Dada to New Objectivity, Part 2: Duchamp

Arp is always given as the paradigm example of this although recent studies suggest that might be an oversimplification. A recent study of Arp seems to find his multi-lingual childhood a model or metaphor for understanding his “multi-lingual” personality as an artist. Arp wrote poetry, was a sculptor and painter, associated with international constructivism, dada, and surrealism. Making this an apt metaphor are the similarities between his creative activities: in poetry, he wrote in both French and German, easily translating one into the other; in painting and sculpture, he is perhaps best known for his reliefs – a medium which fluidly moves from two to three-dimensions as the relief is painted and like a collage but because they are made of wood or other substantial materials, they engage light and shade and volume in real ways as well as pictorial.

The myth about Arp’s early reliefs and collages is that he made them entirely according to the laws of chance – that he cut out pieces of paper (or wood) and let them fall to the ground, creating the future work of art without his direction. Although it seems unlikely that he did, in fact, make his works entirely according to chance, it does not seem unlikely that he wanted them to look as though they had been ruled by chance or that he understood the ways in which chance might affect the final work. Certainly, there is no doubt that in these early works there are no references to figures or recognizable forms and that in place of representation, they assert, if not outright flaunt, the materiality of the object. Arp called his work “concrete reliefs” as part of his assertion that they were not intended as abstractions of the real world. Concerned at one point that randomly shaped forms might signify the presence or touch of the artist, he began to use mechanical drawing techniques to create geometric shapes and for his paper collages, he went so far as to use a guillotine to cut up the paper since it was more impersonal than a scissors and would not risk betraying the presence of the artist’s hand.

The duo-collages: the pair made these as a challenge to the separation between art and craft or between fine art and applied art; the duo-collages were based on rigorous grids, preceding Mondrian’s exploration of the grid; they sought the erasure of their personality and used a paper cutter rather than scissors as the latter, they believed, showed signs of the artist’s hand

Sophie Tauber-Arp the marionette play, The King Stag, based on an 18th century Venetian satire, was another manifestation of the new interest in theories of madness and the brain; the play was revised as a battle between Freud Analytikus, Dr. Komplex (Jung), and a fairy, Urlibido, who watched over the souls of the king; the evil minister of the King, Tartaglia, cries at to be killed at the end of the play because he hasn’t been analyzed and can’t live that way anymore; the marionettes unite Tauber’s abstract gridded tapesty patterns which she made with Arp and the influence of painted Oceanic masks in the faces

Marcel Duchamp is often taken as the prototypical Dadist but we should qualify this by saying that he was the prototypical New York Dadaist. Alchemy, the occult, and the fourth dimension were central to Duchamp's thinking and art, and presumably based on his interest in alchemy is his interest in the marriage or union of opposites. This theme appears quite early in his work, in forms which adhere in more conventional ways to traditional alchemical imagery. But before we consign Duchamp to one of the spiritualities which continued to attract members, we should not overlook Duchamp’s longterm commitment to chess, to machines, to science, and his belief that the aesthetic had little value. He begins as a painter but overall, this is a small part of his productions. In early works such as Sonata and Portrait (both, 1911), we see some influence of cubism although these are clearly not rigorously cubist and his compositions suggest a stronger interest in depicting figures in movement or in a series of positions, such as we see in Nude Descending the Stairs. Here the body has become a cipher, a series of lines moving through space. Duchamp has both denied the surface continuity of cubism and the creation of illusionistic space at the same time. But his more innovative contribution comes through his “organo-mechanical” figures, such as The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes (1912) and his adoption of a rule of reduction, rather than abstraction. Chocolate Grinder: the second version, 1914, eliminates shading and the forms are outlined with thread either sewn on the surface or painted to look like it is sewn. The real object as subject matter of the painting soon gives way to the real object itself with the Bicycle Wheel of 1913 being his first displacement of an object. Eventually he loses interest in the ready- mades and after a few more paintings, and the beginning of his never completed work The Bride Stripped Bare, he gives up painting and ready-mades, and starts to make optical but useless machines and plays chess. The Large Glass embodies many of Duchamp’s ideas about alchemy, about the union of opposites, about the relationship of the third dimension to the 4th, and arguably about art. This work was meant to exist in space, like sculpture. Made of wire and paint between two panes of glass, it is transparent and includes the changing environmental imagery, reflections of spectators, and (depending on how it is installed in the museum) it appears to float in space. For Duchamp, this was a two-dimensional projection of three-dimensional forms, like an x-ray. But because he conceived of his 3-dimensional works as projections or x-rays of the fourth dimension, this work may actually function (artistically speaking) in both the 3rd and 4th dimensions. If 2-dimensional images stand for the world of 3-dimensions, as in a mirror reflection, then why can’t 3-dimensional images stand for the world of 4 dimensions? The glass is a metaphor for a mirror and as such, it creates in 2-dimensional space the world of 3 dimensions. But the 3-dimensional space in the world of the glass then becomes another metaphor–in this case, for the 4th dimension. Duchamp may be trying to create a metaphor or analogy here between the 4th dimension, which cannot really be seen or represented, and the space of the imagination. If the artists of the late 19th century and early 20 century tried to create a new sense of reality in the painting, with reality remaining part of the 3-dimensional world, then Duchamp may be trying to create yet another form of pictorial reality, but with pictorial reality now referring to the 4th dimension. In addition to the alchemical myth behind this work, we also find Duchamp’s interest in U.S. machines and industry. Here, he uses machine-like forms as symbols of biological function and as modernized equivalents of the alchemical narrative. The piece is thus a machine like transformation of the myth of union, a metaphor for sex. The history of the work includes the Bride, 1912, a painting which appears to be related to the Nude Descending a Staircase although the forms here are more machine-like, making this bride into an anthropomorphic machine. Chocolate Grinder is another preliminary work which finds its way directly into the Large Glass. This half of the glass, containing the chocolate grinder, represents the bachelors and the "bachelor machine," while the top half depicts the bride as she undresses. Yet, the bride is not literally stripped bare by her bachelors, not in the picture–if she is stripped bare, it takes place in her imagination, and the glass may be a painting about desire and imagination. The bachelors have their own vision and it will not be the same as hers, so the space between them is the imaginary space of two irreconcilable desires. The space of the glass is a self-referential space; it is the space of ideas and imaginings. Those ideas are present in represented forms. The glass may also function as a metaphor of the “unfulfilled desire and the separation between Duchamp and his audience.” To the extent that the work is about desire, it begins to cross over into the realm of surrealism. The work is usually understood as a cynical view of sex and a cynical or disillusioned view of alchemy since the separation of the bride from the bachelors would suggest that the act of consummation was not successful; it was frustrated. Although Duchamp’s key “anti-art” statement was the ready-made, in particular, the Fountain (1917), the large glass is considered to be an anti-art statement, although for different reasons: it is enigmatic, defies conventional aesthetics, and is accompanied by notes written by Duchamp which actually obscure the meaning even further. But this deliberate attempt to block the meaning is, if not part of the meaning, then intrinsic to the work's meaning. Overall, the real contribution of works like these was the revelation of an "absurd universe," a revelation made through the ironic response to the machine and the attempt to fuse the machine with alchemical metaphors and the fourth dimension.

The strategies which Duchamp united in this work included the suggestion of movement through space, intellectual and formal movement, and irony. Typically, Duchamp holds meaning out of reach–another tactic which is almost central to this work, not only through the elusive imagery but through the collection of notes which accompany the piece, some of which are crossed out, indicating that he has changed his mind or no longer means what they say. Dada and DuChamp’s relationship to the machine need to be understood, at least in part, in relation to the place of the machine in United States culture. In US culture after the turn of the century, the phenomenon of the “new woman” reflected the suffragist movement, the entry of women into jobs which had previously been closed to them, and changes in style such that they looked more athletic and androgynous–gender ambiguous. The threat posed by the new woman coincided to some extent with the threat posed by machines and industrialization: the Ford model of production, a model which presupposed identical values and desires for all Americans, and which, operating from that assumption, imposed standardized work expectations on all workers, led to a work environment dominated by surveillance, both inside the factory and outside. Envisioning the machine as feminine, even if this feminine was the new woman, made the machine into a powerful metaphor of the dangers affecting capitalist industrial society but at the same time it made the metaphor safer. This is not as far-fetched as it sounds, given that the image of the bride is actually based on a crankshaft and a tree, suggesting a union of automobile engine with the myth of Persephone. Duchamp, much like Andy Warhol in the 60s and 70s, made his life a part of his art, and for many observers, his life WAS his art. The Fountain does not immediately strike us today as a machine but in Duchamp’s writing about it, it was a mass-produced object which represented American plumbing, and American plumbing, he stated, was the only claim America could make to an indigenous art. The Fountain was seen by observers as both a male and female form: comparable to the form of a buddha and the form of a madonna. Like his life and his other objects of art, it was gender ambiguous, even if intended for only one gender to use. It was turned 90 degrees for exhibition purposes, complicating the remote notion that this might be functional art. When the work was refused by the exhibition committee he had submitted it to, Duchamp wrote an editorial in which he said that it was irrelevant that R. Mutt may not have made the fountain with his own hands. What mattered was that he had chosen it. In addition, because he had turned it into a useless object, in so far as its intended function was concerned, he had created a new idea for the object. As Hans Richter wrote, it was surprisingly difficult to abolish art. The photo montage and the collage, although initially intended as rejections of the art object, became the new art object and media. The photomontage took ideas which were developed in word art – phonetic poetry, in particular – and transferred them to visual materials. As Haussman, one of the so-called inventors of the photomontage wrote, “it was an explosive mixture of different points of view and levels...aerial photograph against close-up, perspective against flat surface...we called this process photomontage because it embodied our refusal to play the part of the artist. We regarded ourselves as engineers and our work as construction...” This is an art form which embraces mass production and denies the subjectivity of the romantic artist; likewise, it appears to embrace the culture of the masses and deny the culture of high art.