel these threads by returning to the coat and hat rack images experiment and focusing on the question of familiarity. Do you have some particular feeling of familiarity? (To those of you familiar with Wittgenstein, this will, of course, be a familiar experiment with some familiar answers; what I hope to accomplish is to put it into a new – or, at least, less examined — context.)
Consider the following group of remarks from the Philosophical Investigations.(22) (Non-incidentally, these remarks are prefaced by an assertion that many – but most especially depth investigators — find one of the most annoying in Wittgenstein’s corpus: PI: 599: … “Philosophy only states what everyone admits”. Often those who find a quietism of renunciation in Wittgenstein also see him as bullying instead of arguing.)
602. Asked “Did you recognize your desk when you entered your room this morning?”–I should no doubt say “Certainly!” And yet it would be misleading to say that an act of recognition had taken place. Of course the desk was not strange to me; I was not surprised to see it, as I should have been if another one had been standing there, or some unfamiliar kind of object. 603. No one will say that every time I enter my room, my long-familiar surroundings, there is enacted a recognition of all that I see and have seen hundreds of times before. 604. It is easy to have a false picture of the processes called “recognizing”; as if recognizing always consisted in comparing two impressions with one another. It is as if I carried a picture of an object with me and used it to perform an identification of an object as the one represented by the picture. Our memory seems to us to be the agent of such a comparison, by preserving a picture of what has been seen before, or by allowing us to look into the past (as if down a spy-glass). 605. And it is not so much as if I were comparing the object with a picture set beside it, but as if the object coincided with the picture. So I see only one thing, not two. We began this paper with a (chess) mistake. What mistake is Wittgenstein warning us against here? In this context Wittgenstein is being fairly explicit: the mistake is to assume that because S recognizes y, an act of recognition must have taken place. This seemingly simple mistake opens the door to a string of others. Since even superficial investigation (introspection will do) reveals that there is not always a conscious act of recognition (as I hope your own familiarity experiment and experiences have shown), that (alleged) act is driven underground – the depth arguer has to claim there is a hidden mechanism underlying our overt behavior. Wittgenstein’s telling of the depth story is an oft told tale: failure to appreciate differences leads one to assume essences (or is it the other way around?); since there must be an essence – a seed – and since there is obviously no gymnosperm[nakedseed], there must be an angiosperm [a coveredseed].(23) And then, as Hume says in the An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, “We are got into fairy land, long ere we have reached the last steps of our theory.”(24)
This is a particular breed of a more general kind of Wittgensteinean warning of How Not to Do Philosophy. PI: 35 discusses the “’characteristic experiences’ of pointing”, connects it directly to our problem via the Wittgensteinean device of a parenthetical footnote [“(Recognizing, wishing, remembering, etc. .)”], then draws a more general moral:
PI: 36. And we do here what we do in a host of similar cases: because we cannot specify any one bodily action which we call pointing to the shape (as opposed, for example, to the colour), we say that a spiritual [mental, intellectual] activity corresponds to these words. Where our language suggests a body and there is none: there, we should like to say, is a spirit.(Fig. 8) click to enlarge
Figure 8 Marcel Duchamp, Tu m’, 1918
Wittgenstein then turns instead to ahost of ordinary, contextually particular, surface considerations:
37. What is the relation between name and thing named?–Well, what is it? Look at language-game (2) or at another one: there you can see the sort of thing this relation consists in. This relation may also consist, among many other things, in the fact that hearing the name calls before our mind the picture of what is named; and it also consists, among other things, in the name’s being written on the thing named or being pronounced when that thing is pointed at.
Going back to recognition and familiarity, we can connect PI: 37 to PG: 166 [the original home of PI: 602ff.]:
PG: 166 So the multiplicity of familiarity, as I understand it, is that of feeling at home in what I see. It might consist in such facts as these: my glance doesn’t move restlessly (inquiringly) around the object. I don’t keep changing the way I look at it, but immediately fix on one and hold it steady.
Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 1 also makes the connection explicit:
RPP I 166: It may be asked: Does something always come into my head when I understand a word?! (The following question is similar: “When I look at a familiar object, does an act of recognition always take place?”)
The philosophical mistake, the philosopher’s mistake, is to search for something extra in the explanation of our ordinary goings on.(25) (And even worse, but almost inevitable, is to findthat something extra: this structure or that. Here, in Wittgenstein’s lights, the philosopher is like the cheap stage magician, placing the rabbit in the hat to pull it out later.)
There is a familiar (to the point of being well trodden) Wittgenstein path here: this illusory extra will then serve as the criterion (and, if met, the guarantee) of an activity that, to the contrary, only makes sense, can only be seen as the activity it is, or indeed, an activity at all, when looked on as part of a practice. This is (partly) the concern of PI: 149 and the famous rule following sections of the Investigations:
PI: 149. If one says that knowing the ABC is a state of the mind, one is thinking of a state of a mental apparatus (perhaps of the brain) by means of which we explain the manifestations of that knowledge. Such a state is called a disposition. But there are objections to speaking of a state of the mind here, inasmuch as there ought to be two different criteria for such a state: a knowledge of the construction of the apparatus, quite apart from what it does. (Nothing would be more confusing here than to use the words “conscious” and “unconscious” for the contrast between states of consciousness and dispositions. For this pair of terms covers up a grammatical difference.)
The moral so far is: if depth is taken as the a priori requirement of a hidden, underlying structure, then the pursuit of that alleged depth and structure is a task of illusion, superstition: (often under the name of science) a pseudo- scientific alchemy.
But there is another (not at all completely unrelated) sense to depth. Wittgenstein writes inZettel of the real (it has happened) danger of the real (non-illusory) loss of real (not based on a mistake) depth:
Z 456. Some philosophers (or whatever you like to call them) suffer from what may be called “loss of problems”. Then everything seems quite simple to them, no deep problems seem to exist any more, the world becomes broad and flat and loses all depth, and what they write becomes immeasurably shallow and trivial.(26)
>This is the real question we have been asking all along: How does the world become deep? Or, somewhat more precisely in the light of our previous discussion: How does the surface take on a depth?
Wittgenstein sometimes profitably investigated these questions by examining the more particular question: What happens when one comes to understand something?(27)
(Perhaps the warning is unnecessary, but attention to art helps remind us that understanding is not a binary on/off operation: it is not as if the internal mechanism finally works and now I understand Duchamp’s Trébuchet; it is not as if I have a feeling and then suddenly I understand Ernst’s The Hat Makes the Man. The illusion that a non-limited, non-contextual sense can be made of complete understanding goes along with the illusion that a non-limited, non-contextual sense can be made of a hidden guarantee of our practices.)
How, in coming to understand something, does it acquire a legitimate kind of depth? We can now answer this by putting all the elements together. The answer is: by putting all the elements together. (In a local way of course, and for a time.)
Wittgenstein continually argues there is nothing [no thing] extra, added on, in our coming to understand. Coming to understand, as the relation between name and thing named [PI: 37], as the multiplicity of familiarity [PG: 166], is a plurality of commonplaces: it is the manner that makes the man. In philosophy we come to understand by seeing connections:
[PI: 122] A main source of our failure to understand is that we do notperspicuously overview [ubersehen] the use of our words. –Our grammar is lacking in this sort of perspicuity [Ubersichtlichkeit]. A perspicuous presentation [ubersichtliche Darstellung] produces just that understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections’. Hence the importance of finding and inventingintermediate cases. The concept of a perspicuous presentation is of fundamental significance for us. It earmarks the form of account we give, the way we look at things. (Is this a ‘Weltanschauung’?)(28)
What changes when we come to understand are not the facts, but the attitude. The change is a change of perspective; a rearrangement of what has been in front of us all along.
Coming to understand is the both the substance and the style [never mere style] of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. It is coming to understand: process, not conclusion. Through his use of examples, his meandering methodology, his intermediate cases, his juxtaposition of situations, Wittgenstein is showing us how the surface acquires depth. The manner makes the books.
It is in this fashion, as well, that we come to understand Duchamp’s Trébuchet. Let’s look for a moment at the multiplicity and juxtaposition of meanings here:
click to enlarge
Figure 9 The Medieval war machine Figure 10 The cucking stool
Figure 11 The ducking stool
Duchamp was a lover of many things, including lists, dictionaries, and self-reference. High on his list of loves was dictionaries.(29) If he had looked up “trébuchet” in an ordinary French dictionary he would have found the following three senses:
1. A medieval war machine [which the coat rack visually resembles];(Fig. 9) 2. A bird trap; and 3. A very accurate scale used in laboratories. If he also looked up“trébuchet” in a comprehensive English dictionary, he would have seen the additional sense: 4. A cucking- or ducking-stool.(30)(Figs. 10, 11) In addition, there is: 5. A pun with the homonymic French verb “trébucher“, which means “to stumble or trip”, which is precisely what one would do with a coat rack nailed to the floor. And, of course, there is 6. A technical chess meaning, a mutual or reciprocal zugzwang, where whoever moves loses. The image and the multiplicity of meanings work together to change our way of looking at things: Duchamp has inclined us to see the unfamiliar in a formerly familiar and common place hat rack. click to enlarge
Figure 12 Marcel Duchamp, Door: 11, rue Larrey, 1927
Two of Wittgenstein’s students wrote that:
Wittgenstein once described the situation in philosophy thus: ‘It is as if a man is standing in a room facing a wall on which are painted a number of dummy doors. Wanting to get out, he fumblingly tries to open them, vainly trying them all, one after the other, over and over again. But, of course, it is quite useless. And all the time, although he doesn’t realize it, there is a real door in the wall behind his back, and all he has to do is to turn around and open it. To help him get out of the room all we have to do is to get him to look in a different direction. But it’s hard to do this, since, wanting to get out, he resists our attempts to turn him away from where he thinks the exit must be.’(31)(Fig. 12)
A serious warning is necessary here. The description I just read makes it seem a little too easy to dissolve philosophical problems: it has its truth about Wittgenstein’s methodology, but it has to be counterbalanced by attention to the theme that philosophical problems cannot be dismissed, cannot be renounced, but have to be worked through. However, since I have examined this theme of working through elsewhere, and since I’ll shortly close with a similar warning, I’ll bracket it off in this essay.
We here have a constant in Wittgenstein’s career: Early, Middle, and Late Wittgenstein focused on the agent’s attitude. It is through changes in the agent’s attitude that the surface acquires depth. Wittgenstein, of course, located the ethical in that attitude. As early as 1916, Wittgenstein recorded in his Notebooks:
In order to live happily I must be in agreement with the world. And that is what “being happy” means. [NB: p. 75] The will is an attitude of the subject to the world. [NB: p. 87]
click to enlarge
Figure 13 Original version in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus
This kind of view survives in theTractatus ’ discussion of perspective: 5.5423 To perceive a complex means to perceive that its constituents are related to one another in such and such a way. This no doubt also explains why there are two possible ways of seeing the figure(32) as a cube; and all similar phenomena. For we really see two different facts. (If I look in the first place at the corners marked a and only glance at the b’s, then the a’s appear to be in front, and vice versa). (Fig. 13)
And in his discussion of ethics:
6.43 If the good or bad exercise of the will does alter the world, it can alter only the limits of the world, not the facts–not what can be expressed by means of language. In short the effect must be that it becomes an altogether different world. It must, so to speak, wax and wane as a whole. The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man.
Throughout his career Wittgenstein’s attitude toward attitude remains the same. A real change, however, is that in his later philosophy, Wittgenstein becomes much more concerned with diagnosing the reasons some are not satisfied with that answer. The temptation, Wittgenstein comes to claim, is to confuse the illusory notion of depth with the real notion of seeing connections, of really seeing what is before our eyes. In order to see the world in depth one needs to really pay attention to the surface:
RFM: p. 102 (Here we stumble on a remarkable and characteristic phenomenon in philosophical investigation: The difficulty–I might say–isn’t one of finding the solution; it is one of recognizing something as the solution. We have already said everything. Not something that follows from this; no, just this is the solution! This, I believe, hangs together with our wrongly expecting an explanation; whereas a description is the solution of the difficulty, if we give it the right place in our consideration. If we dwell upon it and do not try to get beyond it.) click to enlarge
Figure 14 Photograph of Duchamp playing chess, circa 1930s
What kind of mistake is 1. … Ke4, rushing in to take the pawn? What kind of mistake is failing to see the connections before us? They are not identical, but they are cousins. The chess player rushes in to take the pawn; eager to win material he is too aggressive, moving too close too soon, instead of taking his time.(33) By failing to notice what is there, he ends up on the wrong side of a trébuchet. The chess player does not need a secret revealed, a card turned over; what he needs is to control himself.(Fig. 14)
So, partly too, the philosopher. Wittgenstein’s chapter “Philosophy” in the so-called “Big Typescript” of 1932 includes the fragment:
PO: 162-63: Work on philosophy is – as work in architecture frequently is – actually more of a //a kind of// work on oneself. On one’s own conception. On the way one sees things. (And what one demands of them.)
And even more directly, the chapter begins with the following heading in capital letters:
DIFFICULTY OF PHILOSOPHY NOT THE INTELLECTUAL DIFFICULTY OF THE SCIENCES, BUT THE DIFFICULTY OF A CHANGE OF ATTITUDE. RESISTANCES OF THE WILL MUST BE OVERCOME. (PO: 162)
And now, as is both rhetorically and philosophically required, I will close with a warning. We should not think of the difficulty or resistance here as a psychological matter, as an individual’s quirk. Wittgenstein’s sights were broader, surveying (and diagnosing) his whole culture. As he wrote in the Foreword to Philosophical Remarks:
This book is written for such men as are in sympathy with its spirit. This spirit is different from the one which informs the vast stream of European and American civilization in which all of us stand. That spirit expresses itself in an onwards movement, in building ever larger and more complicated structures; the other in striving after clarity and perspicuity in no matter what structure.(34)
In these matters the individual needs neither psychoanalysis nor shock therapy; it isphilosophy that is required: a philosophical striving after clarity and perspicuity, a philosophical straining (and training) to constantly conquer temptation anew and to see the sense visible amidst the nonsense and the nonsense clothed as sense.(35)
Notes
1.The Collected Works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Past Masters, InteLex Corporation. In referring to Wittgenstein’s works I will use the Wittgenstein industry standard abbreviations:
BB: Blue and Brown Books PI: Philosophical Investigations RPP I: Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. 1 LWPP I: Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. 1 PG: Philosophical Grammar CV: Culture and Value RFM: Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics PO: Philosophical Occasions PR: Philosophical Remarks Z: Zettel
Unless otherwise indicated, references will be to the section number.
2. Vitaly Halberstadt and Marcel Duchamp, L’Opposition et les Cases Conjugées sont Reconciliées[Opposition and Sister Squares are Reconciled] (Paris/Bruxelles: L’Echiquier, 1932) text in English, French and German.
3. Halberstadt and Duchamp, p. 9, Diagram 15. In a position almost identical to Duchamp’s Diagram 15 (our diagram 1), Aron Nimzovich, My System [original German, Mein System, 1925; first English translation 1929] p. 69, gives essentially the same analysis (without, however, using the term “trébuchet”):
WHITE: Kd6, Pc5 BLACK: Ka5, Pc6 the continuation is: 1. K-Q7!, K-Kt4; 2. K-Q6; but not 1. K-Q6?, because of …. K-Kt4, and White has no good move left, and is in fact himself in Zugzwang, in a strait jacket, shall we say?
4. Eugene A. Znosko-Borovsky, How Not to Play Chess, ed. Fred Reinfeld (Dover, 1949) [first English version 1931], p. 31
5. Larry Evans, The 10 Most Common Chess Mistakes … and how to avoid them! (Cardoza, 1998 and 2000)123
6. See also PI: 89.
7. Max Ernst, The Hat Makes the Man. 1920. Cut-and-pasted paper, pencil, ink and watercolor on paper, 14 x 18″ (35.6 x 45.7 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, NY. 8. For a different discussion of the same passage and point, see my “How Old Are These Bones? Putnam, Wittgenstein and Verification”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume LXXIII (1999)
9. See, for example, PI: p. 194.
10.See PI: 435: “…How do sentences do it?–Don’t you know? For nothing is hidden.” See also PG: p. 104: “How does a sentence do it? Nothing is hidden.”
11. The remark continues: But what interests me here? This–that the impression can’t at first be described more exactly than by means of words like ‘queer’, ‘unaccustomed’. Only later follow, so to speak, analyses of the impression. (The reaction of recoil from the strangely written word.)
12. Wittgenstein referred directly to Carroll in PG: 43, PI: 13, PI: p. 198, and LWPP I: 599.
13. My discussion of Ernst’s German is overwhelmingly indebted to Ned Humphrey, a freelance German translator (and my freshman year college roommate). The translations are completely his, and he gave me the Teutonic Carroll phrase as well as other bits of wisdom. I could not be more grateful for his generous help. 14. Here “we” means Ned Humphrey.
15. Thanks to Amelie Rorty for the nuances.
16. Thanks again to Amelie Rorty.
17. See also PO: 177. The surface explorers and the depth spelunkers call for and practice two very different kinds of investigations (and art). (The surrealisms of Duchamp, on the one hand, and Ernst, Magritte, and Dali, on the other, are really quite different.)
18. From MS 131 182: 2.9.1946. The editors footnote as a variant: “indeed for this you need not even leave your most immediate & familiar surroundings I need not for this your most immediate…”.
19. We might call the depth analysis “vertical” and the surface analysis “horizontal”. However, I’ll leave these metaphors to this endnote. An implicit burden of the rest of the paper is to see if sense can be made of any of the metaphors.
20. In formulating the accusation of quietism this way, I am influenced by James Conant, “On Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Mathematics,” section V (pp. 209-213). 21. See John McDowell’s excellent discussions in his “Meaning and Intentionality in Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy”, in P. French, et. al., The Wittgenstein Legacy, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. xvii (University of Notre Dame Press, 1992); and Mind and World (Harvard, 1994) 92-3, and Afterword III (pp. 175-180). I previously discussed quietism in my “One Wittgenstein?” in E. Reck, ed., From Frege to Wittgenstein: Perspectives on Early Analytic Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2001), from which I have cannibalized part of this note.
22. The origin of most of this group is PG: pp. 165-69
23. PG: p. 74 has all the familiar elements: (at least) understanding, essence, family resemblances:
35 The problem that concerns us could be summed up roughly thus: “Must one see an image of the colour blue in one’s mind whenever one reads the word ‘blue’ with understanding?” People have often asked this question and have commonly answered no; they have concluded from this answer that the characteristic process of understanding is just a different process which we’ve not yet grasped.–Suppose then by “understanding” we mean what makes the difference between reading with understanding and reading without understanding; what does happen when we understand? Well, “Understanding” is not the name of a single process accompanying reading or hearing, but of more or less interrelated processes against a background, or in a context, of facts of a particular kind, viz. the actual use of a learnt language or languages.–We say that understanding is a “psychological process”, and this label is misleading, in this as in countless other cases. It compares understanding to a particular process like translation from one language into another, and it suggests the same conception of thinking, knowing, wishing, intending, etc. That is to say, in all these cases we see that what we would perhaps naively suggest as the hallmark of such a process is not present in every case or even in the majority of cases. And our next step is to conclude that the essence of the process is something difficult to grasp that still awaits discovery. For we say: since I use the word “understand” in all these cases, there must be some one thing which happens in every case and which is the essence of understanding (expecting, wishing etc.). Otherwise, why should I call them by all the same name?
See also PI: 164:
164. In case (162) the meaning of the word “to derive” stood out clearly. But we told ourselves that this was only a quite special case of deriving; deriving in a quite special garb, which had to be stripped from it if we wanted to see the essence of deriving. So we stripped those particular coverings off; but then deriving itself disappeared.–In order to find the real artichoke, we divested it of its leaves. For certainly (162) was a special case of deriving; what is essential to deriving, however, was not hidden beneath the surface of this case, but his ‘surface’ was one case out of the family of cases of deriving. 24. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section VII, Part I, next to last paragraph.
25. The following passage appears twice in Wittgenstein:
PI: 436 & PG: p. 169: Here it is easy to get into that dead-end in philosophy, where one believes that the difficulty of the task consists in our having to describe phenomena that are hard to get hold of, the present experience that slips quickly by, or something of the kind. Where we find ordinary language too crude, and it looks as if we were having to do, not with the phenomena of every-day, but with ones that “easily elude us, and, in their coming to be and passing away, produce those others as an average effect”.
The Investigations adds Augustine’s Latin: “(Augustine: Manifestissima et usitatissima sunt, et eadem rusus nimis latent, et nova est inventio eorum.)” In Book XI of the Confessions Augustine, confronting himself with making sense of time, sees paradox after paradox, and then reminds himself of our ordinary time-talk, writing: “They are perfectly obvious and ordinary, and yet the same things are too well hidden, and their discovery comes as something new.”
Philosophical Grammar, instead, adds the same thought as Augustine, but with a decidedly different spin:
PG 169. And here one must remember that all the phenomena that now strike us as so remarkable are the very familiar phenomena that don’t surprise us in the least when they happen. They don’t strike us as remarkable until we put them in a strange light by philosophizing.
26. Wittgenstein then oddly adds: “Russell and H. G. Wells suffer from this.”
27. Especially helpful in this context are:
PG: pp. 72-3: A truthful answer to the question “Did you understand the sentence (that you have just read)” is sometimes “yes” and sometimes “no”. “So something different must take place when I understand it and when I don’t understand it.”
Right. So when I understand a sentence something happens like being able to follow a melody as a melody, unlike the case when it’s so long or so developed that I have to say “I can’t follow this bit”. And the same thing might happen with a picture, and here I mean an ornament. First of all I see only a maze of lines; then they group themselves for me into well-known and accustomed forms and I see a plan, a familiar system. If the ornamentation contains representations of well- known objects the recognition of these will indicate a further stage of understanding. (Think in this connection of the solution of a puzzle picture.) I then say “Yes, now I see the picture rightly”.
And:
[BB: p. 168] Now we have used a misleading expression when we said that besides the experiences of seeing and speaking in reading there was another experience, etc. This is saying that to certain experiences another experience is added.–Now take the experience of seeing a sad face, say in a drawing,–we can say that to see the drawing as a sad face is not ‘just’ to see it as some complex of strokes (think of a puzzle picture). But the word ‘just’ here seems to intimate that in seeing the drawing as a face some experience is added to the experience of seeing it as mere strokes; as though I had to say that seeing the drawing as a face consisted of two experiences, elements.
28. Following Juliet Floyd’s modified translation, who, in turn, is following Stanley Cavell. I discussed Floyd’s translation and analysis in my “How Old Are These Bones? Putnam, Wittgenstein and Verification”.
29. An entry in The Green Box begins: “Take a Larousse dictionary and copy all the so- called ‘abstract,, words. i.e. those which have no concrete reference.”
30. Quoting fromBlackstone’s Commentaries:
A common scold may be indicted, and if convicted shall be sentenced to be placed in a certain engine of correction called the trebucket, castigatory, or ducking-stool.
31. D. A. T. Gasking and A. C. Jackson, “Wittgenstein as a Teacher”, in Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Man and His Philosophy, ed. K. T. Fann (Dell, 1967) 42
32. The original has a line drawing of a cube here.
33. Yuri Averbakh and I. Maizelis, Pawn Endings, trans. Mary Lasher, Chess Digest, Inc., 1974, p. 10, Diagram 18, W: Ka4, Pa6, Pg5; B: Kb8, Pb6, Pg6: “White’s pawn on a6 and Black’s pawn on b6 […] are of the ‘look but do not touch’ variety; whoever attacks first loses.” (The position is what Znosko-Borovsky labels a “Quasi- trebuchet” in How to Play Chess Endings, p. 13). Averbakh and Maizelis go on to analyze the position in terms of co-ordinate squares, what Duchamp and Halberstadt called “sister squares”. The just published Glenn Flear,Improve Your Endgame Play, Everyman Chess, London, 2000, p. 44 gives a similar position and points out that the blunder of moving too close to the enemy pawn “would be embarrassing, a special double-zugzwang called a trébuchet, whoever is to move loses!”
34. The whole forward reads:
This book is written for such men as are in sympathy with its spirit. This spirit is different from the one which informs the vast stream of European and American civilization in which all of us stand. That spirit expresses itself in an onwards movement, in building ever larger and more complicated structures; the other in striving after clarity and perspicuity in no matter what structure. The first tries to grasp the world by way of its periphery–in its variety; the second at its centre–in its essence. And so the first adds one construction to another, moving on and up, as it were, from one stage to the next, while the other remains where it is and what it tries to grasp is always the same. I would like to say ‘This book is written to the glory of God’, but nowadays that would be chicanery, that is, it would not be rightly understood. It means the book is written in good will, and in so far as it is not so written, but out of vanity, etc., the author would wish to see it condemned. He cannot free it of these impurities further than he himself is free of them. November 1930 L. W.
35. I am very grateful to Paul-Jon Benson for reading and commenting on an earlier draft. It would be impossible to exaggerate the help I received on this paper from Lydia Goehr. If this paper were only about mistakes, instead of containing them, then I would have listed her as co-author.
Figs. 2, 3, 7-8, 12, 14 ©2003 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. All rights reserved.
Intentions: Logical and Subversive The Art of Marcel Duchamp, Concept Visualization, and Immersive Experience
Abstract This paper examines the intersection of symbolic logic, immersive experience [VR] and concept visualization in the interpretation of the oeuvre of Marcel Duchamp. Influenced by the mathematicians Henri Poincaré and Élie Jouffret as well as his own intense practice of chess and logic, Duchamp sought to merge the poetic and visceral nature of the aesthetic experience with the logical and systematic character of science. This convolution of elements as disparate as chance, 3d and 4d space-time, linguistics, logic and authorship does not allow for comfortable definitive explanation but rather one, like his work itself, that engages simultaneous multi- dimensional thinking.
Duchamp questioned the purpose of ‘retinal art’, art which is merely visually beautiful, and examined the limitations of science as a singular method of interpreting and communicating experience. The body of his work stands as a systematic yet playful critique of deterministic reasoning. Using symbolic logic to characterize the most common interpretations of Duchamp’s work, the author suggests that Concept Visualization in 3d immersive experience offers a unique method for exploring and introducing the complex lattices of interpretation, intention and concept in the work of Marcel Duchamp.
Introduction click to enlarge
Figure 1 Marcel Duchamp, Rotorelief (Optical Disks), 1935
Marcel Duchamp perhaps more than any other artist in history challenged the definition of art. Throughout his life Duchamp maintained an interest in science, mathematics, optics and art and more than any other eminent artist of the twentieth century understood and researched non-Euclidean geometry and the mathematics of higher dimensionality. Born in 1887 in Blainville (Seine- Infériuere) in Normandy to a notary’s family with a history of art, love of music literature and chess, Marcel as well as his brothers Jacques Villon, Raymond (Duchamp-Villon) and his sister Suzanne became artists. Among his scientific ventures included the development of the illusionistic Rotorelief, (Fig. 1) spinning circular geometric patterns. Although Italian optical scientist discovered and named this optical phenomenon “the stereo-kinetic effect” in 1924, it is clear that Duchamp had discovered the phenomena in early 1920. It is clear that Duchamp understood the mathematics of this method of producing the illusion of volume. He wrote, ” I only had to use two circumferences–eccentric–and make them turn on a third center”. click to enlarge
Figure 2 Leonardo da Vinci, La Gioconda [Mona Lisa], 1503-05, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Figure 3 Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q., 1919
The history of art is filled with artists whose discoveries and research were labeled or advocated as objet d’ art and whose scientific utility was not discovered until many years often centuries later. However, it is the supposition of this author, that no other artist cloaked his or her intentions in deception as a tactic to subvert conventional interpretation. Noted and controversial Duchamp scholar Rhonda Shearer has garnered attention by a stunning hypothesis about the many realms of Duchamp’s work. In 1919 Duchamp drew a supposed impromptu mustache on a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’sMona Lisa (Fig. 2) and titled it L.H.O.O.Q.(Fig. 3) When these letters are read aloud they say “Elle a chaud au cul” or “She has a hot ass” in French. Having created this work of art Duchamp stated that it revealed a truth about his noted foregoer. Duchamp championed the “ready-made”, a manufactured object transformed into art merely by its selection and placement in an aesthetic gallery or museum context. In so doing, Duchamp altered the significance of the objet d’ art as a precious commodity created by the artist. Duchamp often maintained complex documentation of the purchase or discovery of his “found-objects”. In the case of L.H.O.O.Q., Duchamp asserts that it was purchased in a postcard shop on Paris’ rue de Rivoli. This notion that the art object is defined and given value by its context not by an empirical judgement of aesthetic value would transform the art of the twentieth century, greatly influencing Conceptual Art and Postmodern movements. Duchamp’s assertion that art is a matter of selection and context was perhaps a precursor to Baudrillard’s Second Order of Simulacra. According to Shearer, Duchamp had another more subversive objective. She asserts that Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. was in fact a creation of Duchamp–a composite photograph of himself taken in 1912 and a reproduction of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Shearer’s research suggests that not only was L.H.O.O.Q. created by Duchamp or fabricated to his specifications but so was the snow shovel in In Advance of the Broken Arm (Fig. 4), the bird cage in Why Not Sneeze Rose Sélavy (Fig. 5), the ampoule in Ampoule Contenant 50cc d’air Paris (Ampoule containing 50cc of Paris air) (Fig. 6), and the urinal in Fountain (Fig. 7)signed R. Mutt (the famous object refused exhibition in the Society of Independent Artists show in 1917). This controversial theory is gaining greater attention in recent years, although not without significant turmoil. The notion of the “ready-made”, would remain safe according to Arthur Danto, art critic for the Nation, and Thierry di Duve, author of Kant After Duchamp, as this concept of “art object in context” has been an accepted convention of art making and interpretation for three quarters of a century. However if Shearer proves to be correct in her assertions both Danto and the Immanent Duchamp scholar and author Francis Nauman (Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction) would find this a “grand act of deception.” click images to enlarge
Figure 4 Marcel Duchamp, In Advance of the Broken Arm, 1915/64
Figure 5 Marcel Duchamp, Why Not Sneeze Rrose Sélvey?,1921 click images to enlarge Figure 6 Marcel Duchamp, Paris Air, 1919/49
Figure 7 Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917/64 Duchamp’s work, particularly that which displays his keen interest in science and mathematics is also garnering attention outside of the disciplines of art history and art criticism. New York University Physicist Jonathan Williams postulates that Duchamp’s deep play with physics or what Duchamp and the playwright Alfred Jarry referred to as “pataphysics”, was a systematic way of satirizing early 20th century deterministic systems of scientific thinking. Duchamp, according to Williams, began this direction through his investigations of non-Euclidean geometry, fourth dimensional space-time, electromagnetism, and radiation. Duchamp’s playful explorations of these areas seems to be a harbinger, of sorts, for some of the foundations of quantum mechanical theory such as Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the Erwin Schrodinger equations.
Duchamp’s systematic critiques were not limited to the scientific thinking of the day but also confronted modes of artistic production. Duchamp’s disinterest in what he referred to as “retinal art” or art which solely engaged the reproduction of visual experience was methodically deconstructed and supplanted by an art which focused on the grey matter or existed in the realm of pure intellect. “All through the nineteenth century the phrase ‘bête comme un peintre’ or ‘as stupid as a painter'”, Duchamp said. “And it was true- that kind of painter who just puts down what he sees is stupid.” For Duchamp, traditional art making merely copied itself in kind of mobius strip of mimesis and self-reflection simply cloning itself over and over again
As the myth goes, Duchamp gave up art in favor of playing chess throughout the world. “All chess players are artists but not all artists are chess players.” Duchamp used chess as a kind of model for much of his work, using it in his explorations of physics, mathematics and logic. This does not mean that he solely engaged in a form of sublime mathematically derived art. He continued his love of semantics, word games and humor throughout his life one sees this in L.H.O.O.Q. as well as his frequent use of the alter ego Rrose Sélavy (Eros is Life). Any complete and singular interpretation of Marcel Duchamp’s work is quite impossible as it is a lattice manifesting complex interweaving of intentions; mathematics, science, logic, art, consumer critique word play and alter ego.
Parsing the Oeuvre The human propensity for binary oppositional thinking has been studied by psychologists and linguist and is evident in a great portion of western philosophy from Diogenes Laertus 200AD (lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers) to the present. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the discipline of art history, particularly as practiced in the first half of the twentieth century. Often art history has been essentially a historiography of connoisseurship, determining why one body of work by one artist is necessarily better than another body of work by another artist. This reasoning was held together by the supposition of progress, in the inevitable evolution of one mode of artistic production to another. Though not the subject of this study it is notable that when one examines art historiography (or any historiography for that matter) events, intentions and outcomes are often limited to singular reasoning. The academy, when confronted by opposing singular reasoning on any particular individual or subject matter, results in imbroglio. Critical interpretation of Duchamp’s body of work and his intentions is vested in this sort of competition between singular theories.
Duchamp consistently plays with these battles often examining them through his own prism. As Duchamp advocates the value of the “ready-made” he simultaneously describes his intent to define existence “through slightly distending the laws of physics and chemistry.” By using his own form of “absurd mathematics” he simultaneously critiques scientific thinking, logic, the definition of art, the artistic mode of production and aesthetic interpretation. Duchamp writes: Calcul par l’absurde mathématique algébrique – SiA=intention 10. B=Crainte 5 C=Desir- on a une première équation C=a-b et une 2 équation C=A x B Math ces 2 éq. Sont absurdes C=50 / C = 5 / 2C = 55 / 2=27.5 Si A = 10 / B = 5 / c = 27.5 Si A = a = 9 / B=a/ 3 =3/ C +33/ 2=16.5
This formula demonstrates the limits of scientific reasoning by illustrating its inability to explicate immeasurable, highly personalized, data. By inserting variable equivalencies for intention, dread (crainte) and desir (desire) Duchamp demonstrates the limits of deterministic mathematics and hints at his attempts to demonstrate the breakdown of rational models of examining reality. Jonathan Williams in his article Pata or Quantum the End of Deterministic Physics, likens this propensity in Duchamp’s work to the Schrodinger equations which demonstrated that the behaviors, qualities and position of quantum particles needed to be expressed in terms of statistical probabilities thus rendering vacant the possibility of determining that a subatomic particle had any fixed quality at any given point in time. Duchamp’s continued fascination with illustrating this notion also points out his interest in expressing the difficulty that systems of logic have in making distinct calculations of human emotional variables. As one can see when examining the diversity of Duchamp’s work and intentions, traditional art historical and art critical interpreters were and in many cases remain befuddled.
Symbolic Logic and Visualizing Concept in the Work of Marcel Duchamp
The seemingly innate propensity of the human mind to binary, “this not that thinking” may be fruitfully illustrated by using symbolic logic in an interpretation of the intentions of Marcel Duchamp. With symbolic logic as a form of information or concept visualization one can demonstrate the difficulty and visual complexity of examining Duchamp’s work using a deterministic system of equivalencies. First let us use the most oft sited interpretations of Duchamp’s oeuvre and their corresponding significances and assign to each a variable. The following is by no means an exhaustive codification of the many interpretations of Marcel Duchamp’s works it is essentially a categorization of a few of the major theories. A. The use of the “ready-made” or “found object” asserts that by altering the context of a commonplace object it can become art. D. The statement A allows that Duchamp in challenging the definition of the art object by exalting the primacy of the idea over the creative act he subverted the modernist convention of the artist/object and viewer relationships B. The work was an exploration of the mathematics of uncertainty pioneered by Henri Poincaré and the study of the fourth dimensional space theorized by Élie Jouffret (Traité Élémentaire de Géometrie à Quatre Dimensions 1903). H. The statement B allows that Duchamp called into question the discipline boundaries between art and science and destroys the notion of the artist as creator of ‘retinal art’ or the aesthetic object. C. The work was engineered to be reassembled by the patron or viewer, who followed complex, often informed by chance, instructions. This process is evident in Duchamp’s assemblage book works such as La Bôite Verte. P. The statement C allows that Duchamp transformed the boundaries between producer and consumer in the art market and engaged the artist/manufacturer and viewer in the process of creation. We will next make a formula that contextualizes more precisely the relationship between the upper level referent variables A, B and C (in this case those variables that refer to the condition of Duchamp’s work rather than his intentions). Supplanting a corresponding lower case Greek letters, A becoming a(alpha), B becoming b(beta), and C becomes g(gamma) the following is the rule, universal quantifier or binding of variables governing their relationships. (Fig. 8) click to enlarge
Figure 8
The above statement allows that there can only be a single interpretation of the work of Duchamp. In accordance with the current highly polarized arguments about his work the equation illustrates that, of the contemporary hypothesis, only one can be correct. The next equations maintain that there can only be a single derived intention from the overall statement of the condition of Duchamp’s work. In other words the statement: “The work is an exploration of the mathematics of uncertainty pioneered by Henri Poincaré and the study of the fourth dimensional space theorized by Élie Jouffret” may only be linked to the intention, “Duchamp calls into question the discipline boundaries between art and science and destroys the notion of the artist as creator of ‘retinal art’ or the aesthetic object”. We may express this with symbolic logic in the following: (Fig. 9) click to enlarge
Figure 9
The next section of this exploration of the work of Marcel Duchamp through symbolic logic will determine the consistency of each of the condition/intention hypotheses. First we will examine the consistency of the argument A, if and only if, D:(Fig. 10) click to enlarge Figure 10
The statement A if and only if D proves logically consistent. Next we have the hypothesis B, if and only if, H: (Fig. 11) click to enlarge
Figure 11
Having proved the statement B if and only if H consistent we address the theory C if and only if P:(Fig. 12) click to enlarge Figure 12
Having proved the consistency of all three hypotheses given the a priori context that only one of them is correct where are we left in this complex visual analysis of Duchamp’s intentions? His intimate knowledge of Henri Poincaré’s theories and his use of chance in the construction of many of his key works would seem to indicate that Duchamp had been quietly challenging the notion of deterministic reasoning in both the interpretation of art and physical and experiential phenomena. As Poincaré suggests in 1895;
Experiment has revealed a multitude of facts which can be summed up in the following statement: it is impossible to detect the absolute motion of matter, or rather the relative motion of ponderable matter with respect to the ether; all that one can exhibit is the motion of ponderable matter with respect to ponderable matter.
In short, Poincaré asserts that all quantifiable and qualifiable information pertaining to any phenomena can only be measured relative to other qualified and quantified data. As the first to elucidate this “principle of relativity” Poincaré discerned that all explicit information about any physical phenomena in motions is best expressed in the form of a probability. Poincaré’s critique of determinism extends to other disciplines as well as he states, “The science of history is built out of bricks; but an accumulation of historical facts is no more a science than a pile of bricks is a house.” This kind of reasoning is the bedrock of semiotics (meaning in language is ascertain through the relationship between the symbol and its meaning relative to the culture that produced it). It has also been used to critique symbolic logic. The discipline itself relies on abstract patterns, its meaning determined not from the symbols themselves but from the relationship between the marks and other patterns and more significantly cultural meanings. click to enlarge
Figure 13 Marcel Duchamp, Three Standard Stoppages, 1913-14
Duchamp’s connection to logic is most clearly noted in two of his most significant areas of concern: chance and chess. As a chess master Duchamp was, on several occasions, a member of the French championship chess team. For Duchamp chess was an organized, integrated and ordered whole, composed of rule based interactions wherein outcomes were as influenced by unquantifiable elements such as guile or desire as by systematic reasoning. This led Duchamp to assert that complexity in any system was inherently non- deterministic. We see this questioning of aggregation, perhaps more clearly, in his use of chance in aesthetic production.
Le Penseur Multi-Dimensionnelle
Duchamp’s work Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) was first displayed at the Cubist Exhibition at the Damau Gallery in Barcelona and later at the Armory Show (New York, 1913). This painting took the observational cubist penchant of displaying an object from multiple spatial vantagepoints and added a temporal element by rendering a nude figure in motion. This work explored the conceptual possibility of 2d painting, which displayed and illustrates a 3 dimensional figure traversing time. The piece arrives at a visceral form of multi-dimensional cognition. Partial inspired by his interest in chronophotography and the mathematics of Henri Poincaré Nude Descending a Staircase is perhaps his last clear attempt to use a traditional modality of retinal art to express a conceptual or gray matter art. It is also his first widely exhibited work to express his interest in the merger of science and art.
His continued interest in multiple dimensions, though I cannot prove this, is probably where we may find the solution or at least a map to a clear understanding of his work. Though we may never have a concise definition of “what his work was about” Duchamp may have left us clues as to how we may begin to “make sense” of his intentions. click to enlarge
Figure 14 Front view of the postcard in the White Box, 1967
Rhonda Shearer and Stephen J. Gould In their article Boats and Deckchairs present the most profound example of Duchamp’s trickery and play with the multi-dimensional mathematics of Henri Poincaré and Élie Jouffret. Inside Duchamp’s 1967 piece White Box Francis Nauman discovered a “commercial” postcard (1914) (Fig. 14). The postcard displays on its front three boats floating on a placid lake or river and on the reverse some writing. Nauman categorized this discovery as a “random notation” written on a “found object” citing that “on the verso of a postcard, Duchamp notes ‘a possible means by which the fourth dimension could be visually established through the optical illusion of two deck chairs’.” This note was accompanied by an illustration of parallel lines bisected by a perpendicular. The true nature of this object has never been addressed by art historians as the work could be safely categorized as one of Duchamp’s “ready- mades.”
The piece is in fact, an original painting not a commercial postcard. The curious parallel and perpendicular lines on the back are in fact obscure instructions. Duchamp’s fascination with rotation and relative vantagepoints indicates that a new dimension may be experienced through altering ones position relative to an object. When the postcard is turned 90º to the right the boats become an orthogonal rendering of deckchairs viewed from a bird’s eye vantagepoint. The mysterious “random note” on the verso is a plea to adjust your perspective when viewing the postcard but also, when correlated with the image from the front the piece becomes a profound statement about the relationship between the second, third and fourth dimensions.
Like E. A. Abbot’s famous book Flatland (1885) whose main character, a square, is shockingly introduced to the third dimension, Duchamp has demonstrated for us that one can examine from a three dimensional vantage point all sides of a two dimensional object. In turning the postcard we are taking a clearly two-dimensional image and viewing it from the third dimension wherein the objects in question become something entirely different. Inpostcard he begs the analogy: that when viewed from the fourth dimension a three-dimensional object may be seen from all sides. From years of singular interpretations of Duchamp’s oeuvre art historians have safely ignored Duchamp’s multiple interpretations: one obvious and the others subversive. When the work is proclaimed (by the artist himself) and interpreted as a “ready-made” the hidden intention with all of its possible significance is obscured.
Duchamp disavowed models of reasoning, which relied on singular definitions. This kind of one or two-dimensional interpretation is inherently flawed when attempting to ascertain his intentions. With this in mind, Duchamp’s work requires that any conceptual model of his intentions necessitates three-dimensional thinking and thusly is well suited to three-dimensional visualization.
Immersive Experience and Concept Visualization
As demonstrated, the use of symbolic logic as a means to visualizing concept in the work of Marcel Duchamp is extremely difficult. Though I have not examined the use of more advanced forms of symbolic logic (I am not a logician) it is apparent that the data, as envisaged, is not of the highest utility.
click to enlarge
Figure. 15 Screen still from the author’s Immersive Duchamp Concept World an interactive virtual reality computer art piece.
Figure. 16 Screen still from the author’s Immersive Duchamp Concept World an interactive virtual reality computer art piece. Clearly, Duchamp had multiple intentions and the existence of seemingly inconsistent hypotheses about his work point more to the human propensity for dualistic thinking rather than to grasping a more pluralistic possibility. Engaging data that is not quantifiable and highly subjective is difficult to manage logically and exceedingly difficult to graph. However if we create a 3d cartographic form of the logic equations introduced earlier in this paper, we make the data more intuitive and thus cognitively manageable. (Figs. 15 & 16)Using interactive virtual reality software[the software we use in this example is the Glass Virtual Reality Engine, created by the author] one can have an immersive experience of the main theories about Duchamp’s work.
The virtual reality computer art piece Immersive Duchamp Concept World, presents the theories concerning the artist’s work. At the center of the virtual space is the entrance point to the world. The immersant or viewer may follow the map which branches off to various nodal points. Each of these nodal points represents a single theory. From the vantagepoint of the theory the immersant sees the other possible theories through a fog and translucent sheets, they are barely visible, as the immersant/viewer has chosen an alternate path (Fig. 15). In Immersive Duchamp Concept World the immersant is also introduced to various interactive media; readings of Duchamp’s Notes as well as to still images and animations of his work and to the writings of Henri Poincaré. If the immersant chooses to fly above the object it is from this vantagepoint the viewer sees all of the theories as a totality (Fig. 16). This totality, is essentially a relativistic rather than a fixed deterministic system as the viewer governs the experience. This model for information visualization does not stand in opposition to symbolic logic, however it does allow a form of concept visualization that merges reason quantification, qualification and the visceral.
Conclusion
The body of work produced by Marcel Duchamp was a programmatic, if playful, undermining of deterministic thinking. He demolished arbitrary discipline boundaries between artist, scientist and mathematician. His clues to altering our perspective were equally pertinent to viewing and understanding his oeuvre as they were to viewing individual works of art. His implicit and explicit call for altering our vantagepoint relative to his intentions inherently calls into question modernist singular interpretations. Yet, through the use of concept visualization, we can create more exploratory modes of information visualization; modes which allow for simultaneous multiple dimensional thinking. In an immersive environment the viewer can experience a panorama of Duchamp’s intentions, one that does not enforce strict rules of consistency, but nonetheless leads us to comprehension of a poly-dynamic yet visceral logic.
Refrences
Boxer, S. “Taking Jokes By Duchamp to Another Level of Art. “The New York Times 20 March 1999.
Clair, J. Sur Marcel Duchamp et la fin de l’art. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2000.
D’Harnoncourt, Anne & McShine, eds.Marcel Duchamp. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1973.
Duchamp, M. Notes. Paris: Champs Flammarion- Centre d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou, 1999.
Golding, J. Duchamp: The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors. New York: The Viking Press, 1973.
Gould, S. J. & Shearer, R. “Boats and Deck Chairs.” Tout Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal. 1.1 (Dec. 1000): Articles
Hodges, W. Logic. New York: Penguin Books, 1985.
Ifrah, G. The Universal History of Numbers. New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2000.
Reichenbach, H. Elements of Symbolic Logic. New York: Free Press, 1966.
Scribner, C. “Henri Poincare and the principle of relativity.” American Journal of Physics 32 (1963): 673.
Tomkins, C. The World of Marcel Duchamp 1887-1968. Alexandria, VA: Time Life Book, 1977.
Williams, J. “Pata or Quantum: Duchamp and the end of Deterministic Physics”, Tout Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal. 2.3 (Dec. 2000): Articles
Figs. 1, 3~7, 13, 14 ©2003 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. All rights reserved.
Precision Optics / Optical Illusions: Inconsistency, Anemic Cinema, and the Rotoreliefs
SinceCourbet, it’s been believed that painting is addressed to the retina.That was everyone’s error. The retinal shudder! Before, painting had other functions: it could be religious, philosophical, moral. If I had a chance to take an antiretinal attitude, it unfortunately hasn’t changed much; our whole century [the twentieth] is completely retinal,except for the Surrealists, and still they didn’t go so far!(1) click to enlarge Figure. 1 Marcel Duchamp, The Green Box, 1934
Marcel Duchamp’s comment is very strange when one considers the number of his works that involve the distinctly retinal phenomena of optical illusions; these works, produced mainly in the 1920’s, he termed “precision optics.” Optical illusions are an important part of his work because of their unusual characteristics: they present multiple ‘interpretations’ which cannot all be ‘true’ at the same time, but which are nevertheless ‘correct’ ways to see the work. They allow him to incorporate a systematic destabilizing of vision in the system which he attempted to create in the 1910s, and which was presented inThe Green Box (Fig. 1). The systems Duchamp constructed are inconsistent. They produce contradictions which are incorporated into their meaning. In the case of “precision optics,” this inconsistency is a physical component of the work due to the action of the illusions themselves:
But let us now say exactly what is meant by consistency of a formal system… that every theorem, when interpreted becomes a true statement. And we will say thatinconsistency occurs when there is at least one false statement among the interpreted theorems.(2) Optical illusions present images which are “true” but inconsistent. The lines which form the pulsating illusion in Duchamp’s “precision optics” gain their meaning only from the relationship we choose for them; our internal decision that one orientation is more probable than another results in its apparent shift between these mutually- exclusive spatial positions, and understanding it requires the acceptance of these potentials as being a “probability set.” This is why these images are technically inconsistent–they present incompatible versions of themselves. Visual forms of this ‘class’ offer a liminal experience–one where the process of seeing becomes visible in/through that process itself. The optical illusion is a liminal experience; it allows a visualization of the process of interpretation which is normally unconscious. Vision is rendered regressive by optical illusions.
The name ‘rotoreliefs’ refers to optical illusions which appear as three-dimensional forms when displayed on a rotating surface(Fig. 2)such as a phonograph turntable. Superficially, they present an apparent contradiction to this prohibition against “retinal art.”‘ Once in motion they display a pulsating “relief” that oscillates between positive and negative space. Duchamp used these illusions in Anémic Cinéma (1926)(Fig. 3) alternating them with a series of French puns, each arranged into a spinning spiral:
Something else happens when we begin to allow the puns to have their play. The figurative meaning of “la moelle de l’épée” and “la poele de l’aimée” over powers the literal (non)sense.The reference to sexual intercourse could hardly be more evident.Furthermore, once we recognize its figurative character, our readingof the other disks begins to reveal sexual allusions. …Suddenly the abstract gyrating shapes which rise from and sink into the plane of the screen come to resemble the igloos, breasts, welts and genitalia evoked by the words. The sexuality is neither in the literal meaning of the words, nor represented in the optical illusions, seen by themselves.(3)
click images to enlarge
Figure 2 Marcel Duchamp, Rotoreliefs, 1935 (machine modeled after 1964 version created by Vittorio Marchi and Robert Slawinski) Figure3 Marcel Duchamp, Disk Inscribed with Pun for Anemic Cinema, 1926. P. Adams Sitney recognized that sexuality is the subtext to this film, but it is a subtext which requires the interpretation of the viewer looking at the juxtaposition of rotorelief and the text. The meaning produced is an overlay onto the image; this overlay does not resolve the issue of the (potential) retinal nature of these images. The sexuality which Sitney notes is a result of the punning character of the statements; these “word plays” act through a double meaning which becomes apparent when they are read aloud. The doubling of the puns parallels the doubling of the ‘rotoreliefs.’ The gyrating shapes Sitney describes are theretinal aspect of the ‘rotoreliefs.’ This effect originates in the inconsistency of human perception which optical illusions exploit. It is the interpretative shift of the “precision optics” which moves the experience of looking from the purely visual into the mental realm:
“Painting should not be exclusively visual or retinal. It must interest the gray matter; our appetite for intellectualization.”(4) click to enlarge Figure. 4 Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even [ The Large Glass], 1915-1923
“Retinal art” does not promote an intellectual response; that is only the initial effect / impression which this art produces. Duchamp’s conversion of this retinal impression in Anémic Cinéma into sexuality is connected to the system of construction he presented in The Green Box (1934). Inconsistency also enters into “precision optics” becauseThe Large Glass (Fig. 4)is an attempt at a complete formalized system of sexual congress; this is what the notes inThe Green Boxdescribe.’The “mathematical” bias to the construction notes demonstrates Duchamp’s concern with formal systems. His system creates a linguistic formalism, derived from the abstract system of mathematics. It allows his introduction of a ‘formal’ component into the work provided that the viewer is aware of the system he employs:
Conditions of a language:
The search for “prime words” (“divisible” only by themselves and by unity).
Take a Larousse dict. and copy all the so-called “abstract” words. i.e., those which have no concrete reference Compose a schematic sign designating each of these words. (this sign can be composed with the standard stops) These signs must be thought of as the letters of the new alphabet.(5)
The invention of new “signs” for an abstract language corresponding to terms in a dictionary without concrete reference divests language of its meaning, allowing its manipulation in purely technical terms. His proposal parallels what Hilbert attempted to do for mathematics.The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even Duchamp claims is the result of the system which The Green Box documents. The meaning of “abstract” words appears only through their contextual usage. Duchamp suggests what he means by this in his text called *the. While the search for “prime words” and all that entails may be an unrealizable proposal, the new “signs” which become the letters of a “new alphabet” would logically be used to produce a new, formal and abstract language in the same sense that Hilbert’s formal system transforms the ordinary language of geometry into a new language. Kurt Gödel demonstrated in 1932 that formal systems such as Hilbert’s produce inconsistencies which are inherent to logic:
Gödel showed (i) how to construct an arithmeticalformula G that represents the meta- mathematical statement: ‘The formula G is not demonstrable.’ This formula G thus ostensibly says of itself that it is not demonstrable. … But (ii) Gödel also showed that G is demonstrable if, and only if, its formal negation ~ G is demonstrable.(6)
Gödel’s proof is based on a paradox: Theorem G is demonstrable only if it is not demonstrable, but to demonstrate that it is demonstrable is to show that it isn’t. The appearance of this infinite regression of logical consequence arises because G is inconsistent; in the formal system of logic, its construction is both correct and invalid at the same moment. The statement is a true statement of logic that cannot be true. The paradox which G’del produces is one that follows the formal rules for the logical system of symbolic mathematics from which the description above is a translation; that system is thus inconsistent:
Gödel’s paper is proof of the impossibility of demonstrating certain postulates… The traditional belief that the axioms of geometry (or, for that matter, the axioms of any discipline) can be established by their apparent self-evidence was thus radically undermined. …For it became evident that mathematics is simply the discipline par excellence that draws the conclusions logically implied by any given set of axioms or postulates.(7) click to enlarge
Figure. 5 Marcel Duchamp, The Standard Stoppages, 1913-14
In general terms, what G’del demonstrates is that the set of assumptions which provide the foundation for logical certainty have an arbitrary basis because they can be shown to produce inconsistency. In epistemological terms, formalized knowledge derived from logic is in itself an inconsistent proposition; this is Gödel’s Theorem.(8)Duchamp’s work, most obviously in his optical illusions, proceeds from a similar use of paradox to undermine the formal system he proposes. The parameters of that language are suggested by Duchamp’s work–the reference to The Standard Stoppages (1913-14) (Fig. 5) as the unit of measure places the “signs” inside his physical oeuvre.
Viewed by themselves and not as part of the film, the ‘rotoreliefs’ become optical illusions only when they are in motion. Until that happens, they are circular geometric signs. Understanding them as objects requires considering them as they appear when moving and stationary; in motion, their most evident feature is the illusion of space which they evoke.
To lose the possibility of recognizing (identifying) 2 similar objects — 2 colors, 2 laces, 2 hats, 2 forms whatsoever to reach the Impossibility of sufficient visual memory, to transfer from one like object to another the memoryimprint. — Same possibility with sounds; with brain facts.(9)
The “loss” Duchamp describes implies a transformation of the retinal into a mental construction of the type which optical illusions typically present: they provide two similar objects contained in a single image which defies our ability to easily visualize it.(10) The experience of optical illusions allows us to look at “seeing.” In apprehending these illusions we do transfer the memory from one image to the next; that is how we recognize the oscillation between the two positions. In a comment published in 1948, Duchamp echoed his note from The Green Box:
Senses:
One can look at seeing. Can one hear hearing, feel breathing, etc. . . . ?(11)
By “look at seeing” Duchamp describes the particular interpretative effect which accompanies optical illusions. The ‘rotoreliefs” visual oscillation only results from spinning the disks. There is a double contrast here: between static image and the motion image, as well as between the two interpretations of the illusion of positive and negative volumes. It is not possible to “see” both volumes at the same time just as it is not possible to experience the illusion while the disk is stationary. The shift from one volume to the other makes the observer aware of the way biological vision gets interpreted into “seeing.”
The encounter with the “space” which these illusions create is a delayed one–the machine that displays them must first be set in motion. Once that happens, the “space” of the illusion becomes immanent. However, this “space” is unstable as Anémic Cinéma demonstrates and Sitney observes: the illusions pulsate, apparently projecting outwards only to reverse their direction and recede. The volumes which the ‘rotoreliefs’ create are internally inconsistent–they present two mutually incompatible images at the same time. In looking at these objects, it is the process of interpretation which becomes apparent through the oscillation thatAnémic Cinéma connects with sexuality.
The oscillations of these optical illusions may be the “cinematic blossoming” produced by the Bride’s desire. Duchamp makes this condition apparent in his explanation of each component of the Large Glass:
The bride basically is a motor. …The whole graphic significance is for this cinematic blossoming. This cinematic blossoming is by the electrical stripping (see the passage of the bach. machine to the bride) … The last state of this nude bride before the orgasm which may (might) bring about her fall graphically, the need to express in a completely different way from the rest of the painting, this blossoming.(12)
The appearance of the ‘rotoreliefs’ in a film called Anémic Cinéma is not coincidental; it is explicitly related to the Large Glass. This note suggests that the “blossoming” cannot be presented in the same manner as the rest of the painting. The action of the pictured machinery will not actually appear within the painting itself. It is suggestive of the ‘rotoreliefs,’ especially due to their appearance in the film. The pulsating movement of the ‘rotoreliefs’ visibly resembles “blossoming.” That the “whole graphic action” of the Large Glass cannot be expressed by the same techniques as the painting is significant. The work may be technically “unfinishable”; part of its being left “incomplete” may be the depictive problem which is solved by optical illusions such as the ‘rotoreliefs.’
As with a record, the ‘rotoreliefs’ have a hole in the center which is registered on a pin centered on the turntable. The mounting of the disk presents a sexual metaphor which is repeated throughout Duchamp’s iconography. “Precision optics” presents’ an illusion of graphic movement which makes the reliefs appear when playing the disk. This activity is a replay of the action of the chocolate grinder. The static nature of the disk is “consumed” by setting it into motion:
Given an object in chocolate.
1st its appearance = retinal impression (and other sensory consequences)
2nd its apparition.
The mould of a chocolate object is the negative apparition of the plane with one or several curvatures) generating 1st (by elementary prllll- ism)the colored form of the object. 2nd the mass of elements of light (chocolate type elements): in the passage from apparition (mould) to the appearance, the plane, composed of elements of chocolate type light determines the apparent chocolate mass by physical dyeing(13)
Duchamp explicitly explains the transition from retinal to mental here. The senses the concept of “apparition” suggest: (1) the opposite of its retinal effect. This “sense” would mean that “apparition” is a mental state of perception for an object. (2) That the “apparition” appears discursively through a sequence of terms he sets in context. (Continuing the mathematical parallel, these are undefined terms in a Hilbert-type formalism where meaning appears through specific contextual use rather than a direct definition). The “apparition” is a visual effect that appears mentally through the “chocolate type light.” The chocolate object is consumed by the chocolate grinder to produce the illuminating gas for the bride machine.(14) The bride machine then begins moving to produce the “cinematic blossoming”–which is the action of the ‘rotoreliefs.’
Static imagery transforms into (both) mental and physically activity; the playing of a rotorelief on a phonograph thus recreates the action of the bachelor machine which fuels and makes active the bride. By playing the disk the audience takes the place of the bachelors. The bachelors are the force which sets Duchamp’s “mathematics” in motion. Theirs is a specific position in his system, one which repeats in his final work:
[In Etant Donnés…] Marcel Duchamp has determined forever exactly the amount of detail and precisely the fixed perspective that he wants the viewer to perceive. The illusion is complete in itself. Etant Donnés could be described as the alter ego of the Large Glass.(15) click to enlarge Figure. 6 Marcel Duchamp, Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas, 1945-1966
Etant Donnés (1945-1966)(Fig. 6)is a large complex optical illusion. The fixed perspective / view places the audience looking through the door not only in the role of voyeur, but shifts the spectator into the role of the bachelors in the Large Glass. This action is repeated by the ‘rotoreliefs.’ It is important to remember that a phonograph of the type available in the 1920’s requires someone to crank the machine to set the disk into motion. The spectator “grinds” the “chocolate object” producing the “chocolate type light” which is the motion of the disk. Without this active participation nothing happens.
The apparition of the ‘rotoreliefs’ is after-the- fact of retinal stimulation: a “delayed” experience where the transfer from visual comprehension to intellectual comprehension is a change in mental state. That the work is an optical illusion reiterates the relationship as a “false” one. It cannot be both flat and dimensional at the same moment. The knowledge that it is flat and the perception of volume are incompatible. “Precision optics” are therefore inconsistent. Thus, perception of the finished piece is separated from its reality through the interpretation. Duchamp’s approach incorporates the inconsistency of observation that optical illusions exploit:
The figure [of Etant Donnés] is carefully designed to be seen as flattened and foreshortened by the perspective from a fixed eye-level viewpoint; the distant landscape background and the immediate foreground of the door through which one looks are integral parts of the illusion.(16)
The optical component of these works, their “retinalism,” is an illusion: they are not physically as they appear, nor is their effect a result of their physical reality. Where theLarge Glass both excludes the audience (by incorporating them into some of the potential views), the later work replaces the bachelors with the audience. This shift appears specifically in the ‘rotoreliefs.’
Within this framework, the film Anémic Cinéma is rendered almost redundant through its literalization of the “cinematic blossoming” the ‘rotoreliefs’ demonstrate literally through cinema. The “anemia” of the title suggests an awareness of this redundancy by Duchamp and a connection between this awareness and the word “cinema” itself. The title is a near-palindrome, spelled the same forwards as backwards. It presents the problem of “2 similar objects” and allows the function of the puns and word-play of this film as derivable from the system of “prime words.” Each pun replays the action of the ‘rotoreliefs’ linguistically. It is a translation between the everyday language of “undefined terms” and the symbolic order which his formal notational system proposes. The role of “precision optics” is to present these “signs” in the form of new statements. Inconsistency plays a significant role in these works because they base their effect and thus their meaning on the encounter between the audience and the work itself.
At first sight Anémic Cinéma would seem to underline the difference between optical and verbal images. The two modes of representation are held together by the figure of the spiral. Yet we automatically apprehend them differently. The eye grasps the eccentric circles as if they were geometrical wholes. … While the view sees one set of disks as creating depth, he “reads” the other set as flat because of his reflex to the familiar orthography of the Latin alphabet. Thus,the viewer is the victim of an automatic response at odds with the ontological “sameness” of the shots.(17)
The translation of one set of terms into a statement within a formalized system is an action of rendering equivalences between one kind of notation and another. However, this action is only apparent to those who are aware of both formal systems; the sexual implication of the combination which Sitney notes, instead of simply being a juxtaposition of “neutral” content, is a logical combination within the system Duchamp calls “precision optics.” He applied that term to the Rotary Demisphere (1925) (Fig. 7a, b, c, d) and the ‘rotoreliefs’ generally. The “precision” of these works lies in the linkage between the retinal (optical illusion) and the formal logical system. This is more than just an iconographic connection; it is the literal relationship between equivalent terms in a mathematical formalism. While the retinal effect of the two kinds of presentation in Anémic Cinéma remains markedly different, it is also fundamentally the same mental sphere. Alternation in the sequence of the film demonstrates their interchangeability. While Sitney is correct that “the sexuality is neither in the literal meaning of the words, nor represented in the optical illusions, seen by themselves,” the formal system Duchamp devised is sexual: his art is representational within that system: thus sexual. click images to enlarge
Figure. 7a
Figure. 7b Figure. 7c
Figure. 7d
Marcel Duchamp, Rotary Demisphere, 1925
The appearance of the sexual content is built-in to his conception of “antiretinal.” The only group of artists which he believes also took an antiretinal attitude were the Surrealists. Given the sexual content of the mathematics at work in the ‘rotoreliefs’ and Etant Donnés…it is logical that Duchamp would feel Surrealism was also antiretinal is logical. The function of optical illusions in his later works is predicated on this translation of sexuality into visual forms. This is explicit in his final work. Inconsistency is inherent to this formulation not only because optical illusions exploit inconsistency as their form, but because the initial version of his formalized system presented in the Large Glass places the audience physically outside the system while at the same time including them in it:
The Large Glass and some of its studies are, of all Duchamp’s creations, the most accessible (to the point of being literally transparent) as well as the most abstruse. We see through them more than we see them. The viewer becomes part of the view.(18) Anne d’Harnoncourt’s description of theLarge Glass presents its inconsistency clearly through the combination of “accessible” and “abstruse.” This is a paradox. It cannot beboth. That Duchamp’s art is paradoxical is self-evident: “we see through them more than we see them.” The transparency of the work is also its opacity. The inconsistency inherent to the optical illusion plays itself out intellectually and literally. “Precision optics”–Anémic Cinéma and the ‘rotoreliefs’–then, are important elements in the elaboration of Duchamp’sinconsistent system of formalized sexuality. There is a component of the rhetorical in Duchamp’s claims; for example, the system he claims produced theThree Standard Stoppages has been shown to be false.(19) The precision of the “precision optics” lies in the way that they translate these rhetorical positions and claims into the physical form of the objects themselves. This is the intellectualization Duchamp mentions being a partial component of Surrealism, but which “stopped short” because it does not completely subsume the work into the intellectual framework in the fashion that “precision optics” does.
Notes
1. Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padget(New York: Viking, 1971) 43. 2. Douglas R. Hofstadter,Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid(New York: Basic Books, 1979,1999) 94.
3. P. Adams Sitney, Modernist Montage (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990) 25.
4. Cleve Gray, “The Great Spectator” interview, Art in America,vol. 57, no. 4 (July- August, 1969) 21.
5. Marcel Duchamp, The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michael Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (New York: Da Capo Press, 1989) 31.
6. Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman,Gödel’s Theorem (New York: New York University press, 1958, 1986) 58.
7. Ibid., pp. 10-11.
8. Ibid., p. 7.
9. Ibid., p. 31.
10. Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976) 21-25.
11. Duchamp, Op. cit., p. 195. 12. Ibid., pp. 42-43.
13. Ibid., p.70.
14. Ibid.,pp. 41-44.
15. Anne d’Harnoncourt & Walter Hopps, Etant Donnés…: 1 la chute d’eau,2 le gaz d’eclairage: Reflections on a New Work by Marcel Duchamp,second reprint of the Philadelphia Museum of ArtBulletin,volume LXIV, numbers 299 and 300, April-September, 1969, with the 1973 afterword by Anne d’Harnoncourt (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum, 1987) 8.
16. Ibid., p. 12.
17. Sitney, Op. cit., pp. 24-25.
18. d’Harnoncourt, Op. cit., pp. 8-10.
19. Shearer, Rhonda Roland & Stephen Jay Gould. “Hidden in Plain Sight:Duchamp’s 3 Standard Stoppages, More Truly a “Stoppage” (An Invisible Mending) Than We Ever Realized“in Tout- Fait,Issue 1: Volume 1 (December 1999) News Figs. 1~7 ©2003 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. All rights reserved. James Joyce and Marcel Duchamp click images to enlarge Figure 1A Man Ray, Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, 1920 Figure 1B Marcel Duchamp, Cover of “The Blindman No. 1, ” April 1917 (detail of the drawing by Alfred J. Frueh) Figure 2A Man Ray, Portrait of James Joyce, 1922 Figure 2B Drawing by James Joyce for Finnegans Wake (1939), p. 308. Is Marcel Duchamp the model for a character in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake? Yes. Is this character attractive? No. Does this character have an equally unattractive twin brother based on Joyce? Yes. Finnegans Wake [1]is unique in our history: never has a work of literature been so widely known by name yet so rarely read cover to cover. Its fame rests in part on the fact that its author was already world famous from earlier works when it was first published. And the reason for its relative neglect by readers can be explained by even a cursory glance at any one of its 626 pages: Joyce, it would seem, had practically invented a new language, roughly based on English. Offsetting the neglect of the novel by the public at large is the humming worldwide industry of Joyce scholars who are busily earning Ph.D’s trying to decipher it. There are many parallels between Marcel Duchamp (Fig. 1A)(who earned necessary money teaching French to Americans) and James Joyce (Fig. 2A)(who earned necessary money teaching English to Europeans). If Finnegans Wake was unprecedented in literary history, Duchamp’sLarge Glass was no less so in the history of art. Like Joyce, Duchamp was already world famous from earlier work by the time the world saw the mold-shattering new work. In the case of both the artist and the writer, that earlier work was considered extremely difficult by the general public, and was embraced only by a very small number of sympathetic artists; with the Glass and the Wake, Duchamp and Joyce respectively reached a point in their odysseys where their sympathy for the ease of their audience was very close to nil. [2] (Fig. 1B and 2B) Duchamp, though the younger by five years, was considerably earlier than Joyce in reaching this iconoclastic stage. For all its difficulties, Ulysses, written between 1914 and 1921, contains many passages that readers of the time could relatively easily accept as viable literature. Duchamp’s 3 Standard Stoppages, 1913–1914 (Fig. 3), and Bottle Dryer, 1914 (Fig. 4), on the other hand, were decidedly not considered viable by art lovers when they appeared on the scene. click images to enlarge Figure 3 Marcel Duchamp, Three Standard Stoppages, 1913-14. Figure 4 Marcel Duchamp, Bottle Dryer, 1914/1964. click to enlarge Figure 5 Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, 1915-23 Duchamp made his first drawings for parts of The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (a.k.a. The Large Glass) (Fig. 5) in 1912, began the piece itself in 1915, and stopped working on it in 1923. [3] He made his last additions to it in New York before mid-February of that year, when he left for Europe. [4] Joyce started Finnegans Wake on March 10, 1923. It seems a marvelous coincidence that Duchamp ended work on his unprecedented artwork only a few weeks before Joyce started work on his unprecedented book; a person of a metaphysical bent, believing in some sort of transmigrating artistic energy, might posit a scenario out of the coincidence. The writer Calvin Tomkins pointedly connects the most ambitious and notable work of the artist with that of the writer: The“ Large Glass stands in relation to painting as Finnegans Wake does to literature, isolated and inimitable; it has been called everything from a masterpiece to a hoax, and to this day there are no standards by which it can be judged.” [5]“Masterpiece” and “hoax,” of course, are the two labels most often attached to Finnegans Wake as well. * We maintain that beginning with Jarry . . . the differentiation long considered necessary between art and life has been challenged, to wind up annihilated as a principle. —André Breton[6] Alfred Jarry:There is great wisdom in modeling one’s soul on that of one’s janitor. 1902 James Joyce: I have a grocer’s assistant’s mind. 1925. Marcel Duchamp: I live the life of a waiter.1968. A snow shovel? A bottle rack? A bicycle wheel? A focus on the ordinary was a significant feature of Duchamp’s contribution to the visual arts. With his Readymades he sought to elevate mass-produced objects into art’s realm. And he made clear that he considered the idea behind this gesture the most important of any that had come to him. There is a parallel in Joyce’s transparent insistence that the ordinary is extraordinary. This interest was apparent to other writers: Richard Ellmann, his biographer, tells us that “to [William Butler] Yeats, Joyce was too concerned with the commonplace.” [7] Ellmann himself states, “The initial and determining act of judgment in [Joyce’s] work is the justification of the commonplace.” [8] This tendency can be seen in Joyce’s day-to-day proceedings as well as in his writing. To his friend the bookstore proprietor Sylvia Beach, for example, he said, “I never met a bore.” [9] (Nicely parallel is Duchamp saying that he never saw a painting from which he was unable to get something of interest.) Like Duchamp, too, Joyce was capable of de-emphasizing the inventive genius of the originating author in favor of some more generic principle of creativity: speaking of Finnegans Wake to Eugene Jolas, founder of the literary review transition, he said, “This book is being written by the people I have met or known.” [10] To a substantial degree this statement could apply even to Joyce’s early novel Stephen Hero and the collection of stories Dubliners, but it rings ever truer as we travel through Ulysses and then Finnegans Wake, with its “hero” H. C. Earwicker, also referred to as “Here Comes Everybody.” In harmony with this, we find thatUlysses , notwithstanding its structural debt to the Homeric epic, lays out a single day in the life of middle- class citizens of Dublin. AndFinnegans Wake, for all its complex structure and portmanteau words, tells of a tavern keeper, his wife and his three children, yet again in Dublin, Joyce’s native town. One of Duchamp’s many contributions to modern art, of course, was the willful use of the principle of chance, seen most vividly in the earlyThree Standard Stoppages, 1913-14. A few years later he ordered the title of the magazine he launched in 1917 to be Wrongwrong, but a printing mistake transformed it into Rongwrong. The error appealed to him and he accepted the title. [11] Joyce too, according to Ellmann, “was quite willing to accept coincidence as his collaborator.”[12] Once or twice he dictated a bit of Finnegans Wake to Beckett . . . in the middle of one such session there was a knock on the door which Beckett did not hear. Joyce said, “Come in,” and Beckett wrote it down. Afterwards, he read back what he had written and Joyce said, “What’s that ‘Come in’?” “Yes, you said that,” said Beckett. Joyce thought for a moment, then said, “Let it stand.” [13] Authors and critics have found tonal similarities in the work of Duchamp and of Joyce. Ellmann, for example, remarks of Finnegans Wake that its “mixture of childish nonsense and ancient wisdom had been prepared for by the Dadaists and Surrealists.” [14] This complements Michel Sanouillet’s statement that “perhaps no one was . . . more spiritually dada than Marcel Duchamp. In [him] are joined the essential elements of the dada revolt.”[15] Duchamp, who said that his notes for The Large Glass were part of the piece, often repeated that all of his work was based on literature. In the 1910s he said, “I felt that as a painter it was much better to be influenced by a writer than by another painter.” [16] In 1922, meanwhile, the year after the publication of Ulysses and a year before he began Finnegans Wake, Joyce said that his writing owed much to painting. [17] He can actually be seen as striving toward an end result more typical of painting than of writing: after suggesting to a friend that he could compare much of his work in Ulysses to a page of intricate illuminations in the Irish monastic volumeThe Book of Kells, he continued, “I would like it to be possible to pick up any page of my book and know at once what book it was.” [18] And he wrote to Lucia, his daughter, “Lord knows what my prose means. In a word, it’s pleasing to the ear. And your drawings are pleasing to the eye. That is enough, it seems to me.” [19] Both Duchamp and Joyce would have been at a loss without female patronage. In Duchamp’s case, Katherine Dreier was sufficiently devoted to have sometimes followed the artist in his travels—whether invited or not—and named him the executor of her will; she bought the Large Glass from Duchamp’s early supporter Walter Arensberg, and held on to it. In Joyce’s case we find Beach and Harriet Weaver, among others. Both men, however, were known to treat women unfeelingly, and Joyce at times could sound sexist: granting that some women “have attained eminence in the field of scientific research,” he could add, “But you have never heard of a woman who was the author of a complete philosophical system, and I don’t think you ever will.” Yet he admitted in a letter: “throughout my life women have been my most active helpers.” [20] The Readymades and The Large Glass have been lauded or vilified as the end of art as we used to know it, and critics made similar comments on the publication of Finnegans Wake. Joyce himself remarked of his book, “I’m at the end of English.” [21] Yet, despite these and a slew of other connections and parallels, no essay to my knowledge has appeared discussing the possibility of a significant personal connection between these two uniquely influential geniuses. My explorations tell me that a single essay can only serve as introduction to the subject. Joyce and Duchamp, both international figures by the 1920s, moved in the same social circles, yet no biography of either man mentions a meeting of the two. This writer, who was on friendly terms with the artist’s late widow, Teeny Duchamp, once asked her whether she was aware of any meeting or contact between Joyce and Duchamp. She answered that she was not. The only evidence I’ve found that strongly suggests they may have met is in a short biography of the American bookbinder and art patron Mary Reynolds, who “held an open house almost nightly at her home at 14 rue Halle [in Paris], with her quiet garden the favored spot after dinner for the likes of Duchamp, Brancusi, Man Ray, [André] Breton, [Djuna] Barnes, [Peggy] Guggenheim, [Paul] Eluard, Mina Loy, James Joyce, Cocteau, Samuel Beckett, and others.” [22] Since Duchamp was all but living with Reynolds at the time, the likelihood that he and Joyce didnot meet diminishes as a possibility. click to enlarge Figure 6 Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912 Figure 7 Marcel Duchamp, Photograph of Fountain by Alfred Stieglitz, 1917 Whether they met or not, however, I believe that Duchamp was the model for a character in Finnegans Wake, and by no means a sympathetic one. But this is consistent with Joyce’s world outlook; it is probably true of most of the hundreds of characters from past and current history with whom he filled his book. Duchamp’s fictional re- creation, I believe, had to do not only with his presence and reputation in Paris but with more particular considerations having to do with his personality and his relationships. In the years we are focusing on he enjoyed as wide a celebrity in the visual arts as Joyce did in the literary world. And their respective positions dovetailed extraordinarily: both known to the cognoscenti as possessing enormous abilities, both considered bad boys by the larger public. Largely responsible for Duchamp’s bad reputation was Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1913 (Fig. 6), andFountain, 1917(Fig. 7), the notorious upended urinal exhibited as art; for Joyce it was the four-letter words in Ulysses, never before seen or permitted in legitimately published English novels. Duchamp’s “scandal” had been widely publicized in 1917 when New York’s protectors of public morals refused to exhibit the urinal on the grounds that it was “immoral” or “vulgar.” [23] In Joyce’s case the refusal to allow Ulysses entry into various countries on identical grounds was important news. Duchamp lived to seeFountain attain status as one of the most important artworks of the twentieth century; Joyce lived to see a similar destiny for Ulysses. A few details about Duchamp’s relationship with American art patron Mary Reynolds and with the American collector John Quinn may help to explain why Joyce painted the character I find he based on Duchamp in such colors as he did. If this interpretation is correct, the surprise is compounded by the fact that neither Duchamp nor Reynolds is mentioned at all in Ellmann’s massive and highly detailed biography of the writer. Duchamp and Joyce actually lived within blocks of each other at various times in Paris in the ’teens and 1920s. They were also close to many of the same people. Both Constantin Brancusi and Man Ray, for example, probably the two artists closest to Duchamp, made celebrated portraits of Joyce: Brancusi executed two true-to-life drawings of him followed by a totally abstract one that became famous and was eventually the frontispiece for Ellmann’s biography; Man Ray’s 1922 photograph of Joyce may be the most haunting portrait of a writer or artist ever made by Ray. Samuel Beckett, who met Joyce in 1928, was quite close to both the writer and the artist, as was Reynolds, although in a different way.[24] Yet although Joyce must have seen a great deal about Duchamp in the Paris press, and no doubt heard intimate stories about him from excellent personal sources, there is only sparse documented evidence that Joyce and Duchamp even knew of each other’s existence. click to enlarge Figure 8 Marcel Duchamp, Cover of transition, no. 26, 1936 One has to search to find them acknowledging each other. In 1937, when a reproduction of Duchamp’s 1916 Combreadymade was chosen as the cover of an issue of transition(no. 26) (Fig. 8)—the same issue that featured an installment of Joyce’s Work in Progress (the working title ofFinnegans Wake)—Joyce intriguingly told Beach, “The comb with thick teeth shown on this cover was the one used to comb out Work in Progress.” [25] The comment, I would argue, suggests some kind of connection between Joyce and Duchamp that no biographer to my knowledge has yet explored. In Duchamp’s case I know of two references to the writer. Once, telling Dore Ashton in a 1966 interview how some authors were famous in the way of an expensive Swiss chocolate while others were famous more in the way of Pepsi-Cola, Duchamp remarked that Joyce was in the latter category. And in 1956, in a book introduction, he wrote of Reynolds’s “close friendship with André Breton, Raymond Queneau, Jean Cocteau, Djuna Barnes, James Joyce, Alexander Calder, Miro, Jacques Villon, and many other important figures of the epoch.” [26] click to enlarge Figure 9 Marcel Duchamp, Opposition and Sister Squares Are Reconciled, 1932 Reynolds, one of Joyce’s inner circle, [27] was also a “lifelong friend” of Joyce’s perennial intimate Beckett; the two writers would sometimes meet at her house. [28] Joyce’s son Giorgio likewise stayed there at the same time as Beckett. [28A] It was in Reynolds’s house that Beckett started his relationship with Peggy Guggenheim, and they lived there for a short while after. [28B] Beckett and Reynolds were kindred spirits who would eventually both work bravely for the French Resistance. (Joyce, meanwhile, made a point of saying that he was not physically brave; Duchamp similarly once remarked that his response to an invasion would be to stand with folded arms.) Beckett’sEndgame, was to an extent inspired by a chess book Duchamp had co-written, Opposition and Sister Squares Are Reconciled (Fig. 9). [29] This same Mary Reynolds loved Duchamp with an undying fervor. Their sexual relationship survived hell and high water, including Duchamp’s strange, short-lived marriage to a plump, not overly attractive, well-to-do woman. His liaison with Reynolds began in 1924, and “in spite of his refusal to let it impinge on his freedom, it lasted for the better part of two decades.” [30] Duchamp’s friend Henri-Pierre Roché who introduced them, would later write in his journal, She suffers. Marcel is debauched. Has loved, perhaps still loves, very vulgar women. He holds her at arm’s length at the edge of his mind. He fears for his freedom. She wants to attach herself to him as he says. (Mary’s eyes moisten with offended sweet pride.) . . . He comes to see her every day. Hides their relationship from everybody. Doesn’t want her to speak to him at the Café du Dome when they see each other each evening. Hides her. Gets out of their taxi a hundred yards before arriving at the home of friends. She loves him, believes him incapable of loving. . . . Just as a butterfly goes for certain flowers, Marcel goes straight for beauty. He could not go for Mary, but he protects against her his life, his calm, his solitude, his chess game, his amorous fantasies. [31] If Joyce objected to Duchamp’s treatment of Reynolds, it was not due to middle-class prudishness: one of his closest intimates was the Irish tenor John Sullivan, whose “family life was deeply entangled between a wife and a mistress.” [33] Joyce himself may have remained with Nora Barnacle, the woman who loved him, until the end of his life, but a letter of 1904 to an aunt in Dublin suggests inner cravings for an independent existence; with his and Nora’s first child, Giorgio, not yet five months old, he wrote that as soon as he earned some money from his writing he intended to change his life: “I imagine the present relations between Nora and myself are about to suffer some alteration. . . . I am not a very domestic animal—after all, I suppose I am an artist—and sometimes when I think of the free and happy life which I have (or had) every talent to live I am in a fit of despair.” [34] He did stay with Nora, marrying her in 1931, when he was forty- nine, after twenty-seven years of cohabitation. Yet around that time he told Jolas, “When I hear the word ‘love’ I feel like puking.” [35] Nora for her part, after being cajoled by friends, not for the first time, into returning home to her penitent husband after she had fled his drunken behavior, said in 1936, “I wish I had never met anyone of the name James Joyce.” [36] Yet Joyce, when not under the influence, obviously felt a powerful attachment to Nora. In 1928–29, when she was sent into the hospital for operations twice within a four-month period, he refused to be separated from her, and “had a bed set up in her room so that he could stay there too.” [37] As far as women were concerned, then, Duchamp seemed callous and acted accordingly; Joyce could speak callously and behave boorishly, but proceeded loyally. Oddly, each artist got into an inverse relationship with the same male associate, the American lawyer and collector John Quinn. In 1919, when an antiques dealer offered to sell the definitive version of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, Quinn decided that $1,000 was “much too steep.” But in July of that year he and Duchamp met and apparently hit it off. Quinn, a fellow bachelor and, like Duchamp, a “well-known connoisseur of pretty women,” [38]would eventually buy Brancusi sculptures through Duchamp, find a job for the artist when he needed one, and take French lessons from him for a fee. Once, “deciding that Duchamp looked tired and thin, Quinn sent him a railroad ticket and a paid hotel reservation for a few days’ vacation . . . in an . . . ocean resort on the New Jersey shore. Duchamp showed his gratitude by dashing off a pen and ink sketch of the collector and presenting it to him en‘ souvenir d’un Bontemps a Spring Lake.’” [39] Joyce was a less comfortable beneficiary of Quinn’s patronage. In March 1917 Quinn sent Joyce money, but only in return for the manuscript of Exiles. He also wrote a laudatory review ofA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in Vanity Fair, [40] and later he would buy the manuscript of Ulysses. But Joyce never agreed with Quinn on the value of his manuscripts, [41] and he told Ezra Pound that he did not consider Quinn generous. [42]When Quinn tried and failed to defend Ulysses against obscenity charges in an American court, Joyce was critical of his legal strategy, clearly believing that a different approach would have brought more chance of success. [43] And he cannot have been pleased to learn that Quinn had told the publisher whom he had unsuccessfully represented, “Don’t publish any more obscene literature.” The only friendly thing Ellmann reports Joyce saying about Quinn came after the collector’s death, in 1924. All the evidence shows that Joyce expected help from everyone in reach. He firmly believed in his own greatness and was not shy of trading on it. Duchamp may have had as solid a core of self- confidence, but while he took help where he could get it, he did not behave as though it were his birthright. Much more adept at navigating life’s breakers than Joyce, he seems to have been widely admired and even loved. Despite his clear refusal to make a commitment to Reynolds, for example, she remained devoted to him until her death. I met Duchamp once, engaging in a twenty-minute conversation with him the year before his death; the strong impression I was left with of his personality could best be described as “natural Zen aplomb.” Others who were very close to him agree with this evaluation with hardly a qualification. The vivid contrast with Joyce is everywhere evident. A somewhat related illustration appears in Ellmann: “Beckett was addicted to silences, and so was Joyce; they engaged in conversations which consisted often of silences directed toward each other, both suffused with sadness, Beckett mostly for the world, Joyce mostly for himself.” [44] * * * On June 8, 1927, in Paris, Duchamp married Lydie Sarazin-Levassor, the granddaughter of a successful manufacturer. (They would divorce in about half a year.) “The unavoidable conclusion seems to be,” writes Tomkins, “that Duchamp had made a cold-blooded decision to marry for money. . . . When [he] learned at the formal signing of the marriage contract, in the presence of lawyers representing both parties, that the sum Lydie’s father was prepared to settle on her came to only 2,500 francs a month (slightly more than $1,000 in today’s terms of exchange), Duchamp did not immediately back out. He turned pale, according to Lydie, but he signed the contract.” [45] That same summer Joyce composed a connective episode in his ‘Work in Progress’ (later titledFinnegans Wake)—an insert between two previously completed segments, “The Hen” and “Shem the Penman”—including several pages that seem to me rife with uncomplimentary allusions to Duchamp. [46] Since the content of these aspersions typically involves avarice, the timing of the writing supports the suspicion of a connection between this insertion and Duchamp’s newsworthy marriage. The section of Finnegans Wake that we’re about to explore was written three years after Quinn’s death and the start of Duchamp’s relationship with Reynolds, and only weeks after the marriage that some of Duchamp’s friends saw as a Dadaist joke. I suspect that Joyce’s Professor Ciondolone is based in the main on Duchamp. My caution stems from the knowledge that few characters in the Wake are based on a single person, evidence of the universality of certain human traits as Joyce saw them. The brothers Burrus and Caseous, for example, are temporary stand-ins for the twin brothers Shem and Shaun, two of the book’s five main characters; for Ellmann the twins in Finnegans Wake were “every possible pair of brothers or opponents.” [47] One such opponent among Joyce’s contemporaries was the writer and artist Wyndham Lewis, whom Joyce sometimes seems to pair up with himself in Finnegans Wake—Lewis was a sometime friend who had heavily attacked Ulysses in his book Time and Western Man. But when Burrus and Caseous become stand-ins for Shem and Shaun for about five pages, I believe they are largely based on Duchamp and Joyce. If this analysis is accurate, Quinn would be their commonly shared source of milk. Consistent with the idea of twins, they seem at times to exchange personality traits, just as Shem and Shaun periodically do. In the commentary that follows, it is important to keep in mind that almost all of Joyce’s descriptions in the Wake make multiple allusions to a dizzying variety of reference points. In focusing on Duchamp, I am effectively forcing into the background the other references that I’m confident are also present. I fully expect other Sherlocks, perhaps without even arguing with my basic analysis, to have different interpretations. For all we’ll ever know, all may have some kernel of truth. * * * My heeders will recoil with a great leisure how at the outbreak before trespassing on the space question[48] where even michelangelines have fooled to dread I proved to mindself as to your sotisfiction how his abject all through (the quickquidQuick buck.of Professor Ciondolone’s too frequently hypothecated Mortgaged, i.e., borrowed.Bettlermensch)Bettler(German): beggar, so “beggarman.”is nothing so much more than a mere cashdime however genteel he may want ours, if we please (I am speaking to us in the second person), The phrase suggests the idea of twins on which Joyce will elaborate below. for to this graded intellecktuals dime is cash and the cash system. you must not be allowed to forget that this is all contained, I mean the system, in the dogmarks of origen on spurios) Darwin’Origin of Species, i.e., the survival of the fittest. think of Duchamp’s statement, “In a shipwreck it’s every man fohimself.means that I cannot now have or nothave a piece of cheeps Cheese.in your pocket at the same time and with the same manners as you can now nothalf or half the cheek apiece I’ve in mind and Caseous have not or not have seemaultaneously sysentangled themselves, selldear to soldthere, once in the dairy days of buy and buy. Both Duchamp and Joyce sold to Quinn, exchanging their wares—art or manuscripts—for “milk” to free them from the needs of normal labor. Burrus,let us like to imagine, is a genuine prime, the real choice Cheese. full of natural greace, Grease, grace.the mildest of milkstoffs yet unbeaten as a risicide and, of course, obsoletely unadulterous whereat Caseous is obversely the revise. Rival, reverse. of him and in fact not an ideal choose by any meals, though the betterman of the two is meltingly addicted to the more casual side of the arrivaliste case Arriviste—perhaps Joyce’s view of Duchamp (second definition: an unscrupulous, vulgar social climber; a bounder).and, let me say it at once, as zealous Jealous.over him as is passably he. Probably the “art question,” as opposed to the “literature question.” The reverse, the “time” question, brings to mind Lewis’s Time and Western Man, with its attack on Ulysses. Great artists Feared to tread. His object, but conceivably a reference to what I believe Joyce must have considered abject behavior on Duchamp’s part: marrying someone he thought wealthy, and in church (both Duchamp and Joyce were outspoken atheists), while deserting Reynolds, a woman of real value in the estimation of Joyce and his circle Quick buck. ciondolone (Italian): idler, lounger. Breton had famously accused Duchamp, the chess bum, of being an idler, wasting his great intellegence. Bettler(German): beggar, so “beggarman.” The phrase suggests the idea of twins on which Joyce will elaborate below. In 1924 Duchamp had spent a month on the Riviera, “experimenting with roulette andtrente-et- quarante at the Casino, trying out various systems. In a letter to [Francis] Picabia, Duchamp described in . . . detail his attempts to work out a ‘martingale,’ or system, for winning at roulette. He had been winning regularly, he said, and he thought he had found a successful pattern. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘I have ceased to be a painter, I am drawing on chance.”[49] Darwin’Origin of Species, i.e., the survival of the fittest. think of Duchamp’s statement, “In a shipwreck it’s every man fohimself.means that I cannot now have or nothave a piece of cheeps Cheese. Possibly a reference to the wealthy Quinn: both Joyce and Duchamp wanted their bread buttered by the same knife, and the question was whether there would be enough butter for both of them. Cassius, but also caseous: cheesy. [50] demarcation line) with a cheese dealer’s pass.” [51] Did he have such a pass going back to the mid- twenties? Both Duchamp and Joyce sold to Quinn, exchanging their wares—art or manuscripts—for “milk” to free them from the needs of normal labor. Cheese. Grease, grace. Regicide—Brutus and Cassius conspired to kill Caesar. Also risus (Latin): laugh—so perhaps killer of laughter? If Burrus is Joyce in this passage (Joyce also appears as Caseous, but Caseous and Burrus at times seem to switch personalities), he may be describing himself here as a faithful husband, and therefore obsolete—especially in the face of Duchamp’s recent behavior, interrupting a three- year-old affair with Joyce’s friend Reynolds in order to marry – to all appearances – for money (a marriage that Duchamp’s circle unanimously, and accurately, believed would be short-lived). Rival, reverse. Arriviste—perhaps Joyce’s view of Duchamp (second definition: an unscrupulous, vulgar social climber; a bounder). Jealous. Can possibly be. Perhaps Joyce is saying that each twin is jealous of the other. We’ll leave Burrus and Caseous for awhile. My reading has Caseous and Burrus as temporary stand- ins for Shem and Shaun. They mainly represent Duchamp and Joyce. They’re the twins – butter and cheese- in competition for the milk from Quinn; and they are both close to many Reynolds, although in very different ways. I believe there is a strong likelihood that Duchamp’s abrupt discarding of Reynolds in favor of what was widely perceived as a marriage of convenience was a significant motivating factor in his rewriting the passage. It appears on pages 160 and 161 of the Viking edition. This is section I.vi, first published in transition, No.6, Sept. 1927, a few months after Duchamp’s very public marriage in Paris. The timing could not be better if this interpretation is on the mark. The year of 1927, and particularly its first half, contains much of interest to one delving into a connection between Joyce and Duchamp. “The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly,” from a section of Finnegans Wake that Joyce revised for publication in June 1927, contains many references that seem likely connections to Duchamp. [52] Here are lines leading up to “The Ballad”: leave itit toto HostyHosty, for frosty he’s Possibly“Frosty” a possiblea reference reference to theHosty, mann to rhyme the ran, Duchamp’sto Duchamp’s notes, Why Notwhich Sneeze are the rann, the rann, the king fullRrose ofSelavy, repetitions, 1921, with and it’s his marble cubes resembling ice of all ranns. 1917 magazine titled cubes “rongwrong.” Its cover shows two dogs closely examining and/or smelling each other’s posteriors, just as dogs are wont to do in life. (Fig. 10).This was a very provocative image to see on the cover of a magazine at that time. In view of Joyce’s sexual proclivities it would seem that such a magazine Figure 10 cover might well have been Marcel Duchamp, Opposition noted. E.g. – from a letter, and James Joyce to Nora Barnacle, Sister Squares Dec.Are 2, 1909: “I have taught Reconciled, 1932 you to swoon at the hearing of my voice singing or Have you here? (Some ha) Have murmuring to your soul the we where? (Some hant) Have passion and sorrow and you hered? (Others do) Have mystery of life and at the we whered? (Others dont) It’s same time have taught you to cumming, it’s brumming! The make filthy signs to me with clip, the clop! (All cla) your lips and tongue, to Glass crash. provoke me by obscene touches The and noises, and even to do in (klikkaklakkaklaskaklopatzkla my presence the most shameful tscha and filthy act of the body. battacreppycrottygraddaghsemm You remember the day you ihsam pulled up your clothes and mihnouithappluddyappladdypkon let me lie under you looking pkot!). up while you did it? Then you were ashamed even to meet my eyes.” [52A] And in another letter four days later he tells Nora of his desire to “smell the perfume of your drawers as well as the warm odour of your cunt and the heavy smell of your behind.” [52B] One other connection to Duchamp’s exploring canines is Joyce’s own primitive ink drawing reproduced on page 308 of the Wake, a close-up of a thumb-nosing, vulgarily translated as “kiss my ass!” Remembering that Joyce later seems to be calling Duchamp (Caseous) a beggar man (Bettlermensch), we find in Roland McHugh’s Annotations to Finnegans Wake, “Ir. children used to take a wren from door to door collecting money on St. Stephen’s Day. They chanted: The wren, the wren, The king of all birds &c (U.481)—‘wren’ pronounced like ‘rann’.” [53] Perhaps, then, Joyce is dubbing Duchamp “the king of all beggars” here. Here we have “Glass crash,” followed by the third 100- letter word denoting a “thunderclap” in the book. “Glass crash” and the thunder clap word were among the additions Joyce made to the text for its publicationin transition in June 1927; the opening of the “Ballad,”on the other hand, was already present in the first draft, writtenin 1923. [54] Meanwhile, accordingto the accounts of the breaking of The Large Glass, thatevent took place a few months before Joyce made his additionsto this section of Work in Progress. [55] This may be coincidence;from everything given to us as fact by Duchamp and [Katherine]Dreier, Joyce could not have known of the breaking ofThe LargeGlass—according to Duchamp, he himself did not hear of ituntil several years later. Bearing in mind, though, that “Glasscrash” and the thunderclap are followed immediately by the firstlines of the “Ballad”—“Have you heard of one Humpty Dumpty/Howhe fell with a roll and a rumble)”—we may wonder whether, since The Large Glass was a very large and complex “painting” and etching on glass rather than on a more durable traditional support, Joyce was making a sarcastic prediction. Through Reynolds, he could well have known that Duchamp had worked on the Glass for the better part of a decade before leaving it “definitively unfinished,” and that everyone including the artist considered it his most important work. This may be Joyce’s poetic way of saying, “Glass has been known to break.” We have seen him comparing his pages in Ulysses not with conventional painting but with The Book of Kells, created in or around the eighth century; perhaps he was staking his claim to a longer duration for his work than for Duchamp’s. He could even have been manifesting a kind of envy: Although he was uninterested in, even disdainful of, “modern art,” here was a contemporary “painting” that was being hailed as even more of a breakthrough by the art world cognoscenti than Ulysses had been by their literary counterparts. The public reaction to the first showing of The Large Glass may conceivably have further prodded Joyce as he started Finnegans Wake. This fits the picture of energetically competing twins. As to “The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly” itself, the name, according to McHugh’sAnnotations to Finnegans Wake, refers simultaneously to “Pearse & O’Rahilly,” figures in Dublin’s Easter Rising against the British in 1916, and to the French word perce-oreille, “earwig,” a small elongate insect with a pair of pincerlike appendages protruding from the rear of its abdomen.[56] Folklore has it that earwigs can enter the head through an ear and feed on the brain. I believe that Joyce may be connecting the earwig with Duchamp, and also with Alfred Jarry, a writer who meant a great deal to both of them. To some extent all geniuses “feed,” as it were, on the brains of earlier geniuses, but Jarry and to a lesser degree Duchamp made a point of mentioning their progenitors. click to enlarge Figure 1 Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q. A close reading of Finnegans Wake shows Joyce doing likewise: the pincerlike appendages protruding from the earwig’s rear may relate both to Jarry’s homosexual braggadocio and to Duchamp’s notorious phrase “Elle a chaud au cul” (She has a hot ass), the French pronunciation ofL.H.O.O.Q. (Fig. 11), the title carefully lettered at the bottom of Duchamp’s mustachioed and goateed Mona Lisa of 1919. Like many works from this period in Duchamp’s work, L.H.O.O.Q. was credited to, and signed by, his alter ego, Rrose Sélavy, a character who was, according to her creator, an old whore. A calling card that Duchamp designed for her advertised that she was anExpert in precision ass and glass work. For Joyce, of course, the earwig is also a reference to H. C. Earwicker, the “hero” of Finnegans Wake.(Still again on the subject of parallels, Duchamp used one of the world’s most famous works of visual art as the point of departure with L.H.O.O.Q.; Joyce used one of the world’s most famous works of literary art as the point of departure with Ulysses.) The “Ballad” continues, myHave fine you dairymanheard of darling,one Humpty / DuchampThe first was draft a chess has “lay fanatic, low” LikeDumpty the / bumpingHow he fellbull withof the a atinstead one oftime “curled considered up” the Cassidysroll and / Alla rumbleyour butter / Andis strongestThe first playerdraft hasin France.“back” curled up instead of “butt.” in your horns. He played constantly with like old Lord Olofa “Crumple “Hump, helmet and all? / (Chorus) His butter is in Joyce’s friend Beckett. / By the butt. inserted in 1927. ofhis thehorns. Magazine / Butter Wall, his / “He’ll be sent” is missing (Chorus)horns! Of the Magazine from the first draft. Wall,(Repeat) / Hump, Hurrah helmet there, and Hosty, all? “penal” was inserted in 1927. frostyHe was oneHosty, time changeour King that of In 1923 Duchamp made a shirtthe Castle on ye, / Rhyme the “Wanted” poster picturing his rann,/ Now thehe’s king kicked of all about ranns! like own face, both in full and in a rotten old parsnip. / And Balbaccio, balbuccio! profile from Green street he’ll be sentWe had by chaw order chaw of chops, His Worship In his first draft of this / chairs, chewing gum, the section, written in 1923, To the penal jailchickenpox of Mountjoy and china / chambers(Chorus) Joyce wrote here “He had ToUniversally the jail ofprovided mountjoy!/Jail by this schemes in his head for to himsoffsoaping and joy. salesman. bother us.” In making this SmallHe was wonder fafafather He’ll of Cheat all change Joyce may have had in E’erawanschemes for to bother us mind the many letters Duchamp Slow coaches and immaculate sent between 1924 and 1927 contraceptives our local lads nicknamed him (Joyce could have heard about for the populace, / Mare’s / When Chimpden first took them from Reynolds) trying to themilk floorfor the / (Chorus)sick, With his seven dry Sundays a week, / sell, at 500 francs each, bucketshop store Openair love and religious copies of his Monte Carlo Downreform, Bargainweg, / (Chorus) Lower. AndBond (Fig. 12), “a standard religious reform, / Hideous financial document . . . so Soin form.snug he was in his hotel heavily doctored that it premisesArrah, sumptuouswhy, says you,could hardly be called a couldn’t he manage it?/ I’ll readymade.” Thirty were go bail, But soon we’ll bonfire all issued, hand-signed by this trash, tricks andDuchamp and his fictional trumpery alter ego Rrose Sélavy; And ‘tis short till sheriff prospective purchasers were Clancy’ll be winding up his offered an annual dividend of unlimited company 20 percent on their investment. Gestures like With the bailiff’s bom at the these made Breton and others door, / (Chorus) Bimbam at worry about Duchamp’s the door. / Then he’ll bum no mental condition: “How could more. a man so intelligent”—for . . . Lift it, Hosty, lift Breton the most profoundly it, ye devil ye! Up with the original mind of the rann, the rhyming rann! century—“devote his time and energy to such trivialities?” [57] Jarry,in The Virgin and the Mannekin-Pis; (references to the famous Mannekin-Pis statue in Brussels appear regularly in theWake ), speaks of Father Prout’s “magnificent canonical invention: the Suppository Virgin.” In the same section he describes “various hydraulic and intimate mechanisms guaranteeing to devout ladies the birth of male offspring, or if so desired their nonbirth.” [58] for the populace, / Mare’s milk for the sick, Jarry writes, “There are, furthermore, those who drink that [miraculous] water”—the pilgrims taken by “special trains” to “Lourdes water” for “poorer people.” [59] Possibly a reference to Duchamp’s Wanted: $2,000 Reward poster. Burrus (butter), brother of Caseous. This entire verse was an addition of 1927. McHugh: “It balbo: stuttering /It –accio: pejorative suffix / It –uccio: diminutive suffix.” [60] Joyce is obviouslycalling someone a no-good little stutterer, a possible reference to Duchamp’s notes and puns. McHugh: “chow chow chop: last lighter containing the sundry small packages to fill up a ship.” [61] This may refer to the sundry items that Duchamp by 1927 had dubbed his Readymade works of art, which he was continually trying to sell; or to Duchamp’s and Lydie’s wedding gifts, “a daunting assortment of lamps, vases, and tableware” that filled several long tables. [62] Joyce could have heard about this elaborate and very public church wedding from more than one source: his friend Reynolds was still in love with Duchamp, and Man Ray, who had photographed Joyce in 1922, was in attendance with his movie camera to film the happy couple, and was with them socially on a regular basis in the period after their marriage. Duchamp’s Fountain, 1917, was a urinal made of china—large cousin to a chamberpot? Duchamp was trying to sell copies of his Monte Carlo Bond, with its Man Ray portrait of him with shaving- soap horns and beard. This is first of all a reference to HCE—H. C. Earwicker, father of Annalivia and of Shem and Shaun, who are also known as Burrus and Caseous, in Finnegans Wake. If this interpretation is correct, “He’ll cheat everyone” would fit Duchamp and his Monte Carlo Bond scheme./ McHugh: “U.S. Sl[ang] bucketshop: unauthorized stockbroker’s office. [63] The text on Duchamp’s 1923 Wanted/$2,000 Reward (Fig.13) poster reads: “For information leading to the arrest of George W. Welch, alias Bull, alias Pickens etcetry, etcetry.Operated Bucket Shop in New York under name HOOKE, LYON and CINQUER. Height about 5 feet 9 inches. Weight about 180 pounds. Complexion medium, eyes same. Known also under name RROSE SELAVY.” /This entire verse was an addition of 1927. Within weeks of his marriage, Duchamp rented a hotel room to work in. “He began spending more and more time in his hotel room. At home he was often lost in silent meditation, looking out the window and smoking his pipe.” [64] / McHugh: “Sl[ang] trash & trumpery: rubbish.” [65] This may again be a reference to Duchamp’s Readymades, or to the gifts he received at his wedding. “Bum” perfectly fits Joyce’s view of Duchamp, and perhaps of himself as well: both men had to do plenty of hustling, and both were reliant on wealthy women. Perhaps a reference to Duchamp with two horns and a pointy beard in the photograph on Monte Carlo Bond. click images to enlarge Figure 12 Marcel Duchamp, Monte Carlo Bond,1924 Figure 13 Marcel Duchamp, Wanted/$2,000 Reward, 1923 Both Duchamp and Joyce are indebted to the eccentric turn-of-the-century poet and playwright Jarry. As mentioned, Breton summed up that writer’s contribution with this remark: “We maintain that beginning with Jarry . . . the differentiation long considered necessary between art and life has been challenged, to wind up annihilated as a principle.”[67]The references to Duchamp in the Wake repeatedly seem intermingled with references to Jarry, who, like Duchamp in his Rrose Sélavy persona, was known to wear women’s clothes. He also boasted of both homosexual and heterosexual prowess. Further phrases in “The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly” that may refer to Rrose, with her calling card boasting “Specialist in precision ass and glass work,” and to Jarry, include “Our rotorious [Duchamp’s “rotoreliefs”?] hippopopotamuns [“G[erman] Popo: buttocks”[68]] / When some bugger let down the backdrop of the omnibus / And he caught his death of fusiliers, / (Chorus) With his rent in his rears. / Give him six years.” Afterword You know he’s peculiar, that eggschicker, with the smell of old woman off him, to suck nothing of his switchedupes. M.D. made his ante mortem for him. —James Joyce, Finnegans Wake[69] The section of Finnegans Wake containing these two sentences was revised for publication in transition no. 11, issued in February 1928. “M.D.” may refer in part to Marcel Duchamp. (It may also refer to Jonathan Swift, a frequent presence in the Wake: “M.D.”—“My dear”—was Swift’s abbreviation in letters to Stella, a major love of his life.) “Eggschicker,” from “chicker, to chirp as a cricket” (OED), is a word consistent with my reading of various sections of the Wake in which Joyce seems to be poking fun at Duchamp’s writing efforts. The idea of stuttering recurs (a cricket repeats its chirp), being repeatedly associated with Vico and others; here it may refer to Duchamp’s magazine rongwrong, and to the numerous repetitions in his notes. “The smell of old woman off him…”: Here I recall Duchamp’s description of Rrose Sélavy as “an old whore.” “. . . to suck nothing of his switchedupes.” Duchamp in drag as Rrose. M.D. made his ante mortem for him. “L. ante mortem: before death.”[70] This may be an inversion, a device beloved by Jarry, Joyce, and Duchamp. The “his” here may refer to Jarry, since the section contains many allusions to Jarry, according to my reading; if so, the inversion would translate “M.D. made Jarry’s ‘after death’ for him” into “M.D. made Jarry’s ‘afterlife’ for him,” a comment on Duchamp’s repeated trips to the well of Jarry- esque imagery—as if Duchamp had made Jarry immortal. Admittedly, this is only one of numerous interpretations that come to mind. It brings to mind Joyce’s famous comment that hisFinnegans Wake would keep the scholars busy for a thousand years. There are sections of Finnegans Wake in which Duchamp does not seem on the scene as a character, yet in which multiple isolated allusions correspond to words and imagery from his works. Jarry imagery often lurks nearby. Between page 526, line 24, and page 527, line 25, for example, we find: 526.24: it was larking in the trefoll of the furry glans with twostripping baremaids, StillaUnderwood and Moth Mac Garry.The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even is the formal title of Duchamp’s Large Glass; his Traveller’s Folding Item, 1916, is an Underwood typewriter cover. Regarding “Moth McGarry,” a famous, highly poetic section in Jarry’s bookThe Supermale offers a graphic symbolist version of sexual intercourse by picturing a large death’s head moth that took no notice of a lamp but “went seeking . . . its own shadow . . . , banging it again and again with all the battering rams of its hairy body: whack, whack, whack.”[71] 527.03: Listenest, meme mearest! The French version of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even is La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même. 527.07 even under the dark flush of night. The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. 527.09: Strip Teasy up the stairs. The Bride Stripped Bare. . . . The best-known work of Duchamp’s early years as a painter is surely Nude Descending a Staircase, made in two versions of 1911 and 1912 respectively. “…upthe stairs.” could be another simple inversion. 527.18: under nue charmeen. Nue, the French for “naked,” again recalls The Bride Stripped Bare . . . / La Mariée mise à nu. . . . 527.21: Blanchemain, idler. . . . Listen, meme sweety. MD See 160.3. The name “Professor Ciondolone,” we have seen, derived from the Italian for “idler,” according to our reading refers to Duchamp. “Meme” again refers toThe Large Glass. 527.24: It’s meemly us two, meme idoll. The Large Glass. 527.25: meeting me disguised, Bortolo mio. In Beaumarchais’s play The Marriage of Figaro, and in the related operas by Mozart, Paisiello, and Rossini, Dr. Bortolo is a bachelorwho wants a bride. Duchamp said, “Eroticism is a subject very dear to me. . . . In fact, I thought the only excuse for doing anything was to introduce eroticism into life. Eroticism is close to life, closer than philosophy or anything like it; it’s an animal thing that has many facets and is pleasing to use, as you would use a tube of paint.” [72] Duchamp’s notes from 1912–14 for The Large Glass center on love play and sexual intercourse between humanlike machines, and reveal justhow dear eroticism was to the artist. The artist writes, for example, The Bride is basically a motor. . . . The motor with quite feeble cylinders is a superficial organ of the Bride; it is activated by the love gasoline, a secretion of the Bride’s sexual glands and by the electric sparks of the stripping. (to show that the Bride does not refuse this stripping by the bachelors, even accepts it since she furnishes the love gasoline and goes so far as to help toward complete nudity by developing in a sparkling fashion her intense desire for the orgasm.[73] Published literature of the period did not talk this way, and unfettered pornography would have used an entirely different vocabulary. These notes were pioneering in more ways than one. click to enlarge Figure 14 Marcel Duchamp, Given: 1. The Waterfall / 2. The Illuminating Gas, 1946-66 Before its abrupt transformation into an art object, Duchamp’s upended urinal, Fountain, had been a gracefully curvy receptacle for male effusions. The title L.H.O.O.Q., we have seen, which he gave his Mona Lisa with added mustache and goatee, corresponds to the French for “She has a hot ass,” a loose translation of “There is fire down below.” The name of Duchamp’s famous female alter ego, Rrose Sélavy, who made her debut in 1921, is based on the phraseEros c’est la vie (Eros is life). Her pronouncements include, “Have you already put the hilt of the foil in the quilt of the goil” and “An incesticide must sleep with his mother before killing her.” The medium of Paysage fautif, 1946, is semen on Astralon. In theUntitled Original for Matta’s Box in a Valise, 1946, pubic hair is taped to paper. Female Fig Leaf, 1950, Wedge of Chastity, 1954, and the posthumously revealed Etant donnés . . . (Fig. 14) all feature casts supposedly made from a vagina, while Objet D’art, 1951, is decidedly phallic. Joyce’s writing too was famously erotic, to the point where Ulysses was restricted in its distribution. Erotic and scatological passages can be found without too much effort on every page of Finnegans Wake.[74] Molly’s erotic soliloquy, the unpunctuated tour de force with whichUlysses ends, was on its own to a large extent responsible for his early fame among the general public; and in the “Bloom in Nighttown” section (Sirens) of Ulysses, creative abandon reaches an erotic pitch reminiscent of Jarry, Rabelais, and The Thousand and One Nights. Other parallels: Ellmann writes: ‘Joyce had been preparing himself to write Ulysses since 1907. It grew steadily more ambitious in scope and method, and represented a sudden outflinging of all he had learned as a writer up to 1914.’[75] By way of coincidence, Alfred Jarry, who I argue was a strong unacknowledged source for Joyce, died in 1907 (at the age of 34). And in 1914, Duchamp wrote his famous ‘formula’ for Art: Arrhe est ‘a art que merdre est a merde: arrhe merdre. = art merde An English translation might read: ‘Deposit is to art as shitte is to shit.’ Jarry’s ‘merdre’ is the only word not found in any dictionary. Given Duchamp’s extreme interest in the erotic, a likely interpretation would be, ‘My way of saying fucking corresponds to everyone else’s way of saying art as Jarry’s way of saying shit corresponds to everyone else’s way of saying shit’ – or more succinctly, ‘My fucking is to your art as Jarry’s shit is to your shit’. We have seen in Joyce’s 1909 letters to Nora that Joyce was avidly coprophilic. Joyce scholar Clive Hart states, ‘There can be no denying that Joyce found everything associated with evacuation unusually pleasurable…’[76] In Finnegans Wake Kate’s monologue ends with this passage: ‘And whowasit youwasit propped the pot in the yard and whatinthe nameofsen lukeareyou rubbinthe sideofthe flureofthe lobbywith. Shite! will you have a plateful? Tak.’[77] Later in the same work we find Joyce’s verbal version of his own thumb-nosing drawing that we have reproduced at the top of this essay: ‘…kissists my exits’.[78] Duchamp’s urinal-as-art, Fountain, 1917, recalls Joyce’s earlier distillations of the erotic and scatological scrawls found on ‘the oozing wall of a urinal’.[79] In Ulysses, there is this famous exchange: ‘-When I makes tea I makes tea, as old mother Grogan said. And when I makes water I makes water.’ ‘-By Jove, it is tea, Haines said.’ ‘Buck Mulligan went on hewing and wheedling’: ‘-So I do, Mrs. Cahill, says she. Begob, ma’am, says Mrs. Cahill, God send you don’t make them in the one pot. (Joyce’s italics.)[80] And lastly, in Finnegans Wake, Earwicker and Shaun complete an act of communion with the transubstantiated urine of the goddess Anna – daughter of the former, sister of the latter –:‘…when oft as the souffsouff blows her peaties up and a claypot wet for thee, my Sitys, and talkatalka tell Tibbs has eve…’[81] Notes [1] James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, New York: Penguin, 1976 (1939). [2] In this—but not solely in this—there is a common precedent in the eccentric turn-of-the-century French symbolist poet/playwright Alfred Jarry (1873–1907). Jarry’s strong effect on both James Joyce and Marcel Duchamp is the subject of six earlier essays by this writer, two for this journal: “Duchamp on the Jarry Road,” Artforum, September 1992; Jarry, Joyce, Duchamp and Cage, Catalogue for the Venice Biennale, 1993; William Anastasi with Michael Seidel, “Jarry in Joyce: A Conversation,” Joyce Studies Annual, 1995; “Jarry in Duchamp,” New Art Examiner, October 1997; “Jarry and l’Accident of Duchamp” in: Tout Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal, vol. 1, nr. 1 (December 1999); and “Jarry, Joyce, Duchamp and Cage” (rev. ed., in English, of the Italian 1993 Venice Biennale essay, with additions), in: Tout Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal, vol. 1, nr. 2 (May 2000). [3] See Anne D’Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine, eds., Marcel Duchamp (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1973), p. 18. [4] Ibid. [5] Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors (New York: Penguin, 1965), p. 28. [6] André Breton, quoted in Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), p. 217. [7] Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York: Oxford UP, 1959), p. 608. [8] Ibid., p. 3. [9] Ibid., p. 5. [10] Joyce, quoted in Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 5. [11] Irene E. Hofmann. Mary Reynolds and the Spirit of Surrealism (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1996), p. 139. [12] Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 662. [13] Ibid. [14] Ibid., p. 559. [15] Michel Sanouillet (ed.), introduction, in The Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Oxford UP, 1973), p. 6. [16] Ibid., p. 19. [17] Joyce, quoted in Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 559 [18] Ibid. [19] Joyce, quoted in Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 702. [20] Joyce, quoted in Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 648. [21] Ibid., p. 559. [22] Susan Glover Godlewski, “Warm Ashes: The Life and Career of Mary Reynolds,” in: Mary Reynolds and the Spirit of Surrealism (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1996), p. 108. [23] See Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Delano Greenidge, 2002), p. 467. [24] For Samuel Beckett, Joyce was a revered father figure while Duchamp was a friend closer to his own age, as well as a constant chess partner. Beckett “enjoyed Marcel Duchamp, who lived near him. [Mel Gussow] commented on Duchamp’s found objects, such as the urinal he exhibited as a work of art. Beckett laughed: ‘A writer could not do that.’” Mel Gussow, Conversations with and about Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1996), p. 47. In 1981 Beckett “spoke [to a new young friend, Arnold Bernold] of the days before . . . recognition had descended on him, of Joyce with undiminished reverence, of Marcel Duchamp, of his early days in Paris.” Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (New York: Da Capo, 1997), p. 573. [25] Joyce, quoted in Ellmann, James Joyce., p. 744. [26] Marcel Duchamp, in Surrealism and Its Affinities: The Mary Reynolds Collection, a bibliography compiled by Hugh Edwards, (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1956), p. 6. [27] The only other female, as mentioned by Gussow as being in Joyce’s “own circle,” is Nancy Cunard; in Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist, p. 573. Only one other close female friend of Joyce’s, Nancy Cunard, is described as “close” in this collection of conversations; see p. 47. [28] Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett (London: Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich, 1978), p. 68. [28A] Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett (New York, Da Capo, 1977), p. 311. [28B] Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett, p. 276. [29] Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett, pp. 465-467. [30] Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), p. 257. [31] Henri-Pierre Roché, quoted in ibid., p. 258. [32] Ibid. [33] Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 633. [34] Joyce, quoted in Brenda Maddox, Nora (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), p. 66. [35] Joyce, quoted in p. 631 [36] Nora Joyce, quoted in Ellmann, James Joyce (rev. ed., 1982), p. 700. [37] Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 619. [38] Tomkins, Duchamp, p. 148. [39] Ibid, p. 149. [40] Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 427. [41] Ibid., p. 569. [42] Ibid., p. 494. [43] Ibid., p. 569. [44] Ibid., p. 661. [45] Tomkins, Duchamp, p. 278. [46] Joyce, Finnegans Wake, pp. 126–216. [47] Ellmann, James Joyce, (rev. ed., 1982), p. 545. [48] Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p. 160. [49] Calvin Tomkins, Marcel Duchamp, p. 259. [50] I have explored Jarry’s influence on both Joyce and Duchamp in earlier articles; see Anastasi, Jarry, Joyce, Duchamp and Cage, and Anastasi and Seidel, “Jarry in Joyce: A Conversation.” Throughout the Wake I find Jarry referred to with near reverence. Joyce was an intimate friend of Léon Paul Fargue, who in his youth had been Jarry’s closest friend and probably his lover. (Some believe him to have been Jarry’s only lover.) Joyce would likely have heard all about Jarry from Fargue. A photograph of the “Déjeuner Ulysse” banquet, given by Adrienne Monnier in June 1929, shows Fargue sitting next to Joyce near the center of twenty-six guests. See Richard Ellmann, ed.,Letters of James Joyce Letters vol. III (NY: Viking, 1966), p. 193. Jarry’s Faustroll, with its intermittently incomprehensible narrative and numerous made-up words, is an obvious forerunner of theWake. Jarry’s biographer Keith Beaumont, writing of Faustroll and other works of Jarry’s that followed the lead of Stéphane Mallarmé, says, “The result is at times something in the nature of a verbal delirium which, at one end of the literary spectrum, recalls the delight in words of Jarry’s other great mentor, Rabelais, and, at the other, looks forward to the Joyce ofFinnegans Wake and beyond.” Beaumont, Alfred Jarry: A Critical and Biographical Study (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), p. 303. Jarry published hisCaesar Antichrist in 1895. Passages in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar are likely to have informed the Burrus and Caseous sections of Finnegans Wake. Shakespeare has Cassius say of Caesar, for example, “Why man, he doth bestride the narrow world / Like a Colossus; and we petty men / Walk under his huge legs, and peep about / To find ourselves dishonourable graves.” Julius Caesar I, ii, 134. Jarry in life was very short, but since Joyce loved inversion (as did Jarry and Duchamp), he could have seen the Colossus image as a humorous inversion once he had set on the idea of Brutus (Burrus) and Cassius (Caseous) as stand-ins for himself and Duchamp. Actually, for Joyce to picture Jarry as a powerful father (a colossus), with himself and Duchamp as underlings, is consistent with images of Jarry found elsewhere in the book. Again, Shakespeare has Caesar say of Cassius, “He reads too much; / He is a great observer, and he looks / Quite through the deeds of men; he loves no plays, / As thou dost, Antony; he hears no music; Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort / As if he mock’d himself, and scorn’d his spirit, / That could be mov’d to smile at anything. / Such men as he be never at heart’s ease, / Whiles they behold a greater than themselves, / And therefore are they very dangerous.”( I, ii, 197) It was known that Duchamp – in contrast to Joyce – did not enjoy music. And just as Joyce was confident that no living writer could compare with himself, Duchamp behaved in a way that suggested a similar confidence in relation to other artists. [51] Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (New York: Viking, 1971), p. 79. [52] Joyce, Finnegans Wake, pp. 44–47. “By end of 1923 notebook containing rough drafts of all the episodes in Part I except i and vi (pp. 30–125, 169–216) was probably filled.” Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 801. “In 1927 Joyce was revising Part I (pp. 3–216) for publication in transition.” Ibid., p. 802. [52A] Ellmann, 1975, The Viking Press, NY, Selected Letters of James Joyce, p.181 [52B] Ibid, p.184 [53] Roland McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake (rev. ed. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. 44. [54] See David Hayman, ed., A First- Draft Version of Finnegans Wake (Austin, TX: Texas UP, 1963), p. 66. [55] “The crate containing The Large Glass—in storage since the closing of the Brooklyn Museum exhibition in early 1927—had been shipped from the Lincoln Warehouse to “The Haven,” [Katherine] Dreier’s country house . . . where she planned to have it permanently reinstalled. On opening the crate, however, the workmen had discovered that the two heavy glass panels . . . were shattered from top to bottom. Tomkins, Duchamp, p. 288. [56] Roland McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake, p. 44. [57] Breton, quoted in Tomkins, Duchamp, p. 261. [58] Alfred Jarry, “The Virgin and the Mannekin-Pis,” in: Selected Works of Alfred Jarry (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 127. [59] Ibid. [60] McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake, p. 45. [61] Ibid. [62] Tomkins, Duchamp, p. 280. [63] McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake, p. 46. [64] Tomkins, Duchamp, p. 281. [65] McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake, p. 46. [66] Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, pp. 703–4. [67] Breton, quoted in Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I, p. 217. [68] McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake, p. 47. [69] Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p. 423. [70] McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake, p. 423. [71] Jarry, The Supermale, trans. Ralph Gladstone and Barbara Wright (New York: New Directions, 1964), p. 39. [72] Duchamp, in an interview with George H. Hamilton and Richard Hamilton, in “Art and Anti-Art,” BBC radio broadcast, London 1959. Quoted in Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (London: Thames & Hudson, 1969), p. 80. [73] Michel Sanouillet (ed.), Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, p. 42. [74] This observation is backed up by years of highly pleasurable research by the present writer and the resultant book on the subject, Up Erogenously, copyright January 2003 (unpublished). [75] Richard Ellmann : James Joyce, new revised edition, 1982, Oxford University Press NY, Oxford, Toronto. p. 357 [76] Clive Hart, Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake, 1962, Faber and Faber, London. [77] Finnegans Wake, p.142 [78] Finnegans Wake, p.280 [79] Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, p. 113 [80] Ulysses, p.17 [81] Finnegans Wake, p. 117 Figs. 1B, 3-14 ©2003 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. All rights reserved. Rrose Sélavy e la gnosi erotica click to enlarge Figure 1 Marcel Duchamp,Fresh Widow, 1920 Nel 1920 Marcel Duchamp si duplicò scegliendo sembianze femminili: quelle di Rose Sélavy. Con questo nome è indicato il copyright di Fresh Widow (Fig. 1), ready made derivante dal montaggio artigianale di una finestra verde in stile francese con pannelli di cuoio nero. Quei pannelli, per insistenza di Duchamp, dovevano essere lucidati ogni giorno; e forse per questa ragione, per il quotidiano e lubrico strofinamento di quella pelle, la French Window diventò, nella trasformazione di Duchamp, una Fresh Widow, vale a dire una Vedova impudica. Da quel momento le opere di Rose si moltiplicano. Al suo nome è legato, sempre nel 1920, l’apparecchio ottico a motore detto Rotative plaques verre (optique de précision) (Fig. 2). Il ready made del 1921 costituito da una gabbietta con cubetti di marmo e osso di seppia è battezzato Why not sneeze Rose Sélavy? (Fig. 3). Frasi sensuali della donna sono scritte a spirali di lettere bianche su nove dischi neri nel cortometraggio Anémic Cinéma (Fig. 4) girato presso Man Ray e proiettato il 30 agosto 1926 in una sala cinematografica di Parigi: mentre girano, i dischi creano sensazioni pulsanti ed erotiche. Nel settembre 1934 la donna lancia anche le sue edizioni con un libro di perfetta—per quanto tardiva—espressione dadaista: una scatola detta La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (Fig. 5) contenente note e riproduzioni in facsimile, meglio conosciuta come la Boîte verte. Ma ancora: nell’aprile 1939 uscì a Parigi in 515 copie un opuscolo di scritti di Marcel Duchamp intitolato Rrose Sélavy, collezione di “poils et coups de pied en tous genres”. click to enlarge Figure 2 Marcel Duhamp, Rotary Glass Plates (Precision Optics), 1920 Figure 3 Marcel Duchamp, Why Not Sneeze, Rrose Sélavy? , 1921 click to enlarge Figure 4 Marcel Duchamp, Anémic Cinéma, 1925-26 Figure 5 Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even [a.k.a. the Large Glass],1915-23 Nel frattempo il nome di Rose si era trasformato in Rrose. L’evento è del 1921: un gioco di parole pubblicato a pagina 6 di “Le Pilhaou-Thibaou” (quindicesimo numero della rivista “391”) è firmato Rrose Sélavy. Picabia aveva estratto la frase da una lettera che Duchamp gli aveva inviato da New York a gennaio. Era la prima volta che a quel nome floreale veniva aggiunta una “r” e ciò non faceva che duplicare il personaggio appena nato. Fu sufficiente la semplice aggiunta di una consonante per delineare ancor meglio il mistero del doppio: una creatura appena nata cominciava subito a trasformarsi, a possedere una propria “biografia”. Esiste anche documentazione fotografica di Rrose. Nel 1921 Man Ray collaborò al numero unico della rivista “New York Dada” pubblicando una fotografia che aveva scattato a Duchamp nelle vesti femminili di Rrose Sélavy: un cappellino con fascia a motivi geometrici e un elegante collare di volpe sorretto dalle mani che ne palpano il calore. La fotografia ritrae un viso dall’espressione inafferrabile: labbra atteggiate in un sorriso misterioso, occhi di sottile indifferenza. L’attraente cappellino era stato prestato a Marcel-Rrose da Germaine Everling, la compagna di Picabia: l’antiromantico Duchamp aveva scelto come segno più vistoso della sua trasformazione un copricapo che apparteneva a una donna il cui nome—Germaine—alludeva al nucleo rovente dell’illusione romantica: il germanesimo. Il sorriso indifferente di Rrose ricorda quello della Gioconda (Fig. 6): nel ready made L.H.O.O.Q. (Fig. 7) del 1919 Duchamp aveva già deformato la Gioconda disegnando a matita un paio di sottili baffetti su una riproduzione del celebre quadro di Leonardo.(1) click to enlarge Figure 6 Leonardo da Vinci, La Gioconda , 1503-05, Musée du Louvre, Paris Figure 7 Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q., 1919 Cosa rappresenti Rrose può essere chiarificato grazie alla dedica che appare sulla fotografia e che svela l’identità: «Lovingly, Rrose Sélavy alias Marcel Duchamp». Fu dunque un altro io, da aggiungere a quello già esistente senza nulla nascondere. Tuttavia Rrose ambì a una personalità legale e presto si armò di un biglietto da visita: Ottica di precisioneRose Sélavy New York – Parigi Assortimento completo di baffi e trucchetti baffi e trucchetti Non serve sapere che (etc.) Figure 8 Francis Picabia, L’Oeil cacodylate, 1921 Non serve sapere che nell’emporio di Marcel-Rrose si vendono baffi a volontà per capire che lo pseudonimo puntava foneticamente in una direzione erotica: Rrose Sélavy suona infatti come “Eros c’est la vie” (“Eros: così è la vita”). Ma non solo di questo si trattava. In un colloquio con Pierre Cabanne, Duchamp espresse alcune illuminanti considerazioni: «Volevo cambiare la mia identità e dapprima ebbi l’idea di prendere un nome ebraico. Io ero cattolico e questo passaggio di religione significava già un cambiamento. Ma non trovai nessun nome ebraico che mi piacesse, o che colpisse la mia immaginazione, e improvvisamente ebbi l’idea: perché non cambiare di sesso? Da qui viene il nome di Rrose Sélavy. Oggi suona abbastanza bene, perché anche i nomi cambiano col tempo, ma nel 1920 era un nome sciocco. La doppia “R” ha a che fare con il quadro di Picabia Oeil Cacodylate (Fig. 8), esposto nel cabaret “Le Boeuf sur le Toit”—non so se è stato venduto—e che Picabia chiedeva a tutti gli amici di firmare. Non mi ricordo cosa scrissi, ma il quadro è stato fotografato e perciò qualcuno lo sa. Credo di aver scritto “Pi Qu’habilla Rrose Sélavy”». La frase che Duchamp scrisse sul quadro di Picabia suona foneticamente come “Picabia l’arrose c’est la vie”. E ciò allarga il senso da “Eros c’est la vie” alla frase “Arroser la vie”, cioè “berci sopra, fare un brindisi alla vita”.(2) Ambedue i significati del nome rinviano alla visione della vita nutrita da Duchamp: se a una prima considerazione superficiale la trasformazione di Duchamp in Rrose Sélavy sembra innescare un vivace gioco di interpretazione, un’osservazione più precisa dimostra che la trasformazione coagula invece un’erotica duratura: quella derivante dalla gioia di vivere e di vagare liberamente col pensiero. Infatti, oltre a firmare alcuni ready made, Rrose scrive dei bon-mots, dei giochi di parole intenzionalmente senza senso, ma che a volte suonano altamente espliciti. Rrose possiede dunque una personalità “linguistica” che nasce da un’idea precisa di linguaggio. In un’intervista apparsa su “L’Express” del 23 luglio 1964, Duchamp affermò: «Il linguaggio è un errore dell’umanità. Tra due esseri che si amano la parola non esprime quanto di più profondo essi provano. La parola è un sassolino usurato che si applica a trentasei sfumature di affettività. Il linguaggio è comodo per semplificare ma è un mezzo di locomozione che detesto». «E tuttavia—ribatte l’intervistatore—con lo pseudonimo di Rrose Sélavy, lei si è interessato al linguaggio». «Era per divertirmi. Nutro un grande rispetto per l’umorismo, costituisce una sorta di salvaguardia che consente di passare attraverso tutti gli specchi».(3) click to enlarge Figure 9 Marcel Duchamp, Young Man and Girl in Spring, 1911 Cosa si realizza alla lettura dei detti di Rrose? Semplicemente la gioia di leggere qualcosa di sempre nuovo, un’esperienza che potrebbe ricordare quella di raccogliere frutti in un eden. Duchamp lo aveva preannunciato nel 1911 con la tela Jeune homme et jeune fille dans le printemps (Fig. 9): una scena di gioia pagana in cui due giovani nudi colgono liberamente frutti da una pianta che cresce in una natura lussureggiante. La questione di fondo è che solo la donna può farsi capire senza ricorrere al significato, come succede negli aforismi di Rrose. In altre parole, solo la donna è imprendibile. Come l’ironia. [2] Duchamp persegue una forma primitiva di eros: ciò è evidente dalla sua idea di matrimonio, inteso come vicolo cieco, come tomba dell’amore. La caricatura Dimanches del 1909 è a tal riguardo impietosa: la coppia matrimoniale, con il bambino appena nato, si riduce la domenica alla noiosa passeggiata in cui è l’uomo a spingere la carrozzina, mentre la moglie, di nuovo gravida, cammina stancamente al fianco. Sulla propria scelta di scapolo, attratto dalle donne ma respinto dal matrimonio, Duchamp dichiarò una volta a Pierre Cabanne: «Io mi resi conto fin da giovane che non ci si dovrebbe appesantire con troppa zavorra, con troppi lavori, con una moglie, con dei figli, una casa di campagna, un’automobile; per fortuna me ne convinsi subito. È per questo che ho potuto vivere con molta maggior semplicità, come scapolo, di quanto avrei fatto se avessi dovuto vedermela con tutti i problemi abituali della vita». Duchamp difese sempre questo senso di libertà, e scrivendo una volta ad Arturo Schwarz sul senso del matrimonio affermò: «L’ho evitato accuratamente fino all’età di 67 anni. Ho sposato una donna che, a causa della sua età, non poteva avere figli». Anche se in realtà si era già sposato nel 1927, rimanendo coniugato per l’irrisorio periodo di tre mesi. L’eros è per Duchamp una cosa seria; è ciò che sostituisce l’ironia assente. In un’intervista dell’8 dicembre 1961 Alain Jouffroy chiese a Duchamp se credeva che l’umorismo fosse indispensabile per la creazione dell’opera d’arte, e lui rispose: «In modo assoluto. Ci tengo particolarmente perché la serietà è cosa molto pericolosa. Per evitarla è necessario l’intervento dell’umorismo. L’unica cosa seria che potrei prendere in considerazione è l’erotismo. Quello sì che è serio!».(4) Questa idea è alla base della filosofia di Rrose Sélavy, autrice che converte il pathos dell’aforisma in un piacere e l’emozione della scrittura in un pensiero. Al fondo della sua procedura c’è erotismo, perché l’eros scaturisce dalla situazione della continua novità: il pensiero diventa erotico quando si manifesta come pensiero in perenne formazione, e come tale emerge dai lavori di Duchamp del 1911 e 1912: Dulcinée; Jeune homme triste dans un train; Nu descendant un escalier. Per ambire alla novità erotica si deve utilizzare la lingua nei suoi componenti elementari. La lingua è per Rrose quel cioccolato che Duchamp macina nella Broyeuse de chocolat (1914) per ottenere una polvere di cacao che, con l’aggiunta dello zucchero umoristico, diventa una polvere dolce utilizzabile in molte miscele, cosa non praticabile col cioccolato solido. click to enlarge Figure 10 Marcel Duchamp, Bottle Dryer, 1914/1964 C’è inoltre un ready made di Duchamp che può essere letto in senso antifrastico: l’Egouttoir del 1914, lo scolabottiglie circolare (Fig. 10) che sta in piedi senza appoggi, oggetto molto comune nella Francia dei vini. Esso sembra rappresentare ciò che non deve succedere nel linguaggio: gli aforismi di Rrose non devono prosciugarsi come le bottiglie infilzate a testa in giù nello scolabottiglie. Egouttoir si riferisce ovviamente al verbo égoutter, sgocciolare, che a sua volta richiama molto da vicino égoûter, togliere gusto: se una cosa viene prosciugata perde tutto il gusto. La procedura erotica implica la conservazione del gusto: erotica è la differenza, non la ripetitività. Uno dei punti fermi della biografia di Duchamp è la ragione del suo abbandono della pittura: interrogato in merito, rispondeva sempre in maniera simile. Nell’intervista apparsa il 23 ottobre 1965 sul giornale spagnolo “Siglo XX” rispose che era «per via della ripetizione: si possono fare tre o quattro cose eccezionali, ma tutto il resto è ripetizione». Nell’intervista al “Paris-Normandie” del 12 aprile 1967 disse che «non c’è nulla di più noioso della ripetizione. Tutto ciò che non è inusuale o insolito cade nell’oblio». Ma l’erotica implica anche la necessità di sfuggire al gusto fermo creato da una tradizione statica. Nel cortometraggio A conversation with Marcel Duchamp mandato in onda dalla NBC il 15 gennaio 1956, Marcel affermò a un certo punto che esisteva il pericolo di giungere a una specie di gusto: «Se si ripete un certo numero di volte, la cosa diviene gusto».(5) Se c’è un rischio che Duchamp ha sistematicamente evitato è quello di ripetersi: tentò di continuo strade nuove di espressione, fino al silenzio volontario. Duchamp ci prende per mano e ci conduce a una lussuosa visione del Nulla: nonostante questo, la sua opera scatena concitazione. Succede per il corpo del Jeune homme triste dans un train, e per quello nudo che scende le scale: entrambi assumono una forma sempre diversa, come le idee, per loro natura liquide ed eternamente mobili. Duchamp non ha scelto di ritrarre forme ferme, istantanee di un tempo preciso, così come gli aforismi di Rrose non sono forme linguistiche correlate alla logica comune. Duchamp elimina ogni riferimento di autorità: lo fa sciogliendo il significato in una pasta molle ad uso libero. Un uomo (l’artista) traccia il segno e lascia che l’altro uomo (il fruitore) ne tragga il significato che vuole. C’è dunque l’Uomo, carnoso e tondo; c’è il Segno, geometrico e scricchiolante come il pennino che lo traccia; ci sono infine i Significati, mare del Nulla. Col Segno si può creare autorità: si possono creare le utopie e le teologie. Assegnare un Significato al Segno è come stabilire un rapporto di autorità. Ma si può anche liberare il Segno dall’autorità: ecco l’azione erotica, il compito dell’indifferenza, la nullificazione del senso. Se si toglie al Segno il Significato, appare la purezza. Duchamp è giunto a liberare—con gesto d’arte—il Segno dai Significati, e a lasciare al Segno la libertà di intridersi del Significato che arbitrariamente il fruitore gli assegna. E libertà del Significato è gesto d’arte, gesto “politico” nella sua essenza. [3] Nel Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme Éluard e Breton inserirono la definizione di Duchamp sul ready made: «Oggetto usuale promosso alla dignità di oggetto d’arte per la semplice scelta dell’artista». Ma Duchamp ricorre in altri punti del dizionario, e forse le iniziali M. D. che siglano la voce “Hasard” sono le sue: «Hasard en conserve». La definizione significa “Il caso in conserva”; potrebbe essere deformata in “Marmellata del caso” e vi si potrebbe trovare già un senso, certamente non voluto da Duchamp. Si potrebbe cioè pensare al fatto che il caso si mescola molto bene col restante caso a formare la marmellata di ogni singola esistenza. La conserva del caso di Duchamp è da lui raggiunta mediante un atto di puro arbitrio. Nella sua opera, egli induce l’osservatore a un’interpretazione, a fare un commento, ad aggiungere al dato (semmai il semplice dato del ready made) altri dati. Tutto comunque è arbitrario, inutile, sterilmente inefficace. La produzione di Rrose (e di Duchamp) provoca uno stupore arcano, refrattario a ogni speculazione razionale. L’erotica di Rrose sfocia in una sterilità di sapore gnostico: c’è infatti una forma di celibato sterile nei detti di Rrose Sélavy. Sono frasi arbitrarie che scatenano un’idea, un’immagine, una reazione di commento, una serie di interpretazioni a loro volta sterili, inutilmente reiterate all’infinito. E ciò rinvia alla grande intuizione religiosa di Giordano Bruno: quell’universo infinito che contrasta con la necessità di universo finito su cui il Tomismo si reggeva. Bruno tuttavia investe la materia di divinità (panteismo), Duchamp dimostra invece che la materia è infinito Nulla. Bruno reclama un gesto di coscienza: farsi consapevoli che l’infinito è immagine del Dio presente in ogni granello di universo; Duchamp reclama invece un gesto di incoscienza: «L’incosciente è orfano, ateo, celibe».(6) Solo mediante incoscienza si conserva il celibato e l’ateismo. Il celibe è figura dell’incredulo, come l’orfano è figura dell’abbandono al nulla. In ambito religioso Duchamp coltiva un puro ateismo, quello che lievita dal caso messo in conserva. Ma se l’arbitrio domina l’agire di Duchamp, la sua scelta di sterilità è libera. Egli potrebbe scegliere di essere fertile; sceglie invece di essere sterile, e lascia che la moltiplicazione del nulla sia attuata da chi è fertile, cioè dagli “altri”. Egli lascia in eredità un castello: che sterilmente si moltiplichino le interpretazioni delle sue opere d’arte o—nel caso di Rrose—dei suoi aforismi. In tal modo stabilisce un rapporto a doppia direzione: lo sterile fa in modo che il fertile possa perpetuare la sua inutile fertilità; il fertile concede al celibe–sterile di restare tale: gli concede il piacere dell’onanismo (il celibe è onanista per definizione). Non va considerato di secondaria importanza il fatto che nel biglietto da visita di Rrose il primo titolo sia quello aziendale di “Ottica di precisione”: è un chiaro invito ad assumere, nel commercio con Rrose, uno sguardo preciso che nulla tralasci, o che almeno non metta in seconda linea alcune osservazioni per le quali è necessario armarsi di un’ottica speciale. Si tratta dell’ottica gnostica. Idea gnostica è che l’uomo sia un grumo di luce acceso nella tenebrosa prigione del mondo, intriso di dolore e di male. L’uscita dal mondo è possibile solo con una purificazione, perseguibile anche mediante la trasformazione in una creatura diversa. Rrose è una creatura erotica e al contempo pura: con la sua nascita, come quella della Primavera di Botticelli dalle onde del mare, Duchamp approdò a una conquista inaudita di conoscenza e di visione. La sua trasformazione in un personaggio femminile non fu un sacrificio in nome della Grande Madre Mediterranea, ma la definizione gnostica dell’essere puro (cataro) come creatura che vive al di fuori del mondo. Amante di tutte le forme moderne di espressione, anche Breton si soffermò più volte sulla figura di Duchamp. In Testimony 45, articolo apparso nel marzo 1945 sul numero speciale dedicato a Duchamp dalla rivista statunitense “View”, Breton si pose un quesito radicale: in quale misura, dopo l’apparizione della maggiore opera di Duchamp, La Marié mise à nu, sia legittimo continuare a dipingere come se essa non esistesse. L’apparizione di Duchamp diventa secondo Breton qualcosa di sempre più imperativo: «Essa tende a denunciare come obsoleta e vana la maggior parte della produzione artistica recente».(7) Ecco l’azione purificatrice di Duchamp, il suo catarismo evangelico: fare tabula rasa di tutto, imporre la necessità del Radicalmente Nuovo. Lo fece incarnandosi in Rrose Sélavy e realizzando una Gnosi Erotica o, se si preferisce, una Erotica Gnostica: in ogni caso giungendo alla posizione più alta per capire cosa nel mondo—e nella vita—valga la pena sia tentato. Notes 1. L’androginia della Gioconda coi baffetti è solo l’aspetto più vistoso di un fenomeno che ha sviluppi ben più profondi. Si veda il lungo articolo di Lanier Graham, Duchamp & Androgyny: The Concept and its Context inTout–Fait. The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal, vol. 2, n. 4, gennaio 2002. In questo ambito potrebbe anche rientrare l’alterazione sessuale di Etant donnés (del 1946–1966): i genitali femminili osservati attraverso i buchi del portone appaiono decentrati, come se la realtà artistica sia diversa da quella della natura. Ma tornando a Man Ray va notato che egli era il fotografo sia della nudità femminile sia di quel priapo fermacarte che esiste in versioni di marmo e di metallo. Fotografando Rrose, Man Ray attuava un mescolamento del femminile e del priapico, fino a ritrarre una creatura sessualmente ambigua e infertile. Se infatti il priapo fissa l’erezione in una gelida inettitudine così anche la donna eternamente nuda di Man Ray non solleva più tensioni fisiologiche e l’osservatore si trasforma in un gelido inetto. 2. M. Duchamp, Ingénieur du temps perdu. Entretiens avec Pierre Cabanne, Parigi, Belfond, 1967, p. 118. La frase precisa scritta sul quadro di Picabia era “en 6 qu’habilla rrose Sélavy”; si può osservare una buona riproduzione del quadro in Arturo Shwarz,Almanacco Dada, Milano, Feltrinelli, 1976, p. 340. Ma si veda anche Jennifer Gough–Cooper e Jacques Caumont, “Effemeridi su e intorno a Marcel Duchamp e Rrose Sélavy 1887–1968,” nel volumeMarcel Duchamp, Milano, Bompiani, 1993, alla data del 1 novembre 1921. 3. L’intervista del 23 luglio 1964 è pubblicata nelle citate Effemeridi, alla data. La produzione aforistica di Rrose Sélavy è raccolta in Marcel Duchamp, Marchand du sel. Ecrits de Marcel Duchamp, a cura di M. Sanouillet, Parigi, Le Terrain Vague, 1958 (traduzione italiana: Cava dei Tirreni, Rumma Editore, 1969) e in Duchamp du signe. Ecrits, a cura di M. Sanouillet, Parigi, Flammarion, 1994. Michel Sanouillet e Elmer Peterson hanno dedicato a queste frasi un intero capitolo del loro libro Salt Seller. The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, New York, Oxford University Press, 1973. 4. Per l’intervista di Cabanne cfr. Ingénieur du temps perdu, cit., p. 23. L’idea espressa a Schwarz è riportata inLe macchine celibi, a cura di Harald Szeeman, Milano, Electa, 1989, p. 189 nota 4. L’intervista dell’8 dicembre 1961 è pubblicata nelle citate Effemeridi, alla data. Sul valore dell’umorismo si leggano anche le prime battute dell’intervista rilasciata da Duchamp a Guy Viau della Radio–Televisione canadese il 17 luglio 1960, ora pubblicata col titolo Changer de Nom, Simplement in Tout–Fait. The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal, vol. 2, n. 4, gennaio 2002. L’erotica perseguita da Duchamp sembra calarsi nella teoria che Susan Sontag esprime nel saggio Contro l’interpretazione; la scrittrice statunitense vi afferma che la vitalità di un’interpretazione si salva fondandosi su una procedura “erotica”, non “ermeneutica”. 5. Per tutte queste affermazioni si vedano le citate Effemeridi, alle rispettive date. 6. Gilles Deleuze, in Le macchine celibi, cit., p. 15. 7. L’articolo è ora raccolto in André Breton, Oeuvres complètes, vol. III, Parigi, Gallimard, 1999, pp. 144–145. Figs. 1-5, 7, 9-10 ©2003 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. All rights reserved. Glasswanderers 1. “Be your own university”— An introduction It was last June when I decided to go for an interview in the Kunstmuseum (Museum of Art) in Vaduz in Liechtenstein. In my letter of application I mentioned the barriers between different arts as well as the resulting ‘pigeonholing’–to stress the fact that in my mind it is essential to see those barriers not in the sense of limits but rather as challenges. After all I applied for a position which is not exactly tailored to a future high school teacher of History and English. One could interpret this short ‘philosophical interval’ in my letter as a kind of justification–though this was definitely not my aim. Instead I refuse to be labelled as a Historian or English linguist when my interests are distributed among different areas. “Art is not an escape from life, but rather an introduction to it.”(1) -John Cage In my short introductory remark I already mentioned barriers as a central term. I am interested in barriers between different arts and disciplines not in the sense of respecting them but in the sense of blurring. Both, Duchamp and Cage offered me a lot of input through their art, music, philosophy and their blurring of the distinction between art and life. They were in search for a way to escape from traditional painting respectively music. Cage was particularly interested in Zen Buddhism and accordingly invented a new notion of music by using chance as a compositional tool. He was trying to break the traditional barriers between not only theatre, music, dance and fine arts: “I am out to blur the distinctions between art and life, as I think Duchamp was. And between teacher and student. And between performer and audience, etcetera.”(2) Both Cage and Duchamp revolutionized the common understanding of modern art. They withdrew themselves from commitments to what I call ‘entertaining’ artists who were interested in pleasing a large audience. Duchamp, during his whole lifetime refused to be labelled an artist. “My attitude towards art is that of an atheist towards religion. I’d rather be gunned, kill myself or somebody else than creating art again.”(3) Duchamp was certainly doing art while provocatively refusing it, but here the central message was that he did not want to be categorised in any way. In an interview, he similarly remarked that “a human is a human, as an artist is an artist; only if he is categorised under a certain ‘- Ism’ he can’t be human nor artist.”(4)As I continue my lines of thought at this point it only indicates the beginning of a long walk along these (sometimes invisible) barriers. My ‘philosophical walk’ will be that of an amateur wanderer, someone who got deeply inspired by three outstanding, challenging and at the same time, enigmatic characters. John Cage first attracted my interest at a lecture in college where our English professor acquainted us with an apparently bright and free mind. When I learned about Cage’s ideals in education I realized that this was the opposite of what we mostly experienced as college students. Reproduction of knowledge is the most common and also most uncomplicated form of assessment, while the written and oral creative output of a student, even when studying languages, lies at a minimum. However, university, as I experienced it, greatly encouraged the meeting with others. It is a place where social exchange can usually take place on a spontaneous basis. An appealing aspect while working with Cage was the fact that his influence was not just felt in music, but also in visual arts, dance and aesthetic thought in general. He believed that art was intimately connected with our lives and thus not to the museums. Cage stressed the concepts of diversification for unification, of multiversity for university–to express the idea of bringing joy and liveliness into education. He brought into question the term ‘university’ which, he believed, was not encouraging the meeting with oneself.(5) The first rethinking process has to take place in our own minds, thus my title ‘Be your own university.’ My walk will sometimes take place on thin ground, but this interest in border areas would be also in the sense of Cage and Duchamp. Both artists were in search for means to escape tradition. Cage, by inventing compositional tools other than harmony, Duchamp by “unlearning to draw.”(6)In the course of examining those two characters I found many common elements in relation to the mentioned blurring that my final interest focused on this topic. The fact that they shared a lifetime friendship as well as their likewise, but also contrasting ideas and artistic tools represented other interesting elements when studying both characters. Duchamp, more than Cage, created a real challenge for me as his often paradoxical and ironic statements made it hard to ‘complete the puzzle.’ I decided to partly leave the puzzle unfinished–with the slight intention to let my readers finish it. During the last 50 years, there have been numerous publications on both Duchamp and Cage. I must admit that, for some reasons I intentionally have not read many of them. One reason is that, if I would have, this paper would have ended in a life- time project. Moreover, if the information load is too heavy, one would support unconscious reproduction of different information sources. And I wanted my mind to keep a sense of freedom and space. I gained a great understanding through primary sources as interviews, lectures, texts and letters. Now and then I grabbed books which had only indirectly to do with my topic, such as Rodin’s Art or Gertrude Stein’sEverybody’s Autobiography….in order to keep my mind a bit detached. Thanks to technology it is not much of a problem to get a lively impression of Cage fooling around with the interviewer in a live discussion about his Roaratorio. Those conversations transported the sense of humour and lightness in Cage. I also tried to get familiar with his music–with the rhythms I have heard so much about and still could not guess how they sounded in reality. Sometimes it was indeed an adventurous listening practice and I literally had to keep in mind Cage’s quotation that “disharmony is simply harmony we are unaccustomed to.”(7) It is worth stating at this point that this project is not intended to be a scientific text in the common sense (as some may have noticed already) Many art historians, at least in German, tend to write in a manner which is apparently designated for a minority target group. It is not the fact that it is impossible for someone interested to understand such a text but that it seems to be an interminable play with words. It appears that they often claim a sense of totality if not universality and thus maintain a clear distinction between art specialists and public. Both Cage and Duchamp have not left behind the impression that their ideas are not accessible to the interested public. After having read some of Cage’s interviews and quotations I almost feel that it is needless to add anything. Many quotations I will cite in the course of this paper could indeed speak for themselves. I guess I just did not have the nerve to leave the space blank in between. Now honestly – I believe that one should first of all enjoy both artists without much scholarship. Cage, in particular, strived to make his work accessible and useful. This project is best described as an attempt to find my personal way of approaching two artists. I doubt that Duchamp or Cage can be ‘understood’ in the common sense. Duchamp rather left the door open by saying that observers complete works of art themselves. In the end it is up to the audience if a sculpture or a painting is worth surviving. And still, there is something hermetic and mysterious about his work. I must admit that I feel no need to completely uncover its mystery as this would be in contrast to his intentions. The following text will not be scientific in the sense that I do not exclusively intend to give answers but rather challenge new questions. Cage once mentioned in an interview on Duchamp: “‘What did you have in mind when you did such and such?’ is not an interesting question, because then I have his mind rather than my own to deal with.”(8) The paper does not claim comprehensiveness as it, among other things reflects my own experience with both artists. In order to give hints about what my chapters will be about, I used various quotations which I thought would quite well convey the central topic of the respective essay. However, I refrained from giving too much away and also deliberately missed writing summaries of my ‘essay results.’ The topic is too complex to be packed in a few words and I wanted to allow a space where some doors remain open. The idea to partly use translucent paper originates from a quotation by John Cage. In his interview with Moira Roth he was asked if his idea of silence had anything in common with Duchamp’s. He answered: “Looking at the Large Glass (*which is considered to be Marcel Duchamp’s masterpiece), the thing that I like so much is that I can focus my attention wherever I wish. It helps me to blur the distinction between art and life and produces a kind of silence in the work itself. There is nothing in it that requires me to look in one place or another or, in fact, requires me to look at all.”(9) A glass indeed does not require the spectator to observe the artwork itself, but encourages him to see the environment behind it. In my mind the notion of ‘looking beyond’, that is not being dictated to focus on the work of art itself is a wonderful idea. Through the symbolic use of translucent paper for the initial chapter pages the environment becomes visibly through the pages. As the pages are closed, one can see traces of the next page’s writing. The paper’s contents are blurring in view of the next page’s font. In case my readers believe they are not learning anything new, I invite them to skip parts of the paper. In History seminars we were taught about the crucial objectivity of a historian. Objectivity is certainly a necessity or at least something to accomplish in this particular area, while at the same time it is almost impossible. Our personal background will, at least subconsciously, make it difficult to maintain objectivity. In view to Cage’s and Duchamp’s overwhelming philosophical input I found it hard to perpetually keep scientific objectivity. I must admit that I did not manage to repress some creative outbreaks. Regarding objectivity, Cage’s introduction to his Autobiographical Statement seems to be quite apt to end my introduction: “I once asked Arragon, the historian, how history was written. He said, ‘you have to invent it.’ When I wish as now to tell of critical incidents, persons and events that have influenced my life and work the true answer is all of the incidents were critical, all of the people influenced me, everything that happened and that is still happening influences me.”(10) ####PAGES#### 2. “There is only one-ism and that is idiotism”(11) attempt to de-categorise marcel Paul Cézanne, frequently referred to as the father of Modern Art, once mentioned the line “The great artist is defined by the character he imparts everything he touches.”(12) These words almost ascribe a certain sacredness to the artist. Duchamp’s early oil paintings, in particular the Portrait of the artist’s father or The chess game were apparently influenced by Cézanne. However, as he later self-confidently recalled, those “were only the first attempts at swimming.”(13) At the age of about 25, Duchamp found his own way of self- expression. He more and more distanced himself from what he called “retinal painting” where colour and form of an artwork were overvalued. Oil painting, to his mind, could no longer claim perpetuity. Duchamp believed that true art could only be found in the conceptual space of human mind rather than on the surface of the canvas. This idea reminded me of Kandinsky, who, in his famous Essays on Art and Artists(14), similarly wrote that it is not so much the form of a work of art which is of significance, but the spirit behind it. Duchamp was one of the first artists who made every effort to desacrifice the common notion of art. Figure 1 Marcel Duchamp Who is this Marcel Duchamp? “He neither talks nor looks, nor acts like an artist. It may be in the accepted sense of the word he is not an artist.”(15) I think of Duchamp (Fig. 1) primarily as an intelligent deceiver. Most of the time he led us believe he was not doing art, as when he was playing chess. Cage commented on him: “All he did was go underground. He didn’t wish to be disturbed when he was working.”(16) In his ‘professional life’ Duchamp wanted to make his own way, accepting a certain isolation. It seems that he often enclosed himself in the solitude of his studio, not telling anybody of his artistic activities. In this way he made a real distinction between his life as artist and his social life. Duchamp wished to be an ‘invisible’ artist as he constantly pretended art did not play a crucial role in his life. He gave up art for chess, experimented with language, eluded us and well kept his mystery. Duchamp’s enigmatic silence led us to questioning and next to the analysis. His silence, among other things, caused curiosity and made him such an interesting character for the public. Joseph Beuys, however, interpreted his silence as ‘silence is absent’(17) and thus criticised Duchamp’s anti-art concept. He believed that Duchamp’s silence was overrated. Beuys’ statement probably also adverts to his giving up art for chess and writing. On the other hand, Beuys’ artistic goal had much in common with Duchamp’s–he also felt that the action of the artist was more important than the final product. Beuys, by using everyday materials such as fat and felt, also pivotally contributed to the blurring of the distinctions between art and life. “It’s very important for me not to be engaged with any group. I want to be free, I want to be free from myself, almost.”(18)-Marcel Duchamp Figure 2 Marcel Duchamp, Note of 1913 A note, written in 1913, (Fig. 2) reveals an interesting thought, which, in my mind turned out to be central in Duchamp’s artistic life: “Can one make works of art which are not works of art?”(19) As is known, he did make works of art which were up to that point not considered as such–however, he revolutionized the art concept at least for himself. Duchamp wanted art to be intelligent instead of aesthetic. It seems as if he wanted to escape art as practiced in his environment. Duchamp always distanced himself from mainstream artists or what he called “society painters.”(20) However, as we well know, his small, but controversial output exerted a strong influence on the development of the 20th century avant-garde art. Duchamp was not only interested in art–but in many different areas such as literature, music, mathematics and physics which he tried to incorporate in his art. The fact that he was worrying about problems aside from art, in my mind made him a philosopher. And sometimes history teaches us that a philosopher is more successful than an artist who concentrates too much on art itself. Paradoxical as it may seem, Duchamp did not give up life for art but instead made his life a work of art by living and practicing anti-art. He was probably the first anti- respectively non- artist in history. In an interview he once remarked: “I am anti-artistic. I am anti-nothing. I am against making formulas.”(21) He denied himself as an artist. Some years later he interestingly revised his thoughts by saying that he “became a non-artist, not an anti-artist…The anti- artist is like an atheist–he believes negatively. I don’t believe in art. Science is the important thing today. There are rockets to the moon, so naturally you go to the moon. You don’t sit home and dream about it. Art was a dream that became unnecessary.”(22) Anti- or non-artist–in view of Duchamp’s often contradicting statements this question is beside the point. He questioned art as an institution. As Cage mentioned in his 26 Statements Re Duchamp, he “collected dust”(23) while other artists concentrated on being artists. Duchamp refused to lead a painter’s life as he refused to exhibit his works of art. In a letter to an artist fellow, he ironically responded (on the question if he wanted to take part in a public exhibition): “I have nothing to exhibit and, in any case the verb exposer (French word for exhibit) sounds too much like the verbépouser (to marry).”(24) Paradoxically, he did take part in numerous exhibitions of his time…duchamp the intelligent deceiver…Duchamp could obviously live comfor without creating artworks, but never ceased to be an artist of the mind. Duchamp’s characteristic anti-position was not only expressed in art. Cage, in relation to this, commented: “Marcel was opposed to politics. He was opposed to private property. He was opposed to religion as is Zen. However, he was for sex and for humour.”(25) It seems that what Duchamp refused to do often carried as much significance as what he actually did. “I am a réspirateur (breather). I enjoy it tremendously.”(26) -Marcel Duchamp Duchamp had an ironic way of referring to himself in terms as lazy–as a réspirateur or breather–but in fact he was very efficient. In the interview with Cabanne he noted that he preferred breathing to working. When asked how artists manage to make their living, he answered “they don’t have to live. They simply breathe.”(27) According to Duchamp, every breath is itself an artwork without being visually recognizable. He did nothing against the rumour that he had stopped being an artist since the forties–while he was secretly working on Etant Donnés, his last masterpiece, for two decades. Apparently, Duchamp did not even induct his friends into his artistic secrets. Cage commented: “Of course, he was referring to the Etant Donnés, without my knowing that the work existed. He had two studios in New York, the one people knew about, and one next door to it, where he did his work, which no one knew about. That’s why people were able to visit his studio and see nothing going on.”(28) Duchamp managed well to deceive us. At first sight, Duchamp seemed to be a confirmed anti-materialist. He rarely took a job as he viewed the bourgeois business of having a job and making money as a waste of time. In Paris he worked as a librarian for about two years only to escape from the artistic life there. When he came to America, he gave French lessons in order to bring in enough money to live on. Among his friends, Duchamp was well known for his economy regarding his garments. Cage, in this respect mentioned that Duchamp “was opposed to private property” and recalled the following story: “Before he married Teeny, he went to visit her on Long Island. Bernard Monnier, her future son-in- law, went to meet Marcel at the station. He said. ‘Where is your luggage?’ Marcel reached into his overcoat pocket and took out his toothbrush and said. ‘This is my robe de chambre.’Then he showed Bernard that he was wearing three shirts, one on top of the other. He had come for a long weekend.”(29) Art should not be mixed up with commerce(30), he said–although he could have easily made a fortune from Cubistic paintings. This attitude, however, did not prevent him from buying and selling works of art as a means to earn a living. After having read some of Duchamp’s letters in Affectionately Marcel, I got the impression that he was much more than just an art dealer because of existential reasons. His often dry diplomatic letters to Katherine Dreier and the Arensberg family do not sound much like Duchamp, the réspirateur and anti- materialist. “Budget. Enclose the figures on separate sheet: On one side what I received, on the other side the expenses (I have already paid many things or deposited advances). You will see that on account of the new price of the port- folios, I will be lacking 1221 francs in the end.”(31) Cage, in relation to this said that Duchamp was actually “extremely interested in money. At the same time he never really used his art to make money. And yet he lived in a period when artists were making enormous amounts of money. He couldn’t understand how they did it. I think he thought of himself as a poor businessman (…) He couldn’t understand why, for instance Rauschenberg and Johns should make so much money and why he should not. But then he took an entirely different life role, so to speak. He never took a job.”(32) Cage’s statement reveals interesting insights in view to Duchamp’s anti-materialistic attitude (which was of course not truly anti-materialistic) in view to art. Cage indirectly suggested Duchamp’s jealousy of other artists of his time. Without my aiming to give a pseudo-psychological comment, Duchamp apparently resigned making money from art as it did not work out for him. This (well pretended) notion of the anti-materialist fits perfectly into his role as the anti-artist and his withdrawal from painting and the art-world in general, and …it seems as if he once again managed well to deceive us. Duchamp’s self- contradiction must not confuse us, for it is as much one of his trademarks as deception. Duchamp tried to break with the traditional aesthetic predominance through provocation and irony. He thought that painting as a manual activity increasingly covered the true nature of art by overvaluing retinal aspects. With the invention of his readymades, Duchamp completely changed the direction of modern art. By declaring banal, everyday objects as works of art, he did not only desacrifice art in general, but also the artist himself. “Good taste is repetitive and means nothing else than the rumination of traditional forms of taste.”(33)This certainly meant a provocation for artists who felt related to an art movement such as the Cubists or Abstract Expressionists. Duchamp chose his readymades “on the basis of a visual indifference, and at the same time, on the total absence of good or bad taste.”(34) They were no longer created by the artistic skill, but by the mind and decision of the artist. Duchamp wanted to break with art as a movement or constitution by turning away from naturalistic modes of expression and inventing his own symbols. Duchamp did not yearn to reach a large audience. Moreover, Marcel was prepared to be misunderstood by the public. He wished to make his own way, accepting a certain isolation: “In 1912 it was a decision for being alone and not knowing where I was going. The artist should be alone…Everyone for himself, as in a shipwreck.”(35) Duchamp, much in contrast to Cage, was never fond of working in a team. He preferred to be an outsider. This outsider role in view to his ‘job’ as an artist, however, must not be confused with the role he took in social life. Duchamp was often described as sociable by his artist fellows, and interviewers “marvelled at how easy it was to talk with Duchamp.”(36) After a three-months stay in Munich in 1912, Duchamp noted: “I was finished with Cubism and with movement–at least movement mixed up with oil paint. The whole trend of painting was something I didn’t care to continue. After ten years of painting I was bored with it–in fact I was always bored with it when I did paint, except at the very beginning when there was that feeling of opening the eyes to something new. There was no essential satisfaction for me in painting ever…anyway, from 1912 on I decided to stop being a painter in the professional sense. I tried to look for another, personal way, and of course I couldn’t expect anyone to be interested in what I was doing.”(37) Apparently, Duchamp tried somehow to escape the traditional notion of being an artist. When Duchamp speaks of trend in relation to art, it sounds unusual as it is frequently associated with fashion. The public art world must have become too superficial and materialistic for him. He was not interested in art in the social sense. Duchamp felt more attracted to the individual mind as such, as he believed most artists were simply repeating themselves. He worked conceptually, putting art “in the service of the mind”(38), as he would say. Cabanne: “You were a man predestined for America.” Duchamp: “So to speak, yes.”(39) Things had to change. Duchamp, in a letter to his American friend Walter Pach expressed his dislike for the Parisian art milieu. “I absolutely wanted to leave. Where to? New York was my only choice, because I hope to be able to avoid an artistic life there, possibly with a job that would keep me very busy (…) I am afraid to end up being in need to sell canvases, in other words, to be a society painter.”(40) These lines express crucial reasons for his giving up life as an artist in the professional sense. Duchamp felt incompatible with the French art milieu and wished to escape the prison of tradition where the artist ended up in ‘producing’ paintings in order to earn his living. He felt a strong disapproval of meeting up with other artists. Paris bored him and represented everything he associated with tradition. Duchamp, at this point did not only break with the artistic ties but also with those of his home country. He fled to a country where “they didn’t give a damn about Shakespeare.”(41) His arrival in New York in 1915–Duchamp was 28 at that time–would prove the beginning of a new Duchampian era. By that time, he was already known in America, as his painting Nude descending a staircase caused a scandal at the famous New York Armory Show, an international exhibition of Modern art two years earlier. New York, in contrast to Paris, offered him a “feeling of freedom” and as he said he “loved the rhythm of this town.”(42)Duchamp and America turned out to be the perfect couple. Duchamp obviously never felt part of an artistic group such as the Dadaists. Moreover, he constantly expressed his dislike for categorisation. From the very outset, he never aimed to describe objects or comment on painting. The more paradox I found the fact that, in most encyclopaedias, Duchamp is either associated with the Cubists or Dadaists. We must rethink the common notion of art in order to get involved with Duchamp. We must free ourselves from convention, categorisation and from -Isms. The following mesostic written by Cage expresses very well Duchamp’s ultimate artistic intention. He wrote it shortly after he had died. The iMpossibility of TrAdition the loss of memoRy: To reaCh ThEse Two’s a goaL (43) For those of you who nevertheless feel they have to look up Duchamp’s encyclopaedic biography–(I am not keeping the secret) See next page. To refer back to the title: “There is only one - ism and that is idiotism: John Gillard, a friend, published postcards with his thoughts–one of them read “There is only one -ism and that’s a prism.” The idea to change it to ‘idiotism’ came after I was inspired by Kandinsky’s Essays on art and artists. Kandinsky, like Duchamp often was in the centre of interest in art criticism. One German art critic called him the founder of a new art movement called “idiotism.” Duchamp, Marcel (1887-1968), French Dada artist, whose small but controversial output exerted a strong influence on the development of 20th- century avant-garde art. Born on July 28, 1887, in Blainville, brother of the artist Raymond Duchamp-Villon and half brother of the painter Jacques Villon, Duchamp began to paint in 1908. After producing several canvases in the current mode of Fauvism, he turned toward experimentation and the avant-garde, producing his most famous work, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (Philadelphia Museum of Art) in 1912; portraying continuous movement through a chain of overlapping cubistic figures, the painting caused a furor at New York City’s famous Armory Show in 1913. He painted very little after 1915, although he continued until 1923 to work on his masterpiece, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1923, Philadelphia Museum of Art), an abstract work, also known as The Large Glass, composed in oil and wire on glass, that was enthusiastically received by the surrealists. In sculpture, Duchamp pioneered two of the main innovations of the 20th century–kinetic art and ready-made art. His “ready-mades” consisted simply of everyday objects, such as a urinal and a bottle rack. His Bicycle Wheel (1913, original lost; 3rd version, 1951, Museum of Modern Art, New York City), an early example of kinetic art, was mounted on a kitchen stool. After his short creative period, Duchamp was content to let others develop the themes he had originated; his pervasive influence was crucial to the development of surrealism, Dada, and pop art. Duchamp became an American citizen in 1955. He died in Paris on October 1, 1968.(44) ####PAGES#### 3. Silent biography Introduction to John Cage I thought that the best introduction to John Cage would be an ‘incomplete’ or ‘imperfect’ mestostic. ‘Incomplete’ as I would like to leave enough space for thoughts. Cage described his mesostic technique as follows: “Like acrostics, mesostics are written in the conventional way horizontally, but at the same time they follow a vertical rule, down the middle not down the edge as in an acrostic, a string spells a word or name, not necessarily connected with what is being written, though it may be. This vertical rule is lettristic and in my practice the letters are capitalized. Between two capitals in a perfect or 100% mesostic neither letter may appear in the lower case. In the writing of the wing words, the horizontal text, the letters of the vertical string help me out of sentimentality. I have something to do, a puzzle to solve. This way of responding makes me feel in this respect one with the Japanese people, who formerly, I once learned, turned their letter writing into the writing of poems (…)”(45) My mesostics follow a vertical line while the horizontal words consist of different quotations by Cage. Quotations which, in the case of Cage, contain a stronger message than an encyclopaedic biography. Respecting Cage’s ideas such as experience, silence and non-teaching, I would like to leave the reader with the following mesostic. In order to make it easier to identify Cage’s thoughts, I used different type faces. To my astonishment, I found out later that Cage, as a consequence of dealing more and more with the media, also used various font types in various chapters of his book A Year from Monday. In the first chapter,Diary: How to improve the world (you will only make matters worse) 1965, Cage made use of twelve different type faces, letting chance operations determine which face would be used for which statement. “As far as COnsistency Of I aM here and ThERe is iS NothING To say L SPACE FOR YOUR THOUGHTS SIMPLY GOES HARMONY WEARE PREFER EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED INCONSISTENCY UNCUSTOMED ZERO IS THE BASIC THOUGHT WE NEED NOT FEAR THESE SILENCES.” Cage, John Milton, Jr. (1912-92), American composer, who had a profound influence on avant- garde music and dance. Born September 5, 1912, in Los Angeles, he studied with the American composers Henry Cowell and Adolph Weiss and the Austrian-born composer Arnold Schoenberg. In 1942 he settled in New York City. Influenced by Zen Buddhism, Cage often used silence as a musical element, with sounds as entities hanging in time, and he sought to achieve randomness in his music. In Music of Changes (1951), for piano, tone combinations occur in a sequence determined by casting lots. In 4’33” (1952), the performers sit silently at instruments; the unconnected sounds of the environment are the music. Like Theatre Piece (1960), in which musicians, dancers, and mimes perform randomly selected tasks, 4’33” dissolves the borders separating music, sound, and nonmusical phenomena. In Cage’s pieces for prepared piano, such as Amores (1943), foreign objects modify the sounds of the piano strings. Cage wrote dance works for the American choreographer Merce Cunningham. His books include Silence (1961), Empty Words (1979), and X (1983).(46) To refer back to Cézanne’s quotation at the beginning of this chapter–Duchamp proposes the work of art as an independent creation, brought into being a joint effort by the artist, the spectator, and the unpredic actions of chance–a freer creation that its very nature, may be more complex, more interesting, more original, and truer to life than a work that is subject to the limitations of the artist’s personal control. ####PAGES#### 4. Passionate encounters Johnand Marcel click to enlarge Figure 3 Photograph of Duchamp and Cage John Cage’s and Marcel Duchamp’s (Fig. 3) ways first crossed in 1942. Duchamp, as many European artists, spent the war years in New York. They met in famous Hale House, home of Peggy Guggenheim and Max Ernst which was then well known as the meeting place for European artists in exile. 30 year-old Cage, originally from Los Angeles was invited by his artist-friend Max Ernst to stay in Hale House. When, after a short period, Peggy informed Cage and his wife Xenia who were penniless at the time, to move out of Hale House, Cage “retreated through the usual crowd of revellers until he came to a room that he thought was empty, where he broke down in tears. Someone else was there, though, sitting in a rocker and smoking a cigar. It was Duchamp.” Cage mentioned that “he was by himself, and somehow his presence made me feel calmer. Although I could not recall what Duchamp said to me, I thought it had something to do with not depending on the Peggy Guggenheims of this world.”(47) Their first encounter reveals interesting aspects of their prospective friendship. Duchamp, the cool smoking type, sitting in a room all by himself, mumbling something amusingly at a desperate stranger. “He had calmness in the face of disaster”(48), Cage said later. Duchamp could not so easily be disconcerted. The odd encounter scene between Duchamp and Cage somehow conveys Duchamp’s inclination to indifference. Years after they had first met each other, Cage noted in his26 Statements Re Duchamp: “There he is, rocking away in that chair, smoking his pipe, waiting for me to stop weeping.”(49) Cage obviously experienced Duchamp’s cool indifference first-hand. Cage, in many interviews, mentioned his friend’s sense for wittiness. As he told Moira Roth, Duchamp was paradoxically “very serious about being amused and the atmosphere around him was always one of entertainment.” He further remarked that “we get to know Marcel not by asking him questions but by being with him.”(50) The reason why Cage did not want to disturb him with questions was that he then would have had Duchamp’s answer instead of his personal experience. Indeed, the concept of experience, deriving from Zen Buddhism, is central in Cage’s philosophy and should not merely be considered in context of his music. He believed that experience, in most respects, was more significant than understanding. It seems that Cage rather wanted to let things happen when spending time with Duchamp. This philosophy has much in common with Cage’s notion of ideal education, but also with his idea of silence and chance in music. Cage was amazed “at the liveliness of Duchamp’s mind, at the connections he made that others hadn’t (…).”(51) These words undoubtedly give evidence of a unbroken Duchamp admirer. When asked what artist had most profoundly influenced his own work, Cage regularly cited Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp, on the other hand, fondly spoke of Cage as someone full of lightness. “He has a cheerful way of thinking. Not ingeniously (…) He is not acting like a professor or schoolmaster.”(52) I believe that Duchamp did not either want to appear like a schoolmaster, but the respect many people showed towards him, naturally made him less affable. Duchamp, as a consequence of his voluntary artistic isolation, stroke others as aloof. “Had Marcel Duchamp not lived, it would have been necessary for someone exactly like him to live, to bring about, that is, the world as we begin to know and experience it.”(53) -John Cage Cage’s respect for Duchamp had blossomed into a sporadic, yet close friendship. In his introduction to 26 Statements Re Duchamp, Cage noted that due to his view “he felt obliged to keep a worshipful distance.”(54) Duchamp’s often mentioned aloof character must have initially had an impact on their friendship. Following Cage’s remarks preceding his26 Statements, his admiration must have led to dubitation concerning Duchamp. It seems as if he was inapproachable to Cage: “Then, fortunately, during the winter holidays of ’65-’66, the Duchamps and I were often invited to the same parties. At one of these I marched up to Teeny Duchamp and asked her whether she thought Marcel would consider teaching me chess. She said she thought he would. Circumstances permitting, we have been together once or twice a week ever since, except for two weeks in Cadaqués when we were every day together.”(55) Cage’s memories leave the impression as though he had long waited for an occasion to ask Duchamp teaching him chess. He later told Calvin Tomkins that Marcel’s quiet way often gave him the feeling that he did not want attention, “so I stayed away from him, out of admiration.”(56) In contrast, it is hard to imagine Duchamp in the role of the passionate admirer. Duchamp rarely spoke about artists that he thought influenced or inspired him. He soon disengaged himself from a model once he grasped it. However, in the case of Raymond Roussel, a writer whose pieceImpressions d’Afrique “greatly helped him on one side of his expression”, Duchamp made an exception: “I felt that as a painter it was much better to be influenced by a writer than by another painter. And Roussel showed me the way.”(57)Duchamp found his models less in art than in literature. He was on the way to erase the borders between different arts. Duchamp, more than Cage, was the type of artist who, due to his mixture of charm and extravagant aloofness, seduced his admirers into an uncritical adulation of his art. He had more of the cool, indifferent type of character who sometimes preferred not to be understood. Though Cage and Duchamp are often discussed in terms of the same artistic circle–along with Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, their characters appeared to be quite different. Duchamp’s indifference among other things served to keep others from getting to close. I can only to some extent agree with Tomkins who wrote in this respect that “his lack of passionate attachments seemed rather to make him more lighthearted, more alert to everything, and less competitive than others.”(58) Someone who is equally passionate about gathering mushrooms and writing ambitious philosophical texts is in my mind more lighthearted than a professional chess player. click to enlarge Figure 4 John Cage Cage’s sometimes amusing humbleness expressed in his interviews give evidence of his joyful character and his sense of humour (Fig. 4). As Anne d’Harnoncourt, one of Cage’s favourite scholars wrote, he was indeed a delight to observe observing. “Surveying the ground as he walked in a wet field, he found mushrooms; listening to a roomful of silence, he heard his blood circulate in his veins; concentrating on a game of chess, he enjoyed a nearby waterful.”(59) Cage’s interviews, I am thinking in particular of Musicage with Joan Retallack, are interspersed with laughter. Listening to Laughtears–a conversation on Roaratorio, it is not unduly to assert that both the interviewer and Cage laughed their heads off.(60) Though both Cage and Duchamp are frequently described as humorous, Cage’s optimistic and sometimes self-ironic personality probably made him more approachable: “In connection with my current studies with Duchamp, it turns out I’m a poor chess player. My mind seems in some respect lacking, so that I make obviously stupid moves. I do not for a moment doubt that this lack of intelligence affects my music and thinking generally. However, I have a redeeming quality: I was gifted with a sunny disposition.”(61) Isn’t it wonderfully amusing to find someone as Cage philosophising about his ‘lack of intelligence’? Duchamp appeared to be more amusing than humorous as a contemporary described him “(…) His blunders are laughable, but he laughs long before you do; as a matter of fact, you laugh at his amusement, not at him.”(62)After having read parts of Duchamp’s letters and interviews, I must add that I found him very amusing. However I would cagely say that his nature of humour was more subtle and black than Cage’s. Duchamp enshrouded himself in a cloud of mystery. After having finished this chapter you will understand what Cage wanted to express by the following mesostic in memory of Duchamp: Don’t YoU ever want to win? (impatienCe.) How do you mAnage to live with Just one sense of huMor? She must have Persuaded him to smile.(63) click to enlarge Figure 5 Marcel Duchamp, Rrose Sélavy by Man Ray, 1921 As already mentioned in the last chapter, Duchamp was a convinced anti-artist. This attitude was expressed by the adoption of various ‘roles’ such as ‘Duchamp, the dandy’ or ‘Duchamp, the chess player.’ As Roth already wrote in her essay Duchamp in America, Duchamp could be described as a dandy who, as Baudelaire once put it, was obsessed with a “cult of self who used elegance and aloofness of appearance and mind as a way of separating himself from both an inferior external world, and from overt pessimistic self- knowledge.“(64)His dandy appearance also found expression in his ‘roles’ …duchamp the intelligent deceiver… such as Rrose Sélavy (Fig. 5), a self- made, female image inhabiting the idea of an artist-substitute for Duchamp. There is nothing particular in taking on another name – many artists still do. However, he could not so easily take on another sex. Duchamp’s enacted deception was meant as a word play: “(…) Much better than to change religion would be to change sex …Rose was the corniest name for a girl at that time, in French anyway. And Sélavy was a pun on c’est la vie.(65) Duchamp, wearing a seductive fur dressed up as a female and posed for Man Ray’s camera. Rrose Sélavy clearly is the product of an artist who managed to deceive us more than once. After all, he left no indication he was a homo or transsexual. The most famous role Duchamp however adopted was that of the chess player which again showed himself as the anti-artist. Both Cage and Duchamp devoted much of their energy to playing chess. Duchamp, however, was the more obsessive player. How addicted to chess must one be to neglect one’s bride by spending day and night playing chess during honeymoon? For Duchamp, chess apparently also served as a way to distract himself. Duchamp’s first wife, Lydie, was said to become such annoyed by her groom solving chess problems one night that she got up and glued the pieces to the board.(66) During his 9-months stay in Buenos Aires, Duchamp wrote to a friend: “I feel I am quite ready to become a chess maniac (…) Everything around me takes the shape of the Knight or the Queen and the exterior world has no other interest for me other than in its transformation to winning or losing positions”(67) For Cage, the goal of winning was clearly beside the point. His motto could be compared to that of the Olympic athletes, “taking part means everything”, under the premise of Duchamp as the antagonist. He was interested in the Buddhist notion of letting things happen, especially when spending time with Duchamp. Cage could apparently confirm Duchamp’s chess addiction – in his interview with Roth he remembered one game of chess where Duchamp got quite angry with him and ‘accused’ him of not wanting to win: “The only time he disturbed me was once when he got cross with me for not winning a game of chess. It was a game I might have won; then I made a foolish move and he was furious. Really angry. He said ‘Don’t you ever want to win?’ He was so cross that he walked out of the room, and I felt as though I had made a mistake in deciding to be with him–we were in a small Spanish town–if he was going to get so angry with me.”(68) Duchamp was an excellent chess player, who, in the role of the tireless thinker even made it to the French national team. After his immigration to the United States, Duchamp was ranked among the top twenty-five chess players in the twenties and thirties. In 1932, he published a chess book titled Opposition and Sister Squares Are Reconciled which was devoted “to a very rare situation in the end game, when all the pieces have been captured except for the opposing kings and one or two pawns on each side.”(69) The book gives evidence of Duchamp’s mathematical gift. Cage, on the other hand, used his mathematical ambitions for chance operations in music. Duchamp and Cage spent more and more evenings together playing chess. “I saw him every night, four nights in a row,“(70) Cage recalled. What did they do when they were not indulged in their passion? It is certain that they were not talking about each other’s work, according to Cage’s interview with Moira Roth.(71) Meanwhile, they were rather ‘experiencing’ each other simply by spending time together. Cage, rather humble in his statements, often admired his friends’ genius for chess: “I rarely did (play chess), because he played so well and I played so poorly. So I played with Teeny, who also played much better than I. Marcel would glance at our game every now and then, and in between take a nap. He would say how stupid we both were. Every now and then he would get very impatient with me. He complained that I didn’t seem to want to win. Actually, I was so delighted to be with him that the notion of winning was beside the point. When we played, he would give me a knight in advance. He was extremely intelligent and he almost always won. None of the people around us was as good a player as he, though there was one man who, once in a blue moon would win. In trying to teach me how to play, Marcel said something which again is very oriental, ‘Don’t just play your side of the game, play both sides.’ I tried to, but I was more impressed with what he said than I was able to follow it.”(72) click to enlarge Figure 6Photograph of Reunion performance, 1968 For Cage, chess apparently served as a pretext to spend time with Duchamp. In 1968, the year of Duchamp’s death, Marcel and his wife were invited to take part in a musical event entitled Réunion by John Cage (Fig. 6). Cage’s idea behind thishappening was that, in his mind, chess contained a finality in itself, as its goal was to win. Cage thus wanted to alienate the game from its ‘purpose’ by distributing sound sources each time movements took place on the chess board. He noted that “the chess board acted as a gate, open or closed to these sources, these streams of music (…). The game is used to distribute sound sources, to define a global sound system, it has no goal. It is a paradox, purposeful purposelessness.”(73) The event consisted of Cage and Duchamp (and later Cage and Teeny) playing chess on stage on a board that had been equipped with contact microphones. Whenever a piece was moved, it set off electronic noises and images on television screens visible to the audience. Cage’s alienation of the chess game from its original purpose is an interesting concept in view to both Duchamp’s and Cage’s understanding of art. Alienation indeed played a crucial role in both artists’ lives. I am thinking now in particular of Duchamp’s readymades and of Cage’s Prepared Piano. Duchamp later amusingly recounted the chess event: “It went very well, very well, it began about eight-thirty. John played against me first, then against Teeny. It was very amusing.” Asked whether there was any music, he replied “Oh yes, there was a tremendous noise.”(74) Chess brought in no money for Duchamp, but provided richer satisfaction. After all, he was aréspirateur. But why chess? When I learned how to play chess at about 14, I was fascinated about it and eagerly taught it some of my friends. However, I never aimed to perfect it, to rack my brain endlessly about possible combinations. A friend of mine is a passionate chess player and I was quite curious what he found so fascinating about it. He spontaneously answered: “Chess is completely different from other games–it has nothing to do with chance or luck.” I found this statement quite interesting in respect to Duchamp’s use of artistic tools–chance was not only typically Cagean, but in fact used by Duchamp in his music pieceErratum Musical already in 1912, the year Cage was born.(75) For both artists, chance functioned as a means to escape from tradition, taste and conscious intentions. Thus it appears that chess stood in strong contrast to various methods and ideas both Cage and Duchamp used in art. An instinctive compensation? Cage, according to an interview, was interested in mushrooms and chess as a compensation for his concern with chance.(76) This was apparently also true for Duchamp–after all he was well aware of the contradiction between chess and art: “The beautiful combinations that chess players invent–you don’t see them coming, but afterward there is no mystery–it’s a pure logical conclusion. The attitude in art is completely different, of course; probably it pleased me to oppose one attitude to the other, as a form of completeness.”(77)On the other hand, Duchamp believed that art and chess were in fact closer to each other than they seemed. He thought that the game had a visual and imaginative beauty that was similar to the beauty of poetry. Duchamp ended his remarks by saying that “from my close contact with artists and chess players, I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.”(78) When Cage asked Duchamp to write something in his book on the end game, he wrote: “Dear John, Look out! Another poisonous mushroom.”(79) Chess and mushrooms were obviously opposed to the chance operations both Cage and Duchamp used in their art. What immediately came to my mind when I heard about luck in the course of the chess conversation with my friend, were some thoughts Duchamp wrote to his sister’s husband Jean–on the enquiry, what Duchamp thought about one of his works of art: “Artists throughout the ages are like Monte Carlo gamblers and the blind lottery pulls some of them through and ruins others (…) It all takes place at the level of our old friend luck. Artists who, in their own lifetime, have managed to get people to value their junk are excellent salesmen, but there is no guarantee as to the immortality of their work. And even posterity is a terrible bitch who cheats some and reinstates others, and reserves the right to change her mind again every 50 years.”(80) This statement carries a touch of resignation. Duchamp believed that artistic luck had nothing to do with real genius. According to him, “a good artist is just a lucky guy, that’s all.” It seems that Duchamp refused to take part in the ‘artistic lottery’, in the useless competition between artists. Chess, in contrast, justly rewarded those who had a real talent. His passion required him to ‘work hard’ in order to win. Duchamp apparently forgot about his self-made image of the réspirateur when sitting in front of a chess board. I found it interesting to observe that both Cage and Duchamp had obsessions which cannot immediately be connected to art. Duchamp did not exclusively devote his life to art, as did Cage not concentrate merely on music. The former had a passion for chess, the latter for mushrooms and cooking. Cage was aware of the fact that many people criticised him for not devoting his life to music utterly. When he began his studies with Schönberg, he told his teacher that could not afford the price. Schönberg then asked him if he would devote his life to music and Cage’s answer was “yes.”(81) But–why devoting one’s life to art respectively music if all areas are interrelated? Cage, in this respect said that “I still think I’ve remained faithful. You can stay with music while you’re hunting mushrooms(…)”(82) Both Duchamp and Cage expanded the notion of art into areas which were up to that time clearly separated from art itself. Chess cannot be simply regarded as a pastime for Duchamp, as Cage’s mushrooms and cooking passion were not merely an amusement. They did not only function as a counterbalance to their work as artists. Instead, they were integrated within their thinking and philosophy. Both artists transposed the idea of blurring the distinctions between art and life simply by their way of life. A female friend of Cage interestingly reflected on him: “The months that followed, which extended into years, afforded me close proximity to both the man and his work. What I came to see was that there was very little difference between the two. That is Cage cooking was Cage composing was Cage playing chess was Cage shopping was…You get the picture. All of his daily activities, from the most sublime to the most mundane, were equally infused with a kind of mindful detachment.”(83) The way Cage devoted himself to an ‘ordinary business’ such as mushrooms and cooking, is certainly remarkable. Much of his experimental writing and also music was dedicated to his mushroom passion. It seems that whatever Cage experienced in his daily life became raw material for his art. Many of his elaborate remarks in A Year from Monday rather reminded me of an affectionate cook. As in the second part of his Diary: How to Improve the World, where he wrote: “After getting the information from a small French manual, I was glad to discover thatLactarius piperatus and L. vellereus, large white mushrooms growing plentifully wherever I hunt, are indeed excellent when grilled. Raw, these have a milk that burns the tongue and throat. Cooked, they’re delicious. Indigestion.”(84) Similar to Beuys, who worked with felt, fat and cloth after these materials saved his life after an aircrash, Cage’s interest in mushrooms originated from necessity during the World Depression. He then solely lived on mushrooms for one week and after this experience decided to occupy with them intensely. According to Cage, much could be learnt from music by devoting oneself to the mushroom. “It’s a curious idea perhaps, but a mushroom grows for such a short time and if you happen to come across it when it’s fresh it’s like coming upon a sound which also lives a short time.”(85)Cage found many parallels between mushrooms and music. However, he was well aware of the fact that his mushroom passion, like chess, was in fact in conflict to his idea of chance in music. To leave it to chance whether to eat a mushroom or not could after all end fatal. Mushroom growth is not even determined by chance. They are rather choosy–grow on wet grounds only. Like Duchamp, Cage published a book on his passion in cooperation with two other mycologists. And – surprisingly, he did make money with his mushroom passion. Cage once appeared on an Italian show as mushroom expert and won 6000 US dollars by answering ‘mushroom questions’ correctly (86) Mushrooms fired Cage’s imagination. His idea was that everything on earth should be audible because of vibration–including mushrooms. “I’ve had a long time the desire to hear the mushroom itself, and that would be done with a very fine technology, because they are dropping spores and those spores are hitting surfaces. There certainly is sound taking place.”(87)Proceeding on this assumption, he made explorations on which sounds further the growth of which mushrooms. Besides being one of the founders of the Mycological Societyin New York, Cage taught a course called ‘Mushroom Identification’ at the NY School for Social Research. One lecture he held dealt with the ‘sexuality’ of mushrooms: “We had invited a specialist from Connecticut, who had cultivated a certain species of mushroom, a Coprinus, in very large quantities to study their sex. In his lecture, he taught us that the sexual nature of mushrooms wasn’t so very different from that of human beings, but that it was easier to study. He explained that there are around eighty types of female mushrooms and around one hundred and eighty types of males in one species alone. Some combinations result in reproduction, while others do not. Female type 42, let’s say, will never reproduce with male type 111, but will with certain others. That led me to the idea that our notion of male and female is an oversimplification of an actually complex human state.”(88) Would you have thought of mushrooms in terms of female and male? I would not and besides enjoying myself immensely, I am continually amazed at Cage’s affectation of details. He had an extraordinary ability to exploit these new insights and incorporate them into his artistic thinking. And yet at the same I am asking myself how one can possibly have such a playful mind in order to connect sounds with mushrooms…I wonder if Cage was aware of his mushroom passion as something which many people would simply consider absurd if they did not study him thoroughly. To my astonishment I found the answer on the very last page of Cage’s first book Silence. Cage’s thoughts prove that he was hardly someone worldly innocent. “In the space that remains, I would like to emphasize that I am not interested in the relationships between sounds and mushrooms any more than I am in those between sounds and other sounds. These would involve an introduction of logic that is not only out of place in the world, but time-consuming. We exist in a situation demanding greater earnestness, as I can testify, since recently I was hospitalised after having cooked and eaten experimentally someSpathyema foetida, commonly known as skunk cabbage. My blood pressure went down to fifty, stomach was pumped, etc. It behoves us therefore to see each thing directly as it is, be it the sound of a tin whistle or the elegant Lepiota procera.”(89) “Isn’t cooking all about mixture and letting individual flavours hold our attention?” -Anne d’ Harnoncourt In the late 70s, Cage, after serious health problems, began a macrobiotic diet on the advice of John Lennon and Yoko Ono(90). The idea of the macrobiotic diet is to make a shift from animal fats to vege oils. What fundamentally distinguishes the macrobiotic diet from other health programs is that, rather than consisting of a fixed list of foods to be consumed or avoided, it provides a structure which applies to the whole range of available choices, an orientation which many adherents of the diet extend to a whole cosmology. For Cage, macrobiotics undoubtedly meant more than just cooking or eating. However, he did not take the diet too seriously–he used herbs and spices which he enjoyed. In the short introduction to his macrobiotic recipe collection in his Rolywholyover – A Circus Box, Cage wrote: “The macrobiotic diet has a great deal to do with yin and yang and from finding a balance between them. I have not studied this carefully. All I do is try to observe whether something suits me or not.”(91) Strictly following a recipe would not sound much like Cage–reading his recipes for chicken or beans indeed sound a bit like his notations in music–they allow enough room for the performer’s interpretation. Cage’s discovery of macrobiotics is no coincidence–with its oriental origin and its application of yin and yang, the macrobiotic diet fits in very well with both Zen and with the temperament of Cage. He believed he had already been affected by the ideas of the diet before he actually started it: “I accepted the diet you might say aesthetically before I accepted it nutritionally.”(92) As Harnoncourt’s interesting quotation (“Isn’t cooking all about mixture and letting individual flavours hold our attention?”) suggests, cooking has a great deal to do with music where individual sounds hold our attention. After studying Cage, I cannot suppress the impression that he could have utilized all daily activities in his art. Cage’s kitchen probably was one big sound studio: “In all the many years which followed up to the war, I never stopped touching things, making them sound and resound, to discover what sounds they could produce. Wherever I went, I always listened to objects. So I gathered together a group of friends, and we began to play some pieces I had written without instrumental indications, simply to explore instrumental possibilities not yet catalogued, the infinite number of sound sources from a trash heap or a junk yard, a living room or a kitchen…we tried all furniture we could think of.”(93) Cage was astonished by the positive results of the macrobiotic diet. “Your energy asserts itself the moment you wake up at the beginning of the day. It remains constant. It doesn’t go up and down, it stays level, and I can work much more extensively. I always had a great deal of energy, but now it is extraordinary. At the same time,” he added, “I’m much more equable in feeling; I’m less agitated.”(94) His improvement so amazed him that he kept up the diet from that time onwards and frequently recommended it in interviews: “Now, however, after, say, four years of following the macrobiotic diet, my health has so greatly improved that I would seriously advise almost anyone who would lend me an ear to make a shift in diet from animal fats to vege oils, to exclude dairy products and sugar, to ‘choose’ chicken only if it actually is a chicken, that is, free from injected hormones, agribusiness, etc., to eat fish, beans and whole grains, nuts and seeds, and vege s with the exception of theSolanaceae (potatoes, tomatoes, egg-plant, and peppers)”(95) Macrobiotics also inspired Cage to a growing concern with nature and ecological matter. Big business and agribusiness, he stressed, damage our meat, vege and water supplies. Food which he mostly advised in special books of recipes include proper preparations for brown rice, zucchini, beans and chicken. In connection with the museum project calledRolywholyover Circus(96), John Cage published various macrobiotic recipes. Four of them I will include at the end of this chapter. “I try to discover what one needs to do in art by observations from my daily life. I think daily life is excellent and that art introduces us to it and to its excellences the more it begins to be like it.”(97) –John Cage Cage’s devotion to macrobiotics and mushrooms are interesting insofar, as they once again witness his contribution to the blurring of the distinction between art and life. As already suggested, Cage’s passions cannot be simply regarded as pastimes or, as in the case of cooking, in the context of a human necessity–though Cage began his macrobiotic diet on medical grounds, thus out of a necessity. We certainly do not get past spending time to prepare our daily food–nevertheless it is a question of how we deal with those daily routines. Cooking was as much a part of Cage’s life as composing music and poetry. Once Cage managed the shift from ordinary cooking to macrobiotics, he consciously devoted more time to what can be called the ‘act of cooking.’ This is at least the impression he left behind in his elaborate recipe descriptions. As Kuhn wrote in her essay, it was hard to distinguish Cage from his work: “Cage cooking was Cage composing was Cage playing chess was Cage shopping was…” Cage, in contrast to Duchamp, frequently made his friend the theme in his writings as well as music. Cage’s ‘homages to Duchamp’ give evidence of the importance of this friendship for him. In his book, A Year from Monday he dedicated 26 Statements on Re Duchamp to his artist friend. The Statements are among other things Cage’s reflections on Duchamp’s artistic methods: “The check. The string he dropped. The Mona Lisa. The musical notes taken out of a hat. The glass. The toy shot-gun painting. The things he found. Therefore, everything seen–every object, that is, plus the process of looking at it–is a Duchamp.”(98)Cage continued his reflections on Duchamp in the second and third part of his Diary: How to Improve the World. In the late 40s, Cage wrote the music for a Duchamp sequence in Hans Richter’s famous avant-garde filmDreams that Money Can Buy. The song is called Music for Marcel Duchamp. In his M–writings ’67-’72, Cage composed several mesostics in memory of Marcel. The following mesostic was written shortly after Duchamp’s unexpected death in 1968. Cage remarked, “it was a loss I didn’t want to have.”(99) click to enlarge Figure 7 Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, 1915-23 Undoubtedly, Duchamp’s work and philosophy lived on in the work of John Cage – as in the case of his visual work titled Not Wanting to Say Anything about Marcel (1969). The work consists of a Plexiglas field on which one may find letters and fragments of words. Anne d’Harnoncourt wrote about it that “Cage characteristically sought to maintain both multiplicity and transparency by setting eight sheets of clear plastic printed with words in stands so that the viewer peered through them; and if he wasn’t careful, his gaze passed beyond them.”(101) The work is indeed very reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp’sLarge Glass (Fig. 7). As the title suggests, Cage did not want to say anything about his artist friend and thus subjected words to chance operations. He possibly wanted to leave the spectator with language fragments in order not to take him in completely. There is no point in attempting to ‘resolve’ Not Wanting to Say Anything about Marcel. I believe it is a homage to a very good friend. Another interesting work which Duchamp apparently inspired him to, was the box which I already mentioned in connection with his macrobiotic recipes. Duchamp, in his artwork calledBoite , gathered together small reproductions of his artworks unbound in boxed form rather than in an album or a book. So did Cage: Rolywholyover – A Circus is a reflecting box which was designed in consultation with Cage himself. The publication accompanied with a major exhibition at The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles conceived of by Cage as a “composition for museum.” The box is an artwork fully in keeping with his philosophy. It contains a wide range of materials, printed in different formats–such as reprints of texts that Cage found useful and inspiring. The texts can be read in any order. The box also includes reproductions of works by Cage, musical scores, recipes, advice on healthy eating and photography. As Cage said in discussing the box, “The world is vast, give the impression that the materials are endless.”(102) -John Cage Despite Cage’s intense occupation with Duchamp, he always remained a somehow mysterious mind. In the foreword to his alphabet in X-writings ’79-’82, Cage reflected on Satie, Joyce and Duchamp–three artists who greatly inspired him. Cage is quite explicit about his ‘goals’ in respect to those three artists–namely that he is not interested in ‘understanding’ in the sense of giving ultimate answers. His humbleness nevertheless gives evidence of an exceptional bright and free mind. In relation to Joyce’s masterpieceFinnegan’s Wake he wrote: “When I was in Ireland for a month last summer (…) many Irishmen told me they couldn’t understand Finnegan’s Wake and so didn’t read it. I asked them if they understood their own dreams. They confessed they didn’t. I have the feeling some of them may now be reading Joyce or at least dreaming they’re reading Joyce. Adaline Glasheen says: ‘I hold to my old opinion. Finnegan’s Wake is a model of a mysterious universe made mysterious by Joyce for the purpose of striking with polished irony at the hot vanity of divine and human wishes.’ And she says: “Joyce himself told Arthur Power, ‘What is clear and concise can’t deal with reality, for to be real is to be surrounded with mystery.’ Human kind, it is clear, can’t stand much reality. We so fiercely hate and fear our cloud of unknowing that we can’t believe sincere and unaffected, Joyce’s love of the clear dark–it has got to be a paradox….an eccentricity of genius.”(103) I was impressed by Joyce’s quotation–for reality is indeed often mysterious and inexplicable. In Cage’s interview on his Roaratorio–An Irish Circus on Finnegan’s Wake, Cage remarked that “Joyce didn’t mean Finnegan’s Wake to be understood, he meant it to be a piece of music.”(104) We tend to question everything which is unfamiliar with. Asking questions is one thing but expecting precise answers is another. In relation to Duchamp, Cage thought that asking him questions was the wrong tactic. He had no special intentions when spending time with him. I believe that we can learn a lot from Cage when trying to study Duchamp. Asked on how Cage would circumscribe his friendship with Duchamp, he answered: “If, for instance, you go to Paris and spend your time as a tourist going to the famous places, I’ve always had a feeling you would learn nothing about Paris. The best way to learn about Paris would be to have no intention of learning anything and simply to live there as though you were a Frenchman. And no Frenchman would dream of going to, say, Notre Dame.”(105) Nevertheless, there remained a hermetic aspect of Duchamp’s work. Cage once spoke to Marcel’s wife, Teeny Duchamp about this: “I said, ‘You know I understand very little about Marcel’s work. Much of it remains very mysterious to me.’ She answered “It does to me, too.”(106) We must be satisfied with what we are offered by Duchamp–otherwise we will end in a never ending helix. John and Marcel simply enjoyed each other’s presence, without much talking about their work. In order to contribute something to your enjoyment – my suggestion is that you try Cage’s Roast chicken before you continue with the next chapter. In case you are not hungry you will enjoy reading them. ‘Passionate encounters’, this chapter’s motto, is dedicated to the personalities of both Cage and Duchamp as well as their friendship – a friendship which was very much formed by their passions. Though chess initially functioned as a pretext for Cage to spend time with Duchamp, it became an important and enjoyable common amity experience. While writing about chess, I found many parallels in Cage’s passions repertoire and thus tried to examine it also in view to the central notion of the essay–the blurring of the distinction between art and life. Moira Roth’s interview with John Cage has helped me a lot to get an insight into their nature of friendship. However, this only gives a one-side impression and as Duchamp’s documented statements on Cage were comparatively rather rare, it is far from completing the puzzle. I am writing this with the humble precaution of a historian who was taught to take all possible historical resources into account. As I am writing these lines, my thoughts lead me to Duchamp, the perpetual intelligent deceiver. I am thinking of the Duchamp who was never willing to give away too much. While listening to the last beats of Cage’s Music for Marcel Duchamp I am constantly reminded of the Duchamp who managed well to surround himself with mystery. One should be a clairvoyant rather than a historian. Recipes À LA JOHN CAGE “Cage’s scores for music, scores for prints, recipes for chicken, all exist for realization by the artist in real time, and he invited his audience (or his dinner guests) to realize that listening, cooking, and eating are also creative acts.”(107) -Anne d’Harnoncourt John Cage’s recipes are an interesting experience in view to his whole philosophy. His cooking advices are precise and clear, but far from elitist. They give evidence of his pedagogical gift not to impose his ideas on anybody. Cage, for example did not use the imperative form of “you do …(such and such)”, but instead used the self- referential “I” when explaining the cooking procedures. Interesting also, that his recipes are be inspired by various cultures. The following recipes should offer a possibility to ‘experience’ John Cage. I found it quite interesting what Cage said about experience: “I think that there is a distinct difference between…. I think that the most pointed way to put this distinction is by using the word “understanding” as opposed to “experience.” Many people think that if they are able to understand something that they will be able to experience it, but I don’t think that that is true. I don’t think that understanding something leads to experience. I think, in fact, that it leads only to a certain use of the critical faculties. Because…say you understand how to boil an egg. How will that help you in cooking zucchini? I’m not sure. One could make the point more dramatically by saying, “How will that help you to ride horseback?” But that probably goes too far. I think that we must be prepared for experience not by understanding anything, but rather by becoming open-minded.” Roast Chicken Get a good chicken not spoiled by agribusiness. Place in Rohmertopf (clay baking dish with cover) with giblets. Put a smashed clove of garlic & a slice of fresh ginger between legs and wings and breasts. Squeeze the juice of two & three lemons over the bird. Then an equal amount of tamari. Cover, place in cold oven turned up to 220°. Leave for 1 hour. Then uncover for 15 minutes, heat on, to brown. Now I cook at 170°, 30 minutes to the pound. Or use hot mustard and cumin seeds instead of ginger. Keep lemon, tamari or Braggs and garlic. Instead of squeezing the lemon, it may be quartered then chopped fine in a Cuisinart with the garlic & ginger (or garlic, cumin & mustard). Add tamari. The chicken & sauce can be placed on a bed of carrots (or sliced 3/4-inch thick bitter melon obtainable in Chinatown) Brown Rice Twice as much water as rice. If you wish, substitute a very little wild rice for some of the brown rice. Wash or soak overnights then drain. Add a small amount of hijiki (seaweed) and some Braggs. Very often I add a small amount of wild rice. Bring to good boil. Cover with cloth and heavy lid and cook for twenty minutes over medium flame, reduce flame to very low and cook thirty minutes more. Uncover. If it is not sticking, cook it some more. If it is sticking to the bottom of the pan, stir it a little and then cover again and let it rest with the fire off. When you look at it again after ten minutes or so it will have loosened itself from the bottom of the pan. Another way to cook rice: using the same proportion of rice, bring to a boil and then simply cover with lid without the cloth, reducing the fire to low. After forty-five minutes, remove from fire but leave lid on for at least 20 minutes. BEANS Soak beans overnight after having washed them. In the morning change the water and add Kombu (seaweed). Also, if you wish, rosemary or cumin. Watch them so that they don’t cook too long, just until tender. Then pour off most of the liquid, saving it, and replace it with tamari (or Braggs). But taste first: you may prefer it without tamari or with very little. Taste to see if it’s too salty. If it is, add more bean liquid. Then, if you have the juice from a roasted chicken, put several teaspoons of this with the beans. If not, add some lemon juice. And the next time you have roast chicken, add some of the juice to the beans. Black turtle beans or small white beans can be cooked without soaking overnight. But large kidney beans or pinto beans can be cooked without soaking overnight. But large kidney beans or pinto beans, etc. are best soaked (So are the others.) Another way to cook beans which has become my favourite is with bay leaves, thyme, garlic, salt and pepper. You can cook it with some kombu from the beginning. I now use the “shocking method.” See Avelines Kushi’s book. And now I’ve changed again. A Guatemalan idea: Bury an entire plant of garlic in the beans without bothering to take the paper off. Cook for at least 3 hours. Chick-Peas (Garbanzos) Soak several hours. Then boil in new water. Until tender. They can then be used in many ways. 1. Salad. Make a dressing of lemon or lime with olive oil (a little more oil than lemon), sea salt and black pepper, fresh dill-parsley, and a generous amount of fine French mustard (e.g., Pommery). 2. Or use with couscous having cooked them with fresh ginger and a little saffron. 3. Or make hummous. Place, say, two cups of chick-peas with one cup of their liquid in Cuisinart. Add a teaspoon salt, lots of black pepper, a little oil and lemon juice to taste. Add garlic and tahini. Now I no longer add salt, but instead a prepared gazpacho. ####PAGES#### 5. “If that’s art, I’m a Hottentott” “Everyone is doing something, and those who make things in a framed canvas, are called artists.” (109)–Marcel Duchamp Duchamp was apparently interested in a general conception of art. What do we call art? Or better what is not considered as art? Can we define works of art which are not works of art–as Duchamp already questioned. Moira Roth, in relation to this wrote that “if one is Duchamp the answer is probably no, although he did ‘make’ works which were not immediately works of art.”(110) Otherwise, these questions are not easy ones to answer–on the contrary, they provoke a number of new question marks. Where is the border between art and non- art? And then–how do we define non-art? As a historian, I was first of all interested in a definition of art. And as it turned out I had to dig a bit into philosophy. Art originally derived from Sanskrit and meant ‘making’ or ‘creating something’. Plato took up the definition and went one step further by distinguishing artists into two categories: those who are productively creating objects such as architects or carpenters and those who are restricted to the already existing or imitation (what he calledMímesis)(111). Plato honoured the craftsman more than the artist as he believed that the former was oriented at the ideas of the mind, while the latter was simply creating an imitation of the already existing. According to Plato, the painter distanced himself from the truth–in order to attain it, one has to leave all appearances behind and should not duplicate it by a sort of reflection. In the Middle Ages, art (Ars) was generally interpreted as a production and design of everyday objects. It was a skilled trade which was thus never valued under just aesthetic aspects.(112) If we strictly stick to this definition, an artist is nothing else than a workman. And as Duchamp said in an interview, everyone of us is somehow a workman(113)–in different areas of course. Artworks have not always been valued under just aesthetic characteristics–as this short historical outline teaches us. An important milestone in so-called ‘aesthetic’ art was the beginning of the 19th century. The Impressionists’ usual subjects were landscapes or social scenes like streets and cafés. While Impressionist paintings are commonly regarded as ‘beautiful’, it is also undeniable that they helped to create and to preserve–in their depiction of the pleasures of café life, the comfor ladies at bath–a class divided from the world in its comforts and signs of sophistication. Beauty, here, was a means of escaping from the issues and obligations of the day. Beauty separated those who appreciated it and wished to reside within its frontiers. Expressionism, on the other hand represented a move away from the Impressionist trends and was concerned with conveying the artist’s emotions as aroused by his subjects. Any painting technique that helped to express these feelings was considered a valid medium.(114) I found it quite interesting to observe that all art movements or -Isms were somehow a response or artistic counteraction to the preceding movement. The Impressionists strongly rejected the Romantic idea that a painting should convey strong emotions. Expressionism, on the other hand, aimed at stressing the artist’s emotions, which was again in contrast to Impressionism. Duchamp lived in a time where he could choose from Abstract Expressionism, Cubism or Surrealism. However, none of the -Isms pleased him enough to get involved with it. He invented his own -Ism and it turned out to be a counteraction to all the previous art movements. I was quite amazed by the fact that the common notion of ‘beautiful’ art had not always honoured. However, there was a long way to go between Plato and Duchamp. Duchamp’s idea of taste may be interpreted as a response to the governing taste concept since the 18thcentury where “taste was centrally connected with the concept of pleasure, and pleasure itself was understood as a sensation subject to degrees of refinement. There were standards of taste, and a curriculum, in effect, of aesthetic education. Taste was not merely what this or that person preferred, all things being equal, but what any person whatever ought to prefer.”(115) Duchamp’s taste revolution, however, cannot only be interpreted as a denial of all -Isms and taste concepts at the time, but also as a very personal decision in search for his own expression. Defining art as a concept seems like an endless enterprise–not only because every point in history offers us its own definition, but because every single artist provides us with hints of his own world. “For us, art is that which we find under this name: something which simply is, and which doesn’t need to conform to laws in order to exist; a complicated social product.”(116) -Robert Musil Let us imagine a scene in a Museum of Modern Art. A rather perplexed visitor and his child critically observe a Pollock. He turns to his son and whispers, “you could have done this with your left hand, don’t you?” A scene which is so familiar to us that it almost seems like a déjà- vu. Now, fine: “Every human being is an artist”, an impressive line Beuys once mentioned. In a broad sense–if we take together all definitions art history provided us–this statement can retain validity for we all ‘make’ or produce something. The father demonstrated with his statement that in his view art must have something to do with artistic skill. And–skill usually creates an aesthetic product, however the term aesthetic is defined. Van Gogh or Monet would be generally considered as ‘beautiful’ by the majority. Yet History has taught us that every masterpiece of modern art, whether Picasso, Cage or Duchamp, was first met with an outcry of indignation: “this is not art!” (or, maybe “If that’s art I’m a Hottentott”) Art is what we or what critics call art–as different the result may be. Robert Musil’s quotation on art hits the bull’s eye. Art is too complicated to be defined – as it is the product of human beings. It is impossible to find an objective explanation for something that is the most subjective expression of a human-being. The borders between art and non-art are blurring. In my view, art could be compared to a handmade mirror made by a reflecting individual at a particular point of history–whether we find it beautiful or not is beside the point. It may be hard to understand why Duchamp invented his readymades or why Cage first rejected harmony and welcomed noise as an artistic tool. Both, Duchamp and Cage were interested in conceptual art which means that the idea behind a work of art, in the end, was more important than the finished work itself. Duchamp believed that there was nothing inherently sacred about an art-object. This concept is realized in Duchamp’s readymades. He believed he could elevate common, store-bought items to the status of artworks by declaring them so. Cage wished to free himself from his likes and dislikes–by asking questions instead of making choices, by using chance as a compositional tool. Both artists rejected terms like tradition and categorization and were in constant search for an individual form of expression. There is no recipe for what is beautiful or musical–after all it is up to the audience if a work of art is worth preserving or not. click to enlarge Figure 8 Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase ,No. 2, 1912 Duchamp’s taste revolution started rather turbulently. After some years of Cézanne’s and Matisse’s influence, Duchamp soon found his own path. His famous paintingNude descending a staircase (Fig. 8)scandalised the New York art world in 1913. When he first submitted his picture for exhibition in Paris, it was rejected on the grounds that it had “too much of a literary title, in the bad sense–in a caricatural way. A nude never descends stairs–a nude reclines….”(117) Duchamp, at this point, apparently broke with all artistic conventions. He attempted to capture a figure in motion – a concept that apparently proved difficult for the audience of that time to understand. One critic wrote that this landmark painting resembled an explosion in a shingle factory.(118)When observing the Duchamp’s Nude, I was immediately struck by the cubistic elements–because of the darkish brown and grey colours as well as the characteristic angular forms. However, the painting was far from depicting the ideas of any -Ism. TheNude was rather made by a Duchamp who once again proved to be an intelligent deceiver. As Calvin Tomkins wrote, “nudes weren’t supposed to come down stairs and paintings weren’t supposed to have their titles written on the canvas, and any artist who broke the rules in such an irreverent manner must be kidding, right?”(119) I would not say that his intention was to make fun of the Cubists–Duchamp was too much the indifferent type as to make fun of an art movement by such direct means. He did not even make efforts to explain his works of art–and if he did, he did so by making some remarks years later–as in the case of his Nude: My aim was a static representation of movement, a static composition of indications of various positions taken by a form in movement–with no attempt to give cinema effects through painting. The reduction of a head in movement to a bare line seemed to me defensible. A form passing through space would traverse a line; and as the form moved the line it traversed would be replaced by another line–and another and another. Therefore I felt justified in reducing a figure in movement to a line rather than to a skeleton. Reduce, reduce, reduce was my thought–but at the same time my aim was turning inward, rather than toward externals. And later, following this view, I came to feel that an artist might use anything–a dot, a line, the most conventional or unconventional symbol–to say what he wanted to say.”(120) Interesting what Duchamp says about abstraction in terms of his painting. I do not believe, however, that the abstraction he mentioned carried much significance in his future career. Duchamp gave up painting altogether–as he said he tried to “unlearn to draw” in order to escape the prison of tradition.(121) Cage did not have to make efforts to forget music, as he admitted he never had a feeling for harmony. “I certainly had no feeling for harmony, and Schönberg thought that that would make it impossible for me to write music. He said, ‘You’ll come to a wall you won’t be able to get through.’ So I said, ‘I’ll beat my head against that wall.’”(122) Cage indeed disposed of a strong ability to assert himself. Although Duchamp and Cage apparently had different initial positions, they both landed on a similar artistic track. “The first question I ask myself when something doesn’t seem to be beautiful is why do I think it’s not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.” -John Cage click to enlarge Figure 9 Robert Rauschenberg, White Paintings Let us begin from zero–silence, emptiness, nonsense. Rauschenberg’s White Paintings (Fig. 9). Empty space–no message, no dictatorship–we are free to bring in ourselves. Empty canvas–no need for interpretation; we need not say anything about it if we don’t feel like it. The blankness of the white paintings strongly reminded me of Cage’s silence. Rauschenberg, like Duchamp and Cage, was also interested in breaking down the barriers between art and life by using everyday artistic tools. Cage was indeed mesmerized by Rauschenberg’s empty walls. ”I responded immediately,” he said, “not as objects, but as ways of seeing. I’ve said before that they were airports for shadows and for dust, but you could also say that they were mirrors of the air.” What fascinated Cage about the White Paintings was Rauschenberg’s idea of emptiness: “A canvas is never empty”(123), Rauschenberg said; it acts as a landing-ground for dust, shadows, reflections. The White Paintings somehow gave Cage ‘permission’ to proceed with the composition of his silent pieces: “When I saw those, I said, ‘Oh yes, I must; otherwise I’m lagging, otherwise music is lagging.’”(124) “It’s out of that emptiness, and not being put off by ‘nothing’ happening–and when you see it, it really impresses you–that hearing it, hearing the emptiness becomes a possibility all over again.”(125) Rauschenberg’s white paintings greatly inspired Cage to silence in music. He was interested in a silence that was “not the absence of sound but the fact of having changed one’s mind to be interested in the sounds that there are, to hear them.”(126) Silence turned out to be one of Cage’s central concept in his music and philosophy. He defined silence as simply the absence of intended sounds, or the turning off of our awareness. At the same time he made it clear that he believed there was no such thing as silence, defined as a total absence of sound–similar to Rauschenberg, who did not believe in emptiness in terms of an empty canvas. In 1951, he visited a sound-proof chamber at Harvard University in order to ‘hear’ silence. “I literally expected to hear nothing,” he said. Instead, he heard two sounds, one high and one low. He was told that the first was his nervous system and the other his blood circulating. This was a major revelation that was to affect his compositional philosophy from that time on. “The history of art is simply a history of getting rid of the ugly by entering into it, and using it. After all, the notion of something outside of us being ugly is not outside of us but inside of us. And that’s why I keep reiterating that we’re working with our minds. What we’re trying to do is to get them open so that we don’t see things as being ugly, or beautiful, but we see them just as they are.”(127)-John Cage Cage’s taste ®evolution started rather loud and clear. In 1940, he made the Prepared Piano. Before Cage left Cornish school, he was invited to compose the music for an African dance. The only instrument available was a piano. “I knew that wouldn’t work for Bacchanale which was rather primitive, almost barbaric,”(128) Cage recalled. He finally realized that he had to change the piano. Cage tried placing objects between the strings. “The piano was transformed into a percussion orchestra having the loudness, say, of a harpsichord.”(129) Noise as a compositional tool was born….interpenetration of life and art. “You have to remember how straight-laced everything had always been in music…Just to change one little thing in music was a life’s work. But John changed everything…John was freer than the rest of us.”(130) – Morton Feldman When Cage was writing percussion and prepared piano pieces, he became concerned with a new change. He noticed that although he had been taught that music was a matter of communication, when he wrote a sad piece people laughed, and when he wrote a funny one they started crying. From this he concluded that people did not understand each other’s music, that “music doesn’t really communicate to people. Or if it does, it does it in very, very different ways from one person to the next.”(131) Cage said that “no one was understanding anybody else. It was clearly pointless to continue that way, so I determined to stop writing music until I found a better reason than ‘self expression’ for doing it.”(132) Cage’s reaction to ‘common composition’ is very much reminiscent of Duchamp’s rejection of what he called ‘retinal painting’. Strictly speaking, Cage stopped being a composer in the traditional sense, similar to Duchamp who refused to lead an artistic life. “The reason I am less and less interested in music is not only that I find environmental sounds and noises more useful aesthetically than he sounds produced by the world’s musical cultures, but that, when you get right down to it, a composer is simply someone who tells other people what to do. I find this an unattractive way of getting things done. I’d like our activities to be more social and anarchically so.”(133) Cage wanted to create music that was free of melody, harmony and musical theory. In an interview he once gave on his project Roaratorio, an Irish Circus on Finnegan’s Wake, Cage said that “he wanted music not to be in the sense of music, but in the sense of Finnegan’s Wake” which means that he wanted to turn away from music itself–just like Joyce turned away from conventional writing. Cage, by writing Roaratorio, actually turned literature into a piece of music. He made a text from the original and catalogued the sounds and locations mentioned in Finnegan’s Wake. All sound effects were inspired from the text and many recorded in Ireland, with traditional instruments such as flutes, pipes, fiddles and bodhrans (a special drum type). To link up with Cage’s conception of music as an unapt means of self-expression (“when he wrote a sad piece people laughed, and when he wrote a funny one they started crying.”) – Cage had determined that the purpose of music could not be communication or self-expression. What then, was its purpose? The answer came from Gira Sarabhai, an Indian singer and tabla player: “The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences.”(134)Cage was tremendously struck by this. For more than a year he immersed himself in the philosophy of East and West, and began studying Zen Buddhism with Daisetz T. Suzuki, a Japanese Zen teacher who taught at Columbia University. “I had the impression that I was changing–you might say growing up. I realized that my previous understanding was that of a child.”(135) Cage was determined to find out more about the “divine influences”, Gira Sarabhai had told him about. He came to the conclusion that they were the sounds and events that were free to everyone, that is, those of our nature and environment. Buddhism also teaches the transitoriness and fugacity of all creatures and objects. Its ultimate goal is the recovery of a higher purpose which is one independent of likes and dislikes–and thus of everything that is intentional.(136) As soon as Cage gained those insights from oriental philosophy, he introduced it into his music. A quiet mind, he determined, was one free of dislikes; but, since dislikes require likes, it must be free of both likes and dislikes. “You can become narrow minded, literally, by only liking certain things and disliking others, but you can become open-minded, literally, by giving up your likes and dislikes and becoming interested in things.”(137) Thus, Cage more and more became interested in sounds and noises. He gave up harmony, which he believed, had nothing to do with noises. “Sounds should be honoured rather than enslaved. Every creature, whether sentient (such as animals) or non-sentient (such as stones and air), is the Buddha. Each being is at the centre of the universe.”(138) This oriental insight may also express Cage’s passion for mushrooms and his belief to hear the sounds of any plant or object: “I have recently learned that plants respond to the affection you show them! They can almost tell you exactly who cares for them. And they won’t grow if they’re not loved.”(139) In Cage’s mind, the function of music was not to entertain or communicate, but to be a process of discovery, to become aware and sensitised to the environmental sounds that are all around us, and to be free from personal taste and manipulation. The following statement by Cage summarizes this point of view: “Art may be practiced in one way or another, so that it reinforces the ego in its likes and dislikes, or so that it opens that mind to the world outside, and outside, inside. Since the forties and through the study with D. T. Suzuki of the philosophy of Zen Buddhism, I’ve thought of music as a means of changing the mind. I saw art not as something that consisted of a communication from the artist to an audience but rather as an activity of sounds in which the artist found a way to let the sounds be themselves. And, in being themselves, to open the minds of people who made them or listened to them to other possibilities than they had previously considered.”(140) Thus, music lost its purpose of communication and expression. In contrast to the Western practice of making hierarchies–of separating, discriminating and dividing–Zen Buddhism suggested the opposite: no single centre (no best or least), only “an endless plurality of centres, each one world honoured.”(141) Cage believed that emotions, like tastes and memory were too closely linked with the self and that the ego would not open the minds to noises and sounds. There was a way out–that is, Cage’s notion that art and life should no longer be separate but one and the same: “Art is not an escape from life, but rather an introduction to it.”(142) This idea led him to the concept of interpenetration. Previously, sounds that were outside the composer’s intentions were considered alien intrusions, unwelcome ‘noises’. Cage, for example, welcomed noises that were unintentionally produced by the audience–such as coughs or whispers. As a result of including sounds outside of the composer’s and performer’s intentions, Cage welcomed interpenetration. Another important dictum which greatly inspired Cage to his new musical thought were the works of Ananda Coomaraswamy who wrote that “art is to imitate nature in her manner of operation.”(143) This idea should not be confused with imitating nature’s appearance. But how does nature operate? According to the naturalistic evolution theory and natural phenomena, they are not based upon a mechanical, deterministic model, but based on interdeterminacy and chance, such as in quantum mechanics and chaos theory. In the time of the Big Bang, there was a total chaos (a mixture of gases and other elements), and paradoxical as it may seem, this chaos was from time to time organised by chance.(144) In fact we are all existed by chance. As Cage’s works demonstrate, chaos is not really chaos, but unexpected order. I hope there are not too many critical mathematicians and physicists among you… Cage’s response to the chaos of our world was to welcome both its order and its disorder to the greatest extent possible. “Here we are. Let us say Yes to our presence together in Chaos.”(145) Cage met this chaos by using chance operations which encouraged him to shift his focus of attention away from the making of choices to the asking of questions. Likes and dislikes became irrelevant. Cage used his aesthetic of non- intention for making music, poetry and visual art. However, he assured that he did not use it when crossing the street, playing chess, hunting for mushrooms or making love. (146) “What his music is ‘about’ is changing the mind–creating musical situations which, being analogous to life, have the effect of returning himself and his listeners to a level of consciousness freed from intrusive preconceptions, desires and intentions, and leading them toward an unfettered experience of what is before them in the present.”(147) – Laura Kuhn I believe that knowing about Cage’s philosophy is crucial in order to comprehend his musical pieces as serious artworks. Only then we are able to understand that his silent piece or 4’33”was not a deliberate affront or insult to the audience or the act of a fool who made a child’s play. Cage repeatedly stated that he was not interested in shocking or insulting audiences. “I have never gratuitously done anything for shock.”(148) He had no intentions to shock, but the audience did not always perceive it that way. The first performance of John Cage’s 4’33”created a scandal. Written in 1952, it is Cage’s most notorious composition, his so-called “silent piece”. The piece consists of four minutes and thirty-three seconds in which the performer plays nothing. At the premiere some listeners were unaware that they had heard anything at all. It was first performed by the young pianist David Tudor in New York, for an audience supporting contemporary art. “Tudor placed the hand-written score, which was in conventional notation with blank measures, on the piano and sat motionless as he used a stopwatch to measure the time of each movement. The score indicated three silent movements, each of a different length, but when added together totalled four minutes and thirty-three seconds. Tudor signalled its commencement by lowering the keyboard lid of the piano. The sound of the wind in the trees entered the first movement. After thirty seconds of no action, he raised the lid of the first movement. It was then lowered for the second movement, during which raindrops pattered on the roof. The score was in several pages, so he turned the pages as time passed, yet playing nothing at all. The keyboard lid was raised and lowered again for the final movement, during which the audience whispered and muttered.” (149) Cage said later that “people began whispering to one another, and some people began to walk out. They didn’t laugh–they were just irritated when they realized nothing was going to happen and they haven’t forgotten it 30 years later; they’re still angry.”(150) Maverick Concert Hall, the site of the first performance, was ideal in allowing the sounds of the environment to enter, because the back of the hall was open to the surrounding forest. One could hear raindrops patterning the roof –and Cage welcomed all those unexpected, natural sounds. When Tudor finished, raising the keyboard lid and himself from the piano, the audience burst into an uproar–“infuriated and dismayed”, according to the reports.(151) Even in the midst of an avant-garde concert attended by modern artists,4’33” was considered “going too far.”(152) As I am so eagerly writing about Cage’s discovery of Oriental philosophy, Zen Buddhism and the impact they had on his music and thinking in general, I am reminded of his mushroom passion, the macrobiotic recipes, his use of chance and I have the impression that I am writing in circles–that is, I am repeating Cage’s ideas which once again witness the unity in his philosophy as well as in all his daily activities. Cage’s interpenetration of art and life is thus also apparent in my writing–I somehow feel that my chapter mottos do not (exclusively) convey the contents of the respective chapters–everything is blurring in view to Cage’s entirety philosophy. Though a bit confusing, I believe that this is an interesting insight in view to the topic of this paper. It seems as if I am ‘experiencing’ what I am writing about. The fact that Cage was interested in noise and sounds and consequently incorporated it into his music seemed somehow familiar to me. Yesterday I dug out the first compact disc I received from my parents around Christmas 1990. I was 14 years old by that time and a crazy Beatles fan. Up to that time I had listened to earwigs such as Let it be, Yellow submarine, Two of us or Dear Jude and eagerly tried to play them on the guitar. I can vividly remember my disappointment at first listening to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band. The songs seemed strange to me, they sounded completely different from the cheerful songs I had listened before. At least I was compensated with When I’m sixty four and With a Little Help from my Friends, but what about songs likeWithin you Without you? What was George doing with his voice and with all those weird instruments? Or the church like singing of She’s Leaving Home… The cover featuring the wax figures was so queer, not to mention about the odd costumes they wore. Nevertheless, I could not stop listening to the strangeness of the music. I was listening to the songs again and again and with the time I became fascinated about the Beatles’ different music aspect. I tried hard to figure out the contents of songs like Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and was wondering what Lennon wanted to tell us by ‘marmalade skies’ or ‘plasticine porters with looking glass ties’. Those mysterious songs somehow transferred me into another, mysterious world, if only for a few minutes. Maybe one’s ears slowly have to familiarise with good music. “The Beatles insisted that everything on Sgt. Pepper had to be different,” says Emerick, “so everything was either distorted, limited, heavily compressed or treated with excessive equalisation. We had microphones right down the bells of the brass instruments and headphones turned into microphones attached to violins. We plastered vast amounts of echo onto vocals, and sent them through the circuitry of the revolving Leslie speaker inside a Hammod organ. We used giant primitive oscillators to vary the speed of instruments and vocals and we had tapes chopped to pieces and stuck together upside down and the wrong way around.” (153) The Beatles apparently wanted to turn all musical conventions upside down when recordingSgt. Pepper. The album is seen by many people to be the Beatles’ masterpiece. It is especially denoted by its asymmetrical musical phrases and rhythms and its integrated use of electronic music techniques and Indian sitar sound. The album is very experimental. Around the timeSgt. Pepper was released, all Beatles were more or less occupied with Indian philosophy. They attended a seminar by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and learned about sublime consciousness and inner peace and these insights undoubtedly influenced their music. What struck me when I listened to songs like Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was that you heard the orchestra rehearsing before the song actually started. In between you could perceive the audience laughing and applauding (although it was studio recorded). Interesting also, that some songs ‘interpenetrate’, which means that there are no pauses in between the songs. I found these impacts more than interesting after studying Cage’s understanding of music. I was struck…. “The very end of the album typifies the advanced studio trickery applied throughout Sgt. Pepper. After the last droplets of the crashing piano chord of ‘A Day in the Life’ have evaporated, come a few seconds of 15 kilocycle tone, put there –especially to annoy your dog–at the request of John Lennon (it contains a note that is so high- pitched that it is only audible to dogs) Then, as the coup de grace, there is a few seconds of nonsense Beatle chatter, taped, cut into several pieces and stuck back together at random so that, as George Martin says, purchasers of the vinyl album who did not have an auto return on their record player would say “What the hell’s that?” and find the curious noise going on and onad infinitum in the concentric run-out groove.”(154) The Beatles undoubtedly wanted to include some elements that caused some unexpected reactions by the audience. Besides applying different rhythms in one and the same song, they used everyday life sounds such as alarm ringing and someone gasping. They did not even frank us from chance–some of the recordings were stuck together by chance order. Interesting also, the topics of the songs on Sgt. Pepper which differ a great deal from the lighthearted love songs they wrote before. The Beatles were inspirited by different, daily life sources–Lennon wrote Good Morning Good Morning after he was inspired by a TV-spot on Cornflakes. McCartney sang about ”Fixing a hole where the rain gets in (…).” In A Day in the Life, John Lennon reads a newspaper report on a fatal car accident. Harrison’s Within You Without You was inspired by Indian philosophy and turned out to be a co- project with Indian musicians–it was recorded without Lennon, McCartney and Starr. The borders between the music of Sgt. Pepper and life are blurring. It would be interesting to find out what Cage thought about this innovative Beatles album–I can imagine he would have loved the illogical barrage of noise at the end of A Day in the Life. However, I doubt that Cage would have wanted to listen Sgt. Pepper in any recorded version. He did not even listen to the radio. “If you’re in a room and a record is playing and the window is open and there’s some breeze and a curtain is blowing, that’s sufficient, it seems to me, to produce a theatrical experience.”(155) I suppose that Cage would have enjoyed experimenting with the Beatles on the different sound effects. Once asked about popular music in general, Cage responded that “it’s very hard for me to listen to music nowadays with a regular beat; so that I have a hard time to begin with, with most popular music. On the other hand, some of it gets free of it. Rock seems to me to get free of it, because it calls so much attention to loudness that you forget the beat.”(156) Sgt. Pepper is of course far from popular. It is a rather a unique music experience, full of surprising sounds and noises. It allows us to dip into a different world. “He simply found that object, gave it his name. What then did he do? He found that object, gave it his name. Identification. What then shall we do? Shall we call it by his name or by its name. It’s not a question of names.”(157) -John Cage The last pages, besides digressing briefly on the Beatles, were dedicated to Cage’s study of Zen Buddhism and accordingly his invention of dichotomies like silence, sounds and noises in music. Although Duchamp had no direct connections with oriental thoughts, he madereadymades to which said to be completely indifferent.(158) This notion has of course a lot to do with the Cage’s idea of freeing oneself from one’s likes and dislikes. click to enlarge Figure 10 Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel, 1913/1961 Figure 11 Marcel Duchamp, In Advance of the Broken Arm, 1915 In 1913, Duchamp took a bicycle wheel, turned it upside down and mounted it on a kitchen stool. The Bicycle Wheel (Fig. 10) was originally not intended to be shown, it was just for Duchamp’s own use. One year later, this wheel was the first of what came to be known as readymades, ordinary objects delocated and decontextualised. According to Duchamp, his first readymadecan also be seen as a “homage to the useless aspect of something generally used to other ends”, as well as an “antidote to the habitual movement of the individual around the contemplated object.”(159) These lines clearly witness Duchamp’s anti- artistic attitude, his revolt against the tradition where museum visitors admire works of art. He stressed that his readymades were chosen on visual indifference–while, on the other hand he said that looking at the Bicycle Wheel gave him the same kind of pleasure than watching a log fire. Calvin Tomkins’ statement on Duchamp’s first readymade reveals the erotic aspect of his work: “He found it wonderfully restful to turn the wheel and watch the spokes blur, become invisible, then slowly reappear as it slowed down; something in him responded, as he said, to the image of a circle that turns on its own axis, endlessly onanistically.”(160) If Duchamp now found pleasure in observing his Wheel, he is clearly contradicting himself in terms of his idea of indifference. But – is it possible to completely ignore taste when choosing objects? Human-beings are subjective characters and I believe it is basically impossible to separate oneself from likes or dislikes. Our subconsciousness will not play along. However, Duchamp got quite close to the artistic realization of visual indifference. An ordinary object could after all attain the status of areadymade merely by giving it a title and signature. Duchamp’s goal of desacrificing an artwork was attained – other people could buy it and it could easily be replaced. After buying his second readymade, a snow shovel which became known as In advance of the broken arm (Fig. 11), he wrote the following lines to his sister Suzanne in Paris. In this letter he first mentioned the term readymade. “Now, if you went up to my place you saw in my studio a bicycle wheel and a bottle rack. I had purchased this as a sculpture already made. And I have an idea concerning this bottle rack: Listen. Here in N.Y., I bought some objects in the same vein and I treat them as ‘readymade.’ You know English well enough to understand the sense of ‘ready made’ that I give these objects. I sign them and give them an English inscription. I’ll give you some examples: I have for example a large snow shovel upon which I wrote at the bottom: In advance of the broken arm, translation in French, En avance du bras cassé. Don’t try too hard to understand it in the Romantic or Impressionist or Cubist sense–that has nothing to do with it. Another ‘readymade’ is called: Emergency in favour of twice, possible translation in French: Danger (Crise) en faveur de 2 fois. This whole preamble in order to actually say: You take for yourself this bottle rack. I will make it a‘Readymade’ from a distance. You will have to write at the base and on the inside of the bottom ring in small letters painted with an oil-painting brush, in silver and white colour, the inscription that I will give you after this, and you will sign it in the same hand as follows: (from) Marcel Duchamp.”(161) click to enlarge Figure 12 Marcel Duchamp, Bottle Dryer, 1914 Duchamp had a clear notion about his readymades. Those objects he chose for readymades were easily to replace, under the premise that Duchamp signed them. Duchamp could make contracts with art dealers, authorizing them to make editions of his readymades: “10 $ for myBottle Dryer. If you’ve lost it, maybe buy another one at the Bazar de l’Hotel de Ville.”(162) Almost all original pieces actually got lost–among them the famousBottle Rack (Fig. 12) and the Bicycle Wheel, which had been both thrown out by Duchamp’s sister. She must have decided they were useless junk.(163) A similar fate befell Joseph Beuys’ Fat Wedgewhich was conscientiously scrubbed by the cleaning ladies. The fusion of art and life became more and more visible. Duchamp’s readymades were actually a denial of aesthetics and taste and had nothing to do with the artist, his consciousness or his autobiography. It was not anymore a question of visualization, but the simple fact that existed: “You don’t have to look at the readymade in order to respond to it. The readymade is practically invisible. It is a completely grey substance, anti-retinal, so to speak.”(164) Freeing oneself from likes and dislikes required an objective mind which was free from the ego. And yet, Duchamp emphasised his ego, by, for example saying that “everything in life is art. If I call it art, it’s art, or if I hang it in a museum, it’s art.”(165) It seems rather clear that Beuys, with his dictum that “Everyone is an artist” did not much sympathise with Duchamp. John Cage got closer to freeing himself from the ego by using chance operations. Moira Roth, in her essay “Marcel Duchamp in America” wrote in this respect that “The readymades are acts of a dandy’s arrogance. He, and he alone, can point to an object and make it art. He can do what he likes. He makes his own rules. Some critics, and even some artists, might like to imagine it, but the message from Duchamp’s readymades is clear: anything and everything does not constitute art, not is anyone and everyone an artist. Duchamp makes readymades. Other people do not.” (166) Roth’s interpretation of Duchamp’s readymades as products of a dandy’s arrogance seems to fit quite well into the whole context of Duchamp. Let us take the famous Fountain, for example. Duchamp took a porcelain urinal, turned it upside down and signed with the pseudonym – R. Mutt. The most banal of objects was made holy by a decision to place it in a museum–because HE chose it and HE signed it. Duchamp’s idea behind it was that “whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view–created a new thought for that object.”(167) Duchamp’sreadymades were not an expression of artistic skill but the result of the artist’s choice. TheFountain was rejected on the grounds that it was immoral. Consequently, Arensberg, one of Duchamp’s collectors and friends, responded to the sponsors by saying that “this is what the whole exhibit is about; an opportunity to allow the artist to send in anything he chooses, for the artist is to decide what is art, not someone else.”(168) click to enlarge Figure 13 Marcel Duchamp, Fountain , 1917 Duchamp’s reaction on the Fountain’s (Fig. 13) rejection was expectedly one of amusement. His urinal was out of question a deliberate provocation perfectly enacted. Duchamp attained the goal of desacrificing his works of art–however, he was far from desacrificing himself as an artist. Whereas theFountain played a supporting role, Duchamp was the main actor. “Some contended it was immoral, vulgar. Others it was plagiarism, a piece of plumbing. Now Mr. Mutt’s fountain is not immoral, that is absurd, not more than a bathtub is immoral. It is a fixture that you see every day in plumbers’ show windows.”(169) Strictly speaking, Duchamp’s statement was indeed justified, for he had simply taken an everyday object, decontexualised it and thus gave it a new meaning. What was vulgar about a common urinal? After all, it could even suggest something aesthetic–as one of Duchamp’s art collectors and friends had proved: “Arensberg had referred to a ‘lovely form’ and it does not take much stretching of the imagination to see in the upside-down urinal’s gently flowing curves the veiled head of a classic Renaissance Madonna or a seated Buddha (…).”(170) As a matter of fact, the Fountain as a symbol of sexuality that underlay most of Duchamp’s later work has been subject of endless speculations. The taste revolution undoubtedly reached its climax–and no one had been prepared to it already in 1917. I am slowly trying to get back to the starting point of this chapter where I philosophised about questions like “where is the border between art and non-art?” In the course of a historical analysis concerning the definition of art as well as my personal approach, I came to the (possibly possible) conclusion that the borders between art and ‘non-art’ are blurring. Both Duchamp’s and Cage’s artworks can be regarded as mirrors of a time where radical changes in all possible areas took place. This more or less universal explanation, however, is only one side of the coin. It would be rather paradoxical to find one generally valid interpretation of Duchamp’s and Cage’s highly complex as well as personal taste revolution. “I have never been able to do anything that was accepted straight off.” ¾Marcel Duchamp I believe that Duchamp’s taste revolution was primarily the result of his very personal protest against almost everything connected with art as an institution. He wanted to revolutionize the common understanding of art by turning all possible artistic conventions upside down. The following interview extract is only one of Duchamp’s bitterly sarcastic statements about the (then) current state of art: “The entire art scene is on so low a level, is so commercialised–art or anything to do with it is the lowest form of activity in this period. This century is one of the lowest points in the history of art, even lower than the 18th Century, when there was no great art, just frivolity. Twentieth century art is a mere light pastime, as though we were living in a merry period, despite all the wars we’ve had as part of the decoration. All artists since the time of Courbet had been ‘beasts’ and should be put in institutions for exaggerated egos. Why should artists’ egos be allowed to overflow and poison the atmosphere? Can’t you just smell the stench in the air?”(171) These words speak volumes about Duchamp, the confirmed anti-artist. His cynical expression is of such intensity that the outcome is simply Duchampian–in other words, bitterly sarcastic and amusing. In order to fight the war against all retinal artists he used weapons such as sarcasm and provocation. He refused to establish any art school as he refused tradition as a doctrine. Duchamp wished to break the aesthetic predominance of the past as he believed that the distinction between beautiful and ugly simply had been acquired. For Duchamp it was important not to be stereotyped in any way. He wanted to be free of tradition and of categorisation. Duchamp’s taste revolution was the product of a thoroughly convinced protest artist. I will keep in memory Duchamp, the artistic nihilist who could not yet live without creating works of art. Cage’s taste revolution, in contrast, was much more the product of an artist in constant search for self-expression. His life is an example of a multiplicity of interests. As a result of studying Zen Buddhism and Oriental philosophy, Cage’s work became an adventurous experience of dichotomies such as silence and sounds. Not only Zen inspired Cage to create artworks free from intention but an endless kaleidoscopic mixture of interior and exterior influences such as …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… . …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… . …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… . DAILYLIFE Mushrooms Marcel Duchamp……. Cage’s sense of humour and openness………….Arnold Schönberg DadaismMacrobiotics, Language, Jasper Johns, chance, Zen, Merce Cunningham, Visual Arts, Eric Satie, James Joyce……………………… Cage’s convictionoriginalityflexibilitydevotionhonestyint egrityaffability(172)……………………..Robert Rauschenberg, Buckminster Fuller, Chess, Anarchy, Theatre, Henry David Thoreau, Dance, Pedagogy, Literature, Ludwig Wittgenstein…………………..Oscar Wilde, Andy Warhol, White paintings, HIS Audience, Avant-garde, Bauhaus, The Large Glass…………………. Architecture, the Eastern comedic view of Life, Emptiness, Emotions, I-Ching or The Book of Changes, the Magic Square, Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake, Henry David, Chaos Theory, Cornish School, Meister Eckhart, Etant Donnés…………………….. Finnegan’s Wake, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Haikus, Hermann Hesse, Japanese culture, Marshall McLuhan, Mathematics, Number Systems, Realism, Nam June Paik, Ezra Pound, Pythagoras, Kurt Schwitters…………………………….. Spirituality, Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, Mark Tobey, Media, Utopianism, Surrealism, Walt Whitman, Zukofsky Paul, to name but a few …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… . …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… . …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… . …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… . …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… . …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… . I guess this list could be stretched to …..an infinite number of pages but I do Not Intend to Waste your time any Longer. IN case you still have some time left ………….you are warmly welcome to philosophise about this Cage quotation………………. “Which is more musical: A truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?”(173) ####PAGES#### 6. A visit in the Virtual DuCage Museum An imaginative meeting with Works of Ducage I am sitting somewhere in a stuffy room in a Museum of Modern Art. Tired of all the impressions, of the numerous paintings and sculptures I have already observed. The cosy bench in the middle of the exhibition room is apparently there for people who want to observe some paintings in elaborate detail. I guess I am not one of the pseudo art connoisseurs who sit on this bench to discuss with their partner about the revealing colour ‘distribution’ of Jackson Pollock’s Number 4. I find it more interesting to hear the wooden floor cracking as a middle-aged couple enters the room. My head feels in a dubious state; I feel like leaving the museum and yet wish to stay to watch people watching. The couple is walking through the room as soon as they have entered. The artworks apparently did not appeal to them. Which artworks? I have not yet paid attention to the objects that are all around me. Too tired to focus my attention on any painting or one of those small printed plates which contain loads of information on the artist and the work itself. I am turning my head a little so that I get an elusive overview of the works of art surrounding me. click to enlarge Figure 14 Something unidentifiable has focused my attention and overthrown my tiredness. Looks like a huge window divided in two that has been deliberately cracked and then fixed again. (Fig. 14) On the glass there are weird technical drafts. Big question mark……My eyes are slowly wandering to the window behind and the life outside. The church bell is already ringing a loud and clear 5th time. I can perceive a young mother eagerly trying to catch her son who is running away from her. She is wearing high heels which make it almost impossible to catch up with the runaway. The boy and his mother disappear. My eyes are wandering back to the strange object. The second time I watch it, it seems already familiar. The upper half of the glass is somehow more artistic than the lower one which reminds me of a technical draft of whatever. I like the three ‘windows’ on the very top of the upper half. A frame on a frame….it is like featuring a TV on TV…have you seen the movie Pleasantville? The three ‘windows’ tempt me to watch beyond the glass a second time. This time, however, I am focusing my attention on the mysterious glass. Do not misunderstand me – I do not ‘like’ this art-object – after all I would not say it’s beautiful, though it’s not ugly either. It’s simply there. One could object now that everything in this museum is ‘there’. That’s right. But the other paintings hanging on the white walls are not sui for tired museum visitors like me. They call for attention. The glass is different. I am walking around a little and observe the glass from a different angle. It looks different from behind – I can see through it the painting on the opposite wall. Now I know – it’s the unobtrusiveness that makes the glass somehow special for me. The fact that it’s there and yet seems to dissolve in the background….it can be looked at and looked through at the same time….the glass encourages me to see the world behind. And the world somehow looks different through it. I have never had such an experience in a museum. “Use ‘delay’ instead of picture or painting…It’s merely a way of succeeding in no longer thinking that the thing in question is a picture … to make a delay of it in the most general way possible, not so much in the different meanings in which delay can be taken, but rather in their indecisive reunion.”(174) —Marcel Duchamp This is how Duchamp referred to The Large Glass or better The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even in one of his working notes that he collected in The Green Box. He meant it to be a “delay” instead of a picture. Delay…does this make any sense? Delay: make or be slow or late (be delayed by traffic); put off until later (delay a journey)(175). Maybe Duchamp simply opened his dictionary and chose first term his eyes spotted – or delay was meant as one of Duchamp’s numerous wordplays: “One Duchampian has suggested that it be read as an anagram for ‘lad(e)y,’ so that “delay in glass” becomes glass lady.”(176) Whatever the case, he managed well to keep the secret. The Large Glass is probably Duchamp’s most complex and mysterious artwork and has been subjected to endless analysis. As with Duchamp’s most statements on his artworks, his notes published in The Green Box are very hard if not impossible to decode and leave much space for speculation. Duchamp wanted to leave the door open, for in his mind, the spectator ultimately finished the artwork by observing and interpreting it. Or he did not want us to understand The Glass at all. Duchamp would have probably commented on the numerous speculations on his masterpiece “there is no solution as there is no problem.”(177) I am sure that he would have been quite amused at the endless number of interpretation attempts. “All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone. The spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.”(178) Marcel Duchamp Unfortunately I have not yet seen the Large Glass in the Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art – unless in my imagination. When observing pictures of The Glass, I do not focus my attention on any of the objects resembling the bride or the bachelor – nor am I tempted to find out about the meanings of the individual elements…The central message for me is the medium of the artwork itself – that is the glass. The glass as a strong contrast to the traditional paintings drawn on canvasses. I like the idea of an artwork that can be looked at and looked through at the same time. The experience of looking at or beyond the glass is an endless one. Whatever is beyond the painting – it looks different when seen through the cracked glass. In fact, it is not only the environment which is in constant change, but also the artwork itself. The life outside the museum window becomes art – interpenetration of art and life. Thus, the experience of observing an artwork is an unexpected and unique one. Cage, in his interview with Joan Retallack commented on the Large Glass: “The experience of being able to look through the glass and see the rest of the world is the experience of not knowing where the work ends. It doesn’t end. In fact it goes into life.”(179) The elements depicted on the glass are not beautiful nor ugly – but rather indifferent and thus do not much focus the viewer’s attention. Duchamp remarked that “every image in the glass is there for a purpose and nothing is put in to fill a blank space or to please the eye.”(180) His message is clear: Duchamp, as a consequence of ‘unlearning to draw’, wanted to create an artwork which was completely anti- retinal and free of artistic tradition. Besides using glass instead of a canvas, he worked with unconventional materials such as lead foil and wires. I found it quite interesting that Duchamp never actually ‘finished’ his masterpiece. He remarked that “it may be subconsciously I never intended to finish it because the word ‘finish’ implies an acceptance of traditional methods and all the paraphernalia that accompany them.”(181) It is up to us to ultimately ‘finish’ his Large Glass. Duchamp’s wish to escape the prison of tradition is not something we are unfamiliar with. He wanted to find a way of expressing himself without being a painter or a writer, without taking one of these labels and yet producing something that would be a product of himself. As Duchamp meant it to be, The Glass is far from retinal as it represents a complex subject which cannot possibly be decoded by simply looking at the artwork. The process of thinking, according to Duchamp, is more significant than the artistic result. If that was the case – why wouldn’t he have wanted to make his ideas as clear as possible? We must at least read Duchamp’s notes or statements and even then we are confronted with the cryptic nature of this artwork. Who would guess an act of love behind the weird mechanical elements of theBride? One could never suspect the subject of sexual desire from simply looking at TheGlass. Duchamp left us behind some more or less abstruse indications in his Green Boxnotes: “The Bride is basically a motor. This bride runs on love gasoline which is ignited in a two-stroke cycle. The first stroke, or explosion, is generated by the bachelors through an electrical stripping whose action Duchamp compares to the image of a motor car climbing a slope in low gear…while slowly accelerating, as if exhausted by hope, the motor of the car turns faster and faster, until it roars triumphantly.”(182) It is not hard to guess from Duchamp’s formulation that the subject of the Bride is nothing else than the sexual intercourse. However, I do not intend to analyse Duchamp’s notes or statements nor am I interested in reflecting on the numerous interpretations written on Duchamp’s complex masterpiece. I have already commented on my personal interpretation of the artwork and thus believe that I cannot contribute anything more to the endless number of interpretation attempts. My readers, however, can…as every person responds in his own way. Listen to Duchamp’s ‘theory’ how in his mind works of art become works of art: “A work of art exists only when the spectator has looked at it. Until then it is only something that has been done, that might disappear and nobody would know about it, but the spectator consecrates it by saying this is good, we will keep it, and the spectator in that case becomes posterity, and posterity keeps museums full of paintings today. My impression is that these museums – call it the Prado, call it the National Gallery, call it the Louvre – are only receptacles of things that have survived, probably mediocrity. Because they happen to have survived is no reason to make them so important and big and beautiful, and there is no justification for that label of beautiful. They have survived. Why have they survived? It is not because they are beautiful. It is because they have survived by the law of chance. We probably have lot many, many other artists of those same periods who are as beautiful or even more beautiful…”(183) It is our responsibility if an artwork is worth preserving or not. According to Duchamp, a work of art is incomplete until it has been seen and thought about by one or more spectators.(184) We are no longer passive observers but part of the creative process – as the artist himself. Cage’s idea of blurring the distinction between audience and performer was a different one than Duchamp’s. Cage, more than Duchamp was interested in actively incorporating the audience into his art – I am thinking now I particular of Cage’s Silent piece. Cage said that “the performance should make clear to the listener that the hearing of the piece is his own action – that the music, so to speak is his, rather than the composer’s.”(185)The performer’s responsibility thus shifted from self-expression to opening a window for the sounds of the environment. Cage wished to create a music that was performed by everyone. In Cage’s performance of 4’33”, it was actually the audience that was ‘performing’ by contributing sounds such as whispers and coughs. He wanted his music to be free of his own likes and dislikes and let the audience feel that ‘silent music’ was more interesting than the music they would hear if they went into a concert hall.(186) Cage, as a result of welcoming everything that was non-intentional and natural, aimed at creating a music that was a mixture of all sounds the environment and audience offered him. Cage’s ideas of incorporating the audience into his live performances are vividly expressed in numerous interviews. I believe his statements do not need any further explanation – instead, they rather speak for themselves. His interviews are a real pleasure to read. “I think perhaps my own best piece, at least the one I like the most, is the silent piece – 4’33”, 1952. It has three movements and in all of the movements there are no sounds. I wanted my work to be free of my own likes and dislikes, because I think music should be free of the feelings and ideas of the composer. I have felt and hoped to have led other people to feel that the sounds of their environment constitute a music which is more interesting than the music which they would hear if they went into a concert hall.”(187) “More and more in my performances, I try to bring about a situation in which there is no difference between the audience and the performers. And I’m not speaking of audience participation in something designed by the composer, but rather I am speaking of the music that arises through the activity of both performers and the so-called audience.”(188) “Well, music is not just composition, but it is performance, and it is listening. The Amplification of those cards, though it was high, almost at the level of Feedback – which we heard now and then – produced sounds that were still so Quiet that one could hear the audience as performers too. And I’m sure that they noticed that themselves. You noticed, for Instance, the man in The Back who was having trouble with his digestion. And I would hear many different kinds of coughing and I’m sure that people heard those themselves as sounds, rather than as interruptions. I hope, and I’ve hoped this now for thirty years, when I make music that it won’t interrupt the silence which already exists. And that silence includes coughs. I thought the Audience behaved/Performed beautifully, because they didn’t intend to cough – they were obliged to cough; the Cough had its own thought, interpenetrated – nothing obstructing anything Else.”(189) “I just performed Muoyce which is a whispered version of my Writing for the Fifth Time Through Finnegan’s Wake, and it was done in Frankfurt. It lasts for two and a half hours. Klaus Schöning of Hörspiel WDR told the audience which was large, about four or five hundred Joyce scholars, that the doors were open; that once the performance began, they could leave as they wish, and that they could also come back if they wanted. After twenty minutes, they began to leave, and he told me later that only about half of the audience was there at the end. So I think that the work is still irritating. People think, perhaps, that they are no longer irritated, but they still have great difficulty paying attention to something they don’t understand. I think that the division is between understanding and experiencing, and many people think that art has to do with understanding, but it doesn’t. It has to do with experience; and if you understand something, then you walk out once you get the point because you don’t want the experience. You don’t want to be irritated. So they leave, and they say the avant- garde doesn’t exist. But the avant-garde continues, and it is experience.”(190) …I am feeling a bit dizzy of all the writing right now and decide to turn on my CD-player. My friend has recently recorded some John Cage pieces for me. Among them Music for Marcel Duchamp, 4’33” and Imaginary Landscape I do not really know what to expect – yet I have some vague ideas what Cage could sound like. A frenzy huggermugger of sounds and noises is what first comes to my mind….I won’t speculate any longer, I’ll press the play button….The first piece sounds a bit silent; must be 4’33”… I am curious if I can perceive any background noises, but I don’t. At least I have been waiting in expectation for exactly 4 minutes and 33 seconds. Cage well managed to keep me curious for this period of time ;)…..The next piece reminds me a bit of a dramatic scene in a horror film. The music gets faster and faster….. My heart feels like bumping in the same rhythm as the music. It makes me feel nervous. At the point it reaches its climax, the piece unexpectedly ends…….The following track sounds, I would say, totally un-cagean…..harmony pure. This is what the beginnings of electronic music must have sounded like. The music permits me to slowly familiarise with it….Cage was apparently working with compositional tools such as repetition….and, believe it or not, the result sounds harmonious. Probably unintentional harmony. I would say that this is the first piece which permits me to think of something else than the music I am listening to. It does not completely take me in……Cage’s pieces are rather short in length…think I need a short break now in order to ‘digest’ this cagean music experience…..The next track starts with a sound I can hardly endure. Reminds me of an extremely boisterous aeroplane departure…. that suddenly turns into a vacuum cleaner noise. If we were able to receive all frequencies surrounding us, it would assumedly sound like this. The music is increasing in loudness and intensity that I have to skip to the following track………Relief…….The piece I am now listening to sounds like a conversation between two instruments. The one is a dominant cello, the other a timid bell. As different as they may be, they seem to be fond of each other. I begin to like the constant changes in rhythm…they bring about a sense of dramatic tension and yet a touch of playfulness. …I think I will now leave the Cagean music experience in order to reflect… I would very much like to place myself in the position of being a spectator in Cage’s performance of 4’33”, but I think that it is impossible at least at the time. I have ‘listened’ to it on tape and unfortunately could not perceive any of the background noises. I don’t think, however, that the actual experience of having been ‘real’ part of the audience is what truly matters here. It is rather the idea behind the work which becomes part of our awareness once we have been acquainted with Cage’s philosophy. That is of course also the case with Duchamp. Listening to Cage has been an exciting adventure. He offered me everything ranging from….complete silence, quiet harmony, refreshing sound……to unbearable noise. You never know what to expect when listening to Cage. My mind is wandering back to my virtual experience of Duchamp’sLarge Glass……it permitted me to see the world beyond the artwork. Total blurring of the distinction between art and life. Cage’s music left a different impression on me. Most of his music pieces, except of course his Silent piece, completely absorbed me. When listening to Cage’s pieces I was too involved in the musical experience in order to immerse in a different world. Too much intensity of sounds…..and thus little transparency. Cage wanted to incorporate environmental sounds into his music. The sounds we hear every day on the street do not have a distracting effect on us as we are used to them. However, we are not used to Cage’s intensification of these sounds. In my view, the blurring of the distinction between art and life did not work out in all of Cage’s music pieces – at least when listening to the recorded version. I can, of course, only speak about my subjective music experience – I suppose that it would be an entirely different experience if I were able to listen and watch his music in a concert hall. After all it should be considered that his pieces were originally not intended to be listened on CD or tape. Duchamp, however, did not either constantly manage to realise his conception of breaking down the barriers between art and life. His last masterpiece, Etant donnés, is the exact reverse of the Large Glass. This disturbing and provocative work presents a startingly realistic nude made of leather and reclining on a bed of leaves in front of a mechanical waterfall. She is only visible through two peepholes in a massive wooden door. “In 1943 Duchamp rented a studio on the top floor of a building in New York City. While everyone believed that Duchamp had given up “art,” he was secretly constructing this au, begun in 1946, which was not completed until 1966. The full title of the piece is:Given: 1 The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas. It consists of an old wooden door, bricks, velvet, twigs gathered by Duchamp on his walks in the park, leather stretched over a metal armature of a female form, glass, linoleum, an electric motor, etc. Duchamp prepared a “Manual of Instructions” in a 4-ring binder which explains and illustrates the process of assembling/disassembling the piece. It was not revealed to the public until July of 1969, (several months after Duchamp’s death), when it was permanently installed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. No photographs of the interior of the piece or of the notebook of instructions were allowed to be published by the museum for at least 15 years. The viewer of the piece first steps onto a mat in front of the door, which activates the lights, motor, etc., and then peers through two “peepholes” to view the construction behind the door. The voyeurstrains, unsuccessfully, to see the “face” of the eerily realistic nude female form which lies supine on a bed of twigs, illuminated gas lamp in hand. In the distance, a sparkling waterfall shimmers, backlit by a flickering light, part of a realistically rendered landscape painting on glass.”(191) It seems rather hard for me to imagine what feelings a real encounter with Etant Donnéswould evoke in me. After looking at the black and white reproductions, I had the impression that this artwork represented everything Duchamp so vehemently refused: it is far from anti-retinal – the nude lies there, fully exposed and opened by the position of her legs. In contrast to the Large Glass where the viewer can look at and through it from any angle, he is restricted to a particular position – we can only see the artwork through the peephole in the wooden door; the way Duchamp prescribed it. Duchamp’s Manual of Instructions for Etant Donnés again prescribes step for step how to take the artwork apart and put it back together. No room for interpretation for those who install it. When I think of Etant Donnés, I see a big question mark. To me it seems that Duchamp, the confirmed anti-artist tried in vain to keep up his anti- (quite everything) attitude throughout his life. Etant Donnés is after all the best example for a very retinal artwork. His numerous self- contradicting statements give evidence of a character who was not thoroughly convinced of himself as an anti-artist. The following statement made by Duchamp reveals quite a lot in this respect: “I have forced to contradict myself in order to avoid confirmation to my own tastes.”(192)This line may also express Duchamp’s ‘gap’ in maintaining the blurring of the distinction between art and life. Who knows, maybe Etant Donnés was Duchamp’s only ‘honest’ artwork. I believe, however that there is not only one possibility of realizing the blurring of art and life. Maybe Etant Donnés contributed as much to the blurring as the Large Glass. Duchamp probably wanted the spectator not immediately to see the ‘retinal’ aspects of his artwork, but rather what is ‘behind’ it. The ‘behind’ I am thinking of in particular, is the artists’ life, his biography. In Etant Donnés, Duchamp undoubtedly expressed suppressed emotions for a woman he had been in love with before he got married to his second wife. Maria Martins was a woman who would not give up her marriage for Duchamp. Maybe, inEtant Donnés he saw her in a figurative sense raped by her husband. In my view, the lamp she holds in her hand symbolizes a mute cry for help. She cries in vain, for she is locked up behind the heavy wooden door. There is no right or wrong when it comes to interpreting artworks – in the end there are only speculations. Cage quite interestingly commented on his friends’ last masterwork: “I can only see what Duchamp permits me to see. The Large Glass changes with the light and he was aware of this. So does any painting. ButEtant Donnés doesn’t change because it is all prescribed. So he’s telling us something that we perhaps haven’t yet learned, when we speak as we do so glibly of the blurring of the distinction between art and life. Or perhaps he’s bringing us back to Thoreau: yes and no are lies. Or keeping the distinction, he may be saying neither one is true. The only true answer is that which will let us have both of these.”(193) Cage’s quotation once again brings us back to the title of this project – the blurring of the distinction between art and life. Both Duchamp and Cage pivotally contributed to this blurring by realizing unique ideas in this direction – however, it also turned out to be an endless enterprise. It is now up to us to continue their project………. ####PAGES#### 7.“That is a very good question. I do not want to spoil it with an answer” (194) Some Final Remarks This quotation is taken from Cage’s afternote to his Lecture on Nothing which is part of his book Silence. After delivering his Lecture on Nothing, “he prepared six answers for the first six questions asked, regardless of what they were.”(195)“That is a very good question. I do not want to spoil it with an answer” is one of them. Cage’s amusing idea originated from the belief that a discussion is nothing more than an entertainment. Cage, as a result of using chance operations in his music, made his responsibility that of asking questions instead of giving answers and making choices. He was not much interested in giving answers as well as in receiving definite answers – as the nature of Cage’s friendship with Duchamp well demonstrated. Experience, in Cage’s mind, was much more important than understanding. Duchamp, on the other hand, made every effort to make his art mysterious. He was not either interested in giving ultimate answers as he believed that the creative act was a joint effort by the artist and the spectator. I am introducing the final paragraphs of my paper with the analysis of a quotation that I believe is quite apt to ‘finish’ the never ending circle of the DuCage experience. Both Duchamp and Cage demonstrated with their artworks that there is much space for the spectator’s experience and curiosity. They do not offer ultimate answers but leave much space for our own imagination. Like Duchamp and Cage, I am not concerned here with an ultimate answer or ‘summary’ of my project. I see no point in writing a ‘summary’ after having studied those two artists. It would at least seem rather paradoxical to me. Instead, I would like to leave you with the voices of Duchamp and Cage as a ‘stepping stone’ for your own imagination: “People took modern art very seriously when it first reached America because they believed we took ourselves very seriously (…) A great deal of modern art is meant to be amusing. If Americans would simply remember their own sense of humour instead of listening to the critics, modern art will come into its own.”(196) —Marcel Duchamp “This is also for me the effect of modern painting on my eyes, so when I go around the city I look, I look at the walls….and I look at the pavement and so forth as though I’m in a museum or in a gallery. In other words, I don’t turn my aesthetic faculties off when I’m outside a museum or gallery.”(197) —John Cage ……………………………………………Why did I choose these two quotations?……………………… I believe that many people associate with modern art something that is worldly innocent, something that has nothing to do with their reality. After having had the possibility to immerse in the world of DuCage, I am not so sure if there is a difference between art and the life around us. Art, for them, was normality – it was a part of their life as was the street they were living in. Museums then, would symbolize nothing else than life – or we may also change this expression like a parable – namely that life is one big museum… Isn’t every single artwork simply an emotional expression of an individual? If that is so, isn’t then art all about the capability of interpreting the things that are going on around us? I believe it is enough if we try to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. This is what being a glass wanderer is all about. Bibliography(198) Baruchello, Gianfran co and Martin Henry. Warum Weshalb Wozu Duchamp. Klagenfurt: Ritter,1993. Bischof, Ulrike et al. Kunst als Grenzbeschreitung – John Cage und die Moderne. Düsseldorf: Richter- Verlag, 1992. Bianco, Paolo und Doswald Christoph. Andy Warhol – Joseph Beuys. Gegenspieler. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2000. Cabanne, Pierre. Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp. London: Paperback, 1988. Cabanne, Pierre. Duchamp & Co. Paris: Terrail, 1997. Cage, John. Silence. Middletown/Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1967. Cage, John. M-Writings ’67-’72. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1973. Cage, John. A Year from Monday. Lectures and Writings. London: Marion Boyars, 1985. Cage, John. X-Writings ’79-’82. Middletown: Wesleyan Paperback, 1986. Cage, John. Composition in Retrospect. Cambridge/MA: Exact Change, 1993. Cage, John. The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. Cambridge/MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Charles Daniel. For the Birds – John Cage in Conversation with Daniel Charles. London : Marion Boyars, 1995. Charles Daniel. John Cage oder Die Musik ist los. Berlin: Merve Verlag, 1979. Daniels, Dieter. Duchamp und die Anderen. Köln : DuMont Buchverlag, 1992. De Duve, Thierry.Kant after Duchamp. Cambridge/MA: MIT Press, 1996. D’Harnoncourt, Anne and McShine Kynaston. Marcel Duchamp. New York : Prestel, 1989. D’Harnoncourt, Anne et al. Joseph Cornell/Marcel Duchamp…in Resonance. Houston: Cantz, 1998. Duchamp, Marcel. A l’Infinitif. The Typosophic Society. Over Wallop/UK: BAS printers, 1999. Fetz, Wolfgang, Hrsg. Sommerprojekte Bregenz 1998. Kunst in der Stadt 2. Bregenz: Teutsch, 1998. Fetz, Wolfgang, Hrsg.L’Art est Inutile. Avantgardekunst/Arte D’Avanguardia 1960 – 1980. Bregenz : Hecht Druck, 1993. Geddes & Grosset. Dictionary of Art. New Lanark/Scotland: Brockhampton Press, 1995. Gena, Peter and Brent Jonathan.A John Cage Reader. New York: C.F. Peters Higgins, 1998. Glasmeier, Michael und Hartel, Gaby, Hrsg. Beckett, Samuel. Das Gleiche noch mal Anders. Texte zur Bildenden Kunst. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2000. Gough-Cooper, Jennifer et al.Marcel Duchamp. London : Thames and Hudson, 1993. Hauskeller, Michael. Was ist Kunst? Positionen der Ästhetik von Platon bis Danto. München: C.H. Beck, 1998. Kandinsky, Wassily. Essays über Kunst und Künstler. Bern: Benteli Verlag, 1973. Kostelanetz, Richard, ed. Conversing with Cage. New York: Limelight Editions, 1988. Kostelanetz, Richard, ed. John Cage. London: Penguin, 1971. Klotz, Heinrich. Kunst im 20. Jahrhundert. Moderne – Postmoderne – Zweite Moderne. München: C.H. Beck, 1999. Kotte, Wouter. Marcel Duchamp als Zeitmaschine. Köln: Walther König, 1987. Naumann, Francis and Obalk Hector, ed. Affectionately Marcel: The Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp. Ghent: Ludion Press, 2000. Perloff, Majorie et al. John Cage. Composed in America. Chicago: University Chicago Press, 1994. Retallack, Joan, ed. Musicage – Cage muses on Words, Art, Music. John Cage in Conversation with Joan Retallack. Hanover/NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1996. Revill, David. The Roaring Silence. John Cage: A Life. London: Bloomsbury, 1992. Rodin, Auguste. Die Kunst. Gespräche des Meisters. Zürich: Diogenes, 1979. Roth, Moira and Katz D. Jonathan. Difference/Indifference. Musings on Postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage. Amsterdam: G + B Arts International, 1998. Rotzler, Willi. Objektkunst. Von Duchamp bis zur Gegenwart. Köln: DuMont Buchverlag, 1981. Ruhrberg, Karl. Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts. Malerei, Skulpturen und Objekt, Neue Medien, Fotografie. Köln: Benedikt Taschen Verlag, 2000. Stauffer, Serge, Hrsg. Marcel Duchamp. Interviews und Statements. Stuttgart : Cantz, 1991. Stauffer, Serge, Hrsg. Marcel Duchamp. Die Schriften. Zürich: Regenbogen-Verlag, 1981. Stein, Gertrude. Everybody’s Autobiography. New York: Random House, 1964. Stein, Gertrude. Was sind Meisterwerke? Zürich: Die Arche, 1962. Tomkins, Calvin. Duchamp. A Biography. New York: Henry Holt, 1996. Tomkins, Calvin. The Bride & the Bachelors. New York: Penguin/Viking, 1965. Wellershoff, Dieter. Die Auflösung des Kunstbegriffs. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1981. More Resources Tout-fait – The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal #3 www.toutfait.com The Museum of Contemporary Art. Rolywholyover – A Circus. Los Angeles: 1993. Microsoft Encarta ’95. The Complete Interactive Multimedia Encyclopedia. 1995 Edition. Leo Truchlar – Lecture Script Special thanks to ….Sweet Surprise Postcards © John Gavin Gillard Websit https://www.freshwidow.com/etant-donnes2.htm l https://www.english.upenn.edu/??afilreis/88/ cage-quotes.html https://www.freshwidow.com/duchampsources.ht ml https://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/cage/ ……….and finally……Thanks…… for more inspiration to: my best friend Markus for not losing patience in endless discussions and his inspiring piano music my parents for distracting me now and then; Mr. Truchlar for granting me so much freedom and space; Christoph; Dido, Sinéad O’Connor, Era and The Beautiful South for their inspiring music. ####PAGES#### More Resources 1. Richard Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage (New York: Limelight Editions, 1988) 211. 2. Moira Roth & William Roth, “John Cage on Marcel Duchamp”, in Difference/Indifference-Musings on Postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage (Amsterdam: G+B Arts, 1998) 72. 3. Serge Stauffer, Marcel Duchamp (Stuttgart: Edition Cantz, 1992) 29. 4. Ibid. 14. 5. I am referring here to a lecture held by Prof. Truchlar, teaching Americanliterature at the University of Salzburg–however, Cage’s ideas concerning education can be read in Richard Kostelanetz’s Conversing with Cage. 6. Calvin Tomkins,Duchamp, A biography (New York: Henry Holt, 1996) 127. 7. Kostelanetz 91. 8. Roth, Difference/Indifference 73. 9. Roth 80. 10. John Cage, “An Autobiographical Statement”–first appeared in the Southwest Review, 1991. I found it reprinted in the Web: https://www.newalbion.com/artists/cagej/autobiog.h tml 11. SEE NOTE AT THE END OF THE ESSAY 12. I read Cézanne’s quotation on this year’s Harenberg tear-off calender (8th September). I found his thoughts quite interesting in contrast to Duchamp’s idea of desacrificing art. 13. Tomkins 42. 14. Original title: Wassily Kandinsky, Essays über Kunst und Künstler (Zürich: Benteli, 1955). Kandinsky’s book inspired me a great deal before I started my readings on Cage and Duchamp. He expressed many ideas which strongly reminded me of Cage’s and Duchamp’s philosophy. I can imagine that in view to the books’ popularity (it first appeared in 1911) both artists must have sooner or later come across it. 15. Roth, “Marcel Duchamp in America,” in Difference/Indifference 22. 16. Roth, “John Cage on Marcel Duchamp” 76. 17. Wouter Kotte, Marcel Duchamp als Zeitmaschine (Köln: Walther König, 1987) 36/37. 18. Wolfgang Fetz, Kunst in der Stadt 2 (Bregenz: Teutsch, 1998) x -no page reference. 19. Tomkins 116. 20. Ibid. 142. 21. Stauffer, Marcel Duchamp 45/46. 22. Tomkins 408. 23. Cage, A year from Monday 70. Cage obviously referred to a joint work by Duchamp and Man Ray calledDust Breeding–“A glass panel which had been lying flat on sawhorses collecting dust. The resulting image was like a lunar landscape (…) Duchamp later fixed the dust with varnish on the sieves.” (Tomkins p. 229) –another, probably even more relevant explanation could be Duchamp’s “story of his 2 studios.” Cage recalled, “He had 2 studios. One was the one he was working in and the other was the one where he had stopped working. So that if anyone came to visit him they went into the studio where he wasn’t working, and there everything was covered with dust. So the idea was spread around that he was no longer working. And you had proof of it! –dust collected where he worked (laughs).” (Joan Retallack, Musicage p. 111) 24. Tomkins 236. 25. Roth, “John Cage on Marcel Duchamp” 82. 26. Stauffer 85. 27. Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (London: Paperback, 1988) 8. 28. Roth, “John Cage on Marcel Duchamp” 76. 29. Roth 82. 30. Tomkins 270. 31. Francis N. Naumann ed., Affectionately Marcel: The selected correspondence of Marcel Duchamp (Ghent: Ludion Press, 2000) 212. 32. Roth 77. 33. Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp 67. 34. Tomkins 157. 35. Ibid. 93. 36. Ibid. 15. 37. Tomkins 113. 38. Roth 23. 39. Ibid. 17. 40. Tomkins 141/142. 41. Tomkins 143. 42. Ibid. 152. 43. This ‘mesostic’ about Duchamp was published in Cage’sM–writings ’67-’72 (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1973) 34. 44. “Duchamp, Marcel,” Microsoft (R) Encarta. Copyright (c) 1994 Microsoft Corporation. Copyright (c) 1994 Funk & Wagnall’s Corporation. 45. John Cage, Quotations found in the Web: https://www.english.upenn.edu/??afilreis/88/cage-q uotes.html 46. “Cage, John Milton, Jr.,” Microsoft (R) Encarta. Copyright (c) 1994 Microsoft Corporation. Copyright (c) 1994 Funk & Wagnall’s Corporation. 47. Tomkins 330/331. 48. Kostelanetz, 11. 49. John Cage, A Year from Monday- Lectures and Writings (London: Calder & Boyars Ltd, 1968) 71. 50. Roth 74. 51. Ibid. 73. 52. Stauffer 201. 53. John Cage, A year from Monday 70. 54. Ibid. 31. 55. Ibid. 56. Tomkins 411. 57. Ibid. 91. 58. Tomkins 176. 59. Anne d’Harnoncourt, “Paying attention” in Rolywholyover-A Circus (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1993). 60. I would recommend this to anyone who is interested in enjoying a live interview with Cage. I found it in the Internet: https://www.2street.com/joyce/gallery/roaratorio.h tml 61. Cage, A year from Monday x (Foreword). 62. Tomkins, 151. 63. John Cage, M-Writings ’67-’72 (Middletown: Wesleyan, 1973) 27. 64. Roth, “Marcel Duchamp in America“ 19. 65. Tomkins 231. 66. Ibid. 282. 67. Ibid. 214. 68. Roth, “John Cage on Marcel Duchamp“ 78. 69. Tomkins 290. 70. David Revill, The Roaring Silence. John Cage: A Life (London: Bloomsbury, 1992) 214. 71. Roth 74. 72. Ibid. 73. Cage, For the birds 168. 74. Jennifer Gough-Cooper & Jaques Caumont, Ephemerides on and about Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Sélavy 1887-1968 (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd, 1993) no page references! 75. Erratum Musical is a musical composition which was Duchamp’s first implementation of chance–Duchamp jotted down the notes as he drew them out of a hat; he was supposed to sing the resulting score with his two sisters, Yvonne and Magdeleine. 76. Kostelanetz, 18. 77. Tomkins 253 78. Ibid. 211. 79. Roth 81. 80. Francis N. Naumann , Affectionately Marcel 321. 81. Kostelanetz 5. 82 Ibid. 83. Laura Kuhn, “John Cage in the Social Realm“ in Rolywholyover-A Circus. 84. Cage, A year from Monday 61. 85. Kostelanetz 5. 86. Cage, Biography in Rolywholyover-A Circus. 87. Kostelanetz 89. 88. Cage, For the Birds 226. 89. John Cage,Silence (Middletown/Connecticut: Wesleyan, 1967) 276. 90. I must smile at this point–a good friend repeatedly told me in high school that no matter what I write about, I always include John Lennon. It seems as if I hold up to this tradition ;)) John Lennon and Yoko Ono were friends of Cage and sent him six cookbooks on macrobiotics. 91. John Cage, Macrobiotics Recipes , in Rolywholyover – A Circus (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1993). 92. Revill 259. 93. Daniel Charles, For the Birds-John Cage in conversation with Daniel Charles (London: Marion Boyars, 1995) 74. 94. Kostelanetz 30. 95. Daniel Charles, For the Birds 233. 96. Cage, Macrobiotic Recipes in Rolywholyover-A Circus. 97. Anne d’Harnoncourt, “Paying Attention” in Rolywholyover-A Circus. 98 Cage, A year from Monday 70. 99. Revill 230. 100. Cage, M – Writings ’67 – ’72 34. 101. Anne d’Harnoncourt, “Paying Attention“ in Rolywholyover-A Circus. 102. Cage, Introductory Notes in Rolywholyover-A Circus. 103. Cage, X-writings ’79 – ’82 54. 104. Interview Roaratorio. 105. Roth, “John Cage on Marcel Duchamp” 74. 106. Roth 73. 107. D’Harnoncourt, “Paying Attention“ in Rolywholyover-A Circus 108. Quotation by Harry S. Truman 109. Cabanne 11. 110. Roth, “Marcel Duchamp in America“ 27 111. Michael Hauskeller, Was ist Kunst? Positionen der Ästhetik von Platon bis Danto (München: C.H. Beck, 1998) 11. 112. Ibid. 22. 113. Fetz, Kunst in der Stadt 2 x. 114. Those insights are a derived from a mixture of sources such asBrockhampton’s Reference Dictionary of Art (London: Brockhampton Press, 1995) and Microsoft Encarta ’95. 115. Arthur C. Danto, “Marcel Duchamp and the end of taste: A defence of contemporary art” (Tout-fait The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal #3) https://www.toutfait.com/issues/issue_3/News/Danto /danto.html 116. Thierry De Duve, Kant after Duchamp (London: MIT Press, 1996) 3. 117. Gough-Cooper,Ephemerides (reference to be found under 18th March 1912). 118. Tomkins 117. 119. Tomkins 117. 120. Ibid. 79. 121. Ibid. 127. 122. Cage, Quotations 123. David Revill, The Roaring Silence (London: Bloomsbury, 1992) 164. 124. John Cage, The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990) 26. 125. Joan Retallack,Musicage (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1996) 91. 126. Cage, A conversation on Roaratorio (1976/79): https://www.2street.com/joyce/gallery/roaratorio.h tml 127. Julie Lazar, “Nothingtoseeness“ in Rolywholyover – A Circus. 128. Revill 69. 129. Ibid. 70. 130. Roth 2. 131. Kostelanetz, 120. 132. Ibid. 215. 133. Cage, A Year from Monday ix. 134. Cage, An Autobiographical Statement 3. 135. Calvin Tomkins, The Bride & the Bachelors (New York: Penguin/Viking 1965) 100. 136. Ulrike Bischoff (Hrsg.), Kunst als Grenzbeschreitung John Cage und die Moderne (München: Richter Verlag, 1991) 89. 137. Kostelanetz 231. 138. Ibid. 232. 139. Charles, For the birds 227. 140. Charles 42. 141. Ibid. 91. 142. Kostelanetz 211. 143. Cage, A Year from Monday 31 144. Thanks to my friend who is very much into Stephen Hawking and physics. If you are interested in finding out more about the Chaos Theory, I would recommend Hawking’s well known The Illustrated Brief History of Time. 145. Cage, Silence 195. 146. Charles, For the Birds 43. 147. Laura Kuhn, “John Cage in the Social Realm“ part of Rolywholyover 148. Richard Kostelanetz ed. John Cage (London: Penguin 1971) 117. 149. Tomkins 1965, 119. 150. Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage 66. 151. Revill 166. 152. Tomkins 1965, 119. 153. Quotation from page 1 of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Clubs Band’s cover 154. Ibid. 155. Kostelanetz 1988 101. 156. Kostelanetz 1988 225. 157. Cage, A Year from Monday 71. 158. Tomkins, Duchamp, A Biography 157. 159. Naumann, Affectionately Marcel 346. 160. Tomkins 135. 161. Naumann 44. 162. Ibid. 359. 163. Tomkins 158. 164. Stauffer 230. 165. Tomkins 401. 166. Roth 27. 167. Tomkins 185. 168. Ibid. 182. 169. Ibid. 185. 170. Ibid. 185/186. 171. Tomkins 418/419. 172. Don’t pay attention to the anarchic writing 173. Cage, “Quotations”: https://www.english.upenn.edu/??afilreis/88/cage-q uotes.html 174. Tomkins 1. 175. The Oxford English Reader’s Dictionary. 176. Tomkins 1. 177. Ibid. 464. 178. Ibid. 397. 179. Retallack, 110. 180. Tomkins 124. 181. Tomkins 250. 182. Tomkins 5. 183. Fetz, Kunst in der Stadt 2 x. 184. Tomkins 397. 185. Peter Gena and Jonathan Brent, A John Cage Reader (New York: C.F. Peters Higgins, 1998) 22. 186. Kostelanetz 65. 187. Ibid. 65. 188. Ibid. 111. 189. Ibid. 129. 190. Ibid. 115. 191. Info about Etant donnés found in the Internet: https://www.freshwidow.com/etant-donnes2.html 192. Tomkins 419. 193. Roth 80. 194. Cage, Silence (Afternote to his “Lecture on Nothing“) 126. 195. Ibid. 196. Tomkins 226. 197. Fetz, Kunst in der Stadt 2 x. 198. The bibliography contains some books I have not cited in the paper itself – it is a mixed collection of books that have been piling up in my shelves in the course of writing…most of whom were quite helpful Once More to this Staircase: Another Look at Encore à cet Astre click to enlarge Figure 1 Marcel Duchamp, Encore à cet Astre (Once More to This Star), 1911 Figure 2 Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1911 It has been some twenty-five years since Lawrence D. Steefel Jr.’s analysis of Marcel Duchamp’s 1911 drawing Encore à cet Astre (Once More to This Star) (Fig. 1) was published by Art Journal.(1) Despite Steefel’s suggestion that Duchamp’s minor works, primarily his sketches and drawings, be allotted a greater degree of recognition for what they reveal about Duchamp’s creative process as a whole, Encore is still generally accorded little significance beyond its being a study for the Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (Fig. 2).(2) I felt compelled to write about this particular drawing because I strongly agree thatEncore has-and continues to be-relegated to a minor status as little more than a precedent for the Nude…No. 2. While Encore is indeed a small sketch, it would be, in this case, presumptuous to judge significance merely according to appearances. It is crucial to remember that the end of 1911 was a pivotal period in Duchamp’s career. In the last two months of 1911, Duchamp produced several of his most well known paintings, including Portrait of Chess Players, Sad Young Man on a Train, and the major study for theNude… No. 2, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 1. All of the aforementioned paintings have been in some way related to Encore (some more directly than others), yet these relationships have been far from exhausted. In this article, I intend to more fully situate Encore within this period of Duchamp’s life and art by examiningEncore in relation to contemporaneous works, as well as introducing heretofore unaddressed precedents and possible inspirations for this drawing. My motivation for writing this essay was not to “explain” this sketch or to unearth its “meaning,” for I wouldn’t propose to do that with any of Duchamp’s works, especially one as enigmatic as Encore. Rather, I would like to suggest a number of possible influences, inspirations, and intentions based on Duchamp’s own work of the time and the ideas of more recent scholars. Encore consists of three main parts.(3) In the center, a heavily-shaded head(4) rests on a hand or fist, with only a thin line describing a right shoulder and bent right arm. To the left of the head is what appears to be a female figure from the waist down; above the waist is a sectioned cylindrical element topped with swirling lines reminiscent of hair. To the right of the head is what has come to be the most important element, a goateed male figure ascending a staircase.(5) The figure’s head is drastically turned in order to peer at a grid to the right or behind the figure, which Steefel described as a “barred window.” As I agree with Steefel’s interpretation of the “female” figure as a “sex object,”(6) I will concentrate primarily on the other two elements of the drawing, after which I will suggest a reading that integrates all three elements. click images to enlarge Figure 3 Figure 4 Figure 5 Charles Willson Peale, Staircase Group: Raphaelle and Titian Ramsay, 1795, Philadelphia Museum of Art Diego Velasquez, Las Meninas, 1656, Museo del Prado Diego Velasquez,Las Meninas, detail Joseph Masheck noted that there is an uncanny resemblance between the ascending figure inEncore and the ascending figure in Charles Willson Peale’s hyperrealistic Staircase Group: Raphaelle and Titian Ramsay (1795) (Fig. 3), which is, like Duchamp’s drawing, in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.(7) While Masheck made a case for Duchamp possibly having seen a reproduction of the Peale painting in Paris (Encore preceded Duchamp’s first visit to the United States by more than three years), an association between the two images, though enticing, remains dubious.(8) A more practical-and arguably more similar-precedent for the ascending figure is found in a painting with which Duchamp was undoubtedly familiar, the silhouetted figure of Don José Nieto in the background of Velásquez’s Las Meninas (1656) (Figs. 4 and 5). Though the resemblance between the two figures is far from exact, the figures’ postures, particularly the positioning of the legs, head, and right arm (if the roughly horizontal line extending from the above the hip of the ascending figure to the central head’s left eye does indeed describe an arm) are similar enough to merit a comparison. Even the coffered door to Nieto’s left has a gridded appearance akin to the grid to the right of the figure in Encore, albeit on the opposite side. InEncore, the artist’s perspective is a bit different, with the stairs in three-quarter view and the head in full profile; a comparison with Las Meninas shows that the ascending figure is drawn from virtually the same angle that Velásquez would have seen Nieto in the mirror (Velásquez would not have seen Nieto as we do in the painting because the artist is off to the side.) Could this figure that so intrigued Michel Foucault have had a similar affect on Duchamp? click to enlarge Figure 6 Robert Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi, vol. 2, Oppenheim, 1619 Figure 7 Ramon Lull, De nova logica, 1512 It is not enough to simply claim the figure in the Velásquez painting as a model for the ascending figure without an explanation. The figure of Nieto in Las Meninas has long fascinated scholars because of his transitional status; he inhabits a space that is both invisible to the viewer yet implied by his presence. Even more important to Duchamp, I believe, is the ambiguity of his presence, due to the fact he is neither entering nor exiting the room, but, in Foucault’s words, “coming in and going out at the same time, like a pendulum caught at the bottom of its swing.”(9) Like Nieto, the figure in Encore is positioned in such a way that he appears to be traveling upward, yet the severe turn of his head and downward gaze imply an impeding reversal of motion, or at least the potential for a reversal of motion, rendering the figure, like the Sad Young Man on a Train and Nude Descending a Staircase, simultaneously static and dynamic. But why a staircase, and what is its relationship to the title? As Siegfried Giedion indicated, the diagonal planes of a staircase leading the eye upward led to the stair becoming “the symbol of movement.”(10) The general interpretation that the figure is ascending toward the sun/star of the poem is made less feasible by the figure’s backward and downward glance. Moreover, as Jerrold Seigel noted, “the ‘to’ in Laforgue’s title was a preposition of address, not of physical movement.”(11) Regardless, those who champion readings of Duchamp’s works that embrace his heavily debated involvement with the history and theory of alchemy(12)may support the reading of the figure ascending toward the sun/star, as ladders and staircases (which have a closely-tied history and symbolism) are legion in alchemical images and texts. Images of ladders and staircases leading to a star, the sun, or a heavenly/celestial realm (Figs. 6 and 7) support the notion that “the vertical…has always been considered the sacred dimension of space.”(13) That the direction of the figure’s movement remains ambiguous does not necessarily contradict the alchemical interpretation, as the hermetic theologian and neoplatonist Cardinal Nikolaus of Cusa (known as Cusanus) indicated: “Ascending and descending…are one and the same. The ‘art of conjecture’ lies in connecting the two with a keen intelligence.”(14) Another possibility of interpretation takes into account Duchamp’s predilection for wordplay, being that “astre” is an anagram for “stare” (which the figure on the right certainly does), which is a homonym for “stair.” click images to enlarge Figure 8 Figure 9 Figure 10 Grid in perspective Albrecht Dürer, Draughtsman Drawing a Recumbent Woman, 1525 Illumination from the Manuscript of Alfonso the Wise, 1283, Escorial Library click to enlarge Figure 11 Woodcut of a King and a Bisho playing chess, illustrated in William Caxton, Game and Playe of the Chesse, (London: Elliot Stock, 1883) But at or through what is the figure staring? The density of the vertical lines and the converging horizontal lines are certainly meant to convey deep foreshortening (Fig. 8), so one may deduce that the incomplete, hastily drawn grid contains squares and not rectangles. The grid can represent innumerable possibilities: Dürer’s device for drawing perspective (Fig. 9), the checkered mosaic tiles of the Temple of Solomon, generally found in Masonic lodges, and the magic square, to name a few. A possibility that I would like to pursue, however, is that the grid represents a chessboard, due to the fact that the grid contains eight squares at its widest point, the same number of squares on a chessboard. The fact that the grid is vertical rather than horizontal should come as no surprise, since chessboards have been displayed vertically in order to study problems since the Middle Ages (Figs. 10 and 11). Duchamp himself had numerous chessboards displayed vertically in his studio, as recorded in several photographs (Figs. 12 and 13). Moreover, several of his studies forPortrait of Chess Players show the chessboard not only horizontally, but scattered throughout the composition, in some cases above and behind the heads of the players (Figs. 14 and 15). If the figure on the right is examining a chessboard, it may lead to an understanding of the role of the central “head.” click images to enlarge Figure 12 Figure 13 Photograph of Duchamp’s Studio, 1917-18 Photograph of Marcel Duchamp taken by Denise Bellon, 1938 Figure 14 Figure 15 Marcel Duchamp, Study for Portrait of Chess Players, 1911 Marcel Duchamp, For a Game of Chess, 1911 The position of the central head, with the head resting on the hand or fist, is a posture inextricably linked with chess players, as it is seen in myriad representations of the subject(Figs. 16 and 17). Duchamp used this iconic posture for the figure of Jacques Villon in nearly all the studies for Portrait of Chess Players and in the final oil painting (Fig. 18). Duchamp himself appears in this manner on several occasions, as seen in a photograph used for a window display devoted to Duchamp at the bookshop La Hune in Paris in 1946 (Fig. 19), and in the sculpture Marcel Duchamp Cast Alive (1967) (Fig. 20), executed by Alfred Wolkenberg, which bears an eerie resemblance to the head in Encore. There are certainly practical explanations for the intimate communion shared by the game and this posture; chess games can go on for extended periods of time, during which the neck grows tired and requires additional support. However, in several instances, the hand at the chin appears to support the figure mentally rather than physically. click images to enlarge Figure 16 Figure 17 William Henry Fox Talbot, Chess Players, 1840 Honore Daumier, The Chess Players, 1868, Musée du Petit Palais click images to enlarge Figure 18 Figure 19 Figure 20 Marcel Duchamp, Portrait of Chess Players, 1911 Window Display, La Hune Bookshop, Paris, 1946 Marcel Duchamp and Alfred Wolkenberg, Marcel Duchamp Cast Alive click to enlarge Figure 21 Auguste Rodin, The Thinker, 1879-89 Figure 22 Michelangelo, Lorenzo de’ Medici, Medici Chapel, Florence No doubt the most famous, reproduced, and parodied image of thought of the twentieth century is Rodin’s Thinker (Fig. 21), who, rapt in his all- consuming contemplation, is the icon for the workings of the human mind. Centuries earlier, Michelangelo’s depiction of Lorenzo de’ Medici at the latter’s tomb in Florence (Fig. 22), which has often been cited as a model for Rodin’s allegory, was dubbed “Il Penseroso” due to the contrast of his downcast eyes and inward expression with the more active, outward thrust of the sculpture of his brother Giuliano. The fact that both chess players and “thinkers” share the same conventions for representation is far from coincidental, as chess is considered among the most difficult and intellectual of pursuits. Duchamp often stated that art should be more like chess, which is “completely in one’s gray matter,”(15) or, in Hubert Damisch’s words, “cosa mentale.”(16) His desire for art to become “an intellectual expression” was ultimately realized with the Readymades and the Large Glass,(17) but signs of this desire are visible as early as his studies for the Portrait of Chess Players. There is, however, another association to be made with the posture of the central head, one which may be linked to another important painting by Duchamp produced at or near the same time as Encore. For centuries, the propped-up head had an association with another type of thinker, the melancholic. Melancholy, an affliction thought by medieval scientists to have been brought on by an imbalance of bodily humors and the positions of the planets, was exalted during the Renaissance by humanists as a sign of genius.(18) click to enlarge Figure 23 Raphael, School of Athens, 1510-11, detail Figure 24 Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I, 1514 click to enlarge Figure 25 Odilon Redon, Renseroso, 1874 Figure 26 Odilon Redon, Angel in Chains, 1875, The Woodner Family Collection These humanists championed Saturn, who “was discovered in a new and personal sense by the intellectual elite, who were indeed beginning to consider their melancholy a jealously guarded privilege, as they became aware both of the sublimity of Saturn’s intellectual gifts and the dangers of his ambivalence.”(19)Among the more famous portrayals of the saturnine artist is Raphael’s depiction of Michelangelo (Fig. 23), a self-proclaimed melancholic, in hisSchool of Athens (1510-11).(20)Certainly the most famous image of melancholy (and one of the most analyzed images in the history of art) is Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I(Fig. 24), interpreted by Erwin Panofsky as a “spiritual self-portrait,”(21) through which Dürer represented “the melancholic artist, both cursed and blessed with a wider range of knowledge and a glimpse into the realm of metaphysical insight, [who] is painfully aware of the discrepancy between the necessary physical concerns of art and the higher metaphysical understanding that is desired.”(22) Melencolia Ihas already been linked with Duchamp’s work by Maurizio Calvesi, who indicated that both artists had a shared interest in alchemical imagery.(23) A close comparison of the melancholic angel in Dürer’s engraving and the central head in Encore reveals that the two figures share two conventions that Raymond Klibansky, Fritz Saxl, and Panofsky called “the clenched fist and the black face,”(24) meaning that both heads are propped up by a fist and the faces are heavily shaded. These conventions, which were originally physiognomic symptoms of a medical affliction, were appropriated by humanists to signify a mental rather than a physical condition.(25) In addition to Dürer’s famous engraving, Duchamp could have seen these conventions used by another artist for whom his admiration is well documented, Odilon Redon,(26) whose Penseroso (1874) (Fig. 25) and Angel in Chains (1875) (Fig. 26)owe a debt to Michelangelo and Dürer, respectively.(27) click to enlarge Figure 27 Marcel Duchamp, Sad Young Man on a Train, 1911 If the central head of Encore does indeed reflect the conventions of the melancholic artist, does this possibility have any bearing on the title of the Sad Young Man on a Train (Fig. 27), painted shortly after Encorewas produced? While Duchamp insisted that the young man’s “sadness” was introduced merely for the purposes of alliteration (“triste” and “train”), Seigel pointed out that the painting’s original title, “Pauvre Jeune Homme M.,” maintained the same mood minus the alliteration.(28)Moreover, the original title was, like Encore, taken from Jules Laforgue, leading to the possibility that Encore may in some way be a study for the Sad Young Man. Steefel’s descriptions of Duchamp in late 1911 as “fiercely intellectual,” “private and eccentric under a cloak of pervasive ‘Hamletism’ and desultory ennui,” and subject to “an inhibiting malaise of spirit”(29) support the notion that the “sad young man,” who Duchamp clearly indicated is a self- portrait, may in fact be a self-representation as the melancholic artist. As I stated at the beginning of this essay, I find Steefel’s reading of the “female” figure at the left as a “sex object” very persuasive, and her mechanomorphic sexuality is likely an anticipation of Duchamp’s other paintings involving “the erratic mechanism of human desire.”(30) It is tempting to try to understand Encore, one of Duchamp’s many tripartite compositions.”(31), as a single idea, an integrated image in which the three elements have some common denominator. Encore seems to be the very definition of Foucault’s concept of the heteroclite, of things “‘laid’, ‘placed’, ‘arranged’ in sites so very different from one another that it is impossible to find a place of residence for them, to define a common locusbeneath them all.”(32) As it is highly unlikely that the three elements were conceived and intended to be seen independently, an integrated reading appears to be in order. From the various analyses of the elements of Encore I have endeavored to support, a pattern may be inferred: the staircase, a symbol most commonly associated with spiritual concerns; the chess player or melancholic, both of whom are linked to the intellect; and the mechanical/female “sex object,” or, like the later coffee and chocolate grinders, a “sex machine.” Taken together, the spirit, the intellect, and the carnal are all forms of desire-the desire for salvation, the desire for the acquisition of knowledge or creative growth, and lust. Desire, specifically unfulfilled desire, became one of the critical operators in Duchamp’s work, from his distanced disrobing of Dulcinea to the perpetually unconsummated desires of the bride and bachelors.(33) For indeed, by assiduously attempting to locate any logical continuity to conjoin the three figures in Encore, we find ourselves more intimately acquainted with the notion of frustrated desire. Notes 1. Lawrence D. Steefel, Jr. “Marcel Duchamp’s Encore à cet Astre: A New Look,” Art Journal 36, no.1 (1976): 23-30. At the conclusion of Steefel’s article, an English translation of Laforgue’s poem is included under the title “Another for the Sun,” which Steefel indicated came from a translation by William Jay Smith in his Selected Writings of Jules Laforgue. Ron Padgett translated the title as “Again to this Star,” Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett (New York: Da Capo, 1987) 46. Another translation of the title, “Once More to this Star,” is more commonly used in reference to the Duchamp drawing. 2. “Widely recognized as a ‘first step’ towards the evolution of the famousNude Descending a Staircase, painted a month or so after the drawing Encore was completed, the drawing itself has been disregarded as a work of art in its own right and, more surprisingly, has been persistently misread simply as an image by all previous commentators, including Duchamp himself referring to what it presumably is ‘about.'” Steefel, 23. 3. For a more detailed ekphrasis, see Steefel, 24-25. 4. Steefel called this element of the drawing a “mask,” possibly because it lacks ears and hair. However, the figure on the right lacks any discernible ears or hair, yet there is no mention of this figure being masked.To avoid inconsistency, I will simply refer to this element as a head. 5. Steefel indicated that it is a spiral staircase (25), which is certainly the case with Duchamp’s later descending figures. Unless the scribbled out lines above the figure’s head, which Steefel claimed may be “a possible vault of the lower staircase” (26), are the spiraling continuation of the staircase, I see no evidence that this particular staircase is helical. 6. Steefel, 25. 7. Joseph Masheck, ed., Marcel Duchamp in Perspective (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1975) 7-8. 8. Schwarz stated that “[Duchamp] could not possibly have seen the Peale before completing this study.” Arturo Schwarz,The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, 3rd ed., vol. 2 (New York: Delano Greenidge, 1997) 555. 9. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1994) 11. 10. Siegfried Giedion, The Eternal Present (New York: Pantheon, 1964) qtd. in John Templer, The Staircase: History and Theories (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1992). 11. Jerrold Seigel, The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) 38. 12. See Arturo Schwarz, “The Alchemist Stripped Bare in the Bachelor, Even,” in Anne d’Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine, Marcel Duchamp (New York: Museum of Modern Art; Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1973) 81-98; and Maurizio Calvesi, Duchamp invisible (Rome: Officina edizioni, 1975). 13. Christian Norberg-Schulz, Existence, Space and Architecture (New York: Praeger, 1978) qtd.; in Templer, 34. 14. Alexander Roob, The Hermetic Museum: Alchemy and Mysticism (New York: Taschen, 1997) 282. 15. Schwarz, Complete Works, vol. 1, 73. 16. Hubert Damisch, “The Duchamp Defense,” trans. Rosalind Krauss, October 10 (Fall 1979): 5-28. 17. Schwarz, Complete Works, vol. 1, 73. 18. Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy (New York: Basic Books, 1964) 241-254. 19. Ibid., 251. For more about the melancholic temperment as it pertains to artists, see Rudolph and Margot Wittkower,Born Under Saturn (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1963). 20. Klibansky et al, 232 and Wittkower, fig. 21. 21. Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955) 171. 22. Linda Hults, The Print in the Western World (Madison, WI.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996) 95. 23. Maurizio Calvesi, “A noir, Melencolia I,” Storia dell’Arte 1-2 (1969): 37-96. Duchamp invisible; Arte e alchimia (Florence: Giunti, 1986). See also Giuseppina Restivo, “The Iconic Core of Beckett’s Endgame,” in Marius Buning, Matthijs Engelberts, and Sjef Houppermans, Samuel Beckett: Crossroads and Borderlines: L’œuvre Carrefour/L’œuvre Limite(Amsterdam, Atlanta: Rodopi, 1997) 118-124. 24. Klibansky et al, 290. 25. Ibid., 320. 26. Seigel, 50. 27. Douglas W. Druick, ed.Odilon Redon: Prince of Dreams, 1840-1916 (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago; New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994) 79-80, 84. 28. Seigel, 59. 29. Steefel, 23. 30. d’Harnoncourt and McShine, 256. 31. Young Man and Girl in Spring (1911), 2 Personages and a Car (1912), The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes (1912), and The Bride Stripped Bare by the Bachelors (1912) are but a few examples. Both Robert Lebel and Harriet and Sidney Janis have noted Duchamp’s penchant for the number three in his work. Schwarz, Complete Works, vol. 1, 128. 32. Foucault, xvii-xviii. 33. Seigel, 41, 94-97 and Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson,The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp(London: Thames and Hudson, 1973) 39, 42, 44. Figs. 1, 2, 12, 14, 15 ©2002 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. All rights reserved. Duchamp’s Window Display for André Breton’s Le Surréalisme et la Peinture (1945) The subsequent paper is based on parts of a lecture first held at a three-day Marcel Duchamp symposium, which, accompanied by a small exhibition of works by the artist from the museum’s own collection, took place between November 23-25, 2001, at the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt, Germany. What follows is intended to highlight the significance of Duchamp’s 1945 window display of Breton’s second and expanded edition of art theoretical writings, ” Le Surréalisme et la Peinture,” (Fig.1) for the production of his last major work, Given: 1. The Waterfall/2. The Illuminating Gas (Figs. 2 and 3). In the process, I attempt to predate Duchamp’s active involvement with this work and to shed some new light on the relationship between Marcel Duchamp and Maria Martins, his lover at the time, as well as Enrico Donati and Isabelle Waldberg, both of whom were involved with the construction of the shop window display. In the process, a new work by Duchamp will be introduced. In addition, the overall significance of the art dealer Julien Levy and René Magritte’s painting Le Modèle Rouge (1935) (Fig. 4) for all of the above shall be examined. click images to enlarge Figure 1 Figure 2 Marcel Duchamp, Window Display for André Breton’s Le Surréalisme et la Peinture, 1945 Marcel Duchamp, Given: 1. The Waterfall/2. The Illuminating Gas, 1946-1966 (outside view) click images to enlarge Figure 3 Figure 4 Marcel Duchamp, Given: 1. The Waterfall/2. The Illuminating Gas, 1946-1966 (inside view) René Magritte, Le Modèle Rouge, 1935 click to enlarge Figure 5 Isabelle Waldberg, Drawing of Brentano’s Window Display, 1945 On November 10th, 1945, the Swiss artist Isabelle Waldberg included a drawing in one of her many letters to her husband Patrick, living in Paris at the time. “Yesterday morning, we did the window at Brentano’sSurréalisme et la peinture,” she writes (1) . “Marcel naturally did everything, all design and execution. Here’s a drawing of it:” (Fig. 5) Within the drawing, Waldberg points out various objects that can be seen from the perspective of a full frontal view of the window display. On the left is a “chicken wire mannequin bought ready- made,” on the right are “boots with toes painted by Donati.” In the center, towering above the “books” is “an object by me underneath the tent.” She defines the tent as “old paper from M.’s studio en chute.” “chicken wire mannequin bought ready-made” click to enlarge Figure 6 Marcel Duchamp, Cover for VVV Almanac, 1943 (detail) Figure 7 Frederick Kiesler and Marcel Duchamp, Twin-Touch-Test (last page of VVV), 1943 Two small circles within the drawing by Isabelle Waldberg define the protruding breasts of the chicken wire torso, yet from the remaining photograph of the window display it is impossible to tell whether the mannequin is feminine or masculine. In any case, only two years before, for the back cover of VVV (New York, nos. 2-3, March 1943) André Breton’s Surrealist publication in exile, Duchamp had designed a die-cut woman’s profile into which chicken wire was inserted (Fig.6). This see-through miniature torso was to be used for the Twin-Touch-Test, explained on the magazine’s last page (Fig.7): “Put the magazine flat on a table, lift back-cover into vertical position, join hands on both sides of screen, fingertips touching each other and slide gently along screen towards you.” The goal was to experience an “unusual feeling of touch” that the readers were asked to share with VVV. A double- exposure photograph of a slightly ecstatic looking Pegeen Vail (Peggy Guggenheim’s daughter) (2) demonstrated the Twin-Touch-Test while the editors announced a total of five prizes for the best submissions. The VVV design would not be the only time that chicken wire was to appear in Duchamp’s oeuvre. In 1962, for the exhibition of Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanter’s Domain, (D’Arcy Galleries, New York, November 28, 1960 – January 14, 1961) Duchamp installed a surrealist environment for the show (he also designed the catalogue) involving many rooms. In one of them Duchamp used a cupboard to house three white chickens. Lit by a green light, a sign above the poultry, made of nickel coins, spells: Coin Sale (Fig.8) (3) . Pronounced in French, “coin sale” means “dirty corner,” a derogative term for the female gender. Here, the chicken wire is used to keep the hens in place. A third instance involving chicken wire is Duchamp’s altered Family Portrait of 1964 (Fig.9). When compared to the 1899 original (Fig.10) (4) , it becomes apparent that what is missing in the photomontage are not only members of Duchamp’s family but also the chicken wire fence running behind both sides of the people gathered for the portrait. click images to enlarge Figure 8 Figure 9 Figure 10 Marcel Duchamp, Environment for the Enchanter’s Domain (detail), 1960 Marcel Duchamp,Family Portrait (1899), 1964 Duchamp family portrait of 1899 (photographer unknown) “books” Besides at least two other publications displayed in Brentano’s shop window, a minimum of ten copies of Breton’s Le Surréalisme et la Peinture (Fig.11) were either arranged alongside each other at the bottom of the window or were propped upright, showing off the book’s color reproductions of Surrealist paintings (among many more black and white images) (5). First published in 1928 (by Gallimard, Paris), Les Edition Françaises Brentano produced a second, expanded edition of Le Surréalisme et la Peinture in 1945, while André Breton, Surrealism’s founder, was in temporary exile in New York. The book now included his famous observations (pp. 107-124) on Duchamp’s major work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, 1915-23 (Fig.12), the essay having been initially published inMinotaure in 1934 (Paris, 2, 6, Winter 1935, pp. 45-49) for which Duchamp had designed the cover (Fig.13). Earlier in 1945 the essay, originally titled “Phare de la Mariée,” had been published in English as “Lighthouse of the Bride,” in the Marcel Duchamp number of Charles Henri Ford’s magazine View (New York, 5, 1, March 1945, pp. 6-9, 13), for which Duchamp had also designed the cover (Fig.14). click images to enlarge Figure 11 Figure 12 Figure 13 Figure 14 André Breton, Le Surréalisme et la Peinture (cover), 1945 Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (aka the Large Glass), 1915-1923 Marcel Duchamp, Cover design for Minotaure, 1934 Marcel Duchamp, Cover design for View magazine, 1945 It may not come as a surprise then, that Duchamp also had a hand in the design of Breton’s new edition of Le Surréalisme et la Peinture. On July 2, 1945, after meeting with Brentano’s publisher Robert Tenger, Duchamp mailed a letter to Elisa and André Breton in Reno, Nevada with suggestions for the cover: “Take the bare feet, Magritte’s shoes. Instead of black, make a print in sanguine on pink paper (or just white). This bloodshot reproduction would be imprinted in the middle of the board and also imprinted your name, the title of the book […] and Brentano’s below”(6). And sure enough, less than half a year later, it is René Magritte’s Le Modèle Rouge (or Red Model) which appears on the cover of Breton’s book (as well as inside the book, between pp. 104-105). The window display even presented a poster of the image (7). Completed by mid-November 1935, The Red Model, now in the collection of the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, is the replica of an earlier version of the same name and year. In 1936, it was included in Magritte’s first American solo show at Julien Levy’s gallery (January 3 – January 20, 1936). And in 1947, it was sent by Alex Salkin – the painting’s owner since the late 1930s – to the Hugo Gallery in New York, where, most importantly, it was bought by none other than Maria Martins, on the advice of Marcel Duchamp (8). At the time of Duchamp’s design for Brentano’s window display, Maria Martins, the Brazilian Surrealist sculptor and wife of the Brazilian ambassador to the United States, was already engaged in a full-fledged love affair with Duchamp. “boots with toes painted by Donati” click to enlarge Left: Figure 15 Enrico Donati, Boots for Brentano’s Window Display, 1945 Right: Figure 16 Duchamp, Door: 11 rue Larrey, 1927 The boots to the right of the window did not get lost (Fig.15). In a crude way, they were meant to resemble Magritte’s Red Model, being neither shoes nor feet, both shoe and foot. This sure must have appealed to a gender-hopping Duchamp, art’s patron saint of the eternal and/or. There was, of course, his 1927 door in his tiny Parisian studio- apartment which could be both open and closed at the same time (Fig.16). There was his first major solo-exhibition in 1963, by or of Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy, his female alter ego (Fig.17); and a later exhibition, Not Seen and/or Less Seen of/by Marcel Duchamp/Rrose Sélavy 1904-64: The Mary Sisler Collection. It turns out that he was deeply involved with Donati’s shoes as well. Besides the known photograph of the window display (9), there is another one from a different angle, reproduced in the French paper La Victoire (New York, no. 47, November 24, 1945) (Fig.18). Underneath the photograph, the following caption appears: Left: Figure 17 Marcel Duchamp, Cover for Marcel Duchamp: A Retrospective Exhibition, 1963 Right: Figure 18 Marcel Duchamp, Window Display for André Breton’s Le Surréalisme et la Peinture, 1945 Window display by Marcel Duchamp and André Breton at Brentano’s bookstore in New York, for “Surrealism and the Painting.” “Magritte Shoes” by Enrico Donati, mask by Isabelle Waldberg, falling paper and studded feet by Marcel Duchamp. After more than half a century, the quality of the reproduced photograph in the remaining copies of La Victoire is very poor. What can be made out better than from the other photograph are the soles of the feet next to Donati’s, a work by Duchamp only mentioned inVictoire. They are a lot smaller and seem to be feminine in comparison to Donati’s big shoes with protruding plaster toes. Duchamp’s toes appear to be painted on their underside, as if to resemble painted toenails in reverse. They are studded not only at the heel (the heels of a shoe) but also in the center of both soles, with dozens of heads of nails sticking out, altogether arranged in a rectangular shape. While the ensemble with Donati’s shoes might resemble Picabia’s cover for Littérature (Paris, no. 7, December 1, 1922) (Fig.19), it certainly is also reminiscent of Duchamp’s Torture-Morte of 1959 (Fig.20), Duchamp’s enigmatic plaster foot (10). click to enlarge Left: Figure 19 Francis Picabia, Cover for Littérature, 1922 Right: Figure 20 Marcel Duchamp, Torture-Morte,1959 “an object by me underneath the tent” click to enlarge Figure 21 Isabelle Waldberg, Fruit de Mer, 1943 (1948) Born in Oberstammheim, Switzerland, in 1911, Isabelle Waldberg stayed in New York between 1941 and 1946. A former member of George Batailles’s secret society Acéphale, she soon joined the Surrealists and met, among others, André Breton, Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst. At the time she was working on sculptures made of flexible wood sticks (Fig.21) Isabelle Waldberg, Fruit de Mer, 1943 (1948)), some of which were included in Peggy Guggenheim’s famousArt of this Century exhibition in 1944. “Constructions” is the general term Waldberg used for her twisted wooden objects and starting in 1948, she would cast them in iron. It was one of her “constructions” that she used for the window display of Breton’s Le Surréalisme et la Peinture (11) . When Waldberg returned to Europe after WWII in 1946, Duchamp offered her to stay at his abandoned studio apartment in Paris, at 11 rue Larrey, well- known for the door Duchamp built therein, the one both open and closed at the same time. In 1958, she would cast a small bronze portrait of him (Fig.22) and yet another one in 1978/79, incorportating chess Figures and a device Man Ray used for drying negatives (Fig.23). click images to enlarge Figure 22 Figure 23 Isabelle Waldberg, Portrait de Marcel Duchamp, 1958 Isabelle Waldberg, Portrait de Marcel Duchamp, 1978/79 “old paper from M.’s studio en chute“ click to enlarge Left:Figure 24 Marcel Duchamp, Twelve Hundred Coal Bags Suspended from a Ceiling over a Stove (detail),1938 Right: Figure 25 Marcel Duchamp, The Large Glass as reproduced in Le Surréalisme et la Peinture,1945 The paper en chute casts a shadow that certainly must have been to M. Duchamp’s liking. The light source resting at the bottom of the window display does not look unlike the stove used by Duchamp for another, better-known installation, Twelve Hundred Coal Bags Suspended from a Ceiling over a Stove, which he created for the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme at the Galerie Beaux-Arts, Paris (January – February 1938) (Fig.24). The “tent” is what Isabelle Waldberg refers to in regard to Duchamp’s old paper suspended from the window’s ceiling, and “en chute” is how she describes it too, as in chute d’eau orwaterfall. “Paper fall” is what Arturo Schwarz picks up from her, comparing the shape to a “wedding veil, which may be a reminiscence of the Bride’s Garment in the Large Glass, 1915-1923, where it appears just above the Waterfall […]”(12). The Bride’s clothes are never mentioned throughout Duchamp’s notes but are only and first referred to in Breton’s essay Lighthouse of the Bride (1934) (13), where numbers scrawled across a photograph of the Large Glass point out its different components (Fig.25). It is number 13, which, according to Breton (or is it Duchamp?) signifies the location of “Vêtement de la mariée” or clothes of the bride. Of course, it is none other than Le Surréalisme et la Peinture which first makes Breton’s important essay widely available in bookform. But there is much more to it. The “paper fall” might also just be what it resembles most: a waterfall, exactly as in Given: 1. The Waterfall / 2. The Illuminating Gas. Besides the Waterfall, the Illuminating Gas is there, too, resting at the bottom. It is time now to leave Isabelle Waldberg’s description of the window in her letter to her husband Patrick. The remainder of my argument shall inextricably link Duchamp’s window display for Breton’s Le Surréalisme et la Peinture to Given, his last major work. Julien Levy We have to return to Duchamp’s shoes. In January 1936, a year after Magritte painted Le Modèle Rouge, it was first exhibited at Julien Levy’s New York gallery. At the end of the same year, Black Sun Press, New York, published Levy’s book on Surrealism. Within this anthology, Levy describes Duchamp as an “ideal shoemaker” (14) who no longer makes shoes but who is still steeped in the act of creation: “A shoemaker makes shoes. A manually proficient shoemaker makes superb shoes. An ideal shoemaker no longer makes shoes, but ideas in his medium. He is divorced from his material objective and, like a madman, he would cut leather and sew leather and choose leathers like a runway engine, except that he has an idea.”(15) Duchamp had stopped painting in 1918, but – besides pursuing a career in chess – never ceased to be click to enlarge Figure 26 Marcel Duchamp, Not a Shoe, 1950 involved with art. According to Levy, Duchamp, under the name of Rrose Sélavy […] returned to making shoes, quoting Duchamp as saying: “If it is shoes that you want, I’ll give you shoes that you will admire to such an extent that you will lame yourselves trying to walk in them.” (16)It appears that with Duchamp’s feet/shoes in the shop windows nine years later, this is exactly what he has done. And it doesn’t stop here: In 1950, Marcel Duchamp presents Julien Levy with a small sculpture made of galvanized plaster, something Levy wouldn’t part with until his death in 1981. The name of the sculpture is Not a Shoe (Fig.26) and the very first of a total of four small objects that would later be determined to be artistic side-products of his secret involvement with the production of Given. No one knew this at the time, of course, and when exhibited, those sculptures were mostly thought of as being “bizarre artifacts”(17). Not a Shoe is the only one not turned into an edition. click to enlarge Left: Figure 27 Marcel Duchamp, Wedge of Chastity, 1954 (1963) Right: Figure 28 Marcel Duchamp, Female Fig Leaf, 1950 Duchamp’s Window Display for André Breton’s Le Surréalisme et la Peinture (1945) by Girst, Thomas (with an animation by Slawinski, Robert) “old paper from M.’s studio en chute“ The paper en chute casts a shadow that certainly must have been to M. Duchamp’s liking. The light source resting at the bottom of the window display does not look unlike the stove used by Duchamp for another, better-known installation, Twelve Hundred Coal Bags Suspended from a Ceiling over a Stove, which he created for the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme at the Galerie Beaux-Arts, Paris (January – February 1938) (Fig.24). The “tent” is what Isabelle Waldberg refers to in regard to Duchamp’s old paper suspended from the window’s ceiling, and “en chute” is how she describes it too, as in chute d’eau orwaterfall. “Paper fall” is what Arturo Schwarz picks up from her, comparing the shape to a “wedding veil, which may be a reminiscence of the Bride’s Garment in the Large Glass, 1915-1923, where it appears just above the Waterfall […]”(12). The Bride’s clothes are never mentioned throughout Duchamp’s notes but are only and first referred to in Breton’s essay Lighthouse of the Bride (1934) (13), where numbers scrawled across a photograph of the Large Glass point out its different components (Fig.25). It is number 13, which, according to Breton (or is it Duchamp?) signifies the location of “Vêtement de la mariée” or clothes of the bride. Of course, it is none other than Le Surréalisme et la Peinture which first makes Breton’s important essay widely available in bookform. But there is much more to it. The “paper fall” might also just be what it resembles most: a waterfall, exactly as in Given: 1. The Waterfall / 2. The Illuminating Gas. Besides the Waterfall, the Illuminating Gas is there, too, resting at the bottom. It is time now to leave Isabelle Waldberg’s description of the window in her letter to her husband Patrick. The remainder of my argument shall inextricably link Duchamp’s window display for Breton’s Le Surréalisme et la Peinture to Given, his last major work. Julien Levy We have to return to Duchamp’s shoes. In January 1936, a year after Magritte painted Le Modèle Rouge, it was first exhibited at Julien Levy’s New York gallery. At the end of the same year, Black Sun Press, New York, published Levy’s book on Surrealism. Within this anthology, Levy describes Duchamp as an “ideal shoemaker” (14) who no longer makes shoes but who is still steeped in the act of creation: “A shoemaker makes shoes. A manually proficient shoemaker makes superb shoes. An ideal shoemaker no longer makes shoes, but ideas in his medium. He is divorced from his material objective and, like a madman, he would cut leather and sew leather and choose leathers like a runway engine, except that he has an idea.”(15) Duchamp had stopped painting in 1918, but – besides pursuing a career in chess – never ceased to be click to enlarge Figure 26 Marcel Duchamp, Not a Shoe, 1950 involved with art. According to Levy, Duchamp, under the name of Rrose Sélavy […] returned to making shoes, quoting Duchamp as saying: “If it is shoes that you want, I’ll give you shoes that you will admire to such an extent that you will lame yourselves trying to walk in them.” (16)It appears that with Duchamp’s feet/shoes in the shop windows nine years later, this is exactly what he has done. And it doesn’t stop here: In 1950, Marcel Duchamp presents Julien Levy with a small sculpture made of galvanized plaster, something Levy wouldn’t part with until his death in 1981. The name of the sculpture is Not a Shoe (Fig.26) and the very first of a total of four small objects that would later be determined to be artistic side-products of his secret involvement with the production of Given. No one knew this at the time, of course, and when exhibited, those sculptures were mostly thought of as being “bizarre artifacts”(17). Not a Shoe is the only one not turned into an edition. click to enlarge Left: Figure 27 Marcel Duchamp,Wedge of Chastity, 1954 (1963) Right: Figure 28 Marcel Duchamp, Female Fig Leaf, 1950 It most closely resembles theWedge section of the Wedge of Chastity (Fig.27) which in turn relates to the central vertical line of Female Fig Leaf (Fig.28). The latter is believed to be a mock or negative cast of the primary female genitalia, the part most prominently presented to the viewer of Given. Why present Levy with the first hint of Given? Why not. It was Levy, eventually, who would recall Duchamp’s first mentioning of a similar project. In hisMemoirs of an Art Gallery (1977), he wrote of first meeting Duchamp fifty years earlier, on board of the Paris, a transatlantic steamer taking both from New York to Le Havre, France, in 1927. “Marcel toyed with two flexible pieces of wire, bending and twirling them, occasionally tracing their outline on a piece of paper. He was devising a mechanical female apparatus […], a soft anatomical machine. He said, jokingly, he thought of making a life-size articulated dummy, a mechanical woman whose vagina, contrived of meshed springs and ball bearings, would be contractile, possibly self-lubricating, and activated from a remote control, perhaps located in the head and connected by the leverage of the two wires he was shaping. The apparatus might be used as a sort of click to enlarge Figure 29 Marcel Duchamp, Boîte-en-Valise for Julien Levy (X/XX) (detail),1944 ‘machine-onaniste‘ without hands. […] ‘The lines of the two wires,’ he went on, ‘when they are shaped to give just the leverage needed and then removed from their function as messengers between the head and vagina, they become abstractions‘” (18). Here is Duchamp playing with wire in 1927. In 1945, there is the chicken wire torso in the window display for Breton’s book. Almost needless to say that Julien Levy’sBoîte en Valise contained the original maquette for Duchamp’s 1943VVV miniature torso made of chicken wire (Fig.29). It has been remarked elsewhere that when Duchamp enclosed the original in hisBoîte for Levy in January 1944, he “added an inscription, written through the chicken wire after assembly:La Fourchette du Cavalier (The Night’s Fork). The Knight’s Fork is a chess position in which the knight attacks two opposing pieces at once. Duchamp’s erotic transposition of this situation needs no further explanation”(19). Duchamp had arranged the writing in a half-circle, leading from the breast of the torso to its lower region, to the female genitalia, or, for that matter, to Not a Shoe, to the “coin sale.” André Breton click to enlarge Figure 30 Marcel Duchamp, Door for Gradiva, 1937 (1968) Figure 31 Plaster Relief of Gradiva We have to return to Duchamp’s shoes. In the window display of 1945, they were neither all feet nor all shoes: Breton and Duchamp had collaborated many times before. Take 1937. Financially down on his luck and struggling to support his firstborn child, Breton was offered a gallery space by a generous friend for a few months. The original glass door (Fig.30) consisted of the incised outline of a couple through which the visitors could enter the gallery at 31, rue de Seine. Or, as Breton himself described Gradiva’s entrance: “You entered the store through a glass door that had been designed and executed by Marcel Duchamp, whose opening silhouetted, as their shadows might, a rather large man and a noticeably smaller and very slim woman, standing side by side” (20). Breton had borrowed the title of his exhibition space from a book by Wilhelm Jensen (1827-1911) of the same name, in which the archeologist Dr. Norbert Hanold falls in love with a young woman depicted on a Roman plaster relief from Pompeii, now in the collection of the Vatican (Fig.31). The descending female, longingly named Gradiva by the protagonist – originally translating into “she who walks” -, wears a long tunic exposing her beautiful bare feet clad in sandals. The erotically charged space between the sole and shoe is prominently featured throughout Jensen’s short novel written along the theme of cherchez la femme. It was no other than Sigmund Freud, admired by Breton and the Surrealists, who had written a long essay on Jensen’s book, annotating his copy of Gradiva with short notes about the meaning of dreams and foot fetishism (21). Duchamp was no stranger to this part of the female anatomy, as a friend of his remembered him during a tableau vivant at the Arensberg’s a few years after Duchamp’s arrival in New York in 1914: “A young Frenchwoman was reclining on a divan like a virginal Olympia while the male guests took turns stroking parts of her body. Duchamp was devoting himself to her legs, which he caressed with the tips of his fingers. [William Carlos] Williams watched the spectacle in awe: ‘It was something I had not seen before. Her feet were being kissed, her shins, her knees […]'”(22). Duchamp most certainly knew about Gradiva (23). When a long article on her appeared in the first issue of Le Surréalisme, même (24), it was Duchamp who designed the cover (Fig.32), choosing a photograph of the Female Fig Leaf, with the concave form appearing almost convex, the “coin sale”, the Not a Shoe, in the center. There is yet another hint in all of this. Another version of theGradiva door for Breton’s gallery appeared much later. In 1968, for the announcement of theDoors exhibition at Cordier & Ekstrom, New York (March 19 – April 20, 1968), Duchamp produced miniatures of the door, both on paper and acetate (Fig.33). In addition, he created a “life-size” plexiglass replica of his Gradiva glass entrance. Two years after the completion ofGiven in 1966 and shortly before his death, Duchamp must have been amused at the exhibition’s theme of Doors, fully aware that Given, with its exterior consisting of a massive wooden Spanish door and an archway of red bricks, would be posthumously revealed to the public in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. click images to enlarge Figure 32 Figure 33 Marcel Duchamp, Cover for Le Surréalisme, même, 1956 Marcel Duchamp, Announcement for the Exhibition Doors, 1968 Enrico Donati click to enlarge Figure 34 Marcel Duchamp, Cover for Le Surréalisme en 1947, 1947 Figure 35 Le Surréalisme en 1947, Plate XLI, 1947 Not only did Duchamp and Donati collaborate in 1945 (25), but the window display for Breton’s book was the first time that they worked together. Not even two years later, in mid-1947, Donati would assist Duchamp in his cover design for Le Surréalisme en 1947, a major exhibition of the movement held at the Galerie Maeght, Paris (July- August 1947). For each numbered deluxe edition of the catalogue (there were over 1000 of them), Donati and Duchamp would paste pink foam rubber- breasts, surrounded by a rough-edged circle of black velvet (Fig.34). Within the catalogue, plate XLI depicts four images, of which the lower left is a photograph of Duchamp’s and Donati’s window display of 1945 (Fig.35). The upper right image shows another window design by Duchamp of the same year, while the pictures by Surrealist painters Wilhelm Freddie and Jindrich Styrsky both depict half- hidden women. In Freddie’s painting, the lower half of a what appears to be a clothed female whose body hangs outside a wall opening not unlike the brick wall of Duchamp’s Given interior. The back cover of Le Surréalisme en 1947 presents a sticker reading Prière de Toucher or “Please Touch.” (We are not too far from Duchamp’s miniature chicken-wire torso of 1943, his Twin- Touch-Test for the back of VVV.) The abandoned plaster model for the breast cover of the catalogue remained in the collection of Enrico Donati for half a century. (It is now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.) (Fig.36). The model for this and a subsequent plaster was Maria Martins, Duchamp’s intimate friend (26). The breast plasters are linked to the nude torso in Given, for which Maria Martins was the first model. Yet another work by Duchamp was in Enrico Donati’s possession. An unnumbered Boîte-en-Valise, just like Levy’s, including another original art work mounted on the lid’s inside: a scrap of paper with a detailed drawing of the underside of a human foot believed to be that of Maria Martins (Fig.37)(27). In one of Honoré de Balzac’s better- known stories, The Unknown Masterpiece (first published in 1831) (28), the otherwise successful artist Frenhofer struggles for years with a canvas, yet coming up with nothing more than a mass of confused colors. Almost nothing. Amidst the chaos, looking closely, an “enchanting,” “living” and “admirable” female foot can be seen. Though the first studies for Given show a standing female nude with one foot raised at an awkward angle (Fig.38), Duchamp leaves this part of the anatomy out of the final piece (29). click images to enlarge click images to enlarge Figure 36 Figure 37 Figure 38 Marcel Duchamp, Plaster Model for Please Touch, 1947 Marcel Duchamp, Untitled Drawing for Enrico Donati’s Boîte-en-Valise,1946 Marcel Duchamp, Given: Maria, the Waterfall, and the Illuminating Gas, 1947 Maria Martins click to enlarge Figure 39 Marcel Duchamp, Coffee Mill, 1911 Not only did Duchamp and Donati collaborate in 1945 (25), but the window display for Breton’s book was the first time that they worked together. Not even two years later, in mid-1947, Donati would assist Duchamp in his cover design for Le Surréalisme en 1947, a major exhibition of the movement held at the Galerie Maeght, Paris (July- August 1947). For each numbered deluxe edition of the catalogue (there were over 1000 of them), Donati and Duchamp would paste pink foam rubber- breasts, surrounded by a rough-edged circle of black velvet (Fig.34). Within the catalogue, plate XLI depicts four images, of which the lower left is a photograph of Duchamp’s and Donati’s window display of 1945 (Fig.35). The upper right image shows another window design by Duchamp of the same year, while the pictures by Surrealist painters Wilhelm Freddie and Jindrich Styrsky both depict half- hidden women. In Freddie’s painting, the lower half of a what appears to be a clothed female whose body hangs outside a wall opening not unlike the brick wall of Duchamp’s Given interior. The back cover of Le Surréalisme en 1947 presents a sticker reading Prière de Toucher or “Please Touch.” (We are not too far from Duchamp’s miniature chicken-wire torso of 1943, his Twin- Touch-Test for the back of VVV.) The abandoned plaster model for the breast cover of the catalogue remained in the collection of Enrico Donati for half a century. (It is now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.) (Fig.36). The model for this and a subsequent plaster was Maria Martins, Duchamp’s intimate friend (26). The breast plasters are linked to the nude torso in Given, for which Maria Martins was the first model. Yet another work by Duchamp was in Enrico Donati’s possession. An unnumbered Boîte-en-Valise, just like Levy’s, including another original art work mounted on the lid’s inside: a scrap of paper with a detailed drawing of the underside of a human foot believed to be that of Maria Martins (Fig.37)(27). In one of Honoré de Balzac’s better- known stories, The Unknown Masterpiece (first published in 1831) (28), the otherwise successful artist Frenhofer struggles for years with a canvas, yet coming up with nothing more than a mass of confused colors. Almost nothing. Amidst the chaos, looking closely, an “enchanting,” “living” and “admirable” female foot can be seen. Though the first studies for Given show a standing female nude with one foot raised at an awkward angle (Fig.38), Duchamp leaves this part of the anatomy out of the final piece (29). click to enlarge Figure 40 Marcel Duchamp, Study for Given: 1. The Waterfall / 2. The Illuminating Gas, 1947 It is time now to devote our full attention to the wire sculpture below the “paper fall,” below the “Bride’s veil.” In her letter to her husband, Isabelle Waldberg claimed it was hers and it closely resembles her “constructions” of the time. Yet, as she herself wrote, “Marcel naturally did everything.” Only two years before the first known sketches (Fig.40) (34) of the female Figure for Given and at a time when Duchamp was already involved with Maria Martins, Waldberg’s skeletal wire sculpture bears a close resemblance to the strangely distorted body of Given: the head and one arm hidden, the other outstretched, legs spread far apart, one straight and the other sharply bent at the knee, the triangle of genitalia exposed (35) :: click for video(QT: 815KB) download QuickTime Player This animation by Robert Slawinski involves the five following unaltered works by Duchamp in the order in which they are listed below:Window Display for Andre Breton’s Le Surréalisme et la Peinture, 1945 Given: Maria, the Waterfall, and the Illuminating Gas, 1947 Study for Given: 1. The Waterfall / 2. The Illuminating Gas, 1947 The Illuminating Gas and the Waterfall, 1948-49 Given: 1. The Waterfall / 2. The Illuminating Gas, 1946-1966. For Duchamp’s initial introduction of Given in 1945, there could not have been a better setting than a shop window, a work secretly linking Maria Martins to Marcel Duchamp, inextricably bringing the two together in this primal hint at Given‘s appearance, a work that would occupy Marcel Duchamp during the next twenty years until shortly before his death. In a note written in 1913 and published in A l’Infinif, his White Box of 1967, appearing a year after Given‘s completion, Duchamp had unmistakably alluded to the forbidden erotic sensation of the shop-window, the round trip rendez-vous of onlookers and objects, the orgasm through a sheet of glass, the consummation achieved by breaking it, silhouettes emerging. click to enlarge Figure 41 & Figure 42 Marcel Duchamp, Note from A’Linfinitif (White Box),1967 (1913) The question of shop windows:. To undergo The interrogation by shop windows:. The necessity of the shop window:. The shop window proof of existence of the world outside:. – When undergoing the interrogation by shop windows, you also pronounce ] your own judgment Condemnation. In fact, the choice is a round trip. From the demands of shop windows, from the inevitable response to shop windows, the conclusion is the making of a choice. No obstinacy, ad absurdum, : in hiding this coition through a sheet of glass with one or more of the objects in the shop window .The penalty consists in cutting the glass and in kicking yourself as soon as possession is consummated. q.e.d. – Neuilly . 1913 (36) Notes 1. In Patrick Waldberg, Isabelle Waldberg: Un Amour Acéphale, Correspondance 1940-1949, Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1992, p. 331 (translation by Sarah Skinner Kilborne). Brentano’s, a well-known bookstore and publisher at the time, was located in Manhattan at 586 Fifth Avenue. click to enlarge Footnote 2 Marcel Duchamp, Cover for First Papers of Surrealism, 1942 2.Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Delano Greenidge, 1999), p. 772. A year before Duchamp’s back cover for VVV, he had designed the catalogue for theFirst Papers of Surrealism exhibition (New York, October 14 – November 7, 1942), the front cover of which depicts a close-up of bullet traces on the wall of a barn on Kurt Seligmann’s property in Sugar Loaf, New York (see a related article, Shooting Bullets at the Barn, in the Notes-section of Tout-Fait 2, 2000). With chicken and small livestock inside, the only door of the barn was in part made of chicken wire. 3. Jennifer Gough-Cooper and Jacques Caumont, “Ephemerides on and about Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Sélavy,” in: Pontus Hulten (ed.), Marcel Duchamp: Work and Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1993 [exh. cat.]), n. pag. [28 November 1960]. 4. I thank Ms. Jacqueline Matisse- Monnier for providing a transparency of the original photograph to the Art Science Research Laboratory. click to enlarge Footnote 5 Yves Tanguy, En Lieu de Peur, 1941 5. The copy to the lower right of the chicken wire torso appears to be opened to page 176, reproducing Yves Tanguy’s En Lieu de Peur of 1941. 6.Jennifer Gough-Cooper and Jacques Caumont, “Ephemerides,” n. pag. [2 July 1945]. 7. The size of the poster in the display can be determined to be approximately that of the original painting (60 x 45 cm). If it were, in fact, the original and not a reproduction, Isabelle Waldberg would surely have mentioned it in the letter to her husband, although there is a possibility of it having been added later. At the time, however, the painting already was a rather valued work of art and it might not have seemed fit to include it in a window display. (It probably deserves mention that Magritte’s shoes have made it into Frederic Jameson’s influential Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham: Duke UP 1992 (1990), pp. 1-54. Within the essay, Jameson compares the depiction of shoes in the arts from van Gogh to Warhol, granting Magritte’s shoes that they “take on the carnal reality” of humanism. Van Gogh’s shoes, of course, have been pondered over before by philosophers Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida.) 8. David Sylvester (ed.), René Magritte: Catalogue Raisonné, vol. II (London: Menil Collection/Wilson, 1993), p. 207. According to Francis M. Naumann, Maria Martins and Marcel Duchamp were intimately involved throughout all of 1945, with their affair probably having begun as early as 1941 (telephone conversation, March 23, 2000). 9. In a fax of January 19, 2000, Arturo Schwarz claims that the anonymous photograph of the window display reproduced in Duchamp’s Complete Works catalogue was given to him by Breton several years before his death in 1966 and was lost shortly after. 10. In this issue of Tout-Fait, note Raymond J. Herdegen’s comparison between Duchamp’s Torture-Morteand a woodcut of Jesus’ studded feet found in an article by Alfred Jarry of July 1895. 11. In a telephone conversation of April 6, 2000, Isabelle Waldberg’s son, Michel Waldberg, confirmed that like most of the sculptures made in New York, the one used for the window display had apparently been lost. 12. Schwarz, Complete Works, p. 772. 13. It was Hector Obalk who first drew my attention to this peculiarity (conversation of November 8, 1999). 14. Julien Levy, Surrealism, New York: Da Capo, 1995 (1936), p. 16 [original italics]. 15. Ibid. [original italics] 16. Ibid., p. 17 [original italics] 17. Stuart Preston, “Diverse Facets: Moderns in Wide Variety,” in: The New York Times, December 20, 1953, sect. 10, p. 12. click to enlarge Footnote 18 Marcel Duchamp (?), Porte-Gants, 1927 18. Julien Levy, Memoirs of an Art Gallery, New York: Putnam, 1977, p. 20 [original italics]. The quotes are from the beginning of Levy’s “Duchampiana” article which first appeared in View magazine (New York; 5, 1, March 1945, pp. 33-35). The original does not contain the paragraph quoted and it is my assumption that Julien Levy added his observations after seeing Giveninstalled at the Philadelphia Museum following Duchamp’s death in 1968. The impact of seeing Given might have brought back the memory of their conversation of 1927, since, according to Levy-scholar Lisa Jacobs, the art dealer did not keep a diary (e- mail to the author of September 15, 1999).In the first edition of Marcel Duchamp: Parawissenschaft, das Epehemere und der Skeptizismus (Frankfurt a.M., Paris: Qumran, 1983), Duchamp-scholar Herbert Molderings reproduces a porte-gans or four-fingered single glove-rackmade of metal (p. 45; according to the author, Marcel Duchamp 27 is engraved in bold letters at the object’s base). Although the authenticity of this ready-made has not been fully proven, the wire sculpture is from the same year in which the conversation between Levy and Duchamp took place. 19. Ecke Bonk, Marcel Duchamp: The Box in a Valise, New York: Rizzoli, 1989, p. 280 [original italics]. 20. André Breton, Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism, New York: Paragon, 1993, p. 144. 21. See: Sigmund Freud, Der Wahn und die Träume in W. Jensens “Gradiva,” Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1995. 22. Carolyn Burke, Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996, p. 218 23. For a discussion of Gradiva’s importance for Surrealist artists like Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst and André Masson, see: Antje von Graevenitz, “Duchamp’s Tür Gradiva. Eine literarische Figur und ihr Surrealistenkreis,” in: Klaus Beekman, Antje von Graevenitz (eds.), Avantgarde 2 (1989), pp. 63-96. 24. René Alleau, “Gradiva Rediviva,” in: André Breton, Le Surréalisme, même , pp. 13-21 25. For a discussion of their collaborations, see Kim Whinna’s interview with Enrico Donati in the third issue of Tout-Fait, A Friend Fondly Remembered: Enrico Donati on Marcel Duchamp. click to enlarge Footnote 26 Ex-voto anatomici, Pompeii 26. Casts of breasts are nothing new in the history of mankind. InGradiva‘s hometown Pompeii, they were frequently used ex-voto in rituals. See: Stefano de Caro, Il Gabinetto Segreto del Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli (Napoli: Museo Archeologico Nazionale, 2000, p. 28). As good-luck charms, dildos and signs of economic well-being, huge phalluses were also displayed prominently inside and outside many houses and at funeral (Ibid.). As study models for artists or intricate anatomical artifacts for scholars and doctors (mostly depicting deformities), body parts, including both feet and breasts, were in frequent use throughout the centuries (see: Horst Bredekamp, Jochen Brüning and Cornelia Weber (eds.),Theatrum Naturae et Artis: Wunderkammern des Wissens, Berlin: Henschel, 2000, pp. 197-218 [exh. cat.]). In New York, during the late 1910s and early 20s, it was Duchamp-obsessed Dada- Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven who presented a plaster phallus to some of her visitors (see Francis M. Naumann, New York Dada 1915-23, New York: Abrams, 1994, p. 173). On the theme of plaster casts, it was only a little later that the Parisian Bureau of Surrealist Research suspended plaster models of nude women from its ceiling in 1924. It was no other than Breton who oversaw the decoration (see: Mark Polizzotti: Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995, p. 220). 27. Francis M. Naumann, “Marcel & Maria,” in: Art in America, 89, 4 (April 2001), pp. 98-110, 157. 28. Newly published with a preface by Arthur C. Danto, New York: The New York Review of Books, 2001. 29. According to Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition, and professor with the Neurosciences Program and Psychology Department at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), on the brain’s cortex, the area for genitals lies adjacent to that of the feet (see: Stefan Klein, “Fast jeder kann mit einem Tisch verschmelzen,” in Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin 3, January 19, 2001, pp. 20-23, p. 21). 30. Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography, New York: Henry Holt, 1996, pp. 353-373; Francis M. Naumann, “The Bachelor’s Quest,” Art in America, September 1993, pp. 72-81, 67-69; also see footnote (27). 31. See Francis M. Naumann, Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Abrams: 1999, p. 174 (footnote 37). For a solo-exhibition of the artist at the Julian Levy Gallery in1947, Breton contributed an essay on Martins’ sculptures (see Francis M. Naumann, Maria: The Surrealist Sculptures of Maria Martins, New York: André Emmerich Gallery, 1998 [exh. cat.], pp. 42-44). On the occasion of the Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanters’ Domain exhibition in New York, 1960, it was Duchamp (contributing, among others, his coin salebehind chicken wire) who urged Breton to include a work of Maria Martins in the catalogue, “on a single page” (see: Naumann, Francis M. and Hector Obalk (eds.), Affectionately, Marcel. The Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp, Ghent/Amsterdam: Ludion, 2000, p. 368). 32. Francis M. Naumann, “Marcel & Maria,” p. 157, footnote 24. 33. Ibid., p. 103. click to enlarge Footnote 34.1 Marcel Duchamp, Lazy Hardware, 1945 Footnote 34.2 Marcel Duchamp, For Sitting Only, 1957 34. This second study forGiven depicts a waterfall running through the legs of headless female, leading Duchamp scholar Herbert Molderings to the conclude that Duchamp first perceived of Given‘s Figure as a pisseuse, standing upright. To him, therefore, another shop window of 1945 is of crucial importance: Duchamp’s installation for Breton’s Arcane 17 at the Gotham Book Mart in April (conversation with the author, November 24, 2001). Within the window, Duchamp uses a mannequin to whose bare leg a faucet is attached. In this respect, Duchamp’s little-known wedding gift to Julien and Jean Levy becomes more significant. For Sitting Onlywas presented at the wedding on January 20th, 1957, in Bridgewater, Connecticut. It is a toilet seat to which seven falsies – nipples painted pink – are affixed, leaving space for the legs of the “sitter.” The falsies, of course, were the same ones used in collaboration with Enrico Donati for the deluxe edition of Le Surréalisme en 1947 (for a first reproduction and brief description of the work, see: Jennifer Gough-Cooper and Jacques Caumont, “Ephemerides,” n. pag. [20 January 1957]). click to enlarge Footnote 35.1 Marcel Duchamp, In the Manner of Delvaux, 1942 Footnote 35.2 Paul Delvaux, In the Manner of Delvaux, 1942 35. In a telephone conversation with Michel Waldberg (see footnote 11), the son of the artist is convinced that the lost sculpture was one of his mother’s, suggesting that Duchamp might have chosen it because of the likeness to what he secretly had in mind. The material used in Waldberg’s sculpture cannot be clearly defined, however. Hans Christoph von Tavel’s Isabelle Waldberg: Skulpturen 1943-1980 (Bern: Kunstmuseum Bern, 1981 [exh. cat.]) states that all of her New York “constructions” were made of bent twigs, with wire “constructions” only appearing in her oeuvre upon Waldberg’s return to Europe in 1946 (p. 10). Both wire and wood would have suited Duchamp well. Given‘s torso rests on tree branches and he often referred to the Bride in his Large Glass as “arbor type”, with its roots in “the skeletal part of the bride” (see: Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (eds.), The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, New York: Da Capo, 1989, pp. 42, 43). Already in 1942, Duchamp had made the small collage In the Manner of Delvaux, showing a female breast appearing in a mirror. This image itself was a detail appropriated from Paul Delvaux’s painting Dawn, 1937, in which four women, naked from the waist up, seem to emerge from solid tree trunks (see Arturo Schwarz,Complete Works, p. 224). 36. from: Marcel Duchamp: In the Infinitive – A Typotranslation by Richard Hamilton and Ecke Bonk of Marcel Duchamp’s White Box, Northend: The Typosophic Society, 1999, pp.5-6 (translated from the French by Jackie Matisse, Richard Hamilton and Ecke Bonk). Figs. 1-3, 6, 8, 9, Footnote2 ©2002 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. All rights reserved. Figs. 12-14, 16-18, 20 ©2002 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. All rights reserved. Figs. 24-29, Footnote18 ©2002 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. All rights reserved. Figs. 30, 32-34, 36-38 ©2002 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. All rights reserved. Figs. 39-42, Footnote 34, 35 ©2002 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. All rights reserved. Duchamp & Androgyny: The Concept and its Context Click to enlarge Figure 1 Man Ray, Rrose Sélavy (alias Marcel Duchamp), 1921 (Author’s note: The following article consists of the first three chapters of the forthcoming Duchamp & Androgyny: Art, Gender, & Metaphysics. For further information, please contact: [email protected]) The Artist & The Androgyne click to enlarge Figure 2 Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending A Staircase, No. 2, 1912 Figure 3 Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q.,1919 Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) is best known for a painting called Nude Descending a Staircase of 1912, a painting that helped to introduce Modern Art to New York with a bang in 1913.(Fig. 2)Almost as famous is his humorous act of putting a mustache and goatee on a reproduction of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa in 1919. (Fig. 3) Duchamp is widely thought of as the “Daddy of Dada,” as that movement developed during World War I, and as the “Grandpa of Pop,” as Pop Art developed during the 1950s and 1960s, as well as the “Conceiver of Conceptual Art.” He was all that and more. During the first half of the twentieth century, Picasso and Matisse usually were thought of as the most influential “Artists of the Century.” That evaluation has now changed. Looking back over the last hundred years as a whole, Duchamp now is widely regarded as the most influential artist of the century. With remarkable spontaneity and seemingly effortless ease, he put forth a lifelong series of revolutionary objects and attitudes including a remarkable non-attachment to fame or fortune. His modesty astonished everyone who knew him, while his ideas have inspired countless artists. Duchamp’s influence, which started during the period of Dada & Surrealism, continued to grow during the Abstract Expressionist era of Pollock and de Kooning and the Neo-Dada era of Johns and Rauschenberg. It is often said that there are few major artists of the last fifty years who were not influenced by Duchamp in one way or another. His influence continues to expand in ever widening waves around the world today. He gave new status to artists by saying art is whatever an artist says is art, not what critics say art is. In a world that had come to rely too much on reason, he emphasized the intuitive side of our brain by his explorations of chance and open-endedness, an open-endedness that said the viewer is the co-creator of every work of art. In short, he democratized art in a new way. Duchamp also was fascinated by science, especially electromagnetism. What electromagnetic energy is, and how it moves through our bodies and throughout the universe, occupied much of his thinking. Any number of his works bring together left-brain science with right-brain visualizations, not as scientific statements but as playful parodies of science. click to enlarge Figure 4 Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, 1915-1923 In another famous work called The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even, (Fig. 4) 1915-1923 (or “The Large Glass,” as it came to be called), the Bride and the Bachelors are divided and never touch, yet they are connected by “wireless” energy. He later used telephone lines to symbolize this flowing of love-energy back and forth, and reminded us that people, not communication systems, are the real “media.” He grew tired of art that appeals only to the eye, and worked to elevate contemporary art above the merely visual and physical to the level of the metaphysical. His philosophical statements are among the most profound in the history of art. Nevertheless, his verbal and visual statements often are surrounded and penetrated by humor. His wisdom comes wrapped in a smile. By using a good many words with his images, and by leaving meanings open-ended, he required that we think and feel at the same time. There was method to this left-brain/right-brain approach to experience. He based much of his work on the ideal of Androgyny (true male-female balance). Bringing together within ourselves the so-called “male” capacity to be rational and the so-called “female” capacity to be intuitive is the stated goal of the meditative traditions within Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. This dynamic harmony is said to be a key to Enlightenment. Enlightenment (as they understood it) became the objective of many modern artists in their non- religious quest for wholeness, their secular search for the sacred. However, few if any were able to attain this ideal. Various kinds of self- centeredness got in the way. Duchamp was not without shortcomings (especially in his early years) and may not have attained total selflessness, but he seems to have come closer than most. Whatever his limitations, Duchamp was widely regarded by major artists on both sides of the Atlantic ocean as a highly “evolved” human being – perhaps not fully enlightened, but more so than anyone else they were likely to meet. In place of the usual (and often egocentric) insistence on self-expression in art, Duchamp pointed out that self-centeredness can be removed from the artistic process, or at least moved off- center. With his “ready-mades” (anonymous manufactured objects he selected and signed), he generated the idea of art-without-artists, and thus opened even further the opportunity for image-making to everyone. Selecting, he said, is a creative act. Moreover, by often replicating his earlier works as editions of multiples, his concept of “self” moved even further away from the object and opened out toward the not-self. The unification of self and not-self is the aim of traditional metaphysical philosophy. While emphasizing concepts and deprecating the “retinal,” he never lost respect for well-crafted quality. His objects were made with loving care, as were his relationships with others. Duchamp celebrated human nature in general and the erotic impulse in particular, advising above all loving and being loved. He also thought of the relationship between art and life as a kind of oneness. And all along the way he recommended laughter. Many books and exhibition catalogues have been devoted to Duchamp. Some think there is nothing more to be said. However, there are neglected areas, for example, his metaphysical philosophy. In part, this is because formalist art history, which dominated most of the twentienth century, had no interest in metaphysics. As a rule, the philosophy of artists has been studied only by post-formalist art historians in recent decades. This book is an exploration of the metaphysical realm of Duchamp’s thought. At the core of this exploration is an analysis of the symbolism of “androgyny.” Why? Because, as I hope to demonstrate, this underexplored theme was central to his work from the 1910s to the 1960s, and was a direct expression of his metaphysical thinking. What is the meaning of “androgyny”? Several quite different definitions of “androgyny” are in use today. The most superficial definitions have been popularized by Hollywood films, where the term usually refers to “women who act like men,” or “men who dress like women,” or someone whose physical features make it unclear whether that person is male or female. A less superficial use of the term is used in the gay and lesbian community where people often call themselves “androgynes,” feeling a special kinship with the ancient Greek world where homosexuality was common and considered natural. The modern term “androgyne” comes from the Greek language and combines words meaning man [andros] and woman [gune]. Many gay, lesbian, bisexual, and intersexual people celebrate a psychology which combines elements usually thought of as male with elements usually thought of as female. In biology and botany, “androgyny” identifies plants and animals who have the capacity to change sex or to fertilize themselves. In the medical community, the term “androgyny” is used for people who are born with ambiguous genitalia, or (in very rare instances) are born with both a sexually functional penis and a sexually functional vagina. More often than not, such intersexual individuals are called hermaphrodites. “Hermaphrodite” is another Greek term that combines the name of the god Hermes with the name of the goddess Aphrodite. It is an oddity of history that the Greeks worshipped deities who were double-sexed, as did many people around the world. However, if a Greek child was born with double genitalia s/he was killed as a monster. There is another definition of “androgyny,” one that is much older than any of those in common use today, one that is not even found in most dictionaries. This metaphysical definition is even older than the civilizations of Greece and Egypt. It goes back to the Stone Age, but seldom is discussed in scholarship today except by historians of mythology and religion. The great World Religions of today usually are identified as Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. All of them have some of their roots in the spiritual traditions of our Stone Age ancestors who, for thousands of years, venerated the Androgyne as a deity. The public (or exoteric) doctrines and rituals of today’s World Religions usually make no reference to the Androgyne or Androgyny. However, the ancient Androgyne has endured as the image of a spiritual goal in the contemplative (or esoteric) teachings of all these religions–teachings traditionally available only in monastic settings for people who have made a total commitment to self- transformation in order to be greater service to the world. Everyone interested in comparative religion is familiar with the symbolism of Yin-Yang in Taoism, Shiva-Shakti in Hinduism, Yab-Yum in Tibetan Buddhism, etc. These unusual symbols of oneness/two-ness are not limited to Asian religions. All World Religions symbolize themselves with visual forms that have a double structure. Consider the double triangle of Judaism, the star & crescent of Islam, and the horizontal & vertical elements of the Christian Cross. As with all mythological symbols, there are many levels of symbolism associated with these images of what might be described as bi-singularity. Among the most commonly discussed are the relationships between the tribe and the transcendent, between the individual and the divine, between male and female, between active and receptive, between spirit and matter, etc. Among historians of sacred symbolism, it is widely accepted that these images symbolize both the appearance of duality (to ordinary ways of looking) and the larger truth of nonduality – the ultimate cosmic unity of all reality. In short, these double-images of nonduality represent a basic metaphysical teaching: what may seem to be two-ness actually is oneness when seen from a higher level of perception. There are a handful of symbols that have been used in World Religions for many centuries to represent universal unity. One of the best known is the image of the circle-square usually called a “Mandala,” from the Sanskrit term for sacred circle or sacred space. Generally speaking, the square stands for matter, or the material world of forms, while the circle stands for the infinite spirit that surrounds and permeates all forms. Less widely known is the traditional image of the Androgyne in which maleness and femaleness are combined in a single human figure. In the traditional literature, the term Androgyne is capitalized because of its transcendent meaning. So it will be in this book when that specific meaning is intended. While the Mandala image represents a condition, the condition of cosmic unity, the Androgyne image represents one who has continuous awareness of this unity and therefore is said to have “cosmic consciousness.” In the public art of Taoism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, for example, Androgynous deities often are shown as part male & part female. In the esoteric art of these traditions, the teaching is that not only deities but human beings can have this transcendent consciousness. Illustrations of traditional Androgyne art appear in Chapter Two. A bibliography of the comparatively new field of Androgyny Studies is at the end of this book. A rounded view of this primal meaning of Androgyny, and how Duchamp used his understanding of that meaning in his work, is the subject of this book. Our point of departure is a conversation I had with Duchamp when I was a young curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Here is part of what was said: May we call your perspective LG: Alchemical? MD: We may. It is an Alchemical understanding. But don’t stop there! If we do, some will think I’ll be trying to turn lead into gold back in the kitchen [laughing]. Alchemy is a kind of philosophy, a kind of thinking that leads to a way of understanding. We may also call this perspective Tantric (as Brancusi would say), or (as you like to say) Perennial. The Androgyne is not limited to any one religion or philosophy. The symbol is universal. The Androgyne is above philosophy. If one has become the Androgyne one no longer has a need for philosophy. (1) Androgyny & Perennial Philosophy “It is essential…to undertake the reconstruction of the primordial Androgyne that all traditions tell us of…within ourselves.” – – André Breton, On Surrealism in its Living Works (1953) Duchamp was so full of humor that many overlook how philosophical he also was. When asked what adjective would best describe his work, Duchamp replied: “metaphysical if any.”(2) From an early period, his primary purpose seems to have been first to find the transcendent, and then, as an artist, to suggest the transcendent realities of metaphysical truth. He phrased his transcendental goal in various ways. For example, “…art is an outlet toward regions which are not ruled by time and space.”(3) He later said: “…the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing.”(4) click to enlarge Figure 5 Marcel Duchamp,Portrait of Dr. Dumouchel, 1910 One of the earliest indications of Duchamp’s interest in the esoteric was his 1910 portrait of his friend, Dr. Dumouchel, showing an aura around his body, an aura that is particularly luminous around his healing hands(Fig. 5). How Duchamp came to be interested in esoteric ideas is unclear. Might it have have been after reading some books about Theosophy or Alchemy? Perhaps. The subject requires further study. However his interest in metaphysics began, that interest obviously was strong about 1910-11 when his art was moving from Fauvism toward Cubism and beyond. While Duchamp was not interested in metaphysical systems, he was very interested in metaphysical thinking – the kind of thinking that moves the mind beyond duality towards what he described as “regions which are not ruled by time and space.” His way of thinking about metaphysical symbols was not part of a system but does parallel what is known as Perennial Philosophy. Perennial Philosophy is so called because it seems to have been present for as long as there has been philosophy, and because it has continued to appear century after century in Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.(5) All these traditions have their own uniqueness. Many of their public or exoteric beliefs are different from one another. Nevertheless, students of comparative religion have found that there is a body of esoteric beliefs that is common to all of them. This common core of understanding is now widely known as Perennial Philosophy. Here is a concise summary: Beneath, beyond, around, and through all manifested reality is an invisible reality that is formless. It also is infinite, eternal, luminous, and loving. In Western traditions, this is often called the Ground-of-Being, or Unconditioned Consciousness. As a rule, only a few are aware of this transcendent reality continuously. Ordinary egocentricity prevents the possibility of such awareness. Most people suffer all through life because they are bound within a self-referential psychology. This prison of the ego, this shell of selfishness, also prevents people from understanding what life can be like if one is ego- free, free to be world-centered rather than self- centered, free to be all-loving rather than loving only one’s self. Selfish desires condition consciousness and cause constant suffering. There are many ways to break through this egocentric shell and begin to “glimpse light through the cracks.” Every tradition has its own methods. Enlightenment or Illumination are names given to breaking through to a higher level of awareness. Breaking through, it is said, often takes place slowly, gradually, in painful stages. In the language of Tantric Hinduism and Tantric Buddhism, one moves up through chakras to higher levels of awareness. There are parallel stages of development in Christian Alchemy and Jewish Kabbalah. Semi-Enlightened stages include proto-Androgynous awareness of dualities reconciling, of male and female elements uniting. In Alchemy what results from this Mystic Marriage is the Androgyne whose Golden Consciousness transforms life. Is the situation similar in yoga? Mircea Eliade reports that it is: “The union of the divine pair within his own body transforms the yogi into [an] ‘androgyne’.” (6) How old are such teachings in the West? Certainly there was Androgynous thinking in early Christianity, long before medieval Alchemists focused on the image of the Androgyne. In one of Paul’s letters in the New Testament he states that, after Baptism, “There is neither… male nor female, for ye are all one in Jesus Christ.”(7) According to another early Christian document, the Second Epistle of Clement, when Jesus was asked at what moment the Kingdom of Heaven would come, the answer was: “When the two shall be one, the outside like the inside, the male with the female neither male nor female.”(8) Probably even older is the Jewish oral tradition recorded in the Zohar of the Kabbalah: “It behooves a man to be ‘male and female’ always….”(9) It would be a mistake to think Androgyny is only an old ideal; its reality is very much alive. Consider, for example, this testimony from the contemporary Chinese Zen master Chuan Yuan Shakya. She recently reported: “Zen masters treat any monk who attains androgyny as if he were truly royal.”(10) The Perennial Traditions teach that even higher levels of consciousness exist beyond Androgyny. To suggest the nature of the “beyond” there is a special metaphor in Zen. Enlightenment or Satori is described as “entering the stream.” At a higher stage one “becomes the water.” The first step towards transcending the Little Self, and attaining totally fluid consciousness, is realizing there is more to life than the realm of the senses, the realm of self-satisfaction, the realm of space and time. Beyond space and time, where rational analysis and sense perceptions work, is the realm of eternity. According to Perennial Philosophy, eternity is not a long time; eternity is beyond time. Illuminated awareness is said to take place when time and timelessness are linked permanently, when the finite and the infinite always are perceived as aspects of each other continuously commingling, when the world and Nothingness are one. click to enlarge Figure 6 Marcel Duchamp, The Chess Players, etching of 1965, after a drawing of 1911 Such teachings were very important to many major artists of Modernism in their secular search for the spiritual. Artists of the Surrealist era were especially interested in various esoteric traditions from Alchemy to Zen. One of these artists was Duchamp. If he had not had some kind of insight into the nature of the transcendent realm, Duchamp might well have continued as a follower of the Cubists, as in his quasi-Cubist composition of 1911 The Chess Players (Fig. 6). Chess was his favorite game, and he worked out many pictorial space-time problems click to enlarge Figure 7 Marcel Duchamp,Bride, 1912 around this theme. But he soon saw all this “retinal art” (as he called it) as extremely limited. He wanted to return art to something that could be (as he said) “at the service of the mind.”(11) In 1912 came Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 and then the Bride(Fig. 7), as Duchamp rapidly moved past the last vestiges of Cubism toward purely mental, imaginary images. The new images start to center on semi-mechanical metaphors. In the process of changing styles, Duchamp was seriously questioning selfhood. He told Pierre Cabanne how much he had been regretting that art no longer had its traditional functions: “religious, philosophical, moral.”(12) He looked back on the Dada movement that developed during World War I as not just fun and games (even though that was a large part of it), but also as: …an extreme protest against the physical side of painting. It was a metaphysical attitude. … It was a way to get out of a state of mind…to get free. Dada was very serviceable as a purgative. And I think I was thoroughly conscious of this at the time and of a desire to effect a purgation in myself. … (13) Duchamp also recalled : “My intention was always to get away from myself…”.(14) It is said that once Little Self is out of the way, or at least set aside a bit, windows rapidly open toward hitherto unknown realms. One of the radical questions Duchamp was asking himself early on was, “Can one make works which are not works of ‘art’?”(15) One of his radical answers was the revolutionary “ready-made”, which he described as “a work of art for which there is no artist.”(16) His ready-mades were industrial products that he selected and signed, declaring them works of art. He went on to redefine art in a highly democratic way by stating that art is whatever an artist says is art (not what critics say is art). Many critics still hate him for that. By removing the “artist” from the center of the concept of art, Duchamp also seems to have been removing the assumed importance of his own Little Self, and thus the whole ego- centered idea of self-importance and self- expression. In short, he seems to have been moving toward Androgyny. There are a number of traditional indications of how much a person is self-centered. One is aggressiveness. Duchamp was anything but aggressive. He was gentle and humorous, confident and resolute; he never forced himself on others. Another traditional indication is how much money and material wealth one thinks one needs. Duchamp had little desire for money. His indifference to it was legendary. Duchamp owned very little. For most of his life what he owned would fit into a couple of suitcases and a few boxes. Another sign is whether or not one needs to dominate a conversation, and make others agree with you. Duchamp went out of his way to allow people their positions, as people, as artists, or as critics, even if he did not agree. Was he also spontaneous and humorous? Yes. Indeed, he loved word-play and was an incurable punster. Another indication of Androgyny is said to be how much attention is paid to what others think of you, and how you treat other people. Duchamp seldom bothered to read what people wrote about him. Nor, for most of his life, did he feel the need to exhibit what he made. He did not have a retrospective exhibition until 1963. He also tried to live without selling his unique work, except to a few private patrons, by working in a library, teaching French, dealing Brancusi’s art, and selling multiples. Was he also generous and supportive of others? Yes. Was he able to feel so deeply into the heart of other artists that even short conversations with him often were transformative experiences? Yes. Many artists have testified to that. Indeed it is often said that no major artist of the last fifty years was not affected by Duchamp to some degree. Several thick books could be written on that subject. Was he also deeply involved with experiencing and communicating transpersonal truth? Very much so. Did he frequently point toward the transcendent in his work? Yes, as we shall see. According to the Perennial teachings, this is what Androgynous people do, and they do it with spontaneous fluidity and grace. Did his thoughts and actions proceed with unusual fluidity and grace? Yes. Here, for example, is an observation by Georgia O’Keeffe: It was probably in the early twenties when I first saw Duchamp. … I don’t remember seeing anyone else at the party, but Duchamp was there… . I was drinking tea. When I finished he rose from the chair, took my teacup and put it down at the side with a grace that I had never seen in anyone before … . I don’t remember anything else about the party.(17) Duchamp’s dear friend Beatrice Wood expressed the feelings of many: “He had the objectivity of a guru. His mind touched stillness, beholding the unity of life.”(18) Arturo Schwarz, his dealer and cataloger, said: “I dare say he was a guru, in the Indian sense of the word. He would not, of course, have favored being so called. … His simplicity was a way of being, modesty was never a pose with him, he was as natural as his breath. He was generous and understanding. … his advice could not have been wiser and his concern would never be merely skin deep.”(19) The traditional teaching is that so long as one’s awareness is contained within the psychological sphere of the ego, one cannot see beyond the realm of space and time. However, Duchamp obviously was moving beyond that. He was very much involved with perceiving and evoking the realm he described as “beyond time and space.” If we assume that one has connected some of one’s personal, qualifying consciousness with the unqualified consciousness, how can one express the transcendent experience of those higher realities? Words work well to identify realities that exist inside the measurable world, the sphere of space and time. Beyond that sphere, any attempt to use words in the usual descriptive way is useless. How can one pictorialize the invisible? How to verbalize or visualize the transcendent are parallel problems. The most one can do is to suggest the transcendent with symbols and metaphors. Much of Duchamp’s work appears to have been the result of his efforts to do just that. Yet he is dismissed by some as merely humorous if not nihilistic. If there is something more, how might we find the wisdom that he wrapped in so many smiles? My approach has been to listen closely to his words, examine the philosophical context in which he did much of his thinking, and then focus on a singular metaphor that he used regularly, the Androgyne. Such an analytical approach (alas) will be somewhat more linear and “heavier” than Duchamp’s light touch. Keep in mind that much of what he said was said with a smile, and that seems to be true of his visual work as well. The Androgyne Before & After Duchamp “The true mythical androgyne is equally male and female at the same time.” Wendy Doniger, Women, Androgynes, & other Mythical Beasts (1980) “…spiritual perfection consists precisely in rediscovering with oneself this androgynous nature.” Mircea Eliade, The Two and The One (1969) As already noted, certain sacred symbols have been in use continuously for centuries. Among the best- known are double images of nonduality, e.g., those by which world religions symbolize themselves: the Yin-Yang of Taoism, the Circle-Square (or Mandala) of Buddhism, the Double Triangle of Judaism, and the Cross of Christianity. As has been discussed, each symbol is both a two-ness and a oneness. All these double images are intended to remind us of the higher unity that transcends all forms of multiplicity. What seems to be two is one ultimately. Spirit and matter are one. Sky and Earth are one. Male and female are one. All those double images of nonduality are rendered in a visual language that is geometric. Geometry as a sacred visual language did not become common until after the Old Stone Age. In other words, abstract geometric forms of this type are part of the settled, post-nomadic experience. There are other double-images images of nonduality which are much older, going back to the Old Stone Age. This group is pictorial, naturalistic, not geometric. The best known examples include the Double- Serpent, which began in the Paleolithic era and has continued into our time as the medical caduceus, and the Flying Serpent whose various forms include the Quetzalcoatl of the Aztecs, and the cosmic Dragons of Asia. The heavenly and the earthly are united in this symbol of what might be called bi-singularity. The least known of these primordial pictorial symbols is the Androgyne – a single human body which is part-male and part-female. The Androgyne image also has been with us since the Paleolithic era. In Asia it is better known than in the West, where its history and meaning usually are studied only by students of sacred art, archeology, religion, and mythology. Like all works of sacred art, images of the Androgyne are teachings in and of themselves–visual expressions of metaphysical truth. click to enlarge Figure 8 Androgynes from Around The World: Europe, India, China, the Middle East, & the Americas To introduce this mythic image – its structure, antiquity, and ubiquity – I prepared a digital collage of images from the tribal world to the modern world (Fig. 8). In this collage, we see a Stone Age work from North America, a Bronze Age image from the Near East, the Goddess Kuan Yin (with a mustache) from China, Shiva-Shakti from India, and an Alchemical Androgyne from Christian Europe. Each visual metaphor is different, but the essential teaching is the same. Nonduality refers to the highest possible level of human consciousness. The purpose of an “illuminating image” is to illuminate. As an image that is a teaching, it can be approached in various ways. Monks can meditate deeply for years on the meaning of Androgyny as they work to become Androgynes themselves. For first-time viewers, the image can be quite shocking. It is a very irrational image. Logic cannot comprehend it. Happily, there are other ways of knowing. A well-delivered shock can jolt the first-time viewers out of their habitual reliance on linear, left-brain logic. The experience can be like what happens when one tries to deal with a Zen koan, for example, trying to answer the question “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” When logic proves useless, one tends to shift into intuitive, right-brain modes of knowing. That is exactly what the abbot of every Zen koan monastery wants the monks to be doing. Only when the intuition of the monks is as highly developed as their reasoning are they ready to graduate from the monastery and go out to be of service to the world. It is this internal harmony of the “male & female” within us, the “sun & moon” within us, reason and intuition within us, that makes possible the highest form of human wholeness, an Enlightened state of being. When Golden Consciousness emerges, according to the Perennial Philosophy, one is no longer self- serving, or able to love in only qualified ways. One exists for the benefit of others, and every act is an act of love. We can also consider Androgyny from the perspective of modern brain science. At a 1978 conference of psychologists and anthropologists on bimodality I presented a paper demonstrating that there is a one-to-one relationship between how bilateral Androgyne images are rendered in sacred art and the left/right brain. His/Her left side (which actually is controlled by the right brain) always is female. His/Her right side (which actually is controlled by the left brain) always is male. Those present were as surprised as I was to see this relationship. Shortly thereafter I was invited to teach the history of sacred art at the California Institute of Asian Studies in San Francisco, where the faculty included respected practitioners of the major spiritual traditions. I asked each of them if the newly discovered left/right brain is an appropriate metaphor for the Perennial teaching of integrating our rational and intuitive faculties in order to attain Enlightenment. Every teacher there, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist, said yes–with the qualification that scientific understanding is only a partial understanding of traditional wisdom. A similar answer was given to me by a number of Tibetan Buddhists, including Lama Govinda, and the Venerable Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. These interviews supported my growing belief that the discovery of left/right brain was not a trivial fad in popular psychology but something of special importance for the modern world–a concrete, scientific way for anyone to start to think about the psychodynamics of Androgyny and striking confirmation of what Duchamp told me a decade earlier. click to enlarge Figure 9 Native American Androgyne, Stone Age type Figure 10 African Androgyne (Sudan), Stone Age type To see in more detail how Androgyny has been symbolized in traditional sacred art, the following selection of images provides a general overview of the various types of Androgyne iconography that have been rendered around the world from the Stone Age to the present.(20) Representing the Stone Age is a painted image from North America. This figure has breasts and an erect phallus (Fig. 9). Among the neolithic tribes of Africa, it is typical to see images of the Androgyne with breasts and a beard (Fig. 10). That symbolism was continued by Bronze Age Egyptians. Other Bronze Age artists portrayed the Androgyne as a single body with male and female faces, often in association with the Double-Serpent and/or the Sun-Moon (Fig. 11). More widely published are Iron Age images of the Androgyne as a male-female with one breast, as Shiva-Shakti is often seen in Hindu India where there are more sculpted and painted Androgyne images than anywhere else (Fig. 12). In the esoteric tradition of Judaism, the image of Adam Kadmon is central to the Kabbalah (Fig. 13). In the esoteric tradition of Christianity, many versions of the Androgyne image fill Alchemical books and manuscripts of the Renaissance. There are more Androgyne images to be found in those books than anywhere else in the Western art of the modern era (Figs. 14 & 15; 16 & 17). In all these spiritual traditions, the Androgyne symbolizes both divinity among the Gods and Goddesses, and the possibility of psycho-cosmic wholeness here on earth. click images to enlarge Figure 11 Figure 12 Figure 13 Neo-Babylonian Androgyne, Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age type Hindu Androgyne (Ardhanarisvara / Shiva-Shakti), Iron Age type Jewish Androgyne (Adam Kadmon), Iron Age type click images to enlarge Figure 14 Figure 15 Christian Androgynes (Alchemical), 17th century click images to enlarge Figure 16 Figure 17 Christian Androgynes (Alchemical), 17th and 18th centuries Christian Androgynes (Alchemical), 17th & 18th centuries Those traditional images, especially in Stone Age art and the Alchemical book illustrations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were the type of Androgyne images that were known to modern artists in the early twentieth century. Inspired by such images, artists of the Dada-Surrealist era rendered many contemporary variations on this ancient theme as they searched for Androgyny within themselves. A comprehensive survey would show how virtually every major artist of the Surrealist era focused on this iconography. What follows is a small selection of their Androgyne images. The dates range from 1916 to 1954. Most of the artists represented in this portfolio were friends of Duchamp. click to enlarge Figure 18 Paul Klee, Barbarian’s Venus, 1921 BBarbarian’s Venus by Paul Klee (1879-1940) is one of the most “barbaric” Androgyne images of the era. She is a Venus with a penis(Fig. 18). Klee was not a member of the Surrealist circle, but sometimes exhibited with them. He was associated with Kandinsky and Marc in Munich in 1911 and 1912, then took from Cubism and Orphism the concept of fluctuating planes. Klee was thought by some to be an Alchemist when he discussed the Absolute, Nothingness, and the Ground of Being. His students at the Bauhaus (only half in jest) called him “Heavenly Father.” He was one of the first modern artists to explore Androgyny in tribal art. click to enlarge Figure 19 Constantin Brancusi, Princess X, 1916 Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957) was a very close friend of Duchamp. He studied Androgyne symbolism first in Theosophy and then in the tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. A book of Tibetan teachings was on his bedside table for many years. He and Duchamp worked together, played together, and seem to have shared many ideas about the etheric, the infinite, and the Androgynous. Such concepts were central to both artists. In 1916 Brancusi sculpted Princess X (Fig. 19). Most of the critics of the time did not like it. It was too abstract. One was particularly offended by the phallic form. Similar criticism greeted Brancusi’s most famous work, “Bird in Space.” Brancusi called it “Bird of the Ether” because the upward thrust is toward the etheric realm, beyond the realm of space and time, the realm that only Androgynous consciousness can reach. In spite of the phallic interpretations of many viewers, “Bird of the Ether” clearly is about not sexuality but transcendence. click to enlarge Left :Figure 20 Jean Arp, Demeter, 1960 Figure 21 Jean Arp, Idol, 1950 Jean (Hans) Arp (1888-1966) often read Alchemical texts by Jacob Boehme and felt art should lead beyond self-expression to spirituality. He and his good friend Max Ernst made sure this attitude was part of the Dada movement and early Surrealism. Later he was deeply inspired by Brancusi’s fluid style. He carved a number of beautiful Androgynes. His Demeter makes use of the traditional Iron Age symbolism of the Goddess-God with one breast (Fig. 20). For his Idol (Fig. 21) Arp seems to have gone farther back in time for his iconography, back to the Androgyne symbolism of the Stone Age and Bronze Age, when it was not uncommon for idols to have an abstract female body and a tall abstract phallic neck/head (Figs. 22A &22B). click images to enlarge Figure 22A Figure 22B Old Stone Age figures thought to be Androgynes New Stone Age/Bronze Age figures thought to be Androgynes click to enlarge Figure 23 Joan Miró, Dawn Perfumed by a Shower of Gold, 1954 Joan Miró (1893-1983) spoke of wanting his art to express the unity of the finite and the infinite. He was particularly interested in Stone Age art in his later years and used the ancient phallic neck/head symbolism of the Stone Age in his Androgynous painting “Dawn Perfumed by a Shower of Gold.” The lower part is quite female, while the upper part is quite male (Fig. 23). Nudes, Rroses, etc. “Is it a woman? No. Is it a man? No. …I have never thought which it is. Why should I think about it?” Marcel Duchamp discussing his painting Nude Descending a Staircase of 1912 As we have seen, Duchamp was not the only artist of the Dada-Surrealist era interested in Androgyny. The image of the Androgyne was very important to many of the major artists in this circle. They talked about Androgynes in Alchemy, as well as in esoteric Hinduism and esoteric Buddhism wherein the Androgyne also is a primal symbol for Enlightened consciousness. They knew what the Androgyne is, and considered it the ideal condition of human awareness. This is not to say that all these artists actually attained Androgyny, but only to indicate that Androgyny was, to a large extent, their common goal. Even though many Surrealist artists rendered images of the Androgynes and were working towards the condition of Androgyny within themselves, Duchamp devoted more years of his life to articulating images of the Androgyne than any other major artist of the twentieth century, with the possible exception of his good friend Max Ernst. More has been written about Duchamp’s Androgyne images than about anyone else’s modern Androgyne images, but the focus of most of the literature has been on gender issues not metaphysics. This book is about metaphysics. Some would begin the list of Duchamp’s Androgyne images with Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 of 1912, his most famous painting. While most people simply assume the nude is female, a close examination reveals there is a gender question. Is the figure male or female? “Nu” in French can mean male or female, and the visual evidence is not conclusive. This very ambiguity is interpreted by some as being Androgynous, especially in light of the unusual way Duchamp responded to the gender question in a 1916 interview: “Is it a woman? No. Is it a man? No. To tell you the truth, I have never thought which it is. Why should I think about it?”(21) Some think the slightly later Bride also is an Androgyne image, but that depends largely on how one interprets The Large Glass. Others would begin the list with L.H.O.O.Q. of 1919 where Duchamp added a mustache and beard to Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa,” having heard that Leonardo was homosexual. This modified ready-made clearly was intended as a joke, but it also clearly was a deliberate form of Androgyne imagery. click to enlarge Figure 24 Marcel Duchamp, Fountain , 1917 (1964 replica) Figure 25 Marcel Duchamp, Bottle Dryer , 1914 (1963 replica) Some would begin the Androgyne list two years earlier with Fountain – the signed ready-made urinal of 1917(Fig. 24). To declare this plumbing fixture a work of art certainly was a striking challenge to the aesthetic sensibilities of the time, and for many still is a challenge. Even though it is now accepted as a work of art, what might be Androgynous about it? Several people interested in religion (as Duchamp himself was not) looked at this image in 1917 as an abstract form of Buddha or the Virgin Mary. Male Buddha/Holy Mother? Perhaps the combination of those two holy images would be an Androgyne? It would echo the ancient idea of Androgyny if the combination of Divine Mother/Divine Son were deliberate, but there’s no evidence that this was the case in Duchamp’s mind. Some (with a Freudian psychology) see this open receptacle as a female space into which a male enters. This may have been slyly sexual symbolism on Duchamp’s part, but the symbolism of common copulation is not the iconography of Androgyny. The same goes for the ready-made Bottle Dryer of 1914 (Fig. 25). Some see the elements that hold the drying bottles as male and the implied bottles as female. That symbolism may be humorously sexual, but it is not inherently Androgynous. Not so with the gender-bending character Duchamp created as a female alter ego in 1920:Rrose Sélavy. After his Mona Lisa of 1919, we find a string of Androgyne images in Duchamp’s work, some humorous, some serious. He worked on these Androgyne images every decade for the rest of his life. Rrose even “signed” a number of major objects, as well as most of his literary works over the next twenty years. Was Duchamp homosexual? No. Was he bisexual? No. Neither was he homophobic. He had any number of homosexual and bisexual friends. Did he dress in drag regularly? No – only when making a work of art (Figs. 26, 27, 28). This series of male-female images from 1919 to 1942 certainly was intended to be amusing, but they also publicly propagated the idea of Androgyny as “food for thought.” He did not stop thinking about the Androgyne. In 1946 Duchamp secretly began work on the monumental Androgyne image that would occupy him for most of the rest of his life. click images to enlarge Figure 26 Figure 27 Figure 28 Marcel Duchamp, “Belle Haleine (Beautiful Breath)” Perfume Bottle, with a photograph of Rrose Sélavy (alias Marcel Duchamp) by Man Ray pasted on, 1921 Marcel Duchamp, RROSE SÉLAVY in the “Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme,” Paris, 1938 (female mannequin half dressed in Duchamp’s clothing) Marcel Duchamp, Compensation-Portrait in the exhibition “First Papers of Surrealism,” New York, 1942 An early examination of the Androgyne in Duchamp’s work was written by Arturo Schwarz in the 1960s. Some of the theoretical assumptions of Schwarz are quite strange, and have been rejected by a large number of Duchamp specialists. His articulation of the meaning of Androgyny is often imaginative and not always consistent. However, Schwarz deserves credit for his early attempt to bring Androgyny into the art-historical dialogue around Duchamp. He did so from the perspective of Alchemy, the basic principles of which he has articulated clearly. Here is a passage from his essay “The Alchemist Stripped Bare in the Bachelor, Even”: “…for the adept to achieve higher consciousness means, in the first place, acquiring ‘golden understanding’ (aurea apprehensio) of his own microcosm and of the macrocosm in which it fits. It is in the course of his pursuit of the Philosopher’s Stone that he acquires this new awareness. Thus the quest is more important than its reward; as a matter of fact, the quest is the reward. Alchemy is nothing other than an instrument of knowledge – of the total knowledge that aims to open the way toward total liberation. … Individuation, in the alchemical sense, entails abolishing the conflicting male-female duality within the integrated personality… . Eliade has pointed out that ‘to be no longer conditioned by a pair of opposites results is absolute freedom’.”(22) Some, including Schwarz, Jack Burnham, Ulf Linde, John F. Moffitt, and others, have worked hard to have us see Duchamp as an Alchemist. Duchamp, however, offered little support for this belief. Indeed, he made efforts to deny it. When I met Duchamp in 1967 I had been studying the symbolism of Alchemy for a number of years and suspected that he might be an actual Alchemist. While it is true that the Androgyne is the goal of Alchemy, it is possible to have a particular interest in the Androgyne without being an Alchemist. I did not understand this at the time. Duchamp illuminated me. Here is how one of our conversations went: LG: It seems that almost from the beginning of your work as an artist, you have had a philosophical attitude toward what being an artist is. In one of your interviews with Sweeney, for example…, you describe Dada as a “metaphysical attitude.” What you have talked about and written is permeated with the thought-feelings of a philosopher. At the end of your 1956 interview with Sweeney, you spoke of art as a path “toward regions which are not ruled by time and space.” MD: Was that the one filmed in Philadelphia? LG: It was. MD: Yes. Perhaps that is about as much as you can say in a film being made for wide consumption. If one says too much more, the result is simply a great deal of misunderstanding. Understanding can only emerge from a co-experience, a non-verbal experience which the artist and the onlooker can share by means of aesthetic experience. So I leave the interpretation of my work to others. LG: Nevertheless, I think it would be correct to say that you regard the practice of art as a philosophical path toward that which is beyond time and space. MD: That is correct. That is my view, but only part of my view. My view is beyond and back. Some get lost “out there.” My frame of reference is out of the frame and back again. LG: That sounds like the dance of the finite and infinite, stepping back and forth between three dimensions and four dimensions, as Apollinaire or Mallarmé would say. MD: So it does. No one says it better than Mallarmé! LG: May we call your perspective Alchemical? MD: We may. It is an Alchemical understanding. But don’t stop there! If we do, some will think I’ll be trying to turn lead into gold back in the kitchen (laughing). Alchemy is a kind of philosophy, a kind of thinking that leads to a way of understanding. We may also call this perspective Tantric (as Brancusi would say), or (as you like to say) Perennial. The Androgyne is not limited to any one religion or philosophy. The symbol is universal. The Androgyne is above philosophy. If one has become the Androgyne one no longer has a need for philosophy. (23) Notes 1. Duchamp in conversation with Lanier Graham, 1968. Quoted in Graham, Marcel Duchamp: Conversations with The Grand Master (New York: Handmade Press, 1968) 3. For more of this conversation, see below, 5. 2. Duchamp in conversation with William Seitz, 1963. Quoted in “What’s Happened to Art?: An Interview with Marcel Duchamp” in Vogue (15 Feb. 1963) 113. 3. Duchamp in conversation with J. J. Sweeney, 1956. Quoted in Michel Sanouillet & Elmer Peterson, eds.,Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973) 137. [hereafter “SS.”] 4. Duchamp, “The Creative Act” – a talk in Houston at a meeting of the American Federation of Art, 1957. Quoted in Sanouillet 138. 5. The best-known book on this subject is Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1946 & later editions). For a bibliography, see Lanier Graham, “The Perennial Philosophy: A General Bibliography” in Iconography of Infinity: Essays on Art & Philosophy, vol. 2, no. 1 (Spring 1993). The best- known twentieth century writers on this subject include Titus Burckhardt, A. C. Coomaraswamy, Réné Guenon, Karl Jaspers, Frithjof Schuon, Huston Smith, Alan Watts, and Ken Wilber. 6. Eliade, The Two and The One (New York: Harper Torhbook, 1965) 118. 7. Galatians 3:28. 8. The Gospel of Thomas 22 in Doresse, Les Livres Secrets des Gnostiques d’Egypt, vol. 2 (Paris, 1959) 157. 9. Scholem, ed., Zohar: The Book of Splendor (New York: Schocken Books, 1977) 10. 10. Ruminations on Zen Cows, Part 4 (1998) 3 11. Duchamp in conversation with J. J. Sweeney, 1946. Quoted in SS 125. 12. Duchamp in conversation with Pierre Cabanne. Quoted in Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp(New York: Da Capo Press, 1967) 43. 13. Duchamp in conversation with J. J. Sweeney, 1946. Quoted in SS 123. 14. Duchamp in conversation with Katharine Kuh. Quoted in Kuh,Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists (New York: Harper & Row, 1962) 82. Duchamp went on to add: “though I knew perfectly well that I was using myself. … Call it a little game between ‘I’ and ‘me’.” It would be interesting to collect all of Duchamp’s statements about ego, self, etc. Included would be the following from the Western Round Table on Modern Art, San Francisco, 1949: “…the ‘victim’ of an esthetic echo is in a position comparable to that of a man in love, or a believer, who dismisses automatically his demanding ego and…submits… “. Quoted in Clearwater, ed., West Coast Duchamp (Miami Beach, FL: Grassfield Press, 1991) 107 and 110; Also this statement: “And artists are such supreme egos! It’s disgusting.” Quoted in Tomkins, The Bride & The Bachelors (New York: The Viking Press, 1965) 67. 15. Duchamp. WB in SS 74 16. Duchamp in conversation with Francis Roberts. Quoted in “I Propose to Strain the Laws of Physics” inArtnews (Dec. 1968): 47. Duchamp questioned himself this way in a 1913 WB note; IBID., and soon developed the ready-made. 17. O’Keeffe, quoted in d’Harnoncourt and McShine, eds., Marcel Duchamp (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1973) 212. 18. Beatrice Wood, “Marcel,” in Kuenzli and Naumann, eds., Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987; 1990) 16. For the story of their half-century relationship, see I Shock Myself: The Autobiography of Beatrice Wood (San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, 1988). 19. Arturo Schwarz, “Marcel Duchamp, the Man, Even” in Kuenzli and Naumann, eds., OP. CIT., 18. 20. Most of the literature on Androgynes in art is limited to the historical era, when there are written documents. The prehistoric images have been more difficult to interpret owing to a lack of written documents. For a century, scholars have had little to say about the many Stone Age figures that clearly have female bodies but also have strange tall neck/heads. Many figures of this type have been classified as having the shape of a violin. No male/female symbolism was detected. In more recent scholarship we find the fact that there seems to be an unbroken continuity of such symbolism from the Old Stone Age through the New Stone Age, and the reasonable theory that such figures with “phallic necks” are to be interpreted as being male& female simultaneously. For illustrations of such female figures with “phallic necks,”see Gimbutas, The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe 6500-3500 BC (Berkeley , LA: University of California Press, 1974 & 1982; 1990) 133, 135, 154, 157, 202; and Gimbutas,The Language of the Goddess (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995) 82, 183, 230, 231, 232. The oldest figures of this female/male type in Old Europe (#356 & #357) date from between about 20,000 and 15,000 BCE. For parallel images from other parts of the world, see Lanier Graham, “The Great Goddess-God, The Divine Androgyne,” in Goddesses in Art (New York: Artabras, 1997) 43-47. 21. Duchamp, quoted in Nixola Greeley- Smith, “Cubist Depicts Love in Brass and Glass” in The Evening World, New York (Apr. 4, 1916) 3. 22. Schwarz, in d’Harnoncourt & McShine, eds., OP. CIT. 82-83. Mircea Eliade is the twentieth century’s most widely respected historian of religions. His name continues to appear in the Duchamp literature, e.g., Francis M. Naumann, “Marcel Duchamp: A Reconciliation of Opposites” in Kuenzli & Naumann, eds.,Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1989) 40, note 30. Nothing was more important to Eliade than the symbolism of the coincidentia oppositorum. More Eliade citations are to be expected as Duchamp’s metaphysics are explored in more depth. During his visit to Kenyon College in 1960, I asked Eliade this question: “In our seminar on the sacred art, I want to be able to point to twentieth century artists who are still connected to the sacred. Can you suggest any?” He replied: “That is a subject I would like to write about. There are not too many in a society that has lost touch with the sacred. But I would say Chagall is reaching for Paradise, and Brancusi knows what it means to climb the axis mundi. Brancusi connected modern art with the Primal, and thereby injected a new vitality. Yes, I believe in Brancusi, and I’m told Brancusi believed in Duchamp. Is his ‘Mona Lisa with a Mustache’ only a joke or is it also an Androgyne? Several modern artists and writers have explored Androgyny. They are connecting with the Primal. They are worth examining. It also would be worthwhile to explore the abstract painters of today who are reaching beyond the skin of matter for what is underneath.” See Eliade, Symbolism, The Sacred, & The Arts (New York: Crossroad/Herder & Herder, 1986). A comprehensive study of the Androgyne in Surrealism has not been written. It will include images by many Surrealist artists and writers and such articles as Albert Béguin, “L’Androgyne” in Minotaure, 1938. 23. Duchamp in conversation with Lanier Graham. Quoted in Graham, Marcel Duchamp: Conversations with the Grand Master (New York: Handmade Press, 1968) 2-3. Figs. 2-7, 24-28 ©2002 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. All rights reserved. Between Music and the Machine: Francis Picabia and the End of Abstraction Ce qui est extraordinaire, c’est que malgré leurs audaces, l’un et l’autre souffraient d’un mal qu’il leur était difficile de préciser : une sorte de nostalgie de la forme objective, le regret du motif et de toutes les formules classiques dont ils s’étaient peu à peu détachés. — Gabrielle Buffet click to enlarge Figure 1 & Figure 2 Left: FrancisnPicabia, Dances at the Spring I ,1912 Right: Francis Picabia,Procession in Seville, 1912 In January 1913, just two months after their trip to the Jura mountains with Guillaume Apollinaire and Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia and his wife, Gabrielle Buffet, boarded an ocean-liner for New York. They arrived just three days after the opening of the Armory Show, where Picabia showed Paris, Memory of Grimaldi, Dances at the Spring (Fig. 1), and Procession in Seville (Fig. 2). (1) More clearly cubist in technique and less radically at odds with perceived notions of modern painting than the work that drew the bulk of the critics’ ire, Duchamp’sNude Descending a Staircase, Picabia’s three paintings nonetheless received considerable attention in the press, some of which was quite positive. (2) click to enlarge Left: Figure 3 -Francis Picabia,New York, 1913 Right: Figure 4 -Francis Picabia,Negro Song I, 1913 Almost immediately upon his arrival in New York, Picabia was introduced to a small group of artists interested in the European avant-garde, including Mabel Dodge, Alfred Stieglitz, Marius de Zayas, and Paul Haviland. In March, Picabia had his first one-man show at Stieglitz’s gallery where he presented a collection of freshly completed drawings and watercolors (Fig. 3,4), works he described as abstractions, pure paintings having no longer any relation to perceived reality. As he described his works in a text written expressly for the exhibit: “In my paintings, the public is not to look for a ‘photographic’ recollection of a visual impression or sensation, but to look at them as simply an attempt to express the purest part of the abstract reality of form and color in itself.” (3) click to enlarge Left: Figure 5 Picabia,Udnie, 1913 Right: Figure 6 Picabia,Edtaonisl, 1913 In April, he and his wife returned to Paris, where he immediately began work on translating these small watercolors into large, ambitious paintings, designed, in all likelihood, as grand salon- pieces, manifesto-works of his commitment to abstraction (a word, claimed Duchamp, “that he invented” (4) ). At the Salon d’Automne, Picabia presented two of these works, Udnie (Fig. 5) and Edtaonisl (Fig. 6), both of which stand about nine feet on each side, with their perplexing titles. click to enlarge Figure 7 Picabia,I see again in memory my dear Udnie, 1914 printed in block letters at the top. Both are dominated by interlocking curved forms suggesting something organic, as if the painting itself was in the process of growing: Udnie expanding outward from the center, Edtaonisl stretching upward from the bottom (“a rhythm of impulse,” as he was to refer to it (5) ). Picabia had described them in a letter to Stieglitz as “a purer painting of a dimension having no title, each painting hav[ing] a name in rapport with the pictorial expression, [an] appropriate name absolutely created for it.” (6) Throughout 1913 and into 1914, Picabia continued with his practice of “pure painting” as Apollinaire referred to it. But, sometime in mid-1914, Picabia painted I see again in memory my dear Udnie (Je revois en souvenir ma chère Udnie) (Fig. 7), a work that, in its incorporation of vaguely machinal elements with an otherwise abstract composition, prefigured a radical shift that was about to take place in the painter’s work. In early 1915, Picabia and his wife returned to New York, where he took up again with the Stieglitz group, itself experiencing a shift toward a more explicit embrace of modernity and its technological inventions. Along with de Zayas, Picabia began work on a new magazine, 291 (named after the address of Stieglitz’s gallery). As part of a celebratory, inaugural gesture, Picabia prepared a series of mechanical portraits. He represented Stieglitz as a camera(Fig. 8); Haviland as an electric lamp; de Zayas as a complex arrangement of a woman’s corset attached to a spark plug which was itself attached to an engine (Fig. 9); Agnes Meyer (a collector and close friend of de Zayas) as a spark plug. Picabia represented himself as a composite horn-cylinder- spark plug (Fig. 10) (appropriate for a man who was to own some 120 cars during the course of his life (7)). click images to enlarge Figure 8 Figure 9 Figure 10 Francis Picabia, Here, This is Stieglitz / Faith and Love, cover of 291,July-August 1915 Francis Picabia, De Zayas! De Zayas!, 291, July-August 1915 Francis Picabia,The Saint of Saints / This is a portrait about me, 291,July-August 1915 In the following months, Picabia transformed these mechanical portraits into larger paintings, referred to by most scholars as “mechanomorphs.” Unlike the earlier portraits, these works were more elusive, less concerned with the accurate depiction of real machine parts, than in manipulating the formal properties of various fragments of largely unrecognizable machines. In transforming the modest portraits of291 into large-scale paintings on board, Picabia was reenacting the process used in his earlier transformation of the small New York watercolors into the enormous abstractions painted upon his return to Paris. It is impossible to overlook the transformation that took place in such a brief span of time. In early 1914, Picabia was fully committed to exploring the language and ambition of abstract painting; in early 1915 Picabia had turned himself completely around. In adopting the machine and its metaphorical potential, he had returned to the language of representation, to the depiction of things in the world. He had abandoned almost every trace of the concerns–in terms of both form and content–that guided him just a year before. Where the works from 1913/1914 were abstract, organic, painterly, rich with coloristic complexities, and suggestive of interiorized, subjective states of mind, the works from 1915 were largely monochromatic, linear, inorganic, and clearly derived from and reflective of real-world objects. Almost every scholar to have approached this shift has endeavored to highlight its radicality. The break was total and unequivocal, self-evidently so. Michel Sanouillet summed it up most succinctly when he described Picabia as having “turned his back” (8) on modernist painting, abandoning its procedures and promises in favor of a poetics of modernity–one evidently influenced by the example set by Duchamp. As de Zayas was to put it with reference to Picabia’s Spanish origin: “He is the only one who has done as did Cortez. He has burned his ship behind him.” (9) And yet to follow the painter’s work beyond 1913 is to recognize that the break was in fact far from absolute. For one, Picabia never really gave up his commitment to abstraction. Works like Fantasy (Fig. 11) and Music is like Painting (Fig. 12), both of which were painted at the same time as the mechanomorphs, attest to Picabia’s persistent commitment to the procedures and ambitions of abstraction. And there is no doubt that this was a commitment that would erupt here and there throughout the late teens and into the early twenties (Lausanne Abstract, 1918 (Fig. 13); Streamers, 1919(Fig. 14); Coils, 1922 (Fig. 15)), and although the twenties and thirties were dominated by a variety of figurative works, abstraction would appear again in the forties (Painting of a Better Future, 1945 (Fig. 16) ; Playing Card, 1949(Fig. 17) ). And this is to say that even at first glance, Picabia’s case is quiteunlike that of Duchamp. Abstraction, that “word he invented,” would remain throughout Picabia’s life a palpable presence, inflecting almost all of his work, even, if not especially, the mechanomorphs. click images to enlarge Figure 11 Figure 12 Figure 13 Figure 14 Francis Picabia, Fantasy,291, December 1915 Francis Picabia, Music Is Like Painting, 1915 Francis Picabia, Lausanne Abstract, 1918 Francis Picabia, Streamers II, 1919 click images to enlarge Figure 15 Figure 16 Figure 17 Francis Picabia, Coils, 1921-22 Francis Picabia, Painting of a Better Future, 1945 Francis Picabia, The Cowardice of Subtle Barbarism, 1949 click to enlarge Figure 18 Francis Picabia,Paroxysm of Sorrow, 1915 Figure 19 Francis Picabia, Machine Without a Name, 1915 This should be obvious, given the way in which all of the New York mechanomorphs retain, even reinforce, a modernist commitment to the integrity of the picture plane (its flatness and boundedness), as well as in the way in which the bulk of the mechanomorphs, like the earlier abstractions, resist interpretation as real-world objects. In Paroxysm of Sorrow (Paroxyme (sic) de la douleur) (1915) (Fig. 18), for example, the uniform application of paint, the nesting of rectangular forms (the largest of which coincides with the outer limit of the canvas), as well as the work’s aggressive frontality and symmetry suggest a continued dialog with the language of abstraction, in particular with the shallow space, central organization, and largely symmetrical, well-framed composition of Udnie. And this is no less true ofA Machine Without a Name (Fig. 19) where the flatness of the picture plane is asserted unequivocally, not by virtue of an unmodulated application of paint and the web of vertical and horizontal lines. Indeed, its title seems to demand that we understand the painting as thematizing the a-signifying ambition of abstract painting. Perhaps, then, we ought to consider not only de Zayas’ account of Picabia (the Cortez of the avant-garde), but also that of Buffet. For as she understood it, her husband’s work, from 1907 on, was on some level engaged with the discourse of the “painterly.” (10) Indeed, it was this above all that in her mind distinguished the work of Picabia from that of Duchamp. So if we are to take Buffet seriously–and even the most cursory glance at Picabia’s work suggests that we would not be wrong to do so–then we ought to consider the possibility that the mechanomorphs, coming as they did on the heels of an extended investigation of the possibilities of abstraction, were themselves still invested in, or responding in some manner to the promise of modernist painting–the promise, as Picabia described it, of “expressing the purest part of the abstract reality.” (11) The Music of Painting I am working at the moment on a very large painting which concentrates several of my studies exhibited at 291–I am thinking moreover of a painting, a purer painting of a dimension having no title, each painting will have a name in rapport with the pictorial expression, [an] appropriate name absolutely created for it… Excuse the brevity of my letter. I am a little fatigued and tormented by my new evolution. (12) Picabia had just returned to Paris when he scrawled this note on a postcard-size sheet of paper and sent it to Stieglitz. Following up on the implications of his New York watercolors, he began work on the large oil-paintings, Udnie and Edtaonisl, both of which were later shown at the Salon d’Automne. (13) It has since been demonstrated that both titles, although apparently nonsense words, were the result of a series of selections, contraction and reorganization, such that the word “Udnie” was derived from “Uni- dimensionnel” and “Edtaonisl” from Étiole“ danseuse.“ (14) What remained was a pair of words that relinquished their once-signifying logic for the sake of pure sound, freed from the communicative function of language. (15) As titles to abstract paintings, they do indeed serve as “names in rapport with the pictorial expression,” and as such lend support to the viewer’s inclination to consider the painting not as a representation of something, but as itself a something–that we are not looking at a picture ofUdnie, but Udnie itself. While Picabia’s note to Stieglitz is clipped and somewhat vague, it must have been comprehensible to the photographer if only because of his familiarity with the long and quite detailed account that Picabia gave to Stieglitz during his exhibition of abstract watercolors. (16) Picabia’s central argument sets out on common territory, articulating a pictorial practice aimed, like much of modernist painting at large, at communicating one’s “deepest contact… with nature,” a task for which traditional illusionistic techniques are clearly inadequate: For example, when we look at a tree we are conscious not only of its outside appearance but also of some of its properties, its qualities and its evolution. Our feelings before this tree are the result of this knowledge, acquired by experience through analysis; hence the complexity of this feeling cannot be expressed simply by objective and mechanical representation. In this, Picabia is merely recapitulating arguments set out in support of cubist painting, in particular the Puteaux cubism of Gleizes and Metzinger, with whom Picabia was close in the years leading up to his first trip to New York. As the two put it in Du Cubisme, the task of the cubist painter is to “depart from superficial reality” so as to capture the “profound reality… concealed in the most commonplace objects.” (17) We could well imagine that Picabia would continue in this vein, arguing for a painting of the reality beyond appearance, the painting of a more profound reality than the one we see with our eyes alone. And yet Picabia shifts gears at this point, without warning or justification, from the representation of nature to the representation of inner consciousness: The resulting manifestations of this state of mind, which increasingly approaches abstraction, cannot themselves be anything but abstraction. They separate themselves from the sensorial pleasure which man may derive from man or nature (Impressionism) to enter the domain of the pure joy of the idea, of consciousness. And this, we find, is a necessary slippage, because what Picabia really wants to get at is the way in which painting can follow the example of music so as to abandon the task of representation altogether. In sliding from nature to consciousness, Picabia moves one step closer to the painting of form and color alone: We can make ourselves better understood by comparing it to music. If we grasp without difficulty the meaning and the logic of a musical work, it is because this work is based on the laws of harmony and composition of which we have either the acquired or the inherited knowledge. The new form of painting puzzles the public only because it does not find in it the old objectivity and does not grasp the new objectivity. The laws of this new convention have as yet hardly been formulated, but they will become gradually more defined just as musical laws have become more defined and they will very rapidly become as understandable as were the objective representations of nature. Therefore, in my paintings, the public is not to look for a “photographic” recollection of a visual impression or sensation, but to look at them as simply an attempt to express the purest part of the abstract reality of form and color in itself. (18) I have moved rather slowly through this text because it serves to illuminate, especially in its slippages and distortions, the means by which Picabia came to understand his break with the cubist logic–still representational at bottom–for the sake of a painting that would justify itself by virtue of its commitment to “form and color in itself.” (19) Of course, the justification of advanced painting by way of an analogy to music was in no way unique at that moment. But what was unique was the specific nature of his appeal, one that derived in large measure from the example set by his wife, herself a student of advanced musical discourse, both in France and Germany. When Buffet first met Picabia in the winter of 1908, she was on holiday from her musical studies in Berlin. Having completed her studies under Vincent d’Indy at the Schola Cantorum she went to Germany where she met up with fellow student, Edgar Varèse. For Buffet, as for Varèse, the most significant musical influence at that time was the work of the pianist, composer, and theorist Ferruccio Busoni. (20) In fact, the two were so committed to Busoni’s ambitions that they went so far as to build some of the new musical instruments that Busoni had proposed as a way out of traditional tonality. (21)But it was Busoni’s theoretical work rather than his inventions that had the greatest impact on Buffet.(22) Through Busoni, Buffet developed a highly sophisticated account of the state of avant-garde music, an account that was in turn passed on to Picabia. (23) Busoni published Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music, his most ambitious attempt to reconsider the structure and aims of advanced music, in 1907. (24) At stake here was the attempt to draw music as close as possible to “nature herself.” Not to represent nature, but to be nature. In this, Busoni imagined a kind of musical composition that would live and grow as any natural organism–music as a body of sorts, self-organizing and self- contained, a music guided by “natural necessity,” following “its own proper mode of growth.” (25) What made Busoni’s Sketch so radical was the way in which it articulated an alternative to what was at the time the two dominant models of musical composition, so-called “absolute” and “program” music. Absolute music, as it was commonly understood at the time, was based upon the manipulation of the tonal, harmonic, and architectonic conventions of musical composition as they had developed over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Program music, by contrast, was explicitly representational and concerned the use of musical form to suggest events, things, feelings, etc. Its place was in the theater, as it was used to underscore the actions performed by players on the stage. Busoni considered both forms equally impoverished: program music for its utter triviality, its reduction of the lofty art of music to the level of simple imitation–the sounds of thunder, the march of a military regiment, the plaintive cry of the dying heroine (26) ; absolute music for its uncritical acceptance of the given conventions, its inconsequential formalism. (27) Both program and absolute music were hopelessly conventional, and as such of no use to the composer with ambitions of a music of nature at its most profound. It was with this insistence upon the elimination of convention that Busoni faced the problem around which the entire essay turns: insofar as music is to avoid falling into complete “formlessness,” (28) it must establish for itself a certain self- generated system within which to coordinate itself. On the other hand, to perpetuate such a system beyond a single instance is to fall back on convention–a new convention, of course, but a convention just the same. Busoni’s attention to the problems of conventionalization went so far as to include the very act of notation, for as he saw it: “the instant the pen seizes it, the idea loses its original form. The very intention to write down the idea, compels a choice of measure and key.” (29) And it is from this recognition of the inescapably conventional nature of all music, even music at its most self-consciously anti- conventional, that Busoni was drawn to conclude his essay with a long quotation from Hugo von Hoffmannsthal: I felt… that the book I shall write will be neither in English nor in Latin; and this for the one reason… namely, that the language in which it may be given to me, not only to write, but also to think, will not be Latin, or English, or Italian, or Spanish, but a language not even one of whose words I know, a language in which dumb things speak to me, and in which, it may be, I shall at last have to respond in my grave to an Unknown Judge. (30) Hoffmannsthal’s remark serves to underscore what may be the most radical proposition in Busoni’s text (a proposition that would have to wait until 1952 for its performative realization (31)): if it is the case that music draws closer to nature the more completely it abandons the given conventions of musicality, and insofar as this movement pushes the work of art toward the conditions of non- communication (of a language that even the author cannot understand), then one would have to admit that even the brief moment of silence that separates the performance of one movement from the next is “in itself music.”(32) What Busoni is left with is therefore a music divided in two: on the one had, the fullness of a sound that eludes the comprehension of the composer himself, and on the other, the total evacuation of all sound. And this is to say that the insistent pursuit of a non- conventional, fully organic and self-generating work of art leads, at its limit, to either the utterly formless or the entirely vacant. I See Again in Memory… click to enlarge Figure 20 Francis Picabia, Amorphism Manifesto, 1913 Some time in May of 1913, Picabia sent Stieglitz an essay entitled “Vers l’Amorphism,” recently published in Les Hommes du jour. (Fig. 20) Stieglitz published the essay, as well as the accompanying manifesto of the new school of amorphism (“Manifeste de l’école amorphiste“) in its original language and format in the June issue of Camera Work. Of all the texts associated with Picabia’s work, this may well be the most difficult to explain. (33) First of all, the essay and the manifesto, although themselves unsigned, were followed, in the original French version, by an afterward signed by Victor Méric, a figure well-known to have been hostile to almost every form of avant- garde production. (34) Indeed, the magazine itself, Les Hommes du jour, was among the most critical of modernist painting. (35) Immediately the question arises: are we reading a sincere manifesto of the new school of amorphism, or are we reading a parody, a joke at the expense of painters like Picabia for whom the question of pictorial form was at the center of their concerns. The latter seems most likely, especially, since both Picabia’s and Braque’s names are misspelled “Picaba” and “Bracque,” as Jeffrey Weiss has pointed out. In a text otherwise without typographical errors, such misspellings were in all likelihood intentional. But this is just one small indication that something is awry here, and our suspicion should begin with the very first sentence: “L’heure est grave, très grave.” Already we begin to suspect the opposite, perhaps one “grave” is convincing, but two should put us on alert. And as Weiss has convincingly demonstrated, the entire text, from beginning to end, is suffused with similar parodic excesses. At one point the author asserts that “the patient research, impassioned attempts and audacious trials of intrepid innovators… are at last going to lead us to… the single and multiple formula that will contain the entire visible and sentimental universe” while the manifesto itself begins: “War on Form! Form, that’s our enemy! That is our program.” What stands out most prominently in this text is its absurdly hyperbolic tone, the way in which its argument is stitched together as a patchwork quilt of avant-garded clichés. The most incontrovertibly parodic element here–and one that (most shockingly) has gone without comment in the various literature devoted to Picabia’s work (36) –is not to be found in the text itself, but rather in the two illustrations that accompany the manifesto. They claim to be two examples of “l’œuvre géniale” of a painter by the name of Popaul Picador, one of which is titled Femme au bain, the other La Mer. What the reader is looking at, however, is nothing more than a pair of empty rectangles. The caption beneath Femme au bain reads: “Look for the woman, they say. What a mistake! Through the opposition of tints and the diffusion of the lights, the woman is not visible to the naked eye.” No less absurd is the caption beneath La Mer: “At first glance you see nothing. Press on. With time you will see that the water reaches up to your lips. This is amorphism.” (37) (While it is tempting, at least at first, to consider these as the first true monochromes in the history of modernism, beating Rodchenko by more than five years, the manifest contradiction between the blankness of rectangle and the caption’s reference to color combinations makes it impossible to take seriously.) click to enlarge Figure 21 Francis Picabia, Star Dancer on an Ocean Liner, 1913 What then to make of the fact that Picabia sent this to Stieglitz without any additional commentary to signal it as a parody? Could it be that Picabia set out to dupe his American friend? Could it be that Picabia was himself duped? This possibility, although at first seemingly unlikely, becomes all the more complex when we consider that the essay was sent together with a group of other essays and clippings, all of which, in contrast to this one, support Picabia’s work with the utmost sincerity. In addition, the manifesto was prefaced by a reproduction of one of Picabia’s most accomplished watercolors (Fig. 21). Add to that the fact that the amorphism manifesto was published in Camera Work alongside two essays in support of Picabia’s newest abstractions–one by Buffet, the other by Maurice Aisen, a friend of Stieglitz’s living in New York. In both, Picabia’s work is presented as an heir to that of Cézanne, at once the result of the association of painting with music and the manifestation of what Aisen labeled “a plasticity of truth.” Indeed, all indications are that Stieglitz, at least, read the manifesto without any sense of its irony. Likewise, the notion that Picabia set out to undermine his own manifestly sincere effort at what he at that very moment referred to as “pure painting” seems equally unlikely. And yet it seems no less unlikely that Picabia, at least, would have been unaware of the conservative slant of Les Hommes du jour or Méric’s well-known hostility to modernism. As Weiss points out, the very word “amorphe” was at the time an adjective commonly used by critics to express their disdain for the way in which avant-garde painting distorted natural forms. (38) Of course, the clearest sign of the essay’s intent to ridicule is surely Popaul Picador’s géniale rectangles. We are left, then, with an unanswerable question: was this a joke perpetrated by Picabia, or a joke perpetrated on Picabia? Weiss, quite reasonably, insists that without further evidence it is impossible to parse the sincere from the parodic. And as his real concern is the problem of blague in general, Weiss stops here, at the moment of undecidability. For Weiss, the amorphism manifesto serves above all as an example of the way in which parody had so buried itself within the discourse of French painting around 1912 that even in retrospect it is impossible to disentangle the genuine from the fake. But to turn our attention to Picabia in particular, to consider the manifesto in light of Picabia’s contemporaneous practices, one is drawn to a different conclusion. To consider them in relation to Busoni’s paradox in particular suggests that what we are looking at here is not a parody, not something that mocks from the outside the painter’s otherwise sincere commitments, but rather a tensionimmanent to the paintings themselves. For if it is the case that the search for a fully organic, non-conventional language of musical composition threatens to end up as either incomprehensible if not entirely silent, then the analogous search in the realm of painting may well be threatened by the same paradox. This is to say that the amorphous manifesto, rather than the sign of hoax, is perhaps better understood as the sign of undecidability within the very practice of abstraction itself–at least that of abstraction as Picabia was practicing it in 1913. Admittedly, we have little to go on here. Between mid-1913, when Picabia scrawled his anxious note to Stieglitz, and the painter’s subsequent comments to the New York press in early 1915, Picabia left only one tiny remark to help us out. And yet, as is clear from works like I See Again in Memory my Dear Udnie and all the mechanomorphic paintings that were to follow, something radically new erupted out of Picabia’s abstractions, something that very quickly drew these early commitments to a close. Fortunately, this one tiny remark–offered to the press on the occasion of Udnie‘s and Edtaonisl‘s presentation at the Salon d’Automne–is, if only glancingly, revealing of the painter’s shifting attention. In December of 1913, Le Matin printed a brief three-paragraph article in which Picabia was asked to say a few words to his uncomprehending public. He began, not surprisingly, with a reference to music: “There is a song by Mendelssohn entitled: The Marriage of Bees… [but] I don’t hear a single hornet. In other words, it is not a question of imitation…And yet we accept, without question, by tradition, its title. So why not accept, in a painting, a title that is not evoked by the lines themselves?” All this is familiar territory for Picabia, introduced to the painter over a year before and developed both in New York and Paris. But what follows is something quite different, something inflected less by the notion of purity, of the pictorial fullness of “lines themselves”: Udnie is no more the portrait of a young girl than Edtaonisl is the image of a priest, such as we normally conceive of them. They are memories [souvenirs] of America, evocations of it, subtly arranged in the manner of a musical composition; they represent an idea, a nostalgia, of a fleeting impression. (39) Memories, nostalgia, a fleeting impression–these are metaphors that turn not on the notion of purity or fullness, but rather on loss, absence, and metaphors that suggest a troubled relation to the act of representation. What’s particularly telling in this statement is the way in which the appeal to a pure painting, a painting having only itself as its subject, rubs up against a very different appeal, one suggestive of a certain melancholy. Alongside the triumphant declaration of a painting at last liberated from the conventions of representation, free to explore the immanent properties of painting in itself, we find the indication of a peculiar sort of doubt, of the sense that perhaps these paintings speak less of the fullness of the “in itself” than they do of some kind of imminent emptiness. If this admittedly unique text can be said to characterize Picabia’s consideration of his work at the end of 1913, if it is not to be understood as a distortion for the sake of the press (and without further textual evidence, this cannot be discounted), then we would have to consider the possibility that Picabia began to see his own work within a distinctly different context. This is all the more significant in that this reorientation is applied not to new work, but to work already completed, work fashioned out of what seemed to be a well-developed, quite justifiable conception of what modernist painting ought to consider as its rightful domain. It was as if, in a delayed fashion, the negative lesson of Busoni’s ambition had begun to eat away from the inside Picabia’s confidence in the promise of pictorial autonomy. It was as if the undecidability at the heart of amorphism manifesto was working to undermine the authority of his triumphant aesthetic of “form and color in itself.” It was as if these two were now serving as a prognostic of the logical, internally generated demise of abstraction, its unwitting conclusion in the form of the blank canvas. Under such conditions, it is not unreasonable to imagine an attempt to recuperate this loss by turning the process of loss into its thematization. In this way, the experience of demise can be compensated for by its representation. click to enlarge Figure 22 Francis Picabia, Little Udnie, 1913-14 I say this rather speculatively because Picabia would continue to develop his system of abstraction through the end of 1913 and into the early part of 1914, during which time he was painting some of his most convincing works, all of which, in fact, are best understood within the painter’s earlier conception of painting as an autonomous, organic body. Indeed, a work like Little Udnie(Fig. 22) seems only to extend the sort of planar reduction and chromatic uniformity announced in the first version. Here one is left with a radically flattened space, coordinated around a movement from the lower left to the upper right, in a manner that takes Udnie’s compressed space to a new extreme. It is difficult, when looking at Little Udnie, to imagine any slackening of attention, any threat to the painter’s conviction. *** When de Zayas traveled to Paris in the Summer of 1914, he kept Stieglitz informed of his various whereabouts. In a letter from May 22, he expressed a certain reservation regarding Picabia’s recent work, describing it as “more simple and direct but still complicated and arbitrary.” (40) But just one month later, by the end of June, de Zayas seems to have found three new paintings that interested him, works which he described to Stieglitz as having “forgot[ten] matter to express only, maybe the memory of something that has happened.” (41) I would like to underscore the comma that falls between “only” and “maybe,” for it seems to me that this comma is like a kind of pivot or fulcrum around which turns the distinction between the notion of abstraction-as-plenitude and its opposite, abstraction-as-loss. “only, maybe”: de Zayas’ hesitancy seems to me telling, another sign, of sorts, of the ambivalence detected in Picabia’s December 1913 statement to the press. Before the comma, at the moment of “only,” one could still imagine abstraction functioning within the system of “form and color itself” of ‘, only color, painting at its most advanced stage of refinement. After the comma, the moment of “maybe,” one’s grasp of this promised plenitude starts to drain away, threatens to become at best “a memory.” In retrospect, de Zayas’ assessment of Picabia’s most recent work as functioning within the logic of memory, of an experience that is no longer immediately accessible, reflects back on his earlier assessment that Picabia’s work was, although more simple and direct, nonetheless “complicated and arbitrary.” It was as if de Zayas, in a month’s time, reconceived the terms of his own system of evaluation. That which, from one perspective, appears complicated and arbitrary, which is to say, without a structure, lacking a plan, comes to seem from another angle to be a reflection on the very conditions of absence. Where the former interprets the work as having failed to make good on its promise of autonomy, the latter interprets the work as thematizing this failure, as, in a sense, giving form to the experience of lost form. In his June letter to Stieglitz, de Zayas singles out one of the three works in particular–one that, out of concern that it will not fit through the door of Stieglitz’s gallery, he notes to be about two-and-a-half meters high. Although de Zayas does not refer to the work by name, only one of the three fits this description. While both It’s About Me and Comical Marriage are two meters on each side, I See Again in Memory my Dear Udnie [Fig. 7] is two meters wide and almost exactly two-and-a- half meters high. This fact, and the consideration of the painting within the context of “memory” suggest that de Zayas was considering Picabia’s new paintings through the lens of the title of this one work, the largest of the three. Here the question of memory, of recollection, the theme introduced by Picabia in December of the year before, seems finally to have made its explicit appearance. I See in Memory my Dear Udnie would seem to mark a backward step, a kind of reclamatory project in which the absent referent of the earlier abstracts is at once regained and reconstructed. Not only is the space not nearly as flat, but the imposition of a central form negates the all-over quality that so clearly determines the structure of the works from just a few months before. Brightly lit in the center of the canvas sits a conglomeration of overlapping and interlocking shapes–quasi- organic, quasi-machinal, shapes that in their color and tone, distinguish themselves from the uniformly brown and grey space surrounding them. This central form is itself supported by what looks to be a ledge that runs from left to right along the bottom of the painting. The ledge alone gives the painting a sense of illusion entirely absent in the previous works. And the fact that the shapes coalesce into a few discrete units suggests again that out of the flat space of the earlier abstractions, solid forms are in the process of reconstruction. With the aid of a few well-chosen formal devices, Picabia had managed to reconceive the painting-as-body of the earlier works into a new kind of paintingof bodies. click to enlarge Figure 23 Marcel Duchamp, The Bride, 1912 This new kind of painting bears striking resemblance to a work of which Picabia had been in possession for some two years. Duchamp had given Picabia his earliest mechanomorphic painting, The Bride (Fig. 23), in late 1912, probably around the time of their trip to Jura. As in I See Again in Memory my Dear Udnie, the figural construction in Duchamp’s Bride is set off coloristically from the darker and more monochromatic background. Perhaps the only significant difference between the two (besides the question of scale, itself establishing a crucial experiential difference) is that the individual forms in Picabia’s work are far less modeled than those of Duchamp, where the central forms are clearly distinguished from the flat and unmodulated background space. Nonetheless, in both cases, the main figural motifs are conceived in the manner of organic- machinic hybrids. (42) The Bride was one of two key works Duchamp painted in Berlin between July and August 1912, the other being The Passage from Virgin to Bride. Duchamp himself considered it one of his most crucial paintings, wherein he turned from his earlier interest in “kinetic painting,” (still evident in The Passage from Virgin to Bride) toward what he referred to as, “my concept of a bride expressed by the juxtaposition of mechanical elements and visceral forms.” (43) In addition, The Bride marked a crucial moment in Duchamp’s oeuvre, for it coincided with the initiation of his work on The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even. As Duchamp himself notes, it was no coincidence that The Bride was painted just a few months after having seen Raymond Roussel’sImpressions d’Afrique. (44) Roussel’s collection of absurd events, ridiculous inventions and silly machines, included among others a bizarre “painting machine” demonstrated by one Louise Montalescot. It is not hard to imagine that Duchamp, in his “constant battle to make an exact and complete break” (45) with the aims and procedures of traditional painting, would have found in Montalescot’s machine a congenial reference point for his work on The Bride. (46) This cannot be said for Picabia. He saw the same performance Duchamp did. Evidently, however, his commitment to cubism and abstraction prevented him from making immediate use of Roussel’s model. Nor did the presence of The Bride in Picabia’s studio make much of an impact in the two years between 1912 and 1914. And yet, out of the blue, in one painting from the middle of 1914, Picabia turns to Duchamp’s example, an example that had been staring at him for two full years. Scholars have made nothing of this strange delay on Picabia’s part, a delay all the more puzzling in that it erupts, nearly complete in a single work to stand against two years of labor devoted to a practice that, in Duchamp’s mind at least, stood at the opposite end of his own endeavors. “Abstraction,” recalls Duchamp, was in the years 1912-13, “[Picabia’s] hobbyhorse… He thought about nothing else. I left it very quickly.” (47) I want to insist upon this distinction articulated by Duchamp, along with the importance of Picabia’s “delayed” reception of his friend’s work, in order to get closer to an understanding of what occurred in mid-1914, of that which drew de Zayas’ perplexed attention and his stuttered “only, maybe.” But I also want to supplement these anecdotes with another, this time from Picabia’s wife. As she recalled her husband’s disposition in those years, and its relation to those of his closest friends, Buffet offered an assessment that inflects the sense behind the remarks of Duchamp and de Zayas in a peculiar manner. Speaking at first about Apollinaire’s strange attachment to the very aesthetic practices against which the poet’s own work would seem to have militated, (48) she then realizes that her husband, too, exhibited this same peculiar ambivalence. “What is extraordinary,” noted Buffet, “is that, despite their audacity, both suffered from a discomfort they found hard to locate. It was a certain nostalgia for objective forms, a regret over the motif and all the traditional formulas from which they, bit by bit, separated themselves. This break with certain mental habits and inclinations often led them to doubt themselves.” (49) Given the sudden appearance in Picabia’s work of Duchamp’s mechanomorphic example, it is not too much to suggest that this shift would have been accompanied with a certain “nostalgia” or “doubt” as Buffet put it. And given the peculiar title of Picabia’s first mechanomorphic work and the importance the painter placed on his titles, (50) one would be justified in locating in I See Again in Memory my Dear Udnie a certain ambivalence, if not at the center, than at least on the margin. (51) And it is literally on the margin, along the lower left edge of the painting that we read, in clear, legible block-type, the phrase Je“ revois en souvenir ma chère Udnie.” As with Udnie and Edtaonisl, Picabia used a hidden technique in constructing the title. But where the first two were based upon the painter’s own invented phrases (Uni-dimensionnel,Étiole danseuse), the later work begins with a pre-given expression–a kind of ready-made title. Je revois en souvenir ma chère Udnie, was drawn (with slight, but significant modification) from the so-called “Pink Pages” of the Petit Larousse dictionary. These literally pink pages (still present in the most recent editions of the dictionary) provide an annotated list of famous quotations, most of which are drawn from Latin sources. The phrase Je“ revois en souvenir ma chère Udnie,” was derived from Virgil’s Æneid, from a passage in which Antor, in Italy, recalls his distant homeland, to which he, as a dying man, will never return: “Mourant, il revoit en souvenir sa chère Argos” (Dulces moriens reminiscitur Argos). (52) In adjusting this phrase, Picabia made just three small alterations. He 1.) eliminated the word “mourant“, 2.) turned the original third person (“il“) into the first person (“je“), and 3.) changed “Argos” to “Udnie.” If we assume that Picabia chose this phrase knowingly, then we ought to consider the connotations of the painter’s substitutions. With Picabia (je) in place of Antor (il) and Udnie in place of Argos we find the painter recalling not simply any memory, but specifically a memory of something forever lost. Antor, on the edge of death, will never see his home again; it is only through memory that he can return. Analogously, for Picabia, it is only in memory that he is able to see Udnie. And this is to say that the sense of loss is evoked in two different fashions: first, through the literal meaning of the phrase, in the experience of seeing a love-object in one’s memory and not in person; and second, through the very use of Latin, we sense a certain nostalgia in the act of citation itself, for here the dead language is evoked, in parallel fashion, as that which can only be held in memory. In the title “je revois en souvenir ma chère Udnie,” meaning and method intersect, each magnifying the loss implicit in the other. Where the words “Udnie” and “Edtaonisl” point to a purified realm in which language is continually reinvented, where each word is unique, “Je revois en souvenir ma chère Udnie” suggests a realm wherein language falls into disuse, where we find ourselves speaking through the words of the departed. Given the indicators present in the title, the sense of recollection of that which is both dear and departed, I believe we are justified in reading aspects of the painting itself as inflected by the kind of “nostalgia” Buffet spoke of. The first to consider is the palette. In contrast to the aggressively multicolored abstractions of the months before, Picabia has returned to the muted greys and browns of his earlier cubist work. Here and there we find a few strokes of grey lavender, brief moments of color that could suggest a kind of dim recollection of the bright purple tones that dominated the originalUdnie. The overall brownish hue of the canvas could be taken to suggest a newspaper faded with age, the once topical stories now a distant recollection. This is, of course, speculative, but it may well have been the case that Picabia’s adoption of the palette used by Duchamp inThe Bride was meant to suggest, perhaps, that one was looking into a pictorial system (that of cubist representation) that was now, in 1914, somewhat like the Latin language itself, outmoded, no longer accessible to the present. Perhaps this can even be said of the practice of abstraction itself, a practice that Picabia experienced, at least for a few moments, as not simply paradoxical, but indeed impossible, its ambition ending up in the blank canvases of Popaul Picador. William Camfield suggests that Je revois en souvenir ma chère Udnie should be interpreted as a pictorial recollection of Picabia’s encounter with an alluring, enticing dancer that he met aboard the ocean-liner he and his wife took to New York in 1913. In this way, suggests Camfield, “the forms themselves–cream-colored “female” parts and rubbery, probing “male” elements–suggest… the erotic character of those experiences.” (53) And yet there is, I think, another equally justifiable interpretation, one that takes Udnie to be the name of a painting rather than a person. The painter’s earlier insistence to Stieglitz that the titles be understood as linguistic complements to the paintings themselves suggests, in fact, that the title here points not to an earlier experience aboard the ship to New York, but rather the experience in front of a painting by the name of Udnie. In this reading, Udnie is not a person and her attributes, but apractice and its promise. In this reading, what is lost is the original promise of abstraction, the promise of purity, of the plenitude of painting understood as a body, complete and coordinated in itself. In this reading, Je revois en souvenir ma chère Udnie marks the painter’s attempt to figure the loss of this original promise, to thematize the condition of painting in the age of the machine, at the moment in which the organic is threatened, if not altogether overtaken, by the technological. In this reading, the erotics of the mechanomorphic image are as much a menace as an enticement. And if such a reading is warranted, as I think it is–not only by the intersecting implications of Picabia’s earlier commitment to the promise of abstraction, as well as by the perceptions of de Zayas and Buffet, but also by the latent content of the title and the pictorial logic drawn from Duchamp’s example–then we will have to consider the possibility that Picabia’s mechanomorphic turn at the end of 1914 was accompanied by a considerable ambivalence, an ambivalence registered on the surface of I See Again in Memory my Dear Udnie in the form of a peculiar nostalgia for a lost (or abandoned) plenitude. Where Duchamp’s early commitment to the analytical, technical and technological, prepared him to receive the implications of the machinic with the swiftness manifest on the surface of The Bride, Picabia’s early commitment to abstraction held such a reception at a distance. Where the machine entered Duchamp’s work in an almost natural fashion, with little resistance, it seems to have entered Picabia’s more violently, from outside, without the preparatory context in which Duchamp was to receive it. And if this is correct, then we should not be surprised to find Picabia’s subsequent embrace of the world of the machine to be inflected, at times, with a sense of longing for that which it has displaced. And this is to say that the mechanomorphs should be understood not only within the context of a triumphant embrace of the new world of the machine, but also within that of the painter’s troubled, and ultimately failed, relation to abstraction. In some sense, then, the machine was as much a compensation, a substitute, for that which existed only “in memory.” Painting the Machine Picabia was called up for service soon after the war broke out in August. With the aid of Buffet’s connections, he was able to find a relatively secure post as a general’s chauffeur. Soon thereafter Picabia’s father, on the staff of the Cuban embassy, arranged to have his son assigned to the task of negotiating shipments of sugar from Cuba to France. On their way to meet this mission, Picabia and his wife stopped off in New York. They arrived in June of 1915 and managed to postpone the trip to Cuba until some time in the late fall. In the meantime, Picabia resumed contact with de Zayas, Haviland and others around Stieglitz and his gallery. Almost immediately, he began collaborating on the group’s newest project, the magazine 291, a large-format magazine, aggressively avant-gardist in design, far more experimental than that of Stieglitz’s rather sober Camera Work. click to enlarge Figure 24 Picabia,Girl Born without a Mother 291, June 1915 One of the first of Picabia’s contributions to 291 was a small ink drawing (hand-tinted in the deluxe edition) entitled Daughter Born without a Mother (Fille née sans mère) (Fig. 24). With its schematic depiction of a coiled spring alongside a collection of floral forms, the drawing recalls I See Again in Memory my Dear Udnie, a work he had probably “seen again” in New York for the first time since de Zayas took it with him in September the year before. (54) In its more clearly mechanical appearance, the drawing also suggests that his renewed contact with Duchamp (who arrived in New York around the same time) may have encouraged Picabia to harden his earlier organo-mechanic hybrid into something more obviously machine-like. In Duchamp’s studio, Picabia must have seen not only Duchamp’s Chocolate Grinder (Fig. 25), but also the two glass works, the 9 Malic Moulds (Fig. 26)and the semicircular Glider (Fig. 27), as well as the newly purchased glass plates that were to be used for the construction of The Large Glass. He must also have seen at least a few of Duchamp’s readymades (the recent coinage of the term probably made the works all the more enticing). In other words, Picabia must have confronted, in one small space, almost the entire range of Duchamp’s new, unequivocal rejection of modernist painting. click images to enlarge Figure 25 Figure 26 Figure 27 Marcel Duchamp, Chocolate Grinder, 1914 Marcel Duchamp, 9 Malic Moulds, 1914-15 Marcel Duchamp, Glider, 1913-15 click to enlarge Figure 28 Marius De Zayas, Abstract Portrait of Picabia, reproduced in Camera Work, vol. 46, Oct. 1914 It is no surprise then to find that Picabia’s first major project consisted of a series of mechanical portraits, each of which was drawn with the precision used by Duchamp in his various glass works. In this, he was perhaps also drawn in by de Zayas’ so-called “absolute portraits,” one of which, a portrait of Picabia himself, was published in Camera Work in October of 1914 (Fig. 28). The drawing consists of a cascade of repeating curves, each of which appears as if they were made with the aid of a ruler. Included alongside this abstract design is a pair of mathematical formulas (“a+b”; “a+b+c”). De Zayas’ suggestion that his sitters are best captured without reference to their superficial appearance, is entirely in keeping with Picabia’s subsequent mechanical portraits, one of which depicts de Zayas as a bizarre contraption made of an engine attached to a spark plug, itself connected to a woman’s corset [fig. 9]–just the sort of diagrammatic (55) representations that Duchamp was preparing for the Large Glass. click to enlarge Figure 29 Francis Picabia, Behold the Woman, 1915 Although the machines Picabia used were more emphatically modern than Duchamp’sChocolate Grinder, his commitment to a similarly dry technique, drawn from the example of mechanical drawing, points toward a practice almost entirely at odds with well-worked brushstrokes and rich color combinations of his earlier abstractions. Perhaps the best example of this more modernized chocolate grinder is Picabia’s Voilà la Femme (Fig. 29), a small watercolor of what appears to be a fragment of a piston. With its suggestion of a mechanically repeated back-and-forth motion, the image operates within the very same kind of sexual metaphorics that Duchamp was to make so central to his Large Glass. (56) In other words, early in 1915, Picabia seemed poised to follow Duchamp in breaking altogether with the practice of painting (and all its attendant values and promises). An observer of Picabia’s labors in the Modern Gallery, the offices of 291, might well have imagined that the painter had given up all the concerns that guided him up to that point. And yet almost immediately after preparing the mechanical portraits for 291, Picabia began to paint again, working with oil, gouache, and, in some cases metallic paint, on board. Over the course of the summer and fall of 1915, Picabia painted six works of almost equal size, each measuring around three to four feet on either side. (57) A Little Solitude in the Middle of Suns (Petite solitude au milieu des soleils)(Fig. 30), Reverence (Révérence) (Fig. 31), Paroxysm of Sorrow (Paroxysme de la douleur) [fig. 18],Machine without a Name (Machine san nom) [fig. 19], This Thing is Made to Perpetuate My Memory(Cette chose est faite pour perpétuer mon souvenir) (Fig. 32), and Very Rare Painting on Earth (Très rare tableau sur la terre) (Fig. 33) were shown together in February of 1916 along with 10 other works, including a number of smaller watercolors and drawings from the same period, (such as Voilà Elle andThis Machine Laughingly Castigates Manners) as well as three abstract paintings from 1913-14 (Catch-as-Catch- Can (Fig. 34); Comic Force; Horrible Sorrow). click images to enlarge Figure 30 Figure 31 Figure 32 Francis Picabia, A Little Solitude in the Middle of Suns, 1915 Francis Picabia, Reverence, 1915 Francis Picabia, This Thing Is Made To Perpetuate My Memory, 1915 click images to enlarge Figure 33 Figure 34 Francis Picabia Very Rare Painting on Earth, 1915 Francis Picabia, Catch-As-Catch-Can, 1913 Despite the immediate question posed by the fact that these six mechanomorphs were shown alongside three abstract paintings from the year before, scholars have been all but unanimous in their depiction of 1915 as the year in which Picabia made an absolute break with his previous concerns. (58) Implicit here is the consideration of Picabia as having followed a course parallel to that of Duchamp. (59) The explanation for this shift, when it is offered, typically turns on the outbreak of the war, (60) the confrontation with New York City’s technological marvels, (61) the appeal to the idea that Picabia was a man with a “compulsive need for change.” (62) And yet a number of things suggest that something more complex is at work here. For one, there is Buffet’s insistence that Picabia, “was never able to suppress his pictorial vision. He remained a painter even in his most aggressive works.” (63) Buffet’s observation is all the more relevant here in that she used it to distinguish her husband’s work from that of Duchamp for whom the abandonment of painting was a necessary logical step in his aesthetic of “destruction,” as she put it. Indeed, it is somewhat surprising that Buffet has been the only one to make note of this most obvious distinction between these two artists–artists who have been called “Dada’s Castor and Pollux, its yin and yang.” (64) Buffet’s understanding of her husband deserves attention, not only because it enables an entry into the possibility of distinguishing between Picabia’s work and that of Duchamp, but also, and more importantly, because it provides the first indication of the ways in which the works from 1915 draw much of their conviction from the particularities of their dialog with that which seems, on the surface, to have been so definitively abandoned. Her observation points toward a more complex understanding of the ways in which the mechanomorphs draw from and respond to the ambitions, promises–and failures–of abstract painting. Alongside Buffet’s observation one needs to consider two, clearly abstract works from Picabia’s time in New York: Fantasy (Fantaisie) (Fig. 11) and Music is Like Painting (La Musique est comme la peinture)(fig.12). The former, now lost, was reproduced in the December 1915-January 1916 issue of 291 and later exhibited by de Zayas in February 1916 along with two mechanomorphs and two abstractions from 1914; the latter was first seen in a group exhibition at The Society of Independent Artists in 1917, along with the 1913 abstraction, Physical Culture. click to enlarge Figure 35 Illustration of a beam steam engine, mid-19th century Camfield has demonstrated that both abstractions, like the various mechanomorphs of the period, derived originally from illustrations of modern technology. (65) Fantasy, for example, was drawn from an illustration of a nineteenth-century steam engine (Fig. 35). Here we find the furnace, wheel and supporting architecture transformed into a composition of ruled lines (with one exception vertical and horizontal) and a small, precisely rendered circle and a much larger arc. Comparing the final drawing to the original illustration reveals a series of strategic eliminations and reorientations: the furnace to the left has been removed, leaving only the supporting beam in front, rendered as a single, thin line. The wheel remains intact, in the form of a thick arc, but the oblong structure that joins it to the furnace has been transformed into a circle. In addition, Picabia has rotated the dark, rectangular form at the bottom of the machine clockwise ninety degrees, so that it forms a vertical rectangle behind the large arc. These alterations, as well as the extreme degree of abstraction, make it clear that the particularities of original illustration were not meant to factor into the viewer’s interpretation of the work. Unlike the various mechanical portraits published in 291 just six months earlier–works whose interpretation demands a correlation between the final drawing and the original illustration–Fantasy calls for a reading more in keeping with that of Picabia’s abstractions from two years before. click to enlarge Figure 36 Illustration of the effect of a magnetic field on alpha, beta and gamma particles, ca. 1905 Music is Like Painting makes the same case all the more explicitly, especially in light of its title. Here, as Camfield again points out, the painting was drawn from a scientific illustration of the effects of a magnetic field on alpha, beta and gamma particles (Fig. 36). Translated from a black-and-white diagram into a multi-colored watercolor, the painting serves as a clear demonstration of Picabia’s continued commitment to the ideals of a musically inspired abstraction. (66) Yet another indicator of Picabia’s continued relation to the fundamental themes and ambitions of abstract painting is found in the February 1916 issue of 291, the last of the nine issues of the magazine. In it is a statement by Picabia that in fact reads as if it had been written during his first stay in New York. Its distinction between the world of “appearance” and that of “absolute reality,” along with his critique of “conventions” fit fully within the context of statements made to the New York press three years before. The same is true for Picabia’s insistence on the “absolutely pure medium of form,” the notion of “the abstract idea,” as well as the distinction between the “objectivity” of the painting and the “subjectivity” of the painter’s “will.” (67) Scholars have never addressed these recollections of 1913, and in so doing, have overlooked yet another link between the mechanomorphs and the earlier abstractions. Whether or not it was written in 1913 or 1915, the fact that it was printed in 291 in February of 1916 indicates its relevance at that moment–the very same moment as the mechanomorphs themselves appeared in public for the first time (at the Modern Gallery, January 5- January 25, 1916). Picabia’s statement, alongside both Buffet’s comment and the two works, Fantasy and Music is Like Painting, suggest that abstraction hovers alongside all of Picabia’s work of this period. They suggest, in fact, that Picabia understood his mechanomorphs as in some sense in dialog with the ideals and practices of abstract painting. And that dialog, as it appears in the context of Picabia’s works and statements, turns on the relation between the promise ofmodernism and modernity–between the promised unity, autonomy and plenitude of abstraction and the fragmentation, dehumanization and artificiality of the machine. Soon after Picabia arrived in New York, he, Duchamp, Crotti and Gleizes were interviewed for an article on the influence of French artists on the New York art scene. In it, Picabia offered his opinion of the modern machinic world, of which New York was for him a prime example: (68) Almost immediately upon coming to America it flashed on me that the genius of the modern world is machinery, and that through machinery art ought to find a most vivid expression…I have been profoundly impressed by the vast mechanical development in America. The machine has become more than a mere adjunct of human life. It is really a part of human life–perhaps its very soul. It is a perplexing statement–more perplexing than it has been taken to be–and as such deserves considerable attention. To begin with, it needs to be seen in relation to a contemporaneous statement in the pages of 291. The September-October issue was only three pages and included only one image, Stieglitz’s famous declaration of photographic objectivity, The Steerage. The photo was sandwiched between a pair of short texts, both of which were published in English and French so as to draw the attention of as many European artists as possible. One was written by de Zayas, the other by Haviland. Haviland’s text reads, in full: We are living in the age of the machine. Man made the machine in his own image. She has limbs which act; lungs which breathe; a heart which beats; a nervous system through which runs electricity. The phonograph is the image of his voice; the camera the image of his eye. The machine is his “daughter born without a mother.” That is why he loves her. He has made the machine superior to himself. That is why he admires her. Having made her superior to himself, he endows the superior beings which he conceives in his poetry and in his plastique with the qualities of machines. After making the machine in his own image he has made his human ideal machinomorphic. But the machine is yet at a dependent stage. Man gave her every qualification except thought. She submits to his will but he must direct her activities. Without him she remains a wonderful being, but without aim or anatomy. Through their mating they complete one another. She brings forth according to his conceptions. Photography is one of the fine fruits of this union. The photographic print is one element of this new trinity: man, the creator, with thought and will; the machine, mother-action; and their product, the work accomplished. As Picabia used the phrase “daughter born without a mother” as the caption to his drawing from the June issue of 291, scholars have been drawn to interpret the painter’s perspective on the implications of the machine with that of Haviland. (69) On the surface, the two statements resemble one another quite nicely: in both we find not only a consideration of the machine as a fundamental part of modernity, but also the necessity of incorporating this fundamental part of modernity into artistic practice, as well as the association of the machine to the human body, its parts, its functions. Yet to treat the two as analogous, as like-minded in their perception of these considerations of the status of the machine, is to overlook the significant differences of inflection, differences that turn on the particular manner by which the human and the machine were understood to relate to each other. In Haviland’s case, the machine is that which “submits to [man’s] will.” It is “dependent… without aim or anatomy.” Exemplified by the camera–Stieglitz’s camera in particular–the thoughtless machine is put to use by “man, the creator” so as to give birth to the modern work of art. Picabia’s comments suggest something quite different, indeed almost entirely opposed to those of Haviland. For to suggest, as Picabia does, that the machine is man’s “soul” is not to place the machine at man’s service, but very much to the contrary, to place the machine inside man, to replace the creativity of human “will” with the mindlessly repetitive back-and-forth of the piston. Indeed, on closer inspection, Haviland’s view is precisely that which Picabia rejects–which is to say, the understanding of the machine as an “adjunct” to human life, servant to man’s will. Of course, it would be putting too much pressure on this one, likely hyperbolic, media-savvy comment by Picabia to insist that it be used to divide these two perspectives with absolute conviction. Still, it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that Picabia and Haviland hold very different, if not altogether opposed, interpretations of the man- machine nexus. To look at Picabia’s six mechanomorphs of 1915 is to find, again and again, this suspicion confirmed. The work that exemplifies this most obviously is A Little Solitude in the Middle of Suns. As Camfield demonstrates, the basic format was likely drawn from an illustration of an automobile engine, of the sort that included labeled arrows that point to different sub-parts of the machine. (70) The final painting is coordinated around five circular units, each of which is labeled, in a manner likely drawn from the example of Duchamp’s 9 Malic Moulds. (71) Here, however, we are looking not at nine “men” but five “suns”: “Soleil ecclésiastique”; “Soleil interne de lycée”; “Soleil maître supérieur”; “Soleil officier artiste.” The manifestly parodic element of these labels, as well as the indication that the machinic diagram should be related to the stars in a galaxy suggests that we are far indeed from Haviland’s sincere and fully confident embrace of the machine’s vast potential. According to Jean Hubert Martin, Duchamp’s presence can be felt in a number of the mechanomorphs, in the form of much less literal borrowings than we find in A Little Solitude in the Middle of Suns. For example, Martin sees Reverence as a variation on the Chocolate Grinder, Duchamp’s object echoed in the pair of striated forms joined by a thin horizontal rectangle. (72) While this may perhaps be the case, what seems more relevant here is the manifest difference between their treatments of the machine. For one, Picabia’s insistence upon respecting the two- dimensions of the picture plane suggests that he, unlike Duchamp, was unwilling to give up this most crucial and distinctive component of modernist painting. Indeed, it was expressly against the modernist commitment to the integrity of the flat space of the canvas that Duchamp “rehabilitated,” as he put it, the system of scientific perspective. (73) No less significant than Picabia’s insistence upon maintaining the flat space of the picture-plane is the fact that his chocolate grinder–if it is a chocolate grinder at all–has been so fully transformed that it no longer leads the viewer in any direct fashion toward the original illustration from which the painting was drawn. (In fact, a critic at the time insisted that the painting depicted “the chief parts of an aeroplane.” (74) ) Very much unlike Duchamp’s chocolate grinder, Picabia’s Reverence demands to be seen as existing in a suspended state between representation and abstraction, a state that works to frustrate the location of the now absent referent. As such, the painting speaks not so much of the machinic as through the machinic; it is not so much a painting of an absent machine, but a machine of absence. Which is to say it is a painting that manufactures loss–the myriad, unflappable attempts to find the hidden referent is perhaps the most poignant demonstration of its very effectiveness. I want to stress this experience of loss, of absence and its attendant frustrations, because it is an experience that in different ways inflects not only Reverence, but almost all the mechanomorphs of the period. Indeed, in Machine without a Name, one is drawn to this experience straight away, in the title itself. (75) No less explicit is the painting itself, in which the machine depicted is the most skeletal of the group. For one, the diagrammatically rendered machine is drawn in outline alone, with no solid core, pictorially without substance. And the outline itself is deprived of any consistency by virtue of its division into lines of red, black and white. Even as an outline, the parts don’t hold together. What remains is thus little more than an indication of a machine; it depicts what is almost, but not yet, a machine–not yet substantial enough to fully deserve to be called a machine; it does not yet deserve its own name. Paroxysm of Sorrow evokes this experience of loss in a slightly different manner. Here the experience is not one of insubstantiality, but of incompleteness. Duchamp’s counter-example is again of use, for unlike the Chocolate Grinder, where the machine is represented as whole, fully functional, here we find only a detached, isolated, and therefore non-functional fragment. And it is in this context that thedouleur of the title begins to resonate with a certain clarity. (76) Alongside the loss of referentiality implicit in Reverence, the loss of substance inMachine without a Name, and the loss of integrity, completeness and functionality inParoxysm of Sorrow, the mechanomorphs speak of yet another: the loss of the past, the sense in which the modernist embrace of the new is forced to confront its dialectical other, the loss of the old–the production, within the fashion-structure of modernity, of the outmoded. This third instantiation of loss appears in fact at the crossing of two works, at the intersection of the phrase written in an arc along the outer circle of Reverence and the title phrase of This Thing is Made to Perpetuate my Memory, written, again in block-type, along the top of the painting. The former reads: “Objet qui ne fait pas l’éloge du temps passé”; the latter: “Cette chose est faite pour perpétuer mon souvenir.” Together, the two work to undermine each other, to embrace and at the same time resist the anamnesis of modernity, the former in triumphalist terms, in support of the instantaneity of the present, the latter in melancholic terms, with reference to that which such instantaneity abandons. With regard to the latter painting, the implicit nostalgia is all the more relevant as the four, record-like shapes, joined together by four connecting tubes suggest an experience of cacophonous sound, uninterpretable noises. The subtitle, “Il tournent… vous avez des oreilles et vous n’entendrez pas,” makes explicit the implication of lost reception, of that which goes unheard. In a sense then, these works function as peculiar icons of modernity. For the properties of these works intersect in many places the formal properties of the religious icon: not only in the process of morphological simplification, coloristic separation, as well as the insistent flatness, frontality, and symmetry, but also, and perhaps most suggestively, in the use of metallic pigments. (77) They are icons of the fragmentation, dislocation, dehumanization and anamnesis that, by the early teens, were manifesting themselves more clearly than they had to Baudelaire some fifty years before. Indeed, they have about them something of the quality of the allegorical as Benjamin defined it, for they operate at the intersection of a semiosis of absence, a fixation on the fragment, and the melancholic gaze. Such a reading, although speculative, is all the more resonant by virtue of their having developed out of an extended commitment to abstraction, to the promise of unity, plenitude and instantaneity–all attributes of the symbolic. (78) Torn between abstraction and the machine, between the fullness of the symbol and the fragmentation of the allegory, Picabia’s mechanomorphs thematize a tension peculiar to the rupture of 1912, to the end of “the long nineteenth century.” None of the mechanomorphs thematizes this condition more fully than Very Rare Painting on Earth, the largest of the six major mechanomorphs, and the only one to include three-dimensional protrusions–two large, symmetrically placed cylinders on the upper half, one thin cylinder between and below. The title, “Très rare tableau sur la terre,” is, like the other mechanomorphs, derived from a phrase in the pink pages of the Larousse: “rare oiseau sur la terre,” a translation of Juvenal’s “rara avis in terris,” (Satires, VI, 165). We should pause over the uniqueness of the transposition here. Whereas other mechanomorphs involve the replacement of the original word with a word that refers to the objectdepicted in the painting (“voilà Elle,” from “voilà l’homme”; “machine sans nom,” from “la foule sans nom”; “objet qui ne fait pas l’éloge du temps passé,” from “celui qui fait l’éloge du temps passé”), here the original is replaced by a word that refers to the painting itself. It is not a very rare machine, but a very rare painting. And insofar as it is the only mechanomorph that bulges off the surface, perhaps it is indeed a rare painting. But more important than its claim of rarity is the fact that what is at stake here, at least from the point of view of the title, is the painting’s status as a painting–not as a depiction of something, but as a thing in itself. Very Rare Painting on Earth has always struck me as the most awkward, even grotesque, of the mechanomorphs. The cylindrical protrusions are unconvincingly integrated into the flat space of the canvas, in particular the thin rod at the bottom, which, unlike the two at the top, has not been sliced down the middle; it sits on the surface of the painting as if it had been slapped on at the last minute. Although there is a suggestion that the rod is connected to the system of pipes beneath it (through the use of a similarly colored metallic pigment), at the bottom it extends beyond the lower pipe-structure and remains entirely detached to the otherwise interconnected system of tubing around it. It’s also strangely top-heavy. The two gold-painted half-cylinders push so far off the surface that the painting seems on the edge of falling off the wall. And given Picabia’s frequent references to eroticized encounters between man and machine, it is not too much to see in this work the suggestion of two enormous testicles and a long hard penis, replete with a tangle of seminiferous tubules–a suggestion that only adds to the work’s parodic quality. A closer examination of the composition reveals other oddities. While the two gold-painted protrusions at the top give this section of the work an obviously aggressive quality, the unmodulated black space between them appears as a vacant field, a view into an indefinite space behind the machine. Two hulking cylinders are supported by nothing more substantial than the thin white tubes between them. This contradictory juxtaposition of solids and hollows–the play of literal mass and depicted vacancy–only adds to the more obviously awkward elements and, in the end, gives one the sensation of a machine divided against itself. No less disjointed are the structures at the very bottom of the painting: the pair of wheel-like forms and their attendant system of shafts and tubes. The gold-colored wheel (or is it a bell?) appears homeless, crammed as it is in the far left corner. Indeed, it seems as if it were placed there only to fill the space–a compositional decision at the expense of representational consistency. And the same seems to be the case with the right-angled form on the far right. While it works to fill the space, it is unconvincingly integrated into the differently colored tubing that meets it.(79) But perhaps the most systematic attempt to dismantle the conventions of pictorial representation appears in the wide grey rectangular form that lies beneath the centrally placed gold rod. This, the only section modeled in three dimensions appears no less flat than the unmodeled space around it. In part this is caused by the white lines that zigzag across the modeled form, thereby flattening it. But it is also caused by the entirely arbitrary application of light and dark that undermines any sense of a cogent light- source. The one form that could be expected to provide a convincing representation of three- dimensionality ends up negating itself. What is most strange about this work is the way in which the formal devices–culled from the language of abstraction–and the forms of modernity–culled from the language of the machine–work only to undermine each other. As such, the work seems to thematize the failure of modernism in the face of modernity. The work seems to suggest that painting, if it is to continue, if it is not to migrate to glass or find itself replaced by the readymade commodity object, would have to take place within the context of irony, of the internally contradictory, the vulgar, the silly, the absurd. It is as if the only way to regain the promised plenitude of modernist painting was to paste a pair of huge blocks on the surface. For, as the black gap between the two cylinders suggests, such plenitude was no longer possible. That this experience of impossibility should be thematized as absurd, if not grotesque, suggests a certain frustration, if not melancholy–a sign, perhaps, of the strange ambivalence detected by Buffet. Notes 1. The Armory show opened on February 17, 1913. Details of Picabia’s life are drawn from William Camfield, Francis Picabia (Princton: Princeton University Press, 1979); and Maria Lluïsa Borràs, Picabia (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985). 2. Borràs records a number of these articles in Picabia, p. 98. 3. Picabia, “Preface to the Exhibition at the Little Gallery,” 291 (March 17, 1913); reprinted in Borràs,Picabia, p. 109-110. 4. Duchamp, in Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues With Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett (New York: Da Capo,1971) 43. 5. Picabia, quoted in an article by Henry Tyrell in World Magazine (February 9, 1913); reprinted in Borràs, Picabia, p. 106. 6. Picabia, letter to Stieglitz. Stieglitz/O’Keefe File (New Haven: Beinecke Rare Book Library, Yale University). For the complete citation, see below. 7. For a concise description of these five portraits, see Francis Naumann, New York Dada, 1915-23 (New York: Harry Abrams, 1994) 60-61. Of the five, three include the name of the person represented (de Zayas,Stieglitz, Haviland). The fourth, Picabia’s self-portrait, includes the phrase, “C’est de moi qu’il s’agit dans ce portrait.” The fifth drawing, titled Portrait d’une jeune fille américaine dans l’état de nudité, was proposed by William Innes Homer to be a portrait of Agnes Meyer (See: William Innes Homer, “Picabia’s Jeune fille américaine dans l’état de nudité and Her Friends,” Art Bulletin LVII.1 (March 1975): 110-15. 8. Michel Sanouillet, Dada à Paris (Paris: Flammarion, 1965/1993) 28. Pontus Hulten described the mechanomorphs as having “inaugurated an absolutely new pictorial practice, having nothing to do with the brilliant lyricism of the pre-war period.” (“Ils inaugurent une recherche plastique absolument neuve et n’ont plus rien du brillant lyrisme d’avant-guerre.”) Francis Picabia, exhibition catalog (Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, 1976) 7. Jean Hubert Martin argues that Picabia’s mechanomorphs are staked upon the desire “to create a completely new endeavor, without any reference to the past.” (“de créer une œuvre totalement neuve, sans aucune référence au passé.”) Francis Picabia (1976) 45. The analyses of Camfield, Borràs, and Naumann implicitly concur, and their account of the transition is based upon a consideration of the outbreak of the war, the influence of Duchamp, the shock of New York City and the sudden ubiquity of the machine. The problem with such accounts (as with all accounts that focus entirely on the exterior factors involved in an artist’s change of direction) is that it neglects to address the relationship between the exterior factors and those interior, immanent to the artist’s production. 9. In full: “He is the only one who has done as did Cortez. He has burned his ship behind him. He does not protect himself with any shield. He has married America like a man who is not afraid of consequences. He has obtained results.” De Zayas, 291 (July-August, 1915). The one significant exception to this consideration of the mechanomorphs comes in the work of Camfield, for whom both the abstractions of 1913/1914 and the mechanomorphs of 1915 should be understood within the context of psychological representations, visual metaphors for the human condition. Such a suggestion does offer a means of drawing the two periods nearer to one another. However, it only applies to a very limited number of works from each period, and more importantly, forces one to accept the idea that the abstractions are in fact representations–representations of inner, psychological states. (Camfield, Francis Picabia (1979) 77). 10. “Picabia, lui, ne réussira pas à supprimer sa vision picturale; il ne réussira pas à supprimer sa vison picturale; il restera plastique même dans ses réalisations les plus agressives.” Buffet, in Rencontres (Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1977) 249. Buffet used this observation to distinguish Picabia’s mechanomorphs from those of Duchamp. Buffet’s distinction has been marginalized, if not entirely overlooked, in the literature on Picabia, and yet it is clearly among the most perceptive. Picabia’s persistent fixation on the painterly, a fixation entirely opposed to that of Duchamp, and one that extended well beyond the painter’s works from the early teens, demands consideration. In part, this essay is devoted to unraveling the implications of Buffet’s understanding of her husband’s work. < 11. In an interview in 1913, Picabia defended his abstractions as having finally made good on modernism’s promise of an art at last free, self-generated and self-referential. (The New York Times (February 16, 1913), reprinted in Borràs, Picabia, p. 107). Elsewhere Picabia described his abstractions as having given form to “the fullness of [our] new consciousness of nature.” Picabia, (“Preface to the Exhibition at the Little Gallery,” 291 (March 17, 1913), reprinted in Borràs, Picabia, pp. 109-110). This was a sentiment reiterated by Buffet who described the work as aiming for “a unity, a wholeness,” one that, “pierce[s] below the surface… to [the] essence.” (Buffet, “Modern Art and the Public,” Camera Work (June 1913) 12.) 12. Translated by Camfield, Francis Picabia (1979) 59. The letter is conserved in the Stieglitz/O’Keefe File, Beinecke Rare Book Library, Yale University. The original French reads: “Je travaille pour le moment à un très grand tableau qui concentre plusieurs de mes études exposées au 291–je pense davantage à une peinture plus pure, peinture à une dimension n’ayant plus de titre, chaque tableau aura pour nom un rapport avec l’expression picturale, nom propre absolument crée pour lui… Excusez la brièveté de ma lettre, je suis un peu fatigué et tourmenté par ma nouvelle évolution.” 13. Apollinaire was one of the few critics to have found anything positive about them (“I find them very important. And the ridicule changes nothing.” (Apollinaire, Apollinaire on Art, trans. Susan Suleiman (New York: Da Capo, 1972) 329). Both Udnie and Edtaonisl were later reproduced in color in Apollinaire’s review, Les soirées de Paris (March 15, 1914). They were in fact the only two color reproductions in any of the pages of Les soirées de Paris—perhaps a sign of their importance to Apollinaire (then again, Picabia’s financial support to the magazine likely paid a part). In addition to these two works, the issue included four black-and-white reproductions: Star Dancer on a Transatlantic, Catch as Catch Can, Negro Song, Physical Culture. This issue also included Buffet’s essay on new music. 14. Philip Pearlstein was among the first to attempt to decode Picabia’s titles: “The Paintings of Francis Picabia,” Master of Arts Thesis, New York University, Institute of Fine Arts, February, 1955. “The Symbolic Language of Francis Picabia,” Arts XXX (January 1956): 37-43. The title Edtaonisl is produced by interlacing the letters of the two words “étoile” and “danse” while dropping off the final “e” in both words. Pearlstein suggested that Udnie was derived from “nudité,” but it is far more compelling to accept Picabia’s retrospective claim that the title was derived from “uni-dimensionnel” (“Interview with Henri Goetz and Christine Boumeester,” (Paris, June 20, 1968), cited in Camfield, Francis Picabia (1979) 62, n. 14). Picabia was in all likelihood introduced to such linguistic manipulations from Apollinaire and Duchamp (see Camfield, p. 61). Apollinaire liked to play a game he called “POF,” which he described in Mercure de France (November 16, 1917). The game consists in taking a name and making each one of its letters the initial of a word and forming a sentence out of these words (P.O.F. stood for Parti Ouvrier Français). 15. Naumann (New York Dada, p. 57) associates Udnie with the Russian dancer, Napierkowska, whom the two had encountered on the ship from Paris to New York. According to Camfield (Francis Picabia (1979), p. 1, n. 12) the initial subject of Edtaonisl (subtitled ecclésiastique) was a Dominican priest. Nonetheless, and perhaps this bears repeating since it has received so little attention in the scholarship on Picabia’s abstractions, what matters in our understanding of these works as paintings–and not as materials through which we can locate biographical data–is our experience in front of them. Here it is unquestionably the case that the words atop the canvas are non-referential, as abstract as the painting itself. If we are to insist that our understanding of the original referent is crucial to the work, than we are, in effect, admitting that the painting is a kind of inside joke (Udnie = attractive dancer; Edtaonisl = priest-friend of the painter), and if so, it becomes difficult to defend our interest in the paintings at all. Shown at the Salon d’Automne, these paintings were designed to be understood within their given context, one in which Picabia could hardly have imagined that the contemporary viewer would locate a meaningful source for the words Udnie and Edtaonisl. And this is to say that, when considering the work in relation to its reception by the intended audience, the original source of these words is entirely irrelevant. They appear as nonsense words and deserve to be read that way. 16. This statement is printed in full in Borràs, Picabia, pp. 109-110. 17. Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, Du Cubisme (written before the Section d’Or exhibition in October 1912). Re-edition by Éditions Présence, 1980, p. 39. 18. This marks the end of Picabia’s statement, after which is appended an extract from Plato’s “Philebus” in which Socrates says, “What I am saying is not, indeed, directly obvious. I must therefore try to make it clear. For I will endeavor to speak of the beauty of figures, not as the majority of people understand them, whether these figures be living or painted, but as reason proclaims. I allude to the straight line and to the circle, and to the plumb-line and the angle- rule, if you understand me. For these, I say, are beautiful in themselves, and instill a certain pleasure, which has nothing in common with the pleasure one derives from scratching. And there are colors which are beautiful and pleasing thanks to this same quality.” The reference to the pleasure of scratching makes sense in context; Socrates is distinguishing between varieties of pleasure, of which the bodily pleasure of scratching an itch is one. Mark Cheetham refers to this passage by Plato in his book, The Rhetoric of Purity (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991). On p. 153, n. 2, he refers to a number of scholars’ work which have focused on this passage and its relation to the rise of abstract painting, in particular Linda Henderson’s The Forth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Painting (Princton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983). She notes (pp. 310 ff.; p. 215 n. 173) that Picabia in all likelihood got this passage from Stieglitz. In How, When, and Why Modern Art Came to New York, ed. Francis Naumann ( Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996) 21), de Zayas notes Stieglitz’s interest in this passage by Plato, and suggests that Stieglitz became aware of it around 1910. 19. The idea that abstraction would in fact be the logical consequence of the urge to a more profound realism is sufficiently paradoxical to deserve closer attention. It remains, in my estimation, one of the most perplexing aspects of early abstraction. For the notion of abstract painting as the expression of a most profound realism applies not only to Picabia, but also to the bulk of the early abstractionists. Here I can only offer some examples–comments by Mondrian, Malevich, and Kandinsky–as a means of pointing toward what surely demands more concerted attention. Malevich, for example, defined suprematism as “non-objective representation” (Kasimir Malevich, “Suprematism,” translated in The Non-Objective World, trans. Howard Dearstyne (Chicago: Theobald, 1959) 61-65). Similarly, Mondrian, in 1919 spoke of his abstractions as “a pure representation of the human mind,” “representations of relations alone,” “represent[ations] of actual aesthetic relationships,” “represent[ations of] balanced relations,” and “pure reflections of life in its deepest sense.” (Piet Mondrian, Natural Reality and Abstract Reality,” first published in De Stijl I (Amsterdam, 1919), in Piet Mondrian, The New Art -The New Life, trans. Harry Holtzman and Martin S. James (New York: Da Capo, 1993) 82-123). Kandinsky summed it up most succinctly: “Realism = Abstraction; Abstraction = Realism.” (Wassily Kandinsky, “On the Question of Form,” first published in Der Blaue Reiter (Munich: R. Piper, 1912), in Wassily Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art,eds. Kenneth Lindsay, Peter Vergo (New York: Da Capo, 1994) 235-257). Statements like these suggest that the rise of abstraction was born out of the very paradox expressed by Picabia: on the one hand, the urge to more fully represent reality, as it really is, and on the other hand, and fundamentally opposed to the former, to free painting from the necessity of representation altogether. 20. Buffet and Varèse were part of a small group of young musicians and composers who aimed to put Busoni’s theoretical formulations into practice. They even went so far as to build instruments like the dynamaphone that would produce sounds outside the conventional tonal system of western music. Later in life, Varèse reiterated the importance of Busoni to his work. See his comments in Varèse, “The Liberation of Sound,” and Gunther Schuller, “Conversations with Varèse,” in Music in the Western World, eds. Piero Weiss, Richard Taruskin (New York: Simon Schuster, 1984) 518-522. Here, for example, is Varèse on the problem of form in new music: “As for form, Busoni once wrote: ‘Is it not singular to demand of a composer originality in all things and to forbid it as regards form? No wonder that if he is original he is accused of formlessness.’ The misunderstanding has come from thinking of form as a point of departure, a pattern to be followed, a mold to be filled. Form is a result–the result of a process. Each of my works discovered its own form.” In a later conversation, Varèse added: “The essential touchstone for me was Busoni’s prophetic book, Sketch for a New Aesthetic of Music. This predicts precisely what is happening today in music–that is, if you pass over the whole dodecaphonic development, which in my view represents a sort of hardening of the arteries.” (Music in the Western World, pp. 519, 521). 21. Buffet refers to such machines in her 1914 essay on modern music: “Grâce à des bruiteurs mécaniques et perfectionnés, une reconstitution objective de la vie sonore deviendrait possible. Nous découvririons la forme des sons en dehors de la convention musical…” Buffet, “Musique d’aujourd’hui,” reprinted by Slatkin, in the multi-volume reprinting of Les soirées de Paris, vol. II (Geneva: Slatkin reprints, 1971) 181-183. 22. In her introduction to Buffet’s various writings on art, Borràs notes Busoni’s importance to Buffet. (Borràs, “Une Jeune Femme appelée Gabrielle Buffet,” introduction to Buffet’s collection of essays, Rencontres (Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1977) 13-23). Borràs’ analysis, rich as it is in biographical information, nonetheless treats both Busoni’s and Buffet’s work in a more or less cursory manner, and as a result, overlooks what I consider below to be the crucial complexities at work in their organic model of musical composition. I have yet to come across any scholarly consideration of the chain of influence that leads from Busoni to Buffet to Picabia, a chain I consider fundamental to an understanding of the painter’s conception of the stakes involved in the development of abstract painting. 23. She was, for example, attentive not only to the similarities between music and painting, but the differences as well: “We cannot completely appreciate musical form without an initiation into the arbitrary laws of composition and harmony… The entire objectivity of sound had to be created, a convention of the musical language to be organized. The deepest meaning of a musical composition will escape, in part, the comprehension of those listeners who are not educated in music, or who have not, at least, the heredity of a long education.” By contrast, she claims that with regard to painting: The abstract idea in pure line and pure color is conveyed to our understanding more directly… Pure line and color have a definite and particular meaning in themselves which the normal development of our sense perceptions permits us to appreciate without effort. Everyone has in himself the comprehension of the straight line and the curve, of the colors blue and red. Everyone can seize the relations that exist between two lines and two colors and the different impression that ensues from different relations of these same lines and colors. (Buffet, “Modern Art and the Public,” Camera Work, special number (after the double issue, 42-43), (June 1913, pp. 11-14): 13). This privileged place accorded to painting–whether, in the end, justified or not– was for Buffet the result of a profound consideration of the formal conditions of advanced musical composition. She was unique among early theorists of music and painting in that she comprehended the role of conventions in the construction of even “absolute” music. 24. For the still standard biographical account see: Edward Dent, Ferrucio Busoni: A Biography (London: Oxford University Press, 1933). For a more recent account of Busoni’s life and work, see: Antony Beaumont, Busoni the Composer (London: Faber and Faber, 1985). 25. Busoni, Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music, p. 81. One of Busoni’s central concerns was the limitation imposed by the conventional system of the octave: “We have divided the octave into twelve equidistant degrees, because we had to manage somehow, and have constructed our instruments in such a way that we can never get in above or below or between them. Keyboard instruments, in particular, have so thoroughly schooled our ears that we are no longer capable of hearing anything else–incapable of hearing except through this impure medium. Yet Nature created an infinite gradation–infinite!” (p. 89). In an effort to draw closer to the infinite gradation of natural sound, Busoni endorses an expansion of the given system: “I have made an attempt to exhaust the possibilities of the arrangement of degrees within the seven-tone scale; and succeeded, by raising and lowering the intervals, in establishing one hundred and thirteen different scales… One cannot estimate at a glance what wealth of melodic and harmonic expression would thus be opened up to the hearing… With this presentation, the unity of all keys may be considered as finally pronounced and justified. A kaleidoscopic blending and interchanging of twelve semitones within the three-mirror tube of Taste, Emotion, and Intention–the essential feature of the harmony of today.” (Busoni,Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music, pp. 92-93). For an account of Busoni’s expanded scales see Daniel Raessler, “The ‘113’ Scales of Ferrucio Busoni,” The Music Review (Feb. 1982): 51-56. 26. Here is a characteristic passage: “How primitive this art must remain!… [Its] means of expression are few and trivial, covering but a very small section of musical art. Begin with the most self-evident of all, the ebasement of Tone to Noise in imitating the sounds of Nature–the rolling of thunder, the roar of forests, the cries of animals; then those somewhat less evident, symbolic–imitations of visual impression, like the lightening-flash, springing movements, the flight of birds; again, those intelligible only through the mediation of the reflective brain, such as the trumpet-call as a warlike symbol, the shawm to betoken ruralism, march-rhythm to signify measured strides, the chorale as a vehicle for religious feeling… These are auxiliaries, of which good use can be made upon a broad canvas, but which, taken by themselves, are no more to be called music than wax figures may pass for monuments.”(Busoni, Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music, p. 82) 27. “Absolute Music! What the lawgivers mean by this is perhaps remotest of all from the Absolute in music. ‘Absolute music’ is a form-play without poetic program, in which the form is intended to have the leading part. But Form, in itself, is the opposite pole of absolute music, on which was bestowed the divine prerogative of buoyancy, of freedom from the limitations of matter… Per contra, ‘absolute music’ is something very sober, which reminds one of music-desks in orderly rows, of the relation of Tonic to Dominant, of Developments and Codas…This sort of music ought rather to be called the ‘architectonic,’ or ‘symmetric,’ or ‘sectional,’ and derives from the circumstance that certain composers poured their spirit and their emotion into just this mould as lying nearest them or their time. Our lawgivers have identified the spirit and emotion, the individuality of these composers and their time, with ‘symmetric’ music, and finally, being powerless to recreate either the spirit, or the emotion, or the time, have retained the Form as a symbol, and made it into a fetish, a religion.” (Busoni, Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music, pp. 78-79) 28. Busoni, Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music, p. 79. 29. Busoni, Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music, p. 85. We will have occasion to address the consequences of an even more extreme conception of the act of notation in Valéry, for whom the poetic process is an unavoidably artificial act that militates against the sort of unmediated self-expression implicit in Breton’s notion of automatic writing. “A la moindre rature,” wrote Valéry, “le principe d’inspiration totale est ruiné.” (Littérature, (Paris: Gallimard, 1930) 30). 30. Busoni, Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music, p. 102. Hoffmannsthal’s paradox of a language unknown to the author himself is echoed throughout Busoni’s text, at one point citing a letter sent to him by Buffet’s teacher at the Schola Cantorum, in which d’Indy makes reference to “an ideal that one can never attain, but which we may be able to approach.” (Busoni leaves the French text in its original, and quotes only a fragment of the sentence: “…laissant de côté les contingences et les petitesses de la vie pour regarder constamment vers un idéal qu’on ne pourra jamais atteindre, mais dont il est permis de se rapprocher.” (Busoni, Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music, p. 97, n. 1) Given that Buffet had been d’Indy’s student and that he had gone so far as to write for her a letter of introduction to Busoni–a letter she used upon her arrival in Berlin–it would be highly unlikely that she would not have taken note of it. 31. John Cage performed his famous silent piece, 4 minutes and 33 seconds, in 1952. 32. Italics his. Busoni, Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music, p. 89. 33. The text as it appeared in Camera Work is reproduced without comment in the catalog to the Picabia exhibition at the Grand Palais, Francis Picabia (1976), p. 68. However, it does not appear in Picabia’s collected essays, Écrits. 34. Borràs (Picabia, p. 112) provides a detailed analysis of this text and provides crucial information regarding Méric’s aesthetic position. Remarkably, her analysis does not lead her to question the sincerity of the essay. 35. Jeffrey Weiss has provided the most extensive unpacking of this text. Jeffrey Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art: Picasso, Duchamp and Avant-Gardism (New Haven: Yale University Press 1994) 85-89. He points out the flaws in Borràs’ attempt to read the essay as a sincere expression of avant-garde enthusiasm. 36. The only exception, Weiss’ account, comes in what is really a three page appendix to a chapter devoted to Duchamp. 37. In French the passages read: “Cherchez la femme, dira-t-on. Quelle erreur! Par l’opposition desteints et la diffusion de la lumière, la femme n’est-elle pas visible à l’œil nu, et quels barbares pourraient réclamer sérieusement que le peintres s’exerce inutilement à esquisser un visage, des seins et des jambes?” 38. Weiss, p. 87. 39. Picabia, in “Ne riez pas, c’est de la peinture et ça représente une jeune américaine,” Le Matin(December 1, 1913) 1; reprinted in Picabia, Écrits I, p. 26. 40. De Zayas, letter to Stieglitz, May 22, 1914, Stieglitz/O’Keefe Archive (Beinecke Rare Book Library, Yale University); Reprinted in De Zayas, How, When, and Why Modern Art Came to New York, pp. 169-170. 41. De Zayas, letter to Stieglitz, June 30, 1914, Stieglitz/O’Keefe Archive (Beinecke Rare Book Library, Yale University); Reprinted in De Zayas, How, When, and Why Modern Art Came to New York, pp. 180-181. 42. Camfield distinguishes the two by arguing that Picabia’s “forms tend to be more emphatic, the space less ambiguous, the sexuality more evident.” (Francis Picabia, 1979, p. 69). 43. Marcel Duchamp, notes for a slide lecture, “Apropos of Myself” (1964), cited in: Marcel Duchamp, eds. Anne d’Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973) 263. 44. The first performance of Impressions d’Afrique opened on September 30, 1911, but was suspended after a week because of the death of Roussel’s mother. The play re-opened at the Théâtre Antoine on May 11, 1912. A selection of critical responses to Roussel’s play appears in Raymond Roussel: Life, Death and Works (London: Atlas Press, 1987). Calvin Tomkins provides a chronology of Roussel’s performances and suggests that Duchamp likely saw the play in the second or third week in June (Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1996, p. 90). Duchamp expresses his amazement at the performance in his conversations with Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Duchamp, pp. 33-34. 45. Duchamp to Cabanne, Dialogues with Duchamp, p. 38. 46. In a letter from 1946 to Marcel Jean, Duchamp notes: “It was fundamentally Roussel who was responsible for my glass, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even… From his Impressions d’Afrique I got the general approach. This play of his which I saw with Apollinaire helped me greatly on one side of my expression. I saw at once that I could use Roussel as an influence. I felt that as a painter it was much better to be influenced by a writer than by another painter. And Roussel showed me the way.” (cited in Tomkins, Duchamp, p. 91). 47. Speaking of his work in 1912-13, Duchamp contrasts his interests with those of Picabia: “Picabia was above all an ‘Abstractionist,’ a word he had invented. It was his hobbyhorse. We didn’t talk much about it. He thought about nothing else. I left it very quickly.” (Dialogues with Duchamp, p. 43). 48. This astonished Duchamp as well. As he put it to Cabanne, Apollinaire was “still living like [a] writer of the Symbolist period, around 1880, that is.” (Dialogues with Duchamp, p. 24). 49. “Ce qui est extraordinaire, c’est que malgré leurs audaces, l’un et l’autre souffraient d’un mal qu’il leur était difficile de préciser : une sorte de nostalgie de la forme objective, le regret du motif et de toutes les formules classique dont ils s’étaient peu à peu détachés. Cette rupture avec certaines habitudes et inclinaisons de leur esprit les mettait souvent dans le doute d’eux-mêmes.” (Gabrielle Buffet, “Guillaume Apollinaire,” in Rencontres (Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1977) 66). 50. This is clear from his 1913 letter to Stieglitz, where he spoke about “a purer painting of a dimension having no title, each painting hav[ing] a name in rapport with the pictorial expression, [an] appropriate name absolutely created for it.” 51. Carole Boulbès (Francis Picabia: Le Saint Masqué (Jean Michele Place, 1998)), interprets the bulk of Picabia’s mature work with a similar tension: “l’univers esthétique de Picabia semble foncièrement double. C’est une sorte de double monde qui oscille entre le refus et l’acceptation de l’illusion de l’art, entre l’ennui et la jouissance, entre la mort et la vie.” (p. 138). Boulbès concerns herself with Picabia’s work after 1915, and does not address the question, central to this study here, of the relation between abstraction and the mechanomorphs, the question, as I see it, that is determinative of the painter’s subsequent ambivalence, his double monde. 52. The entry in the Larousse includes the following brief explanation of this phrase: “Expression dont Virgile (Enéide X, 782) sert pour rendre plus touchante la douleur d’un jeune guerrier, Antor, qui avait suivi Enée enItalie, et meurt loin de patrie, tué par Mézence.” Various titles drawn from the “Pink Pages” are collected with the original entries in Francis Picabia (Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, 1976) 47-49. Picabia began using phrases from these pages some time in 1913 and he continued to make use of them into 1915. The phrase “Fille née sans mère,” for example, is derived from a passage in Ovid’s Metamorphosis (“Prolem sine matre creatam”), while the title “très rare tableau sur la terre” is taken from one of Juvenal’s Satires (“rara avis in terris”). The use of the pink pages is evident in many other works of this period, including for example, the title to a work from 1914, Impétuosité Française, which comes from the Italian expression “Furia francese,” used by Machiavelli, and fromo a 1915 mechanical portrait of Marius de Zayas, which contains near the top, the phrase “C’est de toi qu’il s’agit,” a phrase which is taken, with a slight modification, from Horace (“De te fabula narratur”). Jean Hubert Martin was the first to have recognized the source material for these titles. (Francis Picabia (Grand Palais, 1976) 47-49) It seems that Picabia was given this idea from Apollinaire, who enjoyed referring to these pages. See Katia Samaltanos, Apollinaire: Catalyst for Primitivism, Picabia, and Duchamp (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984) 71-72. 53. Camfield, Francis Picabia (1979) 69. 54. See letter from de Zayas to Stieglitz, September 13, 1914, transcribed in Marius de Zayas, How, When, and Why Modern Art Came to New York, ed. Francis Naumann (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996) 185. Scholars have often noted the obvious similarity between these two works (Camfield, Francis Picabia, p. 80; Naumann, New York Dada, pp. 59-60), yet it has not been suggested that the painter’s interest in reconsidering his earlier work was probably inspired by his renewed contact with it. This work provides one (of the more obvious) links between the painter’s abstract works and his subsequent mechanomorphs. I think Camfield is mistaken when he claims that this 1915 drawing “suggests what little transition exists between the psychological studies of 1913-1914 and the machinist drawings of 1915. It does resemble somewhat Je revois en souvenir ma chère Udnie, but a clearer suggestion of rods and springs introduces the machine element which Picabia himself claimed for 1915.” (Camfield, Francis Picabia, p. 80) Indeed, his very acknowledgement of a resemblance suggests the contrary. But, as I argue below, this particular connection is but the most superficial, and in the end, one of the least significant. 55. Although beyond the scope of this study, the question of the “diagrammatic”–a term Duchamp himself uses to describe his alternative to the cubist/abstractionist model (Cabanne, Dialogues with Duchamp,p. 31)–deserves attention as one of the significant, yet entirely overlooked, alternatives to the cubist/ abstractionist model proposed by Picabia in 1913-14. 56. The same is true for the more complex drawing reproduced in 291 (November 1915), Voilà Elle, where a target is attached, through a pair of strings, to a gun that itself points back to the target. The masturbatory implications of this drawing have been commented upon by a number of scholars, likewise suggesting its parallel to the erotics of Duchamp’s contemporaneous work. (New York Dada, p. 62; Borràs, Picabia, 158; Camfield, Francis Picabia, p. 70), 57. Of the six known mechanomorphs, all but one (A Little Solitude in the Middle of Suns) are extant. 58. As mentioned above, Sanouillet considers Picabia’s mechanomorphs as the sign that the painter had “turned his back” on his earlier preoccupations. Pontus Hulten refers to the mechanomorphs as having “inaugurated an absolutely new pictorial practice, having nothing to do with the brilliant lyricism of the pre-war period.” In a similar vein, Jean Hubert Martin characterized the mechanomorphs as staked upon the desire “to create a completely new endeavor, without any reference to the past.” (Michel Sanouillet, Dada à Paris (Paris: Flammarion, 1965/1993) 28; Pontus Hulten, Picabia Catalog, 1979, p. 7; Jean Hubert Martin, Francis Picabia, exhibition catalog (Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, 1976) 45). The one exception is that of William Camfield, for whom these works, despite their manifest differences on the level of iconography, nonetheless “attest to continuities of aim and content. Instead of developing a vocabulary of abstract forms and colors [as a means of representing the inner, subjective experiences of the painter], Picabia now sought machine equivalents or symbols to comment on man and human situations, much as the ancient Greeks and Romans had developed personifications of gods, virtues, vices, war and peace.” (Camfield, Francis Picabia (1979), pp. 77-78.) Still, Camfield maintains that beyond this one exception, there exists no other significant connection between the abstractions of 1913-14 and the mechanomorphs of 1915. 59. Perhaps this is a good place to enumerate some of the more prominent examples of the ways in which the relationship between Picabia and Duchamp has been dealt with in the literature. The common interest in man-machine hybrids has been much commented upon (Borràs, Francis Picabia: Máquinas y Españolas, exhibition catalog (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1996) 170; Camfield, Máquinas y Españolas, p. 175); The mutual influence of figures like Roussel, Jarry and Pawlowski has also been cited by Borràs (Picabia , p. 153) and Camfield (Francis Picabia, 1979, p. 79); In addition, for Camfield, one of the crucial similarities involves their mutual interest in the “intellectual” aspect of art (Francis Picabia, 1979, p. 85); Ulf Linde considers alchemy to be a source of mutual inspiration (Francis Picabia, Grand Palais, p. 24), while Martin has focused on their mutual interests in word games (Francis Picabia, Grand Palais, p. 24). Regarding the accounts of their differences, Copely argues for dividing the two along the lines of the cerebral (Duchamp) and the corporeal (Picabia) (Francis Picabia, Grand Palais, p. 15) while Martin distinguishes between the worldly Picabia and the provincial Duchamp (Francis Picabia, Grand Palais, p. 46). Camfield has distinguished between Duchamp’s attraction to the labor-intensive work of the Large Glass as opposed to Picabia’s often improvisational compositions (Máquinas y Españolas, p.175), as well as the more fundamental distinction between the ways in which sexuality is represented in their work–as preposterous in the case of Duchamp, as frustrating in the case of Camfield. (Francis Picabia, 1979, p. 70). In sum, none of the accounts address the distinction that I take to be fundamental: namely the difference between Duchamp’s abandonment of modernist painting (and therefore its attendant aims and values) and Picabia’s continued, if ambivalent, attachment to it. 60. See Virginia Spate, Orphism: The Evolution of Non-Figurative Painting in Paris, 1910-1914 (London: Oxford University Press, 1979). It should be said that one of the more remarkable aspects of the perspective on the war in 1915 (and one that surely deserves attention) was that, for Duchamp at least, the foremost thing on his mind seems to have been not the human devastation of the war, but rather the emptiness of the cafés. Although one may well be tempted to interpret Duchamp’s machinic turn as part of a reflection of the war’s introduction of technologically advanced methods of human destruction, contemporaneous comments present a more naïve, if not utterly self- absorbed consideration of the effects of the war. In an interview from 1915, Duchamp makes only passing reference to the violence of the war; his main concern was the sense of boredom he felt with the entire city talking about nothing else but what was going on at the front: The Quartier Latin is a gloomy endroit these days. The old gay life is all vanished. The ateliers are dismally shut. Art has gone dusty. You know, at the outbreak of the war, all Latin Quarter cafés closed up at 8 o’clock in the evening. When I abandoned Paris last spring, the hour had been advanced to 10:30. But it is a very different life from the happy, stimulating life one used to encounter. Paris is like a deserted mansion. Her lights are out. One’s friends are all away at the front. Or else they have been already killed. I came over here, notbecause I couldn’t paint at home, but because I hadn’t anyone to talk with. It was frightfully lonely. I amexcused from service on account of my heart . So I roamed about all alone. Everywhere the talk turned upon war.Nothing but war was talked from morning until night. In such an atmosphere, especially for one who holds warto be an abomination, it may readily be conceived existence was heavy and dull. From a psychological standpointI find the spectacle of war very impressive. The instinct which sends men marching out to cut down other men isan instinct worthy of careful scrutiny. What an absurd thing such a conception of patriotism is! Fundamentally,all people are alike. Personally, I must say I admire the attitude of combating invasion with folded rms. Could thatbut become the universal attitude, how simple the intercourse of nations would be.” (Duchamp, in “French Artists Spur on an American Art,” New York Tribune, Sunday, October 24, 1915, section IV: 2, 3). 61. See, for example, Naumann, New York Dada, p. 60. 62. Christopher Green, “Cubism and the Possibility of Abstract Art,” in Towards a New Art:Essays on the Background to Abstract Art, 1910-20 (London: The Tate Gallery, 1980) 164. 63. “Picabia… ne réussira pas à supprimer sa vision picturale; il restera plastique même dans ses réalisations les plus agressives.” Buffet, “A propos de l’anti- peinture,” Rencontres, p. 249. 64. William Copely, “Du lièvre et de la tortue et principalement du lièvre,” Francis Picabia,exhibition catalog (Paris: Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, 1976) 14. 65. The illustration used in preparing Fantasy appears in Camfield, Francis Picabia (1979), no page number. The illustration used in preparing Music is Like Painting is illustrated both in Camfield’s 1979 text as well as in his essay for the 1970 exhibition catalog of Picabia’s work at the Guggenheim Museum. William Camfield, Francis Picabia (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1970) 102. 66. Picabia must have taken this work–and by implication, its manifest declaration of a continued adherence to his pre-1915 aesthetic ambitions–quite seriously, as he was to remake the painting five years later for a 1920 booklet on his work. Marie de La Hire, Francis Picabia (Paris, 1920). Camfield dates this painting to some time between 1913 and 1917, when it first appeared in exhibition. He considers the work’s direct recollection of Picabia’s pre-1915 understanding of painting as like music to suggest that it may have been painted as early as 1913. Yet Camfield’s own convincing demonstration of its derivation from a scientific, technological illustration–a procedure not used by Picabia before his arrival in New York in mid-1915–places the work to the same time as Fantasy, a work whose date is ecured by its reproduction in 291. Camfield’s unwillingness to imagine that Picabia would have maintained some of his most fundamental pre-1915 commitments during his period in New York prevents him from recognizing that which is far more likely: Picabia never did abandon his earlier commitments, at least not in the definitive manner that Camfield–and others–have insisted. For Camfield’s assessment of this work see Francis Picabia (1970) 102; Borràs suggests that the work was painted during Picabia’s subsequent stay in Barcelona between mid-1916 and mid-1917, when he returned to New York for the third and final time. She offers no evidence to support this claim. (Borràs, Picabia, p. 175); The fact that the work was shown at an exhibition that opened just four days after his arrival in New York, suggests that it was most likely painted the year before, during his second trip to New York. But even if Borràs is correct, this does not undermine my claim that Picabia’s commitment to abstraction worked alongside his interest in the mechanomorphs. Indeed, if the painting had been done some time between mid-1916 and mid-1917, this would only confirm the notion that Picabia’s fixation on abstraction remained, now two years after his apparent abandonment. 67. Still other indicators include Picabia’s reference to “the metaphysical and invisible world,” the “invisible symbol of the painter,” as well as the notion of a “sublime and superior language.” 291 (February1916), no page number (printed on the final page of the magazine). 68. Anonymous author, “French Artists Spur on an American Art,” New York Tribune ( October 24, 1915), section IV: 2, 3. It is also the one source cited in the defense of the claim that Picabia’s 1915 works mark an absolute break. “Francis Picabia, for example,” notes the unnamed reporter, “admits to having put all former things behind him and to having grasped the genius of American machinery as the new medium through which his art may be expressed.” I believe this remark is best treated as an exaggeration/misrepresentation by an artist who, understandably, was drawn at the moment to focus on the manifest differences rather than the less obvious yet underlying continuities. 69. See, for example, Camfield, Francis Picabia (1979) 80; Borràs, Picabia, p. 156; Naumann, New York Dada,p. 61. In this reading, Picabia’s interest in “la fille née sans mère” is a sign that Picabia perceived himself likeGod: just as God created man, so man created the machine. The machine is therefore “the daughter bornwithout a mother,” the daughter born by man alone. In other words, Picabia’s turn to the machine is partof a larger affirmation of the powers of creation, powers which run alongside those of modern production,likewise affirmed as the manifestation of God-on-earth. (See Camfield, Francis Picabia (1979), pp. 81 n. 30; 82; 138; Francis Picabia: Máquinas y Españolas, exhibition catalog (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1996) 174, 176. 70. Camfield, Francis Picabia (1979), figures section for chapter six, no page number. 71. Duchamp labels his Nine Malic Moulds: “Cuirassier”, “Gendarme”, “Larbin”, “Livreur”, “Chasseur”, “Prêtre”, “Croquemort”, “Police-man”, “Chef de Gare”. 72. Jean-Hubert Martin, “Ses tableaux sont peints,” Francis Picabia (1976), p. 45. 73. Duchamp, in Cabanne, Dialogues with Duchamp, p. 38. Duchamp’s use of glass as an alternative to canvas was driven by the same agenda, and given the obvious eccentricity of this medium, it is impossible that Picabia would not have asked him about his reasons for using it. He would have heard straight away that the glass was among a number of devices for doing away with the values and implications of modernist painting. 74. Unnamed reviewer, “Picabia’s Puzzles,” The Christian Science Monitor (January 29, 1916). 75. For Picabia, the titles are absolutely crucial to the understanding of his work. They are that which “the painting… is the pantomime.” (Statement in 291, no. 12 (February 1916), no page number). 76. Attempts have been made to locate the source for this machine part, in one case suggesting that it was drawn from a diagram for an electric vibrator–hence “paroxysm,” a word used at the time as a euphemism for orgasm. See Naumann, New York Dada, p. 64. 77. Transposing an argument made by Arturo Schwarz with regard to the role of alchemy in Duchamp’s work (see, for example, “The Alchemist Stripped Bare in the Bachelor, Even,” in Marcel Duchamp, eds. d’Harnoncourt and McShine, pp. 81-98). Ulf Linde suggests that Picabia’s use of metallic pigments may be seen as a similar reference to alchemy. Ulf Linde, “Picabia,” in Francis Picabia, exhibition catalog (Grand Palais, 1976) 24. With only the analogy to Duchamp to support it, Linde’s suggestion is even more suspect than Schwarz’s. 78. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1977),especially pp. 159-189; 223-226. 79. In addition, the lower apparatus of wheel and shaft, while more credibly machine- like, nonetheless appears as if its components are in fact attached only internally, thereby preventing the wheel from spinning and shafts from cranking back-and-forth. Fig. 23 ©2002 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. All rights reserved. Figs. 25-27 ©2002 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. All rights reserved. Potty Talk: Marcel Duchamp, Kenneth Burke, and Pure Persuasion Man is the symbol-using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing) animal inventor of the negative (or moralized by the negative) separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making goaded by the spirit of hierarchy (or moved by the sense of order) and rotten with perfection (Burke, On Symbols, 70). This definition is central to Kenneth Burke’s theory of rhetoric. To Burke, words are symbols; they are utterances, manufactured by “Man” to signify those things which they represent. Words are an easy target for study. Although somewhat indeterminate in meaning, the mere presence of them denotes human authorship. Whether written or spoken, a word is a deliberate act, brought into being for the express purpose of expressing. Words are written down to transmit ideas. For example, I could describe the act of milking a goat for the purpose of instruction without including an actual goat (or myself) in the text. Words are small, convenient packages for large ideas. But as a result of indeterminacy, error, ignorance, inadequacy and/or inaccuracy, words can only be symbols, they can never be that which they represent. In other words, the word “goat” cannot and will not be a goat. Thus, words function as a heuristic, they are symbols, which we must inform with our own understanding of what they mean. The word “goat” can make one person think of a petting zoo animal, another person think of a drawing of a goat from a storybook, while it will always make me think of my pet goat, “Maybell.” Each reader generates his/her own idea based on what the words say, and the skillful rhetorician can guide the reader through this generation so that he/she arrives at a desired idea. Since this is how persuasion is accomplished, we must also consider non-verbal symbols for their heuristic qualities— for their ability to arouse thoughts. This non-verbal “text” is as powerful as it is elusive. In the verbal text, specific words are available for scrutiny. The aid of a dictionary can be enlisted to help determine meaning. But objects, while they may be selected, placed, framed, or altered deliberately are “inert.” They do not “say” anything in the sense that this paper does. Inanimate objects, because of their lack of words, invite us to identify them and identify with them. Objects, particularly manufactured ones, are part of our world of things. We are used to using them, and like inkblots in a Rorschach test, they passively accept our ideas, emotions, and judgements. Objects then have enormous rhetorical potential, based on Burke’s idea that identification is the key to persuasion: As for the relation between “identification” and “persuasion”: we might well keep it in mind that a speaker persuades an audience by the use of stylistic identifications; his act of persuasion may be for the purpose of causing the audience to identify itself with the speaker’s interests; and the speaker draws on identification of interests to establish a rapport between himself and his audience. So, there is no chance of keeping apart the meanings of persuasion, identification (“consubstantiality”) and communication (the nature of rhetoric as “addressed”)(Burke, On Symbols, 191). When a person encounters an object, whether it is pondered or not, the mind acts upon it. Like a verbal text, it is “read,” but in a non-linear fashion. Instead, several different features may be observed at once, and immediately the object is recognized or not recognized, its meaning is relative to the viewer’s experience. In other words, it is identified as something familiar or unfamiliar, until it is identified otherwise. The key word is identification, the verbal text may contain words that the audience cannot translate, understand, or care about, and therefore fail to identify with. But the visual text is available for all who can see it. It exists in a language that the mind can understand easily and quickly, and it places the object in closer proximity to the life of the viewer. A picture of a goat, a stuffed goat, or the goat itself is more goat-like than the word “goat,” because it more closely resembles the tangible nature of our own animal existence. And no matter how the object appears, it always appears in the context of sensual experience. When something is seen, no matter how foreign, the image of that something can be used to symbolize that something. Alien words do not mean anything until we learn what thing they represent. In using alien terms, the rhetoricist can sever the “rapport” with the audience. Alien objects, on the other hand, provoke curiosity, strengthening the rapport. I can say “minkiki” and it seems nonsensical, but if I were to produce a minkiki, no matter how absurd it might look, its very existence would testify to its reality. Visual symbols are interesting because they carry more information than words, and in this way the viewer can partake of them more selfishly. He/she can dwell on the things they like and, since there are no words, he/she can supply the words that are interesting and appealing. Its mere presence calls the viewer to identify it. Thus a “speaker” can use non-verbal methods to establish the Burkeian notion of “consubstantiality.” To effectively utilize non-verbal symbols to provoke a specific action would require a great deal of control. While objects can easily establish a rapport, to use this rapport to provoke a specific action is extremely challenging. As with the Rorschach test, people can see the same images, but have different ideas about what they might mean. In contrast to words, objects are much more complex; their function as a heuristic is dizzying, even overwhelming. Burke’s “Terministic Screens” which “direct attention to some channels rather than others,” become problematic in such a context because a visual cue can say so many things all at once (Burke, On Symbols, 115). Marcel Duchamp is an artist who has managed to provoke specific reactions quite effectively. While he is known for his place in the pantheon of Fine Arts, his real skill is his ability to persuade rather than his ability to render aesthetically beautiful objects or arouse the world with his passion. His “readymades” are rhetorical objects; they are his “texts.” And by viewing them in light of Kenneth Burke’s theories, with which they bear a natural affinity, I hope to illuminate Duchamp’s rhetorical methods while analyzing some of Burke’s key concepts. *** Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) began his artistic career in France, but it was in the United States that he became a sensation. His infamous Nude Descending a Staircase (Fig. 1) made its American debut at the Armory Show (1913) along with three other works, Sad Young Man on a Train (Fig. 2), Portrait of Chess Players (Fig. 3), and The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes (Fig. 4); establishing Duchamp as an instant celebrity. While all four pieces sold, Duchamp’s reception was marked by scorn, ridicule, and incredulity. Thousands lined up to get a glimpse of the Nude, articles bashed its artistic value, and his work was rejected by the Cubist School with whom it was identified. He ultimately abandoned what he called “retinal” art, which is purely visual, in favor of “olfactory” (1)painting, which relied on the intellectual process for its aesthetic value (Paz 3). It was with this new attitude in mind that he began to craft his “readymades.”(2) click images to enlarge Figure 1 Figure 2 Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912 Marcel Duchamp, Sad Young Man on a Train, 1911 click images to enlarge Figure 3 Figure 4 Marcel Duchamp, Portrait of Chess Players,1911 Marcel Duchamp, The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes, 1912 The “readymades” are mass-produced items which Duchamp selected, titled, signed, displayed, and, in some situations, altered or “aided.” In the short essay “Apropos of ‘Readymades,'” Duchamp describes his method of selection: “THIS CHOICE WAS BASED ON A REACTION OF VISUAL INDIFFERENCE WITH AT THE SAME TIME TOTAL ABSENCE OF GOOD OR BAD TASTE…IN FACT A COMPLETE ANESTHESIA.” In other words, Duchamp was careful to choose commonplace objects with no meaning to him whatsoever. By signing them with his name, he was able to transform them into art. Some of the meaning of this random process of selection has been lost. In fact, the word “random” has entered the popular vocabulary as a synonym for “cool” and “weird.”(3) But when considered in their original context, the art world of the early 1900s, the “readymades” must have appeared utterly absurd. These pieces, in all their simplicity, are surprisingly complex in the moves they require of the unsuspecting mind. click to enlarge Figure 5 Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917/64 Although they all serve the same rhetorical purpose to me, Fountain is the most interesting of the “readymades.” Submitted under the pseudonym Richard Mutt to a 1917 show sponsored by the Society of Independent Artists (of which Duchamp was a member and founder), and which claimed to welcome the work of “any artist paying six dollars,” the piece was rejected on the grounds that it was “immoral” and guilty of “plagiarism” (Duchamp 817). Duchamp’s Fountain is nothing more than a urinal signed “R. Mutt” and named “Fountain.” (Fig. 5) The immediate response to the piece of plumbing was negative; it was perceived as an insult. But further contemplation brings a number of problems to bear. To approach a urinal in the context of an art exhibit is definitely both strange and estranging. I remember when I first discovered that a toilet could be considered art. I was shocked and confused, considering that my initial understanding of art was bound up in notions of beauty and representational rendering. But once the shock gives way, the implications arouse thought. To a male viewer in a museum, a urinal is an easily recognizable item, an item that probably could be found at another location in that very same museum. This ability to “identify” the item lends itself to Burke’s “identification.” Rather than identify with the artist, who has no voice and is not physically present, the viewer can identify with the object or the “agency.” The object is a “commonplace.” Like Aristotle’s topics it is a common ground, a language which even the illiterate can understand (Burke, A Rhetoric,56). A urinal has a specific use when it is placed in the bathroom, but outside of the bathroom it confounds. It invites the male viewer to participate in a strange way. Traditional high art, the nude especially, is often criticized for being for a male audience, and this piece calls attention to that. But unlike nudes, which are often criticized for seeking to engage the male viewer with sexual imagery, this seeks to do so without it. A urinal requires the male to instead expose himself and to have another type of relation altogether. A urinal is a place to urinate while art is something to adore. To pee on art would be a sacrilege, and this is what Duchamp has done by creating his peon art. The title of the work compounds the problem. Duchamp chooses to call it Fountain. This title in its simplicity has the effect of conjuring up essentials. Similar to my asking readers to think about “goats,” Duchamp is asking his audience to think about fountains. The word may cause each person to think about a particular fountain, but when used to name a urinal, it creates a dialectic. What makes a fountain a fountain and a non-fountain a non-fountain? The result is an essentialization, or the recognition of an ideal fountain which bears the qualities of “Fountainness.” This “perspective by incongruity” is gained by placing things in different, seemingly opposite, contexts (Hyman, 21). Once the concept of Fountain is arrived at, then the next step is to determine how Fountain is a fountain. To fulfill the Fountain’s Fountainness the viewer must first fill the fountain. (Who ever heard of a fountain with no water?) Fill the fountain with abstract notions of an idealized Fountain or fill it with urine, either way the viewer becomes the mechanism by which Fountain can function. Here scatology and eschatology overlap (Burke, A Rhetoric, 308)(4)Through the simple act of placing a urinal (agency) in a particular scene, Duchamp (agent) has created (purpose) a spiraling mass of artistic criticism that goes high and low, and ultimately asks the viewer to transcend previous notions of what art is.(5) The actual process which I have described is what Burke would call a “Watershed moment” (Warnock, 272).(6) As you can see, the discussion requires a proliferation of terms, or symbols. What I have been calling a urinal, in a sense, is not even a urinal at all. It does not function, nobody would use it; and as useful and common as a urinal can be, when it is sculpted into a Fountain, it becomes useless and unique. Similarly, Fountain is not a fountain at all. It has no water in it and it is just a urinal. Even Marcel Duchamp’s role is called into question as the actor in this drama. He signed it as an artist, but he signed the wrong name. He did not make it in any conventional sense of the word. It is art because people view Duchamp as an artist. The more one looks at Fountain as art, the less it resembles it. And the less it resembles art, the more it looks like it. I am not deconstructing Duchamp’s work. I am simply describing the way it functions. While deconstruction as a critical act relies on the inherent indeterminacy of meaning, Duchamp’s work uses indeterminacy as a rhetorical device and does so with determination. He crafts his “readymade” texts with a specific purpose in mind, and in that way I think he deserves to be studied as a skilled persuader. Duchamp’s work lends itself to the study of Burke’s theories of rhetoric because Duchamp was very interested in language, signs, and symbols. Duchamp used signs that require his audience to engage in the process “No-ing” and “Knowing” (Warnock, 272). While “Knowing” requires an intuitive apprehension of truth; “No-ing” requires the audience to travel around the subject, negating that which it is not, and through the process of elimination, arriving at the truth. Fountain requires the audience to engage it in this way. The piece does it so well that its meaning cannot be nailed down. It is an action, perpetually shifting in meaning as each new vantage point is reached. Duchamp’s work continually calls the audience to transcend meaning. Doing so, it approaches Burke’s pure persuasion: The dialectical transcending of reality through symbols is at the roots of this mystery, at least so far as naturalistic motives are concerned. It culminates in pure persuasion, absolute communication, beseechment for itself alone, praise and blame so universalized as to have no assignable physical object (Burke, A Rhetoric, 275). click to enlarge Figure 6 Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, 1915-23 It should be noted that Duchamp frequently gave his works away rather than sell them (Paz, 89). As well, “In 1923 Duchamp abandoned definitively the painting of the Large Glass. (Fig. 6) From then on his activity has been isolated and discontinuous. His only permanent occupation has been chess” (Paz, 87). Based on these facts, it seems as though Duchamp was interested in persuading as an end in itself. He did not seek out fame or wealth; he was a creative person who liked to play games. Duchamp’s works are rhetorical actions which cause the viewer to act and transcend, while always maintaining a playfulness which mirrors Burke’s own attitude and approaches the Burkean notion of pure persuasion. Notes 1. Paz discusses Duchamp’s term “Olfactory Art” for the “negation of painting,” or painting with ideas rather than pictures. He uses the word “olfactory” to draw attention to the fact that it relies on the intellectual process rather than the eyes and to bring to mind its “smell of turpentine.” 2.For more information please see Robert Lebel, “1913: Triumph at the Armory Show and Rejection of ‘Retinal’ Art,” Marcel Duchamp (New York: Grove Press, 1959) 25-35. 3. For example, “Oh my God, Jenny! Did you see the Beck interview n MTV last night. He is so totally random.” 4. From Burke on “fecal idealism” in ancient Egypt. 5. For a discussion of “Act, Agent, Agency, Scene, and Purpose,” see Burke’s “The Five Master Terms.” 6. The “Watershed Moment” is one in which the audience transcends the division between itself and the text, but this transcendence leads to further problems. Bibliographies Blankenship, Jane, Edward Murphy, and Marie Rosenwasser. “Pivotal Terms in the Early Works of Kenneth Burke.” Brummett, 71-90. Booth, Wayne C. “Kenneth Burke’s Comedy: The Multiplication of Perspectives.” Brummett, 243-270. Brummett, Barry, ed. Landmark Essays On Kenneth Burke. Davis: Hermagoras Press, 1993. Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. – – – . On Symbols and Society. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989. – – – . “The Five Master Terms.” Landmark Essays on Rhetorical Invention in Writing. Davis: Hermagoras Press, 1994. 1-12. Comprone, Joseph. “Kenneth Burke and the Teaching of Writing.” College Composition and Communication 29 (December 1978): 336-40. Day, Dennis G. “Persuasion and the Concept of Identification.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 46 (October 1960): 270-73. Duchamp, Marcel. “Apropos of ‘Readymades.’” Stiles and Selz, 819-820. – – – . “The Creative Act.” Stiles and Selz, 818-819. – – – . “The Richard Mutt Case.” Stiles and Selz, 817. Duncan, Hugh Dalziel. “‘Introduction’ to Symbols in Society.” Brummett, 179-198. Griffin, Leland M. “When Dreams Collide: Rhetorical Trajectories in the Assasination of President Kennedy.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (May 1984): 111-131. Hochmuth Nichols, Marie. “Kenneth Burke and the ‘New Rhetoric.’” Brummett 3-18. Hyman, Stanley Edgar. “Kenneth Burke and the Criticism of Symbolic Action.” Brummett 19-62. Keith, Philip M. “Burkeian Invention: Two Contrasting Views: Burkeian Invention, from Pentad to Dialectic.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 9 (Summer 1979): 137-41. Lebel, Robert. Marcel Duchamp. New York: Grove Press, 1959. Nemerov, Howard. “Everything, Preferably All At Once.” Brummett, 63-70. Paz, Octavio. Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare. New York: Viking Penguin Inc., 1978. Rosenfeld, Lawrence B. “Set Theory: Key to the Understanding of Kenneth Burke’s Use of the Term Identification.” Western Speech 33 (Summer 1969): 175-83. Rueckert, William H. “Towards a Better Life Through Symbolic Action.” Brummett 155-178. Stiles, Kristine and Peter Selz , eds. Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Tomkins, Calvin. The World of Marcel Duchamp. New York: Time Inc., 1966. Warnock, Tilly. “Reading Kenneth Burke: Ways In, Ways Out, Ways Roundabout.” College English 48 (January 1986): 262-75. Figs. 1-6 ©2002 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. All rights reserved. In Boggs We Trust An earlier, abridged version of this article was published in: Dagblad Trouw (Dutch National Newspaper), Saturday February 24, 2001 click to enlarge Figure 1 J.S.G. Boggs When Marcel Duchamp was asked why he stopped painting at an early age, his answer was: “I don’t want to copy myself, like all the others. Do you think they enjoy painting the same thing fifty or a hundred times? Not at all, they no longer make pictures; they make checks.” Now that the art world revolves around more money than ever before, and the commodification of art has reached neurotic levels, Duchamp’s statement is hard to disagree with. But what if Duchamp had met J.S.G. Boggs (Fig. 1), an artist who actually makes bills, checks, and recently coins? As a moneymaker, Boggs seems to be the epitome of the commercial, repetitive artist Duchamp had in mind. Nevertheless, my guess is that he would take an interest in Boggs’ bills. In fact, Duchamp made some checks himself–to pay for the services of his Parisian dentist Tzanck in 1919, to help his friend John Cage raise funds for the advancement of performance art, and to satisfy a personal fan’s request for a signature at a New York gallery in 1965. click to enlarge Figure 2 Marcel Duchamp, Tzanck Check, 1919 Figure 3 J.S.G. Boggs, $1 Fun Bill, date unknown The parallels between the Tzanck Check (Fig. 2) in particular and Boggs’ bills go further than the laborious production process that these painstakingly precise copies spring from. Like Duchamp, Boggs documents conceptions of value that inform the art world, and investigates how worth comes into being (even though enlightenment about these matters can hardly be expected). Furthermore, he plays with economic systems as if they were children’s toys, like Duchamp did with the institutions of the art world. And if you still cherish any illusions about the absolute value of money, or art, for that matter, start thinking about Boggs’ bills.(Fig. 3) 1. In the beginning Boggs made his first bill in 1984–unintentionally so, and without the faintest notion of the never- ending lawsuits, the media attention, and the extraordinary prices that his bills would generate in the years to follow. At the time, Boggs was sitting in a Chicago bar, making a complex drawing on a napkin that depicted the number one. Numbers were an obsession of the artist at that time; they still are, in fact. A waitress of the bar instantly developed a liking for the drawing. It reminded her of a dollar bill, and as much as she liked it, she asked Boggs to pay his 90-cent bill with it. The waitress also insisted that Boggs accept a dime in change. With a fine pen, he has been copying bills ever since. click to enlarge Figure 4 J.S.G. Boggs’ version of Sacagawea Dollar (front and back), 2001 Figure 5 Original $1 Sacagawea Coin Recently, Boggs commemorated that original event silently: for his latest project, which started right at the official beginning of the twenty- first millennium, Boggs had 100,000 Sacagawea dollars fabricated (Fig. 4) by an organization specializing in educational materials regarding Currency. Boggs’ own version of the new one-dollar coin is slightly larger than the original, (Fig. 5) and is pressed out of plastic. The coins have six different mintmarks–J, S, G, B, M21 and CH 84. The currency artist financed their fabrication with a 5,000-dollar bill that he self-evidently drew himself. In the seventeen years that lie in between, Boggs has managed to spend his bills in several million dollars worth of economic transactions. If Duchamp paid for his dentist, Boggs paid for a Yamaha motorbike, for countless bills in bars, restaurants and hotels, for airplane tickets, artworks, rare old bills, and many other goods. In Portland, he bought a Hamburger with a 1,000- dollar bill, and received 997 real dollars in exchange. In the first months of this year he spent over 6,000 of his new plastic Sacagawea coins, among which 1,300 were exchanged for five ounces of gold bullion. All these transactions have elements of ordinary purchases, of barter transactions of an original artwork against a mass produced consumer good, and of artistic performances that are only slightly relevant to economics. 2. After Boggs click to enlarge Figure 6 J.S.G. Boggs, Swiss 100 Francs bill, late 1980s Figure 7 J.S.G Boggs, $10 FUNback, 1997 Is Boggs a counterfeiter–albeit a very successful one? No. A superficial glance is sufficient to distinguish Boggs’ bills from the original. The backside is left blank and Boggs adds some puns to the front. Instead of “In God we trust,” an orange fifty dollar bill reads “Red gold we trust”; a Swiss 100 Francs bill from the late 1980s (Fig. 6) depicts his self-portrait as an “angry young man”; on a ten dollar bill, the building of the treasury is replaced by the Supreme Court, (Fig. 7) accompanied by the text “Please give me a fair trial.” Furthermore, all bills are signed by Boggs himself, sometimes as “treasurer of art,” on other occasions as “secretary of measury.” The problem is that Boggs does draw his bills life size and in the actual colors of the original, which resulted in legal trouble on a number of occasions. In Australia, a court case was dismissed almost right away, after which Boggs received $20,000 in damages. In England, Scotland Yard arrested him and confiscated his work while he was installing a gallery exhibition. Again, he was acquitted of the charges. To celebrate his victory, Boggs announced that he would live on self-made money for an entire year. In the United States, however, his trials have caused him more lasting trouble. When Boggs was spending a year as a fellow at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, the Secret Service raided his apartment and studio and confiscated approximately 1,300 objects. Although the U.S. Attorney did not press charges, Boggs has been involved in a legal battle for almost an entire decade now to get all of his belongings back. Paradoxically, one of the few counterfeited bills that he owned (but did not make himself) was returned, but the Secret Service kept the clownish 1,000,000 dollar bill available by order from the Internet. Incidentally, the trial will result in the largest transaction in Boggs’ career as a money artist, since he plans to pay for the lawyer’s fee, which amounts to around a million dollars, with 100,000 dollar bills. Bogg’s lawyers, who are most sympathetic to his case, have actually promised to accept these bills as a valid means of payment. Unlike the Secret Service, the contemporary art world does value Boggs’ bills. Museums like the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the British Museum in London own copies of his work. Private collectors underscore their cultural value by offering Boggs considerable sums for a hint about when and where he spent his bills; subsequently, they pay large sums to acquire a bill from the shopkeepers who were brave enough to accept Boggs’ money. Like Duchamp, whose signature was sought after in the 1960s as if he was a celebrity, Boggs has a large following of people eager to obtain his signature. Personal fans have to pay him a small fee for an autograph, while a signature is only within reach for mavericks who are willing to spend $2,000 or more. No need for Boggs to complain about financial or artistic rewards. In short, Boggs’ bills generate extreme, albeit contradictory, reactions. I wonder, however, if the legal trouble and the arti-financial success that his work generates are really that distinct. Note, for instance, that both the legal apparatus and the army of collectors ultimately intend to take his work out of circulation. And when it comes to their sense of humor, my expectations of a collector who pays $50,000 or more for a Boggs bill are no higher than that of a prosecutor who wants to stop Boggs from making the bills in the first place. Both try to “capture” Boggs, with either money or the law as their instrument– in vain, I presume. 3. No land for money I met Boggs when he was in Amsterdam in early February for a performance in the “West Indisch Huis.” In the seventeenth century, the “West Indisch Huis” was built for the West Indische Compagnie, which enjoyed a monopoly on trade between America, West Africa and Holland. Currently the building is the home base of the John Adams Institute, which organizes lectures by American intellectuals, writers and artists. The title of Boggs’ performance there was I’ll take Manhattan. At the start of the performance Boggs, 44, who has wild gray-blond hair that nearly reaches his shoulders, takes a digital picture of the audience, while a bag filled with orange plastic Sacagawea coins lies between his legs. Then he recounts the story of Peter Minuit, governor of the West Indische Compagnie, who sailed to the island of Manhattan. He was welcomed in May 1626, 375 years ago today, by an Indian clan. Soon after his arrival, Minuit bought the island from the Indians for trinkets worth sixty guilders. Among those trinkets were “wampum,” the Indian word for bead money, which had not only monetary but also cultural value for many clans–“wampum” was a means of transmitting the history of the clan from generation to generation. The Dutch, however, did not have history but money on their mind, which induced them to create their own “wampum” in order to deal with the Indians. Unknowingly, the Indians responded appropriately to the sly and sacrilegious offer of the Dutch by accepting the trinkets, but since they lacked a conception of land ownership, the Indians must have conceived of the transaction as some foreign ritual. Come to think of it, no land was exchanged for any money on that May Day in 1626. The story of Minuit and the Indians is a perfect pre-figuration of Boggs own work; Minuit paid, just like Boggs, with improvised money, and probably needed a good share of rhetoric to do so. The color of Boggs’ Sacagawea coins is the same as the family name of the Dutch royal family: Orange. In fact, many of the first Dutch settlers on Manhattan used to live north of the island in Fortress Orange (the present Albany), and after the Dutch re-conquered Manhattan from the English in the second half of the seventeenth century, they renamed it New Orange. Here is another parallel: the acquisition of Manhattan by the Dutch is listed in American history books for $24, mistakenly so, since the nineteenth century American historian who came up with the figure used the exchange rate of his own time rather than some seventeenth century equivalent. However, the exchange rate he used (60/24) is almost exactly the same as the present exchange rate of the Dutch guilder against the American dollar. Is there a meaning to all these parallels–synchronicities, as Boggs calls them? “I have no answers, just questions,” he says as he concludes his performance. It is the child in Boggs, who never seems to have deserted him, who needs these exercises in confusion. 4. Indecent proposal When Boggs talks about his work, it is with great enthusiasm, cheer and wonder. However, when talking about the lawsuits, the tenderness in his eyes makes way for a furious look. Although Boggs seems flattered with the artistic and financial success of his endeavor, he does not strike me as particularly “money” oriented. Boggs admits that the material form of money is what fascinates him–the fact that it functions as a visual icon of society in a way that electronic money does not. But more than just a copier of money, he is a performance artist. When a collector recently offered to buy all his remaining coins for $100,000, Boggs refused. The golden rule is that he only parts with his money in real economic exchanges. He does not sell his work, in other words, he only “transacts” it. “Do you think they will accept Boggs money here,” he asks in an old Amsterdam bar. Boggs insists that I will not intervene during the transaction, and promptly walks to the bar with a gentle smile on his face. Then he explains to the barkeeper with a charming voice: “Hi, I am an artist; I make my own money, and I try to spend it in real transactions. Today I would like to spend my money with you. These coins represent the value of a dollar. Would you accept four of them in exchange for two beer[s]?” The lady looks puzzled and doubts if she should accept his offer. Before she can answer, however, her husband intervenes: “Paying with fake money is impossible,” he says aggressively, “is playing a trick” [in Dutch the husband used the word “kunstenmakerij,” which means both “making art,” and “playing a trick”]. Unsolicited, the barkeeper continues that he has been making his own living for thirty-five years, and urges Boggs to support himself with honest means as well. The next day, many refusals of his coins will follow, even at the coin shops located behind Dam Square. There is a striking pattern in the responses that his proposal evokes. Out of disbelief, men react irritated, while women often start giggling — an indication for social scientists that some taboo is being violated. Never does Boggs mention that the deal he is offering them is an offer nobody can refuse — after all, even the coins are worth much more than their face value on the resale market for Boggs’ work. 5. Resisting uniformity By fabricating his own money, Boggs takes us back to a time when money was far from uniform. That time is not as far behind us as we tend to think. Until the nineteenth century, and in some countries up until the early twentieth century, a hodgepodge of different coins and bills were in circulation. In the United States, for instance, the dollar as we know it was only standardized in 1928. Until that time, almost any bank could issue its own bills. The Central Banks that were established in the nineteenth century were supposed to monitor the circulation of currencies and to create order in the chaotic monetary traffic of those days. As a result, the uniformity of money increased rapidly around the turn of the century, while issuing money was monopolized by the state in many Western European countries. Around the same time, the German sociologist Georg Simmel wrote in his magnum opus Die Philosophie des Geldes that money is ultimately a destructive force. Money, that colorless and indifferent equivalent, would cover the world with an “evenly flat and gray tone,” Simmel wrote. Money reduced the diversity of goods and transactions to a common, uniform denominator. It even put pressure on relationships, Simmel argued, since social interaction was increasingly transformed into economic exchange. In a late response to Simmel, the American sociologist Viviana Zelizer showed in The Social Meaning of Money (1994) that people do manage to resist the destructive power of money. In the second half of the nineteenth century, when monetary traffic was becoming standardized rapidly, many households started creating what Zelizer calls domestic currencies. They earmarked money for specific goals and named them Christmas money, drinking money, vacation money, etc. Moreover, these households established a direct link between the way money was earned and the appropriate spending of it. Thus, they partially nullified the alleged uniformity of money. Currently, an area of tension is emerging comparable to that in the nineteenth century. This tension is exactly what provides Boggs’ art with the necessary ammunition. On the one hand, the uniformity of money has entered an era of renaissance due to the introduction of the EURO in the European Union, no less than eleven different currencies will disappear at once on January 1, 2002. Because of the increasing use of credit cards and payment by means of a PIN code, money is on its way to becoming extinct in its material form of bills and coins. In the global economy, money can only be spotted as changing numbers on computer displays in anonymous offices. “You see?” Simmel mumbles posthumously. At the same time, however, a widespread and multifaceted resistance against this ongoing standardization of monetary traffic is emerging. Look at the new republics that came into being after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the crisis in the Balkans. One of the first political acts in these countries is the introduction of their own currency, which serves as a symbol of national unity. As inhabitants of a small country, the Danish population had good reasons to vote against the introduction of the EURO in a public referendum that was organized last fall. And on the Internet, where you would expect the ultimate triumph of money’s uniformity, new electronic currencies like e-gold are coming into being. Finally, it is remarkable that in the last decade, local currencies have been established in a number of places, like the British LETS (Local Exchange and Trading Schemes), Ithaca money in the American college town, or Noppes in Amsterdam. Like Boggs, many citizens refuse to reconcile themselves with the uniformity of money. 6. The Fragility of Money All of these manifestations of resistance – Boggs’ bills in the first place — emphasize the conventional nature of money. If a businessman remarks that Boggs’ money is not real, Boggs acts surprised. Why would it be less real than the money we spend in everyday life? With a smile he replies that it costs the Central Bank only a few cents to print the bills we use, whereas Boggs himself has to put many hours into making his own money. It is a reversal of Duchamp’s institutional critique, addressing the economy rather than the art world. Whereas people demand originals rather than mass produced objects inside the walls of cultural institutions, Boggs’ original work is not accepted in the economic realm as a stand-in for the ready-made bills of modern Central Banks. Thus Boggs forces people to come to terms with the fragile basis of money, with the fact that money lacks a solid, material basis. It solely derives its value from agreement—a widespread agreement, for that matter, but certainly not more than that. Many people still think that we can exchange our paper bills for gold at the Central Bank in a case of emergency, but that possibility was abolished in most countries in the first half of the 20th century. Given the conventional basis of money, it is easy to understand why objects as diverse as pearls, horse blankets, beads, rice, salt, gold, playing cards or cigarettes could serve as media of exchange in the past. (Boggs united them in an installation for the New York office of the consultancy firm Accenture.) Because many of these means were neither divisible, transportable or perishable, they did not survive the test of time. In that respect, Boggs argues tongue in cheek that his own Sacagawea coin is a good competitor of the original. It is both lighter and larger than the original which makes it easier to distinguish from a quarter. click to enlarge Figure 8 David Greg Harth, “I Am America” dollar bill, July 1998 © David Greg Harth, New York Figure 9 René Magritte, Ceci n’est pas une pipe [This is not a pipe], 1926 David Greg Harth, another American artist with a fascination for money, underscores that the value of money is ultimately founded on trust.(Fig. 8) On one-dollar bills he puts stamps with texts such as “I am not a dollar” (the parallel with René Magritte’s painting Ceci n’est pas une pipe (Fig. 9) goes without saying.) “He is right,” says Boggs. Ultimately, the bill is not a dollar at all, at most a representation of it. The bill is real, but the dollar itself is an abstraction… just like God. Indeed, it is remarkable how fundamentally modern monetary systems are grafted onto religion. According to Boggs the invention of both money and God date from the same era, and the traces are still visible in our own days. Just think of the double meaning of words like “redeem,” or the root of the word “credit”–it is a direct derivative of the Latin word for believing. The side of Dutch coins reads “God Is With Us,” while “In God We Trust” is printed on American bills. 7. Keep Boggs in circulation click to enlarge Figure 10 J.S.G.Boggs, On Broadway (Dance Dollar), 1995 Private Collection, Larchmont, NY Given the fragility of money, it is hardly surprising that Boggs’ proposals arouse such hostile reactions. It confuses people to a greater degree than they are comfortable with. And who can blame them? How easily trust in economic value can be undermined and the consequences have lately been illustrated when investors gained billions of dollars on the NASDAQ and lost them as easily when stock prices collapsed only months later. As mysterious as the rise and fall of the Internet economy is the creation of value that Boggs realizes by printing his own money. Without the help of any official institution–the Central Bank in the last place–he sneaks plastic coins into the economy with a face value of 100.000 dollar. Their real value is even many times higher: a month after their first release, a complete set of six one-dollar coins was sold on Ebay for $87. It goes to show that as painstakingly as the fundamentals of our modern monetary system were established in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, so easily are they tampered with. Or, as Boggs remarks: “When you are dealing with an abstraction, the borderline between something and nothing is very subtle.” (Fig. 10) Fig. 2 ©2002 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. All rights reserved. *Works by Boggs © J.S.G. Boggs–courtesy Szilage Gallery R. rO. S. E. Sel. A. Vy 1. L’odissea dei Rammendi 1a. Tre Rammendi Tipo click to enlarge Figure 1 Marcel Duchamp, Three Standard Stoppages, 1913-14 E’ già stato ampiamente discusso dagli studiosi il fatto che la procedura operativa descritta da Duchamp per la realizzazione deiTre Rammendi Tipo (1913-14) (Fig. 1) non sembra essere attendibile. L’evidenza sperimentale fa infatti escludere la possibilità di ottenere qualcosa di simile ai Rammendi di Duchamp. Non solo, ma una ispezione dell’opera esposta al MOMA ((Museum of Modern Art in New York City) evidenzia delle imbastiture sul retro delle tele di supporto, che definitivamente sembrano escludere quanto descritto nella celebre nota della Scatola Verde.Tutto questo è accuratamente documentato da Shearer & Gould (1999), i quali tuttavia precisano anche l’insistenza con cui Duchamp, esplicitamente intervistato a proposito, conferma la veridicità del contenuto della nota. In questo primo paragrafo intendo presentare alcune considerazioni sull’argomento. click to enlarge Figure 2 Marcel Duchamp,Tu m’, 1918 Una semplice misurazione mostra che la distanza (in linea retta) fra i due capi visibili di ciascuno dei tre Rammendi è costante. Ciò è evidenziato anche dal fatto che in Tu m’ (Fig. 2), di cui parleremo più avanti, Duchamp presenta i Rammendi accuratamente appaiati, capo contro capo. Ora, è assolutamente improbabile che tre fili che cadono liberamente si dispongano mostrando tre volte di fila la stessa distanza da un capo all’altro. Ciò sembra confermare una volta di più l’impossibilità pratica di ottenere un risultato come quello presentato da Duchamp seguendo le istruzioni della nota della Scatola Verde. Tuttavia, se Duchamp sostiene caparbiamente di essersi attenuto a quel protocollo operativo, questa insistenza deve farci riflettere. E’ vero che la sua opera è disseminata di tranelli e di ambiguità volutamente fuorvianti; tuttavia usualmente Duchamp opera in modo che siano i nostri sensi ad ingannarci, e non le sue parole; in altri termini la sfida che egli ingaggia con l’osservatore è una sfida leale, mantenuta costantemente su un piano di correttezza: le tracce potranno essere volutamente rese ambigue, tuttavia sono messe davanti all’osservatore nella loro oggettività: sta all’osservatore leggerle con razionalità. E’ interessante notare che nei Tre Rammendi Tipo, Duchamp sembra dissimulare accuratamente l’uguaglianza delle sei misure in linea retta dei fili e delle loro sagome di legno. click to enlarge Figure 3 Marcel Duchamp, Miniature version of Three Standard Stoppages, in Boîte-en-valise, 1941 Osserviamo come li dispone Duchamp, quando i fili e le sagome siano posti verticalmente (come suggerisce l’orientamento dell’etichetta di testo di ogni filo). Per questo scopo considererò la riproduzione miniaturizzata dei Tre rammendi Tipo della Boite-en-valise (1941) (Fig. 3), perché è la sola rappresentazione che io conosca dove tutti e sei le componenti (3 fili e tre sagome) sono sicuramente disposte da Duchamp stesso. Ma simili considerazioni potrebbero essere fatte anche per tutte le altre disposizioni che io conosco, inclusa quella al MoMA. Mentre le etichette poste vicino al lato inferiore delle tele sono accuratamente allineate l’una con l’altra, i fili sono incollati a partire da differenti distanze dal lato superiore, e ciò preclude la possibilità di confrontarne a colpo d’occhio le lunghezze e l’allineamento delle estremità superiore ed inferiore dei tre fili. Si potrebbe imputare questo sfasamento alla casualità della caduta. Si ricordi tuttavia che Duchamp tagliò le strisce di tela su cui sono incollati i fili dopo l’esecuzione dell’opera, in un tempo differito, diversi anni dopo; così come Duchamp pose attenzione all’allineamento delle etichette, avrebbe ugualmente potuto porre la stessa attenzione per l’allineamento dei punti iniziali dei fili. Analoghe tecniche di dissimulazione sono utilizzate anche per la presentazione delle sagome di legno. Per prima cosa, l’ordine di presentazione dei tre fili (F) è, diciamo, FA, FB ed FC, mentre le sagome (S) sono presentate nell’ordine SC, SA, SB. Secondo, le sagome sono ruotate di 180° rispetto ai fili corrispondenti, rendendo ancora una volta difficile il confronto a colpo d’occhio. Terzo, per poter sovrapporre la sagoma sul corrispondente filo, dobbiamo mentalmente ribaltare le sagome SC e SA, perché i loro profili mostrano una simmetria assiale rispetto ai corrispondenti fili FC e FA. Lo schema risultate è questo: Fili (F) Sagome (S) SC SA SB F F F rotazione rotazione A B C rotazione a 180° & a 180° & a 180° ribaltamento ribaltamento Infine, mentre in due sagome il punto di partenza del profilo curvilineo è evidenziato da una tacca ben incisa nel legno (e ad uguale distanza dal lato superiore), nella terza abbiamo ancora una volta uno sfasamento (in avanti) del punto di partenza del profilo curvilineo. (Con quest’ultima sagoma sembra tuttavia che Duchamp intenda fornirci un piccolo indizio, perché qui manca l’incisione della tacca nel punto di partenza del profilo curvilineo: una difformità che balza subito all’occhio). Non sappiamo se questi spiazzamenti nella disposizione degli elementi della composizione sono casuali o no (noi sappiamo tuttavia che Duchamp era molto meticoloso nella pianificazione e preparazione delle sue opere). Se no, possiamo pensare che ciò che viene nascosto così meticolosamente deve assolutamente avere una grande importanza. Nel caso contrario, possiamo almeno capire perché, fina ad ora, gli studiosi non hanno considerato il dato oggettivo che sto discutendo, in relazione alle nuove difficoltà che introduce per l’accettazione del protocollo operativo dichiarato da Duchamp per i Rammendi. Quindi, comunque sia, le distanze fra i capi visibili dei fili sembrano essere un punto cruciale. Ora, ammettendo che effettivamente Duchamp abbia lasciato cadere i fili, allora deve esservi stato un qualche dispositivo per mantenere costante la distanza fra i due capi nel corso della caduta. A questo punto si possono congetturare diverse possibili di tecniche esecutive, compatibili 1. con quanto possiamo vedere nei Rammendi; 2. con ciò che è descritto nella nota dellaScatola Verde; 3. con quanto dichiarato da Duchamp in diverse interviste. A titolo di curiosità ne presento un paio. Il primo ipotetico dispositivo può essere un semplice tutore, come nello schizzo in Fig. 4 — il tutore dovrebbe cadere assieme al filo. Fig. 4 Stoppages Device 1 Le eccedenze di filo rispetto alla regolare lunghezza di un metro, visibili alle estremità del dispositivo, costituirebbero i due tratti di filo necessari per l’imbastitura che in ogni Rammendo osserviamo nel lato posteriore delle tele (essi potrebbero avere già infilato l’ago necessario per l’imbastitura). Un altro dispositivo, illustrato inFig. 5, potrebbe essere costituito da due guide verticali; anche in questo caso potremmo avere le due eccedenze di filo per le imbastiture alle opposte estremità del filo. Fig. 5 Stoppages Device 2 Sebbene dobbiamo considerare questi dispositivi come mere congetture, dobbiamo almeno riconoscere che in tutti e due i casi, durante la caduta essi permetterebbero al filo: 1. di torcersi a proprio piacere; 2. di mantenere quella morbida linearità che con una caduta completamente libera pare impossibile ottenere, 3. di mantenere costante la distanza fra gli estremi del filo. Inoltre (fatta salva qualche maliziosa reticenza): 4. la procedura descritta dalla nota della Scatola Verde risulterebbe veritiera, 5. Duchamp non avrebbe mentito nelle interviste. Comunque sia, nei Tre Rammendi Tipo possiamo considerare due punti fissi A e B, e tre linee che passano per essi, come mostra la Fig. 6. Fig. 6 Axiom of three lines running through two fixed points Ciò può evocare alla nostra mente l’assioma euclideo dell’esistenza e unicità della retta per due punti. Come è noto, il motivo dei Rammendi ricompare spesso nell’opera di Duchamp, e basandosi su questo elemento, egli sviluppa numerosi ed importanti concetti. Non sembra essere arbitrario pensare a quest’opera come una sorta di assioma a partire dal quale Duchamp deduce la costruzione dell’intero edificio della sua opera (geometrico, ma non solo). Ma, cosa asserirebbe questo assioma? Col suo modo strambo e apparentemente ingenuo, pare che Duchamp intenda rimuovere dall’assioma euclideo l’assunto di unicità della retta per due punti: le rette per due punti sarebbero infinite, tutte quelle ottenibili dal caso attraverso la caduta del filo, ed i Tre Rammendi starebbero in rappresentanza di esse (dopo tutto occorre ricordare che spesso in Duchamp il numero 3 sta per molteplicità o infinità). Di fatto sappiamo da tempo dell’interesse di Duchamp per le geometrie non euclidee. Henderson afferma che Per Duchamp le geometrie n-dimensionali e non euclidee erano stimoli per andare al di là della pittura a olio tradizionale per esplorare le relazioni fra le dimensioni e anche per riesaminare la natura della prospettiva tridimensionale. Come Jarry prima di lui, anche Duchamp trovò qualcosa di deliziosamente sovversivo nelle nuove geometrie, con i loro cambiamenti di così tante ‘verità stabilite’. (341) Comunque, l’operazione concettuale di Duchamp è meno ingenua di quanto possa sembrare a prima vista. In geometria, concetti come punto, retta, piano e così via non vengonodefiniti: essi sono enti o concettiprimitivi ; essi sono indirettamente definiti dando le loro regole d’uso, che sono assiomi e teoremi; in altre parole, in una assegnata geometria, retta,punto, o piano… possono essere qualunque cosa che si comporti esattamente secondo gli assiomi e i teoremi di quella geometria. Ad esempio, nel celebre modello di Poincaré di geometria iperbolica, piano è rappresentato da un cerchio, e retta è un particolare arco di circonferenza. Nei Tre Rammendi Tipo di Duchamp sembra esservi una consapevolezza di questo aspetto; d’altra parte è noto che Duchamp amava leggere testi di geometria e in particolare conosceva alcuni aspetti del pensiero di Poincaré, come anche Shearer ha evidenziato in Marcel Duchamp’s Impossible Bed and Other ‘Not’ Readymade Objects…(26–62). Tuttavia, ciò che interessa nella prospettiva di questo articolo, non è tanto il possibile contenuto non euclideo dell’assioma dei Rammendi, ma la rimozione dell’assunto di unicità. Attraverso questo assioma Duchamp sembra affermare un nuovo principio: quello dellaripetizione, o più precisamente quello della iterazione di uno stesso procedimento seguendo accuratamente una stessa regola. 1b. Reticolo di Rammendi click to enlarge Figure 7 Marcel Duchamp, Network of Stoppages, 1914 Left: Figure 8 Marcel Duchamp,Young Man and Girl in Spring, 1911 Right: Figure 9 Young Man and Girl in Spring (1911), rotated 90° I Rammendi ricompaiono in una nuova opera elaborata nel medesimo periodo: il Reticolo di rammendi(1914) (Fig. 7). Il reticolo è dipinto sulla seconda versione incompiuta del giovanile Giovane e Fanciulla in Primavera (1911) (Fig. 8). Cominciamo col notare che rispetto all’orientamento originale di Giovane e fanciulla in primavera lo sfondo del Reticolo è ruotato di 90°. (Fig. 9)E’ noto che la rotazione ad angolo retto in Duchamp ha importanza e significato del tutto particolari (vedi per esempio Gould & Shearer); questa rotazione usualmente denota il passaggio da uno spazio ad n dimensioni ad uno ad n+1 dimensioni (perché l’aggiunta di una nuova dimensione richiede l’aggiunta di un nuovo asse cartesiano, perpendicolare a ciascuno dei precedenti). In questo caso abbiamo il passaggio dalla monodimensionalità di ciascun Rammendo alla bidimensionalità del Reticolo. Ma più in generale in Duchamp la rotazione a 90° indica che siamo in presenza di un salto qualitativo. Cerchiamo allora di capire che tipo di salto vediamo del Reticolo. La tesi che sostengo è che con questa opera in modo intuitivo Duchamp focalizza ulteriormente un nuovo concetto, che oggi chiamiamo ricorsione, e che in forma latente egli stava elaborando da qualche anno, come vedremo. Di fatto nel Reticolo Duchamp utilizza ricorsivamente i Rammendi: abbiamo i tre Rammendi ripetuti tre volte, organizzati in terne e con una gerarchizzazione espressa da un grafo ad albero piuttosto astratto, che sembra sottolineare una diramazione. La stessa diramazione è la cifra formale unificante del dipinto Giovane e fanciulla in primavera, sebbene qui la diramazione abbia lo specifico significato di sdoppiamento: infatti tutta la composizione è basata su un motivo a forma di Y. In accordo con La sposa messa a nudo in Marcel Duchamp, anche, dobbiamo far risalire questa cifra al simbolismo alchemico, dove Y sta per androgino (Schwarz, 111). Sia il Giovane che la Fanciulla levano le braccia aperte in una Y; i loro stessi corpi hanno una innaturale disposizione obliqua, che se osservata capovolta mostra nuovamente le diramazioni di una Y. Alla base della composizione abbiamo due archi diramanti, mentre alla sommità troviamo le diramazioni di un albero. Al centro della composizione c’è una forma circolare all’interno della quale vediamo una piccola figura umana; da questa forma circolare parte l’albero con le sue diramazioni; quindi se guardiamo alle due figure del Giovani e della Fanciulla come al prolungamento di tali diramazioni, esse costituiscono le diramazioni della piccola figura umana al centro della composizione. (Secondo Schwarz gli archi diramanti sono glutei, la figura circolare rappresenta Mercurio nell’ampolla, e l’albero con le sue ramificazioni rappresenta un fallo; infine, il percorso che ho descritto dovrebbe essere letto all’inverso, come il desiderio dei giovani di ricongiungersi in una primordiale unità androgina). Qualunque interpretazione si dia del dipinto, esso presenta un dato oggettivo: quello di una cascata di sdoppiamenti, a cui guardo come un antecedente formale del motivo della ricorsione. Inoltre si noti che le forme sferiche suggerite dagli archi alla base della composizione sono ripetute, sia dall’ampolla, sia dai numerosi cespugli fioriti dello sfondo; e, cosa più interessante, all’interno dei cespugli sferici osserviamo numerose infiorescenze sferiche (come nell’ortensia). Così abbiamo un nuovo suggerimento di ricorsione: fiori sferici, all’interno di infiorescenze sferiche, all’interno di cespugli sferici, assieme ad altre forme sferiche. Per di più qui abbiamo una prima evidenza di quelle ripetizioni su scala ridotta (cespuglio, infiorescenza, fiore) che discuteremo più avanti. Il motivo sferico è a sua volta connesso con un ulteriore importante motivo: quello della circolarità. Seguiamo ancora una volta nel dipinto la cascata di sdoppiamenti: i due archi in basso (come getti di una fontana) sostengono il cerchio contenente la piccola figura umana, a partire dal quale cresce l’albero diramante; questa diramazione ricade verso il basso attraverso la diramazione delle due figure dei giovani, che a loro volta poggiano i piedi proprio sui due archi alla base della composizione; in altre parole possiamo vedere in questo dipinto una sorta di moto convettivo, che ritorna circolarmente al punto di partenza. Dunque, eseguendo il Reticolo di Rammendi sulla copia (incompiuta) di Giovane e fanciulla in primavera, Duchamp puntualizza gli antecedenti formali dell’opera. Possiamo sottolineare la stretta continuità fra le due opere osservando che l’unico dettaglio ben definito della copia è il busto della fanciulla con le sue braccia aperte: questa ramificazione umana è innestata con perfetta continuità sulle diramazioni del reticolo. Questo innesto (ricorsivo) di una opera su un’altra opera costituirà anche negli anni a venire uno degli elementi distintivi del modo di operare di Duchamp. click to enlarge Figure 10 Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even [a.k.a. The Large Glass], 1915-23 Aprendo il paragrafo abbiamo detto che in Duchamp le rotazioni di 90° sono speciali segnali, per mezzo dei quali viene allertata la nostra attenzione. Vediamo quali significati può avere in questo caso. L’inarcamento del busto e la posizione delle braccia della fanciulla denotano una postura eretta che tuttavia è chiaramente contraddetta dall’orientamento del quadro; come a dire: non interessa l’elemento figurativo della ragazza, ma il motivo formale della diramazione. Dunque, nel passaggio dai Giovani al Reticolo Duchamp ci chiede di focalizzare l’attenzione sull’aspetto concettuale (della ricorsione), mentre l’elemento narrativo (il mondo psichico dei due giovani e le vicende connesse) è apertamente confinato sullo sfondo (ma chiaramentenon rimosso): questo passaggio all’astrazione è un primo salto di qualità. Il secondo salto qualitativo si ha nel passaggio da una iterazione su base 2 (sdoppiamenti) ad una ricorsione su base 3 (tre volte tre Rammendi). Abbiamo già ricordato che per Duchamp 3 spesso significa molteplice o infinito. Non riesco a vincere la tentazione di proporre qualche una congettura interpretativa: stiamo forse osservando la Sposa supina che leva le braccia nel delirio sei sensi, soggiacendo all’abbraccio tentacolare dello Scapolo? O forse il Reticolo non rappresenta dei tentacoli ma delle fiamme? Della passione o della punizione? Siamo forse testimoni della progressiva messa a fuoco da parte di Duchamp di quell’innesto uomo-macchina che ci verrà compiutamente rappresentato nel Grande Vetro? (Fig. 10) click to enlarge Figure 11 Marcel Duchamp,Nine Malic Moulds, 1914-15 Comunque sia, la prossima stazione dell’odissea dei Rammendi è segnata da una nuova rotazione a 90°, per mezzo della quale il Reticolo di Rammendi viene prospetticamente proiettato su un piano orizzontale e diviene il sistema dei Capillari nell’Apparato Scapolo del Grande Vetro. Il salto di qualità connesso a questa nuova rotazione non ha bisogno di essere sottolineato. Esso comporta (fra altre importanti considerazioni) l’esportazione del principio del 3 (e quindi anche del 9) alGrande Vetro, a cominciare dagli Stampi Maschi (Fig. 11), che devono essere uno per Capillare, quindi appunto 9, mentre sappiamo dalla lettura delle note della Scatola Verdeche nel progetto iniziale erano solo 8. 1c. Tu m’ Nel 1918 Duchamp realizza il suo ultimo dipinto Tu m’, in cui riprende e elabora ulteriormente le tematiche che nello stesso periodo sviluppa nel Grande Vetro. All’interno del dipinto (di cui Schwarz, 1974, ha fornito una esauriente e convincente interpretazione) ricompaiono i Rammendi in una strana composizione che voglio analizzare in questo paragrafo. Sulla sinistra del dipinto e in basso abbiamo una rappresentazione delle sagome dei Rammendi; qui sembra che Duchamp voglia giocare a carte scoperte: le sagome sono tutte e tre accuratamente allineate, in modo da evidenziarne le uguali lunghezze. I Rammendi sono direttamente rappresentati altrove nel dipinto, come vedremo oltre. Tuttavia Duchamp usa solo due delle tre sagome, la prima e l’ultima; quella centrale, qui non utilizzata, è la stessa che ci aveva ingannato nei Tre Rammendi Tipo (forse un’espiazione?) Una mano col dito puntato, dipinta approssimativamente al centro della composizione, indica chiaramente la parte destra, dove, a colpo d’occhio, riconosciamo chiaramente i Rammendi; essi sono disposti nuovamente a coppie, e formano quattro coppie: il Rammendo rosso (corrispondente alla sagoma più in basso) e il Rammendo nero (sagoma più in alto). Nelle due coppie più in alto (una coppia di coppie) i Rammendi hanno lo stesso orientamento, mentre nelle coppie più in basso (altra coppia di coppie) i Rammendi sono disposti con orientamenti differenti. Così, abbiamo una coppia di coppie di coppie: un altro suggerimento di ricorsività, sebbene nuovamente a base 2. Ricordiamo che abbiamo già osservato la stessa oscillazione fra 2 e 3 come base numerica della ricorsione nelle note della Scatola Verde, dove Duchamp prevedeva solo 8 (=23) Stampi Maschi ( da cui dovevano partire 3 capillari per ogni Stampo) mentre la scelta definitiva sarà 9 (=32, uno per ogni Capillare). Ma questa scelta non è definitiva, come testimonia il ritorno al 2 in Tu m’. Torniamo alla descrizione del dipinto. I Rammendi paiono fluttuare liberamente nella superficie del dipinto. Da essi si dipartono perpendicolarmente dei raggi colorati da cui irradiano delle circonferenze (composti alla Kandinsky, suggerisce Schwarz). I raggi ci danno prospetticamente la dimensione della profondità, e sembrano alludere vagamente a evolute e evolventi di una curva, che Duchamp può aver visto sui testi di geometria. O, seguendo Henderson i raggi con le loro irradiazioni potrebbero essere una allusione alla presenza di Elettricità. In King and the Queen surrounded by Swift Nudes (1912) and the Invisible World of Electron dice che: “simili immagini circolari o spiraliformi continuerebbero a servire a Duchamp in numerose opere susseguenti come indicatrici della presenza di elettricità o magnetismo.” Considerando la profondità suggerita dai raggi colorati, la nostra attenzione è attratta da uno strano quadrilatero sghembo color latte, appena percepibile rispetto ad uno sfondo quasi del medesimo colore. Notiamo così che le quattro coppie di Rammendi si dipartono esattamente dai quattro vertici del quadrilatero, perpendicolarmente ad esso, venendo così a formare uno strano prisma in prospettiva. Il fatto che rammendi e quadrilatero debbano essere considerati come un tutto unico è prospetticamente sottolineato dal comune punto di fuga, posto sul margine inferiore del dipinto alla destra della mano indicante. Dunque, Duchamp attira la nostra attenzione sullo strano prisma (vedi Fig. 13). Figure 13 A prism in perspective with shared vanishing point, Tu m’ (1918), detail C’è una interessante ambiguità (probabilmente voluta) nella scelta del sistema di rappresentazione di questo strano prisma. Ne abbiamo già indicato l’impianto prospettico col suo punto di fuga. Ora, secondo le regole della prospettiva, i rammendi più lontani dovrebbero essere prospetticamente scorciati, ma l’assioma dei Rammendi tipo impone di conservarne rigidamente le lunghezze. Di conseguenza, Duchamp non disegna (non può farlo) la seconda faccia del prisma (parallela alla prima color latte) perché ciò determinerebbe un secondo punto di fuga, come mostrato in Fig. 14. Ciò comporta una visione assonometrica e non prospettica. Figure 14 Second vanishing point of the prism, Tu m’ (1918), detail Dunque il Prisma di Tu m’è rappresentato contemporaneamente sia attraverso un sistema prospettico che assonometrico, e delimita quindi uno spazio ambiguo, che per di più sembra chiuso ma in realtà è aperto. D’altra parte, essendo i Rammendi delle generalizzazioni di segmenti o di rette, c’era daaspettarsi che lo spazio delimitato dal prisma avesse qualche proprietà generalizzata rispetto ad uno spazio ordinario. Ma devo alla acuta capacità di osservazione di Gi Lonardini, mia moglie, la scoperta della principale e straordinaria proprietà di questa regione dello spazio. Per comprenderla dobbiamo volgere l’attenzione alle ombre dei ready-made dipinte nella composizione. A partire dalla sinistra del dipinto abbiamo l’ombra della Ruota di bicicletta del 1913 (Fig. 15)(che starebbe per Duchamp, nell’interpretazione di Schwarz), poi osserviamo l’ombra delCavatappi del 1918 (Fig. 16) (secondo Schwarz sarebbe il fallo dello Scapolo-Duchamp, che desidererebbe consumare l’incesto violando l’intimità della sposa, e questo sarebbe il significato del trompe l’oiel dello strappo al centro della composizione) e infine sulla destra l’ombra dellaCappelliera del 1917 (Fig. 17) (essendo appesa al soffitto simbolizzerebbe l’impiccagione quale punizione per l’incesto, ancora una volta secondo Schwarz). click images to enlarge Figure 15 Figure 16 Figure 17 The shadow of Bicycle Wheel (1913) in Tu m’ (1918), detail The shadow of Corkscrew (1918) in Tu m’ (1918),detail The shadow of Hat Rack (1917) in Tu m’ (1918), detail Per la verità nel quadro è presente (quasi) sempre una quarta ombra, quella vera (cioè non dipinta) proiettata da un vero scovolino per bottiglie piantato nel centro dello strappo, perpendicolarmente alla tela; e con questa quarta, anche le 3 ombre sarebbero ricondotte ricorsivamente a 4 cioè ad una potenza di 2. Ho provato un certo imbarazzo nel constatare che l’ombra della Cappelliera sembra eseguita maldestramente rispetto alle altre ombre, la cui esecuzione invece è impeccabile. Poi ho notato che mentre nelle fotografie del ready-made la cappelliera ha sei steli, nell’ombra proiettata sembra di scorgerne (ma in modo incerto) più di sei: uno più marcato che mostra la sua tipica arricciatura, ed altri sfumati e solo leggermente accennati… L’interpretazione di Gi è che stiamo osservando l’ombra dell’ombra. Questa è la straordinaria proprietà (ricorsiva) dello spazio generalizzato racchiuso dal prisma. click to enlarge Figure 18 Marcel Duchamp,Pencil-ink miniature of Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1918 Una vicenda della biografia di Duchamp pare in relazione con quanto osservato, e sembra indicare una persistente presenza delle tematiche nel pensiero di Duchamp nel periodo in cui elaborò Tu m’. Ho appreso infatti dalla lettura delle Effemeridi di Gough-Cooper & Caumont (1993) che il 23 luglio del 1918 (l’anno di Tu m’) Duchamp regalò all’amica Carrie Stettheimer per la sua casa delle bambole una miniatura in inchiostro e matita di 9.5×5.5 mm del proprio Nudo che discende le scale n.2 del 1912 (Fig. 18), che venne collocato nella sala da ballo miniaturizzata. Così, possiamo osservare la stessa idea di ripetizione in scatola che abbiamo incontrato in Tu m’, ma qui abbiamo inoltre l’importante specificazione della scala ridotta. click to enlarge Figure 19 Marcel Duchamp,The Delights of Kermoune, 1958 Possiamo riconoscere tracce dell’idea della ripetizione in scatola e su scala ridotta anche in altre opere. Ricordiamo Le delizie di Kermoune, del 1958 (Fig. 19): Duchamp creò un grafo ad albero che ricorda ilReticolo di Rammendi, composto di aghi di pino fissati ad un foglio con la stessa tecnica a imbastitura usata per i Rammendi; era un regalo di ringraziamento per l’ospitalità ricevuta da Claude e Bertrande Blancpain a Kermoune. Apprendo dalla lettura delle Effemeridi (alla data 1-8-58) che Duchamp pose l’opera in una scatola grigia nascosta nell’armadio degli ospiti. Nell’idea di ripetizione in scatola e su scala ridotta sembra di poter leggere una sorta di presagio dell’idea di frattale. In una nota della Scatola Verdeleggiamo: Fare un armadio a specchi Fare questo armadio a specchi per stagnola. Così, se l’armadio dei Blancpain fosse stato un simile armadio (con specchi interni), allora la scatola grigia sarebbe stata ripetuta infinite volte, proprio come in un frattale. click to enlarge Figure 20 Marcel Duchamp, Boîte-Series F, 1966 click to enlarge Figure 21 Marcel Duchamp, Reproduction of Why Not Sneeze Rrose Sélavy (1920) for the Boîte, 1940 Il tema della ripetizione in scala ridotta è anche sviluppato a fondo nella Boite-en-valise del 1941 (Fig. 20). Qui notiamo un’altra suggestiva ripresa del prisma dalle strane proprietà diTu m’: guardiamo il modello del ready-made Perché non starnutire Rose Sélavy? (del 1919) contenuto nella Boite-en-valise (Fig. 21). L’articoloMarcel Duchamp: A Readymade Case for Collecting Objects of Our Cultural Heritage Along with Works of Art sottolinea una importante proprietà dell’opera: il punto di partenza è una foto (2D) del celebre ready-made; la piccola gabbietta è ritagliata lungo i lati destro, alto e sinistro; questa sagoma è poi ripiegata su uno sghembo prisma solido (3D) che ha la sezione simile a quella del prisma di Tu m’. Dunque abbiamo superficie 2D che simula un oggetto 3D (per mezzo della piega lungo il lato frontale superiore della gabbietta, così da sovrapporsi al corrispondente lato del prisma). Così, la dimensionalità di questo oggetto è un numero fra gli interi 2 e 3. click to enlarge Figure 22 Marcel Duchamp, Mina’s Poems à 2 Dimensions ½,1959 Figure 23 Photograph of Katherine Dreier’s library room before the installation of Tu m’, 1918 Si tratta di una sorprendente coincidenza: l’idea di ripetizione (dell’ombra, in Tu m’, dell’oggetto in scala ridotta, nellaBoite-en-valise ) è esplicitamente associata ad una dimensionalità non intera, cioè ad una dimensionalità frattale: un’altra suggestiva proprietà dello strano prisma. Altrove troviamo un esplicito riferimento ad una dimensione non intera da parte di Duchamp, nei versi composti per Mina Loy; il titolo è Mina’s poems à 2 dimensions ½ (Effemeridi, 14 aprile 1959) (Fig. 22). Un chiarimento è ora necessario per evitare possibili fraintendimenti. Non desidero affermare né che le opere di Duchamp esaminate (e altre che considereremo nel seguito)siano frattali (i frattali sono oggetti geometrici ben definiti, con diverse ben definite proprietà che non possiamo notare in Duchamp: questo è assolutamente ovvio), né che Duchamp abbia chiaramente intuito un tale concetto. Dobbiamo solo ammettere che l’idea di ripetizione ricorsiva in scala ridotta è oggettivamente collegata a quella di frattale, così che, in presenza dell’idea di ricorsione (anche se solo intuita) l’idea di frattale deve assumere una qualche evidenza, almeno in una forma embrionale. Io penso (ed ho iniziato a mostrare altrove, Giunti, 2001b) che nella misura in cui l’intuizione della ricorsione da parte degli artisti diviene più definita e precisa, allora anche la rappresentazione di frattali risulta essere consapevole, più chiara e più pertinente (come ad esempio nei casi di Klee ed Escher). Tuttavia, dobbiamo riconoscere che l’intuizione di una dimensionalità non intera, specialmente se relazionata ad una ripetizione su scala inferiore, è una intuizione straordinaria, che non possiamo notare (per quanto ne so) in nessun altro artista dello stesso periodo. Si ricordi inoltre che il primo libro di Mandelbrot sui frattali, dove egli li definisce in termini di dimensionalità non intera, fu pubblicato nel 1975. Infine torniamo a Tu m’ per un’ultima considerazione. Una fotografia che ho visto nelle Effemeridi (9 gennaio 1918) mostra la libreria di Miss Dreier prima dell’installazione di Tu m’ (Fig. 23). In primo piano vediamo chiaramente una gabbia per uccelli. Forse lo strano prisma era già in partenza concepito come una voliera. 1d. Due brevi divagazioni circolari click to enlarge Figure 24 Marcel Duchamp,Sad Young Man on a Train, 1911 Figure 25 Marcel Duchamp, Family Portrait (1899), 1964 Sebbene il tema della ricorsione sia frequentemente collegato al motivo del Reticolo (vedremo nel seguito altri esempi riferibili all’odissea dei Rammendi), riconosciamo la sua eco in altre opere nel corso dell’intera carriera artistica di Duchamp. Qui voglio discutere altre due opere, entrambe riferibili alla sua biografia; queste opere che si collocano emblematicamente agli opposti estremi della sua vita artistica:Giovane triste in treno del 1911 (Fig. 24) e Ritratto di famiglia del 1964(Fig. 25). Giovane triste in trenoè un autoritratto (in cui sono evidenziati due oggetti di affezione: il bastone da passeggio e la pipa). Leggiamone la descrizione di Duchamp: “Prima di tutto c’è l’idea del movimento del treno, e quindi quella del giovane triste che si muove nel corridoio; per cui si hanno due movimenti paralleli corrispondenti.” L’idea di un moto nel moto è certamente ricorsiva, ed è sottolineata dall’allitterazione presente nella titolazione originale: Jeune homme triste dans un train. Questa allitterazione tr( iste, train) è stata analizzata in un importante articolo da Gould (2000) che richiamerò estensivamente nella prossima sezione di questo articolo. Egli fra l’altro si interroga sul perché il giovane uomo dovrebbe essere triste? Egli ipotizza diverse risposte. Qui richiamerò due di esse. Il primo motivo di tristezza è che il giovane sente col proprio moto di aggiunge solo poca cosa al moto generale del treno. Questa congettura di Gould conduce a mia volta ad una ulteriore congettura. Se guardiamo al moto nel moto come ad una precoce intuizione dell’idea di frattale, allora la tristezza del giovane sarebbe in relazione con l’intuizione di una importante caratteristica dei frattali: quella dello scaling dimensionale. Così, la tristezza del Giovane è simile a quella di Achille, che nel paradosso di Zenone, non può raggiungere la tartaruga. Il secondo motivo di tristezza è che nel suo moto il giovane è doppiamente vincolato (dai binari e dal corridoio della carrozza) ad un percorso lineare, che Duchamp sente come fortemente limitativo: così sembra esservi la percezione della limitatezza della linearità; di fatto lo stesso anno, in Giovane e fanciulla in primavera, Duchamp introduceva l’importante elemento della circolarità nella iterazione, attraverso le turbolenze convettive che già abbiamo indicato in un paragrafo precedente. click to enlarge Figure 26 Duchamp’s family photo,1899 Figure 27 Salvador Dalì, Slave Market with Invisible Apparition of Voltaire’s Bust, 1940 Veniamo al Ritratto di famiglia, che lo ritrae fanciullo assieme ai genitori ed alle sorelline. Si tratta di una vecchia fotografia di famiglia (1899) (Fig. 26) , che Duchamp ritaglia secondo uno strano contorno curvilineo. Possiamo riconoscere una tecnica alla Arcimboldo, ampiamente sperimentata anche da Salvador Dalì (ad esempio nel celebre Mercato di schiavi con apparizione invisibile del busto di Voltaire(Fig. 27), o anche meglio nel Volto della guerra, opere entrambe del 1940): si tratta infatti di un busto umano composto da tanti busti umani: ricorsione ovunque (e qualcosa che ancora ricorda i frattali). Le teste della madre e della piccola Magdeleine formano gli occhi, mentre la testa del giovane Marcel è la bocca; infine Suzanne, Yvonne ed il padre Eugene formano le braccia ed il torace. Per adesso sorvoliamo sul significato (non solo psicologico) dell’esclusione dei fratelli maschi da questa composizione (ne riparleremo in un paragrafo successivo, dopo aver acquisito nuovi elementi). Ora limitiamoci alle conseguenze sul piano formale di questa esclusione: notiamo che la sagoma formata dall’esclusione di un fratello forma in modo funzionale l’incavo dell’ascella del grande busto di busti, mentre la permanenza del secondo fratello e delle altre persone presenti nella foto originale avrebbero reso irriconoscibile o almeno deformato la sagoma del grande busto. Ora, voglio osservare che Duchamp ha ottenuto questa opera a partire dalla fotografia di una famiglia (la propria); in questo modo la ricorsione, che abbiamo notato sul piano formale, è ricollegata, sul piano dei contenuti, alla ricorsione ciclica del perenne ricambio generazionale, in cui i figli diventano i nuovi genitori, che avranno nuovi figli che diventeranno nuovi genitori… Dunque abbiamo l’associazione di ciclicità e ricorsione. Questa associazione è rinforzata dal fatto che la sagoma che si viene a creare attraverso il ritaglio operato non ha più nulla delle rigidità rettilinee a senso unico del primo autoritratto, ma ha piuttosto, come giustamente nota Clair (2000) le curve e le rotondità di un famoso readymade: quelle della Fontana del 1917. Ritorneremo più avanti su questa importante osservazione. Infine, se guardiamo al Ritratto di famiglia come alla filogenesi di Duchamp, allora l’autoritratto di Giovane triste in treno potrebbe illustrare la sua ontogenesi (dopo tutto questo autoritratto non è statico ma una rappresentazione piuttosto dinamica della sua evoluzione temporale). Se così fosse, dovremmo riconoscere l’implicita affermazione che entrambi i processi (filogenesi e ontogenesi) condividono le medesime modalità ricorsive. 2. La lingua di Rrose 2a. La nota sulla Lingua nella Scatola Verde Nelle note della Scatola Verde leggiamo una complessa nota intitolata Lingua. Eccola: Ricercare delle “Parole prime” (“divisibili” solo per se stesse e per l’unità). Prendere un dizionario Larousse e copiare tutte le parole dette “astratte”, che non abbiano cioè riferimenti concreti. Comporre un segno schematico che designi ognuna di queste parole (questo segno può essere composto con gli arresti-campione). Questi segni devono essere considerati le lettere del nuovo alfabeto. Un raggruppamento di parecchi segni determinerà (Utilizzare i colori – per differenziare ciò che corrisponderebbe in questa (letteratura) a sostantivo, verbo, avverbio, declinazioni, coniugazioni ecc.). Necessità della continuità ideale cioè: ogni raggruppamento sarà collegato agli altri, da un significato rigoroso (specie di grammatica che non designa più una costruzione pedagogica della frase, ma, tralasciando le differenze delle lingue e i “giri” di frase di ogni lingua, pesi e misure delle astrazioni di sostantivi, di negazioni, dei rapporti da soggetto a verbo ecc. per mezzo dei segni-campione, (rappresentando le nuove relazioni: coniugazioni, declinazioni, plurale e singolare, aggettivazione, inesprimibili nelle forme alfabetiche concrete delle lingue viventi presenti e a venire). Questo alfabeto non conviene che alla scrittura di questo quadro molto probabilmente. In questa nota Duchamp ipotizza la creazione di una lingua artificiale che deve essere una generalizzazione delle lingue naturali. La logica sottesa alla costruzione della nuova lingua ha due aspetti essenziali intimamente collegati: la ricorsività e l’astrattezza. Riguardo al primo aspetto, quello della ricorsività, notiamo che gli elementi atomici della nuova lingua artificiale, cioè i suoi fonemi, sono certe parole, prese dal dizionario di un linguaggio naturale, che Duchamp indica col termine di parole prime (spiegherò la mia ipotesi circa il significato di parole prime nel prossimo paragrafo). Quindi i fonemi della nuova lingua artificiale sono parole (combinazioni di fonemi) di una lingua naturale: fonemi di fonemi, parole di parole. A ognuno dei fonemi del linguaggio artificiale corrisponde un segno grafico, cioè un grafema, composto attraverso segni-campione, che penso siano (almeno in relazione con) i Rammendi (quindi un grafema composto da grafemi). Dunque in sintesi Duchamp ipotizza una lingua artificiale che sia la generalizzazione ricorsiva di una lingua naturale. Il secondo aspetto, quello dell’astrazione, è riferibile alla focalizzazione sulla sintassi del nuovo linguaggio; infatti Duchamp parla di continuità ideale, significato rigoroso, pesi e misure delle astrazioni di sostantivi, nuove relazioni… mentre la semantica è chiaramente svalutata quando parla dell’assenza di una costruzione pedagogica della frase, dei giri di frase propri ad ogni lingua… Considerando l’applicazione di un metodo ricorsivo e l’aspirazione all’astrazione generalizzante, è possibile vedere una sorta di intuizione di due aspetti che hanno effettivamente caratterizzato la ricerca linguistica nella seconda metà del 900. Cominciamo dal primo: sappiamo che nelle cosiddette grammatiche generative la frase è costruita attraverso regole grammaticali di tipo ricorsivo, dove ogni simbolo può essereriscritto (cioè sostituito) con altri simboli, che a loro volta possono ricorsivamente contenere lo stesso simbolo riscritto (vedi per maggiori informazioni Ghezzi e Mandrioli, 1989 o il classico Grishman, 1986). La produzione di una sentenza per mezzo di una tale grammatica è spesso descritta attraverso speciali grafi ad albero in cui ogni riscrittura corrisponde ad una nuova ramificazione. Il semplice esempio che segue è tratto dal classico Chomsky’s Universal Grammar. An introduction. Il simbolo iniziale è S (Sentenza); gli altri simboli sono: NS (Sintagma Nominale), VS (Sintagma Verbale), D (Determinante), N (Nome), V (Verbo); le regole grammaticali sono: Questa grammatica produce semplici sentenze nella forma Soggetto-Predicato-Complemento, come in: “The child drew an elephant” (Cook). Il corrispondente diagramma ad albero è illustrato in Fig. 28 Fig. 28 E’ interessante notare che l’unico grafema effettivamente composto da Duchamp con i Rammendi è un grafo ad albero: quello delReticolo di Rammendi. Fornirò un secondo esempio di simili grammatiche nel prossimo paragrafo, direttamente riferito a Duchamp. Per quanto riguarda il secondo aspetto, è noto che il progetto di una grammatica universale non è altro che lo sforzo di individuare per generalizzazioni progressive quelle strutture grammaticali astratte comuni a tutti i linguaggi naturali. Maturana (1978) precisa in modo esplicito l’importanza della ricorsività quale elemento universale fondante di ogni linguaggio: Per contro, la grammatica universale di cui parlano i linguisti come insieme di regole soggiacenti comuni a tutti i linguaggi naturali umani può riferirsi solo all’universalità del processo ricorsivo di accoppiamento strutturale che ha luogo fra gli umani nell’applicazione ricorsiva delle componenti di un dominio consensuale senza dominio consensual (52) Tornando a Duchamp, la nota sul linguaggio si conclude con una considerazione importante. A cosa può servire questo nuovo linguaggio? Duchamp risponde esplicitamente: è un linguaggio utile a descrivere questo quadro, cioè il Grande Vetro (ricordiamo che le note della Scatola Verde si riferiscono appunto alla progettazione e alla descrizione del Grande Vetro). Perché? Perché questo linguaggio astratto ne condivide la natura di progressiva generalizzazione ricorsiva. Se tuttavia questo linguaggio è quello utile alla descrizione delGrande Vetro, allora serve anche per scrivere le note stesse della Scatola Verde (che sono parte integrante delGrande Vetro), all’interno delle quali troviamo la stessa nota che descrive proprio il nuovo linguaggio (abbiamo qui un primo esempio di quei cicli autoreferenziali caratteristici di Duchamp di cui parleremo oltre). Infatti notiamo che nelle note della Scatola verde Duchamp usa una sintassi effettivamente strana ed elastica, che non si accorda con le usuali regole sintattiche delle lingue naturali: troviamo verbi transitivi senza complemento, periodi ipotetici in cui sono omesse le conclusi, incisi non risolti, e così via. Così il linguaggio della Scatola Verde è forse una prima approssimazione del nuovo linguaggio, “rappresentando le nuove relazioni: coniugazioni, declinazioni, plurale e singolare, aggettivazione, inesprimibili nelle forme alfabetiche concrete delle lingue viventi presenti e a venire”. 2b. Parole prime e autoproduzione Ora, cerchiamo di chiarire cosa dobbiamo intendere per parole prime. Seguendo un suggerimento di Calvesi io penso che siano emissioni vocali primarie, come la parola Dada, o come le prime articolazioni sillabiche di un bambino, come mama o papa, quando esse ancora non hanno una precisa referenza semantica (parole astratte, dice Duchamp), cioè quando sono ancora solo pure combinazioni di fonemi elementari (135). Così, io penso cheparole prime e parole astratte debbano intendersi come sinonimi. Se le cose stanno così, possiamo intravedere qualche primo esempio di questa lingua nuova: si tratta dei famosi non-senso di Duchamp giocati sulle allitterazioni a cascata. Il più famoso: Esquivons les ecchymoses des Esquimaux aux mots exquis Gould ha analizzato questo gioco di parole nel saggio citato sopra (che per me è stato fonte di ispirazione e divertimento). Si tratta di continue ricombinazioni di alcuni gruppi sillabici principali, che in questo contesto possiamo considerare alla stregua di fonemi. Il fatto che dalla combinazione delle sillabe in parole nasca un non senso, corrisponde esattamente alla programmatica svalutazione dell’aspetto semantico rispetto a quello sintattico. Qui la combinazione sillabica vale esclusivamente per la sua grammatica combinatoria, ma non ha alcuna valenza espressiva, non c’è alcuna costruzione pedagogica della frase, né alcun giro di frase (leggi, come credo: forma idiomatica). Le regole grammaticali per la ricombinazione sillabica sono compendiate nella seguente semplice grammatica (ricorsiva), che può generare il gioco di parole di Duchamp (e infiniti altri non-sense, con la stessa struttura, in un puro grammelot francese): Il simbolo iniziale è P. Gli altri simboli seguenti (in lettere maiuscole) sono i cosiddetti simboli non terminali (cioè i simboli che devono essere riscritti): W (parola), C (Connettivo), D (Doppia sillaba), S (Sillaba semplice), E (sillaba che inizia in E), K (sillaba Key). Infine, i seguenti (in lettere minuscole) sono i simboli terminali (cioè i simboli che non possono essere riscritti): es, ek, ex, von, mos, mò, mot, key, keys; essi traslitteranola pronuncia delle corrispondenti sillabe francesi. Il simbolo | sta per “oppure”. P -> W C W C -> C W C | le | de | o (si noti che questa regola è ricorsiva) W -> D S | S D D -> E K E -> es | ek | ex K -> key | keys Fig. 29 mostra la derivazione del gioco di parole di Duchamp. click to enlarge Figure 30 Marcel Duchamp, Rotary Demisphere, 1925 Gould giustamente evidenzia che il gioco di parole è scritto sullaRotary Demisphere del 1925 (Fig. 30), un dispositivo ottico che quando ruota genera l’illusione di una spirale che si srotola senza fine verso l’esterno. Questa significativa associazione è molto importante perché mostra come per Duchamp in questo gioco di parole si ha una autoproduzione potenzialmente infinita. Usando la grammatica proposta sopra è facile verificarlo, se ci si contenta non solo di frasi non-sense, ma anche di parole non-sense (ricordiamo che questa grammatica genera sentenze in purogrammelot francese). 2c. Autoreferenzialità e autoproduzione di senso I giochi di parole di Duchamp hanno spesso un’altra importante caratteristica: quella dell’autoreferenzialità. Ecco un primo esempio: Si la scie scie la scie et si la scie qui scie la scie est la scie qui scie la scie il y a suissscide metallique. [Se la sega sega la sega e se la sega che sega la sega è la sega che sega la sega allora si ha suicidio metallico] Ho appreso leggendo le Effemeridi (17 marzo 1960) che fu composto per un’opera d’arte di Jean Tinguely (un happening, diremmo), per la cui la scena era inizialmente progettato un esercito di seghe. Il gioco di parole non è di quelli memorabili, ma è particolarmente utile per introdurre quello che ci interessa, perché l’immagine della sega che sega se stessa è chiaramente autoreferenziale. Inoltre è presente l’elemento della proliferazione attraverso la ripetizione sillabica (autocostruzione). Infine abbiamo almeno un divertente suiss-scide, con suono quasi identico a suicide, cioè un suicidio di seghe (scie – scide) svizzere (suiss), che Duchamp scrisse probabilmente pensando ad un esercito di seghe che si muovono con perfetto sincronismo (con precisione svizzera) fino ad un inconsapevole ed ottuso suicidio (autodistruzione). Curiosamente, l’happening di Jean Tinguely ebbe inaspettatamente le stesse caratteristiche del gioco di parole: fu autodistruttivo (e questo era previsto) ma anche autocosrtruttivo (e questo fu inatteso). Un fantasioso macchinario, fatto di ogni sorta di materiale riciclato, doveva autodistruggersi con un incendio; ad un certo punto, temendo per un guasto imprevisto l’esplosione di un estintore, Tinguely implorava l’intervento del pompiere, il quale invece esitava; quando finalmente il pompiere iniziò le operazioni, rischiò il linciaggio da parte del pubblico che credeva il suo intervento fuori luogo nel contesto dell’happening. Così, nell’interazione fra l’opera e gli spettatori, finì per autogenerarsi un evento comico del tutto inatteso. Torniamo ora, dopo questa digressione, al tema dell’autoreferenza nei giochi di parole di Duchamp. Egli persegue questo obiettivo con tecniche sottili ed efficaci. Come esempi considererò due giochi verbali riprendendo l’analisi che ne ha fatto Gould, e sviluppando alcune altre considerazioni. Il primo, piuttosto semplice, è questo: Cessez le chant laissez ce chant [Cessate il canto lasciate questo canto] dove, come ha osservato Gould, con uno scambio delle consonanti iniziali (C e L) fra le prime due parole di ogni riga (verbo e articolo) secondo lo schema C L L C egli provoca un gradevole chiasmo a livello uditivo, e una inversione del senso della frase a livello semantico. Qui desidero sottolineare che ciascuna delle due righe di testo, presa a sé, non ha alcun particolare valore al di là del suo ovvio riferimento semantico; ma nuovo senso è creato dalla congiunzione delle due frasi, a causa dei loro riferimenti interni reciproci: l’effetto del chiasmo e l’effetto di inversione di significati. In altre parole, la congiunzione delle due frasi produce un valore aggiunto che va al di là della pura somma del valore semantico delle due frasi. Dunque nel gioco verbale il tutto è superiore alla somma delle parti, ed il valore aggiunto si genera attraverso dei rimandi interni, cioè questo gioco di parole è autoreferenziale. Il secondo gioco di parole, più complesso ed affascinante, è bilingue (francese vs. latino): éffacer FAC assez AC [cancella FAI abbastanza E] La parola éffacer suona come una contrazione di ef (F) ed éffacer (cancella), e quindi può significare qualcosa come: cancella F; ora, eseguendo l’operazione prescritta dalla prima parola alla parola stessa éffacer (quindi una operazione autoreferenziale) si ottiene acer il cui omofono è assez, cioè si ottiene la seconda parola francese. E qui il tutto si fermerebbe, perché assez significa abbastanza, come dire: è abbastanza, tutto è finito. Qui entra in gioco la parte latina. Applicando la stessa cancellazione di una F alla prima parola latina, si passa da FAC (fai) ad AC (e). La scrittura è così completata. Notiamo poi che in ciascuna riga la parola latina ha valore semantico opposto a quello della corrispondente parola francese, così da creare un’alternanza di ordini e contrordini che è sottolineato dal passaggio di lingua. Qui viene la parte interessante. L’ultima parola AC (e) implicitamente suggerisce di aggiungere qualcosa; se questo qualcosa fosse proprio la F che prima abbiamo cancellato, ed eseguissimo il comando (come abbiamo fatto per passare dalla prima alla seconda riga), otterremmo:efassez FAC, omofono di effacer FAC; avremmo cioè un ciclico ritorno alla riga di partenza, in un moto periodico infinito. In questo gioco di parole possiamo vedere, con maggiore evidenza che nel primo, una intrinseca autoreferenza: le 4 parole prese isolatamente hanno scarso significato (giusto i loro diretti riferimenti semantici); ma la trama di relazioni che si autostabilisce fra di esse crea e mette in moto un motore che produce nuovo senso. Più precisamente, la prima delle 4 parole contiene in sé il germe dell’intero meccanismo, e nelle relazioni interne con le altre parti del sistema si autogenera un moto circolare potenzialmente infinito. Ancora una volta, e con ben maggiore evidenza, l’autoreferenzialità genera organizzazione e quindi nuovo senso. E’ suggestivo pensare che un piccolo gioiello come l’ultimo gioco di parole può condensare in sé una quantità di caratteristiche non solo di molte altre opere di Duchamp, ma addirittura del complesso della sua opera. In particolare, la tipica idea duchampiana di ricontestualizzare i propri precedenti lavori, come nel caso dei Rammendi, è intrinsecamente autoreferenziale, in quanto Duchamp si riferisce sempre ad un precedente Duchamp. Nel ciclico e ricorsivo riutilizzo senza fine di idee simili in contesti sempre nuovi, si generano quei salti qualitativi, quelle generalizzazioni, quei valori aggiunti, Bateson direbbe quelle tipizzazioni logiche di livello superiore, che fanno progredire il suo lavoro ed il suo pensiero. Ogni singolo elemento della sua inesauribile attività mentale contiene in nuce, i germi essenziali delle caratteristiche generali; ogni elemento della sua produzione contiene potenzialmente una quantità di informazione sufficiente a ripercorrere (se non proprio ricreare) la sua intera produzione, esattamente come negli organismi viventi, dove ogni cellula contiene l’informazione genetica potenzialmente capace di rigenerare l’intero organismo. 3. Il mondo della Vespa Consideriamo un’altra importante nota dalla Scatola Verde. Iscrizione dell’alto Ottenuta con i pistoni di corrente d’aria. (Indicare la maniera di “preparare” questi pistoni). Poi “collocarli” per un certo periodo di tempo, (da 2 a 3 mesi) e permettere che lascino la loro impronta intanto che tre reti attraverso le quali passano gli ordini dell’impiccato femmina (ordini il cui alfabeto e i termini sono regolati dall’orientazione delle 3 reti) (una specie di tripla “griglia” attraverso la quale la via lattea sostiene e conduce i detti ordini). Poi toglierli in modo che non resti altro che la loro impronta rigida cioè laforma che permette tutte le combinazioni di lettere mandate attraverso la suddetta forma tripla, ordini, autorizzazioni, ecc. che devono andare a raggiungere i tiri e lo spruzzo. Questa nota contiene per me una quantità di suggestioni, che risuonano così profondamente col mio modo di vedere le cose, che mi è molto difficile tenere distinte le proiezioni della mia immaginazione da ciò che effettivamente la nota presenta. Comunque, considerando il peculiare linguaggio adottato da Duchamp nelle note della Scatola Verde, l’analisi è sempre esposta (credo deliberatamente, da parte di Duchamp) ad un ampio margine di arbitrio interpretativo. Venendo allo specifico della nota, cominciamo ad osservare che attraverso le reti passano gli ordini della Sposa: nel sistema del Grande Vetro la Sposa è regina. Uno dei suoi apparati essenziali è chiamato da Duchamp laVespa , e l’idea di una Vespa-regina mi fa pensare all’organizzazione sociale degli imenotteri (insetti come le api, le formiche o, appunto, le vespe). Al vertice della loro complessa organizzazione sistemica c’è la regina. Essa, oltre ad assolvere all’importante funzione riproduttiva, regola molte funzioni vitali della comunità emettendo varie sostanze chimiche (ad esempio, una nuova sciamatura delle api è indotta quando viene raggiunta una certa concentrazione di un particolare ormone prodotto dalla regina). Di fatto, dal punto di vista di un osservatore esterno al sistema, queste emissioni chimiche possono essere descritte come ordini. La Via Lattea rappresentata alla sommità delVetro ha in effetti le parvenze di una rappresentazione entomologica (come una grossa larva, o come l’addome molle e rigonfio di uova della regina). Ed una innegabile suggestione entomologica emana anche dalla descrizione dell’apparato Vespa, con le sue secrezioni, la materia filamentosa, il meccanismo di ventilazione (proprio come il un alveare). Insomma, la prima suggestione è quella di vedere rappresentata una società di insetti: alla sommità della rappresentazione giace la regina, alla base c’è la macchinosa e complessa laboriosità delle caste subalterne. (Una piccola digressione. Queste considerazioni per così dire entomologiche consentono di fornire un significato aggiuntivo al gioco di parole di Duchamp: A Guest + A Host = A Ghost (Fig. 31), già ampiamente analizzato da Gould. Diverse specie di vespe depongono le loro uova nelle immediate vicinanze di un bruco, o addirittura al suo interno, precedentemente paralizzato con una puntura; alla schiusa, le larve potranno nutrirsi di carne fresca, avendo la precauzione di banchettare a partire dagli organi non vitali. Nello studio del parassitismo, l’organismo parassitato, qui il bruco, è detto Host; se poi indichiamo poi con Guest la larva parassita, la parola Ghost illustra perfettamente la fine del povero Host). Ora, dobbiamo sottolineare un piccolo ma significativo dettaglio. Nel Grande Vetro la Vespa è solo uno degli apparati della Sposa, mentre io ne ho parlato come se fosse la Sposa stessa. Questa identificazione fra una parte (l’apparato della Sposa) e il tutto (la Sposa stessa) è autorizzata da Duchamp stesso, come vedremo meglio oltre, perché è la stessa relazione, apertamente dichiarata da Duchamp, fra la sposa (parte) e il Grande Vetro (tutto): così, l’identificazione tutto-parte (Vetro-Sposa) viene ripetuta (ancora una volta) su scala inferiore (Sposa-Vespa). Inoltre, l’identificazione Sposa-Vespa è coerente col ritratto psichico della sposa stessa fatto da Schwarz. Egli ricorda anche un incubo che ebbe Duchamp mentre terminava il dipinto della Sposa a Monaco: la Sposa divenne un gigantesco insetto che lo torturava atrocemente (147). click to enlarge > Figure 31 Marcel Duchamp, A Guest + A Host = A Ghost, 1953 La seconda suggestione rimanda alle schede perforate delle macchine industriali o di certi organetti musicali che circolavano per le vie delle città in quegli anni: scheda perforata significa ordine codificato; dunque, la regina emana i suoi ordini disponendo particolari combinazioni dei fori delle diverse reti-schede peforate. Le 3 reti sono collocate per 2 o 3 mesi in loco, in modo che possano spontaneamente e plasticamente conformarsi al fluire degli ordini della sposa; si verrà in tal modo a strutturare automaticamente quel codice idoneo a veicolare gli ordini della Sposa; esso sarà basato sul sistema delle mutue posizioni delle tre reti; tale codice rimarrà poi stabilmente impresso nel sistema attraverso la loro impronta. Duchamp prevede quindi una prolungata esposizione delle reti ad eventi stocastici, che finiscono per strutturare e modellare il loro stesso codice. Biologicamente parlando, tutto questo evoca l’idea di un processo di adattamento selettivo in atto. Esattamente come quello che ha condotto all’evoluzione di un efficiente sistema biochimico di autoregolazione di un formicaio, o di un alveare, o infine di un nido di vespe. Un’ultima suggestione che questa nota esercita su di me, strettamente connessa alla precedente, è di tipo matematico, e riguarda il comportamento delle reti neurali. Gurney le definisce così: “Una rete neurale è un assemblaggio di semplici elementi di calcolo, unità o nodi, la cui funzionalità è liberamente ispirata da quella del neurone animale. L’abilità di calcolo della rete è immagazzinata nella forza, o peso, delle connessioni fra le unità, ottenuta con un processo di adattamento a, o di apprendimento da, un insieme di schemi di addestramento.” In altre parole, le reti neurali sono formalismi matematici che simulano il connessionismo e l’attività neuronale. Sono costituite da variabili numeriche interconnesse in una struttura a rete, e sono ricorsivamente ricalcolate, in modo da ottimizzare, in un continuo processo per tentativi ed errori, le prestazioni della rete stessa, in base all’obiettivo per cui è stata progettata. Quindi le reti neurali vengono così a modellarsi, in un processo talvolta molto simile a quello evolutivo, in base all’obiettivo di volta in volta prefissato come scopo. Così, le reti neurali manifestano lo stesso tipo di organizzazione evidenziato nel processo evolutivo. Questo è il modo in attraverso cui le reti neurali apprendono: si tratta di un processo di autorganizzazione interna attraverso cicli ricorsivi. Innegabilmente, tutto ciò è molto simile a quanto immaginato da Duchamp per le tre reti della Via Lattea. E’ ora necessario precisare che ai tempi di Duchamp non esisteva la biochimica (tantomeno quella applicata allo studio del funzionamento di un alveare); ed è pure scontato che non esistevano le reti neurali (e meno che mai le cosiddette reti multistrato, come dovremmo qualificare quelle di Duchamp); quindi non intendo ipotizzare che Duchamp potesse essere influenzato dalla conoscenza di simili nozioni, né tantomeno che egli intendesse col Grande Vetro creare una metafora di un sistema complesso (come una società di insetti o come una rete neurale). Né intendo infine sostenere che la sua intuizione abbia in qualche modo precorso nello specifico quei risultati scientifici futuri. Più semplicemente, la mia idea è che concetti come quelli di ricorsione, autoreferenzialità, feedback circolare (e così via) sono così strettamente connessi fra loro e al concetto di autorganizzazione che, in un modo o nell’altro, quest’ultimo aspetto doveva trovare il modo di esprimersi, anche se in una forma implicita, come quella evidenziata qui. click to enlarge Figure 32 Photograph of Duchamp’s Dust Breeding by Man Ray, 1920 Un ulteriore chiarimento è necessario. Anche nella realizzazione dei Setacci del Grande Vetro Duchamp progettò un altro sistema stocastico, e realmente lo pose in atto, esponendo il Vetro alla polvere per circa 4 mesi. La celebre foto di un dettaglio del Grande Vetro coperto di polvere, titolata Allevamento di polvere (Fig. 32), eseguita da Man Ray nel 1920, documenta il risultato. Tuttavia questo esempio (per quanto importante) non riguarda l’aspetto dell’autorganizzazione suggerito sopra: qui abbiamo una pura casualità che ciecamente produce un risultato, sicuramente interessante, ma senza una specifica organizzazione; là invece avevamo la stessa casualità che invece produceva organizzazione (la creazione del codice); in altre parole, e parlando in termini di entropia, qui abbiamo un’entropia che aumenta, là avevamo una riduzione. Topologia di Marcel 4a. Ricetta per Bottiglie Leggiamo in una nota della Scatola Verde: Leggiamo in una nota della Scatola Verde: E al contrario: L’asse verticale considerato isolatamente ruotante su se stesso, per esempio una generatrice ad angolo retto determinerà sempre un cerchio in tutti e due i casi: 1° girando nella direzione A; 2°, direzione B. Dunque, se era ancora possibile, nel caso di asse verticale in riposo, considerare2 direzioni contrarie per la generatrice G, la figura generata, (qualsiasi sia), non può più essere chiamata destra o sinistra dell’asse. A mano a mano che c’è meno differenza da asse ad asse c o d, cioè a mano a mano che tutti gli assi spariscono in grigio di verticalità, il davanti e il dietro, il dritto ed il rovescio prendono un significato circolare: la destra e la sinistra che sono i 4 bracci del davanti e del dietro si riassorbono lungo le verticali. L’interno e l’esterno(per esteso 4) possono ricevere una simile identificazione, ma l’asse non è più verticale e non ha più l’apparenza unidimensionale. Sebbene la nota sia un po’ oscura, e come sempre la sua lettura sia ardua, è possibile ipotizzare un modello interpretativo coerente con le parti principali di questa nota, modello che trova per di più una coerenza anche con alcune fondamentali opere di Duchamp. Cominciamo ad immaginare un semplice rettangolo. Se tracciamo un asse verticale che lo attraversi, rispetto tale asse ha senso distinguere una parte destra ed una parte sinistra della figura. Ora, se siamo in uno spazio 3D, e con un movimento circolare chiudiamo il rettangolo a formare un cilindro (Fig. 33A) non ha più senso parlare di destra o di sinistra rispetto l’asse precedentemente tracciato, perché qualunque punto del cilindro può essere raggiunto sia girando verso destra che verso sinistra. Fig. 33A Se vogliamo utilizzare il rettangolo per rappresentare il cilindro nel piano 2D, dobbiamo accordarci sulla semplice convenzione che i due lati verticali del rettangolo rappresentano la stessa linea del cilindro. Così, se noi camminassimo sul rettangolo come se fossimo sul cilindro, quando uscissimo da lato sinistro potremmo continuare rientrando da quello destro, e viceversa, come mostrano le Fig. 33B e 33C. click images to enlarge Fig. 33B Fig. 33C click to enlarge Figure 34 Marcel Duchamp, Door: II, rue Larrey, 1927 Duchamp applica questa idea nella suggestiva Porta: II, rue Larrey del 1927 (Fig. 34) che quando chiudeva l’ambiente di destra apriva quello di sinistra, e viceversa. Dunque, con una semplice chiusura circolare passiamo dal rettangolo al cilindro, perdendo così la distinzione fra destra e sinistra. Ora, ripetendo la stessa operazione di chiusura circolare partendo dal cilindro, otteniamo una forma geometrica a ciambella che in topologia si chiama toro (Fig. 35A). Con questa operazione perdiamo anche la distinzione fra alto e basso. Fig. 35A Come prima, se usiamo il rettangolo per rappresentare il toro in uno spazio 2D, dobbiamo accordarci su una seconda semplice convenzione, analoga alla prima: i due lati orizzontali del rettangolo rappresentano una stessa linea circolare del toro, e se camminassimo sul rettangolo come se fossimo sul toro, quando uscissimo dal lato superiore potremmo continuare rientrando da quello inferiore, e viceversa, come mostrano le Fig. 35B e 35C. click images to enlarge Fig. 35B Fig. 35C Ed ora, l’ultimo passo. Riferiamoci ancora ad un rettangolo nello spazio 2D, manteniamo le due regole per l’uscita e il rientro dai lati orizzontali e verticali della figura, e introduciamo una piccola ma importante alterazione della seconda: quando usciamo dal lato superiore possiamo rientrare dal basso, ma scambiando destra e sinistra, e viceversa, (Fig. 36B e 36C). click images to enlarge Fig. 36B Fig. 36C E’ facile verificare che quando passiamo dal cilindro al toro non abbiamo questo scambio fra destra e sinistra. Vediamo in Fig. 35A i bordi del toro prima della chiusura: percorriamo le due circonferenze con lo stesso orientamento (orario o antiorario in entrambi i casi). Fig. 35A Dunque il toro non si accorda col nuovo scambio della seconda regola. Per ottenere l’effetto desiderato, occorre che il cilindro penetri se stesso (con una autointersezione) prima di chiudersi, come illustrato in Fig. 36A. Fig. 36A Click to see animations Animation A1 The formation of the Klein Bottle Animation A2 The Klein Bottle La nuova strana figura è chiamata Bottiglia di Klein (dal matematico Klein).L’animazione A1 aiuta a visualizzare la formazione della bottiglia a partire da un semplice rettangolo per mezzo di due chiusure circolari simultanee. (En passant: dobbiamo ammettere che la superficie kleiniana sarebbe un ottimo posto su cui disegnare una sega suicida!) Questo oggetto ha molte strane proprietà topologiche, fra cui citiamo la più importante per il presente contesto: mentre il toro ha due facce (interna ed esterna) la bottiglia di Klein ha solo una faccia, perché con questa figura noi perdiamo la distinzione fra interno ed esterno, come possiamo facilmente verificare con un piccolo sforzo di immaginazione, con una esplorazione mentale dell’oggetto.L’animazione A2 può servire allo scopo. Tutto ciò si accorda con l’affermazione : “L’interno e l’esterno (per esteso 4) possono ricevere una simile identificazione“. Una domanda interessante: il suggerimento di Duchamp ad uno spazio 4D in questa nota ha forse una corrispondenza col fatto noto che in uno spazio 4D potremmo realizzare una bottiglia di Klein senza superfici che si intersecano? La necessità della quarta dimensione per la costruzione della bottiglia di Klein senza aoutopenetrazioni è chiaramente e intuitivamente mostrato in modo non tecnico da Rosen(1997) con alcune importanti implicazioni filosofiche. Infine, possiamo ipotizzare un possibile significato della chiusa della enigmatica nota, riguardo al fatto che l’asse “non è più verticale e non ha più l’apparenza unidimensionale“: se guardiamo agli assi come alle linee lungo le quali chiudiamo due volte il rettangolo (la prima per passare al cilindro, e la seconda per passare alla bottiglia di Klein) non abbiamo più un asse, ma due, e così non abbiamo più unidimensionalità. click to enlarge Animation A3 Moebius band Animation A4 Two Moebius bands forming a kleinian bottle Nella costruzione di una bottiglia di Klein, ho mostrato che per ottenere il necessario scambio destra-sinistra nella seconda saldatura occorre effettuare una autopenetrazione. Si può tuttavia ottenere un simile scambio tagliando un cilindro e richiudendo la superficie dopo una torsione a 180°, come mostra l’animazione A3. Se ne origina una figura topologica chiamata Anello di Moebius; questa strana figura ha una singola faccia ed un singolo bordo. Dalla congiunzione di due anelli di Moebius lungo il loro unico bordo, otteniamo una bottiglia di Klein, come l’animazione A4 può aiutare a visualizzare. click to enlarge Figure 37 Marcel Duchamp, Sculpture for Traveling, 1918 Nella realizzazione di Traveller’s sculpture del 1918 (Fig. 37), Duchamp sembra utilizzare una tecnica che richiama abbastanza da vicino le operazioni descritte sopra. E’ noto che incollò fra loro diverse strisce di gomma colorata irregolari, tagliate da cuffie da bagno. L’oggetto originale è andata perso e quindi occorre riferirsi alle storiche fotografie ed alla descrizione che Duchamp stesso ne fece.Nelle fotografie storiche sembra di intravedere con qualche difficoltà sia autopenetrazioni che torsioni; la descrizione dell’opera che Duchamp fece a Jean Crotti (Effemeridi, 8 luglio 1918) parla di strisce di gomma “incollate assieme, ma non piatte” (corsivo mio); penso che alludesse proprio a qualche torsione (come quella necessaria per l’anello di Moebius) prima dell’incollatura. Dalla stessa fonte apprendiamo che Duchamp considerava la Scultura da viaggio più interessante della pitturaTu m’. 4b. Bottiglia in Arte in Bottiglia click to enlarge Figure 38 Marcel Duchamp, 50 c.c. of Paris Air, 1918 Figure 39 Marcel Duchamp, Pulled at Four Pins, 1915 Jean Clair (2000) afferma che Duchamp sicuramente conosceva la bottiglia di Klein e le sue importanti proprietà topologiche, ed indica nella nota precedentemente analizzata un possibile riferimento ad essa. Inoltre ipotizza che l’ampolla dell’Air de Paris del 1919 (Fig. 38) possa riferirsi ad essa (sia iconograficamente che per i problemi che essa pone). Io credo che questa osservazione mantenga la sua validità anche per altre opere di Duchamp. Come primo ulteriore esempio pensiamo al readymade Tirato a lucido del 1915 (Fig. 39), una semplice cappa di camino. Nel disegno del 1964 che ne fece Duchamp, nella parte alta della forma vediamo una curvatura che ricorda quella della ampolla citata; per di più dobbiamo pensare che la cappa di camino serve per aiutare la circolazione convettiva dell’aria fra interno ed esterno. click to enlarge Figure 40 Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917/1964 Consideriamo ora la famosa Fontana del 1917 (Fig. 40). A me pare che essa possa essere vista come una sezione trasversale della bottiglia di Klein. Il collo per la connessione col tubo dell’acqua (in primo piano nella fotografia) sarebbe l’equivalente del collo della bottiglia di Klein, che poi rituffandosi nel proprio ventre (qui la parte sezionata) andrebbe a ricongiungersi con i fori di scarico dell’orinatoio (corrispondenti al fondo introflesso della bottiglia di Klein). Di fatto la doppia funzione come fontana (dispositivo erogatore, orientato all’esterno) e come orinatoio (dispositivo per raccogliere, orientato all’interno) sembra una prima conferma di questa lettura. Spesso si è affermato che la firma R. Mutt (vale a dire Mutt. R., ovvero Mutt Er) starebbe per Madre (Mutter in tedesco). Ciò annetterebbe nuovo senso all’associazione fra la Fontanae la Bottiglia di Klein. Infatti la Madre è colei che potenzialmente ha nel ventre la sua progenie; il suo grembo, cioè il suo interno, si estroflette esternamente attraverso la sua progenie, che a sua volta contiene progenie al proprio interno, che presto verrà estroflessa…. Nel presente di una donna è contenuto il suo futuro; in questa contemporaneità di presente (interno) e futuro (esterno) che si esprime in una sorta di estroflessione temporale, è possibile cogliere una analogia con le proprietà della bottiglia di Klein. Se accettiamo questo punto di vista, allora possiamo anche comprendere la criptica nota della Scatola Verde: Non si ha che: per femmina il pisciatoio e se ne vive. Queste considerazioni proiettano a loro volta nuovo senso sul ready-made Ritratto di Famiglia. Abbiamo già ricordato che Clair ravvede nella sagoma ritagliata le parvenze dellaFontana. Questo confronto è in effetti coerente con le osservazioni fatte sopra. Di fatto la Madre (con l’ultima nata) sta al vertice della composizione. L’esclusione della prole maschile evidenzia la continuità della linea femminile della discendenza. Il maschio è solo un accessorio riproduttivo: il padre è infatti in una posizione periferica. Perché allora la presenza del giovane Marcel in posizione centrale? La teoria della pulsione di Marcel per la sorella potrebbe essere una possibile spiegazione, ma io penso che il ruolo di Marcel sia semplicemente quello di un osservatore. Infine voglio ricordare che la sagoma della Fontana è talvolta vista come un simbolo del Buddha. Se così fosse, e se volessimo mantenere l’analogia kleiniana, la mia opinione è che non dovremmo pensare all’immagine del Buddha seduto in posizione eretta, ma a quella in cui egli appare completamente ripiegato su se stesso, sprofondato in quella meditazione interiore che dischiude le porte alla contemplazione dell’universo. Nel saggio citato sopra,Rosen suggerisce che “la “quarta dimensione” necessaria per completare la formazione della bottiglia di Klein implica la dimensione interiore dell’essere umano; non è solo un’altra arena per la riflessione, qualcosa che ci si pone davanti; piuttosto è ripiegata dentro di noi, implicando le profondità preriflessive della nostra soggettività”. click to enlarge Figure 41 Marcel Duchamp, Boîte-Series G, 1968 Duchamp più volte afferma che tre particolari ready-made sintetizzano il mondo del Grande Vetro, e nella Boite-en-valise(Fig. 41) essi affiancano verticalmente la riproduzione dell’opus maior. Si tratta (procedendo dall’alto) di: 1. Air de Paris, (collocata all’altezza della Sposa), 2. Pieghevole da viaggio del 1916 (la fodera di di una macchina da scrivere Underwood) posto all’altezza dell’orizzonte, in corrispondenza al vestito della Sposa; 3.Fontana , posta all’altezza dell’apparecchio scapolo. Non desidero qui fare una nuova esegesi di queste associazioni fra i tre readymades e le corrispondenti parti del grande vetro: personalmente trovo quella di Shearer, 1997, perfettamente convincente. Voglio invece sottolineare che sia alla sommità che alla base di questa colonna di ready-made stanno due oggetti riconducibili alla topologia della bottiglia di Klein (con qualche forzatura anche il ready-made intermedio potrebbe essere ricondotto alle tematiche topologiche degli altri due: infatti la copertura allude ad un ben delimitato spazio interno, che tuttavia, a causa della mancanza del fondo, non ha una ben definita distinzione rispetto all’esterno, proprio come nello strano prisma di Tu m’; inoltre l’oggetto è fatto di gomma, quindi e soggetto alle deformazioni continue dellageometria di gomma, come i matematici chiamano la topologia). Questa circostanza suggerisce di riconsiderare attentamente le immagini della Sposa, la sua storia iconografica (i disegni e i dipinti del 1912, sul soggetto della Vergine e della Sposa), nonché la rappresentazione degli scapoli. click to enlarge Figure 42 Marcel Duchamp, The Bride, 1912 Figure 43 Marcel Duchamp,Sketch of the Wasp apparatus, Green Box, 1934 In effetti, soprattutto la Sposa (Fig. 42), e particolarmente nel dipinto del 1912, è caratterizzata da una topologia quantomeno ardua. Possiamo osservare un intrico di tubi o vasi, connessi da aste e stantuffi che attraversando diaframmi si riversano in tasche, si gonfiano in ampolle, si estroflettono in sacche, per poi defluire in canali. E’ poi interessante notare che nessuna delle parti di questa composizione inizia e termina chiaramente da qualche parte. In particolare nella Scatola Verde troviamo uno schizzo, completo di didascalie, che rappresenta l’apparato Vespa (Fig. 43): è una sorta di cono, penetrato da un cilindro che lo percorre internamente ed alla sommità fuoriesce dal cono, pur rimanendone incapsulato in una specie di nicchia. E’ difficile vedere in questi intrichi delle strutture che ricalchino alla lettera quella della bottiglia di Klein, ma sicuramente l’ambiguità di questo ibrido fra l’organismo dissezionato ed il motore meccanico suggerisce una topologia contorta senza chiara distinzione fra dentro e fuori, con le sue labirintiche autopenetrazioni ed il suo complesso sistema circuitale. Del resto anche le note che descrivono l’incredibile anatomia della Sposa condividono la stessa caratteristica di labirintica e circolare impenetrabilità (da questo punto di vista possiamo cogliere una sottile continuità fra il dipinto della sposa e la successiva Scultura da viaggio). Anche nel caso della Sposa, come nei precedenti, l’analogia con la bottiglia di Klein può essere importante nella misura in cui si accorda coi significati comunemente accettati dell’opera o, ancora meglio, se può essere portatrice di nuovo senso. Ora, la contorta topologia della Sposa rispecchia la fondamentale caratteristica di chiusura sua e dell’intero Vetro: sia la Sposa che anche l’apparecchio Scapolo sono macchine autoreferenziali totalmente chiuse su se stesse; i cicli della loro attività sono di fatto drammaticamente rivolti a se stessi, come lo stesso Duchamp esplicitamente avverte in una nota della Scatola Verde: –Vita lenta — –Circolo vizioso — –Onanismo- Così, lo schema di funzionamento del Grande Vetro è un grande percorso chiuso, un labirintico circuito anulare. In particolare vi è un aspetto della Sposa, descritto in una nota della Scatola Verde, che esplicitamente ci riconduce alle tematiche della Madre discussi sopra. Duchamp dice: “La Sposa è alla base un motore. Ma prima di essere un motore che trasmette la sua timida potenza — essa è la potenza-timida stessa.” Qui Duchamp propone nuovamente l’idea della Sposa che è contemporaneamente sia uovo (potenza timida) che veicolo per perpetrare l’eternità dell’uovo (motore che trasmette potenza timida), cioè Madre. Duchamp ha ribadito più volte anche con diverse parole questo importante concetto, per esempio dicendo che la Sposa è parte delVetro , ma contemporaneamente è il Vetro stesso. Questa paradossale identità fra parte e tutto (che abbiamo già osservato a proposito della Vespa della Sposa) corrispondente perfettamente alla paradossale identità fra dentro e fuori delle forme kleiniane di Duchamp 4c. La macchina autopoietica Il tema del circolo chiuso autoreferenziale connesso al tema della autocreazione ha senza dubbio suggestive e affascinanti analogie con la macchina autopoietica di Maturana e Varela: “Una macchina autopoietica è una macchina organizzata (definita come un unità) come una rete di processi di produzione (trasformazione e distruzione) di componenti che produce le componenti che (i) attraverso le loro interazioni e trasformazioni continuamente rigenerano e realizzano la rete di processi (relazioni) che li ha prodotti; e (ii) la costituiscono (la macchina) come una concreta unità nello spazio in cui esse (le componenti) esistono specificando il dominio topologico delle sue realizzazioni come una tale rete” (Maturana e Varela 78-79). Questa definizione abbastanza difficile necessita almeno di qualche breve spiegazione. La macchina autopoietica descritta dai due autori, in quanto sistema, è composta di parti (o unità) e relazioni fra le parti. Parti e relazioni costituiscono la struttura del sistema, e sono descritte da un osservatore (un essere umano) che può operare distinzioni e specificare ciò che distingue come unità e relazioni. Egli nota che in tale macchina le parti e le relazioni producono il mantenimento e la continua rigenerazione delle parti e delle reciproche relazioni stesse. Una macchina autopoietica è caratterizzata da chiusura operazionale: chiusura non significa che il sistema autopoietico sia chiuso (cioè che non abbia scambi di energia e materia con l’esterno) ma che i comportamenti del sistema nell’interazione con l’esterno sono totalmente autoreferenziali; ovvero, la risposta di un sistema agli input esterni dipende esclusivamentedallo stato interno del sistema stesso e non dagli input esterni. Esprimiamo questi fatti dicendo che un sistema autopoietico è strutturalmente determinato. In altre parole un sistema chiuso operazionalmente, risponde a una perturbazione del suo equilibrio riorganizzandosi in modo da porsi in un nuovo possibile stato stabile di coerenza interna, compatibile col proprio mantenimento e col nuovo contesto prodotto dalla perturbazione. Il comportamento di un tale sistema è perciò definito autocomportamento. Secondo questa teoria, la ricorsiva interazione fra due sistemi fa sì che essi co-evolvano plasticamente rimodellando i propri stati di coerenza interna, in modo da creare un nuovo stato di reciproca coerenza. Questo processo si chiama accoppiamento strutturale. Nella visione di Maturana e Varela il processo della cognizione è caratterizzato dai medesimi assunti. Varela (1985) ne specifica schematicamente le caratteristiche, mettendo i sistemi autonomi (cioè i sistemi dotati di chiusura operazionale) in opposizione a quellieteronomi della concezione tradizionale: – logica di fondo: coerenza interna (vs. corrispondenza); -il tipo di organizzazione: chiusura operazionale ed autocomportamenti (vs. input/output); – il modo di interazione: produzione di un mondo (vs. interazione istruttiva, rappresentazione). (155) Dopo questa presentazione necessariamente breve del concetto di macchina autopoietica, riassumiamo quegli aspetti che sono più interessanti dal punto di vista delle argomentazioni di questo articolo. Un sistema autopoietico è caratterizzato da alcuni principali ingredienti: autoreferenzialità, ricorsione, chiusura, circolarità, capacità di autocreazione, autorganizzazione, autocomportamenti, autoproduzione di senso. Abbiamo visto sopra che questi ingredienti sono ampiamente diffusi nell’opera di Duchamp, anche se spesso in una forma embrionale. Inoltre consideriamo ora che la bottiglia di Klein, che abbiamo riconosciuto in diverse opere di Duchamp, è talvolta usata per simbolizzare i sistemi autopoietici a causa della sua autopenetrazione circolare: vedi ad esempio Palmer (2000), che ha anche sottolineato come la bottiglia illustra perfettamente quella particolare relazione fra parti e tutto che abbiamo osservato precedentemente. Così la nozione di sistema autopoietico permette di guardare all’opera di Duchamp ed alGrande Vetro in particolare secondo una prospettiva del tutto inedita: il Grande Vetro ci presenta le parti (o unità) di un sistema estremamente complesso; le note della Scatola Verde prescrivono invece le relazioni fra le parti del Vetro. Il Vetro e laScatola costituiscono una struttura di un sistema ermeticamente chiuso. L’ermeneuta-osservatore opera una descrizione si questa struttura. La descrizione ha luogo in un contesto di accoppiamento strutturale fra l’ermeneuta stesso ed il sistema Scatola-Vetro. La cosa interessante in questa interazione è che le parti del sistema osservato sembrano esibire la straordinaria capacità di riorganizzarsi plasticamente in sempre nuovi stati di coerenza interna, proprio come la mente dell’ermeneuta osservatore durante il processo cognitivo della lettura del Grande Vetro. Ciò è probabilmente dovuto alla complessità (non banalità) del sistema Vetro-Scatola. In altri termini io guardo alla coppiaVetro- Scatola come ad un sistema ermeticamente chiuso ed autoreferenziale, che nell’interazione con l’ermeneuta sembra essere in grado di ricostruire e rimodellare se stesso ricorsivamente, co- evolvendo col mondo dell’ermeneuta; questo reciproco adattamento crea nuovi mondi, cioè produce nuovo senso, nuove ermeneutiche, ed ermeneutiche di ermeneutiche. Mi piace leggere in questa prospettiva le suggestive immagini di Madeleine Gins (2000): D. drinks M. drinking B.–drinks-toasts. ( …) Symbols that gaze back at ...... Forests of gazing-back symbols- [D. beve M. che beve B.-drinks-toasts (…) Simboli che guardano fisso indietro a ...... Foreste di simboli che guardano fisso indietro–] La capacità infinita di produzione di senso (che abbiamo già notato in piccolo negli esercizi linguistici dei giochi di parole di Duchamp) è forse la vera grande opera alchemica realizzata con il Grande Vetro. Nella prospettiva della macchina autopoietica, paradossalmente, proprio la chiusura impenetrabile del complesso sistema Vetro-Scatola può dare conto non solo dell’incredibile numero delle sue ermeneutiche, ma, sorprendentemente, anche del fatto che nessuna di esse può essere esclusa dalle altre, e che tutte, sebbene differenti, sono mutuamente compatibili, perché ciascuna di esse è effettivamente basata su uno dei possibili stati stabili di coerenza interna del sistema. Analoga osservazione ha fatto anche Clair, quando osservava che nessuna delle ermeneutiche precedenti, da quella di Breton a quella di Schwarz, contraddiceva la sua nuova lettura del Vetro in relazione al romanzo di Pawlowsky Viaggio nel paese della quarta dimensione (103). Questo è indubbiamente uno dei maggiori motivi di fascino del pensiero e dell’opera di Duchamp, enigmatica e non finita, cioè capace di una infinita (auto)produzione di senso. 5. Conclusioni E’ possibile ravvisare nel corso delle vicende artistiche della prima metà del 900 un percorso, non ancora esaurientemente esplorato: quello della graduale emergenza di una nuova sensibilità, di una nuova prospettiva di interpretazione del mondo, di un nuovo paradigma, che scientificamente ha trovato completa espressione nelle cosiddette Scienze della complessità, definitivamente affermate negli anni 70. Col termine di Scienze della complessità, e seguendo Hedrich (1999), intendo riferirmi 1) alla Teoria dei Sistemi Dinamici (TSD), che descrive e caratterizza il comportamento di sistemi di equazioni differenziali non lineari, e 2) agli ambiti applicativi che ammettono tali modelli matematici come descrizione appropriata. Hedrich classifica anche questi ambiti applicativi in base alla loro distanza dal nucleo concettuale centrale della TSD: a) nel primo guscio, immediatamente contiguo al nucleo centrale della TSD, troviamo quei settori delle scienze empiriche che si occupano direttamente dello studio, nei differenti contesti, dei fenomeni dell’instabilità dinamica, del caos deterministico e della dipendenza sensibile dalle condizioni iniziali; b) nel guscio successivo troviamo le teorie scientifiche che riguardano modelli astratti di sistemi complessi, come gli automi cellulari, le reti neurali e la geometria frattale; c) nell’ultimo guscio troviamo infine le teorie che secondo diversi punti di vista si occupano dell’autorganizzazione, come la termodinamica non lineare di Prigogine, la sinergetica di Haken, l’autorganizzazione molecolare di Eigen, l’Autopoiesi di Maturana e Varela. In precedenti articoli (Giunti 2001a, 2001b) ho precisato il senso di questa ricerca, focalizzando l’attenzione su alcune delle manifestazioni fenomeniche peculiari del comportamento di sistemi complessi; numerosi artisti (con maggiore o minore consapevolezza) condividono una particolare attenzione per queste manifestazioni e tendono ad esprimerle nella loro opera; queste manifestazioni hanno a che fare con concetti quali feedback circolare come meccanismo causale di base, ricorsività, autoreferenzialità, autorganizzazione, frattali, topologie complesse, instabilità dinamica, dipendenza sensibile dalle condizioni iniziali, caos deterministico. Questi aspetti sono così intrinsecamente legati l’uno all’altro che quando si manifestano (magari solo a livello embrionale) la presenza di uno implica quasi automaticamente la presenza di molti (o tutti) gli altri. La comune sensibilità per queste manifestazioni fenomeniche dei sistemi complessi permette di stabilire legami profondi ed inattesi fra artisti che altrimenti sembrerebbero abitare pianeti totalmente differenti, come Duchamp, Klee od Escher. Per quanto riguarda Duchamp, le mie considerazioni precedenti si sono limitate ai gusci b) e c) della classificazione enunciata sopra. Ciò non significa che non sia possibile stabilire significativi punti di contatto fra il pensiero e l’opera di Duchamp e le teorie scientifiche riferibili al guscio a). E’ vero l’esatto contrario: soprattutto le idee di instabilità dinamica e di dipendenza sensibile dalle condizioni iniziali costituiscono l’aspetto più immediatamente evidente e di fatto il più abbondantemente esplorato (si consideri ad esempio il Simposio di Harvard: Il caso di Duchamp e Poincaré, 1999). In ogni caso, a mio giudizio, un più dettagliato studio sul concetto dicaos presso Duchamp sarebbe necessario, perché talvolta è confuso dai commentatori con l’idea di casualità (ovviamente presente in Duchamp) che però è un concetto differente, anche se collegato a quello di caos. Nel precedente paragrafo ho associato il Grande Vetro (e più in generale l’opera di Duchamp) al concetto di autopoiesi. Si deve considerare tale relazione per il suo giusto significato, cioè, appunto, è una semplice associazione e non assolutamente una identità: non sostengo che l’opera di Duchamp sia una macchina autopoietica; essa tuttavia manifesta caratteristiche le quali possono essere ben descritte attraverso alcuni aspetti della teoria di Maturana e Varela. In particolare voglio sottolineare che questo accostamento non intende porsi come una nuova ermeneutica sostitutiva di qualcuna o tutte le precedenti. Al contrario desidero sostenere che questa prospettiva di lettura fornisce qualche elemento per comprendere l’inesauribile ricchezza delle ermeneutiche possibili e la loro compatibilità reciproca, sia per quelle passate e presenti, sia per quelle che (sono sicuro) si aggiungeranno nel futuro. Infine, per quanto mi riguarda, la sintesi di come vedo io le cose, è nel titolo di questo articolo: R. come Recursion (Ricorsione); rO. S. (S. Or.) come Self Organisation (Autorganizzazione); E. come Eigenbehaviours (Autocomportamenti); Sel. come Self reference (Autoreferenzialità); A. come Autopoiesis (Autopoiesi); Vy come Life (Vita). Ringraziamenti Desidero esprimere il mio ringraziamento a Gi, mia moglie, per i suoi suggerimenti. Voglio anche ringraziare l’amico Paolo Mazzoldi per la consulenza entomologica e per la supervisione per la correttezza della traduzione. Infine sono grato a Rhonda Roland Shearer e Stephen Jay Gould per aver condiviso importanti informazioni circa i Tre Rammendi Tipo, che mi hanno indotto a modificare alcune affermazioni nel presente articolo. Nota Le citazioni delle note della Scatola Verde sono tratte dalla traduzione pubblicata da Maurizio Calvesi in Duchamp Invisibile. (313-348). Bibliographies Bateson, G. Mind and Nature. A Necessary Unity. New York: Bantam Books, 1980. Calvesi, M. Duchamp Invisibile. Roma: Officina edizioni, 1975. Clair, J. Marcel Duchamp. Il grande illusionista. Bologna: Cappelli, 1979. – – – . “Duchamp at the Turn of the Cenuturies.” Tout-Fait 1.3. News (Dec. 2000) Cook, V. Chomsky’s Universal Grammar. An introduction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988. Duchamp, M. The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors Even [a.k.a. The Green Box]. Typographic version by Richard Hamilton. Trans. George Heard Hamilton. Stuttgart, London, Reykjavik: Edition Hansjorg Mayer, 1976. Gins, M. “Costructing Life,”Tout-fait 1.2. Art & Literature (May 2000) Giunti, R. “Paul Klee on Computer. Biomathematical Models Help Us to Understand His Work.” The Visual Mind 2. Ed. Emmer, M. In print (2001a). – – – . A Complex History. Are Klee and Escher Apart Cases? Submitted (2001b). Ghezzi, C. and Mandrioli, D. Informatica teorica. Milano: CLUP, 1989. Gough-Cooper, J. and Caumont, J. Effemeridi su e intorno a Marcel Duchamp e Rrose Sélavy. Bologna: Bompiani, 1993. Gould, S.J. “The Substantial Ghost: Towards a General Exegesis of Duchamp’s Artful Wordplays.” Tout-fait 1.2. Articles (May 2000) Gould, S. J. and Shearer, R. R. “Boats and Deckchairs.” Tout-fait 1.1. Articles (Dec. 1999) Grishman, R. Computational Linguistic. An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Gurney, K.Neural Networks. 1996 Hedrich R. “The Sciences of Complexity: A Kuhnian Revolution in Sciences?” Epistemologia XII.1 (1999) Henderson, L.D. The Fourth Dimension and Non- Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. – – – . “Marcel Duchamp’s The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes (1912) and the Invisible World of Electron.” Weber Studies 14.1 (1997) Mandelbrot, B. Les objets fractals. Paris: Flammarion, 1975. Maturana H. “Biology of language: The Epistemology of Reality.” Psychology and Biology of Language and Thought: Essays in Honor of Eric Lenneberg. Eds. Miller, G. A. and Lenneberg. New York: Academic Press, 1978. 27-63. Maturana, H. and Varela, F.Autopoiesis and Cognition. Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1980. Palmer, K. Intertwining of Duality and Nonduality. 2000 Rosen, S. M. Wholeness as the Body of Paradox. 1997 Schwarz, A. La sposa messa a nudo in Marcel Duchamp, anche. Torino: Einaudi. 1974. Shearer, R. R. “Marcel Duchamp’s Impossible Bed and Other ‘Not’ Readymade Objects: A Possible Route of Influence from Art to Science [Part I & II].” Art & Academe, 10: 1 & 2. (Fall 1997 & Fall 1998): 26-62; see also – – – .”Marcel Duchamp: A Readymade Case for Collecting Objects of Our Cultural Heritage Along with Works of Art.” Tout-fait 1.3. Collections (Dec. 2000) Shearer, R. R. and Gould S. J. “Hidden in Plain Sight: Duchamp’s 3 Standard Stoppages, More Truly a ‘Stoppage’ (An Invisible Mending) Than We Ever Realized.” Tout-fait 1.1. News (Dec. 1999) Varela, F. “Complessità del vivente e autonomia del cervello.” La sfida della complessità. Eds. Bocchi G. and Ceruti M. Milano: Feltrinelli, 1985. 141-157. Figs. 1-3, 7-11, 13-17, 18-22, 24, 25, 30-32, 34, 37, 38-43 ©2002 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. All rights reserved. “Macaroni repaired is ready for Thursday….” Marcel Duchamp as Conservator “…while not as world-shaking as war, [Duchamp’s art] certainly has outlived the latter. The survival of inanimate objects, of works of art through great upheavals, is one of my consolations. My justification, if need be.” (Man Ray, Self-Portrait,1963) Marcel Duchamp’s reputation involves a profound insouciance, and an apparent disregard for his own artworks. One of modernism’s most enduring myths is that, once an artist creates a work, it is launched into the world and endures on its own. James Joyce articulated this ideal in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916): “The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent paring his fingernails.” Joyce’s meaning is more deeply imbedded in notions of reception and the autonomy of the text, to be sure, but it can also be extended to describe an artist’s post-creative strategies. Indeed, Joyce was notorious for his endless revisions and for the extensive post- publication relationship he maintained with his works. Similarly, throughout his life, Duchamp maintained an intimate relationship with them, personally conserving, repairing, cleaning and preserving them. Indeed, such behaviors accounted for much of his private activity in the second half of his career. click to enlarge Illustration 1 Photograph taken in Katherine Dreier’s West Redding, Connecticut, home; summer 1936. A photograph from 1936, taken in Katherine Dreier’s Connecticut home, suggests this more prosaic side (SeeIllustration 1). Wearing a pullover rather than his usually natty clothes, a five-o’clock-shadowed Duchamp stands wearily next to the Large Glass (1915-23) which he had just spent weeks reconstructing. This image, as well as Man Ray’s quote above, begs an interesting question. How is it that the unconventional and often fragile works of an artist who publicly eschewed those art world institutions that would normally be trusted to conserve them-dealers, galleries, museums-have come down to us in relatively fine condition, or indeed, at all? (1) Duchamp’s acquaintances knew him to be inordinately concerned with issues of conservation, no matter whose works were involved. Georgia O’Keeffe’s first meeting with Duchamp was memorable for her not because of his outrageous behavior but because of his sober concern for artworks. I was seated at a table very near [a] painting drinking something or other out of a glass and I finished it and put the glass in front of me. Duchamp walked over to me and very slowly took the glass and put it some other place away from the painting. He said that was not a good place for that glass of wine. That is how I met Marcel Duchamp. (2) He was consulted in all matters pertaining to conservation. He arranged for the restoration of twenty-one damaged pictures by his brother-in-law Jean Crotti, and was then asked to have their Renoir paintings restored towards a new valuation of them. (3) Duchamp demonstrated particularly selfless devotion to the artworks of his friend and patron, Katherine Dreier. In 1951, at her request, Duchamp visited a church in Garden City, New York, to examine her 1905 muralThe Good Shepherd. (4) Duchamp wished to supervise the restoration himself and, after inspecting it on a ladder with a “search light”–Duchamp was sixty- four-years-old at the time–he suggested no extensive restoration except the removal of the varnish and its subsequent waxing. ‘Waxing is much better than varnishing,’ he opined.(5) Duchamp’s judgment, it turns out, was technically sound. He eventually employed the services of the painter Fritz Glarner (1899-1972) who, he believed, was “an expert at cleaning paintings.” (6) After viewing the mural together, Glarner’s restoration took seven days, two hundred dollars, and Duchamp’s arrangements to draw money from a foundation set up for this very purpose. (7) Duchamp’s thoroughness in conserving his friend’s artwork–a piece that he must have known had little historical significance–is extraordinary. Moreover, he promised Dreier that, after this project was over, he would take her portrait of her father to New York for repair. (8) In startling contrast to his usual heightened concern for artworks, when Jackson Pollock’s Mural (1943, University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City) would not fit the space for which it was painted–in Peggy Guggenheim’s apartment–Duchamp and David Hare cut off eight inches to make it fit. (9) This might be explained by his chill disinterest in abstraction, and by his pragmatism in solving problems. But it had been Duchamp who convinced Guggenheim to give Pollock his first one-man show, and it was he who suggested that Pollock paint the mural on canvas rather than directly on the wall so that it could be exhibited publicly. As one might expect, whenever Duchamp was engaged in buying and selling artworks he was especially attentive to their condition. For instance, he sprang into action when the collector Jacques Doucet expressed interest in a slightly damaged Picabia collage, Plumes(ca. 1923-27), made of feathers, macaroni, cane and corn plasters; it was one of the works from the ’80 Picabias’ exhibition at the Hôtel Istria (Paris) which Duchamp had organized. After personally repairing it, he wired Doucet: “Macaroni repaired is ready for Thursday….”(10) And about the Picabia works he himself owned, also made of unconventional materials, Duchamp told Doucet that he would not consider selling them “except in conditions guaranteeing the precious side of these things.” (11) In his capacity as dealer for Brancusi’s sculptures, Duchamp was often faced with delicate situations involving condition. Once, a small crack had been discovered in the white marbleBird in Space which was in transit to the 1933 Brummer Gallery exhibition. Characteristically resourceful, Duchamp found a way to exhibit it so that the crack was not noticeable. (12) And he was particularly watchful of the Brancusis in Dreier’s collection. He reminded her to move “the marble bird and the soft stone piece [the base]” of the BrancusiMaïastra out of her West Redding, Connecticut, garden for the winter. It had been Duchamp himself who had sold it to her. (13) Still, he realized that conservation was not its own end; it was a function of proffering sales, too. Years later, Duchamp advised Roché to accept an offer for Brancusi’s La Colonne sans fin which had stood for a long period outside Dreier’s home. After it had split in the back, “restorers” had painted it black. (14) Duchamp’s concern for his own pieces is first of all apparent in his careful selection of materials. Although he used an enormously expanded range of media, he did so with an abiding concern for their durability and for protecting them. Early in his career Duchamp fantasized about the use of such unconventional materials as toothpaste, brilliantine, cold cream, shoe polish, and chocolate on glass. But he would only do so, according to his notes, if the works made from them could be cleaned. (15) His attitude had not changed when, four decades later, he used talcum powder and chocolate for a delicate landscape, Moonlight on the Bay at Basswood [Minnesota] (1953). He may have turned to these materials in the first place since he had no traditional artist’s materials on hand, and perhaps to compensate for the conventional nature of the work (a fairly straightforward landscape). In any case, his concern with the work’s well-being manifest itself when, within an hour of offering the recently made landscape to his patron, Duchamp “hastily” made a frame for the image “to protect the fragile surface from brushing against something and being marred.” (16) He later expressed his worries about the piece saying that he “hoped it will last and the poor chocolate, I’m afraid, will disappear or get white.” (17) Modernists using non-traditional materials have often demonstrated obsessive concern about the condition of their pieces. Arthur Dove (1880-1946), for instance, whose dazzlingly advanced collages employ a broad range of unconventional materials, worried about the longevity of his works. Towards this end he read extensively on the subject of permanency, grinding his own colors, priming and stretching his own canvases, and even making his own pastels. (18) As a painter, Duchamp had showed a decided preference for high-quality products. Robert Lebel observed that the artist’s “scrupulous study of paints and their properties led him to select the German Behrendt brand which he used exclusively.” (19) Duchamp established this preference–because of its reputation for permanence–during his brief Munich sojourn (1911-12) on the advice of his German friend, Max Bergmann. The Bride (1912) is painted with these pigments, which were, as Calvin Tomkins corroborates, “the best brand available.” (20) Indeed, Duchamp lived long enough to test their quality. When his forty-year-old Portrait of Dr. Dumouchel (1910) arrived at the Arensberg’s very dirty, the artist assured them that they “will have no difficulty” cleaning it. He was confident that the restorer would recognize that it was made with Behrendt paints. Afterwards, Duchamp smugly confirmed he “was sure that Dumouchel [would] be surprisingly fresh after Miss Adler’s shower,” (21) “shower,” of course, being Duchamp’s anthropomorphizing euphemism for a cleaning. Looking back at paintings made decades earlier, he was generally pleased that many of them had remained stable and fresh looking. Referring to the pigments in his Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), for instance, Duchamp observed (1966) that “they’ve behaved very well, and that’s very important.” (22) Similarly, he had once boasted to Jasper Johns (1960) that the lacquered dust in the Large Glass was “just as good today as it was thirty years ago.” (23)Duchamp had beamed about the physical condition of that work to another interviewer a few years earlier. “Thank God, the color still looks fresh. It’s not a faded flower, not like an old master in a museum….” (24) Such was his sensitivity to materials that when he was asked his opinion about the future of painting, he often took it to mean the medium rather than the genre. “One can forget oil painting,” Duchamp said in a late interview. “It discolours. It needs repairing all the time. Yes, one can find something else.”(25) Though his response may have been a defensive strategy with which to sidestep empty speculation about then- current art trends, it is nonetheless interesting that it took this form. When Duchamp critiqued the commercial end of art, it was often by addressing the vulnerability of art objects: Artists [in France are] selling their stuff like so many beans. Although much money has been derived from widespread sales, posterity will never see a great deal of the work we rave about because of frequent use of bad pigments. (26) His resentment at easy sales is here expressed as a remonstrance about bad workmanship. At this particular moment his anxiety about the longevity of art may have been particularly acute. His public career had by this time greatly diminished and, more troubling still, Duchamp had just seen the destruction wrought upon hisLarge Glass first-hand. Duchamp first considered using glass as a support in his artworks in part because it promised longer preservation for the pigments. (27) After a short while, paintings always get dirty, yellow, or old because of oxidation. Now, my own colors were completely protected, the glass being a means for keeping them both sufficiently pure and unchanged for rather a long time. I immediately applied this glass idea to The Bride [the Large Glass]. (28) Duchamp’s glass works required careful, sustained maintenance because of its fragility and since glass naturally reveals its dirt more conspicuously. (29) Duchamp’s friend H.-P. Roché remembered that the Large Glass was “washable on both sides under the shower,” and, as opposed to canvas, acquires “no dust on its backside.”(30) Still, such cleanings must have been complicated affairs. Duchamp once wrote Jacques Doucet to say that cleaning Glider Containing a Water Mill in Neighbouring Metals (1913-15), which Doucet had recently purchased, “will take me 2 or 3 afternoons.” (31) click to enlarge Illustration 2 9 Malic Molds,1914-15, painted glass, wire and sheet lead. Teeny Duchamp Collection,France. Though they may have preserved the materials applied to them, and though they may have been cleanable, Duchamp’s glass works were predictably vulnerable and underwent a dizzying history of damage and repair. For instance, the Nine Malic Moulds (1914-15) was first broken when it was placed against an armchair on castors which rolled away (SeeIllustration 2). Left temporarily at the apartment of a friend, Roché noticed later the same year that the work had scratched the piano. After it cracked once more, this time in the possession of another friend who placed it too close to the fireplace, Duchamp and Roché took it to the well-known framer Pierre Legrain. (32) It seems its greatest danger came from the casual treatment of the people who putatively cared for it. This must have been a sobering lesson for Duchamp who became even more attentive to his works’ conditions in the years that followed. Decades later, he again turned his attention to the long-term safety of Nine Malic Moulds. “I was wondering if you could have your glass reframed in a manner more solid and definitive,” he wrote to Roché in Paris who now owned the piece. He outlined a complex process whereby its custom-made frame could be removed, the glass cleaned, and a new frame put around it. “Leave the mastic to dry several months without moving the glass,” Duchamp insisted. About a month later, he wrote again, repeating his instructions for strengthening the piece and conveying his concerns for its future: “If the glass must travel, it is essential that it arrives in perfect shape ‘for centuries to come.'” (33) Given Duchamp’s concern for his artworks, one wonders if he would have made any of glass had he known their fate. Charles Demuth thought it so obviously unwise that he once lamented, “Dear Marcel, having used glass so often seems to have added difficulties for the Future–he would, of course.” (34) After the debacle of destruction and repair engendered by the Large Glass, he never made another work in that medium. The major work of Duchamp’s early career, the Large Glass (1915-23), had only been exhibited once (Société Anonyme Exhibition, 1927) before it was broken en route from the Brooklyn Museum to Katherine Dreier’s home in West Redding, Connecticut. (35) Dreier conveyed the terrible news in Lille in 1933, where, over lunch, he could be expected to take the news with some restraint. Years later Duchamp recalled that, in order to spare Dreier’s feelings, he had gallantly expressed “a reaction of charity instead of despair.” (36) She may have been especially contrite since another of Duchamp’s glass works,To Be Looked at, (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close To, For Almost an Hour (1918), had earlier been broken while it was in her possession. Years after her death, Duchamp candidly described the broken Large Glass in painfully descriptive terms as “marmalade.” (37) One wonders why Duchamp did not simply abandon the wrecked Large Glass at this point considering the extent of the damage and since his work on it had all along been fitful and inconclusive. And if the transparency of the glass were vital to the work, the cracks would severely compromise that. Why then, did Duchamp, notorious for his bored disengagement with art, go to such great lengths to restore it? Having seen the devastated Large Glass in the autumn of 1933, he had some idea of the immense effort required for its repair. He informed Dreier of his plans: he had arranged to be in America for nearly three months, had studied an “invisible glue” with which to repair the work, and had conceived a plan to mount the reconstructed work between two heavy plates of glass. “Although very heavy,” Duchamp speculated, “it would make a solid[emphasis his; a gentle barb to Dreier?] piece of furniture when in place.” (38) Bearing a certain amount of responsibility for the damaged to the Large Glass, Dreier paid for everything connected to its repair, including materials and contracted labor. (39) She assured Duchamp of a room in her house, offered him thermoses of coffee, breakfasts on a tray in the mornings, and a carpenter on hand to assist in the reconstruction. (40) She even covered his passage to America. It is a misconception that the Large Glass had merely cracked in the patterns one sees today, remaining more or less intact. In reality, except where some of the wire designs were holding some shards together, the work was reduced to an enormous pile of unattached fragments. Testimony is provided by an account in a local newspaper which described the carnage as “a 4 by 5-foot three hundred pound conglomeration of bits of colored glass.” (41)The title of another article, “Restoring 1,000 Glass Bits in Panels; Marcel Duchamp, Altho an Iconoclast, Recreates Work,” (42) called attention to the uncharacteristic manual labor now demanded of the notorious anti-artist involving gloves, glue pot and a pile of splintered glass. “It’s a job, I can tell you, ” Duchamp confessed to his interviewer, “like doing a jigsaw puzzle, only worse.” (43) Privately, he described his absorption in this gargantuan project: I haven’t answered your letter, nor written, because I have turned into a glazier who thinks of nothing else from 9 in the morning to 7 at night but repairing broken glass. But it’s working. Another three weeks and the Bride will be back on her feet again. (44) And to Brancusi, he described this period as something of a nightmare, “I’m waking up…. For 2 months I have been repairing broken glass and I am very far from my Parisian ways.”(45) Dreier, in turn, complained to one of her friends about the artist’s monomania at this time: “Duchamp is a dear, but his concentration on just one subject wears me out, leaves me limp.” (46) Intimations that the artist was tiresome in conversation are exceedingly rare in the historical record. The Large Glass became a different work in the course of restoration, a portion of its original, intricate iconography having been lost altogether. The upper right hand side of the work, including the “inscription du haut” (“top inscription”) and the “9 tires” (“9 shots”) figure, was so fragmented that Duchamp was forced to insert three new pieces of glass. He had the holes for ‘9 tires’ redrilled and the missing part of the ‘inscription du haut’ completely restored. (47) The area of the Bride’s “clothes” were also remade in three narrow strips of glass inserted horizontally between the upper and lower panels. The only section free of cracks is the one including part of the “Milky Way.” Ultimately, the work became a mixture of old and new, Duchamp’s restoration “completing” the unfinished work, as it were. The present format of the Large Glass–the original glass sandwiched between two thicker planes all held together by a metal frame–was a contingency of the restoration. Duchamp had previously repaired the broken To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour (1918) in this fashion and, satisfied with the result, performed a similar operation on Nine Malic Moulds (1914-15) a couple months later. (48)By the time he addressed the restoration of the Large Glass, the repair strategy was a familiar one. After completing the restoration of the Large Glass, Duchamp regarded it as a different work than the one he had begun more than two decades before. Along with the title, he now inscribed the words “-cassé 1931/ - réparé 1936.” He apparently felt that the history of the piece, including its restoration, was important for viewers to know. click to enlarge Illustration 3 3 Stoppages Étalon(Standard Stoppages), 1913-14, wood, glass, threads, varnish and glass. Katherine S. Dreier Bequest, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Duchamp used his restoration junket to Connecticut to conserve other of his works in Dreier’s collection. He had theRotary Glass Plates (Precision Optics)(1920)–which Dreier had been unable to locate–and the3 Standard Stoppages(1913-14) (See Illustration 3) taken out of storage. He cleaned, reassembled and replaced the motor on the former. And it was only at this time that 3 Standard Stoppages assumed its final shape. He mounted the three narrow canvas shapes on glass and photographed them against the clapboarding of Dreier’s house. This provided something of a grid background for the photograph of the piece that would be included in the Boîte en valise. (49)Duchamp altered a long, wooden croquet-mallet box to hold both the glass plates and the original wooden “yardsticks.” Indeed, much of the format of the piece, as we shall see, is a function of his concerns for its preservation. Not just an engineering problem to be solved, the damage to the Large Glass jolted Duchamp’s sense of his career. It occurred when his production of artworks had virtually stalled, perhaps just when his sense of himself as an artist was particularly vulnerable. Calvin Tomkins has observed that “the shattering of Duchamp’s most important work seemed like one more confirmation of his decision to give up being an artist.” (50) Surveying the damage and undertaking its repair galvanized his resolve to enter that phase of his career which involved the large-scale reiteration and reproduction of his works in multiples. Jean Suquet has observed that even before Duchamp began repairing the broken Large Glass, he first published the Green Box (Paris, 1934). “Only then,” Suquet says, “did he restore the image between two new plates of glass, now to be read through the foundational grid of his writings.” (51) The artist himself admitted that “the notes [in the Green Box] help to understand what it [the Large Glass] could have been.” (52) The following year, perhaps still reeling from the destruction of his major work, Duchamp began thinking of making an “album” of all that he had made until then. This would later be realized in hundreds of copies as the Boîte en valise–for all intents and purposes a portable museum of his most important artworks. Indeed, the damage wrought upon the Large Glass had provided dark inspiration for theGreen Box. The scraps of paper in the Green Box reminded a startled Katherine Dreier of the broken shards of the Large Glass. (53) Duchamp himself mused about the appropriateness of splinters and shards for their historical moment. He told his author friend Anaïs Nin that the form of the Green Box–which, as a box of scraps resembled the crate full of shards that was now the damagedLarge Glass–should replace the conventional codex, adding, “It is not the time to finish anything. It’s the time of fragments.” (54) It is part of the Duchamp legend that the artist viewed the destruction of theLarge Glasswith dispassionate resignation. The artist himself helped give this perception currency. The filmed interview, “A Conversation with Marcel Duchamp,” with James Johnson Sweeney at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1956), opens with Duchamp looking at the Large Glass. He first recounts the story of the damage to the work then adds, “The more I look at it, the more I like the cracks.”(55) This appears to be the first intimation that the breakage was part of an “incorporation of chance” in the work. The legend of Duchamp’s appropriation of accident into the work’s aesthetic later gained momentum through John Cage’s advocacy of aleatory effects. Some observers, however, found nothing enchanting nor conceptual about the damage. “Anyone can get their painting wrecked,” quipped one critic. (56) Duchamp, too, seemed to realize that the restoration could not make the work pristine again, nor would the cracks make it a more interesting work. Worried how a museum might regard the repaired Large Glass-before it had found a permanent home-he sullenly speculated, “I have a hunch that broken glass is hard to swallow for a ‘museum.'” (57) In the end, Duchamp regarded the piece as a broken and repaired work of art. Asked in another filmed interview a decade later whether the cracks in the glass are fundamental to the work, he responded simply and definitively, “No, no.” (58) Poignantly, he once downplayed its damage describing it not as a “ruin,” but merely “wrinkled.” (59) Likewise, Duchamp would have been saddened-not delighted as is often claimed–to learn that the replica of “In Advance of the Broken Arm” (1915), the show shovel readymade, was used by an unwitting janitor to clear the sidewalks outside an exhibition of his works. (60) By now it is clear that he could not have looked smilingly on such lapses in conservation. Such legends gain plausibility by confusing the nonchalant provocation of his art with his professional aspirations. Duchamp’s reconstruction of the Large Glass is seldom recounted in the literature, for much the same reason. But it demonstrates his profound concern for his works and his willingness to endure much hardship and tedium to restore them. Certainly, there exists no other modern artwork of the same calibre as the Large Glass on which its author labored so intensively to restore it. Since Duchamp had never surrendered his works to a dealer, at least until the last few years of his life, his pieces were not scattered widely across private collections. And because he was obsessive about keeping his relatively small oeuvre together, he had unique access to his works. Thus, he could more easily track their whereabouts and monitor their conditions. Although Duchamp’s concern for his works’ preservation was an ongoing one, his efforts along these lines accelerated in the late 40s and early 50s. This was the period when his historical reputation was being consolidated through increasing exhibitions and a burgeoning literature devoted to him. This was also the period when the Arensbergs were looking for a museum to which they would bequeath their collection. Reassured that they already owned most of his artworks, Duchamp nevertheless felt personally responsible for maintaining them. click to enlarge Illustration 4 King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes, 1912, oil on canvas. Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art. When he visited them in April, 1949, for example, he discovered that Paris Air (1919), a sealed glass ampule, had broken. He had already mended it once before, but now the damage seriously compromised the integrity of the piece. Duchamp wrote a letter to Roché in Paris requesting that he procure a similar ampule from the same pharmacy from which he had bought the original. (61) In the same spirit of conscientiousness, in 1952, as the Arensberg Collection was destined for permanent display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, he retouched his painting Paradise (1910). (62) He had hoped to rectify a considerable craquelure that can still be seen in the painting on the back, The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes (1912) and lamented “Unfortunately this picture has not stood time as well as my other paintings….” (See Illustration 4) (63) In general, Duchamp’s patrons shared his conservation concerns especially since some of his works required specific and unusual maintenance. For instance, the repairedLarge Glass, now standing in Katherine Dreier’s home, had become a fragile, glass monolith. Because Dreier dared not move the piece, she considered converting her home into a “Museum in the Country.” (64) Still troubled by the matter at the end of her life, she confessed to Duchamp that she might not leave enough money to guarantee its upkeep and safety. (65) The issue was resolved only after her death when Duchamp–acting as her executor–decided that it should enter the Arensberg Collection in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which already contained the preponderance of his works. That way, Duchamp knew, its maintenance would be assured–and the major work of his early career could stand beside his others. It had been considerations of conservation that were critical to the choice of Philadelphia as the permanent home of the Arensberg Collection in the first place. The Arensbergs had been considering the Art Institute of Chicago until, during the period of loan for the exhibition “20th-Century Art from the Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection,” (20 October-18 December, 1949), an Alexander Calder sculpture of theirs had been broken (Mobile, 1934), and the frame of a Fernand Léger painting (The City, 1919) had been repainted without their permission. Moreover, the Arensbergs found some of the display construction shoddy and the overall presentation rough and unprofessional. (66) Duchamp regarded the exhibition of his works as an opportunity to inspect them and, if necessary, to conduct repairs and conservatorial measures. On one occasion, he asked Michel Sanouillet to bring “two bottles of crystal mastic varnish” from Paris to the opening of the 1951 Sidney Janis Gallery (New York) exhibition, “Brancusi to Duchamp,” so he could treat his two paintings on display there. (67) Duchamp would apparently not settle for any varnishes he could have bought locally. After seeing his Genre Allegory (George Washington) (1943) at a MoMA exhibit (1948), Duchamp was troubled that the original deep-blue background had faded. He asked André Breton, its owner, if he could repaint the blue before the work returned to Paris. (68) It is not known whether he ever performed the retouching, but it is noteworthy that the work was only five years old at the time. Remarkably, Duchamp did not always require a first-hand look at his works to proceed with conservation. After seeing a photograph of Coffee Mill (1911), which was to be used as a reproduction in Lebel’s monograph on the artist, he recommended the painting receive “a very thin coat of transparent varnish.” (69) As we saw in the repair of the Large Glass and in the conservation of Dreier’s mural, Duchamp generally heeded the judgment of professionals. For example, in response to an Art Institute of Chicago conservation report for one of his earliest paintings, Garden and Chapel at Blainville (1902), he agreed to have a new stretcher and liner made for it. (70)More often than not, however, the conservation of works already in museum collections involved cajoling institutions, the search for funds, contacting restorers and the like, all of which Duchamp himself was willing to undertake. He once expressed his anxieties about the rapid deterioration of works in the collection of the Société Anonyme to its director, George Heard Hamilton. Informed there was no money for conservation, Duchamp volunteered to approach Mary Dreier, sister of his deceased friend Katherine Dreier. After their meeting, he wrote Hamilton again, this time asking for a more detailed account of the conservation costs including–and this was his own plan–a capital sum for an endowment specifically devoted to that purpose. In the end, Mary Dreier was unable to fund an endowment but contributed $1,500 per year for conservation during her lifetime. (71) Not only had Duchamp originally helped amass the collection of the Société Anonyme, he had now provided for its long-term conservation. Over the course of his career, Duchamp came to understand what every art mover, preparator, and curator knows: that artworks are most vulnerable while being moved. His own glass pieces had undergone a gauntlet of destruction brought largely about by their transport. These moves were a continual source of anxiety for both the artist and for his patrons as well. After patiently waiting years for Duchamp to finish theLarge Glass, the Arensbergs sold it to Dreier when they moved to California in 1923. Presciently, and ironically, they feared it might be damaged in the move. (72) Not just those of his glass works, his paintings also sustained damage while in transit. The renowned Nude Descending a Staircase, #2 (1912) was torn slightly during its loan to the “Three Brothers” exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum (1957). Duchamp, along with a professional restorer, determined that the one-inch-long tear in one of the darker areas of the picture and some missing paint was not terribly serious. The artist suggested a temporary repair so that it could travel to its next venue. (73) Aware of the high degree of risk in moving artworks, Duchamp sometimes insisted on specific travelling guidelines for his pieces. Roché, who owned the repaired Nine Malic Moulds (See Illustration 2), received lots of advice along these lines, especially when it was to be exhibited. “For your glass, have it carried by someone, upright,” Duchamp suggested, “as we did for the Surrealist exhibition at Wildenstein’s [Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme,” Paris]. A year later, he thanked him for personally walking it to the Musée National d’Art Moderne show, “Le Cubisme 1907-1914.” Concerned about the piece travelling twice across the Atlantic–so it could be exhibited in the “Three Brothers” exhibition–Duchamp asked Roché if he would consider selling it while it was in America.(74) In making this request he was shrewdly killing two birds with one stone: it would lessen the risk to a glass work in transit, and also move the piece closer to the preponderance of his oeuvre. It appears that Duchamp implicitly charged his patrons with a certain level of safeguarding for his artworks. When the Arensbergs were to send him Paradise/The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes/Paradise (1910/1912), he told them that special insurance would be required since his New York studio was not fireproof. (75) A justifiable respect for fire was reflected in his assent that, if the Art Institute of Chicago wished to borrow his avant- garde film Anémic Cinéma (1925-26), they should first have a non-flammable copy made.(76) Such premeditated concerns work against Duchamp’s reputation for heedlessly courting the vicissitudes of fate. Packing Duchamp’s unorthodox works for travel was often a sophisticated affair. He admonished Roché to pack “Why not sneeze Rose Sélavy?” (1921) “so that the weight of the marble doesn’t strain the bars or the base of the cage” when it was to travel to the MoMA’s “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism,” (December, 1936). (77) On a much more ambitious scale, packing and moving the repaired Large Glass was too important to occur away from Duchamp’s watchful gaze. In September of 1943 he was on hand at Dreier’s home to supervise its transfer to the Museum of Modern Art where it was on loan until 1946. He personally directed the four installers as they crated and moved the piece and then, riding in the truck, gave strict instructions that its speed not exceed fifteen miles per hour. (78) Even so, a few slivers of glass, held only in place by gravity, were jarred out of place. Duchamp later “spent several hours fitting them back where they belonged.”(79) As might be expected, he supervised the removal of the Large Glass from the Museum of Modern Art three years hence (on 1 April 1946) in preparation for its return to Dreier’s home. When the Large Glass was to be transported for the last time, now to its permanent disposition in the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1952, Duchamp had become the undisputed authority on moving the fragile and unwieldy construction. The arrangements intensified; his communications to director Fiske Kimball reveal anxieties about the move. Duchamp expressed a fitful series of nervous requests and balks. He suggested they wait for good weather before proceeding and, after further thought, cabled Philadelphia suggesting, “Four strong men needed.” (80) Hoping to avoid the kind of damage originally wrought upon the work, a few days later he wired to say that he was “expecting to ride back on [the] truck.” (81) Although he only rode back as far as New York, he appeared in Philadelphia the next day to supervise the unloading. In the end, a relieved Duchamp was able to tell Dreier that the transport of theLarge Glass “was a success.”(82) Eventually, under Duchamp’s supervision, the Large Glass would be cemented to the floor of the Philadelphia Museum of Art amidst the Walter and Louise Arensberg Collection. Though this protected the work from further damage, it also meant that the piece could never be exhibited elsewhere. Its immobility is one reason why exacting replicas of theLarge Glass had to be made by Richard Hamilton (1966) and Ulf Linde (1961) for the Duchamp retrospectives they were then mounting. Hamilton also reproduced the Glider Containing a Water Mill in Neighboring Metals (1913-15) for the same reason. After years of worrying after the transport of his glass works, Duchamp, in his last years, seemed reluctant to see them move at all. To Hamilton’s queries about possible loans to his lionizing Tate Gallery retrospective (1966), Duchamp said he did not wish that the fragile To Be Looked at… (1918) should travel from the MoMA. (83) Evidently, its safety had become more important than its being looked at. Duchamp’s anxieties about the condition of his pieces reflected his convictions about posterity and historical reputation. He believed that the physical condition of an artwork had a direct bearing on its place in history, metaphorically equating the endurance of an artwork with the span of a human life. The mortality of artworks lay both in their physical condition and in their historical significance–if a work was not “healthy,” it could not enjoy the “life” of a historical reputation. “Men are mortal, pictures too,” was his aphoristic description of the physical lifetime of a work. (84) Another statement from the same year further developed this notion. I believe in [the] life and death of a painting, of a work of art, a short life something like fifty years, about a man’s life . . . painting especially dies after forty or fifty years when the pigment and everything has darkened, and so forth and really there is death there . . . look at Monet which has become completely black, when it was painted and young it was . . . exactly the image of life . . . of man’s life. (85) Although Monet’s paintings may have lost some of their original vividness, they have hardly become black. This sort of hyperbole indicates Duchamp’s sensitivity to the conditions of artworks and their prospects for “life” in perpetuity. Although most artists share Duchamp’s interest in preserving the original state of their pieces, Edgar Degas regarded an artwork’s gradual diminution as a desirable part of its appreciation. When the Louvre cleaned one of its Rembrandt paintings, the artist cried, “Time has to take its course with paintings as with everything else, that’s the beauty of it. A man who touches a picture ought to be deported. To touch a picture! You don’t know what that does to me.” (86) Though moved to conserve his pieces as effectively as possible, Duchamp did acknowledge the inevitability of an artwork’s decline. When Robert Lebel and Robert Dorival were trying to organize a major Duchamp exhibition in Paris, in 1966, they requested the artist solicit the Philadelphia Museum of Art about possible loans of his works. He responded, “Impossible for the glass: the [9] Malic Moulds–they are senile and no longer travel.” (87) For Duchamp, artworks could “die” altogether, consigning their historical significance to oblivion. In the early 60s, art historian William Seitz asked him about contemporary artists who used unorthodox materials. Seitz was doubtless referring to the aesthetic implications such materials raise. But Duchamp’s answer says much about what he regarded as an artist’s central concern–the material longevity of his works. Seitz: It’s interesting that so many artists how work in very perishable materials, such as refuse and old newspapers. Duchamp: Yes that’s very interesting. It’s the most revolutionary . . . attitude possible because they know they’re killing themselves. It’s a form of suicide, as artists go; they kill themselves by using perishable materials. They know it will last five years, ten years, and will necessarily be destroyed, destroy itself. (88) Duchamp’s use of the word “suicide” implies that artworks represent artists’ historical existence. Artists are thus obligated to create works that are physically sound and durable. In ironic reaction to this anxiety, Duchamp once said that one attraction to chess for him was that “at the end of the game you can cancel the painting you are making.” (89) It may seem surprising that a Dadaist would so insistently recoil at the idea of ephemeral artworks. A commonly held notion about Dada artists is that their nihilism was so pervasive that they and their works somehow self-destructed as a result of a perverse inherent logic. The anti-art attitude of the Dadaists, however, was more theoretical than actual. Gabrielle Buffet- Picabia recalled that, during Arthur Cravan’s notorious drunken speech and strip-tease at the Grand Central Gallery (site of the 1917 American Independents Exhibition), her circle of friends were worried lest Cravan damage a painting that was situated behind him.(90) Perhaps more than most avant-gardists, many Dada artists expressed a heightened interest in conserving their works and gestures for a posterity that would appreciate them. Along these lines, Lucy Lippard finds it ironic that the “ex-Dadas have been more concerned with their own histories than have been the participants in any other major movement.” (91) click to enlarge Illustration 5 Tu m‘, 1918, oil on canvas, bottle brush,three safety pins, one bolt. Société Anonyme Collection, Katherine Dreier Bequest, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn. Considering Duchamp’s obsessive concern for the condition of his pieces, it is not surprising that he sometimes expressed the theme of conservation directly in some of his works. For instance, he painted a trompe l’oeil tear inTu’m (1918) (See Illustration 5) which he rudely “repaired” by three real safety pins. The hasty, ersatz “repair” suggests that conservation is often a crude compromise. The “tear” is widely regarded as a witty jibe at the preciousness of art. But it also suggests that paintings are fragile things and can sustain horrible damage. The tear, it is important to observe, is only an illusion of damage; perhaps Duchamp could not abide an actual one. click to enlarge Illustration 6 Unhappy Ready-made,Boîte en valise reproduction made by Duchamp after Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti’s painting, Le Ready-made malheureux de Marcel (Paris, 1920).Guido Rossi Collection, Milan. The title of his Readymade malheureux (Unhappy Readymade) (1919) implies that an artwork’s physical condition is integral to its meaning. It was comprised of a geometry book that he instructed his sister, then living in France, to hang on her porch (SeeIllustration 6). Predictably, the weather gradually destroyed it. The original idea for the piece was first expressed in a note, later included in The Green Box, in which Duchamp reminded himself to “Make a sick picture or a sick Readymade.”(92) The inspiration for Unhappy Readymade, then, involved the notion of the physical vulnerability of artworks. The Unhappy Readymade is unhappy because it will not endure; it is gradually deteriorating. Insofar as real weather tears the work apart, the piece is a metaphor for the damaging effect of time on art. (93) Duchamp explored the idea of repair and conservation in 3 Standard Stoppages. (1913/14) (See Illustration 3). He had been inspired by a Paris shop sign, “stoppages et talons,”advertising invisible mending and heel repairs to socks and stockings (et talon, or étalon = “standard”). (94) Mending is, of course, an operation of repair and maintenance. Perhaps the varnished threads in 3 Standard Stoppages, whose shape has determined a new standard of measure, are meant to be read as threads which have become unraveled from an “invisible” mend. Interpreted in this way, what is being conserved in this work (mends) is the evidence of repair, now absurdly made standard in the templates. What makes this doubly preposterous is that the forms that repairs take are wholly contingent on the damage they seek to rectify. This work thus suggests something of the despairing futility of predicting and measuring repair. As mentioned earlier, he completed it in 1936 by cutting the canvases according to the shape of the varnished threads, gluing these to glass plates, and fitting them into a slotted, wooden box. Also included in the box are flat, wooden “templates” (yardsticks, of sorts) whose shapes were determined by threads dropped from a certain height. Thus completed, the format reflected his attempt to conserve the sophisticated documentation of a pataphysical experiment. click to enlarge Illustration 7 Network of Stoppages Etalon , 1914, oil on canvas. Museum of Modern Art, New York.