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In a well-known Spanish medical publication called MD, diverse articles relating to
anomalies in art were often published: the elongation of El Greco´s
figures was the result of a distortion produced by squint; Goya´s black
paintings were due to progressive lead poisoning; Van Gogh´s flaming
colors, a particular case of schizophrenia. Perhaps because of this
and other reasons, I ended up associating Duchamp (MD) with a picturesque
uncle of mine, a doctor and subscriber to this magazine in the sixties.
A connection that surely underlay one of my dreams where Duchamp appeared
camouflaged with my uncle, as if he were another member of the family.
The dream consists of a family reunion, which takes place in a room whose atmosphere, from
what could be seen through a french window, was redolent of Paris or
Buenos Aires. In a cinematographic black and white, the effect of contrasted
lights and shadows reproduced a saturated masculine ambiance –somewhere
between Bogart and Gardel- characteristic of the first detective movies.
No one speaking, we were all there, our silhouettes cutout against the
window’s resplendence while a river grew torrentially outside, sweeping
debris along the street. Shortly after, much like the effect of an acetate
about to burn, the image acquired a reddish tone, gradually dissolving
into the face of Marcel, who ended up with his hair tinged of a red
oxide, a color between minium and brick, as one of his “bachelors” or,
why not, like a cosmopolitan Adam in a two-piece suit about to ignite.
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This reference to a distinctly masculine universe makes me think of
gentlemans' purveyers and of the goods themselves : cigars, pipes, cards,
dice, liquor cases, gaming tables lined with green cloth, roulettes,
domino pieces, chess boards… some of the elements extensively and enigmatically
used in cubist imagery, along with instruments and music scores.
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Figure
1
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| Marcel
Duchamp, Monte Carlo Bond, 1924. |
Except for chess,
which was an obsessive presence in Duchamp´s life, the only one of his
works related to these types of games, more specifically to Roulette,
is that known as the Monte Carlo Bond (Fig.
1), dated November 1, 1924, the year after leaving his masterpiece
The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (1915-1923) ‘definitely
unfinished’. This is also the year that marks his legendary and supposed
retirement from art, and his move towards the more rarified and abstract
world of chess.
The Monte Carlo
Bond or Obligation pour la Roulette de Monte Carlo is a ‘rectified
and imitated readymade’, a lithograph for a real document, a bond issued
in 30 numbered exemplars each with a value of 500 francs. The original
bonds, commercial obligations used to release a certain sum on a defined
date with a determined rate of interest, were redesigned and released
by Duchamp with the purpose of collecting funds in order to experiment
with a mathematical system in the game of Trente-et-Quarante,
using a Martingale
that would allow him to win ‘slowly but surely’ over the Monte Carlo
bank, thus making roulette to behave like a chess game.
Placed directly over the 'radiant' image of a roulette
wheel in the lithograph, is a curious photograph of Duchamp with his
hair and face covered in foam. In the lower part of the document, inscribed
on the roulette table there are two signatures : Rrose Sélavy's (Duchamp´s
feminine alter ego, here
starring as President of the Administrative Council,) beneath
the black diamond; beneath the red one, as simple administrator, is
Marcel's. Printed in the background and repeated 150 times in green
ink, is a game of words of the capricious harvest of Rrose Sélavy: moustiques
domestiques demistock (domestic mosquitoes half-stock).
But let us first see how some authors have described
this image:
| David Joselit:
“a lithograph including a portrait by Man Ray of Duchamp transformed
through shaving cream into a chimerical figure perhaps resembling
a faun or devil (…) Marcel, like Rrose, is masquerading as a hyper-masculine
devil or faun.”
Dalia Judovitz:“a
self-portrait of his head covered with shaving foam and his hair
pulled up into horns, further destabilizes the authority of this
financial document.”
Calvin Tomkins: ”A
Man Ray photograph of Duchamp’s head -the face lathered with shaving
soap and the hair soaped into two devilish-looking horns”.
Peter Read: “a colored
lithograph representing the surface of a roulette table with a
photograph of Duchamp’s head covered with shaving foam, his hair
pulled up into the horns of a faun or devil, stuck onto the roulette
wheel which forms a surrounding circle, similar no doubt to the
halo which, in Henri-Pierre Roché’s eyes, Duchamp always wore.
Cut out (decapitated) from a larger photo by Man Ray, Duchamp’s
head resembles that of John the Baptist presented on a plate with
his erect horns of hair ready to be shaved off, the male falls
victim to both Salomé and Dalila –a powerful recurrence of serrated
symbolism.”(5)
Juan Antonio Ramírez:
“The most striking visual element of the raffle tickets printed
by Duchamp is his own effigy, resembling a faun (achieved with
shaving soap), against the background of a roulette wheel. This
is one way of giving a human story-line to a mechanism, a means
of bestowing sexuality on it; here again is the satyr-bachelor
trapped in his masturbatory circularity, hoping to acquire the
lounged-for winnings after each of the croupier’s ‘manipulations’[“This
was admitted by A. Schwarz, who quoted Freud: ‘A passion for gambling
is equivalent to the ancient compulsion to masturbate.”] But perhaps
there is something more, an allegory of the artist and his chance
reward.” |
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Figure 2
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Giambologna,
Mercury, 1576.
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Figure
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Advertisement
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Figure
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Patek Philip advertisement
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General
consensus seems to be that Duchamp’s lathered head is like that of a faun
or devilish figure. On a closer look however, the foamy shapes above Duchamp’s
head do not correspond to the traditional horns of devils or fauns; instead,
their shape is strongly evocative of one of the principal attributes of
classical antiquity’s messenger god Mercury (Fig. 2).
Curved back in their own particular manner, these forms match Mercury’s
winged traveler’s cap known as petasus, as can be clearly seen
in Giambologna’s sixteenth-century bronze statue, rather than the short
erect horns normally belonging to fauns and devils.
Is it not curious
that in the different readings Duchamp´s face is repeatedly interpreted
as a faun, a demon or a satyr, as a masculine being necessarily supplied
with horns? This interpretation is fostered not only when thought of
in connection with the ‘diabolic’ artistic-financial operation of the
Tzanck Check of 1919,
but also by images of the aforementioned creatures in classical mythology
in which beard and horns appear simultaneously to characterize them.
The horns, as history of art dictates, would proceed from the beard.
Iconographically,
the Roman god Mercury –or Hermes as he was known in ancient Greece—
is suggestively pertinent to Duchamp’s financial document. Renowned
for his speedy effectiveness, resourcefulness, and shrewdness, Mercury
was the Roman god of trade, profit, merchants, travelers, and shepherds,
as well as patron to artists, impostors, and all dishonest folk.
In addition to the winged cap, Mercury was endowed with wings for his
feet called talaria, a caduceus or rod entwined with serpents,
and a purse as symbol of his commercial powers.(10)
Even his name resonates with these associations; deriving from the Latin
root for merchandise, a mercibus, the name Mercury underlies
the term ‘mercantile’. Indeed, these are all attributes intensely associated
with Duchamp’s conduct, which may be summarized in his anagram: marchand
du sel, or salt merchant.
Beginning at about
this time (1924), this kind of behavior was accentuated when, along
with his renewed passion for chess, Duchamp embarked in a series of
negotiations and artistic-financial speculations. Such an attitude is
well synthesized in the advertisement of the Flying Wheel (Fig. 3), a wheel with wings, identical in essence
to the collage over the roulette: a popular synthesis, if you like,
of a good part of Duchampian iconography.
Thus, Duchamp’s
Mercurial image not only bears an iconographic resemblance to the ancient
god but is also conceptually tied to the activities surrounding the
Monte Carlo Bond.Moreover, Duchamp’s disguise may be
read on yet another level, one with deep personal implications, as shall
be developed throughout this essay. For what we see in the photomontage
is a bearded Mercury, as he appeared in some archaic Greek vases, but
which is rather unusual in later imagery, where he is generally shown
beardless, almost feminine.
Duchamp’s use of foam for creating a beard (as an adolescent in front
of a mirror conjuring up virile fantasies) (Fig.
4) exalts this ambiguity, for it simultaneously indicates
the absence of a beard after shaving and the appearance of a false beard
in place of a real one.
Duchamp’s obsessive
capillary experiments, and the consequential psychological negotiations
between various identities begins casually in 1919, in Buenos Aires,
when he shaves his head as a part of a treatment to reduce hair loss.
This confers him a rather marginal aspect in the widest sense of the
word, whether as an initiate in some sort of sect – chess?-,
as a convalescent man –his friends find him excessively thin- or simply
delinquent .
On his return to Paris
in the midst of 1919, in a gesture that clearly anticipates the creation
of his feminine pseudonym Rrose Sélavy, he creates the well-known readymade
of the Mona Lisa (L.H.O.O.Q.) adding a mustache and Mephistophelean
small beard to the image. At the end of 1921, after the aromatic transsexual
display of Rrose Sélavy presented as Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette
on the altered label of a lugubrious flask of Rigaud perfume,(Fig. 5) he creates a tonsure on his head in the form
of a comet with its tail projected towards his forehead. (Fig. 6)
Three years later,
immediately after the self-portrait in the Monte Carlo Bond –in
Cinésketch, a theatrical diversion of Picabia and René Clair-
Duchamp reappears as Adam in a tableau vivant based on a sixteenth-century
painting by Cranach,(Fig. 7) displaying
an evidently artificial beard (a significant counterpart to the ambiguous
beard of foam), a watch, and a shaved pubis. Certainly not the last
'shaving' in his work.
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Figure
5
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Figure
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Figure 7
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Duchamp
as Belle Haleine, 1921. Photo Man Ray. |
Marcel
Duchamp, 1921. |
Adam
and Eve. Marcel Duchamp and Bronja Perlmutter. Paris, 1924. |
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In contrast to
the horn theory, which focusses interpretative attempts on the nature
of the monetary operation, the hairdo with wings might lead to a different
interpretation, especially when we consider that the hermetic Mercury
appears with his hair and beard covered in foam. An evanescent material
indicative of some activity, foam is a composite of bubbles produced
by an insistent battering movement where air is incorporated into a
liquid of some density (in this case, soap). A substance fraught with
multiple sexual and poetic evocations as revealed by its etymology:
Foam, in Greek, is Aphros, the origin of Aphrodite (or Venus),
the goddess born from the sea’s foam.
This element offers an important clue for deciphering the identity
of the unusual portrait, by setting out with the following equation:
Hermes + Aphrodite = Hermaphrodite.
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| Figure
8 |
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Roulette |
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| Figure 9 |
| Marcel Duchamp,
Rotorelief disk, 1935 |
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| Figure 10 |
| Durer, Adam and Eve, 1504. |
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| Figure
11 |
| Limbourg Brothers, Temptation and Fall,
before 1414 |
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| Figure
12 |
| Temoins
Oculistes, detail (the right eye in the center) and roulette with
green zero |
This androgynous combination could be interpreted as some kind of mythological
correction made by joining Mercury’s communicative capacity (exemplified
in the movement of the roulette) (Fig. 8) with
the perfection of potential success in the ‘figure’ of gambling
which is indirectly represented through Aphrodite’s attributes (love,
beauty, sexual passion) of two human entities in conflict: Rrose Sélavy,
the ‘widow’ whose signature appears beneath the black diamond, and Marcel Duchamp, the confirmed ‘bachelor’ who signs as “administrator”
under the ancestral red one.
The structure
of this Obligation reveals the duplicity involved in the names
and colors corresponding to each one of the diamonds, as well as the
eventual convergence in the central image of the hermaphrodite as third
element. With each turn of the wheel, the red and black loose their
identity through the increasing speed of the movement, and end by fusing
their specific identities into what in Duchamp’s terms may be called
a gris de verticalité… “as all axes disappear in the gris
de verticalité, the front and back, the reverse and obverse adopt
a circular significance...”
In analogous manner,
the roulette not only continues (in another format and on a different
topological level) the inter-dimensional speculation attributed to his
Bicycle Wheel of 1913
and the perceptual experimentation of optical devices related to the
Témoines Oculistes (Oculist Witnesses) in the lower part
of the Bride Stripped Bare, but also incorporates chance (a characteristic
element of the game of roulette) as a necessary element. In this way,
the legendary duality of the Bride Stripped Bare is subverted
by a third element: the androgyne, an option for the incomplete couple
of a fresh widow and an untamed bachelor.
Referring to the
general principle of the illusory effect of his twirling spirals, Duchamp
wrote: “I only have to use two –eccentric- circumferences and make them
turn over a third center.” (Fig. 9)
To visualize the
symbolic effect of this curious ‘dissolution’, one has only to imagine
a displacement of the frontal point of view of an archetypal image,
as for example Durer’s Adam and Eve (Fig. 10). If instead of looking
at the image from a frontal position, we place ourselves over the image
and look at it from a bird’s eye view, from a roulette type of perspective,
we notice that the vertical axis (the natural hinge represented by the
tree), as well as Adam and Eve (Marcel/Rrose; red/black) have been transformed
into three points aligned on a plane. If we now imagine a circular Paradise,
as in some early representations (Fig. 11),
and we make our first parents (re-péres: references) circulate
rapidly around the central point, there will be a moment where the traditional
position (Adam at the left; Eve at the right) disappears. We can no
longer speak of right and left, for these occur simultaneously –as in
Pawloski’s La Diligence Innombrable
- in all locations at the same time. All differences are reconciled
as long as the ubiquitous and instantaneous velocity lasts. Speed and
motion, a strategic resource used by Duchamp throughout his life as
a hypothetical solution to psychological emergencies.
Duchamp’s obsession
with the synthesis of opposites
also manifests itself in the arrangement of the head in relation to
the roulette’s circular form which, deep down, is nothing other than
a bull’s eye or target. (Fig. 12)The
coincidence of the right eye with the center of the wheel nullifies,
in principle, the distance between the observer and his objective, between
the self and the world, for structurally the perspectival
system consists of a reciprocal identity between the point of view
and the horizon point.
By superposing the right eye with the center of the roulette, Duchamp
conjures up not only his intention of succeeding in the prediction of
the bet,
but also perfectly illustrates the unitary principle of conciliation.
Jarry, in relation
to the unusual language of Bosse-de-Nage, his character in Exploits
and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll who only said “HA HA”, refers to
the formula of the principle of identity: “A Thing is Itself.” “Pronounced
quickly enough, until the letters become confounded, it is the idea
of unity. Pronounced slowly, it is the idea of duality, of echo, of
distance, of symmetry, of greatness and duration, of the two principles
of good and evil.”
On the other hand,
the difference (in relationship) between The Bride Stripped Bare
and the Monte Carlo Bond lies in that in the former the separation
is external (bachelors looking for their couple) while in the latter
it is internal (the incorporation of Rrose Sélavy by hermaphrodite ‘infusion’)
projecting the target, the objective, onto itself.
The strategy of
the lathered image inscribes itself in the precise game of identities
offered as a form of escape, or renovated compensation, for an artist
who is clearly over burdened by his intense immersion during the past
eight years in the complexities and contradictions of the drama underlying
The Bride Stripped Bare: the Bride above
, the Bachelors below, and the difficulty of connecting these two dimensions
through one of the last devices in process, that of the Témoines
Oculistes, an optical apparatus whose purpose is to help overcome
the threshold of an almost forsaken horizon standing between the Bride
and the Bachelors.
Significantly, Duchamp left the work ‘definitely unfinished’…as is indicated
in the final adverb of the complete name of the work: The Bride Stripped
Bare by her Bachelors, Even.
Literally, the
Monte Carlo Bond is then a unifying tie, the ‘bond’ between
two ancient and opposite entities, represented by the traditional colors
of the roulette. This duality is fragmented in an exemplary manner into
37 numbers disseminated in the oracle-like vertigo of the roulette
, optically nullifying (through the ‘indifference’ produced by speed)
the abysmal separation into an androgynous instantaneous paradise.
In the fifties,
speaking of the relationship between chess and the roulette, Duchamp
tells Arturo Schwarz that both games involve “a struggle between two
human beings”, which he tries to reconcile by “turning the roulette
into a more cerebral game, and chess into a game of chance”. And in
1968, the last year of his life, in a conversation with Lanier Graham,
he specifies: “The symbol is universal. The Androgyny stands over philosophy.
If one has turned into the Androgyny then philosophy is no longer necessary.”
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3
But behind the
rapid wings and the weightless foam, stands always the sea, a sea that
is indicated in various locations: 1. the location of Monte Carlo itself;
2. in the nature of the shaving foam transformed into Aphros,
‘sea-foam’; 3. hidden behind the insistent tongue twister moustiques
domestiques demi-stock that is repeated 150 times in green ink
much like a ‘security slogan’ in the background of the Obligation.
The phrase is nearly identical to Nous livrons à domicile /des moustiques
domestiques /[demi-stock],
the same phrase that appears completed, three years later, on one of
the discs of Anemic Cinema:
“ON DEMANDE DES MOUSTIQUES DOMESTIQUES [DEMI-STOCK] POUR LA CURE D’AZOTE
SUR LA CÔTE D’ÁZUR.”
That “cure d’azote
sur la Côte d’Azur”, can also be found camouflaged in the back of the
Obligation’s statutes:
Art. 1er. –La
Société a pour object:
1º L’explotation de la roulette de Monte-Carlo dans les conditions ci-après.
2º L’explotation du Trente et Quarante et autres mines de la Côte d’Azur
sur délibération du Conseil d’Administration.
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| Figure 13 |
| Anemic Cinema disc |
The Anemic Cinema
disc (Fig. 13)would then be a verbal collage
somewhere between the lemma printed in the Bond’s background and
the Côte d’Azur named in the statutes, which is phonetically transformed
into Cure d’Azote (generally translated as ‘nitrogen cure’). The
Anemic Cinema disc indirectly introduces the term Azoth,
a word whose significance transcends the simple summer Mediterranean oxygenation.
Azoth
necessarily refers us to alchemy (a metaphoric background which, together
with modern science and psychology, abounds in Duchampian exegesis)
where the three basic symbolic substances (mercury, sulphur, and salt)
are complemented with a fourth one, the mysterious vital principle known
as Azoth. This primus agens is seen by some as “the invisible,
eternal fire; others as electricity; still others as magnetism. Transcendentalists
refer to it as the astral light.” Also described as “primitive air”
and as “the Waters or Crystalline Chaotic Sea”,
the key virtue of this mysterious ingredient consists in bonding together
the physical matter represented in the three basic substances. And it
is this unifying virtue that causes some to identify it as “unconditional
love”. A sort of generic glue whose powerful and subtle nature cannot
be wholly scrutinized.
Existing documents
allow us to suppose that around the time of the Monte Carlo Bond,
Duchamp was going through a particularly critical moment. And although
(as usual) his reserved nature strategically covers the details, in
the sixties, towards the end of his life, he writes: “Since 1923 I consider
myself as an artist ‘défroqué’ [unfrocked].”
“Thus, after 1923, -according to Jean Clair- came a time of disillusion
and apathy. Duchamp défroqué. Duchamp idle. Duchamp the chess player.”
In a maternal
approach, Katherine Dreier, one of his patrons, considered that the
psychological atmosphere of a casino was detrimental “for a person as
sensitive as Marcel”. And Breton: “How could a man so intelligent –the
most profoundly original man in the century, according to Breton- devote
his time and energy to such trivialities? Searching for an explanation,
Breton could only conclude that some hidden malaise must be at work
–what he had described to Jacques Doucet as Duchamp’s ‘desperate’ state
of mind.”
Nevertheless, in the spring of 1924, before the Monte Carlo Bond,
Duchamp writes to Jacques Doucet after one month at the Riviera during
a chess tournament: “The climate suits me perfectly, I would love to
live here.”
Therapy? ‘Oxygenation’
in Monte Carlo? Perhaps the encapsulated air in the foam is of the same
nature as the Air de Paris, his readymade from the early 1920s.
Originally a glass phial filled with physiological serum -bought and
emptied by Duchamp in a Parisian pharmacy, and then presented as a souvenir
to the Arensberg upon his return to New York - Air de Paris can
be seen as a translation of the 50cc of Parisian air into a ‘psychological
serum’. All this, the same year when Rrose Sélavy is ‘born’.
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| Figure
14 |
| Rrose
Sélavy, Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette, 1921 |
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| Figure
15 |
| Cellini,
Perseus and Medusa, 1545-54 |
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After her first manifestation retaining the copyright of Fresh Widow
(French Window) — a French window condemned in its visibility by glass
panes covered in brilliant black leather— Rrose Sélavy is presented
visually on the name and label of Un Air Embaumé originally a
perfume of Rigaud rebaptized as Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette.
(Fig. 14)Another psychological serum,
although rather lugubrious, judging from the initial case: a small coffin
where the image of the rigorous and concentrated transvestite slides
through.
This problematic
identity foreshadows the foaming Monte Carlo portrait, and allows us
to imagine the deep significance behind the "exploitation of Thirty
and Forty and other mines of the Côte d'Azur under the deliberation
of its Administrative Council." In other words, under the deliberation
of its only two members; what Duchamp calls on other occasions "un
petit jeu entre Je et Moi".
And
apropos of dualities, the mercurial portrait, as any medal, must have
another face. The opposite image -in my view- is not the beautiful and
radiant head of John the Baptist or that of the sedated Holofernes as
has been suggested, but is instead the image of that who lays fearful
of her own reflection upon Perseus’s shield: Medusa. Deadly force that
petrifies whoever looks at her. A true evil eye. An evil ‘Voilette’.
Why
Medusa? Because of Perseus: “Mercurial, aerial, Perseus is unique in being
able to conjure the gravity of things, the opacity of chaos, the numbness
of Saturn’s weighty world …there where the spirit, too tied to earth,
becomes frozen in its fear of petrification.”
Because Perseus, like Mercury, carries on his helmet and sandals
the same rapid and ethereal wings.
And also, because in the axis of that tree, the serpent twirls around
like a Caduceus, symbol of medicine [MD] and transformative power. Another
indispensable attribute of Mercury, where the two opposite animals, the
bird and the serpent, determine the significance and polarity of the implicit
process: the serpent as material energy associated with the ascendant
spiral and the bird as liberated, spiritual form. The relationship with
Perseus is then didactically illustrated at the moment when Perseus, his
head covered with the winged helmet, exhibits Medusa’s severed head, sustaining
her mangled hair made up of serpents in a symmetrical, mirror-like manner.
(Fig. 15)
It
is therefore not beyond reason to suppose that the reverse of the circular
self-portrait in the Monte Carlo Bond (its corresponding negative
image) is Caravaggio’s image of Medusa (an actual shield) painted
at the end of the sixteenth century. Interestingly, it is often said that Caravaggio used his own
features as the model for this round image, while gesticulating in front
of a mirror. Thus allowing us to propose the following iconographic
relationship:(Figs. 16, 17 & 18)
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| Figure
16 |
Figure 17 |
Figure 18 |
| Caravaggio,
Medusa, c.1597 |
Azoth.
Union of the 3 elements: mercury, sulphur and salt |
Marcel
Duchamp, Air de Paris, 1920 |
In
this sequence, the ‘ petrification’, the detention or apathy felt by
Duchamp in the period following The Bride Stripped Bare would
necessitate a certain ‘ breathing space...or draft of air’ (a courant
d’air) that could revitalize his faculties as ‘respirator’: “I like
living, breathing, better than working (...) if you wish, my art would
be that of living: each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed
nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral. It’s a sort of constant
euphoria.”
In this particular circumstance, the nature and secret of the euphoric
and constant element could not be found in the habitual cultural ‘nutrition’
-that is in his reinscription into artistic and social activity- but
in the timeless properties of an essential symbolic scenery: the sea,
and chance. The crystalline, chaotic waters; effectively, a cure
d’azote sure la Côte d’Azur – geographical location of immersion
and baptism where the annexed feminine (Aphrodite/Rrose) establishes
a natural and mythic complicity. An element in front of which, reason
and logic (with all their intentions and grueling calculations) see
themselves compelled to negotiate between the metaphoric territories
of the combative (masculine) chess, and the roulette’s whimsical chance.
The
serum, the glass bubble with its ethereal air of Paris is nothing else
than a necessary ‘azoth’, a sensitive order freely incarnated in that
alter-ego with the name of a rose, a flower imbedded with the liberating
energy of eros. Thus we can imagine graphically how Caravaggio’s asphyxiating
Medusa incorporates the revitalizing virtue of azoth as a kind of medicinal
potion, transforming itself. The result may be fully appreciated in
the Monte Carlo ‘cameo’ with the foaming head encrusted in the solar
aura of the roulette.
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| Figure
19 |
| Birth
of Venus, with Hermes (holding Caduceus) and Poseidon |
L’Obligation
d’un Possible? A feasible Bond? In any case, a secret unconscious
martingale throwing its bet over the lingering target of a much-needed
self-regeneration. A new birth of a Je and a Moi unified
as a pearl in its shell generated by the Chaotic 'gambling' Sea of Monte
Carlo. A very personal system where Duchamp nevertheless, “never wins
nor loses”
, in natural compliance with that central point, indifferent, of the
“et-qui-libre”
hermaphrodite.
On
the other hand, the synthetic figure of the Bond, the underlying
instrument to the whole therapeutic process is none other than the Caduceus,
(Fig. 19) the winged rod with the two symmetrically
intertwining serpents. This object may be associated - via Tiresias -
with the alternating masculine/feminine sex, and with the oracular gift
of prophecy. In this context, the story of Tiresias is quite pertinent:
| Celebrated
prophet of Thebes…It is said that in his youth he found two serpents
in the act of copulation…and that when he had struck them with a
stick to separate them, he found himself suddenly changed into a
girl. Seven years after he found again some serpents together in
the same manner, and he recovered his original sex by striking them
a second time with his wand. When he was a woman, Tiresias had married,
and it was from those reasons, according to some of the ancients,
that Jupiter and Juno referred to his decision a dispute in which
the deities wished to know which of the sexes received greater pleasure
from the connubial state. Tiresias…declared that the pleasure which
the female received was ten times greater than that of the male.
Juno, who supported a different opinion…punished Tiresias by depriving
him of his eyesight… But…Jupiter…bestowed upon him the gift of prophecy,
and permitted him to live seven times longer than the rest of men. |
Vedi
Tiresia che mutò sembiante
Quando di maschio femmina divienne,
Cangiandosi le membra tutte quante;
E prima, poi, ribatter li convenne
Il due serpenti avvolti, con la verga,
Che riavesse le maschili penne.”
(Dante, Divina Commedia. Inferno, Canto 20:40)
(…)
In
more recent times, in 1944, Poulenc created a musical adaptation of
Apollinaire’s 1903 piece Les Mamelles de Tiresias (Tiresias’s
Breasts). Both versions remove themselves from the original tale
in a significant and burlesque manner, transposing the hermaphrodite
sexual alternation into domestic terms. The modern narrators relate
a decline in France’s birth rates due to the feminine emancipation of
Thérèse/Tirésias, a loss compensated by her husband who gave birth to
40,000 children in one day… In any case, Poulenc decided to transfer
the action of Apollinaire’s version from Zanzibar, an island near the
African east coast, to Zanzibar, a supposed population on the French
Riviera somewhere between Nice and Monte Carlo. All because he adored
Monte Carlo and also because “that was where Apollinaire spent the first
15 years of his life”, adding that this was a place “sufficiently tropical
for a Parisian like myself.”
In
the end, Duchamp did not become an addict to roulette, but instead submerged
himself for the rest of his days in the sophisticated infra-mince
labyrinth of the strategic possibilities offered by chess. In relation
to Monte Carlo, in 1952 he sums up his adventure by saying: “Artists
throughout history are like gamblers in Monte-Carlo and in the blind
lottery some are picked out while others are ruined... it all happens
according to random chance. Artists who during their lifetime manage
to get their stuff noticed are excellent traveling salesmen but that
does not guarantee a thing as far as the immortality of their work is
concerned. And even posterity is a terrible bitch who cheats some and
reinstates others, and reserves the right to change her mind again every
50 years."
But
perhaps, the clue for transcending history and not simply being subject
to random chance is as claimed by a commercial slogan of some web page:
“with caduceus you’re not a number… you are an individual!”.
In other words, you must pronounce Zanzibar! Zanzibar! "quickly
enough, until the letters become confounded".
Notes
 1.
“The Martingale is a very old and extremely simple system for recovering
betting losses by progressively increasing the stakes. It is based on
the probability of losing infinite times in a row and is usually applied
to ‘even money’ bets.” For this definition of the Martingale, see <
http://ildado.com/roulette_rules.html
2.
David Joselit, Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp, 1910-1941. Cambridge,
Mass: MIT Press, 1998.
3.
Dalia Judovitz, Unpacking Duchamp: art in transit. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1995.
4.
Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: a biography. New York: H. Holt, 1996.
5.
Peter Read, “The Tzank Check and Related Works by Marcel Duchamp”, Marcel
Duchamp Artist of the Century, edited by Rudolph Kuenzli and Francis M.
Naumann. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1989.
6.
Juan Antonio Ramírez, Duchamp, Love and Death, Even. London: Reaktion
Books Ltd, 1993.
7.
This
piece was created by Duchamp as an imitation of a real check drawn upon The
Teeth´s Loan & Trust Company, Consolidated, an invented bank, with
which he paid his dentist Daniel Tzanck a sum of $115 dollars.
8.
That
people have read the foam-created forms as horns may also be due to the
Dionysiac connections implicit in the game of words resulting from Duchamp’s
pseudonym Rrose Sélavy (Eros, c’est la vie). However, this type of
eroticism is more readily connected with an essentially vitalist oeuvre,
as is Picasso’s, rather than with Duchamp’s, which may be characterized as
mental and elaborate.
9.
For “all things Mercury” see http://www.hermograph.com/science/mercury.htm
Go to the link about the god Mercury for the history, symbolism, and
legends surrounding the ancient god, and see in particular his “Work
History”.
For Mercury´s
thievish activities, see the entry for Mercurius, in John Lemprière,
Classical Dictionary.(1788) London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1984, p.373-374.
10.
For ancient representations of Mercury endowed with his various attributes
see Gregory R. Crane (ed.) The Perseus Project, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu
August, 2002. See the references to Mercury under Greek and Roman
Materials: 109. Boston 98.1135 which shows a silver coin bust of
Mercury wearing his winged petasus with caduceus; 122.
Boston 98.676 which shows Mercury with his purse.
11.
For images of a bearded Mercury, see Gregory R. Crane (ed.) The Perseus
Project,
August, 2002. See the references to Hermes under Greek and Roman
Materials: 28. Louvre G192; 68. Toledo 1956.70
12.
From Buenos Aires, Duchamp wrote to Walter Arensberg in 1919: “I play
chess all the time. I’ve joined a local club, where there are very good
players grouped according to grade. I have not yet been honored with
a grade. (…) I play night and day and nothing in the world interests
me as much as to find the right move… I am less and less interested
in painting. Everything around me is knight shaped or Queen shaped and
the outside world only interests me in as much as it transposes into
winning or losing positions.”
13.
In Wanted, dated 1923, a work immediately previous to the Monte
Carlo Bond, he personifies as such in a reward poster. This was
later used as the poster for his retrospective exhibition at the Pasadena
Museum in 1963.
14.
Originally, Un Air Embaumé. A balm, a perfume; an ‘embalmed’
air, as well.
15.
According to Hesiodus, Aphrodite was born when Uranus (father of gods)
was castrated by Chronos, his son. When Uranus fell to the sea, his
genitals produced foam. From aphros, or the sea’s foam, Aphrodite
was born, and later drawn to Cyprus or Cythera, the paradisiacal isle
of Watteau’s renowned painting.
16.
More than a recreation of Duchamp’s conscious or unconscious intentions,
this interpretation of the Monte Carlo Bond is an act of reconstruction
in the interpreter. An analogical projection on a proposed riddle, where
‘the public, the interpreter, makes the work’.
17.
Not as their son (as in the mythological account where Hermaphrodite
is born from Hermes and Aphrodite, but is originally a masculine being
who only later becomes androgynous after meeting the nymph Salmacis)
but as a symbolic fusion of the two. For the story of Hermaphroditus,
see Lemprière, p.277.
18.
Duchamp writes to Picabia in a letter of 1924: “Le problème consiste
d’ailleurs à trouver la figure rouge et noir à opposer à la roulette
(...) Et je crois avoir trouvé une bonne figure. Vous voyez que je n’ai
pas cessé d’être peintre, je dessine maintenant sur le hasard.” DDS
p. 269.
19.
As in 1920, in Fresh Widow: a French window painted of a ‘mint’
green color, whose glass panes have been supplanted with black leather.
In accordance with Duchamp’s instructions, these had to be constantly
shined ‘as if they were shoes’.
20.
“Adam: to be red. Some writers (…) assign to the word adam the
twofold signification of "red earth", thus adding to the notion
of man's material origin a connotation of the color of the ground from
which he was formed.” See www.newadvent.org/cathen/01129a.htm
21.
See Algebraic Comparison (of the Green Box of 1914). DDS,
pg. 45. Third note pertaining to the Preface and to the Warning,
seminal notes in the writings of Duchamp.
22.
In Ulf Linde, Cycle, La roue de bicyclette. Marcel Duchamp,
Abécédaire. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1977. And also inscribed
in the sequence of circular chronology: Coffee Mill, Chocolate
Mill, Propeller (the declaration to Léger and Brancusi towards
the end of 1912 in the 4th Salon de la Locomotion Aérienne:
“Painting is over. Who could do it better than this propeller?”), Bicycle
Wheel, Rotative Plaque Verre, Discs with Spirals,
Monte Carlo Bond, Door of 11 of rue Larrey (somehow summarized
in the door of the Gradiva Gallery of 1937), Rotoreliefs,
etc.
23.
See the chapter La Diligence Innombrable in Voyage to the
Country of the Fourth Dimension, a scientific novel by Gastón de
Pawlowski, published for the first time in 1910. According to some declarations
by Duchamp, this novel was influential for certain speculative notions
applied to the Bride Stripped Bare. Jean Clair develops this
idea extensively in his book Marcel Duchamp ou le Grand Fictif.
Paris: Editions Galilée, 1975.
24.
The fastest and perhaps most significant period of Duchamp’s development
(1912), beginning with Nude Descending a Staircase and King
and Queen Traversed by Fast Nudes (and variants), to Airplane,
where velocity is a fundamental factor for confronting the static petrification
of certain ancient references.
25.
In The Spirit Mercurius, Jung says: “Mercury truly consists of
the most extreme opposites; on the one hand he is undoubtedly akin to
the godhead, on the other he is found in sewers.” And in Psychologie
et Alchimie, Hermes/Mercury “is the primordial hermaphrodite being
that divides itself to form the classic couple brother-sister, unifying
itself later in the conjunctio in order to finally reappear under
the radiant form of the Lumen Novum, of the Lapis.” The hermaphrodite
is also ‘the philosophical Adam, still with his rib...’
26.
“Physiquement -L’œil est le sens de la perspective.” DDS, p.123.
27.
“Le jeu du tonneau est une très belle sculpture d’adresse.” DDS, p.37.
A popular game where the objective is to insert metal rings over metallic
frogs -or toads- placed on a box with numbered holes.
28.
Alfred Jarry, Selected Works of Alfred Jarry, edited by Roger
Shattuck & Simon Watson Taylor, London: Jonathan Cape, 1965, p.
228-229.
29.
This position makes one think of the Bride as a transformed Aphrodite,
originally an ancient Asiatic goddess similar to the Mesopotamic Ishtar
and the Syrian goddess Astarté, in addition to the Virgin. Or in Duchamp’s
own words: “the apotheosis of Virginity”.
30.
This was fulfilled only later in a casual manner, when the Bride and
the Bachelors –in the clamoring style of Jarry- literally broke the
glass in the midst of an accidental copulation while they were transferred
(after the work’s first and last exhibition in intact form at the Brooklyn
Museum, to Connecticut), one panel on top of the other, in a truck.
31.
18 black and 18 red, plus a green zero in the European roulette; the
American version uses a double zero.
32.
See Lanier Graham, “Duchamp and Androgyny: The Concept and its Context,”
Tout-Fait, vol.2, Issue 4 (January 2002) Articles <http://www.toutfait.com/duchamp.jsp?postid=1226&keyword=>.
33.
Green is also the color of zero, a unique oasis –together with the color
of the game board—flanked by a black 26 and a red 32 [VOISINS DU ZERO!
in roulette argot] in a numeric version of that ineffaceable scene of
the Western imagination.
34.
Marcel Duchamp, Posthumous Notes #s 227, 234, 249 y 279.
35.
This was a film of 7’ created in 1926 with the help of Man Ray and Marc
Allégret, where discs with word games about Rrose Sélavy written in
spiral form alternate with abstract patterns of Discs with Spirals
(created two years before) and turn hypnotically inside out.
36.
DDS. Sur l’Obligation Monte-Carlo, p.268.
37.
See www.volcano.net/~azoth/newpage1.htm
and http://azothgallery.com/index.htm
38.
The priest who hangs his habits. On the one hand, in Laforgue’s sense:
“The idea of liberty would be to live without any habits (…) a whole
existence without a single act being generated or influenced by habit.
Every act an act in itself.” Revue Anarchiste, 1893. On the other
hand, as a specific incapacity: ”l’impossibilité du fer (du faire).”
39.
“In two reappraisals, at least, other than this manuscript, Duchamp
would explain his state of being ‘ défroqué’." The first time,
in 1959, to G. H. Hamilton, he confided, "It's true that I really
was very much of a Cartesian défroqué - because I was very pleased
by the so-called pleasure of using Cartesianism as a form of thinking,
logic and very close mathematical thinking." (Interview with the
BBC, in London, September 14-22, 1959.) A second time, in 1966, he confided
in the critic Pierre Cabanne that, "Depuis quarante ans que je
n'ai pas touché un pinceau ou un crayon, j'ai été vraiment défroqué
au sens religieux du mot…" (Entretiens avec P. Cabanne,
"Je suis un défroqué" in Arts-Loisirs, Paris, no. 35,
May 25 - 31, 1966, p. 16-17.) In Jean Clair, “Duchamp at the Turn of
the Century”, Tout-Fait, vol. 1, Issue 3 (December 2000)
News <http://www.toutfait.com/duchamp.jsp?postid=877&keyword=>.
40.
Both of these references are in Tomkins, p.261.
41.
Tomkins, p.259.
42.
Jean Clair, Méduse. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1989. p.93. The
original text in French reads: “Mercuriel, aérien, Persée est seul à
pouvoir conjurer la pesanteur des choses, l’opacité du chaos, l’engourdissement
du monde pesant du Saturne …là où l’esprit, trop rivé à la terre, se
fige dans l’épouvante de sa pétrification.”
43.
See Lemprière, p.464-466, for the story of Perseus. Interestingly, it
is Mercury who gives Perseus the winged sandals when Perseus is about
to embark on his adventure in pursuit of Medusa’s head. The winged helmet
(which grants invisibility) is given to Perseus by Pluto.
44.
“The Perseus is an emblem of triumph. Perseus holds up by her
snaky hair the decapitated head of Medusa, the horrifying gorgon whose
gaze turned onlookers into stone. The hero’s ingenuity –avoiding her
petrifying gaze by using his metal shield to reflect her image- allowed
him to vanquish what had seemed an invincible threat to civilization.”
Quoted from Sarah Blake McHam, “Public Sculpture in Renaissance Florence”,
Looking at Italian Renaissance Sculpture, edited by Sarah Blake
McHam, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p.169.
45.
For a summary of the history and interpretation of this painting see
the entry in the exhibition catalogue by Flavio Caroli, l’Anima e
il volto. Ritratto e fisiognomica da Leonardo a Bacon. Milan: Electa,
1998, p.182-183.
46.
Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp. The Documents
of 20th-Century Art. New York: Viking Press, 1976, p.72.
47.
Duchamp writes to Picabia from Monte Carlo: “it’s delicious monotony
without the least emotion”. And to Doucet: “I’m beginning to play and
the slowness of progress is more or less a test of patience. I’m staying
about even or else am making time in a disturbing way for the aforementioned
patience, but still doing that or something else… I’m neither ruined
nor a millionaire and will never be either one or the other.” As summarized
by Lebel: “He considers his martingale infallible in this respect but
he also admits that if one perseveres long enough one can hope to win
an amount equal to the wagers of a clerk who works in his office as
many hours as the gambler does in the casino."
48.
A Duchampian game of words between equilibre and et qui libre?
(Who is free?)
49.
Lemprière, p.635.
50.
Max Harrison, Poulenc, Les Mamelles de Tiresias. Le Bal Masqué.(CD
brochure) Saito Kinen Orchestra, Seiji Osawa (456 504-2 Philips).
51.
See www.caduceus.co.uk
Fig.
1, 5-7
©2003 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris.
All rights reserved.
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