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Duchamp is an even
more anti-historic being than I. -- Salvador Dalí
...whether you're
anti or for, it's two sides of the same thing.
And I would like to be completely... nonexistent. -- Marcel Duchamp
The Passage from "Le Pendu Femelle" to "La Phallesse"
"In mathematics, it goes from a very simple theorem to a
very complicated one", as Marcel Duchamp concludes his important interview
with Pierre Cabanne, "but it's all in the first theorem. So, metaphysics:
tautology; religion: tautology: everything is tautology, except black
coffee because the senses are in control! ... but the rest is always
tautology".
For Duchamp, however, not only metaphysics, religion and all the rest,
but also grammatical gender, and especially the sexual identities in terms
of which he elaborates it, are also tautological. Here, the "very simple
theorem" is the conventional division of words, in Romance languages,
into masculine and feminine--and the "very complicated theorem", by contrast,
the unconventional sexual identities in terms of which Duchamp elaborates
grammatical gender. Indeed, Duchamp's is the distinctly modern realization
that necessarily precedes alternative (e.g. feminist and queer) sexual
identities, and makes them possible in the first place: the identification
of gender also as a surface no less constructed than that of language
or of painting.
| click to enlarge |
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| Figure 1 |
| Marcel Duchamp, Fresh
Widow, 1920 |
The strange affinity, in this respect, of Manet's Mlle.
V... in the Costume of an Espada (1862) to R[r]ose Sélavy's first
autograph work, Fresh Widow (1920)(Fig. 1)--in
fact, a French window--is exemplary. "Woman", as a political signifier,
Mlle. V reduces to the essential equivalence of painting and drag
as similarly factitious; and "Spain", as an historical signifier, it self-consciously
eschews in favor of a stylish "Espagnolisme". Like Mlle. V in drag,
whether commenting on the making of Modernist art or the formation of
modern sexual identity, Fresh Widow is also, first and foremost,
a construct(ion). Analogous to language, it is made by another (the carpenter
Duchamp hires) and acquired by oneself only as another (signed, albeit
in block letters, by R[r]ose Sélavy). As such, it is so perfectly transparent
to itself (a French window) that in order to obtain meaning it need at
first achieve at least contingent opacity: whether as a French window
or a fresh widow, either way, habillée en noir. In this sense,
perhaps there can be no more thoroughly modern surface than the perfectly
flat and opaque, black leather curtain with which Fresh Widow
both occludes the "window on the world" of Renaissance perspective and,
at once, asserts the analogous untransparency of modern sexual identity.
To Manet's equivalence of painting and drag, their relationship
to language as similarly gendered and factitious is Duchamp's essential
contribution. Indeed, the mind reels at all the wonderfully non-literal
translations we might come up with for one of the venerably venereal quips
Duchamp so loved to invent: "A charge de revanche; à verge de rechange"
[Owe a favor; replace a penis].
"Even Steven's" comes quickly to mind, as does, with malaprop dexterity,
"Procastrination". Yet any such translation begs the more seminal question,
what exactly is a "replacement penis"?--and what kind of favor can one
possibly repay with tender of this sort? Although the debt here is obviously
masculine, elsewhere--by Duchamp's own admission, throughout his works--the
downpayment is expressly feminine, as when he observes: "l'arrhe de la
peinture est du genre féminin" [the downpayment / art of painting is feminine
in gender] (DDS 37; WMD 24). In this economy in which literary
and artistic transactions freely participate in sexual exchange, another
of the artist's fundamental "laws" as he calls them--"'cuttage' in reserve"
which, he enigmatically pronounces, is limited to "razor blades which
cut well" (DDS 47; WMD 31)--reveals the common currency
of both the debt and downpayment of Duchamp's art to be neither castration
exactly, nor its anxiety really, but rather the essential reversibility
of the male-female dyad which both underlies and structures his works
more generally.
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| Figure
2 |
Figure
3 |
| Marcel
Duchamp and André Breton, Window installation for Arcane 17,
1945 |
Marcel Duchamp, Etant donnés: 1° la
chute d'eau / 2° le gaz d'éclairage, 1946-66
|
Although both Duchamp's Arcane 17 window installation
(1945)(Fig. 2), as well as his Etant Donnés
installation (1946-66) (Fig. 3), prominently
feature a female mannequin, that mannequin has been both beheaded--which
is to say, emasculated of a masculinity it never possessed--yet
at once reprovisioned with the phallus, indeed, with either of its two most
fundamental figurations in Duchamp's oeuvre: a faucet attached to
her thigh in the former, a Bec Auer lamp in her hand in the latter
(which I will discuss at greater length below). With no greater investment
in the historical or political stakes by which sexual exchange, for Duchamp,
instead becomes a matter of a sex change--of a "replacement penis", no doubt
facilitated by "'cuttage' in reserve"--so too the phallus becomes a sort
of "phallesse": an empty, or at least a priori indeterminate,
sexual (ex)change value. Of course, a sex change can cut either way--and
it is with no greater difficulty that Duchamp's pre-Surrealist fellow-traveler,
Apollinaire, describes the corollary scenario in Les Mamelles de Tirésias
(1917): exit Thérèse and, the tether to her balloon breasts easily severed,
enter Tirésias. Thérèse "gives a great cry and opens her blouse", read Apollinaire's
stage instructions, "her breasts pop out... and as she lets them go[,] they
fly up, balloons on the end[s] of strings".
In a series of doublets more than worthy
of Duchamp at his most playful--"virgin / bride, vierge / verge,
peindre / [pendre], passeur / pas soeur!, Cézanne / Suzanne"--de
Duve analogously locates the phallus at the fulcrum of a variety of sexual
(ex)changes, or "passages", which structure not only the artist's title
painting, The Passage from Virgin to Bride (1912) (Fig. 4),
but also his earliest signature works more generally. What separates Duchamp's
Vierge [Virgin] (1912) (Fig. 5)
from his Mariée [Bride] (1912) (Fig. 6) is exactly "'cuttage'
in reserve"; or, as de Duve explains, a difference of "I", "the lacking
signifier", which is "the phallus, the signifier of lack".
Thus, get rid of the "I" in "vierge" [virgin], as he observes, and you
have "verge" [penis]:
the sign of her loss of virginity. Similarly, get rid of the "I" in "peindre"
[to paint], and you have "pendre" [to hang].
Although beginning as "a woman to be painted"--as both Duchamp's Virgin
and virgin canvas--the Bride nevertheless ends up as "a woman
to be hanged";
or, as de Duve concludes, "[once] a woman painted, in the past participle,
the Bride will now be called 'le pendu femelle' (hanged female)".
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| Figure
4 |
Figure
5 |
Figure
6 |
| Marcel Duchamp,
The Passage from Virgin to Bride, 1912 |
Marcel Duchamp,Vierge,
No. 1 [Virgin], 1912 |
Marcel Duchamp,
Mariée [Bride], 1912 |
Yet, neither "woman to be hanged", nor certainly "hanged
female", truly embraces the genital-as-zoological quality of "Le Pendu
Femelle"--both the most abstract and also the most ambivalent of Duchamp's
figurations of the "phallesse"--which I would instead translate
as "the female of the species which is male and hangs". For as a "hanged"
and, in this sense, a dead woman, Duchamp's "Le Pendu Femelle" at once
presents a dead end: a sign otherwise without reference in his works.
Yet, as establishing an essential homology between her sex and his own,
as between these and painting in turn--à la Renoir's famous dictum, that
he paints "with his prick" (cf. DDS 239)--its relevance to Duchamp's
works could not be more manifest. Here, where neither member is on top,
but potentially both at the same time--and Mar-Cel doubly identifies as
both "Mar[iée]" and "Cél[ibataire]": "Bride" and "Bachelor"--Rrose lifts
her skirts to reveal the most traumatic sign of gender difference of all:
for Duchamp, its essential indifference. Neither sexually nor linguistically,
neither "his" nor "hers" alone, "Le Pendu Femelle" is just such a reversibly
gendered, anatomical cipher--or, "phallesse". Although Duchamp's
explicit figurations of "Le Pendu Femelle" are already several--and variously
observable in the Passage, Bride and, severed from this
last, the Large Glass (Fig. 7(c)-(e))--these
merely reiterate an anterior, even atavistic formal prototype, according
to which (with disconcerting, Apollinaire-like simplicity, no doubt) insert
rod or piston into circle or semicircle, sphere or demisphere. Georges
Bataille perfectly captures the formal logic of "Le Pendu Femelle" when
he similarly identifies the "two primary motions"--"rotation and sexual
movement"--to the rotating wheels of the locomotive (like the semicircular
head of "Le Pendu Femelle"), driven by the in-and-out thrust of its pistons
(exactly how Duchamp mechanically renders Le Pendu Femelle (1913)
in Fig. 7(a)).
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| Figure
7a |
Figure
7b |
Figure
7c |
| Marcel Duchamp,
Le Pendu Femelle (1913), detail from the Green Box,
1934 |
Marcel Duchamp,
Detail (reversed) of Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2,
1912 |
Marcel Duchamp,
Detail of The Passage from Virgin to Bride, 1912 |
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| Figure
7d |
Figure
7e |
| Marcel Duchamp,
Detail of The Bride, 1912 |
Marcel Duchamp,
Detail of The Large Glass, 1915-23 |
####PAGES####
|
the "passage"
may literally be the anatomical route...
-- Dawn Ades, Neil Cox, David Hopkins
Rites of Passage: t / here
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| Figure 8 |
| Paul Cézanne,
Bibémus Quarry, c. 1895,
Museum Folkwang, Essen |
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| Figure 9 |
| Marcel Duchamp,
The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even [the Large
Glass], 1915-23 |
Contrary to de Duve's claim of the somehow epiphanic
significance of Kandinsky and "Secession"--to which Duchamp was
introduced during his 1912 Munich sojourn--even
in Germany, the artist still speaks the lingua franca, not of Kandinsky
and non-objective art, but rather of Cézanne and Cubism (Fig.
8). The Berlin "Secession", he writes
to his brother Jacques Villon, "finally allowed me to see how young
French painting was looking abroad... I was really pleased to find they
have Cubism here, it was so long since I'd seen any. And that certainly
played a part in my having a soft spot for Berlin".
Indeed, in their analogous obsession with the problem of the background,
Duchamp spends the better part of a lifetime pursuing both the Cubists,
and especially the Master of Aix. As he explains to Francis Roberts:
| The main point is the subject, the
figure. It needs no reference. It is not in relation. All that background
on the canvas that had to be thought about, tactile space like wallpaper,
all that garbage, I wanted to sweep it away... The question of painting
in background is degrading for the painter. The thing you want to
express is not in that background.
|
Of course, the greatest testament to Duchamp's efforts in
this regard is his largely lacunary Large Glass (1915-23) (Fig. 9). Yet because the
"ground" can never be eliminated, not even by the changeable
view to the other side of the Large Glass, for Duchamp, rather,
it was at first a question of how necessarily to oppose figure to ground,
yet otherwise to elide them: in other words, a formal-as-conceptual question
of Cézannian / Cubist "passage".
Notwithstanding Duchamp's 1910 portraits of his father
ensconced in an armchair (Fig. 10),
or of his brothers playing chess at an off-miter card table (Fig.
11), it is not in these superficially Cézannesque
treatments, but rather in such early conceptual experiments as Avoir
l'apprenti dans le soleil [To Have the Apprentice in the Sun]
(1914) (Fig. 12) that
Duchamp's obsession with the background first comes to the fore. In this
drawing of a bicyclist racing uphill, yet executed on sheet-music paper,
the generative idea is straightforwardly revealed by the title:
| avoir l'apprenti dans le soleil
= à voir: l'empreinte qui dans le sol est
given to sight: the imprint which is in the ground |
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| Figure 10 |
Figure 11 |
Figure 12 |
| Marcel Duchamp,
Portrait of the Artist's Father, 1910 |
Marcel Duchamp,
The Chess Game, 1910 |
Marcel Duchamp,
Avoir l'apprenti dans le soleil [To Have the Apprentice
in the Sun], 1914 |
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| Figure 13 |
| Marcel Ducahmp,
Musical Erratum, 1913 |
In Apprentice, then, although figuration is inherently
opposed to the space of musical notation, nevertheless, the ascending
figure of the bicyclist is, at once, conceptually assimilated to the ascent
of the musical scale itself. For "sol" refers not only to the
title sun ["soleil"] of the drawing--the very precondition of
what is given to sight--but also to the rising ground ["sol"]
which the bicyclist ascends, exactly as the musical scale does also ["sol"
= key of G].
In the relationship of its imprint ["empreinte"] to its sheet-music
paper as ground ["sol"], Apprentice in fact revisits
another work of just the prior year, Musical Erratum (1913) (Fig.
13), which Duchamp scores for three voices, and whose lyrics he
exactly appropriates from a dictionary definition of imprint ["imprimer"].
In this "musical mistake", both the aleatory lyrics themselves,
as well as the equal value of the notes, and their arbitrary order and
range, all participate in the artist's contemporary experiments with objective
chance. Most telling of all, however, are the respective relationships
of the "imprints", or "figures", in Musical Erratum
and Apprentice to their otherwise identical "ground". However unconventional
the lyrics and notes in Musical Erratum, nevertheless, their relationship as musical notation to
their sheet-music paper as ground is entirely conventional. In Apprentice,
by contrast, that relationship--analogizing the ascent of the bicyclist
to that of the musical scale and, therefore, the figure to the ground--has
been entirely conceptualized. As Duchamp explains, "before the Nude my paintings were visual. After that they were ideatic":
not only in how they convey the "passage" from figure to ground,
however, but also in how they figure the ascent of a bicyclist, like the
descent of a nude, and movement more generally.
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| Figure 14 |
Figure 15 |
| Marcel Ducahmp,
Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912 |
Marcel Ducahmp, Nude
Descending a Staircase, No. 1, 1911 |
Indeed, the difference between the second version of
Duchamp's Nude Descending A Staircase (1912) (Fig.
14) and the first version (1911) (Fig.
15) is exactly this: the sense of depth, evidenced
by the inward-turning spiral staircase, which the second version specifically
de-emphasizes, and instead replaces with a more conventionally "chronophotographic"
foreground-as-frieze, inspired by Duchamp's interest in the time-lapse imagery
of such photographic pioneers as Etienne-Jules Marey (DDS 170-1;
WMD 124).
Yet rather than developing in and through space--conceived in both the first
and the second Nude as an analogously chronophotographic process of successively doubling
the figure--both Passage and Bride are irreducibly whole: constituted of jigsaw-like
elements which are unrepeated and, as such, cannot depict the sort of spatio-temporal
trajectory whose "there", as in either Nude, is but the
displaced double of its "here". Rather, the psycho-sexual trajectory,
or Passage,
from Virgin to Bride, Duchamp instead figures as the forked
rods terminating in semicircles which, at the center of the second Nude,
Passage and Bride, variously exemplify "Le Pendu Femelle"
(Fig. 7(b)-(d)); together
with the chronophotographic cues of Morse Code-like dots and dashes which,
similarly inspired by Marey's time-lapse imagery, in both the second Nude
and Passage, Duchamp specifically localizes about "Le Pendu Femelle":
as a series of inscribed arcs in the former; an extremely irregular polygon
in the latter. For "Le Pendu Femelle" is exactly what we should
expect to find in a state of chronophotographic flux as our Virgin
first transits to Bride, as evidenced by the presence of these cues in her Kama Sutra-like
Passage; no longer to be in a state of flux once our Virgin
has definitively arrived there, as evidenced by the absence of these cues,
now, as Bride; and, in any event, invariably to swing, "pendu"(lum)-like,
as our nude bridegroom descends the staircase, as evidenced by the presence
of these cues, first of all, in the second Nude. By contrast, all
reference to "Le Pendu Femelle" is, appropriately, entirely absent
from either version of Duchamp's eternally nubile Virgin.
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| Figure 16 |
Figure 17 |
| Marcel Ducahmp, Nude Descending a Staircase,
No. 3, 1916 |
Marcel Ducahmp, Sad Young Man on a Train,
1911 |
The male-ish gender of the second Nude, whose
title is admittedly neutral on this score,
is further confirmed by Duchamp's inscription of the third Nude
(1916) (Fig. 16) as the son ["fils"], presumably, of the second:
"Marcel Duchamp [Fils] / 1912-1916", as the third Nude
reveals at recto. Doubtless, "daughter" would have better served
the same filial purpose, were not the second Nude male; the third
Nude a replica of the second; and both, in this sense, a reprise
of another nude young man, from just the month before the second Nude:
Duchamp's Sad Young Man on a Train (1911)
(Fig. 17). Sad Young Man is a painting
of "two parallel movements corresponding to each other" which,
Duchamp elaborates, are those of the train and of the sad young man passing
through its corridor.
However, the artist also provides us with two further and frankly anomalous
details: the nude young man is a self-portrait--"Marcel Duchamp /
nu (esquisse) / Jeune homme triste dans un train...", as he inscribes
the picture at verso--in which he is smoking a pipe.
An entire series of only barely symbolic, yet closely related "parallel
movements" thus emerges, according to which everything rather starts
to resemble the phallus: from the erect young man penetrating the train's
"corridor"; to the train, itself, surely entering the tunnel
of his symbolic; where the pipe he smokes is no longer one--for, "faire
une pipe" is not to make a pipe, as Magritte's picture famously disavows
(Fig. 18), but rather
"to give a blow job". Indeed, the "parallel movements"
of Sad Young Man and, separated by only a month, the second Nude are
entirely comparable: the nude young man, who at first penetrates a venerably
Freudian corridor, in turn, descends an equally venerable staircase:
exactly the psycho-sexual Passage which the title work nominally regenders. No differently, the swing
of his "pipe" in Sad Young Man, at first replaced by that of his "pendu"(lum) in
the second Nude, Duchamp analogously regenders as "Le Pendu
Femelle" in both Passage and Bride. Rather, the salient difference between Sad
Young Man and the second Nude is the use of chronophotographic
cues in the latter -- to supplement the similarly chronophotographic process
of successively doubling the figure in both works--in a way which specifically
isolates and identifies "Le Pendu Femelle". The source of these
chronophotographic cues--in the time-lapse imagery of the foils Marey's
fencers wield -- exactly re-emphasizes the phallic aspect of "Le
Pendu Femelle" by transforming Marey's fencers' foils into the "phallic
barbs" which, as John Golding observes, everywhere proliferate throughout
Duchamp's first stab at The Bride Stripped Bare By The Bachelors
(1912) (Fig. 19).
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| Figure 18 |
Figure 19 |
| René Magritte, The Treachery
of Images, 1929 |
Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare
By The Bachelors, 1912 |
####PAGES####
["Joey"] moved his penis as if it
were the handle of a machine
and called it "cranking up the penis". -- Bruno Bettelheim
| click to enlarge |
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| Figure 20 |
| Marcel Duchamp,
Coffee Mill, 1911 |
As Time Goes By: The Passage from Pendu(lum) to Chronograph
The first and only other instance when these
chronophotographic cues significantly come into play is Duchamp's pseudo-plan
and -elevation of the Coffee Mill (1911) (Fig.
20), where, as in the second Nude, they
again plot a specifically "circular" movement. This is the same
(meta)physical trajectory--which, of course, is not one--that
Duchamp's two versions of the Chocolate Grinder (1913; 1914) (Fig.
21a, b) and, more famously, his Bicycle Wheel (1913) (Fig. 22)
also share. In addition to their common trajectory, however, the Coffee Mill and Chocolate Grinder also share a common morphology:
from the knobbed handle of the Coffee Mill, which traces a circle
about its stationary rod; to the three cylinders of the Chocolate
Grinder, which also rotate about a stationary rod--one which is, itself,
capped with a circular head, and not so enigmatically called the "bayonet"
(DDS 96; WMD 68), if we again think of Marey's fencers'
foils; finally, to a bicycle wheel which, in the title work, is mounted
to another stationery rod--this one (like "Le Pendu Femelle"
in the second Nude, Passage and Bride), by contrast,
forked. If we add, as post-scripts, Duchamp's experiments with the Rotary
Glass Plates (1920) (Fig. 23)
and Rotary Demisphere (1925) (Fig.
24), which figure the same sort of rod-and-demisphere
apparatus spinning on axis, the fact of a common morphology to all these
variegated objects becomes evident, as does its formal prototype in the
work which Francis Naumann suggests might be Duchamp's first Ready-made:
Bilboquet (1910) (Fig. 25),
a variation on the traditional cup and ball game, which if correctly manipulated,
exactly consists of a ball perched upon a rod. Indeed, the vicious circles
all these rods variously describe, or are otherwise inserted into, like
the sexual coupling Bilboquet assumes in particular,
even anticipate Giacometti's own "pendu"(lum) of sexual frustration,
Suspended Ball (1930) (Fig. 26).
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| Figure 21a |
Figure 21b |
Figure 22 |
| Marcel Duchamp,
Chocolate Grinder, No. 1, 1913 |
Marcel Duchamp,
Chocolate Grinder, No. 2, 1914 |
Marcel Duchamp,
Bicycle Wheel, 1913 |
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| Figure 23 |
Figure 24 |
Figure 25 |
Figure 26 |
| Marcel Duchamp,
Rotary Glass Plates, 1920 |
Marcel Duchamp,
Rotary Demisphere, 1925 |
Marcel Duchamp,
Bilboquet, 1910 |
Alberto Giacometti,
Suspended Ball, 1930 |
| click to enlarge |
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| Figure 27 |
| Marcel Duchamp,
The Chocolate Grinder's Leg, 1914, from the Green Box
(1934) |
In addition to their circular trajectory, however, the
Coffee Mill and Chocolate Grinder are also productive
of the same scatological-type comestibles, and in this sense participate
in the same bodily metaphor: "Slow life--Vicious circle--Onanism..."
(DDS 82; WMD 56), as Duchamp laments in his Large Glass
dirge. Even without the dirge, however, the embodied onanism of Duchamp's
"circular" imagery is not exactly subtle. "Always there has
been a necessity for circles in my life", he explains, for "rotation.
It is a kind of narcissism, this self-sufficiency, a kind of onanism".
In exactly these terms, indeed, Bruno Bettelheim describes how one of his
similarly circle-obsessed patients, "Joey", "moved his penis
as if it were the handle of a machine and called it 'cranking up the penis'".
(Like the crankshaft of the Model-T Duchamp could neither drive nor marry
and, faute de mieux, the automobile heiress whom he did marry,
but soon only drove on Sundays?) Yet what the Coffee Mill and Chocolate
Grinder add to the morphological mix is exactly this--an explicitly
phallic "crankshaft": self-evident in the alternately detumescent,
tumescent and outright saluting sweep which the Coffee Mill's knobbed
"handle" traces; no less evident, however, in the "nickel-plated
Louis XV chassis" on which Duchamp "mounts" his beloved-of-youth
(if, perhaps, then G-Rated) Chocolate Grinder (DDS 97; WMD
68). For "she"--"[La] Broyeuse de chocolat" [The
Chocolate Grinderess], as Duchamp calls her, already a very strangely
marked type of what would simply appear to be "un broyeur"--ain't
no lady. Not only is she "montée" [mounted] to her chassis,
but how she is "montée" [hung]. Indeed, that Louis
XV decor should ever have such Size-Queen-Anne "legs" (Fig. 27)--formidable!
The only difference, then, between the Coffee Mill's knobbed "handle" and the Chocolate Grinder's
cabriole "legs" is whether the body of the mechanomorphic apparatus
prefers to crown itself at top with a time-lapse whirligig of lesser phalli,
or to ride them instead like so many carousel horses: the casters with which,
in a sheerly gratuitous gesture even for Duchamp, he supplies the second
Chocolate Grinder's "legs". But for
all her great good luck, just like the modus (non) operandi of the Large Glass "Bride", the Chocolate Grinder's is also the
tale of an affection she does not exactly requite, as Duchamp describes:
| sur un châssis
Louis XV = sur un[e] chasse: il lui quinze
during the chase: fifteen times [she]
nickelé = niques, elles,
[f]ait
thumbs that nose of hers at him |
| click to enlarge |
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| Figure 28 |
| Salvador Dalí,
Persistence of Memory, 1931 |
Yet the perhaps ball-busting Chocolate Grinder
is no lady in this sense as well. For the viciously-circular bodily metaphor
she figures is, in itself, an endlessly-sweeping clockwork metaphor: a sort
of sexual end-game gone terribly wrong and instead become a waiting-game--or,
more to the point, a kind of Crying Game (as in "Le Pendu
Femelle" after all...). Thus the "circularity" of
the Coffee Mill and Chocolate Grinder refers not only to
the not-so-merry-go-round of onanism--"éternullité", as Jules
Laforgue says in his vein splittingly funny way--but
also to the circular movement of a clock, as does "Le Pendu Femelle"
which is both "femelle" [la "pendu...le" = clock], yet
grammatically masculine ["le pendu...le" = pendulum]. Indeed,
the so-called first "Blossoming" of the "Bride"--which,
in the upper register of the Large Glass, includes "Le Pendu
Femelle"--"should graphically aim", says Duchamp, "at
a clockwork movement (electrical clocks in railway stations)... to develop[:]
how best to express the throbbing jerk of the minute hand" (DDS
64; WMD 43). With its source, then, not only in the type of "rotation
and sexual movement" which Bataille similarly identifies to locomotives,
but also in the sort of clock we specifically find in "railway stations"
-- in other words, in waiting rooms--"Le Pendu Femelle"
indeed inaugurates the same countdown which Dalí's famous paean not just
to time waiting to get hard, Persistence of Memory (1931) (Fig.
28), by contrast, indefinitely suspends.
It is not only in relation to a clock, however, but
also as another sort of measuring device, a "barometer", that
Duchamp describes "Le Pendu Femelle". In a note entitled "In
'Le Pendu Femelle' -- and the Blossoming-Barometer", he explains:
"The filament substance might lengthen or shorten in response to
an atmospheric pressure organized by the wasp. (Filament substance extremely
sensitive to differences of artificial atmospheric pressure controlled
by the wasp)" (DDS 69; WMD 48). This "Blossoming",
by contrast, is thus effected by two principal actors. First, there is
the "baromètre" (i.e. "une barre à mettre"), of which
Man Ray's Catherine Barometer (1920), as well as his portrait
that year of Mina Loy (which prominently features a thermometer-earing),
also create something on the order of phallic mood-rings.
Second, there is the "guêpe" [wasp]. However, the wasp is not
only the grammatically invariable riposte -- "La Guêpe" (femelle)
-- to "Le Pendu Femelle", but also it is the female of the wasp
that has the poisonous stinger ["aiguillon"], which is itself
a variant on the "minute hand" ["aiguille"] of the
first "Blossoming", just as the former's venomous "sting"
reiterates the latter's "throbbing jerk". No matter, then, whether
we prefer to speak of a mercurial "barre" become "longue
et rigide", as Le Robert defines it, or, instead, of a retractable
"aiguillon". At issue, either way, is the same tumescence-inducing
operation: whether of bar or stinger, a process of "lengthening or
shortening" which, in response to "differences of pressure",
the barometer and the wasp can bring to bear more or less at will. Although
Duchamp's "Blossoming" perhaps parallels the undisclosed inner
workings of Woody Allen's famous "Orgasmatron", we can be certain
that it does parallel the tumescence-inducing "mechanical woman whose
vagina, contrived of mesh springs and ball bearings, would be contractile,
[and] possibly self-lubricating", which Duchamp once proposed to
erect.
####PAGES####
a language that will match
how he experiences things
-- and things only, not people. -- Bruno Bettelheim
Rites of Passage: s / he
| click to
enlarge |
| |
| Figure 30 |
| Marcel Duchamp,
Fountain, 1917 |
| |
| Figure 31 |
| Constantin Brancusi,
Princess X, 1916 |
Further elaborating the domain of the "phallesse"--of
such formidably phallic she-males as "La Broyeuse de chocolat"
and "Le Pendu Femelle" / "La Guêpe" (femelle)--Duchamp's
Fountain (1917) (Fig. 30)
analogously redesignates and, in the process, exactly reverses what would
very much appear to be "un pissoir" (or, otherwise, "un
urinoir"), instead, as "une fontaine". Indeed, Kermit
Champa asks, "Phallic? Vaginal? It was a man-made female object for
exclusive male functions. Yet, who could characterize it precisely?"
Nevertheless Fountain can perhaps be characterized as a "female object" in the
same sense that Duchamp might have described the similarly organic lines
of Brancusi's phallic totem, of only the prior year, Princess X
(1916) (Fig. 31).
For Beatrice Wood, indeed, Fountain was not only the "Madonna
of the Bathroom",
but also comparable to "a Brancusi, with curved lines of genuine sensitivity",
a formal logic perhaps informed by the fact that Fountain and a
version of Princess X were both slated to appear at the 1917 New
York Independents exhibition.
But Fountain is also a "female object" according to another
of Duchamp's randy quips: "On n'a que: pour femelle la pissotière et
on en vit" (DDS 37; cf. WMD 23). For those who easily
recall the days of disco, the gist is fairly clear--"I've got what
you want; you've got what I need":
| |
on n'a que = on a
queue: we've got dicks
et on en vit = et on envie: and we want [what
they've got] |
(Or, "where there's pussy there's prick" ["où
il y a Chaliapine"],
as Duchamp elsewhere declares.) Lost in between what "we've got"
and what "we want", however, "pour femelle / la pissotière"
plays by an entirely different set of rules. Although I might as well
be quoting Freud's infamous remarks in his lecture on "Femininity",
yet here too the problem--as in "Le Pendu Femelle" / "La
Guêpe" (femelle)--is "femelle". Like its closest English
translation--which is not really the "female" gender, but rather
the zoological "bitch"--"femelle" frankly varies from
catwalk to dogshow, for exactly which reason Flaubert counsels its use
"only in speaking of animals".
No less problematical, however, is the second and likewise "femelle"
term: "la pissotière". Even so, "We've got dicks, but all
we've got for broads are open holes, and we want them"--taking both
"femelle" and "la pissotière" as crudely reductive
of male desire to the desire for any available opening--doesn't quite
work.
For, behind the obviously problematic view of feminine
sexuality inherent in "pour femelle / la pissotière", the more
fundamental problem is Duchamp's intent to assimilate the meaningfulness
of gender in its psycho-sexual sense to its meaninglessness--or only circumscribed,
even binary meaningfulness--in any linguistic sense.
By which I mean, why are farmers, pirates and poets all in the conventionally
feminine form in Latin, although grammatically they are masculine, and
in Rome they were paradigmatically men? This is the typically aesthetic
question to which Duchamp likewise reduces gender, most obviously, when
he explains to Cabanne, "If it isn't a literary movement, it's a
woman; it's the same thing".
At this grammatical-as-ontological level, by simultaneously reversing
both the flow and the gender of "un pissoir", instead,
as "une fontaine", Duchamp similarly alienates it from
its expressly male identification by the simple and--like the rose of
Shakespeare and Stein--entirely arbitrary process of renaming it. So,
too, in "Le Pendu Femelle" ["the female of the species
which is male and hangs"], "La Guêpe" (femelle) and its
phallic stinger, as well as the Chocolate Grinderess and its phallic
cabriole "legs", even this process of renaming is, itself, self-consciously
marked and, in this sense, not unlike the use of "she" as the
indefinite personal pronoun, yet definitely to raise the issue of why
"he" is otherwise assumed. Duchamp's early experience with the
failure of English, by contrast, to gender its articles might even explain
the artist's otherwise inexplicable preoccupation with no sooner arriving
in New York than replacing each occurrence of a gender indefinite "the"
with an even more indefinite "*" in his title text of 1915:
The.
| click to enlarge |
| |
| Figure 32 |
| Marcel Duchamp, Nine
Malic Molds, 1914-15 |
Nevertheless, the Nine Male-ish Molds
(1914-15) (Fig. 32)--or
"Moules Mâliques [Mâlic (?)]" (DDS 76; WMD 51),
as Duchamp calls them--are perhaps the culminating example of all of this
grammatical-as-ontological play. Although both grammatically ["un moule"]
and descriptively ["mâlique"] masculine, their vessel-like form
is gender ambivalent: whether as uterine-like molds to condense and cast
gas (the enigmatic purpose Duchamp assigns them in the Large Glass),
or as dress forms whose typically male costumes make (i.e. mold) the man.
Yet, if "femelle" carries the double signifying burden of "bitch",
"mâle"--although obviously the foil to "Le Pendu Femelle"
/ "La Guêpe" (femelle) and "pour femelle / la pissotière"--carries
no such double connotation. As applied to the species, it means male; as
applied to men, manly. Rather, Duchamp descriptively emasculates the Molds, not as "mâle", but rather as "mâlique" or "mâlic"
(i.e. "male-ish") more as we might speak of clothes making the
drag king than the man. Like Rrose Sélavy--the "female-ish" dress
form, which is often confused with an alter ego (as if there were any ego
in any of this, in the first place)--the dress-form Molds similarly
identify the constructedness of language and of dress to that of gender
more generally. Indeed, if "mâlique" constitutes an invented,
feminine form of the adjective "mâle" (in the sense that "-ique"
tends to form the feminine), only further confusing matters, "mâlic"
restores Duchamp's neologism to an equally invented, male-ish form (-"ic")
--albeit one which is, itself, derived from an invented, female-ish form
(again, "-ique").
Exactly confounding logic, then, we have "Le Pendu Femelle" /
"La Guêpe" (femelle), which are clearly insertive, yet are located
in the upper register of the Large Glass: the so-called "Bride's Domain". On the other hand,
we have the Male-ish Molds which by definition are receptive, yet
are classed among the elements of its lower register: the so-called "Bachelor
Apparatus". With the phallic "Bride" on top, lording it over
her receptive "Bachelors" at bottom (cf. DDS 58; WMD
39), feminine and masculine in their psycho-sexual no less than their linguistic
sense--rather than meaningfully contingent, historical and political, coordinates--become
meaninglessly binary axes, and these, along an overarching grid of indifference.
####PAGES####
|
Circles are straight.
They are a straight line. -- "Joey"
Becoming Full Circle: From PiRr to πR2
Like the "circularity" of the Bicycle Wheel,
Coffee Mill and Chocolate Grinder -- or the tautological "I" they posit, whose
final determinant is only the "not-I" to which their onanism
opposes itself -- clad not only in the black leather of a Fresh Widow,
but also in "pi", the very figure of the circle, Rrose Sélavy
embodies an alternative (meta)physical trajectory. As Duchamp describes
her:
| ...en 6 pi qu'habillarrose Sélavy
= [Fr]ancis Picabia, Rrose Sélavy
= in sex, [it is] "pi" that clothes
eros, such is life |
| click to enlarge |
| |
| Figure 33 |
| Marcel Duchamp,
An Original Revolutionary Faucet: Mirrorical Return, 1964 |
In this sense, however, revolution no longer describes
a circular process of onanism, but rather a rotational process of sexual
involution--no longer a going around and around, but rather a turning inside-out--as
in Duchamp's engravings, Mirrorical Return (1964) (Fig. 33).
Here, above a line drawing of Fountain, the artist writes "an
original revolutionary faucet / 'mirrorical return'"; and below it,
"a faucet which stops running when we're not listening". In some
sense, the logic of a faucet "mirrorically returned" as a urinal
is only a variation on the circular theme with which we are already familiar.
Thus, the named, but not reproduced (effluent) faucet appears in Mirrorical
Return only by way of opposition to what it is not: the (influent) urinal,
which Duchamp does reproduce, as a line drawing of Fountain. But
Duchamp has also found a new binary axis--similar to "le" / "la",
"mâle" / "femelle", etc.--with only circumscribed (if
any) meaningfulness, by means of which to reclassify and once again to desublimate
sexual identity as a sort of user's manual--"insert tab A into slot
B" --for them for whom neither hunger nor love moves the world. Duchamp's
new binary axis exactly continues his earlier play on "mâle" /
"femelle", now, as plumbing fixtures--or "Lazy Hardware"
as they are sometimes called (DDS 154; WMD 106)--which are
indeed classified as insertive ["tuyau mâle"] or receptive ["tuyau
femelle"], respectively.
Neither is the "mirrorical return" Duchamp stages of "pour
femelle / la pissotière" at all unexpected: "pour mâle / le robinet"!
Yet what is "original revolutionary",
as the engravings boldly declare, either describes a faucet caught in
the pleonastic grip of advertising or one caught, instead, in a "revolutionary"--in
the sense of rotational--process, which is itself "original":
a sort of sexual spin-cycle, according to which his sex goes in, her sex
comes out; so too faucets go in, urinals come out. Thus, rather than return
Fountain to where it began--as he does the "handle"
of the Coffee Mill, completing its circuit of (de)tumescence--Duchamp brings Fountain
to where it never was, yet in some parallel sense always is. He rotates
it through the "fourth dimension", which exactly accounts for
its sexual involution, with what was an insertive / effluent faucet "mirrorically
returned" as a receptive / influent urinal.
Indeed, that the faucet doesn't actually appear in Mirrorical Return
is precisely Duchamp's (fourth-dimensional) point. For urinal and faucet,
in this sense, are not analogous objects, but rather are alternate manifestations
of the self-same object. At any given time and place, only one aspect
of its essentially dyadic nature is in esse--the other aspect,
by contrast, is always in potentia, and awaits the object's rotation
through the fourth dimension. For this reason, Duchamp elsewhere compares
the process of "mirrorical return" to the effect achieved by
so-called "Wilson-Lincoln" diagrams (DDS 93; WMD
65). Seen from the left, these accordion-pleated diagrams appear to be
Wilson; only at another time and place--a few seconds later, say, now
seen from the right--do they appear to be Lincoln. In this way, the object
has no absolute priority of identity--whether Wilson or Lincoln, faucet
or urinal--but only a relative identity, a pure sexual (ex)change value,
whose coordinates need include not only a place (our three dimensions)
but also a time (the fourth dimension, according to popular understanding).
Although the "Wilson-Lincoln" diagram is destined to remain
among the Large Glass' definitively unfinished elements, yet the
only difference between it, a faucet "mirrorically returned"
as a urinal, and Duchamp's related researches into the fourth-dimensional
field of sexual involution--his 1950s erotic casts which we might never
more accurately describe as "invaginated"--is
one of medium: e.g. Feuille de vigne femelle (1950) (Fig. 34),
in which her trough returns as a peak, if not strictly speaking his
peak; Coin de chasteté (1954) (Fig.
35), in which a positive form and its negative
are indissolubly elided; even Objet-Dard (1951) (Fig.
36), in which Eve's rib, from Etant Donnés, instead returns as Adam's (d)art.
No differently than Duchamp reversibly genders sexual identity along the
axes of "le" / "la", "mâle" / "femelle",
he thus "engenders" the figure-ground problem: as a question
not only of three-dimensional versus invaginated / fourth-dimensional
space, but also of real versus virtual space, to which I myself now turn.
| click on
images to enlarge |
| |
|
|
| Figure 34 |
Figure 35 |
Figure 36 |
| Marcel Duchamp, Feuille de vigne femelle [Female Fig Leaf], 1950/61 |
Marcel Duchamp, Coin de chasteté
[Wedge of Chastity], 1954/63 |
Marcel Duchamp, Objet-Dard
[Dart-Object], 1951/1962 |
####PAGES####
Vagina. Somebody's vagina will explode. Explode
us all. -- "Joey"
You Do Something To Me
| click to
enlarge |
| |
| Figure 37 |
| Marcel Duchamp,
Tu m', 1918 |
|
Figure 38 |
| Marcel Duchamp, Bottle
Dryer, 1914/61 |
|
| Figure 39 |
| Gustave
Courbet, Woman with White Stockings, 1861 |
In "Notes on the Index", Rosalind Krauss points
to the "indexical" quality of numerous elements of Duchamp's essentially
self-retrospective work, Tu m' (1918) (Fig. 37).
Krauss' indexical signs are those like the footprint in the sand which betrays
the presence of Friday to Robinson Crusoe-or,
more generally, any physical or verbal trace which assumes and, therefore,
indicates the existence of its erstwhile or immediate agent. In a physical
sense, this is exactly the quality which Duchamp's erotic casts, as physical
traces, consistently both instantiate and sexualize. Verbally, as in the
case of Tu m's title, there can be no "You" if, prior
to it, there is no "Me" speaking. Or, as Sandra Bernhard so brilliantly
states the corollary, "Without You I'm Nothing". Nevertheless,
for Krauss, Tu m' is somehow indifferently indexical: indeed, a
veritable summa of verbal shifters ("You", so "Me"),
pointing hands ("Here!" which, perhaps from my perspective, is
"There!") and cast shadows (indicating the subject of "Me
and My Shadow"), albeit spoken by no one and pointing nowhere in particular,
rather too emphatically signaling the void. Like the apparent irreducibility
of its title verbal shifters--"Tu m'", which Krauss neutrally translates as "simply 'you' / 'me'"--the
neutrality of its indexical signs, more generally, is only apparent. For
Tu m' is not "simply 'you' / 'me'"--there being
no "bar", nor anything else separating "us"--but rather,
given the verb its title assumes, "You are" or, more likely, "You
do" something to me. If not a Cole Porter-style sexual provocation,
Tu m' does at least imply that, rather than standing in the disembodied
no-place of entirely abstract You's and Me's, the spectator is instead directly
implicated in just the sort of "existential relationship" on which
the indexical sign is always predicated. Indeed, standing in front of Tu
m', the spectator is in the very midst of the ur-mother of all such
"existential relationships": a vagina.
Like the unspeakably impaled quiddity that is Duchamp's
Coin de chasteté , no less bleakly erotic is the terrible caesura
which the bottlebrush rips open in the surface of Tu m'. Yet not
only is the bottlebrush by definition insertive but also--as with the multi-phallic,
even deity-like Bottlerack (1914) (Fig.
38)--it specifically begs a glass vessel. Thus
the space the spectator occupies in front of Tu m' is not only penetrated (by the bottlebrush) but also, according to
the same logic, is itself uterine (or bottle-like) in shape. Indeed, the
space in front of Tu m', and annexed by it, is remarkably consistent,
as a virtual space (defined by the virtual presence of a glass bottle),
whose opening is likewise virtual (defined by the trompe-l'oeil breach),
yet possessed of a distinctly liminal reality: both opened by a real
bottlebrush and, in turn, closed by real safety pins. Exactly as
Duchamp describes his "bird-plus" reprise of Courbet's 1861 Woman
with White Stockings (1968) (Fig. 39),
here, too, "you can see a ['faux con'] and a real one":
not a falcon ["faucon"] and a fake cunt ["faux con"]
perhaps, but rather a fake cunt (a trompe-l'oeil breach, opening onto a
virtual glass bottle) and a real pecker (a real bottlebrush).
For Duchamp, it couldn't all be more logical. Rather
than impute the surrounding space of the artwork to its glass medium--exactly
as we do for the Large Glass, or its freestanding Glissière (1913-15) (Fig. 40), or A regarder
(1918) (Fig. 41)--simply perform the reverse
operation: and impute the glass medium to the surrounding space of Tu
m', no differently than we need also impute the Ready-mades, whose
shadows Duchamp projects and paints onto the surface of Tu m',
to that same space.
| click images
to enlarge |
| |
|
| Figure 40 |
Figure 41 |
| Marcel
Duchamp, Glider Containing a Water Mill in Neighboring Metals,
1913-15 |
Marcel
Duchamp, To Be Looked at (the Other Side of the Glass)
with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour, 1918 |
At this level, indeed, Duchamp's oeuvre is fairly redolent
with sexualized, virtual figures: not only the virtual glass bottle I propose,
but also the optical illusions of breasts and other part-objects engendered
by his experiments with "Precision Optics", as Krauss suggests.
Dissatisfied, perhaps, that the artist's virtual glass enclosure, not unlike
the Emperor's New Clothes, can't be (dis)proved?--Duchamp surely cackled
to himself. In that case, when did you last take a good, hard look, not
through glass, but at it? Exactly as Duchamp's title work,
A regarder, instructs us: "with one eye, close to, for almost
an hour", the glass is itself "to be looked at".
Not only is the glass there, but it also has a reverse side--and
it is precisely this reverse side, "the other side of the glass"
["l'autre côté du verre"], at which we should be looking. In addition
to the three-dimensional difference of this side versus "the other
side of the glass", however, the title also alludes to the difference
of inside versus outside: again, the specifically fourth-dimensional process
of physical involution. Thus, the other side ["l'envers"] of the
glass medium ["l'en-verre"] is always-already inside-out ["à
l'envers"]:
"l'envers / de l'en-verre / est à l'envers". Or, as Duchamp explains:
"the reverse and the obverse acquire a circular significance... [just
as] the interior and the exterior (in the fourth dimension) can receive
a similar identification" (DDS 45; WMD 29). In this way,
the surrounding space, which Duchamp's glass artworks really slice in three
dimensions, "mirrorically returns" as the virtual glass enclosure
which Tu m' inversely assumes in four dimensions. Nor is the complementary
nature of the Large Glass (as really slicing space) and Tu m'
(as virtually enclosing it) especially surprising insofar as both works,
in the 1930s, originally complemented and, in this sense, even completed
each other in one and the same room: Katherine Dreier's West Redding, Connecticut
library.
Although we can no more see the fourth dimension
than we normally do see glass, by specifically directing our attention
to "the other side of the glass", which is always-already "inside-out",
rather than ourselves taking a walk around the glass, during an impossibly
hallucinatory hour of zero focal distance ("with one eye, close to,
for almost an hour"), in effect, the glass takes a walk around us.
In the fourth dimension, Duchamp explains, three-dimensional objects (e.g.
spectators, penises...) are felt to be "circumhyperhypo-embraced
(as if grasped with the hand and not seen with the eyes)" (DDS
126; WMD 89). If "circum-embraceability" is not itself
without sexual suggestion, Duchamp makes his sexual-as-spatial premise
explicit when he describes ideas like the fourth dimension as grasped
by "the mind the way the penis is... by the vagina".
Like a specimen in a glass bottle, the spectator of Tu m' thus
becomes an object of surveillance, just as by colluding with the key-hole
of Etant Donnés, in the self-conscious process of peeping, the spectator himself
becomes the actual show.
####PAGES####
|
With his interest in incandescent lights came
also
a fascination with headlights. -- Bruno Bettelheim
Moonlight Becomes You
The lost weekend Duchamp shares with Apollinaire and Picabia,
visiting Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia and her mother, is nevertheless survived
by two important documents: Apollinaire's 1912 "Zone", named
after the region in the Jura mountains they were visiting, and Duchamp's
"La Route Jura-Paris", also from that year, named after the
road they took to get there. Having only just harrowed every driver's
hell--mountain passes in a torrential storm--Duchamp memorializes the
headlights, which he surely confronted on the road that stormy trip, as
the "headlight / lighthouse child" ["enfant-phare"],
who is indeed the principal protagonist in "La Route Jura-Paris"
(DDS 41-42; WMD 26-27).
Throughout the text, Duchamp even imparts a telling specificity to the
oncoming direction of these headlights in particular. Yet the automotive
near-collision he stages is not only personified, but also its protagonists,
rather more surprisingly, are nude. "To one side", as Duchamp
explains in "La Route Jura-Paris", the "leader of the five
nudes" is "in front of" the others, "towards"
the road and, himself, a sort of "terminus". "To the other
side", also a sort of "terminus", etc., the "headlight
/ lighthouse child" confronts the "leader of the five nudes"
(DDS 41-42; WMD 26-27).
A lighthouse is not itself without sexual suggestion,
as Breton's important article on Duchamp specifically emphasizes, "Lighthouse
of the Bride" (1935),
by otherwise inexplicably attributing the lighthouse to the "Bride",
just as Duchamp's Etant Donnés nude is famously possessed of a beacon-like lamp she also holds
aloft. Nor do Duchamp's light sources, any more than Zeus' mighty thunderbolt,
or his golden-shower visitation of Danaë, leave much to the imagination.
As Duchamp explains in his instruction manual for installing Etant
Donnés, "the spotlight should fall vertically, exactly,
on the cunt".
Yet, in exactly this sense, the "headlight / lighthouse child",
as it turns out, is also a "comet", one which, precisely reversing
the natural order of things, instead leads with its fiery tail ["sa
queue en avant"] (DDS 42; WMD 26). As such, Duchamp's
conflation of the headlight / lighthouse / tail-leading comet doubly emulates
Marey's foil-leading fencers. For not only do comet and fencer each lead
with the "tool" ["queue"] of his trade, but also the
tip of that tool--not unlike the fiery spear of Saint Theresa's "ecstasy",
or the bizarrely protuberant, glowing finger of E.T. --is, in both
cases, brightly illuminated.
| click to enlarge |
| |
| Figure 42 |
| Marcel Duchamp, Once
More to This Star, 1911 |
Like a moth to a flame, all these various figurations
of headlights, lighthouses and lamps, as well as the light-tipped "tools"
wielded by Duchamp's comet and Marey's fencers alike, exercise a similar
force of attraction, especially, on the comings and goings of nudes in particular.
Thus, in Duchamp's "La Route Jura-Paris", the headlight / lighthouse
/ tail-leading comet all but beats a path to the "leader of the five
nudes"; similarly, in Duchamp's first stab at The Bride Stripped
Bare By The Bachelors, the "phallic barbs" of the "Bachelors"--based
on the light-tipped parry!-thrust! of Marey's fencers--both surround and
take aim at the nude "Bride"; and, no differently, the second
Nude, as it turns out, is exactly the reverse of another nude of
just the prior year--this one, however, ascending a staircase: Encore
à cet astre [Again to This Star] (1911) (Fig.
42). Duchamp even nicknames the drawing "Nude
Ascending A Staircase", and explains that it "represented
a nude going up the stairs, and it is... the original idea in reverse of
the 'Nude Descending'".
As in "La Route Jura-Paris", therefore, we again have two nudes
whose direction relative to each other--whether nearly colliding on a road,
or crossing paths on a staircase--is specifically mediated by a source of
light. Moreover, exactly as Duchamp reverses the direction of the tail in
relation to a comet, he reverses the ascending nude into a descending nude
in relation to a "star". Yet the "star" to which the
one nude ascends, the other nude, according to Duchamp's logic, already
is--or at least possesses. For the descending Nude need not ascend
"to this star", because its "Le Pendu Femelle" is
that fully phallic--light-tipped foil-wielding, headlight / lighthouse "Bride"-beaconing,
tailing-leading comet-shooting--"star".
| click to
enlarge |
| |
| Figure 43 |
| Marcel Duchamp,
Hanging Gas Lamp (Bec Auer), 1903-4 |
 |
| Figure 44 |
| Marcel Duchamp,
Apolinère Enameled, 1917/65 |
For an artist so fundamentally concerned with the two
primary conditions of representation--"sol" and "soleil":
ground and light--that he ubiquitously invaginates the space of the former,
and phallicizes the light of the latter, it is perhaps unsurprising that,
just like the figure-ground problem, a lamp--the "Bec Auer" --should
also illuminate Duchamp's entire career: from the first drawing he makes
of it (1903-04) (Fig. 43),
just before finishing lycée and moving to Paris, to the very thing itself
which the Etant Donnés nude holds aloft in the last decades of his
career. Although one could argue that the light-tipped phallic body of Duchamp's
first drawing of the lamp, together with the vaginal hood it "penetrates",
pretty much tells the entire story, I would like, instead, to approach the
"Bec Auer" obliquely, as inflected by Apolinère Enameled
(1917) (Fig. 44).
Once a signboard for Sapolin Enamel, the advertising copy of Apolinère
Enameled would have originally read: "Manufactured by / Gerstendorfer
Bros." By eliminating the letter "M", then eliminating the
first letter following each English word so formed (or nearly so formed),
Duchamp transforms the first line of the text from "Manufactured By"
into "M anu f act u red By": that
is, into "An[y] Act Red By". As with his Ready-mades more generally,
"Manufactured" thus becomes a question of "Any Act":
not of making, but rather of choosing the Ready-mades, of which Apolinère
Enameled is one of the "assisted" variety. In a Nominalist
dream come true, "Red" even conflates the (read) text / (red)
image dialectic always at issue in Duchamp's works anyway: "the difference
between speaking about red and looking at red" (DDS 118 (n.
1); WMD 83), as the artist observes.
Suddenly, however, the rules change, and what would
have originally read "Ger s ten d or fer
Bros."--and, therefore, should read "[H]er Ten Or Fer
Bros."--instead reads "[H]er Ten Or [Epergne]". Never more
appropriately, "Or" is indeed the turning point, between old
rules "or" new ones, as between what should read "Fer Bros.",
but does read "Epergne". As a Duchamp-style bilingualism, an
untranslated "Fer" [Iron], plus a translated "Bros."
["Frères"], would have yielded the eminently conceptual, metallurgical-as-metalogical
concern: "Fer Frères et cie."
Like a gaggle of geese, or a pride of lions, an "Epergne" is
exactly this: a "fraternity" of phallic-metallic candlesticks
["Fer Frères"] which, surrounding a large central dish, can
be used as a centerpiece. But if "Or" constitutes a full stop
in the flow of the text, pronounced "Au-Er" in French, it also
refers to Duchamp's beloved-of-youth (Bec) "Auer" lamp. In addition
to the sconce which is clearly observable on the rear wall of Apolinère
Enameled, we therefore have an "Auer" lamp in the text,
which itself presents a choice between two further lighting fixtures:
"Fer Bros." and "Epergne".
If, however, these various lighting fixtures are the prick,
where, as Duchamp says ["où il y a Chaliapine"], is the pussy?
It is "mirrorically returned", right where we should expect
to find it, in the mirror which, beside the sconce, is also set against
the rear wall of Apolinère Enameled. Insofar as "mirrorical
return" constitutes a process of sexual involution (e.g. her urinal
becomes his faucet, or her trough becomes his peak), we should expect
the "spectacular" presence of the sconce to "mirrorically
return" as a spectacular absence. In other words, as a multi-phallic
figuration of his sex, expressly included within the picture, the sconce
should "mirrorically return" not only in an inverted form (as
a unitary, concave figuration of her sex) but also, paradoxically, as
an absence (as something implied by, but no longer expressly included
within the picture). No differently, what the "Epergne" adds
(textually) that the sconce does not contain (visually), a large central
dish, we should likewise expect to "mirrorically return" in
the mirror.
| click to enlarge |
| |
| Figure 45 |
| Marcel Duchamp, Paysage
Fautif, 1946 |
This is exactly what the hair--which Duchamp, seemingly
gratuitously, sketches in the mirror--as a Freudian fetish accomplishes.
As a fetishistic disavowal of sexual difference, the hair dissembles the
absence of her "candlestick" (which is not a young woman's
and, therefore, cannot be in the mirror), by concealing the presence
of her "dish" (which is a young woman's, yet is hidden behind
the hair in the mirror), just as the Bottlerack in some sense both
begs, yet dissembles its bottles. Both the absence of her candlestick
and, conversely, the presence of her dish are likewise disavowed.
The spectacular candlestick "mirrorically returns" as an unspectacular
dish--it invaginates in the mirror, even as the dish it becomes is hidden
by the hair--and, I suppose, all run away with the spoon. No differently,
really, if what separates Duchamp's Virgin from his Bride is, as de Duve argues, the difference of an
"I"--of a "vierge" [virgin] ineffably changed by a
"verge" [penis] --perhaps this is also to say that a "mariée"
[bride] is consummated by a "marée" [swelling tide], and that
her "passage" is a sort of "pa[i]ssage" ["paysage"
= landscape]. In this case, we would have exactly what we do have in Duchamp's
semen on astralon Paysage Fautif [Harem-Scarum Landscape
] (1946) (Fig. 45): for once, the artist inseminating
the ground, rather than invaginating it.
####PAGES####
 1.
Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942), trans.
Haakon Chevalier (N.Y.: Dover, 1993) 383. For not only the opposite point
of view, but also an important critique of anti-historicist readings,
see David Hopkins, "De-Essentializing Duchamp / Or... Rrose Sélavy:
Dada's Mutter Stripped Bare", Art History, vol. 14, no. 2
(June 1991) 274-79. For an historical reading of Duchamp's "equivocal
masculinity," see Amelia Jones, "Equivocal Masculinity: New
York Dada in the context of World War I", Art History, vol.
25, no. 2 (April 2002) 162-205.
This article is a chapter of the dissertation I recently
completed writing at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University ("When
Father Doesn't Know Best: Surrealism, Metaphor, Masculinity"), where
it was originally presented in 1998 as part of a methodology seminar led
by Robert Lubar. My great thanks, for their engaged and challenging criticism,
are also owing to Jenny Liu, Linda Nochlin, Katherine Smith and Deborah
Vischak.
2.
Francis Roberts, "Interview with Marcel Duchamp: 'I propose to Strain
the Laws of Physics'", Art News, vol. 67, no. 8 (Dec. 1968)
62.
3.
Marcel Duchamp, Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp,
trans. Ron Padgett (N.Y.: Da Capo Press, 1971) 107.
4.
Cf. David Joselit, "Notes on Surface: toward a genealogy of flatness",
Art History, vol. 23, no. 1 (March 2000) 19-34, where he discerns
a "shift from a model of subjectivity founded in interiority to one
in which the self is constituted through a play of surfaces": that
is, as "psychological flatness" (p. 32).
5.
Marcel Duchamp, Duchamp du Signe: Ecrits, ed. Michel Sanouillet
(Paris: Flammarion, 1975) 154; The Writings of Marcel Duchamp,
ed. Michel Sanouillet, Elmer Peterson (N.Y.: Da Capo Press, 1973) 107
(hereinafter cited as DDS and WMD). At times I have modified
the translations used by Sanouillet and Peterson; all emphasis is my own.
6.
Sigmund Freud, "Medusa's Head" (1922), in The Standard Edition
of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans.
James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis,
1961), vol. 18, p. 273, where he succinctly posits: "To decapitate
= to castrate".
7.
Guillaume Apollinaire, "The Mammaries of Tiresias" (1917), in
Three Pre-Surrealist Plays, trans. Maya Slater (N.Y.: Oxford University,
1997) 171. See also David Hopkins, "Men Before the Mirror: Duchamp,
Man Ray and Masculinity", Art History, vol. 21, no. 3 (Sept.
1998) 318-19.
8.
Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp's Passage
from Painting to the Readymade, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota, 1991) 69.
9.
De Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, p. 42.
10.
De Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, p. 42.
11.
De Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, p. 42.
12.
De Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, p. 42.
13.
De Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, p. 42.
14.
Unless, of course, the "hanged female" and the decapitated female
mannequins in the Arcane 17 window installation and the Etant
Donnés installation are "hanged" and "decapitated"
in the same "capital" sense. In this event, "Le Pendu Femelle"
would indeed anticipate the phallic emphasis of the female mannequins:
not only their paradoxical decapitation-as-castration (i.e. "'cuttage'
in reserve"), but also their simultaneous endowment with phallic
substitutes (the faucet and the lamp).
15.
The essential homology of the clitoris and the penis antedates the arrival
of Freudian theory in France, as when Diderot observes: "Le clitoris
est un membre viril en petit". Jack Spector, Surrealist Art and
Writing, 1919-1939: The Gold of Time (N.Y.: Cambridge University,
1997) 286 (n. 105). See also Sigmund Freud, "Fetishism" (1927),
in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and Institute
of Psycho-Analysis, 1961), vol. 21, pp. 152-57, where he describes "a
woman's real small penis, the clitoris". On "invagination"
as a fourth-dimensional trope in Duchamp's works, see "Becoming Full
Circle: From PiRr to πR2", herein.
16.
See Georges Bataille, "The Solar Anus" (1927; 1931), in Visions
of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1985) 6: "The two primary
motions are rotation and sexual movement, whose combination is expressed
by the locomotive's wheels and pistons. These two motions are reciprocally
transformed, the one into the other. Thus one notes that the earth, by
turning, makes animals and men have coitus, and (because the result is
as much the cause as that which provokes it) that animals and men make
the earth turn by having coitus."
17.
Dawn Ades, Neil Cox, David Hopkins, Marcel Duchamp (N.Y.: Thames
and Hudson, 1999) 55.
18.
De Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, pp. 96-118. See also Anne d'Harnoncourt,
Kynaston McShine, eds., Marcel Duchamp (N.Y.: Museum of Modern
Art, 1973) 263, where Duchamp refers to Munich as "the scene of my
complete liberation", albeit without explanation.
19.
Marcel Duchamp, Affectionately, Marcel: The Selected Correspondence
of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Francis Naumann, Hector Obalk, trans. Jill
Taylor (Ghent: Ludion Press, 2000) 26. But it's also unclear how Duchamp's
defining gestures -- not only the famous fracas caused by the second Nude
at the Armory Show, but also the scandalous submission of Fountain
to the New York Independents exhibition -- betrays even the slightest
influence of German "Secession", rather than the specifically
discontinuous model of Parisian avant-garde rejection, to which de Duve
opposes it.
20.
Roberts, "Interview with Marcel Duchamp", p. 46. See also Duchamp,
Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, p. 18.
21.
See Ades, Cox, Hopkins, Marcel Duchamp, p. 55. Cézanne, therefore,
is not only the "retinal" painter whom Duchamp consistently
excoriates, but also the "father" of Modernist art (in de Duve's
sense) whom Duchamp, by instead conceptualizing the "retinal"
figure-ground problem, both overthrows and, at once, becomes.
22.
Carol James, "Duchamp's Silent Noise / Music for the Deaf",
in Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century, ed. Rudolf Kuenzli, Francis
Naumann (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T., 1990) 113.
23.
Duchamp's lyrical definition reads: "Faire une empreinte; marquer
des traits; une figure sur une surface; imprimer un sceau sur cire"
[Make an imprint; mark with lines; a figure on a surface; impress a seal
in wax] (DDS 52-53; WMD 34).
24.
Roberts, "Interview with Marcel Duchamp", p. 46.
25.
E.g. Duchamp, Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, p. 34; Roberts,
"Interview with Marcel Duchamp", p. 46; Katherine Kuh, The
Artist's Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists (N.Y.: Harper and Row,
1962) 83.
26.
On Passage as instantiating a sort of spatio-temporal collapse,
see Jonathan Crary, "Marcel Duchamp's 'The Passage from Virgin to
Bride'", Arts Magazine, vol. 51, no. 5 (Jan. 1977): 96-99.
27.
In a 1916 interview, Duchamp circumvents the question of the second Nude's
gender as follows: "'Is it a woman?' this young but very world-weary
Frenchman repeated after me... 'No. Is it a man? No... The Nude descending
a staircase is an abstraction of movement'". Dawn Ades, "Duchamp's
Masquerades", in The Portrait in Photography, ed. Graham Clarke
(London: Reaktion Books, 1992), pp. 102-3. For a balanced reading of the
second Nude's possible gender(s), see Ades, Cox, Hopkins, Marcel
Duchamp, pp. 48-51.
28.
Duchamp, Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, p. 29.
29.
Duchamp, Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, p. 33.
30.
See Marcel Jean, The History of Surrealist Painting, trans. Simon
Taylor (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1960) 34.
31.
See John Golding, Marcel Duchamp: The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors,
Even (N.Y.: Viking Press, 1973) 41. Duchamp's title Disk Inscribed
with Pun (1926) makes the connection between foil and phallus explicit:
"Avez vous déjà mis la moëlle de l'épée dans le poêle de l'aimée?"
[Haven't you already put the stem of the foil in the stove of the goil?]
(cf. DDS 153; WMD 106).
32. Bruno Bettelheim, The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the
Birth of the Self (N.Y.: Free Press, 1967) 304. On the "autism"
of Duchamp's works -- including their conceptual relationship, in this
sense, to Bettelheim's "Joey" -- see Rosalind Krauss, "Notes
on the Index: Part 1", in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and
Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T., 1985) 199-200; Annette
Michelson, "'Anemic Cinema': Reflections on an Emblematic Work",
Artforum, vol. 12, no. 2 (Oct. 1973): 64-69. See also Robert Lebel,
Marcel Duchamp, trans. George Hamilton (N.Y.: Grove Press, 1959)
30, where he describes Duchamp as "entrenched in an 'autism' which
leaves no possible ambiguity".
33. Cf. my "Meret Oppenheim -- or, These Boots Ain't Made For Walking",
Art History, vol. 24, no. 3 (June 2001): 358-78.
34. Francis Naumann, Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction (Ghent: Ludion Press, 1999) 40-41, 57 (n.
2), where he suggests that Bilboquet might be a souvenir of a bordello
visit, or perhaps of a circus act in which "La Femme Bilboquet"
was no less suggestively catapulted across the stage onto a projecting
spire. Interestingly, Steven Harris reads Claude Cahun's and Man Ray's
use of the bilboquet in the 1930s as "[playing] on castration in
the detachability of cup and ball". "Coup d'oeil", Oxford
Art Journal, vol. 24, no. 1 (2001): 103.
35. Roberts, "Interview with Marcel Duchamp", p. 63
36. Bettelheim, The Empty Fortress, p. 304.
37. On the Large Glass "Bride" as automobile, see n.
73, herein.
38. See Golding, Marcel Duchamp, p. 25.
39. Duchamp's La Pendule de Profil (1964) is exactly "Le Pendu
Femelle" both become a clock [une "pendu...le"] (cf. DDS
47; WMD 31), yet one which, according to Duchamp, "no longer
tells the time" (Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel
Duchamp (NY: Delano Greenidge Editions, 2000) 845).
| click to enlarge |
 |
| Figure 29 |
| Marcel Duchamp,
Why Not Sneeze Rose Sélavy, 1921 |
40. Duchamp's Why Not Sneeze Rose Sélavy
(1921) (Fig. 29) materializes the same cold, dry conditions which Man
Ray's Catherine Barometer parodies: the former, created for Dorothea
Dreier; the latter, as a joke at the expense of her sister Katherine.
Thus, the cold-as-marble cubes, which Duchamp includes, are unable to
cause the thermometer even to rise, let alone to create the sort of tickle
which only a good sneeze (or another spasm, also of the involuntary sort)
can hope to relieve. To its coldness, the cuttlebone [cuttlefish = "seiche"],
which Duchamp also includes, merely adds a sense of aridity ["sèche"]
and, in this way, doubly describes both the object's patron [Dreier =
drier] and its title subject: "Voici le domaine de Rrose Sélavy /
Comme il est aride -- Comme il est fertile -- Comme il est joyeux -- Comme
il est triste" [Here's where love lives. How dry it is -- and fertile.
How joyous it is -- and sad]. Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel
Duchamp, p. 900 (n. 23). Cf. Albrecht Dürer's Melencolia I
(1514), where the melancholic elk and its referent in black bile also
symbolize the artistic process as essentially "cold and dry".
41. Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (N.Y.: Henry Holt, 1996)
276, quoting Julien Levy, Memoir of an Art Gallery (1977).
42. Bettelheim, The Empty Fortress, p. 241.
43. Kermit Champa, "Charlie was like that", Artforum,
vol. 12, no. 7 (March 1974): 58. Following Hopkins' analysis of Fountain
in terms of a proto-fetishistic / homosexual masculinity, Franklin anthropomorphizes
it, as turned on its side and photographed by Stieglitz, into a full-blown
Tea-Room Daddy -- and its "hollow, porcelain protrusion", in
particular, into a "bare, thick, round organ". See Paul Franklin,
"Object Choice: Marcel Duchamp's Fountain and the Art of Queer
Art History", Oxford Art Journal, vol. 23, no. 1 (2000): 26,
33. See also Hopkins, "De-Essentializing Duchamp", p. 278; "Men
Before the Mirror", p. 319. Yet, by Franklin's own anti-essentialist
logic, this "hollow, porcelain protrusion" is a priori
neither phallic nor clitoral / vaginal, neither effluent nor influent.
44. See William Camfield, "Marcel Duchamp's Fountain: Its
History and Aesthetics in the Context of 1917", in Marcel Duchamp:
Artist of the Century, ed. Rudolf Kuenzli, Francis Naumann (Cambridge,
Mass.: M.I.T., 1990) 74, citing Beatrice Wood, I Shock Myself (1985).
45. Beatrice Wood, "Marcel", in Marcel Duchamp: Artist of
the Century, ed. Rudolf Kuenzli, Francis Naumann (Cambridge, Mass.:
M.I.T., 1990) 14. In this sense, the Ready-mades indeed constitute a very
specific sort of object, one in which the immanence of form and function
is as atavistic, even, as the bodily functions to which they often refer.
For, however closely allied Duchamp's and Picabia's interest in mechanomorphic
imagery, when Duchamp undertakes the Ready-mades, he doesn't so much shift
gears as abandon them altogether. How very easy, for example, to imagine
Picabia's spark-plug girl -- Portrait d'une jeune fille américaine
dans l'état de nudité (1915) -- as part of the Large Glass.
How very difficult, by contrast, to imagine a real spark-plug among the
ostentatiously low-tech Ready-mades.
46. See William Camfield, "Marcel Duchamp's Fountain: Aesthetic
Object, Icon, or Anti-Art?", in The Definitively Unfinished Marcel
Duchamp, ed. Thierry de Duve (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T., 1991) 152.
Picabia's cover for the June 1917 issue of 391 -- depicting a propeller,
but entitled Ane [Ass] -- thus suggests that, whatever the New
York Independents choose to make of "Fontaine", ultimately,
"[ils se] Font Ane[s]" = "[they] Make Asses [of themselves],"
perhaps referring to "Buridan's Ass", and the problems of choice
and free will. Cf. Marcel Duchamp, Notes, ed. and trans. Paul Matisse
(Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1980) note 101. Picabia's propeller,
moreover, captures not only the "circularity" of the Ready-mades,
but also their Brancusi-like resemblance to modern sculpture. Cf. DDS
242; WMD 160, where Duchamp chastens Brancusi: "Painting's
washed up. Who'll do anything better than that propeller? Tell me, can
you do that?" See Ades, Cox, Hopkins, Marcel Duchamp, p. 69.
47. Duchamp, Notes, note 265.
48. See Mary Anne Doane, "Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the
Female Spectator", Screen, vol. 23, nos. 3-4 (Sept.-Oct. 1982):
74-77.
49. Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard and Pécuchet with "The Dictionary
of Received Ideas" (1881), trans. Alban Krailsheimer, Robert
Baldick (N.Y.: Penguin Books, 1976) 305. See also Jones, "Equivocal
Masculinity", p. 204 (n. 82).
50. Cf. Spector, Surrealist Art and Writing, p. 226 (n. 70), where
he discusses the French tendency to invest grammar with ontological significance;
Jean Clair, "Sexe et topologie", in Marcel Duchamp: abécédaire:
approches critiques, ed. Jean Clair (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou,
1977) 59, where he describes Duchamp's works in terms of "a sort
of naive, ontological experience of mathematical ideality, where sexual
differentiation is abolished" (my translation).
51. Duchamp, Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, p. 102.
52. Robert Lubar has pointed out to me that "une moule"
[a mussel (feminine)] is French argot for "cunt". Like a "clock"
which doubles as a female-ish / phallic "pendulum" ("Le
Pendu Femelle"), so too the Molds, then, are a sort of male-ish
"cunt".
53. Bettelheim, The Empty Fortress, p. 254.
54. Amelia Jones, Postmodernism and the En-gendering of Marcel Duchamp
(N.Y.: Cambridge University, 1994) 287 (n. 35). For variations on Duchamp's
pun, see DDS 151, 159; Duchamp, Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel
Duchamp, p. 65.
55. Cf. Craig Adcock, "Duchamp's Eroticism: A Mathematical Analysis",
in Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century, ed. Rudolf Kuenzli, Francis
Naumann (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T., 1990) 153.
56. On the "erotic homology between a spigot and a penis", see
Franklin, "Object Choice", p. 47 (n. 114).
57. In sum, a round-trip ticket to the fourth dimension buys the ticket-holder
a doubly inside-out and left-right reversed welcome home. See Adcock,
"Duchamp's Eroticism", p. 149. Although unobservable in the
case of bilaterally symmetric plumbing fixtures, the potential for left-right
reversal exactly accounts for the Tu m' corkscrew (on which, see
n. 69, herein). On the eroticism of Duchamp's fourth-dimensional imagery,
see Adcock, "Duchamp's Eroticism", pp. 149-67. On Duchamp's
fourth-dimensional imagery more generally, see Craig Adcock, "Geometrical
Complication in the Art of Marcel Duchamp", Arts Magazine,
vol. 58, no. 5 (Jan. 1984): 105-9; Linda Henderson, The Fourth Dimension
and Non-Euclidian Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University, 1983) 117 ff.
58. In medical jargon, the difference is exactly between her "invaginated"
sex and his "external" one, which Duchamp identifies to the
fourth-dimensional process of sexual-as-spatial involution more generally.
Indeed, in Duchamp's fourth-dimensional imagery, "vagina and penis
lose... all distinctive character". Clair, "Sexe et topologie",
p. 58 (my translation). See also Dalia Judovitz, Unpacking Duchamp:
Art in Transit (Berkeley: University of California, 1995) 212-19;
Hellmut Wohl, "Duchamp's Etchings of the Large Glass and The
Lovers", in Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century, ed.
Rudolf Kuenzli, Francis Naumann (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T., 1990) 180.
Cf. Jones, Postmodernism and the En-gendering of Marcel Duchamp,
p. 91, citing Ecke Bonk, Marcel Duchamp: The Box in a Valise (1989).
59. On the biblical referent of the rib imagery, see Adcock, "Duchamp's
Eroticism", p. 162, citing Francis Naumann. In an especially felicitous
turn on the "mâlic" molds, Clair would conversely describe Duchamp's
erotic casts as "femâlic". Clair, "Sexe et topologie",
p. 56.
60.
Bettelheim, The Empty Fortress, p. 290.
61.
Krauss, "Notes on the Index", pp. 196-99.
62.
Roman Jakobson, "Quest for the Essence of Language" (1966),
"Shifters and Verbal Categories" (1957), in On language,
ed. Linda Waugh, Monique Monville-Burston (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University,
1990), pp. 409, 386-92.
63.
Krauss, "Notes on the Index", p. 199.
64.
Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, p. 885.
65.
In some sense, the Tu m' bottlebrush and "Le Pendu Femelle"
are even of a chrono(photo)graphic piece. For, just as the shadow cast
by the Tu m' bottlebrush (in the manner of a sundial, perhaps)
plots a sort of chronographic movement, the similarly phallic "Le
Pendu Femelle" is identified to chrono(photo)graphic movement
more generally. See "As Time Goes By: The Passage from Pendu(lum)
to Chronograph", herein.
66.
Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T.,
1993), pp. 81, 96-97, 135-37.
67.
The title-cum-user's manual of Duchamp's A regarder (l'autre côté du
verre) [...] is often mistranslated as To be looked at (from [sic]
the other side of the glass) [...].
68.
See Adcock, "Duchamp's Eroticism", pp. 160-61, citing Charles
Stuckey. For Duchamp, "en verre" famously refers to how "picture
on glass ['sur verre'] becomes delay in glass ['en verre'] -- but delay
in glass does not mean picture on glass... a delay in glass, as you would
say a poem in prose or a spittoon in silver" (DDS 41; WMD
26).
69.
For those wondering where the left-right reversal ["l'inverse"]
always accompanying the inside-out reversal ["l'envers"] can
be found, look no farther than the Tu m' corkscrew. Ostentatiously
abetted by its pointing hand(le), the corkscrew directly signals "the
other side of the glass", where, being left-right specific, it will
immediately left-right reverse: in Tu m', as in Duchamp's glass
artworks, therefore, "l'inverse / est [au-delà de] l'envers / de
l'en-verre". On the corkscrew's asymmetrical (i.e. left-right reversible)
helix as a venerable, fourth-dimensional trope, see Lewis Carroll, The
Annotated Alice: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking
Glass, annot. Martin Gardner (N.Y.: New American Library, 1974), pp.
180-84 (nn. 4-5).
70.
Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, p. 111, citing Lawrence Steefel,
The Position of "La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même"
(1915-1923) in the Stylistic and Iconographic Development of the Art of
Marcel Duchamp (1960). See also DDS 131; WMD 93, where
Duchamp describes the experience of the fourth dimension as comparable
to "holding a penknife clasped in one's fist"; Schwarz, The
Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, p. 35 (n. 9), where Duchamp perhaps
protests too much, "I would not say that sex is the fourth dimension;
far from it, I would never say that"; rather, "Sex is three-dimensional
as well as four-dimensional".
71.
See Jones, Postmodernism and the En-gendering of Marcel Duchamp,
pp. 191-204; Judovitz, Unpacking Duchamp, pp. 199-211, where the
authors variously describe the experience of voyeurism in relation to
Etant Donnés.
72.
Bettelheim, The Empty Fortress, p. 317.
73.
Duchamp's "car-as-driver" analogy also informs the Large
Glass, which he describes as "un monde en jaune" = "un
monde engin": "a world engine" (DDS 66; cf. WMD
44).
74.
André Breton, "Lighthouse of the Bride" (1935), in Surrealism
and Painting, trans. Simon Taylor (London: MacDonald, 1972) 85-99.
75.
Marcel Duchamp, Manual of Instructions for Marcel Duchamp, "Etant
Donnés" (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1987) 20 (my
translation). On Duchamp's similarly phallic use of light in the Arcane
17 window installation, see Charles Stuckey, "Duchamp's Acephalic
Symbolism", Art in America, vol. 65, no. 1 (Jan.-Feb. 1977):
96.
76.
In order to produce his time-lapse imagery of "phallic barbs",
Marey thus rigged his foiling-leading fencers with "tiny electric
bulbs" or, at times, with reflective "metal buttons". See
Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey, 1830-1904
(Chicago: University of Chicago, 1992) 100 ff, 287-91; François Dagognet,
Etienne-Jules Marey: A Passion for the Trace, trans. Robert Galeta,
Jeanine Herman (N.Y.: Zone Books, 1992) 149-50.
77.
Duchamp, Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, p. 46 (my emphasis).
78.
See Lawrence Steefel, "Marcel Duchamp's Encore à cet astre:
A New Look", Art Journal, vol. 36, no. 1 (Fall 1976): 23-30,
where he discusses the possible gender(s) of the nude(s) on the staircase.
See also Bradley Bailey, "Once
More to this Staircase: Another Look at Encore à cet Astre",
Tout-Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal, vol. 2, no.
4 (January 2002) Articles.
79.
See de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, pp. 119-42.
80.
We can similarly translate Duchamp's Pharmacie (1914) as "Phare,
ma cie."
81.
See Freud, "Fetishism", pp. 152-57.
82.
Needless to say, I've taken a few liberties with my translation, combining
"fautif" [faulty: harum-scarum] and "faux tifs" [false
body hair: body hair which a harem paradigmatically lacks].
Figs. 1-7, 9-17, 19, 20-27, 29,
30, 32-36, 37-38, 40-41, 42-45
©2003 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. All rights
reserved. |
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