The Politics of Equivocation: Sherrie Levine, Duchamp's

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The Politics of Equivocation: Sherrie Levine, Duchamp's 'Compensation Portrait', and Surrealism in the USA 1942-45 Author(s): David Hopkins Source: Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 26, No. 1 (2003), pp. 47-68 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3600446 Accessed: 08-09-2017 12:52 UTC

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This content downloaded from 132.174.250.220 on Fri, 08 Sep 2017 12:52:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Politics of Equivocation: Sherrie Levine, Duchamp's 'Compensation Portrait', and Surrealism in the USA 1942-45

David Hopkins

In 1981 the American artist Sherrie Levine re-presented a slightly blurred reproduction of a reproduction of Walker Evans' FSA-period portrait of Allie 1. For a useful summary of Levine's early Mae Burroughs as a work by herself, titling it 'After Walker Evans' (Fig. 1). It practice in relation to 'oppositional was one of a sequence in which she could be seen as usurping canonical images postmodernism', which also goes on to problematise her later shifts in attitude in th( by modernist Masters of photography for femininity. More broadly it could be 1980s, see Abigail Solomon-Godeau, 'Living seen as instantiating the Duchampian strategy of appropriation as a defining with Contradictions: Critical Practices in the hallmark of postmodern art production. Applying another twist to the Age of Supply-Side Aesthetics' in Photography the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, V at principle of the readymade, Levine asserted that pre-existing works of art now Institutions, and Practices (University of stood to be lifted wholesale out of history and re-authored.1 Minneapolis Press: Minneapolis, 1991), What many people did not realise was that Levine's strategy had already pp. 124-36 and passim. been pre-empted by Duchamp on two fronts. In 1942 the same Walker Evans image had been symbolically stripped of its author and presented as one of a set of Compensation Portraits which functioned as surrogate images of members of the Surrealist group. In this case the sharecropper's wife's features stood in for those of the English Surrealist writer and painter Leonora Carrington (Fig. 2). The context for the Compensation Portraits will be supplied in due course, but it suffices at present to say that Duchamp-in league with Andre Breton- probably made that choice. As part of the same batch of Compensation Portraits, Duchamp presented one of himself, making use of a section cut from a Ben Shahn photograph of another victim of the US Depression (Fig. 3). In doing this, he re-presented part, if not all, of another artist's work. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Levine was to make her dialogue with Duchamp much more overt by producing sculptural versions of the 'Bachelors' from his Large Glass or producing shiny bronze versions of Fountain (1917). What is clear from the above is that even her socially-inflected FSA appropriations had had an oblique relation to the intricacies of his output. The true author of Duchamp's Compensation Portrait, Ben Shahn, was, like Evans, synonymous with a Left-orientated 'documentary' aesthetic credo in 1930s America. But as well as appropriating a politically-affiliated artist's work, Duchamp chose, by invoking the social 'transparency' of a photographic image, to implicitly identify himself with the subject of Shahn's work, namely a flesh-and-blood victim of social catastrophe. For those accustomed to thinking of Duchamp as the arch-dandy of twentieth-century art, the ultimate ss ironist of strenuously-defended 'positions', this overt referencing both of Left 5,?

'C- %' ????: commitments and human suffering, however apparently tangential to his wider :E .-L"?:"::,P

,-? :ff7 output, must open up important questions. Was it simply an opportunistic i joke? Or does it reflect more deep-seated concerns? It is remarkable that the a

'E :::::;:i;. : gesture has gone relatively unremarked for so long. But then Duchamp, of """"'" course, chose not to meet the political (or social) head on, but, like Levine later, to negotiate his relations with the bluntness of social fact via his habitual Fig. 1. Sherrie Levine, After Walker Evans n 4, 1981, black x use of the quotational,and thewhite apparently marginal photograph, or glancing. 10 > 8 ins. (Photograph )r In After Walker Evans Levine courtesy effectively takes on Duchamp of at hisPaula own game. Coope Gallery, New If oneYork.) of the outcomes of his adoption of Ben Shahn's image had been to bring

It OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS OXFORD ART JOURNAL 26.1 2003 45-68

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about one of his characteristic gender shifts, she re-appropriates his manoeuvre, re-feminising the authorial relation to the subject of the Evans photograph. It is also important here to see Levine as a respondent to 1980s 2. For the 1980's concentration on indexicality discourses centred on the interplay between the iconic and indexical see Rosalind Krauss, 'Notes on the Index', Parts I and II, reprinted in The Originality of the Avant properties of photographs and thus making a subtle point about documentary Garde and Other Modernist Myths (MIT Press, photography.2 The documentary aesthetics of Walker Evans had been Cambridge, MA, 1985), pp. 196-219. The first characterised by late 1930s supporters such as Lincoln Kirstein as predicated part of her essay takes Duchamp's work to be

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Fig. 2. Compensation Portraits, selected for 'First Papers of Surrealism' (New York, 1942). Calas Papers, The Young-Mallin archives, New York. Photograph by John Schiff. (Courtesy of Judith Mallin.)

48 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 26.1 2003

on a renunciation of authorial subjectivity in favour of an apparent artlessness, whilst Evans himself had developed a sophisticated credo of stylelessness paradigmatic. For photography, see especially rooted in his reading of French realist writers such as Flaubert. His work thus p. 203. played heavily on the issue of 'transparency' in so far as the plight of the 3. For a discussion of Evans' 'styleless style', subjects of his photographs seemingly predominated over the imposition of the particularly as promoted by Lincoln Kirstein in photographer's subjectivity. (Hence Evans' predilection for severely frontal as his essay 'Photography of America' in Evans' seminal American Photographs (Museum of opposed to angled viewpoints.3) In this sense Evans' documentary images fed Modern Art: New York, 1938 ), see Joel off photography's indexical relatonship to 'the real'. In effect, however, Eisinger, Trace and Transformation: American Evans' images came to privilege iconicity over indexicality in so far as the Criticism of Photography in the Modernist Period (University of New Mexico Press: Albuquerque, authorial name 'Walker Evans', synonymous precisely with a 'styleless style' 1995), pp. 98-102. redolent of aesthetic stoicism and pragmatism, eventually interposed itself

4. Such readings borrow their impetus from between the stylistic look and the content of the photographs. His subjects got Craig Owens' seminal interpretation of works subordinated to his brand label. by Levine and her contemporaries as Levine's removal of Evans' authorial rights symbolically renders the image fundamentally 'allegorical'. Hence he writes: 'Allegorical imagery is appropiated imagery. 'transparent' again; we see the suffering, indomitable woman once more. To a [The allegorist] adds another meaning to the degree this reading runs against the grain of accepted accounts of Levine's image.' Elsewhere he asserts that 'allegory work of the early 1980s in which she is thought to 'thicken' the referential or occurs when one text is doubled by another . . . [thel paradigm for the allegorical work is thus discursive density of pre-existing photographic images rather than returning the palimpsest'. See his 'The Allegorical them to 'transparency'.4 However, although my interpretative tack will Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism' eventually produce a Levine who is somewhat unequal to the contest with (Part 1), October, no. 12, Spring 1980, pp. 79- 80. Howard Singerman has recently contested Duchamp, it has the advantage of re-emphasising the political potentialities of a the 'thickness' of Levine's early work, arguing practice which, from early on, was frequently found wanting by critics of the that Owens, although accurate, was Left.5 Certainly Howard Singerman has invoked a Levine preoccupied with 'premature'; see his 'Sherrie Levine's Art History', October, 101, Summer 2002, p. 98. looking 'through' the image rather than simply adding accretions at the level of For Singerman, it is Levine's sculpture of the authorship by aligning Levine with feminist theorists such as Luce Irigaray. 1990s which can best be characterised in terms of 'thickness' which he sees as connoting 'a sense of the fullness of history, or its effects' (p. 119). To substantiate such claims Singerman also looks to an aspect of Levine's dialogue with Duchamp, examining in some depth the combined allusions to Brancusi and Duchamp at work in Levine's 1990s re-workings of the latter's Fountain (pp. 106-13). Ironically this essay will find in Levine's After Walker Evans images precisely the historical density that Singerman ascribes to later works, whilst finding it useful to invoke his own earlier characterisation of these images as 'transparent'.

5. See Abigail Solomon-Godeau, 'Living with Contradictions', p. 128.

Marcel Duchamp

Fig. 3. Marcel Duchamp, Compensation Portrait, from the catalogue 'First Papers of Surrealism' (New York, 1942), 10? x 7? ins. Collection Mme Duchamp. (Copyright Succession Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP Paris and DACS, London 2002.)

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 26.1 2003 49

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Hence, as he says, 'Her standing with those who have been taken, rather than across from them, can be read as a gesture of solidarity. Levine positions herself-or is positioned-as an object on the side of the picture over and 6. Howard Singerman, 'Seeing Sherrie Levine', against a viewer who marshals the distancing separating conjuction of vision October, 67, Winter 1994, p. 95. and theoretical knowledge.'6 In a sense, of course, Levine also restores the 7. See Howard Singerman, 'Sherrie Levine's rights to (female) selfhood that were symbolically usurped by Duchamp in his Art History'. Shahn appropriation. But how effectively does she return us to the subject who 8. One of Duchamp's most scathing dismissals of politics occurs during the Dialogues with is, so to speak, 'behind' the photograph, and how much is her ability to do this Marcel Duchamp conducted by Pierre Cabanne modified by her (self-imposed) obligation to engage with the historical (trans. Ron Padgett, London, 1971, p. 103): 'I Duchamp? If the game with Duchamp is necessarily one of cross-referentiality, don't understand anything about politics and I say it's really a stupid activity, which leads to of virtuoso discursive shuffling and re-shuffling, what if she has overlooked nothing. Whether it leads to communism, to some move or other, missed a trick? Recent critical writing on Levine, notably monarchy, to a democratic republic, it's exactly that of Singerman himself, has dwelt on her art-historical acuity, but to what the same thing as far as I am concerned. You're going to tell me that men need politics in order extent might history be said to rebound on her?7 to live in society, but that in no way justifies This question can only be answered adequately later, but it initially opens the idea of politics as a great art in itself. up the need for a more nuanced historical account of Duchamp's Compensation Nevertheless this is what politicians believe; they imagine themselves doing something Portrait. The bulk of this essay will therefore be an exercise in re-establishing extraordinary! It's a little like notaries, like my the various coordinates of this gesture, which entails placing it in two political father. I remember my father's legal papers; the frameworks: firstly that of Surrealism, as it emerged from a decade of language was killingly funny.' frustrated dialogue with Communist Party ideology, and secondly, that of 9. See T. J. Clark, 'All the Things I Said about 1930s 'documentary' photography and its ethical commitments. Duchamp' in Martha Buskirk and Mignon Nixon (eds), The Duchamp Effect: Essays, Interviews, Round The interrogation of Duchamp's political outlook is long overdue. Table (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1996), Throughout his life Duchamp reiterated a fundamental antipathy towards pp. 225-7. ideology but this is far from saying that his works and behaviour lacked a 10. Benjamin Buchloh, Introduction to October, political inflection.8 His studied indifference to social exigencies has made him 70, Fall 1994, p. 4. appear cooly unmoved by the causes that exercised his contemporaries and it is not surprising that social historians of art have tended to skirt warily around Duchamp's brand of negativism. In a short article of 1996, T. J. Clark finally gave voice to a sense that Duchamp's legendary sangfroid might actually be an index of an underlying fraudulence. Designating Duchamp the 'Edgar Allan Poe of the twentieth century'-a judgement which sets up an analogy with the sheer enormity of the nineteenth-century writer's influence whilst neatly hinting at a leaning towards the mystificatory or occult that both men shared- the parallel ultimately rides on Clark's sense that Duchamp's status, like Poe's, is unearned. In Clark's view the name Duchamp has come to be identified with a principle of negation which might more productively be aligned with, say, Berlin Dada, or certain moments within Constructivism.9 So far, counter- arguments to this kind of position-such as Benjamin Buchloh's denunciation of the 'increasingly instrumentalised rationality of social art history' which proves 'incapable of recognising the complex circumscriptions of aesthetic objects'-have been pitched at too abstract a level.10 Just as Levine has made highly specific, if often oblique, contributions to the historical unravelling of Duchamp, so a reading of Duchamp's politics must take into account his disdain for the grand statement and his preference for the seemingly offhand but heavily over-determined intervention within the archive. What is required at base is an analysis of how Duchamp's equivocations, on both aesthetic and political levels, were themselves responses to the cross-currents of ideology. This essay addresses several instances of that process at work.

In October 1942 Surrealism was launched officially in an American context with an exhibition at the Whitelaw Reid mansion, Fifth Avenue, New York, entitled

50 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 26.1 2003

'First Papers of Surrealism'. On show were works by Surrealist emigres who had recently arrived in the USA to escape regimes in their home countries.

11. For a thorough discussion of the staging of These emigres included Surrealism's 'Pope', Andre Breton, and the painters the exhibition and the implications of the use of Max Ernst and Andre Masson. Other figures who were represented, such as string see Lewis Kachur, Displaying the Miro, remained in Europe, whilst politically volatile associates, such as the poet Marvellous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dali and Surrealist Exhibition Installation (MIT Press: Benjamin Peret, were dispersed in Mexico and other Latin American countries. Cambridge, MA and London, 2001), pp. 166- In the catalogue for the show, the group's presences and absences were 214. An interesting recent study of this episode dramatically underlined. The exhibition itself had seen Breton solicit the is T. J. Demos, 'Duchamp's Labyrinth: First Papers of Surrealism, 1942', October, 97, services of his old friend Marcel Duchamp. Newly arrived back in the city of Summer 2001, pp. 91-119. Neither of these his Dada exploits, Duchamp dropped his habitual distrust of 'official' Surrealist authors make anything of the catalogue for the activities and obliged Breton with an installation for the exhibition's opening in show, or of the Compensation Portraits, which are my concern in what follows. Demos, however, which the gallery space was criss-crossed with a mile of string. 1 In the case of reads Duchamp's labyrinthine installation, in line the catalogue, he came up with a highly multivalent concept. Since most of the with a 1936 text by Georges Bataille, as a 'de- Surrealists were unavailable to be photographed, they were represented structuring anti-architecture' (p. 116) which serves to metaphoricise the geographical and alongside their works by what Duchamp described as 'Compensation political displacements undergone by artists of Portraits'. These were published, in the words of a statement in the the period. Hence: 'the "nausea" of the catalogue, in lieu of being able to offer an 'adequate photographic image of labyrinth also identifies the experience of loss or threatened loss of nation-state identity and each of the contributors'.12 Normally passed over even in the literature on consequent dislocation' (p. 115). This sits very Surrealism, the images raise fascinating questions concerning the ways well alongside the points I make below about Surrealism's dispersal was coped with and rendered visible. As already the thematics of the Compensation Portraits taken en masse. indicated, they also provide a springboard for examining Duchamp's relation

12. First Papers of Surrealism, ex cat,to Surrealist Co- politics. ordinating Council of French Relief Laid Sources, out for convenience in a grid (Fig. 2), and therefore not shown in the New York, 17th October-7th November 1942, clusters in which they were reproduced in the course of the catalogue, the unpaginated. The concept of 'Compensation Portraits' seems to have come from 'Compensation Duchamp, Portraits' constitute a disparate set of found prints or although both Duchamp's and Breton's photographs, names each one identified with the name of a Surrealist group member. appear beneath this statement. There is some confusion as to how the images were selected. Some historians 13. Something of the confusion surrounding accept the view the that they were chosen at random, probably by Breton and origins of the images is suggested, for instance, Duchamp, but this essay is predicated on the likelihood that, far from being the by the discussion of them in Dickran Tashjian's A Boatload of Madmen: Surrealism and outcome the American of chance, their implications were carefully orchestrated by this pair, Avant-Garde 1920-1950 (Thames particularlyand Hudson: Duchamp.13 However, in terms of their placement in the catalogue, New York and London, 1995). At one point where they were scattered in eccentric configurations through several pages, a Tashjian acknowledges that they were 'supposedly chosen at random' (p. complex 216) but allusion the to chance does seem to be involved. images are captioned as 'Selected by This exhibitors concern with chance underlines the fact that Duchamp had a central for "First Papers of Surrealism" (New York, role in designing the catalogue. Its cover, which is also by him, consists of a 1942)' (p. 217), implying more deliberation and choice on the part of individual artists. photograph Similar of the stone wall of Kurt Seligmann's barn at Sugar Loaf, New confusions persist elsewhere in the York, relatively at which Duchamp had randomly fired a shotgun to produce five scant literature. indentations (these indentations are replicated by perforations in the cover at 14. For an account of the shotgun-firing appropriate points).14 (Fig. 4). There can be little doubt that these holes allude incident, see Martica Sawin, Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York to School those (MITwhich he had earlier produced as an outcome of firing paint-tipped Press, Cambridge, MA, 1995), p. matchsticks 225. As shefrom a toy cannon at the top section of the Large Glass as an ironic says, it is profoundly ironic that Duchampenactment of the Bachelor's 'shots' (Fig. 5). Inside the catalogue, Duchamp's possibly used the shotgun with which Seligmann committed suicide twenty years later.own Compensation Portrait (Fig. 3), to be discussed shortly, was placed beneath (Seligmann is also among the Surrealists a diagramatic study by him for the Network of Stoppages, a further chance- represented by the Compensation Portraits.) related element of the Glass which helped dictate the positioning of the 15. The Network of Stoppages was Bachelorsproduced in by the bottom left section of the work. Such an arrangement suggests using each template of the 3 Standard Stoppages that the Compensation Portraits consciously played on the relations between (1913-14) three times. Along each of the resultant 'Capillary Tubes', the positions chance and of identity.'5the Identity here becomes defined in relation to varying 'Nine Malic Moulds' (Bachelors) registerswere of contingency. Physiognomies are shown to have no fixed relation to established by marking circles. For a more detailed account of these intricacies names. of the At Large the same time, random similarities of physiognomy across Glass see entries nos. 282 and 292 in Arturo geographical boundaries (as emphasised by the marked racial diversities figured Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, in the Compensation Portraits) appear to hint at the geographical dispersal of the vol. 2 (Thames and Hudson: London, 1997), Surrealists occasioned by the war, a dispersal itself ordained by the outbreaks

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 26.1 2003 51

This content downloaded from 132.174.250.220 on Fri, 08 Sep 2017 12:52:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms David Hopkins of violence for which Duchamp's random shots are analogues. (Duchamp's back cover of the catalogue, which confusingly bears the title and dates of the exhibition, incidentally depicts holes in Gruyere cheese, a reversal from hard pp. 594 and 607 respectively. For a succinct stone to soft edible matter but also an obliquely sardonic bodily metaphor) account of the functioning of the Glass see Dawn Ades, Neil Cox. and David Hopkins, Marcel (Fig. 6). To pursue these links further, the connotations of chance in relation Duchamp (Thames and Hudson: London, 1999), to the Network of Stoppages summon up the clustering of the Bachelors as, Chapter 5. according to Duchamp's notes for the Glass, 'the cemetery of uniforms and 16. Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare By liveries'. 6 This suggests that two linked lines of thought are in operation. On Her Bachelors, Even (Green Box Notes), trans. the one hand identity is released from physiognomy and made fluid. On the George Heard (Hamilton: London and New York, 1960), unpaginated. other hand, it hardens into a social mask. Beyond this esoteric rationale for the presentation of the group en masse,

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-52; 12"4. `" ., c ? i 1:'?tri; s?jr: "' "'\r ,? n r? I ?: .? b :X 2' i?/?v (?,; ,, ?I?h :tf;t I I \i?C??; ,.? 'L.? L1\? i s: 'zl -,"p\ a_-?- ??; 'i, ? ?F:: r ?jl i_3 `r 5L f;.i P? I: .? zht? ?, -b? a??c;L?i \ii: ".?" I- ?????? 4. ?'V Tsr ,fY; ''';Y? ,i .,.. ??ri"J .L '`` rr ,? 't ?jp-ac: .. j14---- it;'y"'r. ' Ix?;r ?C-' ?zi :C ;t i'fri;y36!, ?czut=i I? r 4?i? (?ic., ,,t=E' lozt-. ?? c t:'t' (C . CI \ itr Lt* i -i: TI? ' ' .1?. ... iti? -??\ iu r? 1 =. ? +' ?rt`5-b "J Al -: ''C r .? Z rtr- ?9 ?, ; .C? tCI * ,, ili? t\ ?*6'4: r? o"rlkrii: 's- r .?

Fig. 5. Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915-23, various materials, 109? x 69- ins. Philadelphia Museum of Art, bequest of Katherine S. Dreier 1915-23. (Copyright Fig. 4. Front cover for the catalogue Succession Marcel Duchamp / 'FirstADAGP Paris Papers of Surrealism' (New York, 1942). (Photograph courtesy of the Scottish National and DACS, LondonGallery 2002.) of Modern Art, Dean Archive.)

52 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 26.1 2003

which obliquely comments on a previous tradition of group portraits of the Surrealists in which passport-style photos were employed, the choices involved 17. In the 1920s and 1930s the Surrealists in selecting individual images seem far from arbitrary (Fig. 2).17 Some of the routinely presented themselves en masse using choices are playful. Matta, for instance, as the youngest member of the mug shot portraits. The first notable instance of Surrealist circle, is represented by a boy in a sailor suit in the middle of the this is the page of La Rkvolution Surrealiste, no. 1, December 1924, in which they are shown, second row. Giorgio De Chirico, third row at right, is represented as a statue. alongside figures they admired such as Freud, Miro, second from right at the top, is confusingly represented by a photograph surrounding the anarchist, Germaine Berton. of a couple with the implication that the anglicised version of his first name, Other important usages of the format are Man Ray's Surrealist Chessboard (1934) and the layout Joan, sparks gender confusion. In other instances the portraits exaggerate a in La Rkvolution Surrealiste no. 12, December characteristic of the artist concerned. That of Max Ernst, therefore, in the top 1929, in which the group, with eyes closed, left corner, makes much of his prematurely whitened hair and adds to the surround Magritte's je ne vois pas la (femme) cachke dans laforet. Beyond this, the group were often photographed standing or sitting together. Interesting variations on the latter tradition occurred in early 1942 when George Platt Lynes produced a few group photographs for the 'Artists in Exile' exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York (March 1942) in which the Surrealists now appeared alongside fellow exiles such as Fernand Leger and Piet Mondrian. Later in the year, at some point after Duchamp's arrival in June, a variation of this group portrait was taken with each row of protagonists oriented in a different direction as though dramatising the doctrinal divergences at work among the emigres. Among the group are Leonora Carrington, Max Ernst, Kurt Seligmann, Duchamp, and Breton, and it is fair to assume that the Compensation Portraits, in so ": far as they allude obliquely to the dispersal of ? I:-?ctrl?? cJp) the Surrealist group at this point in time, have a distinct relationship to this genre of group portrait. Arguably, however, the historically :n'1SiF 'b? B, removed or 'exotic' aspect of certain of the tl" r ???.. Compensation Portraits has its precedent not in : ?: ::. :? ' :S?: 9L. mainstream Surrealism but in what Simon Baker

F-7.i : 13C'1 has seen as a pre-emptive parody of the ....: :::.. Surrealists' group portrait of December 1929; ?, the collage of photographs (of the likes of Johann Strauss and Samary and Got in 'Voyage to the Moon') which accompanies Georges Bataille's 'La Figure Humaine' in Documents, no. h; O11 4, 1929 (See Simon Baker, "'The thinking man and the femme sans tete": collective perception and self-representation', Res 38, Autumn 2000, pp. 194-5.) As yet, it has proved impossible to identify many of the actual personages who appear in the Compensation Portraits, but research f continues in this area. Certainly, this essay is ?s:i:? predicated on assuming the special significance,

or political urgency in 1942, of a few of the .r' images over and above the rest.

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Fig. 6. Back cover for the catalogue 'First Papers of Surrealism' (New York, 1942). (Photograph courtesy of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Dean Archive.)

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 26.1 2003 53

This content downloaded from 132.174.250.220 on Fri, 08 Sep 2017 12:52:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms David Hopkins mythology of his capacity for 'depaysement'. In yet further cases, the portraits seem to have been selected because of physiognomic links: this is the case with Masson's stand-in, in the centre of the bottom row, an unidentified Inuit. In this instance, however, an oblique tribute to the Surrealists' fascination with Oceanic and Eskimo art might also be at isssue, whilst the 'portrait' of the Cuban-born Wifredo Lam (second row down at right), who was undergoing a i profound re-orientation during this period, having returned to his native Cuba after a lengthy immersion in European culture, no doubt feeds off his recovery _ of an 'African' identity.'8 In the case of Duchamp himself, the compensation portrait (second from right, second row)-which has already been identified ' 'l as a section from a photograph by the American Ben Shahn of the wife of a tenant farmer-bears a striking likeness to certain photographs of the lean- - faced Duchamp of the mid 1930s (Fig. 7). But beyond this its significance is overdetermined to a degree which now needs to be unpacked. The first determining factor, which initially only needs to be touched on briefly, is the discourse around gender identity which characterised much of

Fig. 7. Beatrice Wood, Photograph of :?ig.... Man Ray, MarcelDuchamp with Louise and Walter Arensberg, Philaelphi Mse :of D.; TheHollywood, 1936. (Current whereabouts Trust~ /t A Pars nd ondn00unknown.)

18. Andre Breton wrote a short but significant essay in 1941 registering the shifts in Lam's ...... tk IC ,sensibility: 'Wifredo Lam: The long nostalgia of ::i,'~i:i: S S S poets . . . ' in Surrealism and Painting, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Icon Editions: New York, 1972), pp. 169-71. Lam's self-discovery was to find visual expression in his key 1943 painting TheJungle. Subsequently the fullest account of his personal odyssev was Pierre Mabille's essay 'The Jungle', Tropiques, no. 12, A-. _ t _ 2 E t January 1945, reprinted in translation in M. Richardson (ed.), Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean (Verso: London, 1996), pp. 199-212. Discussing Lam's .f '~_I r jL encounter with Picasso in Paris in 1938, Mabille ,a~ g v 5wrote: 'The Master, in the prime of his genius and glory, still powerfully marked by the revelation of negro art, saw standing before him a black man who had known Western values . . . but who, far from having been absorbed by Europe, had gradually regained an awareness of himself and his own means.' (Richardson, Refusal of the Shadow, p. 208.)

Fig. 8. Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp Dressed as Rrose S6lavy, c.1923-4, gelatin silver print. Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Samuel S. White III and Vera White Collection. (Copyright Man Ray Trust / ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2002.)

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Duchamp's previous output. In 1921 and 1923-4 he had collaborated with Man Ray to produce photographic images of himself in the guise of Rrose

19. For discussions of Rrose Silavy in relation Selavy, his female alter ego (Fig. 8).19 Clearly, the woman in the Ben Shahn to the thematics of gender in Duchamp's photograph represents some further manifestation of Rrose, although here output, see Amelia Jones, Postmodernism and the female identity has not so much been assumed as hijacked. Feminine identity En-gendering of Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994), Chapter 5; becomes a kind of available vessel, a conceit which might be linked to the Dawn Ades, 'Duchamp's Masquerades' in Freudian commonplace whereby women are symbolised as vessels in men's Graham Clarke (ed.), The Portrait in Photography dreams. At the same time, photography becomes the vehicle for a kind of (Reaktion Books: London, 1992), pp. 94-114; and David Hopkins, 'Men Before the Mirror: transmigration of souls. There is plenty of evidence that this was a period in Duchamp, Man Ray and Masculinity', Art which Duchamp was preoccupied with the ontological implications of History, vol. 21, no. 3, September 1998, photographic inscription.20 In one seemingly offhand gesture, published in the pp. 303-23.

20. The roots of this concern are discussed in my 'Men Before the Mirror', pp. 311-12.

Fig. 9. 'Marcel Duchamp at the Age of Eighty-Five', photographer unknown, reproduced in View (New York), March 1945. (Current whereabouts unknown.)

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David Hopkins

1945 issue of View magazine devoted to him, he presented a contemporary photograph of himself aged fifty-eight which was captioned with the date 1972 and the information 'Marcel Duchamp At The Age of 85' (Fig. 9). Ageing here 21. This account relates to the Mulhall familx is brought on by photographic angling and lighting (Duchamp in fact died in of Muskgrove, Arkansas. Quoted in Howard Greenfeld, Ben Shahn (Random House: New 1968). Beyond these conceptual games lie the political resonances accruing York, 1998), p. 127. from Duchamp's hijacking of an image saturated by social hardship. At this point, then, it is useful to examine the photograph and related images by Ben Shahn from which Duchamp derived his work. The source for the surrogate portrait was a photograph of Rehabilitation clients in Boone County, Arkansas, taken by Ben Shahn in October 1935 (Fig. 10). Duchamp's cropping of the image obviously emphasises the link with his own features, but de-emphasises the social context which was Shahn's subject.The woman's skinny crossed arms as she appears to hug herself, the gap between herself and her children, the pose of the girl faintly echoing that of her mother, all emphasise the tensions wrought within the family as it has to weather the effects of the US Depression. Such a family was one of many thousands in the American South displaced during the mid 1930s as a result of a combination of natural disaster and enforced reductions in employment for sharecroppers and tenant farmers. Shahn's second wife, Bernarda Bryson, was to provide a written account of the living conditions of a similar Arkansas family: 'They had been resettled on submarginal land; it was almost solid rock. There were no windows in their home, a dirt floor and no water. What water they had was hauled from a great distance. Their cash crop of that year: $1.40.'21 Shahn, established as a socialist mural painter having worked with Diego Rivera on the Rockefeller Mural in the early 1930s, was unemployed by the mid 1930s and joined the government-sponsored Federal Art Project under the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Working as a photographer between 1935 and 1938, he was employed under the documentary wing of the

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Fig. 10. Ben Shahn, Untitled (Rehabilitation Clients, Boone County, Arkansas), October 1935, gelatin silver print, 17 x 24 cm. Courtesy of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museum, Robert M. Sedgwick II Fund. (Copyright President and Fellows of Harvard College.)

56 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 26.1 2003

Resettlement Administration (later to be known as the FSA-Farm Security Administration).22 He worked with a small Leica camera equipped with a 22. The best recent account of Shahn's right-angle viewfinder which allowed him to photograph his subjects unaware. photographic output is Deborah Martin Kao, In the case of the image in question, there are several related photographs in Laura Katzman, and Jenna Webster, Ben Shahn's existence which show him honing in on the troubled psychology of the New York: The Photography of Modern Times (Fogg mother.23 Art Museum and Yale University Press: New Haven, 2000). As the title implies, the book Quite how Duchamp came to know Shahn's work is uncertain. In the 1930s largely concentrates on Shahn's New York Duchamp had largely been resident in France, and much preoccupied with output, but Deborah Martin Kao's esssay 'Ben Shahn and the Public Use of Art' (pp. 39-73) is chess, although he visited the USA for a brief period at the end of 1933 and for very useful for his overall attitude to longer in late 1936. The Depression was then at its height. One reporter who photography in the 1930s. See also Susan interviewed Duchamp whilst he was visiting his patron, Walter Arensberg, in H. Edwards, 'Ben Shahn: The Road South', History of Photography, vol. 19, no. 1, Spring Los Angeles, recorded the French artist's view that California seemed like a 1995, pp. 13-19. 'white spot in a gloomy world'.24 More specifically, in a 1960s interview with 23. See Margaret R. Weiss, Ben Shahn, Pierre Cabanne, Duchamp revealed some knowledge of the FSA, although he Photographer: An Albumfrom the Thirties (Da Capo appears profoundly unsympathetic: 'there was an official organisation called Press: New York, 1973), plates 52 and 53. the WPA-or something like that-which would give every artist about thirty 24. Arthur Millier, 'Painter Hits Art Theory', or forty dollars a month [Cabanne notes that it was more like a hundred Los Angeles Times, 16th August 1936, sec. 2, p. 2. As quoted by Naomi Sawelson-Gorse, dollars] on the condition that he give his paintings to the State. This was so he 'Hollywood Conversations: Duchamp and the could live. It was a complete fiasco. The State's storerooms became filled with Arensbergs' in Bonnie Clearwater (ed.), West all these artists' rubbish.'25 Of course, he may simply have thought of Shahn's Coast Duchamp (Grassfield Press: Miami Beach, 1991), p. 30. work as rubbish or ephemera, hence the readiness with which he eventually

25. Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel appropriated it. It is interesting, though, that one of Duchamp's closest Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett (London, 1971), contacts in New York after he emigrated there in June 1942 was the Surrealist- p. 84. associated dealer Julien Levy. Levy had actually worked with Lincoln Kirstein 26. For a detailed account of Duchamp's on the Museum of Modern Art's 1932 exhibition 'Murals by American attempts to return to the US see Calvin Painters and Photographers', selecting the Photo-Murals section of the show, Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (Chatto and Windus: London, 1997), pp. 323-7. and thus establishing a relationship with Shahn which would lead to his showing Shahn's paintings (as opposed to his photographs) at his New York gallery in May 1940. Although Levy and Shahn fell out shortly after this, the event represented a significant alliance between an artist synonymous with social realism and a dealer broadly committed to Surrealism-and from this we can assume that, once established in America, Duchamp would have had plenty of reason to take note of Shahn. The above returns us to the question of Duchamp's stance on political engagement. Since it seems likely that Duchamp knew very well what Shahn and his art represented, what was at stake, ideologically, in appropriating one of his images? To focus this question properly we first need to ponder more closely the relationship between the set of Compensation Portraits and the title of the exhibition and catalogue for which they were produced, 'First Papers of Surrealism'. Those Surrealists who entered America in the early 1940s had enormous difficulty obtaining entrance papers. It took two years of diplomatic manoeuvring by Duchamp's American patrons Walter Arensberg and Katherine Dreier before his papers were deemed suitable for a smooth entry into America, whilst Max Ernst , once he had got to America after several periods of imprisonment as an 'enemy alien' in France, spent a lengthy period detained on Ellis Island.26 In a sense, the Compensation Portraits (Fig. 2) summon up the idea of the Surrealists entering America under assumed identities withfalse papers. (Duchamp had in fact assumed the identity of a wholesale cheese merchant in order to transport materials for his Boites-en Valise through the German-occupied zones of France in 1941. This adds to the associations of the close-up photograph of Gruyere cheese on the back cover of the 'First Papers of Surrealism' catalogue, investing the publication's contents

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This content downloaded from 132.174.250.220 on Fri, 08 Sep 2017 12:52:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms David Hopkins with connotations of avant garde smuggling.)27 (Fig. 6) Many immigrants to the US around this time found it helpful to 'modify' their identities, frequently Americanising their names, and in this respect the fact that several images 27. For further elaboration of the cheese represent archetypes of recent American subculture is interesting. The merchant episode see Tomkins, Duchamp, pp. 323-4. portraits of Breton and Picasso, for instance, at second from left, top row, and top right respectively, have distinct gangster or 'film noir' connotations. Kay 28. First Papers of Surrealism, ex cat, unpaginated. Sage (bottom right corner), the wife of Yves Tanguy, is translated into a figure 29. First Papers of Surrealism, ex cat, from a Wild West costume drama. The implication is that Surrealism offers a unpaginated. return to America's pioneer spirit, or that it is the province of the socially dangerous and marginalised. In the case of Duchamp's portrait, these associations get extended to the issue of America's socially disadvantaged-and this is reinforced by the fact that Leonora Carrington, the estranged partner of Max Ernst who had suffered a mental breakdown after escaping France for Spain, and eventually got to America via Lisbon, is presented by a further example of FSA photography, Walker Evans' portrait of Allie Mae Fields Burroughs (second from right, third row), the wife of a southern sharecropper. This image had initially appeared in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the classic marriage of documentary photography and text by Walker Evans and James Agee, published the previous year- another factor which overdetermines the strategic nature of the choice of Compensation Portraits, and establishes Duchamp's and Carrington's as being particularly loaded. Ironically, of course, the fact that Duchamp and Carrington are presented here under the very imprimatur of 'documentary' photography, means that their Compensation Portraits double back precisely on the question of 'truth telling' or veracity. If these are false passport photographs what they in fact say about their undercover subjects might be said to be predicated, at least by virtue of links to documentary aesthetics, on the notion of 'honesty'. Here we begin to enter deep water. For in appropriating such imagery, which in the case of Duchamp amounts to him usurping the identity of someone from a very different class position than himself, should we assume that some spurious identification with America and its socially disadvantaged is being set up-from the standpoint of Surrealism in general or Duchamp in particular? Certainly the catalogue for 'First Papers of Surrealism' appears to have a dual strategy in terms of cultural politics. On the one hand Surrealism is shown to represent a continuation of certain currents endemic to American literature, so that in an essay by R. A. Parker entitled 'Explorers of the Pluriverse' American literary figures such as Poe and Melville, and eccentrics such as Benjamin Paul Blood and Charles Hoy Fort, are seen as Surrealists avant la lettre.28 On the other hand, much is made of the movement's galvanising impact in the US: in his foreword to the catalogue Sidney Janis talks of the conditions being propitious for 'this persistent and magnetic domination'.29 Avant garde domination was exactly what Breton, his authority diminished by his enforced exile, dreamed about. Were the Surrealists trying to have it all ways, asserting avant-garde hegemony for themselves on foreign soil whilst identifying with an indigenous community of the socially subversive or downtrodden? It is necessary here to think about Surrealism's political position at this time. The early 1930s had been characterised by the movement's attempt to align itself with international formations of Communist artists and writers but, after 1934, when Russian ideologues had sanctioned Socialist Realism as the official cultural policy of international Communism, the Surrealists grew increasingly alienated, and in 1935 broke completely with the Party. By the late 1930s, despite short-lived

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groupings around journals such as 'Contre-Attaque', which saw Breton enter an alliance with his old enemy Georges Bataille, the Surrealists' lack of direct

30. Andre Breton and Leon Trotsky, 'Towards party-political affiliation had deprived them of any official outlet for their a Free Revolutionary Art', trans. Dwight views. Eventually, in 1938, Breton made a trip to Mexico where, in league MacDonald, as reprinted in Charles Harrison with the exiled Leon Trotsky, he produced an important manifesto laying out and Paul Wood (eds), Art in Theory 1900-1990 (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1992), the Surrealists' position on the compatibility of artistic experimentalism and pp. 527-8. revolutionary politics. As part of the jointly produced 'Towards a Free 31. See Laura Katzman, 'Ben Shahn's New Revolutionary Art' Breton and Trotsky launched a withering attack on Socialist York: Scenes from the Living Theatre' in Kao, Realism: 'The official art of Stalinism mirrors with a blatancy unexampled in Katzman and Webster, Ben Shahn's New York, p. 20. For an excellent account of Left political history their efforts to put a good face on their mercenary profession. ... In formations, in relation to art, in mid 1930s the realm of artistic creation, the imagination must escape from all constraints America see Andrew Hemingway, 'Meyer and must under no pretext allow itself to be placed under bonds.'30 Schapiro and Marxism in the 1930s', Oxford Art Journal, vol. 17, no. 1, 1994, pp. 13-29. In this context it is interesting that Duchamp should wish to literally identify himself with the work of an artist, Ben Shahn, whose sympathies in the 1930s 32. Louis Aragon, untitled contribution to The Quarrel Over Realism (first published in La had very much inclined towards Socialist Realism, (although it should be noted Querrelle du realisme, Paris, Collection that in 1935 Shahn had severed his previous editorial connections with the Commune, Editions sociales internationales, Communist-oriented Art Front, despairing of in-fighting between Stalinists and 1936, pp. 55-68), reprinted in translation by James Johnson Sweeney in Christopher Phillips Trotskyists, and had begun to adopt the moderate liberal position which would (ed.), Photography in the Modern Era: European eventually see him endorsing New Deal policies).31 Duchamp's literal Documents and Critical Writings 1913-1940 (Metropolitan Museum of Art: New York, identification with Shahn in the Compensation Portrait could be seen as deeply 1989), p. 77. ironic in relation to Surrealism. No doubt Duchamp was well aware that, in

33. Phillips, Photography in the Modern Era, the mid 1930s, Louis Aragon, who had famously split from the Surrealists in pp. 73-4. This essay appeared in another 1932, had forcefully advocated a return to realism in art as opposed to what he version in Art Front as 'Painting and Reality' (Art termed the 'anodyne arabesques' of experimentalist modes of art Front, 3, January 1937, pp. 8-10). production.32 Significantly, in an essay published in both Paris and in America 34. The exhibition took place at the Julien Levy Gallery, New York. See Juien Levy, Photographs in the pages of Art Front Aragon had aligned his project with the potentialities by Henri Cartier-Bresson and an Exhibition of Anti- of photography. Aragon had made a point here of denigrating Man Ray- Graphic Photography, ex cat (New York, 1933). accused of sterility, of being detached from life and too heavily dependent on 35. See Susan H. Edwards, 'Ben Shahn: The Fine Art idioms-in favour of Henri Cartier-Bresson, seen as a photographer Road South', History of Photography, vol. 19, no. of the people, of movement rather than stasis.33 In effect, he sketched the 1, Spring 1995, p. 17. Edwards notes that Shahn's interest in photography was also emergence of two traditions of photography, a modernist one and a stimulated by his contemporaneous friendship 'documentary' one; the latter, of course fulfilling his aesthetic requirements. with Walker Evans, with whom he discussed Significantly, it had been Duchamp's art dealer friend Julien Levy who had first 'both aesthetics and technique', but credits the Levy Gallery showing of Cartier-Bresson as the shown Cartier-Bresson's work in America when, in 1933, he had pre-empted catalyst for Shahn's stylistic development as a Aragon by aligning it with a group of news photographs as an example of what photographer. he termed 'anti-graphic photography.'34 It was precisely this work which proved inspirational for Ben Shahn, about to embark on a stint as a photographer.35 This suggests that Duchamp's implicit identification with the documentarian Shahn made an extremely telling point in relation to photographic discourse. If we recall that Duchamp's Compensation Portrait constituted a reincarnation of Rrose Selavy, his female alter-ego, the photographer responsible for capturing the elusive image of Rrose had originally, of course, been his friend Man Ray, the butt of Aragon's anti-modernist photographic critique. By now deftly placing the imaging of Rrose in Ben Shahn's hands Duchamp registered a shift in photographic debates which simultaneously placed Surrealism's doctrinal rifts of the early 1930s firmly under the spotlight. All of this could be seen as markedly satirical at the Surrealists' expense, but a modification of the argument might hinge on the fact that Duchamp's Ben Shahn appropriation does not stand alone among the Compensation Portraits. Taking into account the additional presence of the portrait of Leonora Carrington-which utilises Walker Evans' FSA photograph-the intention may have been a more concerted attempt to reinstate, albeit ironically, the

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Surrealists' leftist credentials. In this sense the images do indeed become a form of compensation for the Surrealists' failure to achieve proletarian identifications, a failure which would have been felt particularly acutely by the 36. See Dickran Tashjian, A Boatload of Madmen, emigre Surrealists at a time when certain of their ex-associates in France were pp. 219-21. actively lending support to the Resistance. 37. Duchamp was to continue to experiment It is interesting in the latter respect that the 'First Papers of Surrealism' with the idea of the silhouette profile in a series of Self-Portraits in Profile of 1958 (see Schwarz, exhibition was actually organised under the auspices of a French Relief The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, cat. 577, organisation-the Coordinating Society of French Relief Societies-which, for pp. 811-12). These works also exploit an reasons of political expediency, was pro-Vichy. This even extended to entrants element of double-reading (and hence some residue of the Wilson-Lincoln effect to be at the opening of the exhibition being obliged to pass a life-size bust of discussed below) in so far as they play on Marshall Petain.36 It is surely possible to see Duchamp strategically capitalising figure-ground reversals, with the backgrounds on the embarrassing position which 'official Surrealism' found itself to be in. If against which the profiles are placed frequently possessing greater 'presence' than the profiles. this is the case, he was, for the first moment in his career, squarely involved in 38. See Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography, p. 341. political debate, mobilising his selection of 'Compensation Portraits' to point up the Surrealists' inability to, as it were, assume the identifying features of 39. A concise account of the US flag's genealogy is supplied by Fred Orton in his political struggle. By contrast Duchamp demonstrates a willingness to over- Figuring Jasper Johns (Reaktion Books: London, identify with the downtrodden, to the extent of abandoning his own gender. 1994), pp. 89-91. This, of course, evokes the image of a more invested Duchamp than we are used to. And it must be added that all this is far from being finite as an interpretation. In line with the equivocation so fundamental to Duchamp's personality, it would be entirely appropriate to posit a further level of content. There may be an essentially cynical attitude towards economic cycles of boom and bust at stake here. Duchamp's alter-ego Rrose Selavy, once a high-class femme fatale, a denizen of the pages of Vogue, has undergone an economic slump. Perhaps Duchamp simply found it amusing to position himself among his earnest Surrealist colleagues wearing the trappings of the social. The above dilemma-hinging squarely on Duchamp's attitude to 'commitment'-can be cast in a different light by turning to another, profoundly untypical work produced by Duchamp early in 1943, just a few months after the design of the First Papers catalogue. The artist was asked by Alexander Liberman, the editor of Vogue, to submit an entry for a competition his magazine was holding to produce an image of George Washington for the cover of the magazine's 'Americana' edition of February 1943. Duchamp came up with an assemblage entitled Allegorie de Genre ('Genre Allegory' or 'kind of allegory') (Fig. 11) in which the profile of George Washington is conjured from a section of shrivelled bandage gauze.37 This has been stained with iodine to evoke dual connotations of wounds and the stripes of the American flag, and studded with a scattering of disconsolate stars. Turned sideways the image suggests the shape of the United States. For various reasons the image was rejected by Vogue's editors. It seems that the stained gauze evoked associations for them of used sanitary towels.38 This is interesting in so far as the production of the first American Flag-sewn together from separate pieces of cloth by Betsy Ross in 1777-had had connotations of 'women's work', and Duchamp in a sense preserved the home-made quality of that initial gesture as well as actually employing thirteen stars, emblematising the union of the original thirteen US colonies (possibly his concession to historical exactitude given the 'Americana' theme).39 Perhaps Vogue's editors, acutely conscious of their magazine's largely female readership, elided knowledge of these 'feminine' origins for the US flag with discomfort at the blood-stained appearance of the assemblage. The 'sanitary towel' association becomes more significant, however, in relation to the fact that three years later Duchamp produced a small work, to be included in one of his Boites-en- Valise, consisting of a splash of his own semen on black

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Fig. 1?. Marcel Duchamp, All6gorie de genre (Portrait de George Washington), 1943, assemblage: cardboard, gauze, nails, iodine, and gilt stars, 53 x 40.5 cm. Mus6e National d'Art Moderne, Centre National d'Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, Paris. (Copyright Succession Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2002.)

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satin, entitled, pointedly enough, 'Wayward Landscape'.40 The two might almost be read as indexical pendants of 'masculine' and 'feminine' bodily production, but at some further level these gestures, and particularly the Allegorie, seem to play off the political-in so far as that comes to be configured in terms of terrain or land mass-against eruptions or breaches of the body's boundaries. Given that the USA entered the Second World War about a year prior to the production of Allegorie de Genre it is safe to assume that the work commented on the way America's sense of nationhood was inextricably bound up with bloodshed. The stars, attached as they are to the ends of long nails, physically puncture the gauze. In this respect, they undoubtedly echo both the Bachelors' 'shots' which had been drilled into the Large Glass over twenty years earlier and the actual shots fired by Duchamp at Seligmann's barn wall and replicated in the cover design for First Papers of Surrealism (Fig. 4). Such allusions to the role of firearms in American culture help explain the work's radical unsuitability for the 'Americana' edition of Vogue. But the butt of Duchamp's irony would have been far from clear. In fact the work actively thematises equivocation in terms of its play on doubleness. Another feature of Duchamp's Large Glass, although one which was only speculated on in the notes for the work, had been a diagrammatic reformulation of what Duchamp called the 'Lincoln-Wilson system': a kind of double portrait utilising the alternating Fig. 12. Royalist print from the French facets of a concertinaed surface, which, seen from one angle reads as President Revolution, c.1793. Musee de la Revolution francaise-Vizille (France). No d'inventaire: MRF Lincoln and from the other as President Wilson.4' You can look at things one 1986-255. (Photograph by Andr6 Morn.) way, Duchamp implies, or you can look at them another, and this phlegmatic acceptance of the relativism of one's position pervaded much of his output, 40. For some discussion of this work in relation (think for instance of the gender-specific nature of Fountain or the enforced to gender metaphors in Duchamp (and Picabia) see my 'Questioning Dada's Potency: Francis viewing position of the spectator of Etant Donnes).42 Quite possibly Duchamp Picabia's "La Sainte Vierge" and the Dialogue was also familiar with a type of print, circulated by monarchists during the with Duchamp', Art History, vol. 15, no. 3, French Revolution, in which the outline of a classical urn could also be read September 1992, pp. 317-33. inversely as the profiles of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, thus signalling 41. In his notes for the Glass Duchamp described 'the portraits which seen from the left secret allegiance to the royal couple (Fig. 12). Duchamp's gesture is equally show Wilson seen from the right show Lincoln', hermetic but in no way harbours clandestine assent to a cause.43 It is also far following the description with a small sketch of from coincidental that, included in the Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism catalogue a rudimentary optical figure (see Marcel Duchamp, Green Box Notes, unpaginated). It is accompanying the Museum of Modern Art's large exhibition of 1936, had significant that Andre Breton made reference to been a trick portrait of Roosevelt, produced in 1933 by the graphic artist C. C. this idea in his 'Lighthouse of the Bride' essay, Beal (Fig. 13). Captioned 'Find What Roosevelt means to the USA in this to be discussed shortly, which was reprinted in translation in the US-published liesw magazine in picture', the image was made up of figures and objects symbolising various March 1945. Here Breton linked the concept to measures linked to the New Deal programme.44 All in all, this establishes that the 'dazzling' of the Bachelors' 'splash' as it Duchamp's seemingly casual appropriation of a New Deal-associated enters into the Bride's Domain of the Large Glass (see View, March 1945, p. 9), referring photograph by Ben Shahn, only months prior to the Allegorie de Genre, was obliquely to the section in the Green Box .otes heavily over-determined politically. where Duchamp does indeed speculate on the It is also possible to assert that, in the wake of Allegorie de Genre, Duchamp vicissitudes of the 'splash' in relation to the Wilson-Lincoln effect. In full Duchamp's produced two further politically-tinged gestures. The first of these, which rumination reads as follows: 'Mirrorical underlines the anti-patriotic reading of the Allegorie was a cover design for the return-Each drop / will pass the 3 planes at Surrealists' VVV Almanac (nos. 2-3) of March 1943 in which Duchamp simply the horizon / between the perspective and the geometrical drawing of the 2 figures which will re-presented as a readymade an anonymous etching of an apocalyptic horse be / indicated on these 3 planes by the Wilson- rider, allegorising death, wearing the Stars and Stripes of the US flag (Fig. 14). Lincoln system .... The mirrorical drops not The second gesture was far richer in terms of its implications and returned the drops themselves / but their image pass between these two states / of the same figure.' more squarely to the relations between Surrealism and America as originally (Green Box Notes, unpaginated). These ideas are dramatised by the Compensation Portraits. Asked by Andre Breton to produce a obviously complex, but they refer to certain cover for his 1946 poetry collection 'Young Cherry Trees Secured Against optical transformations undergone by the Bachelors' 'drops' or 'splashes' in being Hares', Duchamp came up with a dust jacket design bearing an image of the refracted from one (male) zone into another Statue of Liberty with a hole cut in the position of its face and filled with the

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This content downloaded from 132.174.250.220 on Fri, 08 Sep 2017 12:52:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Politics of Equivocation: Sherrie Levine,

(female) zone of the Glass. It seems very likely that a connection exists here with Wayward Landscape, as discussed above, not least because this drop of semen, rather than having an 'invisible' biological destiny during coition, has been fixed two dimensionally as an optical 'smear' (a blurred photograph might well be a further analogue for this 'dazzling'). All of this suggests that Wayward Landscape and the Allegorie de Genre, as well as having landscape and/or political associations, are post-facto recapitulations of earlier ideas bound up with ineffable metaphysical inversions of visuality and gender identity.

42. Duchamp's desire to avoid side-taking, to cutivate an 'irony of indifference', has been linked by Thomas McEvilley to the early Greek philosopher Pyrrho of Ellis (c.365-275 BC) on the basis that, in one conversation with Arturo Schwarz, Duchamp spoke positively of his writings: see Thomas McEvilley, 'Empyrrichal Thinking (And Why Kant Can't)', Art Forum, vol. 27, no. 2, October 1988, especially pp. 120-7. In a sense, the fixity of the spectator's position ordained by a work such as Etant Donnes acts as a counterpoint to this refusal of viewpoint. Certainly the gender- specific nature of the readymade Fountain has led, in recent years, to a revised sense of the exclusivity of address in certain areas of Duchamp's output. See, for instance, my 'Men Before the Mirror', and Paul B. Franklin, 'Object Choice: Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain" and the Art of Queer Art History', Oxford Art Journal, vol. 23, no. 1, 2000, pp. 25-30. 43. See E. H. Gombrich, 'Illusion and Visual Deadlock' in Meditations on a Hobby Horse (third edition) (Phaidon: London and New York, 1978), p. 153. I 1 *S A, X K ' ^W ii 44. See Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, ex cat, tJs555*i 4 ~55 ~. \6.;'~ -X :S '_:- . s .. b - ed. Alfred H. Barr Jr (Museum of Modern Art: ap 0 S 1 tw i ? -:: k mwv,. -:X el v e a? !

New York, 1936), cat. 523. The catalogue Qs? X * ' ' e i tA. '!5 i v -, .' . < : entry is followed by a lengthy legend explicating AN W l:- ^1 4 f4l u :oit%-asaa,aE:B~i:.-a~ bi ~i ~~ the constituent elements of the image. It is significant, also, that the catalogue as a whole contains a number of double-images ranging from works by Archimboldo (cat. nos. 6 and 7) to Bracelli (cat. no. 53) In many ways, this device sets the tone for the publication, and Fig. 13. C. C. Beall, Find What Roosevelt Means to the USA in this Picture, 1933, reproduced in finds its realisation, in terms of Surrealist usage, Alfred H. Barr's 1936 catalogue to the MoMA exhibition, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism. This in the 'paranoiac-critical' double images of reproduction was taken, with kind permission, from a copy in the collection of Professor Sally Stein. Salvador Dali (for example, cat. no. 320). Dali's The author would like to thank Professor Stein for her generous assistance in the reproduction of use of the technique continued to dominate his this image. canvases of c. 1938-40, but this was precisely the period when his ambiguous attitude towards Fascism alienated him decisively from Bretonian Surrealism. In this respect, Duchamp's sudden features of a photograph of Andre Breton from the book's inside cover utilisation of a Dali-associated technique in 1943 (Fig. 15). Once again, the theme of transvestism was revisited in so far as is curious. In his important resume of Surrealist Breton became transformed into an allegorical female figure. But the image's achievement, 'Artistic Genesis and Perspective of Surrealism' of 1941, Breton had taken pains main function was to cross-relate two sets of ideas. Firstly it played on the to place Dali's achievement in the past: '[his Statue of Liberty's dual role as the first sight for immigrants to the US and work] from 1936 onwards has had no interest emblematisation of democratic principles for the world at large. Secondly, it whatsoever for Surrealism' (see Breton, Surrealism and Painting, p. 76). Quite possibly overlaid these ideas on to Breton's own immigrant status in the US and the pathos of his failure to import Surrealism's evangelising artistic-cum-political

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This content downloaded from 132.174.250.220 on Fri, 08 Sep 2017 12:52:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms David Hopkins

libertarian project to America. The fact that Breton was to return to France in April 1946 added to the nest of ironies.

The Statue of Liberty had, of course, been imported from France in the first Duchamp was willfully signalling some degree of place. Sculpted by Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi, it had been presented to the US solidarity with the Surrealist outcast (who, by France in 1877 as a symbol of the spread of French Enlightenment ideals. needless to say, does not figure in the set of Compensation Portraits). Duchamp and Dali appear More specifically, it embodied shared republican principles, and was displayed, in fact to have got on very well, first in 1933 in fragmentary form, at the 1876 world fair in Philadelphia to mark the when Duchamp visited Cadaques, and again in anniversary of America's split from Britain after the War of Independence. the middle of 1940 when, together with friends and lovers, they listened to the fall of France on (Duchamp's likely sensitivity to the historical roots of allied French-US a radio in the town of Arachon near Bordeaux. political ideals resonates with his attention to detail in deploying thirteen stars Certainly, later in life the two men became in the portrait of Washington for the Allegorie and the sense in which the image close friends. Dawn Ades has recently noted their shared fascination with perspective and takes an ironic cue from the monarchist prints circulated during the anamorphosis: see 'Dali's Optical Illusions' in Revolution. No doubt he was also aware of the extent of French involvement, Dawn Ades (ed.), Dali's Optical Illusions on the side of the Americans, in the War of Independence.) Duchamp (Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art and Yale University Press: New Haven, 2000), p. 22 and passim. MEEMMPMR - -- -, -77.? .?" ?rur,?-r .1?... ??12..- --1 1? .Bl?I VV:R:~.fl : i I.I I*rU

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Fig. 14. Marcel Duchamp, Front Cover for WV, nos 2-3 (Almanac for 1943), New York, 1943, readymade (anonymous etching). Philadelphia Museum of Art, gift of Carol Zigrosser. Photograph by Lynn Rosenthal 2002. (Copyright Succession Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2002.)

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ruthlessly parodies Breton's inability to broker cultural alliances between France and the US (an enterprise rendered absurd in any event by Breton's

45. See Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: stubborn resistance to learning English), and the reading is compounded by The Allegory of the Female Form (Picador: London, Marina Warner's observation that at one time a placard stood next to the 1985), p. 11. There in fact existed a sub-genre entrance of the Museum of Immigration by the statue's plinth bearing a of group photographs of the Surrealists in which group members poked their heads and upper painted image of the statue through which visitor's could poke their heads. bodies through painted placards. Two of the They could then purchase a snapshot of themselves as Liberty with the added most significant examples are reproduced in Max caption 'My Ideals'.45 Duchamp's play on the equation between Breton and Ernst: Fotografische Portrats und Dokumente (State Museum: Bruhl, 1991), where Jurgen Pech Liberty amounting in the end to little more than tourist kitsch was suggests that the device may have had some role simultaneously poignant and damning. in Max Ernst's canonical Surrealist group Whether or not Breton was stung by his friend's merciless irony is portrait Au Rendez-vous des amis of 1922 (pp. 46-7).

Fig. 15. Front cover of Andr6 Breton, 'Young Cherry Trees Secured Against Hares', 1948. (Author's collection.)

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This content downloaded from 132.174.250.220 on Fri, 08 Sep 2017 12:52:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms David Hopkins unclear.46 But there is a further aspect of Duchamp's depiction of Breton which suggests that it carried the stamp of the equivocations on questions of engagement which have been noted above. When contemplating his book 46. Mark Polizzotti notes that, although Breton cover commission, Duchamp must surely have had in mind the final lines of himself professed to like the design, one of his then allies, Charles Duits, felt that the Surrealist Breton's painstaking exposition of the Large Glass, 'Phare de la Mariee', which leader was being lampooned. It is interesting had originally appeared in Minotaure in the winter of 1935 but had been that Breton appears to have been oblivious to reprinted in America, in a translated version, in the Surrealist journal View of one of the darker ironies of the title 'Young Cherry Trees Secured Against Hares' (a title he March 1945. Here Breton had talked of 'La Mariee mise a nu' as constituting a himself had come upon, by chance, in a kind of beacon which should be kept 'luminously erect, to guide future ships horticultural catalogue). At this time Breton's on a civilization which is ending'.47 Breton's choice of metaphor could be seen former wife, Jacqueline Lamba, was involved in an affair with the American artist David Hare. as obliquely linking Duchamp's Bride to the personification of Liberty on Ellis See Mark Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Island, partly by reference to Duchamp's own previous movements between Life of Andre Breton (Bloomsbury: London, France and the US, and partly by reference to America's strong socialist and 1995), pp. 518-19. anti-Fascist currents of the mid 1930s. 47. See Andre Breton, 'Lighthouse of the Breton also knew that the Large Glass contained imagery which could be Bride', View, series V, no. 1, March 1945, p. 13. related to Liberty's Beacon, namely the 'illuminating gas' produced by the 48. Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, cat. 28, p. 459. Bachelors in its Lower Domain. What he most probably did not know was that the origins of Duchamp's use of such imagery lay in a drawing of a humble 49. So far as I am aware Duchamp himself never voiced any preoccupation with 'Bec Auer' hanging gas lamp that had been produced as early as 1903-4.48 Philadelphia's historical significance, and it could Around 1946-7, having designed Breton's book cover, Duchamp began work easily be argued that he was simply ensuring on what was to be a form of translation of the concerns of his Large Glass into that his final work joined the other examples of his output in the Arensberg Collection, which three dimensional terms. In this final elaborate assemblage-cum-installation, was initially bequeathed to the Philadelphia Etant Donnes, he placed a real Bec Auer lamp in the hand of an otherwise Museum of Art in 1950. Given the drift of the ravaged Bride-stripped-bare, now fallen to earth. He stipulated that the piece current argument, however, the choice of Philadelphia may well have been over- eventually be installed permanently in Philadelphia, aware no doubt of the determined. For a short discussion of this issue city's links with the beginnings of the US republic.49 All of this suggests that, see Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography, p. 433. whatever other symbolic allusions were at play in the installation, there may 50. Various accounts of Etant Donnes and its well exist a buried allegory of social liberation.50 And it suggests that he possible meanings exist. Two of the most comprehensive are Anne d'Harnoncourt and remained haunted by what Breton, however misguidedly, had stood for. Walter Hopps, Etant Donnes: Reflections on a New Robert Lebel once noted that, reflecting on Breton after his death, Duchamp Work by Marcel Duchamp (reprinted Philadelphia was moved to an uncharacteristic burst of lyricism. Breton, Duchamp said, had Museum of Art, 1987), and Arturo Schwarz, 'Completing the Large Glass', chapter XVII of been 'the lover of love in a world that believes in prostitution'.51 The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp. For a As with the Compensation Portrait utilising Shahn, the cover of Breton's book summary of the main lines of interpretation, was to become a marginal item of Duchampiana, its significance only apparent with an emphasis on religious implications, see Dawn Ades, Neil Cox, and David Hopkins, to a few initiates, but an elaborate version of Allegorie de Genre was eventually Marcel Duchamp (Thames and Hudson: London, reproduced in the Surrealist review VVV in February 1944.52 In many ways it is 1999), chapter 9. Dalia Judovitz's 'Rendezvous a precursor to a later reflection on patriotism, Jasper Johns' Flag painting ofwith Marcel Duchamp's "Given"' in R. Kuenzli and F. Nauman (eds), Marcel Duchamp: Artist of 1954-5. Flag has also been seen by commentators as overtly thematising the Century (MIT Press: Cambridge, 1989), equivocation, and it is odd that the possibility of Johns either consciously or pp. 184-202, is perhaps the most interesting of unconsciously recapitulating what he may have seen in a copy of VVV has barely several post-Structuralist readings. been entertained given his subsequent near-obsession with Duchamp.53 51. 'Andre Breton', Arts-Loisirs (Paris), no. 54, However, if Flag projects a kind of undecidability as to the relative claims 5-11 October 1966, pp. 5-7. As cited by Robert Lebel, 'Marcel Duchamp and Andre on art of the aesthetic and the social, at a time when McCarthyism made it Breton' in Anne d'Harnoncourt and Kynaston strategic for Left-inclined artists to play mute, Duchamp's work acquires aMcShine (eds), Marcel Duchamp, p. 140. quite committedly anti-American resonance by comparison. All of this 52. VVV, New York, no. 4, February 1944, suggests that the early to mid 1940s was a period when Duchamp allowed pp. 65-6. This is an uncut proof of a reproduction of the gauze from Allegorie de Genre himself to hint at social opinions, or even political affiliations, that he normally with a cut-out black and blue page laid over the kept well hidden. image to produce the shapes of Washington's profile and the map of the USA on its side.

53. For a discussion of Flag in terms of * equivocation see Fred Orton, Figuring Jasper Johns (Reaktion Books: London, 1994), chapter Just as Duchamp believed in foregrounding his own (and his viewer's) 2, especially pp. 145-6. Johns' fascination with positionality, Duchamp's 'position', vis-a-vis the imperatives of a socially Duchamp has been well documented. For a

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responsive art practice, can finally be gauged by returning, as a coda to this essay, to where we began, namely the phenomenon of his reception by Sherrie Levine. recent run-through of the main points of comparison see Roberta Bernstein, 'Seeing a It seems suitably ironic, given the trajectory of this discussion, that among Thing Can Sometimes Trigger the Mind to Levine's more recondite homages to Duchamp has been a series of works Make Another Thing' in Kirk Varnedoe, Jasper Johns: A Retrospective (Museum of Moder Art: playing on George Washington's profile in which the 'masculinity' and New York, 1996), pp. 43-7. In the past, Johns' 'femininity' inscribed within the Allegorie de Genre cryptogram are made overt conscious referencing of Duchamp has tended to be dated from around May 1957 when he (Fig. 16). But what needs to be returned to here is the question of how the visited the Arensberg Collection in Philadelphia ethical implications of a work such as After Walker Evans (Fig. 1) are inflected, in the company of Robert Rauschenberg. in advance, by a set of historical pre-conditions, namely-to pinpoint the However, Johns had known John Cage from salient moments in the preceding narrative-the network of discursive bonds early 1954 and might easily have seen canonical Surrealist publications such as Vl'V prior to that link the Compensation Portraits of Duchamp and Leonora Carrington. starting work on Flag late in 1954. It is clear by now that part of the force of Sherrie Levine's After Walker Evans 54. I borrow the Mobius strip metaphor from resides in its relationship to Duchamp's Compensation Portrait of himself as Adrian Rifkin's recent Ingres Then, And Now another troubled woman from the Depression years and, thus, in Levine's (Routledge: London and Nes York, 2000), p. 6. stance, vis-a-vis Duchamp, as a female appropriationist. Indeed, the whole 55. Martha Rosler, 'In, around, and dialogue here might be seen as turning on the gendering of the act of afterthoughts (on documentary photography)' in Richard Bolton (ed.), The Contest of Meaning appropriation. However, one has to ask whether Levine was aware that the (MIT Press: Cambridge, 1992), pp. 318-19. Walker Evans image had itself been appropriated as a Compensation Portrait on Alongside Rosler's, another important discussion behalf of the female Surrealist Leonora Carrington. In terms of the complex problematising the issue of 'realism' in relation to FSA photography is John Tagg's 'The historical discourse within which she was situating herself, it might be argued Currency of the Photograph: New Deal that Levine was, in a sense, identifying not so much with the subject of the Reformism and Documentary Rhetoric'. See photograph as with Leonora Carrington; in other words with a symbolic avatar chapter 6 of his The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Macmillan: of the appropriative powers of the female author (at least in so far as these Basingstoke and London, 1988), pp. 153-83. powers were claimed, on Carrington's behalf, by Duchamp/Breton). This An excellent general discussion of the ethics of would lead us to conclude that, according to the Mobius strip logic of the documentary photography is Abigail Solomon- Godeau, 'Who is Speaking Thus? Some historical archive, it is Duchamp, despite his resistance to being pinned down Questions about Documentary Photography', in to any 'position', who achieves the unlikely feat of identifying with the subject her Photographj at the Dock: Essays on Photographic of Ben Shahn's photograph.54 Histor., Institutions, and Practices (University of Minneapolis Press: Minneapolis, 1991), The point here, which has necessitated this final return to Levine, is that the pp. 169-83. discursive unravelling of Duchamp's paradoxes, in which Levine participates both knowingly and unknowingly, ends up 'compensating' him for the ideological equivocation to which he liked to profess. And this in itself makes a telling point about the possibility of the author maintaining any one-to-one relationship between his/herself and the positionality of social subjects. In terms of the larger framework 'of this discussion, it sets the discursive contingency of images against the rigidly determinant conditions of a socialist realist aesthetics. In a sense, of course, Levine becomes the catalyst for the emergence of a politically incisive Duchamp, but at the same time she risks appearing merely to be the conduit for his historical 'completion'. The instabilities of her position as simultaneously art historian and actor in art history place her own (political) agency at risk. Duchamp, with his chess player's ability to predict conceptual fall-out, comes out of all of this looking both compassionate and committed. One final point seems worth noting. In her important essay on documentary photography, which itself acknowledges the philosophical limitations of the documentary ethos, Martha Rosler notes that when Evans' portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs was initially reproduced in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men it was not captioned. In the text, however, the subject of the picture was referred to under a false name, Allie Mae Gudger, in order to offer her real life equivalent

Fig. 16. Sherrie Levine, President Profile 1, some protection.55 In a peculiar sense, then, this image had always been a form 1979/1993. (Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, of 'Compensation Portrait'. New York.) At the end of this trail of false identifications we might ask what it is that is

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This content downloaded from 132.174.250.220 on Fri, 08 Sep 2017 12:52:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms David Hopkins really being compensated for. Lack, after all, has been summoned up in so many guises throughout this essay. Originary identities and authorial positions, the failure of Surrealism's political project, the fact of its dispersal . . .-all of the compensatory ploys discussed so far might appear to lead back irresistibly to the Freudian notion of the fetish as stand-in for lack, particularly as that comes to be figured in the image of an emaciated woman made to act as stand- in for Duchamp's femininity; an image furthermore that is simply a fragment, cut away from a larger photograph and, by implication, a larger (social) whole. Should Duchamp's oft-imputed sidestepping of ideological accountability, his dandyish irresolution in the face of embattled modernist causes, be seen as masking something that was lacking at another level: the ability to distil critique from an endless deferral of meaning? Or was he not, in the instances discussed in this essay, facing up to the double bind of commitment, at least in so far as Surrealism, and the figure of Andre Breton especially, embodied that dilemma? In the end, Duchamp's politics emerge as a politics of equivocation, underwritten by mourning. His position takes on an ethical cast. In so far as he chooses to stand in for a woman, or a proletarian subject, or to have that person stand in for him, he suggests it is the experience of standing in the place where the other stands that we crave and can never have.

This essay was delivered as a paper in various versions, at the Association of Art Historian's Conference, Edinburgh (April 2000), at the Universities of Glasgow, Manchester, York, East Anglia, and Essex, and also at Edinburgh College of Art. My thanksfor the many helpful suggestions made on those occasions by colleagues. The title, it has been pointed out to me, could be read as an echo of Denis Hollier's 'On Equivocation (Between Literature and Politics)', October 55, Winter 1990, but that was certainly not my intention. Any thematic parallels that exist are purely fortuitous. I particularly wish to thank Simon Bakerfor two very helpful items of information, and Simon Dell, who raised several questions that proved pertinent to the final version. I am also grateful to Adrian Rifkinfor his help in resolving certain structural questions.

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