Duchamp’s Legacy

As we approach both the fiftieth anniversary of Marcel Duchamp’s death and the centenary of his most famous “readymade” it would appear that not a lot more can be said about the man and his work. And yet, most scholars would agree that, since Duchamp’s passing and the subsequent emergence of the enigmatic Étant Donnés, the reception of his oeuvre has become highly problematized. As Benjamin Buchloh notes in one of the most recent publications directly addressing this issue, the “near total silence” which has surrounded Étant Donnés attests to the fact that Duchamp’s oeuvre has “fallen short of its actual historical potential.” ⁽¹⁾

In an effort to break this silence and move beyond the impasse in question, many scholars have taken Étant Donnés as a point of departure for the reassessment of the Duchampian project. Through the peephole, this re-reading has involved an assessment of the erotic dimension of Duchamp’s work, primarily on the basis of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Some of the most important research in this area has been undertaken by two of the most prominent scholars in the field, Thierry de Duve and Rosalind Krauss. Krauss, for her part, was one of the first to explore the precise connections between Lacan and Duchamp when, in a chapter entitled “Notes on the Index” from her seminal 1986 work The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, she uses Lacanian theory to unlock the mysteries of the Large Glass. First, she develops Lacan’s notion of the “mirror stage”: how the “child’s self-identification through his double” allows for the movement from “a global undifferentiated sense of himself towards a distinct, integrated notion of selfhood.” ⁽²⁾ She then uses this concept to read the Large Glass as a ‘‘split self-portrait” which – through the emphasis placed on certain syllables in the title La MARiée mise à nu par ses CELibataires, même – displays a “self-projected as double.”⁽³⁾

This analysis is extended further in her 1994 work, The Optical Unconscious, where she again differs to Lacan – through reference, this time, to his “L schema” apparatus – in order to put forward an “alternative” reading of modernism.⁽⁴⁾ Indeed, it is not difficult to recognize the Lacanian co-ordinates which frame Krauss’s thesis regarding Etant Donnés: that, at the peephole, “vision is demonstrably hooked up to the mechanism of desire” so that the viewer as voyeur becomes a “carnal being trapped in the searchlight of the Other’s gaze […] a self that exists on the level of all other objects of the world.”⁽⁵⁾ It is ultimately by recourse to Lacanian theory that she can argue that, in the Duchampian field, “nothing […] breaks the circuit of the gaze’s connection to its object or interrupts the satisfaction of its desire.”⁽⁶⁾

In his 1991 work Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade, Thierry de Duve calls for a parallel approach to the relationship between psychoanalysis and art history – what he terms a “heuristic parallelism” ⁽⁷⁾ – which uses Lacanian theory to read the work of art in terms of dream analysis. First, he examines how the development of Lacan’s conceptual apparatus takes place through a close reading of Freud’s approach to dream analysis. From this theoretical standpoint, de Duve then interrogates Duchamp’s oeuvre using the Freudian method, arguing that Duchamp discovered “a truth that has long been familiar to psychoanalysis,” namely, that “the practice of painting has something to do with sublimation.” ⁽⁸⁾ Like Krauss, de Duve does not attempt to hide the fact that his analysis of Duchamp is supported by Lacan’s conceptual apparatus, declaring that Duchamp’s “definition of the Real was strictly that of Lacan.” ⁽⁹⁾

One can conclude, then, that Krauss and de Duve’s respective readings of Duchamp’s work are governed by a common grounding in Lacan’s conceptual apparatus. However, it should be remembered that, as with the history of psychoanalytic studies of art, there is also a long and well-established tradition of psychoanalytic interventions into the Duchampian field, of which Krauss and de Duve’s Lacanian stances are simply the most recent examples. As Paola Magi has recently noted, the range of perspectives which make use of psychoanalysis in assessing Duchamp’s work is wide and varied: from Lebel’s brief intimations on the possible connection between the clinical setting and the Large Glass, to Schwartz’s thorough examination of the lIbidinal forces at work in Duchamp’s oeuvre , to the different interpretations put forward by Ulf Linde, Maurizio Calvesi, and Octavio Paz.⁽¹⁰⁾

A surprising omission from this list is the name of Jean Francois Lyotard, whose 1977 work Les Transformateurs Duchamp, written at a pivotal moment during the rediscovery of Duchamp’s work in France, paved the way for all subsequent appraisals of Duchampian eroticism.⁽¹¹⁾Of course, one should also make reference to the many rigorous interpretations of Duchamp’s work offered by Lacanians themselves: for example, Jean Copjec’s suggestion that Duchamp may have in some way understood the aesthetic object as a form of sublimation;⁽¹²⁾or Badiou’s recent claim that the psychoanalytic aspect of Duchamp’s work is “another story” which “is probably the contradictory destiny of the most important part of modern art.” ⁽¹³⁾

What, in my view, separates Krauss and de Duve from other scholars in the field is the extent to which they have applied Lacanian theory to Duchamp’s work; they have, I would argue, gone the furthest in integrating Lacan’s conceptual model into the field of Duchamp Studies, as an established methodological tool. The necessary predominance of this specific Lacanian line of enquiry was given an increased level of credibility in 1987 when, to mark the one hundredth anniversary of Duchamp’s birth, the Philadelphia Museum of Art reissued the Bulletin that had been devoted to Étant Donnés in 1969. It was this publication which, by foregrounding the connection between Duchamp’s final work and a series of preparatory etchings produced in 1968 entitled The Lovers, caused the Lacanian connotations in Étant Donnés to reverberate. It was firstly deemed to be highly significant that one of the sketches was taken directly from Gustave Courbet’s 1861 painting Woman with White Stocking. Even more important, however, was the fact that another seemed to directly indicate the influence of Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde – a painting which, at the time Duchamp was working on the etchings, was in the possession of none other than Lacan himself. The significance of this curious set of circumstances was again underlined as recently as 2009 when, in the catalogue released to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Étant Donnés installation in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the precise nature of the link between Duchamp, Courbet, and Lacan was further clarified. According to Michael Taylor, Duchamp most likely saw L’Origine du Monde in late September 1958, “when he and his wife were invited to dine with the Lacans at their apartment at 3 rue de Lille in Paris.” ⁽¹⁴⁾ Thierry Savatier goes as far as to suggest that Lacan deeply admired Duchamp and that it was therefore “inconceivable that he would not have brought the painting to Paris for this important rendez-vous”.⁽¹⁵⁾

While this new evidence adds weight to de Duve and Krauss’s Lacanian interventions, I would argue that it also brings to light a number of important questions which remain unanswered by Duchamp scholars. The first point worth noting is how the relationship between The Lovers and Étant Donnés, while strengthening the validity of a psychoanalytic reading, also brings into focus the specific dilemma which art historians faced when the preparatory sketches were first discovered; namely, the fact that the direct, unambiguous reference to Courbet fundamentally undermines all the criteria according to which Duchamp’s work had for so long been judged and evaluated. How, as Calvin Tomkins asks, can we account for the fact that Duchamp was explicitly claiming as an influence over his last major work an artist who he had previously criticized “for setting art on its exclusively ‘retinal’ course’,” the very attitude against which he was seen as reacting?⁽¹⁶⁾Krauss’s answer to this question appears insufficient since, by insisting on the distinction between the eroticism of Duchamp’s later works and the earlier “cerebral Duchamp” who rejected “the world of material sensations” in favour of “the world of ideas,” she simply holds in place the very categories which the Courbet/Lacan question forces us to re-examine. ⁽¹⁷⁾

If we choose to interrogate this interpretative aporia a little further, we begin to see that its roots lie in the paradoxical nature of the relationship between the Large Glass and Étant Donnés, the two diametrically opposed centre-pieces of Duchamp’s visual output. For almost fifty years, scholars have struggled to adequately explain what is at stake in the overlapping dimensions of openness and closure which penetrate each work: one is a blatantly figurative installation which remains fixed at a limited viewpoint; the other is a frustratingly inaccessible form whose opacity is counteracted by its transparency, the simple fact that the viewer is free to walk around it. This obvious feature was identified by Anne d’Harnoncourt as early as 1969, a year after Duchamp’s death, in what was the first critical appraisal of the work; and yet, to this day, several issues raised by d’Harnoncourt’s initial response remain unresolved. For example, her description of Étant Donnés as “the alter ego of The Large Glass” raises a very important question for Duchamp scholars: if we are to understand Étants Donnés as a “mise-en-scène” of the Large Glass’s implicit “erotic content,” then how do we account for the role of the viewer-come-voyeur positioned in the space mapped by the “Glass”? If the allegorical content of the “Glass” is rendered visible in Étants Donnés – so that the “Bride” can be seen lying on a mass of twigs and the “brick base” of the “Bachelor” machine is “echoed in the inner brick wall and the outer brick doorway” – then what is the precise “allegorical” role of the viewer located at the peephole? ⁽¹⁸⁾

What this apparent dichotomy leads us to is the fundamental impenetrability of the Large Glass itself. As Tomkins has noted, there is no getting away from the fact that, for almost one hundred years, nobody has come to fully understand the work. The reality is that, despite the transparency of its support, the forms in the Large Glass remain opaque: although each element has a name, it is impossible to move beyond the work’s purely formal qualities – its status as a Large Glass – and identify specific motifs. The “conceptual” interpretation which appears to overcome this obstacle is here undermined by Duchamp’s insistence that the Large Glass has “no theoretical substratum,” that “fundamentally, there are very few ideas.” ⁽¹⁹⁾If, as has been generally accepted, the Glass’s “anti-retinal” status marks it as a work of “conceptual art” then why does Duchamp continuously emphasize the importance of its formal dimension: the various “technical problems” concerning the support, the colour, the “rehabilitation of perspective” based on “dimensions,” etc.? ⁽²⁰⁾On the whole, such efforts to account for the dilemma the work presents have been undone by their own acute cynicism: despite openly dismissing as naive those readings which attempt to unlock the mysteries of the Glass, scholars continue their own efforts to excavate the secrets the work contains. The fact remains that, in the face of assertions that meaning is impossible to decipher, the Large Glass’s impossible status continues to exert a fascinating hold.

The basic premise of this paper – and the central argument in my doctoral thesis, Marcel Duchamp: Resolving the Word/Image Problematic, Afterthought – is that this set of obstacles persists because the dominant Lacanian interventions into the Duchampian field remain limited in their theoretical scope. The reason for this, I claim, is that such readings rely heavily on what Slavoj Žižek has called “the distorted picture of Lacan as belonging to the field of ‘post-structuralism’.”⁽²¹⁾Thus, my hypothesis is that, in order to answer the above questions and build on Krauss and de Duve’s work, one must continue their Lacanian analysis of Duchamp’s oeuvre from a Žižekian perspective. That is to say, in order to account for the fundamental lacuna in Duchamp scholarship and properly address the problematic nature of his reception, one must revisit the 1958 encounter between Lacan and Duchamp on rue de Lille with Žižek as a companion.

It is worth noting here the significance of recent remarks made by Hal Foster on the subject of Duchamp’s legacy. In an essay entitled “What’s Neo About the Neo Avant Garde” Foster appears to be one of the first scholars to advocate the need for a specific Žižekian reading of Duchamp as part of a broader psychoanalytic understanding of the avant-garde tradition. Through a critique of Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde, he examines the paradoxical nature of the avant-garde’s reception and offers a precise description of Žižek’s revised interpretation of Lacan when he affirms the importance of “rigourous” re-readings which take the form of a “radical” return. The problem with this approach, I claim, is that it does not perform the particular reading it calls for: by narrowing his focus to an analysis of the neo avant-garde Foster overlooks what precisely is at stake in Žižek’s “return” to Lacan. In doing so, he obscures the precise “symptomatic” nature of the avant-garde tradition in general and Duchamp’s “readymade” in particular.⁽²²⁾

In order to address this limitation I will engage in a Žižekian reading of Duchamp that accounts for the revolutionary nature of Žižek’s re-reading of Lacan. The aim, in short, is to bring together Duchamp with Lacan via Žižek: to re-habilitate the psychoanalytic core of Duchamp’s work by re-examining it through the prism of Žižek’s revised interpretation of Lacanian theory: namely, his attempt to articulate how Lacanian theory, rather than belonging to the tradition of post-structuralist thought, represents a “radical break” with this tradition and as such should be viewed as one of the most “radical contemporary versions of the Enlightenment.” ⁽²³⁾

At the same time, this revised Lacanian reading of Duchamp sets the scene for an important encounter, over the Lacanian threshold, between Duchamp and Žižek. Not only does Žižek allow Duchamp’s work to become readable in a new and interesting way, his conceptual apparatus also re-coordinates the parameters of the Duchampian field, redefining them for the concerns of visual culture in the twenty-first century. In short, Duchamp’s work begins to operate as a crucial iconological tool in a re-defined critique of ideology; a matrix enabling us to locate contemporary ideological phenomena operating on the visual (aesthetic-iconological) plane. This may have important implications for avant-garde scholarship in particular and the discipline of art history as a whole: a reading of Duchamp (via Žižek) on the basis of Lacanian theory opens up a radical revision of the historical avant-garde in which an alternative understanding of modern art becomes possible. One is thus directly responding to Alain Badiou’s assertion on the urgency of telling “another story” about the work of Duchamp in order to re-engage with “the most important part of modern art.”⁽²⁴⁾What this “other story” both entails and engenders is a re-habilitation of art history to its psychoanalytic foundations and, ultimately, the emergence of a new mode of disciplinary exchange which moves beyond the “parallel” approach offered by Thierry de Duve. ⁽²⁵⁾

With regard to the broader implications of these claims, the current paper should be viewed as the first step in contributing to a paradigmatic shift in the field of Duchampian scholarship, an effort to bring about what Žižek has defined as a Copernican revolution: instead of seeking to overcome the persistent obstacles which Duchamp’s work continues to present by “adding complications and changing minor premises”.⁽²⁶⁾within the terms of the established interpretative framework, I am calling for a fundamental change in the foundations of this basic framework itself, a new paradigm of Duchamp studies which fully recognizes the revolutionary kernel of his work. ⁽²⁷⁾ Through Žižek, Duchamp’s oeuvre will be opened up to a Lacanian-Hegelian heritage where – against the standard “post-structuralist,” “postmodern” (“conceptual”) reading of his work – he is located in a lineage of rationalism alongside figures such as Kant, Hegel, Freud, and Marx. It is only in this way that the deafening silence surrounding the man and his work can be shattered so that, to the sound of broken Glass, the emancipatory potential of his project can become fully realized.

Two sides of a Coke ad: The Duchampian title and the Lacanian signifier.

When searching for a place to begin such a radical re-thinking of Duchamp’s project it helps to consider Duchamp’s own point of departure, the genesis of his major work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. “It’s not the bride itself,” he famously declared, “it’s a concept of a bride that I had to put on the canvas one way or another, but it was more important that I should have thought of it in words, in terms of words, before I actually drew it.”⁽²⁸⁾ With this statement, Duchamp reminds us that the Large Glass’s impenetrability is rooted firmly in a distinct and original use of language: the indecipherable nature of the allegory the Glass is said to represent, namely, the story of “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors.” Although acknowledged as the tale of an erotic encounter, the extremely cryptic nature of the hand-written notes through which the story itself is told ensures that a clear reading is always blocked. Thus, given that a full understanding of the visual dimension of Duchamp’s work is not complete without unlocking the meaning of these notes – or, more specifically, by identifying their precise signifying logic, what Charles Cramer has loosely defined as a particular Duchampian “syntax” – it is here that the focal point of this paper resides. ⁽²⁹⁾

Our analysis of the visual dimension of Duchamp’s oeuvre will therefore begin by focusing on the system of language that supports it. Adding an increased theoretical rigour to Cramer’s analysis, my basic thesis is that the notes are the most complex and extreme form of what Žižek terms the “poetic act of naming,” an elaborate system of metaqua signifierassociations rooted in a fundamental psychoanalytic understanding of language. In what remains of this paper, I will argue that, in his use of words, Duchamp literally follows the basic rule of psychoanalysis to the letter (à la lettre)In Žižekian terms, he grounds “the irreducible gap between the enunciated content and the act of enunciation that is proper to human speech.” ⁽³⁰⁾
Or, to Duchamp’s own words, he gives palpable presence to the “art-coefficient,” the “gap […] between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed.” ⁽³¹⁾

Of the many statements Duchamp makes on the subject of language, one of the more curious was offered in the recently published “afternoon interviews” with Calvin Tomkins. Discussing how a painting comes to acquire a mystical aura, he explains that “an object is an object, a three-dimensional form, but words are taken and repeated.”⁽³²⁾ Duchamp then elaborates on his point by drawing on an example from the world of advertising: “Like publicity. All along it’s the same thing, “Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola.” After a while magic appears around Coca-cola […] maybe in fifty years, if nobody speaks of Coca-Cola again, it will disappear.” ⁽³³⁾ It is with this strange analogy that one begins to notice an interesting overlap between Duchamp and Žižek. The first point worth noting is how, with these comments, Duchamp returns to a point made in an earlier interview undertaken fifty years after the rejection and subsequent celebration of his Nude Descending a Staircase. In conversation with Francis Steegmuller, he declared that, if the painting’s “infamy” has lasted fifty years, then “there’s more to it than just the scandal.” When pressed to elaborate (“what else is there?”) he responds as follows: “There’s It” – “It?” – “It. Whatever has no name.” ⁽³⁴⁾ Further contextualization of this point can be found in his assertion that the “Nude” scandal was ultimately rooted in a basic misunderstanding on the part of his colleagues (and brothers) in the Puteaux group of the painting’s title. In another statement focusing on the central issue in question, Duchamp explains that “they thought it was too much of a literary title, in a bad sense–in a caricatural way.” ⁽³⁵⁾ It is the same misunderstanding, he maintains, which contributed to the subsequent scandal the work provoked at the New York Armory Show in 1913: “what contributed to the interest provoked by that canvas was its title.”⁽³⁶⁾ In short, one can conclude that, by referring to a Coke ad in order to demonstrate the general function of language in sustaining the aura surrounding the work of art, Duchamp is effectively highlighting the specific role of the title in his own work.

The crucial point is that, in one of those unique intellectual analogies which have become the hallmark of his Writings, Žižek also uses an advertisement for Coca-cola to elucidate his own particular theoretical understanding of language. In doing so, his analysis displays a striking overlap with Duchamp’s comments: from his Lacanian perspective, the “magic” described by Duchamp is articulated as an effect of the act of naming whereby the “‘spirit of America’ (the cluster of features supposed to express it)” is “condensed in Coke as its signifier, its signifying representative.” Furthermore, Duchamp’s specific reference to the “it” which persists in the “Nude” – the “whatever has no name” – is formulated by Žižek as the “impersonal it” or surplus-X of the commodity-form, that “unattainable something” which is “in Coke more than Coke.” ⁽³⁷⁾

The Coke ad can therefore be viewed as the point at which an encounter between Žižek and Duchamp might be said to take place: for Duchamp, the ad demonstrates the particular status of titles in his work and the more general function of language in relation to the work of art; for Žižek, it is used to exemplify the Lacanian logic of the signifier and show how it diverges radically from post-structuralist theory. It is through the coke ad, then, that it becomes possible to undertake a new reading of Duchamp’s titles on the basis of Žižek’s re-reading of Lacan’s conceptualization of language. Conversely, by further exploring the implications of this overlap one engages in a psychoanalytic reading of Duchamp’s oeuvre which functions, at the same time, as a Duchampian reading of psychoanalysis. In other words, it might be argued from a uniquely psychoanalytic viewpoint that Duchamp’s work provokes a new understanding of the signifier, a shift from a post-structuralist to a Lacanian notion which, by opening up the radical break Žižek speaks of, ultimately contributes to a re-evaluation of Lacanian theory.

The Lacanian signifier and the Žižekian name

How, then, might we draw out the Lacanian connotations suggested by this curious parallel between Duchamp and Žižek? In this section, my aim is to sketch the theoretical background to Žižek’s “Coca-Cola remarks” in order to specify where his reading of Lacan diverges from post-structuralist theorists such as Krauss and de Duve. In turn, I will use this distinctly Žižekian perspective to offer a new way of understanding Duchamp’s use of titles. The elucidation of Žižek’s theoretical apparatus will thus be followed by a close, formal analysis of Duchamp’s work. ⁽³⁸⁾

The central argument being put forward is that Žižek’s Coca-Cola reference, by demonstrating the psychoanalytic logic of language, allows us to re-read Duchamp’s work in terms of what Žižek terms “the dogmatic stupidity” of the signifier. Žižek’s basic point is that, as a signifying structure, the advertising image is not constituted as a field of representation – it does not come to represent the “spirit of America” – until it is supplemented by the label “Coke.” It must be remembered that, as a name, the label “Coke” has no meaning; it is fundamental empty, its function is purely structural: as such, it acts as what Žižek calls a “reflexive marker” ⁽³⁹⁾ or unifying feature: a registered trademark which, by supplementing the advertising image, constitutes it as a totality. It is this operation – referred to by Lacan as a “quilting” process – which allows the interplay between visual-verbal elements to generate the ad’s central message.

This occurs when the empty label “Coke” acquires the status of a sign: that is, it comes to explicate the meaning generated by the advertisement. The shift from empty name to sign takes place through a simple inversion whereby “coke” comes to designate the field it supplements; that is to say, the question “What does ‘Coke’ mean?” is given an answer: “Coke is [‘the Spirit of America’].” The process is complete when the sign “Coke” becomes a signifier, a stand-alone label with its own significance: when “Coke” takes the place of the advertising image by functioning as a metaqua signifierreplacement for its central message. In other words, the sentence “Coke is [‘the spirit of America’]” simply shifts to “this object–a Glass bottle or red tin can–is ‘the spirit of America’ [because it is a bottle/can of Coke].”

The crucial point worth emphasizing is that, as a signifier, the label “Coke” does not represent or bring to mind the concept created by the ad: despite its apparent wealth of significance – its status as a signifier – it remains an empty name or trademark which, through a metaqua signifieroperation, simply stands in for the concept it is seen to “represent”; in this sense, the ad should simply be understood as the “missing representation”⁽⁴⁰⁾.whose place is held by the label inscribed on the tin can or Glass bottle. It is this shift in perspective which allows us to grasp Žižek’s basic argument: the signifier does not designate an object from a distance (or, the label “Coke” does not point to the contents of the Glass bottle or tin can); rather, it is inscribed into the object, onto its surface, as the empty name holding the place of the missing representation (the advertisement).

This is what Žižek means by the “dogmatic stupidity” of the signifier: the fact that a name is no more than a tautological, performative element which, rather than calling to mind a particular signified-idea, represents its lack. What conceals the signifier’s “stupidity” is a fundamental formal inversion, a reversal in causality, through which the object-referent is misrecognized as containing the signified content designated by its name: the red can or Glass bottle is believed to contain a set of particular properties because it is a can or bottle of Coke; in short, the object is viewed as the physical embodiment of the “spirit of America”. This is what Lacan termed the retroactive production of meaning: the way the missing representation – the advertising image and all the significance it carries – magically “stays behind” in the object as its “immanent essence,”⁽⁴¹⁾ as the impersonal “it,” that magical aura which cannot be named because it is merely an effect of naming. ⁽⁴²⁾

It is the “dogmatic stupidity of the signifier,” Žižek maintains, that is overlooked in the post-structuralist conception of language. In Žižek’s reading, the post-structuralist perspective makes two basic theoretical claims. The first assertion is that “the relation of the subject to the world of objects is mediated through language” and, consequently, the objective world is no more than the “imaginary effect-illusion of the signifier’s play” which must therefore be abandoned to the “infinite self-interpretive play of language.”⁽⁴³⁾ This “self-referential” conceptualization of language, Žizek argues, is based on a clearly defined theory of the signifier: that language is “the place of auto-reflexive movement” in which metonymy is given “logical predominance” over metaphor.⁽⁴⁴⁾ Thus, in the post-structuralist reading, the signifying chain functions, at its most fundamental level, as a “decentered network of plural processes” in which meaning is constantly sliding along the signifying chain. ⁽⁴⁵⁾

According to Žižek, it is on the basis of this particular understanding of language that Derrida criticizes Lacan for giving primacy to metaphor over metonymy. For Derrida, Lacan localizes the central lack in the signifying chain in a single (Master) element thereby stemming the differential flow which corrupts the closed nature of the signifying field. For Žižek, this critique betrays a misunderstanding of the notion of Lacan’s notion of the signifier: how, for Lacan, the signifier does not represent a lack but incarnates – takes the place of – a lack. Žižek’s point is that such an understanding of the signifying process, by giving primacy to the metonymical relations between signifier, misreads the distinctly metaqua signifierstatus of the signifier as defined by Lacan. It is for this reason that Žižek insists on the distinction between the post-structuralist understanding of the signifier and the psychoanalytic version put forward by Lacan. While the Derrida’s conceptualization of language remains rooted in the Saussurean tradition, Lacan’s represents a radical break with this tradition: it inverts the fundamental principles of Saussure’s semiotics by submitting them to a Freudian reading.

It is this precise theoretical error which, I claim, Krauss and de Duve fall victim to in their “Lacanian” interrogations of Duchamp. While both thinkers claim to use the Lacanian notion of the signifier to examine Duchamp’s Writings, it is clear that their analysis is based on a post-structuralist mis-reading of Lacan. Krauss, by equating the Lacanian signifier with Jakobson’s concept of the “shifter,” over-simplifies Lacan’s radical Freudian interpretation of linguistic theory. The result is a distinctly Derridean reading of Lacan in which Duchamp’s notes are seen to display a “strategy of infecting language itself with a confusion in the way that words denote their referents”; in line with the self-referential conception of language, she argues that the notes “upset the balance of meaning” through an “outrageous formalism” which, by causing confusion, grounds the logic of the shifter such that “form begins to erode the certainty of content.” ⁽⁴⁶⁾

De Duve, as I have noted, examines Lacan’s theory of the signifier through a close reading of Freud’s dream analysis in order to argue that, in his titles, Duchamp’s “definition of the Real was strictly that of Lacan.” ⁽⁴⁷⁾The problem is that this thesis is rooted in what Žižek calls “a fundamental theoretical error” regarding the analysis of dreams. In mapping the structure of a dream onto a work of art de Duve overlooks Freud’s basic point: that the “essential constitution of the dream”⁽⁴⁸⁾ is not its “latent content” but the mechanism of displacement and condensation which transforms this content into “the form of the dream.” As a consequence, his analysis obscures the psychoanalytic dimension of Lacan’s theory of the signifier, as it is articulated by Žižek, thereby overlooking what is at stake in Duchamp’s titles.

On the whole, it would appear that de Duve’s particular understanding of the Lacanian signifier is governed by the very formal inversion which, according to Lacan, conceals its true workings. For example, from the assertion that the word assumes its fundamental form “when the signifier has no other signification than its own being as a signifier” ⁽⁴⁹⁾ we can see that the basic (Saussurean) notion of the signifier is retained; in other words, de Duve’s reflexive recognition of the signifier’s status qua signifier (that the signifier signifies itself) is supported by the assumption that the signifier is a material representative of a signified-idea (that it signifies). Beneath his claim that language is reduced to a basic “zero-degree” level of “nothingness,” to “the realm of non-language,” when “words ought to ‘forget’ that they have referents,”⁽⁵⁰⁾ it is not hard to detect the central tenant of post-structuralist theory: the notion that language is a self-reflexive system, that “there is no pure-object language.” ⁽⁵¹⁾

One might even go as far as to argue that, beyond Krauss and de Duve, it is the Derridean rather than Lacanian understanding of language that has served as the dominant interpretative framework through which Duchamp’s Writings have been received. Indeed, is it not the post-structuralist conceptualization of language which, to date, has framed our understanding of the notes in Duchamp’s “Green Box”? In accordance with the theoretical principles described above, it has been widely acknowledged that the notes have a “cryptic, absurd” dimension which is rooted in the fact that they are “unanalyzable by logic.” It is assumed that the notes are “simply impossible to fathom,” that they have “no meaning whatsoever” and are simply examples of Duchamp’s humorous word-play, his ironic poeticism.⁽⁵²⁾ What all of this ultimately bears witness to is the fundamental contradiction which penetrates the current state of Duchamp scholarship. To paraphrase Žižek’s words, this (post-structuralist) insistence on a type of ironic poeticism is ultimately affected: that is, the whole effort to reinforce the idea that Duchamp’s Writings are “caught in a decentered network of plural processes,” the constant attempts “to evade the theoretical form,” mask a fundamental fact: that at the root of what is being said “there is a clearly defined theoretical position which can be articulated without difficulty.”⁽⁵³⁾

The Duchampian title and the Žižekian name

How might Duchamp’s homology between the Coke and the “Nude” acquire new meaning against this theoretical background? To put the question another way, how does the overlap between Žižek and Duchamp allow us to read the Duchampian title on the basis of the Lacanian signifier? In order to closely examine the status of the title in the “Nude” – a task I have undertaken in more detail elsewhere⁽⁵⁴⁾ – it is perhaps best to focus on the 1911 painting which served as its preparatory work: Sad Young Man on a Train (Jeune homme triste dans un train). The most striking aspect of this painting – a detail, it must be said, which is all too often overlooked by art historians – is the fact that “the sad young man” mentioned in the title is nowhere to be seen in the image in question. Duchamp’s reduction of the visual motif to a precise configuration of points, lines and planes ensures that the viewer inevitably struggles desperately to identify any recognizable content. He himself underlined this point when he said that “the object is completely stretched out, as if elastic” ⁽⁵⁵⁾ so that, in the painting, “there isn’t much of the young man, there isn’t much of the sadness, there isn’t much of anything in that painting except […] a repetition of schematic lines.” ⁽⁵⁶⁾

What Duchamp achieves in this painting, I claim, is the dissolution of the illusion which conceals the true workings of the title, its true status as a (Lacanian) signifier: namely, the perspectival error according to which the title’s representational content is (mis-)perceived as being inherent to the object (the painting). The effect of such an operation manifests itself, I would argue, in the very acute feeling of discomfort which accompanies the viewing of the work: the way the viewer, standing perplexed before an explicitly opaque surface, is forced to ask in vein: “Where is the man indicated in the title?”⁽⁵⁷⁾ Indeed, is it not this very simple yet direct question which lies at the root of the art historical debate surrounding “Sad Young Man,” the continued attempts to decipher the work’s title and subject matter? What the question “where is the man on the train?” reveals is a basic misconception regarding the title’s actual function and status. In other words, the assertion made in the catalogue entry for the work, that the title expands upon “the simple description of the figure for (or of) a nude, by also designating it – as if with a subtitle – ‘Jeune homme triste dans un train’,”⁽⁵⁸⁾ is made on the assumption that the title has the status of a sign; that it somehow points to (or designates) the content of the painting from an objective distance.

Could it be possible to argue, then, that many Duchamp scholars have, to date, made the same error as Duchamp’s colleagues in the Puteaux group? Just as the hanging committee misunderstood the title’s “literary” status, so too have scholars missed the basic fact that the “subtitle” Sad Young Man on a Train is not a sign at a distance from the painting but a sentence [“sad-young-man-on-a-train” or “JEUNE-HOMME-TRISTE-DANS-UN-TRAIN”] inscribed onto the surface of the picture? This alternative reading is given weight when we consider Duchamp’s decision to directly paint the name of the work in block capitals, a procedure he goes on to repeat with the “Nude” (“NU-DESCENDANT-UN-ESCALIER”) and all his subsequent works thereafter. The most explicit example of this is, of course, the sentence which Duchamp literally inscribed in black paint on the back of the lower panel of the Large Glass: LA MARIÉE MISE À NU PAR/SES CÉLEBITAIRES, MÊME/Marcel Duchamp/1915-1923/inachevé. Through this explicit act of inscription Duchamp is doing much more than simply emphasizing the title’s role in the painting; he is foregrounding the fact that the title functions not as a sign (in the Saussurean sense) but as a type of signifying structure, a verbal inscription which is part of the picture, on the same level as the visual inscriptions. This might well have been what was meant by his insistence that “I always gave an important role to the title, which I added and treated like an invisible colour.” ⁽⁵⁹⁾ This is also why it is Žižek who appears to offer the most precise description of the Duchampian title when he writes:

In this case the relation between the picture and its title is not the usual one whereby the title corresponds simply to what is depicted […] Here the title is, so to speak, on the same surface. It is part of the same continuity as the picture itself. Its distance from the picture is strictly internal, marking an incision into the picture. ⁽⁶⁰⁾

The basic point is that, in Duchamp’s titles, we encounter the Žižekian re-conceptualization of Lacan’s master signifier in its purest form.⁽⁶¹⁾ Given that the title [“sad-young-man-on-a-train,” “JEUNE-HOMME-TRISTE-DANS-UN-TRAIN”] cannot be said to designate or represent the motif in question, one can logically conclude that the man on the train is the central absence around which the picture is constructed: the motif is, in Žižekian terms, the missing representation for which the title is a metaqua signifiersubstitute. The title is only part of the painting in so far as it fills the central hole in the painting. It should therefore be understood not as a sign but as a signifying structure – an inscription – which holds the place of that which is lacking; namely, the scene whose exclusion is the condition which constitutes the painting as a field of representation. Duchamp even suggests as much when, in response to the question “is the man you?”, he admits that “of course the sad young man on the train is myself.” However, he immediately qualifies this statement by referring not to the painting but to “the occasion of a train trip I took from Paris to see my family in Rouen […] in October 1911” when the idea of the painting came to him.⁽⁶²⁾ He is here referring to the actual scene – the missing representation – which is nowhere to be seen in the work; the scene is significant because it marks the important point in Duchamp’s development: when he came upon “the idea of using the movement as one of the elements” of a painting. ⁽⁶³⁾ It is in this way that the title of the work functions as a master signifier par excellence: it does not call to mind or represent the idea of the sad young man; rather, it is inscribed into the field as the element which holds the place of that which is lacking. It is the reflexive marker which constitutes the painting as a totality (as a field of representation) by holding the place of a central void.

The “Lacanian” logic of Duchamp’s titles becomes even more evident when we consider the rapid development of his work before and during his stay in Munich. During this period, his titles clearly take on an even more explicit metaqua signifierstatus: “Two Nudes, One Strong and One Swift,” “The King and the Queen Traversed by Nudes at High Speed,” “The King and the Queen Traversed by Swift Nudes,” “The King and the Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes,” “Virgin No. 1,” “Virgin No. 2,” “The Passage from the Virgin to the Bride.” In this series of works, the effect produced in “Sad Young Man” is driven to its extreme limit: the fact that the motifs are nowhere to be seen merely emphasizes the workings of the title, its status as what might be (retroactively) termed a Lacanian signifier. The procedure finds its most acute formulation in Duchamp’s final work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even: it is only when we recognize that the name “Bride” clearly does not point to any identifiable object in the picture (“Where is the ‘Bride’ designated by the title?”) our attachment to the “painting’s” content is disrupted and our attention is drawn to the title itself, to the act of inscription as a signifying operation. It becomes immediately clear that the word “Bride,” rather than pointing to the opaque forms in the picture, functions instead as the element holding the place of a missing representation, the central emptiness around which the picture is constructed.

The problem, however, is that this Žižekian (Lacanian) dimension of Duchamp’s work remains obscured by the fact that the current misunderstanding of the precise role and status of Duchamp’s titles is supported by a fundamental error in perspective. The viewer continues to see the title The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even as a sign designating the Large Glass, despite the fact that Duchamp constantly drew a division between the two.⁽⁶⁴⁾ Due to an excessive investment in the work’s representational content, a belief that the signified-content produced by the workings of the title somehow persists as the intrinsic or immutable essence of the object, the true logic of the title is obscured. It is this excessive movement beyond the purely phenomenal qualities of the Large Glass, which accounts for the work’s magical aura, the power of fascination which, to this day, it continues to exert. By aesthetically fetishizing the object, we miss Duchamp’s basic point that “afterward there is no mystery – it’s a pure logical conclusion.” ⁽⁶⁵⁾

Once again, de Duve appears to fall into this trap when, in reflexively acknowledging the role of the title, he reveals the underlying assumption supporting his argument that, rather than taking the place of what is clearly absent from the painting, the title represents a certain signified-idea. What comes to the fore in his insistence that “the woman is so obvious in Duchamp’s works, openly announced in their titles: Virgin, Bride, Stripped Bare, and so on” is, I maintain, a fundamentally post-structuralist conceptualization of language which is completely opposed to the Lacanian position he purports to adopt. Despite claiming to read Duchamp’s work on the basis of Lacan’s notion of the signifier, it is clear that de Duve, to use Žižek’s terminology, still finds reason to retain the mask of the Saussurean sign: he sees content as that which is “announced” by the title; the title designates a “real referent”; it “expresses” and “proclaims” its signified.⁽⁶⁶⁾

It could be argued that Duchamp, in his efforts to foreground the status and role of his titles, was actively taking this perspectival error into account in advance. Indeed, if we focus on the evolution of the visual plane of his work, we can see how he may have been attempting to break the viewer’s excessive attachment to the object-referent (the painting): his progressive reduction of the image to no more than compositional arrangement of lines on a flat, opaque surface, is aimed at reinforcing an obstacle blocking the viewer’s engagement with representational content. However, it is also important to note how the increased distortion of the motif in Duchamp’s work runs directly parallel to an increased emphasis on the literary (metaphorical) nature of his titles. By reducing the motif to a set of opaque forms forming part of a specific point-to-point configuration, Duchamp breaks the viewer’s misplaced investment in the painting’s content; the crucial point is that he does so in order to underline the fact that the painting is a fundamentally symbolic mechanism. By staging a distortion in the field of visual representation – an obstacle between the viewer-subject and the painting-object – he draws attention to the signifying structure which supports the field itself: how, in effect, it is the workings of the title which provoke the viewer’s frantic search for an identifiable motif. It is only when we read the sentence “sad-young-man-on-a-train” that we attempt to move beyond the opacity of the work’s appearance towards what Erwin Panofksy called the world of “artistic motifs.” ⁽⁶⁷⁾

The development of Duchamp’s style could thus be viewed as a repeated effort to reinforce this effect by reducing the operation to its fundamental structure: “reduce, reduce, reduce was my thought – but at the same time my aim was turning inward, rather than toward externals.”⁽⁶⁸⁾ The point of culmination is, of course, the Large Glass where the effect is driven to its most extreme point: “And later, following this view, I came to feel that an artist might use anything – a dot, a line, the most conventional or unconventional symbol– to say what he wanted to say. The “Nude,” in this way, was a direct step to the Large Glass.” ⁽⁶⁹⁾ In front of the Glass we are left with no option but to subtract all excessive investment in the object’s representational content, all fascination with the work’s magical “it.” In doing so, we make the crucial step toward “regions more verbal”: we shift our perspective away from the object and towards the symbolic (“conceptual”) inscription that supports the visual (“retinal”) field.

Such a perspectival shift allows for a radical definition of Duchamp’s notion of “movement.” Consider, for instance, his strange insistence that, in “Sad Young Man,” there are “two parallel movements corresponding to each other”: “first, there is idea of the movement of the train, and then that of the sad young man.” ⁽⁷⁰⁾ The question which must be asked is this: why, if Duchamp is referring to the painting’s representational content, does he say that the movement of the train comes before that of the man when, normally, the identification of the motif (“man”) would logically come before that of the idea (“train”)? It is only by subtracting our fascination with the painting’s content – by giving up all attempts to identify the “man” and the “train” – that the answer becomes evident: the only conditions under which the movement of the “train” can come before that of the “man” is if Duchamp, rather than referring to the object-motif, is actually speaking about the effects of signification created by the title, the fact that, in the chain of signifiers [“sad-young-man-on-a-train”], “train” is the last element.

From our Lacanian-Žižekian viewpoint, it is the “movement” triggered by the title – the viewer’s movement beyond the surface of the painting, his efforts to overcome the obstacle posed by the image of a figure broken into a series of converging lines – which concerns Duchamp. In other words, he is not referring to the movement of the man or the train but that of the viewer: he or she who falls into the trap (illusion) of reaching beyond the work’s physical appearance in an attempt to grasp some identifiable motif. It can thus be argued that the title generates the viewer’s movement beyond the realm of the painting’s purely formal co-ordinates, a frantic search for “movement” in the painting. ⁽⁷¹⁾

Based on this revised understanding of Duchamp’s notion of “movement,” one might argue that his work gives physical form to the what Lacan termed the retroactive production of meaning: the way the signified (the meaning created by the title) “stays behind” in the object (the painting) because it is produced retroactively, created “après-coup”; that is, when the chain of (signifying) elements in the title has been supplemented, supported, and “quilted” by the intervention of an empty name. This operation becomes explicit if we focus closely on the precise working of the title in “Sad Young Man”. Note how it is only with the last word in the title (train) that the relations between the words which precede it become fixed, and meaning is retroactively produced. “Train,” in other words, plays the role of the pure signifier: the reflexive marker which supplements and unifies the series [“sad-young-man-on-a”] chain thereby constituting it as a field within which metonymical relations between words begin to operate. In other words, it is only with the last word that the relations between the words in the chain are fixed and meaning is created; it is only with the last word that the “movement” of the viewer on the visual plane is generated.

Duchamp himself suggests as much with the curious remark that “the young man is sad because there is a train that comes afterward.” ⁽⁷²⁾ The choice of the term “afterward” draws our attention to the fact that the word “train” comes after the series “sad-young-man.” This, in turn, underlines the position of the word “train” within the chain of signifiers and emphasizes the fact that meaning is produced after the sentence is unified by the last element. Similarly, in the Large Glass it is clear that meaning is produced retroactively; that is, when one reaches the end of the sentence. This is why it is Lacan who offers a perfect description of the work’s title through what he called “the diachronic function of this button tie” at the level of the sentence: “insofar as a sentence closes the signification with its last term, each term being anticipated in the construction by the other terms and, inversely, sealing their meaning by its retroactive effect.” ⁽⁷³⁾ In short, it is the last term – the addition of the adverb “même” – which seals the sentence and totalizes the chain which precedes it by grounding the metonymical relations between the words in the chain. As with the word “train,” “même” functions as a Lacanian signifier par excellence, the purest form of the “the dogmatic stupidity proper to the signifier as such.”⁽⁷⁴⁾ As Duchamp explains:

Words interested me; and the bringing together of words to which I added a comma and “even,” an adverb which makes no sense, since it relates to nothing in the picture or title. Thus it was an adverb in the most beautiful demonstration of adverbness. It has no meaning. This “antisense” interested me a lot on the poetic level, from the point of view of the sentence….In English, too, “even” is an absolute adverb; it has no sense. All the more possibility of stripping bare. It’s a “non-sense.” ⁽⁷⁵⁾

It is important here to note Duchamp’s insistence that Sad Young Man on a Train “already showed my intention of introducing humour into painting, or, in any case, the humour of word play: triste, train…‘Tr’ is very important.”⁽⁷⁶⁾

In Žižekian terms, the “tr” is the crucial feature which grounds the empty, self-reflexive nature of the title, the status of the title as a pure signifier. This operation reaches its most extreme point when the “tr” of train is replaced by the word “même” and the performative, tautological dimension of the signifier, is exposed. This effort to openly stage the performative (metaphorical) and, ultimately, tautological dimension of language also gives new meaning to what Duchamp refers to as the “literary” use of the title, or the poetic use of words: “titles in general interest me a lot […] at the time, I was becoming literary. Words interested me […].”⁽⁷⁷⁾ However, he maintains that, while his work might be called “literary,” his use of words is “not entirely literary”: it was “much deeper than literary” because “it’s using words, but then everything that uses words is not necessarily literary, as you know.” ⁽⁷⁸⁾ Duchamp was referring here to “the poetic aspect” of the words, the way in which the common assumption that a word simply pointed to an object was fundamentally challenged: “I wanted to give ‘delay’ a poetic sense that I couldn’t even explain. It was to avoid saying ‘a Glass painting,’ ‘a Glass drawing,’ ‘a thing drawn on Glass,’ you understand?”⁽⁷⁹⁾ For Duchamp, “poetic words” are the opposite of words which have an “essential concept”; they are, he explains, “words distorted by their sense” ⁽⁸⁰⁾ which create “an explosion in the meaning of certain words” so that “they have a greater value than their meaning in the dictionary.”⁽⁸¹⁾ What this explosion ultimately calls attention to is “the intellectual side of things,” to the symbolic-conceptual dimension of the object, to “regions more verbal.” ⁽⁸²⁾

It is at this point that the full weight of the parallel between Lacan and Duchamp is felt. What is significant is the way Duchamp’s statements on poetry have very close resonances with Lacan’s and Žižek’s claim that the poetic act of naming ultimately displays what can, retroactively, be termed a psychoanalytic understanding of language: an attempt to name the “unnameable X” in the object through “tautological pseudo-explanations”⁽⁸³⁾ which themselves ground the tautological nature of the naming process itself. Indeed, is it not a “certain systematic and deliberate use of the signifier as such”⁽⁸⁴⁾ that becomes apparent in Duchamp’s series of puns? By reducing language to the zero-level of a tautology, does a pun not openly stage the “poetic” dimension of language, the dogmatic stupidity of the signifier?

While the answers to these questions are beyond the scope of this paper it is worth repeating that, for Lacan, the act of staging the logic of the signifier finds its purest form in the poetic act of naming. This is his point in Seminar VII when he discusses the importance of the technique adopted in the phenomenon of courtly love within the context of the psychoanalytic process. It is thus significant that Duchamp consistently relates his approach to the use of titles to the poetic tradition: “it was the poetic aspect of the words that I like […] it was really poetic, in the most Mallarméan sense of the word, so to speak.” ⁽⁸⁵⁾ The Duchampian notion of “humour” – as with the term “movement” – can thus be fundamentally redefined along Lacanian lines. Directly echoing Lacan’s description of the “amusing side” of courtly love – which “has perhaps no other cause than the semantic confusion produced’ by the use of metaphor” ⁽⁸⁶⁾ – Duchamp continuously refers to his use of titles in terms of humour: it was, he notes, “amusing to try.”⁽⁸⁷⁾

The crucial concluding point is that, while the encounter between Duchamp and Lacan in front of Courbet’s L’Origine du monde remains the only corroborating evidence to support the direct influence of Lacan over Duchamp and vice versa, the fact remains that Lacan developed his theory of the signifier through an analysis of the very source from which Duchamp’s radical use of titles emerged – that is, a particular poetic understanding of language that can, after the fact, be understood through a psychoanalytic lens. From this departure point Duchamp’s oeuvre and Lacan’s theoretical apparatus open themselves up to the possibility of radical transformation whereby, to cite the mediator of the message, both thinkers “may simultaneously redeem themselves, shedding their old skins and emerging in a new unexpected shape.”⁽⁸⁸⁾

Notes

1. Benjamin Buchloh, introduction to The Duchamp Effect: Essays, Interviews, Round Table, ed. Martha Buskirk and Mignon Nixon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 4

2. Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 197.

3. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde, 202.

4. Krauss leaves the reader with little doubt as to the extent of her debt to Lacan when, in the opening chapter of The Optical Unconscious, she outlines the specifics of her theoretical position. Her argument begins with the thesis that modernism is a fundamentally visual field in which the “the fundamentals of perception,” the opposition between figure/ground and not-figure/not-ground, are constantly maintained (Ibid., 14). To demonstrate this point she maps the topology of modernism onto the structuralist graph developed by the Klein Group and asks: how does one trace an “alternative history, one that had developed against the grain of modernist opticality” (Ibid., 20), one that rose out of modernism to “defy its logic”? (Ibid., 21). The task Krauss sets herself, in other words, is to trace an opposing trend in modernism, one which instead of being “contained by the terms of visual perception” (Ibid., 14) functions as a “statement of this containment” (Ibid., 15). What Krauss attempts to identify is a shift in which the opposition figure/ground is both preserved and cancelled, an inversion in the fundamentals of perception which unveils “the structure of the visual field as such” (Ibid., 15), what she calls “vision as a form of cognition” (Ibid., 16). In order to map the logic of this counterhistory, Krauss locates what she sees as its practical and theoretical poles: it is Duchamp’s decision to give up work on the Large Glass, she ventures, which indicates a possible starting point; and it is Lacanian psychoanalysis which marks a conceptual foundation. She writes: “The theorists of this refusal were Bataille and Breton, Caillois and Leiris, with in the background, Freud. And in the foreground, Dali linked through one arm and Caillois through the other, there was Lacan. Lacan, it struck me, provided the key to this refusal, a way of giving it a name” (Ibid., 22; my emphasis).

5. Ibid., 112.

6. Ibid., 112. Krauss’s arrives at this statement by way of supplementing the semiotic graph used by the “structuralists” with Lacan’s L schema: a model which shows the subject “as an effect of the unconscious” (Ibid., 23). This move allows Krauss to map the figure/ground axis in the visual logic of modernism onto Lacan’s conceptual categories (the ego, the object, the subject and the Other) thus providing theoretical justification for the counterhistory which frames her analysis of Duchamp’s late work. It is Lacan’s shema, she writes, which “displays the diagnol, mirroring relationships” lacking from the structuralist graph, the co-ordinates which “map the way the ego identifies with its object.” There is, she definitively declares, “no mistaking it” (Ibid., 23).

7. Thierry De Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 4.

8. De Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, 31. In the book’s opening chapter, which is entitled ‘Art and Psychoanalysis, Again?’ and is framed by a quotation from Lacan, de Duve presents an overview of the long tradition in psychoanalytic readings of art and asks: “of what use can psychoanalytic interpretation be in the constitution of a historical ‘narrative’ récit of art?” His response, much like that of Krauss, is clear and definite: “the time at which the question is being asked must be explicit: that time is today” (Ibid., 1). He is equally unambiguous when he explains that his attempt to bring the two “incommensurable historicites” (Ibid., 5) of art and psychoanalysis into a parallel relation – a method which, he claims, is unlike “applied psychoanalysis” and “psychoanalytic aesthetics” in that it neither presupposes a strict adherence to Freudian doctrine nor burdens itself “with any equally a priori critical suspicion” (Ibid., 7) – is made on the basis of a simple hypothesis: that the “truth-function that Duchamp’s work […] brings to light” resonates with the fundamental premises of Lacanian theory. He writes: “And behind these artistic and theoretical resonances one hears the voice of Lacan, who, more than anyone, authorized this sort of reading and established it, epistemologically. This is what interests me here. One will soon see the important place I reserve for Lacan in the exercise of parallelism that follows” (Ibid., 8-9; my emphasis).

9. De Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, 78-9. He arrives at this analysis through his heuristic parallelism: an “explicit point-by-point comparison” (Ibid., 67) between Duchamp’s Munich painting The Passage from Virgin to Bride and Freud’s famous “injection dream”. The crucial point worth emphasizing here is that this comparison relies on Lacan’s specific reading of the dream in question, such that de Duve’s interpretation of Duchamp’s work is ultimately vectored through the lens of Lacan’s conceptual categories, the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary (Ibid., 69).

10. Paola Magi, Treasure Hunt with Marcel Duchamp (Milan: Edizioni Archivio Dedalus, 2011), 11.

11. Indeed, it is to Lyotard’s topological analysis of the specular “dispositif” at work in Étant Donnés that Krauss refers in her own Lacanian reading of the work. Similarly, de Duve cites Lyotard’s 1969 essay on the “Principal Trends in the psychoanalytic Study of Artistic and Literary Expression” as the most recent moment of “breaching” in the history of post-Freudian aesthetics, to which de Duve responds by asking “what use can we make today of the relation of psychoanalysis to art?” Situating his own contribution within this tradition and in relation to Lyotard’s work he writes: “the method that I propose here has bully broken with an attitude of reciprocal deconstruction that characterizes the second-to-last moment of the double breaching of art and psychoanalysis, as narrated in Lyotard’s 1969 essay. If my method produces any results, they should remain valued even if a later breaching of the Freudian corpus carries the relation of art to psychoanalysis to yet unsuspected shores.” De Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, 2-3, 7.

12. Joan Copjec, editorial for “Aesthetics & Sublimation”, Unbr(a): A Journal of the Unconscious 1 (1999): 4.

13. Alain Badiou, “Some Remarks Concerning Marcel Duchamp,” The Symptom 9, (2008)

14. Marcel Duchamp: Étant Donnés, ed. Michael R. Taylor (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2009), 112.

15. Thierry Savatier, L’Origine du monde: Histoire d’un tableau de Gustave Courbet (Paris: Bartillat, 2006), in Taylor (ed.), Marcel Duchamp, 127.

16. Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1996), 460

17. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, 108.

18. Anne d’Harnoncourt and Walter Hopps, “Etant Donnés: 1. La chute d’eau; 2. Le gaze d’éclairage: Reflections on a New Work by Marcel Duchamp,” Philadelphia Museum of Art Bulletin 64, nos. 299-300 (April-September 1969): 6-41.

19. Marcel Duchamp, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett (London: Da Capo Press, 1979), 25.

20. Duchamp, Dialogues, 38.

21. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 2008), xxx.

22. Hal Foster, “What’s New About the Neo Avant Garde,” The Duchamp Effect: Essays, Interviews, Round Table,, ed. Martha Buskirk and Mignon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 5-32. For a full elaboration of this thesis see Robert Kilroy, Marcel Duchamp: Resolving the Word/Image Problematic, Afterthought, unpublished doctoral thesis, Department of French, School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies, Trinity College Dublin, 2014.

23. Žižek, The Sublime Object, xxx.

24. Badiou, “Some Remarks Concerning Marcel Duchamp,” 2008.

25. For a full elaboration of this point see Robert Kilroy, “Re-Framing the Real: Duchamp’s Readymade as a Lacanian Object,” in Preservation, Radicalism and the Avant-Garde Canon, ed. Rebecca Ferreboeuf, Fiona Noble, and Tara Plunkett (London: Palgrave Macmillon, 2016), 133-152. See also Robert Kilroy, “Facebook: The Central Place of the Lacanian Clinic,” Lacunae: APPI International Journal for Lacanian Psychoanalysis Vol. 3, no. 11 (2015): 1–22.

26. Žižek, The Sublime Object, vii.

27. This assertion is based on the following statement made by Žižek in the updated preface to his seminal 1989 work The Sublime Object of Ideology: “When a discipline is in crisis, attempts are made to change or supplement its theses within the terms of its basic framework – a procedure one might call ‘Ptolemization’ […] But the true ‘Copernican’ revolution takes place when, instead of just adding complications and changing minor premises, the basic framework itself undergoes a transformation […] the question to ask is always: is this truly a Copernican revolution, or merely a Ptolemization of the old paradigm?” Žižek, The Sublime Object, vii.

28. Marcel Duchamp in interview with Richard Hamilton and George Heard Hamilton, “Marcel Duchamp Speaks,” BBC – Third Program (series: Art, Anti-Art, ca. October 1959); issued as an audio tape by William Furlong (ed.), Audio Arts Magazine, Vol. 2, no. 4 (1976). For full audio see http://www.tate.org.uk/audio-arts/volume-2/number-4.

29. Charles Cramer, “Duchamp from Syntax to Bride: Sa Langue dans sa Joue,” Word & Image 13, no. 3 (July-September 1997): 279-303.

30. Slavoj Žižek, How to Read Lacan (London: Granta, 2006), 18.

31. Marcel Duchamp, “The Creative Act,” Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michael Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (New York: Da Capo Press, 1973), 139.

32. Calvin Tomkins, Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews (New York: Badlands Unlimited, 2013), 62.

33. Ibid., 62.

34. Marcel Duchamp in Francis Steegmuller, “Duchamp: Fifty Years Later,” Show 3, no. 1 (February 1963): 2,. in Thierry De Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade, trans. Dana Polan, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 191.

35. Duchamp, Dialogues, 83.

36. Ibid., 44.

37. Žižek, The Sublime Object, 106.

38. I have elsewhere discussed how this particular aspect of Žižekian theory relates to Duchamp’s work in “The Sublime Object of Iconology: Duchampian Appellation as Žižekian Interpellation,” Seachange: Art, Communication, Technology, International Online Journal (Montreal: McGill University, 2016). I argue that a Žižekian reading of Duchamp’s titles allows us to rethink Duchamp’s oeuvre as a radical form of ideology critique. For the purposes of this paper, however, my intention is to elaborate a Lacanian/Žižekian reading of Duchamp’s titles in more detail, by examining them outside their broader relation to the ideological parameters of the aesthetic field. In the bibliography I have included some works by Žižek which, although not directly cited, are included because they are germane to my brother arguments concerning Duchamp’s project. It is in The Fragile Absolute or Why is the Christian Legacy worth fighting for? (London: Verso, 2008), for example, that Žižek makes direct reference to Duchamp in the context of a distinctly Lacanian reading of the avant-garde tradition. It is the curious nature of his assessment of Duchamp – the fact that he overlooks what, according to his own theoretical framework, he should have been able to see – which I take as a departure point for my re-reading of Duchamp. It is in this way that my Žižekian reading of Duchamp functions primarily as a Duchampian reading of Žižek, an interrogation – via the Duchampian lens – of the aesthetic-iconological foundations of Lacanian thought, the very co-ordinates lacking from Zizek’s apparatus. A substantial elaboration of this argument is the subject of my forthcoming book entitled Duchamp with Zizek: Towards a Word/Image Parallax.

39. Slavoj Žižek, Interrogating the Real, ed. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2006), 186.

40. Žižek, The Sublime Object, 178.

41. Ibid., 113.

42. Ibid., 113. For a full elaboration of how, through Duchamp, the act of naming functions as a critique of the ideological structure of the aesthetic field see Kilroy, “The Sublime Object of Iconology” (2016).

43. Ibid., 177.

44. Ibid., 177, 172.

45. Ibid., 174, 172.

46. Krauss, Modernist Myths, 200.

47. De Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, 78-9.

48. Žižek, The Sublime Object, 5.

49. De Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, 125. While beyond the scope of this paper, it is worth noting here how this inherent limitation in de Duve’s reading of Lacan comes to manifest itself as an obvious contradiction in his ‘parallel’ approach: the fact that his efforts to escape the ideological pitfalls of the psychoanalytic position – its status as “an indecisive and even highly troubling epistemology” (Ibid., 3) – are undermined by the indecisive and highly troubling nature of the parallel method itself. De Duve maintains his approach affords him a critical distance towards the ideological tendencies inherent in a psychoanalytic study of art: “To put the problem this way is to ask what role ideology plays in art and in psychoanalysis and to imagine that ideology varies in an inverse relation to the truth function of art and analysis” (De Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, 3). In other words, the “heuristic parallelism” provides a model which ensures that one remains “attentive to the truth-function that is at work in the two fields” (Ibid., 4). However, the very admission that “of course, as ‘parallel’ as my reading will be, I cannot help applying to Duchamp Freudian concepts (or others, Lacanian in particular)” (Ibid., 7) testifies to an obvious discrepancy between theory and practice, between what he claims to be doing and what he is actually doing. In the face of all rigorous attempts to avoid psychoanalytic essentialism, there is no getting away from the fact that he falls into the very position he seeks to escape. What this contradiction ultimately underlines is the significance of Žižek’s thesis regarding ideology, arrived at on the basis of his re-reading of Lacanian theory: that ideology functions not at the level of concepts (what people think they are doing) but in the form – or “socio-synthetic dimension” – of their activity (what they are actually doing). One might argue it is this paradox – what Žižek terms the “enlightened false consciousness” of postmodern scepticism – which governs the current paradigm in Duchamp Studies: that is to say, despite all efforts on the part of scholars to take into account “the distance between the ideological mask and the reality,” at the level of what one is doing one “still finds reason to retain the mask.” Žižek, The Sublime Object, 173-4, 15, 26, 28.

50. Ibid., 127.

51. Žižek, The Sublime Object, 177.

52. See Tomkins, Marcel Duchamp, 6, 4, 3.

53. Žižek, The Sublime Object, 173-174.

54. Here I will provide a more nuanced version of the analysis of the “Nude” which appears in “The Sublime Object of Iconology” by focusing on the work that precedes it, Sad Young Man on a Train (1911).

55. Duchamp, Dialogues, 29.

56. Duchamp in Tomkins, Duchamp, 76.

57. I can claim to have had personal experience of this phenomenon when, as an intern at the museum where Duchamp’s painting is held, I was repeatedly asked the same question by perplexed visitors: “where is the man on the train?” This question serves as the departure point in the aforementioned paper, “The Sublime Object of Iconology,” when it is discussed in relation to a curious joke made by Žižek in which he demonstrates the Lacanian logic of the signifier through reference to a viewer’s experience of a painting in a gallery.

58. Angelica Zander Rudenstine, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1985).

59. Tomkins, Duchamp, 51.

60. Žižek, The Sublime Object, 179.

61. This thesis is expanded in Kilroy, “The Sublime Object of Iconology” where it serves as the basis for a re-reading of Duchamp’s readymade in terms of Žižek’s revised notion of ideology.

62. Tomkins, Marcel Duchamp, 76.

63. Duchamp, Dialogues, 130.

64. Is this not his aim when splitting the work into visual and verbal poles? He writes: “I wanted the album to go with the ‘Glass,’ and to be consulted when seeing the ‘Glass’, as I see it, it must not be ‘looked at’ in the aesthetic sense of the word. One must consult the book, and see the two together. The conjunction of the two things entirely removes the retinal aspect that I don’t like. It is very logical.” Duchamp, Dialogues., 42-3. By continuously grounding the text-image disjunction Duchamp calls attention to the fact that the visual (“retinal”) is governed by a symbolic (“conceptual”) structure, a point which is further underlined by the distinctive way he chooses to name each work: The Large Glass and The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.

65. Duchamp in Tomkins Duchamp, 211.

66. De Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, 31-32.

67. Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York and London: Harper and Row, 1972), 5.

68. Duchamp, Writings, 124-5.

69. Duchamp, Writings, 124-5.

70. Duchamp, Dialogues, 29.

71. This the central claim in “The Sublime Object of Iconology”: that the “Nude” can be understood as the point where this movement becomes eroticized, when the frantic search for content becomes sexualized through the transformation of the motif from man to female object. Thus, when de Duve asserts that, with Duchamp’s Munich works, “erotic themes enter his work and never leave,” he misses the basic point that the themes in question are not “in the work” but are an effect of the title; thus, one could say that the eroticism in question is present at the very level of de Duve’s own activity: his own (mis-)recognition of erotic themes; his own movement beyond the opaque surface of the painting to the realm of representational content. See de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, 31.

72. Duchamp, Dialogues, 29.

73. Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York and London: Norton & Company, 2006), 682.

74. Žižek, The Sublime Object, 103.

75. Duchamp, Dialogues, 40.

76. Ibid., 29.

77. Ibid., 40.

78. Duchamp with Hamilton, Audio Arts Magazine. Op. cit. note 28 above.

79. Duchamp, Dialogues, 40.

80. Ibid., 88-9.

81. Ibid., 16.

82. Duchamp, Writings, 141.

83. Slavoj Žižek, Less Then Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso.
2012), 943.

84. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York and London: Norton & Company), 148.

85. Duchamp, Dialogues, 40.

86. Lacan, Seminar VII, 150.

87. Duchamp, Dialogues, 29.

88. Žižek, The Sublime Object, viii.

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On “The Creative Act”

Julian Jason Haladyn

With art … the finitude of the sensible material becomes a support for the production of affects and precepts which tend to become more and more eccentred with respect to preformed structures and coordinates. Marcel Duchamp declared: “art is a road which leads towards regions which are not governed by time and space.” – Felix Guattari (1)

In his polemic text “The Creative Act,” Marcel Duchamp describes the act of creating art as consisting of a dialogue between the two poles (as he terms them) of the artist – the creator of the work – and the spectator, or more generally the posterity – the person or people who experience the work. For Duchamp, both of these subject positions are necessary in order to create a work of art, which must be seen to involve not just the making of the work but also its reception. This relationship is described most clearly in the concluding paragraph of the text, where he states: “the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act” (2). This understanding of art undermines the privileged position typically accorded the artist within modernity, who is most often perceived as the singular creator or “genius” behind great works of art. By suggesting that artists actively depend on the contributions of viewers in order for their work to be completed, Duchamp directly challenges the authority of artists over their art – and, by extension, the modern conception of art based upon this vision of the “genius” artist.

At the heart of Duchamp’s short text is, I propose, a fundamental questioning of the accepted parameters of the artist-viewer relationship that emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century with the modern conception of art and the museum. Whereas prevailing modernist theories assume the artist to be a position of privilege, marking a distinct perspective on the world that is the basic expression of their uniqueness or “genius” – a perspective that defines everything the artist produces precisely because it is produced by the artist – Duchamp’s vision of art is fundamentally based upon the relational interactions or dialogues of viewer and artwork, with the artist’s participation being mediumistic. “If we give the attributes of a medium to the artist,” he tells us, “we must then deny him the state of consciousness on the esthetic plane about what he is doing or why he is doing it” (3). Duchamp clarifies this position in an interview with Pierre Cabanne, where he states:

I believe very strongly in the “medium” aspect of the artist. The artist makes something, then one day, he is recognized by the intervention of the public, of the spectator; so later he goes on to posterity. You can’t stop that, because, in brief, it’s a product of two poles – there’s the pole of the one who makes the work, and the pole of the one who looks at it. I give the latter as much importance as the one who makes it. (4)

Rather than creating an artwork that is experienced by a spectator after it is completed, in Duchamp’s description the artist is positioned as a medium that produces works of art only with the participation of the spectator and, more important, the posterity (multiple spectators in multiple contexts) that historically recognizes the work as art. What Duchamp proposes is a dialogic artist-viewer relationship that is predicated on a psychological and affective transference, an important term he uses to describe the interaction between artist and spectator – and, in the more historical interpretation, between the past and present – through the material presence of the art object.

The purpose of my present text is two-fold. First, to argue for the significance of “The Creative Act” within modern artistic and cultural discourse, specifically examining Duchamp’s act of defining the relational subject positions of the artist and spectator that form the basis for his theory of art – which, I propose, can be applied to a more general consideration of the psychology of modern subjectivity. Second, to analyze Duchamp’s use of the word “transference” when he defines the workings of the creative act and to situate this Duchampian transference, a psychological notion based on subjective dialogue, in relation to the psychoanalytic understanding of the term. In this way my analysis approaches “The Creative Act” psychologically, considering the text primarily as a statement on art, not as an esoteric practice or discipline but rather as the basis of and material for a continuing artistic dialogue that takes place through the artist-artwork-viewer relationship.

Creating the Creative Act

It may be helpful to begin by outlining the circumstances in which Duchamp wrote and presented “The Creative Act,” an aspect of the text that is often overlooked. As one of only a few documents in which Duchamp clearly describes his understanding of the process of creating art – one might even say his philosophy of art – it is important that we consider the (practical) development of this text especially as it relates to and even reflects his practice as an artist.

In 1957, Duchamp was invited to give a talk at the American Federation of the Arts Convention in Houston, Texas. His acceptance of this invitation was likely motivated at least in part by the fact that the exhibition Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Marcel Duchamp was on view at The Museum of Fine Arts of Houston during this convention. Organized by James Johnson Sweeney, director of the Guggenheim, where the show was first presented, this exhibition brought together works by Duchamp and his two brothers – hence, it is often referred to as the “Three Brothers” exhibition. As Calvin Tomkins suggests, Duchamp was no doubt encouraged by Sweeney and “may have felt under some obligation to help promote” the exhibition (5). The show was of considerable importance to Duchamp, who actively participated in its planning as well as the design of the catalogue. His talk would in this way greatly aid in promoting the “Three Brothers,” the opening of which (on the evening of April 3) was included on the schedule of activities for the convention (6). Duchamp presented his paper on the morning of April 5 as part of a panel discussion that included Professor William Seitz (Art History, Princeton University), Professor Rudolf Arnheim (Psychology, Sarah Lawrence College), and Gregory Bateson (anthropologist). The topic for this panel was the creative act, with the title being directly adapted by Duchamp as the title of his paper – which was published in Art News the same year.

The approach that Duchamp takes in “The Creative Act” builds upon and extends his earlier theories of the role of the artist in society that he discussed at the Western Round Table on Modern Art, which took place at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1949 (7). Duchamp proposes two key ideas during the four sessions of the roundtable.

The first is the concept of what he terms the esthetic echo, which he compares to the notion of aesthetic taste:

Taste gives a sensuous feeling, not an esthetic emotion. Taste presupposes a domineering onlooker who dictates what he likes and dislikes, and translates it into beautiful and ugly when he is sensuously pleased or displeased. Quite differently, the “victim” of an esthetic echo is in a position comparable to that of a man in love or of a believer, who dismisses automatically his demanding ego and helplessly submits to a pleasurable and mysterious constraint. While exercising his taste, he adopts a commanding attitude, when touched by the esthetic revelation, the same man, almost in an ecstatic mood, becomes receptive and humble.… the man of taste trusts his pre-established likes and dislikes. The man who gets the esthetic shock – it’s a shock – is not master of himself. He submits and becomes humble (8).

The distinction Duchamp is suggesting between taste and the esthetic echo hinges on a question of the spectator’s subjective will, specifically whether or not an artwork is viewed passively or actively. Most people, according to Duchamp, respond to an artwork in a manner that generally conforms to preconceived interpretations, which often consist of culturally accepted opinions or shared perspectives (uncritically) reproduced by the viewer; this is what is meant by taste – which for Kant allows people a common means of judging and making communicable their subjective responses within a larger community. With taste, therefore, will is not a necessary component since one’s initial response of like or dislike is trusted. To experience the esthetic echo, however, the spectator must give up any commanding attitude over the artwork and actively be willing to engage in a dialogue with it, creating receptiveness beyond the mere apprehension of the work. Here Duchamp envisions the act of viewing as the possibility of using one’s will to create meanings that are not given.

The second major idea that Duchamp introduces at the 1949 roundtable is his belief that the artist and artwork must be treated as separate, a notion that – even after the Poststructuralist critique of the author – remains challenging to this day. Responding to a discussion about the artist’s recognition of when a work is complete, Duchamp adds: “We don’t emphasize enough that the work of art is independent of the artist. The work of art lives by itself and the artist who happened to make it is like an irresponsible medium. No artist can say at any time ‘I am a genius. I am going to paint a masterpiece.’ That is not done” (9). In this articulation of the artist as an irresponsible medium we can see the starting point for the main themes of “The Creative Act,” in which Duchamp presents a more focused argument for the mediumistic (as he terms it) quality of the artist and, by extension, his conception of the artwork as a creative experience that is distinct from the person who created it – a distinction that he leaves for the spectator to reconcile. For Duchamp, the artist cannot be responsible for what becomes of the artwork – how it may be interpreted or understood, whether it is appreciated or not – once it is sent out into the world, not unlike the idea that a medium such as paint or marble is not responsible for a painting or sculpture produced out of its materials.

It is important to note that Duchamp’s proposed view of the artist as an irresponsible medium is not simply an abstract theory but instead emerged directly out of his own experience as an artist. As Tomkins points out, there existed for Duchamp a “notable gap between his own intentions and the end results” of his various artistic projects, the eventual significance of which, from an art historical perspective, has little to nothing to do with Duchamp’s intentions – what W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley characterize as “the intentional fallacy” (10). This gap can be seen in the events surrounding his painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), which, after its scandalous success in the 1913 “International Exhibition of Modern Art” or (as it is better known) the “Armory Show” in New York City, represented a key turning point in his career. When this same painting was submitted a year before to the 1912 Salon des Indépendants it was regarded so poorly that his brothers, on behalf of the organizers, asked him to change the painting, which he instead withdrew from the exhibit – the entire demoralizing event precipitated his trip to Munich from June to October. Even after the work’s subsequent inclusion that same year in an exhibition of Cubist work at Galerie Dalmau in Barcelona and the “Section d’Or” exhibition in Paris, the painting was still not considered to be of much artistic importance in comparison to the innovativeness of his contemporaries. The American response to Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 was a surprise to Duchamp, who would not realize his own success as an artist until his visit to New York in 1915 – a status he did not experience in France until much later and arguably never to the extent as in the United States (11). What was the difference between the painting that was “refused by the Indépendants” and “didn’t cause a stir” at Galerie Dalmau or in Section d’Or and the painting that became the succès de scandale of the Armory Show (12)? Through this discrepancy, Duchamp experienced first-hand how irresponsible his intentions as the work’s creator were in its reception.

On its most basic level, “The Creative Act” is Duchamp’s recognition and articulation of this gap between the artist’s intentions and the end result of the work as experienced by the spectator (and posterity). He defines the experiential discrepancy between these positions as the personal art coefficient, which can be seen “in the chain of reactions accompanying the creative act” in which we can witness “the relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed.” He continues: “To avoid a misunderstanding, we must remember that this ‘art coefficient’ is a personal expression of art ‘à l’état brut,’ that is, still in a raw state, which must be ‘refined’ as pure sugar from molasses, by the spectator” (13). The emphasis on the spectator’s role as refiner of the raw artistic product of the artist serves to clarify the distinction Duchamp is highlighting, particularly in terms of understanding different receptions of a work of art by different groups of people – and, as was the case with Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, to radically different ends. (No one interpretation is correct or incorrect, according to Duchamp, although he makes it clear that posterity provides what he calls the final verdict.) From his own experience as an artist Duchamp recognized that judging works of art is ultimately and almost exclusively the responsibility of the spectator, with the artist becoming a type of medium out of or through which the work is created (14). The different and even contradictory responses elicited by an artwork represent the overdetermined nature of the creative act, which, as Duchamp came to see it, necessarily involved a dialogic relationship between the artist (as medium) and spectator through the work of art.

The significance of Duchamp’s conception of the artist as mediumistic cannot in my opinion be overemphasized, especially when considered not just a theory of art but also a theoretical critique of modern notions of authorship – and the modern subject more generally. In fact, with “The Creative Act” Duchamp anticipates the Poststructuralist interrogation of the author performed most powerfully in Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” and Michel Foucault’s “What Is an Author?” (published in 1967 and 1969 respectively). Let us therefore examine “The Creative Act” in relation to two key areas of overlap: first, Barthes’ and Duchamp’s critical shifts in focus from the authority of the author to that of the reader-spectator; second, the manner in which Foucault and Duchamp divide or split the role of the “author” and “artist” (respectively) to challenge the perceived unity given to the author-artist position in modernity. In addition to explicitly connecting Duchamp’s analysis of the artist with the examinations of the author performed by Bathes and Foucault, an important goal of this comparison is to locate Duchamp’s ideas within the larger critical investigation of the author question that pervades twentieth century discourse, a category of inquiry in which (surprisingly) “The Creative Act” is not typically examined.

The Birth of the Reader-Spectator

In “The Death of the Author,” Barthes questions the significance of the author’s role in understanding or approaching a text. His critique focuses on the manner in which the author is used as a given in the reading of a text, treated as the natural origin or source that the reader is supposed to uncover in order to experience the “true” meaning of the work. “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing,” Barthes tells us (15). Earlier in the essay he notes that this overt focus on the author as a key interpretive position is a distinctly modern way of examining texts, pointing to (but not explicating) the history of interpretation that pre-dates the nineteenth century. M. H. Abrams describes this development in his influential
The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition:

The pragmatic orientation, ordering the aim of the artist and the character of the work to the nature, the needs, and the springs of pleasure in the audience, characterized by far the greatest part of criticism from the time of Horace through the eighteenth century…. Gradually, however, the stress was shifted more and more to the poet’s [author’s] natural genius, creative imagination, and emotional spontaneity, at the expense of the opposing attributes of judgment, learning, and artful restraints. As a result the audience gradually receded into the background, giving place to the poet himself, and his mental powers and emotional need, as the predominant cause and even the end and test of art. (16)

It is this shift of orientation from audience to author that Barthes objects to, proposing a form of reversal in which it is the author who is required to recede into the background of a text, giving place to the audience or reader as the predominant cause and even the end and test of art. Or, as Barthes dramatically proclaims in the final statement of his essay, “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author” (17).

In spite of the forcefulness of his title, the main target of Barthes’ critique is not strictly speaking the role of the “author” (as writer or creator of a text) – a role that he necessarily participates in and even celebrates and enjoys throughout his writing – but rather with the excessive privileging of the author’s authority over the text. At no point is this “death” equated with the elimination or disappearance of the author position, in theory or practice; what disappears is the privileged autonomy associated with the role of the author in modernity. Barthes replaces the designation “author” with what he terms the scriptor, which, although it excludes the “passions, humours, feelings, impressions” – that is, the personal or subjective qualities of the writer – typically associated with the Romantic vision of the author (as genius or author-god), still maintains a similar position in relation to the text (18). Even a cursory examination of his substitution of “scriptor” for “author” demonstrates this overlap since, quite literally, scriptor is the Latin word for a writer, scribe, or author; beginning in his 1953 Writing Degree Zero, Barthes uses this alternative categorization to describe the act of writing in which the writer can no longer claim presence within what is written. He is therefore not removing or killing the author, as commentators often claim (19), but instead is proposing an understanding of authorship that is again more akin to a pre-nineteenth century orientation that privileges the reader’s relation to the text. In the most extreme interpretation, Barthes’ scriptor is an author reduced to the function of a scribe or copyist that merely re-produces texts by drawing upon an immense dictionary of existing or ready-made cultural material, as a result of which there is no claim to personal expression or originality.

Here we can see a direct parallel between Barthes’ conception of the author as scriptor and Duchamp’s description of the artist as medium. In both cases there is an active de-privileging of the modernist authorial relation between the author-artist and their work, which is replaced by a renewed focus on the reader-spectator’s authority in disentangling, making sense of and even completing the text. This is made clear by Duchamp’s assertion that the spectator contributes to the creation of a work of art by interpreting its inner qualifications; and by Barthes, who in S/Z states: “What is at stake in literary work (in literature as work) is making the reader no longer a consumer but a producer of a text” (20). For Duchamp and Barthes the role of the reader-spectator is vital to addressing the author question, the critical evaluation of which depends upon understanding a text not just as the product of an author-artist but also, and more important, as a social space or language (textual or visual) that invites engagement (present and future).

The specific position granted the reader-spectator in relation to the text, however, is quite different in each of their two accounts. On the one hand, Duchamp argues that the spectator (or posterity) is responsible for the final evaluation and interpretation of what an artist creates, locating spectators within the creative process by making them the determining factors – particularly through the shared experience of multiple spectators – in the social and historical constitution of a work of art. As he states: “The creative act takes another aspect when the spectator experiences the phenomenon of transmutation; through the change from inert matter into a work of art, an actual transubstantiation has taken place, and the role of the spectator is to determine the weight of the work on the asthetic scale” (21). The power of the Duchampian spectator is in this way directly based upon an aesthetics of subjective judgment, with individual spectators being called upon to interpret and share what they experience. On the other hand, Barthes clearly disavows the manifestly subjective aspects of the reader (as person) and instead proposes the birth of a position that quite literally structures the received text, which is experienced most fully by readers who deny their own (as well as the author’s) pathological interest in order to engage with the text in-itself. According to Barthes:

The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted. (22)

Barthes’ reader occupies the fundamental position in which the multi-dimensional aspects of a text are given unity, the result not of an individual reader’s subjective experience but rather the act of being the text’s destination. The distinction between “The Death of the Author” and “The Creative Act” can in this way be summed up as follows. While Barthes depersonalizes the role of the reader-spectator, which he declares is without history, biography and most significantly psychology, Duchamp celebrates the subjective abilities of reader-spectators to engage in a personal dialogue with a text, deciphering it through acts of individual judgment.

On an historical level, it is important to acknowledge the fact that “The Death of the Author” was first published in the 1967 double issue of the American journal Aspen, no. 5/6, designed and edited by Brian O’Doherty. In place of a traditional bound publication, O’Doherty produced a white box containing a series of loose texts (in the most general sense of the term), a format that, as he – or, more accurately, his pseudonym Sigmund Bode – writes, “constitutes a test for the reader” (23). Translated into English by Richard Howard, Barthes’ text was printed as an eight-inch square pamphlet that also included essays by George Kubler and Susan Sontag. While planning Aspen, no. 5/6, O’Doherty contacted Barthes about contributing to the project:

Barthes was in Philadelphia at that time and he came to New York to talk about the project. He got it immediately. My notion that art, writing etc., was produced by a kind of anti-self that had nothing to do with whoever “me” was, an excellent preparation for our conversation. He said “I think I may have something for you.” When “The Death of the Author” arrived, I knew it was revolutionary. (24)

Written (at least in part) for Aspen, no. 5/6 – with the more often cited French version appearing the following year in the journal Mantéia – Barthes’ text reflects the critical issues of authorship that are enacted through the dialogic interplay of materials in this box. The significance of Barthes writing “The Death of the Author” for this project is heightened when we consider that it appears alongside an audio recording of Duchamp reading “The Creative Act” (presented on one of several records found in the box). Given O’Doherty’s overall interest in Duchamp and his work, as well as the obvious parallels between Aspen, no. 5/6 and Duchamp’s Box-in-a-Valise (1935-41), it is more than likely that Barthes was (or became) aware of “The Creative Act” when he wrote “The Death of the Author.”

Questioning the Author-Artist

Following in the wake of Barthes’ text is the presentation of Foucault’s influential lecture “What Is an Author?” at the Collège de France in 1969, which he published as an essay the same year in Bulletin de la Société Français de Philosophie. Similar to “The Death of the Author,” Foucault’s essay confronts the overt privileging of the author’s authority over the text within modernity. But where Barthes focuses on articulating a death or disappearance of the author in order to refocus discussion on the significance of the reader – formulating a type of either/or – Foucault actively draws attention back to the (admittedly) problematized authorial position or function, examining what he terms the author-function:

It is obviously insufficient to repeat empty slogans: the author has disappeared; God and man died a common death. Rather, we should re-examine the empty space left by the author’s disappearance; we should attentively observe, along its gaps and fault lines, its new demarcations, and the reapportionment of this void; we should await the fluid functions released by this disappearance. (25)

Here we see a subtle acknowledgement of Barthes’ text, which Foucault critiques by inferring that the “death of the author” is an empty slogan. While accepting the basic premise that the author (in the modernist sense) is no longer at the center of a given text or group of texts, this disappearance for Foucault is not the end of the author question but instead represents his point of departure for examining a simple yet vital problem: what is it that occupies the position once reserved for the author? No longer the end and test of art (to borrow Abrams’ description), the term “author” has become an open question in relation to the text that is understood at one and the same time as the author’s and not the author’s – a contradiction that Foucault makes clear from the outset he recognizes in his own writing, grounding his analysis in a subjective framework.

This problematic can be described quite simply as a splitting of the author into two distinct roles: the individual who is responsible for the actual creation of a specific text and the authorial identity that, typically associated with a name, is used to designate the role of the text’s creator. In the first case we are talking about an individual who makes (physically and/or conceptually) a text, the author as person – for example, the “Michel Foucault” who wrote “What Is an Author?” among other texts, who was born in 1926 and died in 1984. In the second case we are referring to the functioning persona associated with the text, the “figure who is outside and precedes” the text and yet the “text apparently points to” – the “Michel Foucault” whose name, no longer tied to the life of the individual, historically authenticates “What Is an Author?” (26). Foucault’s concept of the author-function critically references this historical persona, what in Lacanian terms can be called the real author that gives authority and unity to a text on the level of history, a position that must be regarded as separate from the reality of the author who happens to have written the text. It is the often assumed correlation between these two roles, if not the outright and unquestioned belief in their similitude, that Foucault challenges through his examination of “the ‘author’ as a function of discourse,” a rational entity constructed around the (judicial) need for authority within modernity (27).

The division of the authorial position into personal and functional roles serves to highlight the inherent contradiction in the modern conception of the author-artist. If a person – and here we need to remember the consistent modernist claims (including Duchamp’s) that everyone can be or is an artist – were to actually embody and enact all of the qualities associated with the designation “author” or “artist,” this combination of (psychological) demands would foster what can only be described as a schizophrenic subjectivity. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari articulate a vision of this (irrational) entity in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia: “The schizophrenic is the universal producer. There is no need to distinguish here between producing and its product” (28). Interestingly enough, the framework of the book reflects this approach, which Foucault in his preface notes is informed “by seemingly abstract notions of multiplicities, flows, arrangements, and connections” that are best read and understood as an “art” (29). Such a play with language, in which contradictions are embraced rather than avoided or resolved, raises serious questions about the authority of the author-artist and by extension the authenticity or autonomy of the text as a source of (intrinsic) meaning.

In different but complimentary ways, Foucault and Duchamp each enact this playfulness by approaching language – which we will consider for now in the restricted sense of written language – not as a transparent medium of expression but rather as an open discursive space that is, as Foucault poetically writes, “an attempt to exhaust language” (30). We see this particularly in the authors Foucault chooses to focus on, which prominently include Friedrich Hölderlin, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Raymond Roussel – Duchamp notably sharing an interest in Roussel – as well as in the development of his archaeological method of analysis that, stated simply, treats language as a stratified space into which we can dig. Duchamp’s use of language similarly serves not to clarify or describe but rather to carry the mind “towards other regions more verbal”; while specifically addressing the short texts he often inscribed on his readymades, this statement also speaks to his propensity for giving works complex or (to use Guillaume Apollinaire’s term) intellectual titles as well as his general interest in notes and puns (31). In both Foucault’s writing and Duchamp’s artistic practice, language – and here I propose we can extend its parameters to include not just written or spoken but also visual language – is an opportunity to make visible the contradictory functioning of the author-artist, a conflicted position that remains defined by its pathological need to exceed or even transcend itself (as seen throughout avant-garde practices).

For Duchamp, the schizophrenic quality of the modern author-artist is, as stated earlier, not just a theory but rather represents a philosophy of art developed directly out of his first-hand experience as a practicing artist. While the catalyst for Duchamp’s critique of the (privileged) role of the artist is likely the radically different responses to Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, it is the invention of the readymade that most powerfully manifests his critical perspective. To begin with, the term “readymade” should not be treated as a rigid artistic categorization that is seen as unifying all artworks under its banner but instead must, I propose, be understood as describing a (particularly modern) theoretical or philosophical artistic discourse (32). This is precisely why, as Thierry de Duve tells us, Duchamp’s “readymades are easily annexed by the deconstructionists as a proof of irrelevance or obsolescence with regards to the notion of authorship” – and why the art historical treatment of the readymade as an artistic (rather than philosophical) gesture ironically serves to strengthen the authorial role of the artist, of Duchamp’s in particular (33). The challenge posed by Fountain (1917), for example, is not simply the fact that it questions the categorical space of “art” but rather that, by taking the authority of the author-artist – and the institutionalization of this authority – too seriously, it makes visible inherent contradictions in the modernist discourse of art. Through the artist’s act of choosing an already-made and undifferentiated object, the readymade functions as “art” because it is, in Foucaultian terms, strategically situated in the breach separating the two roles of the author-artist, within the space opened by art historical discourse – the object, in this case a urinal, being experienced at one and the same time as a priori and a posteriori. (Or, following Deleuze and Guattari, as a lack of distinction between producing and its product .) We can even go so far as to call the readymade a schizophrenic form of art that is consistently involved with its own conflicted and contradictory character, a condition inaugurated through an exaggerated split between the psychology of the artist as (absent) person and the artist as a functioning discursive presence (as medium).

Here the overlap between Foucault’s conception of the author-function and Duchamp’s arguments for the mediumistic qualities of the artist can be seen most notably in their shared critique of the assumed singular or immediate unity attributed to the position of the modernist author-artist. “The author,” according to Foucault,

constitutes a principle of unity in writing where any unevenness of production is ascribed to changes caused by evolution, maturation, or outside influence. In addition, the author serves to neutralize the contradictions that are found in a series of texts. Governing this function is the belief that there must be – at a particular level of an author’s thought, of his conscious or unconscious desire – a point where contradictions are resolved, where the incompatible elements can be shown to relate to one another or to cohere around a fundamental and originating contradiction. (34)

This forced unity, which results from a failure to distinguish between the author as person or individual and the author as author-function, is a means of establishing the vision of a complete and autonomous discourse that is at one and the same time supported by and serves to demonstrate a stable site of subjectivity within modern culture. By arguing that the author is a function of discourse – rather than the other way around – Foucault undermines the perceived unity and authority of the “author” (or “artist”), which, rather than referring to a real individual, becomes a space that “simultaneously gives rise to a variety of egos and to a series of subjective positions that individuals of any class may come to occupy” (35). Without its unifying principle, however, the author-artist becomes little more then a mediumistic being that, as Duchamp notes, is not conscious of what is being created or why – a task that is instead entrusted to the reader-spectator, whose role is to accept or judge the “social value” of an artist-author’s work (36). This is a key consequence of giving the attributes of a medium to the author-artist: recognizing that the person who creates a text cannot occupy the author-function and therefore should be treated as separate from their work.

Duchampian Transference

The question becomes: if the artist is not wholly responsible for the creation of art, but is dependent upon the spectator’s engagement with the work, what is the means by which these two positions are able to fulfill the creative process? Duchamp similarly asks, if the artist “plays no role at all in the judgment of his own work, how can one describe the phenomenon which prompts the spectator to react critically to the work of art? In other words, how does this reaction come about?” His answer is quite significant: “This phenomenon is comparable to a transference from the artist to the spectator in the form of an esthetic osmosis taking place through the inert matter, such as pigment, piano or marble” (37). Of particular interest is his use of the term “transference” to describe the process of exchange between artist and spectator through the object of the artwork. This word choice can be read in two different but not mutually exclusive ways: first, the common usage in which one is referring to the act of transferring something and, second, the psychoanalytic understanding that describes the psychological process by which feelings, emotions, and even memories are unconsciously transferred or projected from one person onto another, typically an analyst in the clinical setting. (And, given his propensity for puns and other playful forms of using language, it is likely that both meanings are being employed simultaneously.) The aim of this final section is to consider the implications of Duchamp’s notion of transference within the process of the creative act, specifically as it relates to and extends the psychological and affective territories of psychoanalytic thought. Before considering this Duchampian transference – as I describe his particular approach – it is important that we first establish a basic understanding of transference as a concept.

“What are transferences?” Sigmund Freud writes in Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, “They are new editions or facsimiles of the tendencies and phantasies which are aroused and made conscious during the process of the analysis; but they have this peculiarity, which is characteristic of their species, that they replace some earlier person by the person of the physician” (38). Published in 1905, this early formulation proposes transference as a form of resistance to the analytic process on the part of the person being analyzed (the analysand), with the working through of the transference – by making oneself conscious of feelings or emotions rather than projecting them – representing a (potential) breakthrough in the analysis. An often-cited example is when patients transfer feelings of love onto their analyst, thereby stopping the analytic process until such time that this love can be recognized as belonging to a different object; this moment of conscious realization is for Freud a (if not the) cornerstone of psychoanalytic practice. Since its introduction, the concept of transference has continued to explore and extend as a tool of analysis and, more significantly for our purposes, as a more general operation that Melanie Klein suggests is evident “throughout life and influences all human relations” (39). It is through this expanded understanding of transference as a relational phenomenon applicable to everyday human relations that the concept, no longer restricted to the clinical setting, is able to be used as a vital concept for addressing the intersubjective exchanges that take place throughout modern life – with the relation of the author-artist and reader-spectator being a particular subset of this form of cultural analysis.

In the fourth chapter of Postmodernism and the En-gendering of Marcel Duchamp, Amelia Jones discusses Duchamp’s work through a psychoanalytic consideration of his (uncertain and chaotically eroticized) author-function, emphasizing the way his work plays out the relational qualities of transference through the creative exchange between artist and spectator via the artwork – which she treats as analogous to the clinical relationship of the analyst and analysand. Her (admittedly Lacanian) description of “transference” provides a valuable perspective on how we can approach Duchamp’s use of the term: “transference – this site where the struggle for meaning takes place via the spoken or written text that ‘represents’ the subject under analysis – is also the psychic site where both the analyst and analysand are constituted, in relation to each other, as meaningful subjects” (40). This definition characterizes transference as an enunciative space, both representational and psychic, in which the subjective struggle for meaning is articulated through two interconnected relationships. The first is the relation of the reader-spectator to the text being examined, with the reader-spectator performing a role similar to that of an analyst and the text being the subject under analysis. The second is the relation of the reader-spectator to the author-artist, with the author-artist in this case playing the role of analyst to the reader-spectator that is now in the position of the analysand.

Jones clarifies the workings of these two relationships by discussing, in a notably psychoanalytic tone, how she (as a spectator) personally functions within these relational positions when viewing the work of Duchamp. As the interpreter of his artworks, Jones notes that she is “the analyst and Duchamp is the narrative I produce from his enunciative ‘symptoms’ as meaningful.” Yet, as she continues:

I am also his analysand, subject to his texts, and he is my ego ideal. I transfer my desires and unconscious wishes onto him as authority – identifying with him so as to produce myself as full. The fantasy “Duchamp” promises to take the place of the lack for me, even as I “master” him through analysis. I interpret his works, yet they are always already interpreted by his own selections, the “secondary revisions” of enunciative production…. I make the attempt to master him so I can submit myself to his mastery: We are, so to speak, in a reciprocal dialectic of analytic transference. (41)

In this manner Jones reads her encounter with his work as a dual act of relational subjection in which she at one and the same time is constituted by and constitutes Duchamp’s work, a process that she directly compares to analytic transference. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that Jones re-frames the parameters of the transference relationship using Duchamp’s notion of the creative act. As she reveals through her analysis, the creative transference enacted in the artist-artwork-spectator relation is based within a series of interdependencies that are analogous to those found in the analyst-analysand relation of psychoanalytic transference; this correlation, far from drawing a mere parallel between discourses, actively demonstrates a fundamental discursive overlap on the inter-subjective or relational level.

This overlap may also account for Duchamp’s subtle but significant presence in the writings of Guattari, where the readymade serves (schizophrenically) as both exemplar and foil to his aesthetic theories. We see this particularly in his aesthetic paradigm, a re-envisioned form of analysis in which the psychology of modern subjectivity is examined through an aesthetic (rather than scientific) lens, a methodology that for Guattari, as Stephen Zepke observes, begins with the readymade – making “Duchamp the harbinger of a re-vitalized creative act” (42). Treated as both aesthetic and political, the readymade is seen as a language of creative enunciation that functions through an authorial and psychological refrain, privileging not the “origin” of a particular act, event or object but rather the complex subjective affects and emotions – what Guattari describes as a constellation of universes – that result from the relational interactions that the readymade facilitates. Here again we see evidence of the shared territory between clinical and cultural transferences, with art representing a key modern form of subjective creativity that Guattari actively incorporates into the realm of psychology on both theoretical – through his critical re-thinking of psychoanalysis – and practical – through his work as an analyst – means. For this reason his conception of transference is quite telling: no longer conceived as a dual relation between two subjects, Guattari views transference as (at minimum) a triangular relation that also includes a mediating object that functions as an ambiguous medium (43). Is not the readymade the ultimate (creative) expression of a mediating object?

Jones also employs the readymade as a major instance of transference within Duchamp’s work, although for her it is the artist’s signature (in whatever form it takes) that is the ultimate site of the transferential relation. The urinal that Duchamp used in Fountain, for example, was part of a series of mass-produced objects that, at the time, could be found in commercial lavatory supply stores, meaning that it could be (and was) easily replaced by another of its kind with little to no difference in the overall experience of the work. The presence of a signature is therefore at odds with the inherent repeatability of a machine-made urinal, with the contradictory result of producing an individualized object that is multiple or manifold. By signing a urinal (one of many) with the pseudonym R. Mutt Duchamp makes the spectator’s relationship with the work a blatantly self-conscious and problematic one by destabilizing, on the one hand, the assumed unity of the work of “art” and, on the other hand, the perceived singularity of the artist’s act of creation – with the artist, in Foucault’s terms, functioning as simultaneously the internal function of the work’s creation that precedes the urinal and the external figure to which Fountain points. It is the ability of the readymade, as a literal new edition or facsimile of an already-existing object, to call attention to the arbitrariness of the author-artist’s discursive authority over the artwork that is its most challenging and dangerous quality. The instability of Duchamp’s authorial “I,” which the indexical signature of the “artist” stands in for, is in this way transferred via the art object to the spectator so that, as Jones states, his “shifting ‘I’ enforces an unstable intersubjective exchange, an ongoing process of transference” (44). Rather than a singular event, the creative act is here seen as the product of a recurrent and ongoing repetition – another key aspect of psychoanalytic transference (45) – with the readymade making obvious the continual transferential process, active but not recognized in all works of art, by which an object is constituted and reconstituted as “art” by each consecutive spectator who (with the help of the artist’s author-function) recognizes it as such.

For Duchamp the artist’s role in the creation of an artwork is a means rather than an end, the last analysis being reserved for the evaluative and interpretive acts of the spectator and, more generally, the posterity (of art history). To understand Duchamp’s conception of transference therefore requires us to appreciate his vision of art as a psychological process of dialogue, one that does not stop when the artist has completed the artwork or even when it is placed within an institution of display, but continues on to include the reception and interpretation of the work on the social level. “Don’t say that the artist is a great thinker because he produces it,” Duchamp tells Calvin Tomkins. “The artist produces nothing until the onlooker has said, ‘You have produced something marvellous.’ The onlooker has the last word on it” (46). What we see in Duchamp’s proposed creative act is therefore not just a relation of artist and spectator or spectator and artwork, but rather involves a networking of the three. To return to Jones’ description of “transference,” it is the dialogue among the permutations of the two relationships she outlines – the manner in which the reader-spectator’s analysis of the text (and by extension the author-function) is also the site where the reader-spectator and author-artist connection is constituted or made (historically) real – that most closely articulate the dynamics of Duchampian transference as described in “The Creative Act.”

Within the text we find an invaluable clue to help us contextualize, both personally and historically, Duchamp’s approach to the artist-artwork-spectator relation. Following his introduction of the two poles and his proposed attribution of the ontological status of “medium” onto the position of the artist, he calls upon T. S. Eliot’s words from “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (written in 1919) to describe what he sees as the split roles of the artist: “The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material” (47). Eric Cameron points to the fact that this is Duchamp’s only direct quotation of a critic, making it imperative that we take this reference seriously – particularly since, in spite of the perceived polarity between his vision of art and Eliot’s, Duchamp was obviously able to see in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” something of the conflicted character of the modern position of the “artist” that spoke to him, positively or negatively, about the (most often) unacknowledged realities of creating works of art (48). In addition to the above quoted characterization of the artist, we also find in Eliot’s essay two key ideas that parallel aspects of the creative act as Duchamp describes the process.

The first concerns the depersonalization of the artist, a process of “continual self-sacrifice” or “extinction of personality” that Eliot suggests is a necessary progression by which the mind of a mature artist becomes “a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations” (49). His use of the word “medium” is especially significant given the importance of the term in Duchamp’s text. For Eliot, the expression of a (great) artist is based not on personality but rather the ability to escape one’s self, to function as a medium – with much of the term’s religious connotations – through which (great) works of art are created. We can see in this depersonalized vision many of the qualities that characterize Duchamp’s notion of the artist as a mediumistic being, with one overriding distinction. Whereas Eliot clearly believes in the artist’s privileged position, which the role of medium as a genius-like state beyond the individual serves to maintain, Duchamp’s proposal of giving the artist the attributes of a medium directly undermines the artist’s authority over the work precisely because of the disconnect between the person (who suffers) and the mind (that creates). In other words, while Eliot uses the term “medium” to describe a condition of higher (objective) authority that the author-artist achieves through the sacrifice of the personal – which, as he suggests, turns art towards a condition of science – for Duchamp the role of “medium” defines – through a (playfully) pseudo-scientific description – the unawareness or, as he worded it in the 1949 roundtable, irresponsibility of the author-artist in terms what is created and why. “The artist doesn’t count. He does not count. Society takes what it wants,” Duchamp tells Tomkins in no uncertain terms (50).

The second idea in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” that is of interest to us is Eliot’s suggestive scientific analogy in which he describes the functioning of the author-artist as catalyst, specifically comparing the process of creating art to a chemical reaction. We are invited to consider the action that takes place when oxygen and sulphur dioxide “are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nonetheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected; has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged” (51). The filament of platinum, necessarily active without either being depleted or leaving a trace of itself in the final product, represents for Eliot the ideal mind of the author-artist in the creative act. As he makes clear in the lines following this analogy – those quoted by Duchamp – the ideal or perfect author-artist results from the separation of the affects of personality from the (de-personalized) expression of the mind that, like the platinum, creates without leaving a trace of its self. We can easily apply the basic parameters of Eliot’s use of this analogy to Duchamp’s arguments for a creative act that is no longer defined by the authorizing presence of the artist (as the end and test of art), although, unlike Eliot, Duchamp would never claim that the work possesses no trace of the artist. For Duchamp, the artist’s personal intentions and desires (the “series of efforts, pains, satisfactions, refusals, decisions”) are irrelevant to the artwork’s final realization, which, like the created sulphurous acid, must be understood and judged as distinct from the artist (as person) that created it. The reason for this is because “the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions” that, especially in terms of aesthetic choices, cannot be considered fully self-conscious and therefore must not be treated as the singular source of and for the work’s meaning (52). In this manner, while the artist (as author-function) is the catalyst for the artwork, the actual realization of a work of art can be accomplished only through the transferential process of the creative act.

This last point brings up an important distinction that should be made between Eliot’s use of this analogy and our present consideration of it in relation to Duchamp’s text. By focusing exclusively on the filament of platinum and what its function has to say about the mind of the author-artist Eliot overlooks the remaining elements involved in this chemical reaction, thereby leaving out most of the relational interactions beyond the central figure of the author-artist. In this respect, Duchamp can be seen as taking this analogy more seriously than Eliot by considering not just the catalyst, which is only the first pole in Duchamp’s equation, but also the two gasses – the oxygen and sulphur dioxide roughly coinciding with the spectator and the artwork in its raw state – that combine to form a new acid – sulphurous acid again roughly standing in for the final realization, accomplished by the second pole of the spectator, of a work as “art.” The complex relational process that we see in the formation of this new acid can in this way be used to help describe or illustrate, in quasi-scientific terms, the transmutation that takes place when inert matter becomes a work of art – a process that is for Duchamp determined through an (aesthetic) act of transference.

Let us now examine the functioning of Duchampian transference through an (imagined) encounter with the readymade, in this case Bicycle Wheel (1913). To begin with, we know from Duchamp’s numerous accounts that this object began not out of an active intention to make an “artwork” but rather for the personal curiosity and pleasure of attaching the wheel from a bicycle to the top of a wooden stool, in order to have something to play with in his studio. The truthfulness of his claims – in a manner that strangely reflects Freudian psychoanalysis – are irrelevant, since what is important is not his real actions or intentions but rather his framing and interpreting of himself through what he chooses (consciously or unconsciously) to say or not say. In fact, his conception of the personal art coefficient is based within this type of discrepancy, noting the psychological and affective differences between what an artist intends to create (the unexpressed but intended) and what is actually created (the unintentionally expressed). Thierry de Duve’s describes the art coefficient as “Duchamp’s Freudian (even Lacanian) witty and ironic redefinition of the romantic self,” which presents as a “measurable ratio between repressed or failed intentions, idiosyncrasies and preferences on the one hand, and the return of the repressed, Freudian slips and failed acts on the other – in other words, the ratio between (disgusted) ‘taste’ and (ridiculous) ‘genius’” (53). Therefore, it is not Duchamp’s intentions when creating Bicycle Wheel that are of interest to us but rather his conceptual and material act(s) of creating this (aesthetic) object that, regardless of whether it is “good” or “bad,” exists as art in a raw state. The following illustration – which I have loosely based on the visual language of Coffee Mill (1911) – describes the basic subjective mechanism of Duchamp’s relation to the readymade.

What exists at the completion of this first pole, which is the end of the artist’s personal contribution to the creative act, is the work of art in a raw state that Duchamp proposes is the “inert matter” through which the (creative) transference occurs. The second pole of the creative process begins when the spectator encounters this raw artwork – in our current example, when we stand in front of the artistic construct that is Bicycle Wheel. It is the role of the spectator to (aesthetically) refine the work by, on the one hand, reacting critically to what the artist presents – experienced as what Duchamp calls an aesthetic osmosis from artist to spectator through the artwork – and, on the other hand, (actively) judging the work as perceived and interpreted from the position of the spectator that is notably disconnected from the work’s creator. Here we can recognize the shift in the role of the artist’s relation to their work. While Duchamp initially created Bicycle Wheel, once this work entered the outside world its connection to the person “Marcel Duchamp” is replaced by an association with the “Marcel Duchamp” that exists strictly as a function of art historical discourse – a contradictory existence as that is at once a presence and absence, which I have illustrated by (following Derrida) putting the term “artist” under erasure.

It is the author-function of Duchamp (and not the real person) that we in fact engage with when viewing Bicycle Wheel, a reality of the artist’s position – as a mediumistic being that is denied a state of consciousness on the aesthetic plane – that consequently leads to the realization that the artist-artwork-spectator relation is not unidirectional (emanating from artist). Rather, the functioning of the transference as Duchamp describes it necessarily involves two interdependent and dialogic creative actions. In the first we see a linear transfer from the artist through the artwork to the spectator and on to posterity, whereas in the second the critical (and answerable) response of the spectator is transferred onto the work of art, which in turn impacts the cultural understanding of the artist’s author-function and therefore the posterity of both the artist and the work (54).

This dynamic vision of the act of artistic creation therefore hinges on an artwork’s capacity to affect the spectator, who emerges – or, in Barthes term, is born – through an active participation in the transference process. Since it is the spectator who is tasked with completing the work that the artist begins, with actually making the historical work of art, we must acknowledge the (subjective) authority of the spectator’s look as a catalyst for these relational interactions. As Duchamp tells Tomkins: “The onlooker is part of the making of the painting but also exerts a diabolical influence by looking alone,” which he stresses is a “transcendental” action through which spectator’s “change the physical image without knowing it” (55). Here we can recognize the full extent of Duchamp’s theory, which aims not only to fundamentally question the assumed authority of the author-artist but also to establish a vision of art that has no definitive beginning or end. The creative act exists in and through the dialogic relations of Duchampian transference, as the spectator gets caught up in the repeated and repeatable relations that the artwork engenders.

References

1. 1. Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis, An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 100-101.

1. 1. Marcel Duchamp, “The Creative Act,” The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (New York: Da Capo, 1973), 140.

1. 1. Duchamp, “The Creative Act,” 138.

1. 1. Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 1987), 70.

1. 1. Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (New York: Owl Books, 1996), 396.
   2. In her Masters thesis on “The Creative Act,” Lauri Nelson reproduces several key documents related to Duchamp’s text including the schedule for the A.F.A. convention (appendix 6), the January 1957 draft of “The Creative Act” (appendix 5), and the “Biographical Sheet” that Duchamp filled out for the convention, in which he refers to himself as a “freelance artist” (appendix 3). See Lauri G. Nelson, “This Kind of Circus, all in Cordiality”: Marcel Duchamp’s Speech “The Creative Act,” M.A. Thesis (Houston: Rice University, 1994), 1104-120. This document is available online at: http://scholarship.rice.edu/bitstream/handle/1911/13872/1360084.PDF?sequence=1

1. 1. This roundtable was organized as a means of confronting the question of the state of art in the mid-twentieth century, bringing together a number of prominent individuals in fields related to art. In addition to Duchamp, the participants were George Boas, Gregory Bateson (who would also be on the panel with Duchamp at the American Federation of the Arts Convention in 1957), Kenneth Burke, Alfred Frankenstein, Robert Goldwater, Darius Milhaud, Andrew C. Richie, Arnold Schoenburg (who could not attend but instead provided a statement), and Frank Lloyd Wright. The roundtable consisted of three official sessions, with an unofficial session added at the end.

1. 1. Marcel Duchamp, et al., The Western Round Table on Modern Art [Transcript of Proceedings], ed. Douglas MacAgy (San Francisco: San Francisco Art Association, 1949), 44c. This transcript is available online on UbuWeb at: http://www.ubu.com/historical/wrtma/transcript.htm. It should be noted that Duchamp starts off the roundtable discussion with a statement markedly similar this the one I have quoted, although his wording is a bit less concise. In this first version he connects the esthetic echo to the lack of an adequate definition of art, stating: “We also imply that art cannot be understood through the intellect, but is felt through an emotion presenting some analogy with a religious faith or a sexual attraction – an esthetic echo.” Duchamp, et al., The Western Round Table on Modern Art>, 5a.

1. 1. Duchamp, et al., The Western Round Table on Modern Art, 30a.

1. 1. Tomkins, Duchamp, 397. For a discussion of “the intentional fallacy,” see W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954).

1. 1. This discrepancy between the reception of his work in America and France is, Miriam Jordan and I argue, a key motivating factor in Duchamp’s decision to establish the major collection of his artwork at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. See Miriam Jordan and Julian Jason Haladyn, “The Posthumous Exile of Marcel Duchamp” [Errata Series pamphlet] (London: Blue Medium Press, 2013).

1. 1. Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, 31; 45.

1. 1. Duchamp, “The Creative Act,” 139.

1. 1. In a particularly compelling exchange at the 1949 roundtable, Gregory Bateson and Frank Lloyd Wright respond to Duchamp’s statement that the artwork is independent of the artist: Bateson: Now, Mr. Duchamp, what you are saying is that the artist is the picture’s way of getting itself painted. That is a very serious and reasonable thing to say, but that implies that in some sense, the work of art exists before it is there on canvas. Duchamp: Yes; it has to be pulled out. Bateson: Which is on its way out. Wright: All right, gentlemen you can put it at that end too, if you want to, but no work of art is ever going to rise higher than the artist. Duchamp: Who is great, the work or the man? Duchamp, et al., The Western Round Table on Modern Art, 31a.

1. 1. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Image – Music – Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 147.

1. 1. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 20-21.

1. 1. Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 148.

1. 1. Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 147.

1. 1. See, most notably, Harvey Hix, “Morte D’Author: An Autopsy,” Iowa Review 17.1 (Winter, 1987): 131-150 and Sean Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992). There are two key exceptions to this reading: William Gass, “The Death of the Author,” Salmagundi 65 (Fall 1984): 3-26 and Molly Nesbit, “What Was an Author?” Yale French Studies 73 (Everyday Life, 1987): 229-257.

1. 1. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 4.
   2. Duchamp, “The Creative Act,” 139-140.

1. 1. Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 148.

1. 1. This quotation is taken from the contents page of Aspen, no. 5/6, where O’Doherty presents a lengthy quote from his pseudonym Sigmund Bode’s 1928 (fictitious) book Placement as Language. Andrew Stafford has adapted Aspen, no. 5/6 for the web, presenting the box as a series of twenty-eight numbered items that include, in addition to the box itself, printed material, records, a reel of super-8 film and several (small) artworks. See: http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen5and6/index.html

1. 1. Phong Bui and Brian O’Doherty, “In Conversation: Brian O’Doherty with Phong Bui,” Brooklyn Rail (June, 2007): http://www.brooklynrail.org/2007/06/art/doughtery (accessed April 26, 2013). It is interested to note that, in a letter to Brian O’Doherty dated October 29, 1967, Barthes apologizes for the brevity of the text and expresses “his hopes that it would be acceptable and ‘in sufficient harmony with the issue.’” Quoted in Gwen Allen, Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), 57.

1. 1. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980), 121.

1. 1. Foucault, “What Is an Author?” 115.

1. 1. Foucault, “What Is an Author?” 124. Foucault briefly describes the emergence of this form of authorship “when a system of ownership and strict copyright rules were established (towards the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century) that the transgressive properties always intrinsic to the act of writing became the forceful imperative of literature.” Foucault, “What Is an Author?” 124-125. For an extensive discussion of the legal aspects of the author question see Nesbit, “What Was an Author?” For a more general analysis of “What Is an Author?” see Adrian Wilson, “Foucault on the ‘Question of the Author’: A Critical Exegesis,” Modern Language Review 99.2 (2004): 339-363

1. 1. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 7.

1. 1. Michel Foucault, “Preface,” in Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, xii.

1. 1. Michel Foucault, “The Father’s ‘No’,” Language, Counter-memory, Practice, 86.

1. 1. Marcel Duchamp, “Apropos of ‘Readymades,’” The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, 141. This text is of a talk he gave in 1961 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

1. 1. Such an approach, while not explicitly argued for, is at least intimated by Octavio Paz in his essay “The Castle of Purity.” When discussing the readymade, he notes that the “wealth of commentaries on their significance … shows that their interest is not plastic but critical or philosophical,” with Paz later in the text referring to Duchamp’s gesture as “a philosophical … game more than an artistic operation.” Octavio Paz, Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare, trans. Rachel Phillips and Donald Gardner (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1990), 22; 28.

1. 1. Thierry de Duve, “Authorship Stripped Bare, Even,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 19/20 (1990/1991): 235.

1. 1. Foucault, “What Is an Author?” 128. Foucault explores this issue in The Archaeology of Knowledge; see, most notably, chapter 1, “The Unity of Discourse,” 23-33. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Routledge, 2003).

1. 1. Foucault, “What Is an Author?” 131.

1. 1. Duchamp, “The Creative Act,” 138.

1. 1. Duchamp, “The Creative Act,” 139.

1. 1. Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 107.

1. 1. Melanie Klein, “The Origins of Transference,” Melanie Klein: Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963 (London: Vintage, 1997), 48. In a more recent iteration, Jean Laplanche proposes that “maybe transference is already, ‘in itself’, outside the clinic” and that “perhaps the principle site of transference, ‘ordinary’ transference, before, beyond or after analysis, would be the multiple relation to the cultural, to creation or, more precisely, to the cultural message.” Jean Laplanche, “Transference: Its Provocation by the Analyst,” Essays on Otherness (New York: Routledge, 2005), 222.

1. 1. Amelia Jones, Postmodernism and the En-gendering of Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), 113.

1. 1. Jones, Postmodernism and the En-gendering of Marcel Duchamp, 114.

1. 1. Stephen Zepke, “The Readymade: Art as the Refrain of Life,” in Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New ed. Simon O’Sullivan and Stephen Zepke (New York: Continuum, 2008), 33. While Zepke’s treatment of the readymade is admirable, his dialectic distinction between a Duchampian “conceptual” version and a Guattarian “affectual” version, particularly in relation to his claim that the readymade is re-made by Guattari (and Deleuze) “against Duchamp,” does not hold up – and, I would add, is not supported by Guattari’s treatment of Duchamp – since the readymade as Duchamp conceived it is already a ground for a modern form of art based within an (affective) act of becoming for the spectator. Zepke, “The Readymade,” 35.

1. 1. Félix Guattari, “The Transference,” The Guattari Reader, ed. Gary Genosko (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 63.

1. 1. Jones, Postmodernism and the En-gendering of Marcel Duchamp, 133.
   2. Jacques Lacan’s discussion of transference is particularly helpful here, since it can also be applied to a reading of the readymade. As he states: “If transference is only repetition, it will always be repetition of the same missed experience.” Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 143. Considered in relation to Lacan’s statement, the readymade can be seen as repeated and repeatable moments of transference that, as Duchamp makes clear, are constituted within and through the relational gap between artist and spectator. “What art is in reality is this missing link, not the links which exist,” Duchamp tells Arturo Schwarz, noting that art is no what we see: “art is the gap.” Quoted in Dalia Judovitz, Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 135.

1. 1. Calvin Tomkins, Marcel Duchamp: Afternoon Interviews (New York: Badlands Unlimited, 2013), 31.

1. 1. T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921), 48. Lawrence Steefel informs us that in a 1961 personal discussion Duchamp said he “feels that Eliot’s essay presents his own feelings as well or better than he himself has ever done in writing.” Lawrence D. Steefel Jr., “Dimension and Development in The Passage from the Virgin to the Bride,” in Marcel Duchamp in Perspective, ed. Joseph Masheck (New York: Da Capo Press, 2002), 97 n15.

1. 1. Eric Cameron, “Given,” in The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp, ed. Thierry de Duve (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 1. In the discussion that follows this text (see pages 31-39) Rosalind Krauss takes particular issue with the connection being made between Duchamp and Eliot, which not only betrays her understanding of Duchamp but also cannot be supported by anything in his practice. Marjorie Perloff explores this topic in her essay “Duchamp’s Eliot: The Detours of Tradition and the Persistence of Individual Talent” – originally published in T. S. Eliot and the Concept of Tradition, ed. Giovanni Cianci and Jason Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) – available online at: http://marjorieperloff.com/stein-duchamp-picasso/duchamps-eliot/

1. 1. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 47; 48.

1. 1. Tomkins, Marcel Duchamp: Afternoon Interviews, 30.

1. 1. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 48.

1. 1. Duchamp, “The Creative Act,” 139.

1. 1. Thierry de Duve, Kant After Duchamp (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 319-320.

1. 1. In psychoanalytic terms, this back-and-forth relation of artist and spectator involves not just transference but also a countertransference, which in the clinical setting describes the analyst’s act of projecting (unconscious) feelings or emotions onto – and most often in response to – the analysand. I have intentionally avoided bring up this second term because, following the logic of Guattari’s view of transference, I believe the act of counter-transference is already contained within the transference dynamic. Particularly for our present discussion, although I do believe this holds true generally, distinguishing between these two forms of transferential relations denies the necessarily dialogic nature of the psychological interactions being described.

1. Tomkins, Marcel Duchamp: Afternoon Interviews, 60-61. Duchamp uses Nude Descending a Staircase as an example of what he means, noting that it went from a scandalous painting to a boring one “by being looked at too much.”

1

click to enlarge

Figure 1
Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q.

Attempting to recall exactly when in 1919 the L.H.O.O.Q. had been made, Marcel Duchamp himself offered two different dates: in conversations with Sidney, Harriet and Carroll Janis in early 1953, he mentioned December;⁽¹⁾ in conversations with Pierre Cabanne in June 1966, October.⁽²⁾
Either date—October 1919 or December 1919—may be the right one.
From early August to December 27, 1919, Duchamp resided at avenue Charles-Floquet (Paris 7e), in the home of Francis Picabia and Gabrielle Buffet (the latter pregnant with Picabia’s fourth child, who was born on September 15). Picabia had been living for some time (days or weeks) in rue Émile-Augier (Paris 16e) with Germaine Everling, his mistress, who was also pregnant by him (their child was born January 5, 1920).⁽³⁾ This particular situation (two places of residence, two pregnant women, etc.) would indicate that during this nearly five-month stay there were few, and perhaps no contacts between Duchamp and Picabia (except, in all likelihood, towards the end of the stay), and may explain why L.H.O.O.Q. was not published in issues 9 (November 1919), 10 (December 1919), or 11 (February 1920) of 391, Picabia’s journal, but rather as a Picabia version entitled Tableau dada par Marcel Duchamp in issue 12 (March 1920).⁽⁴⁾ Michel Sanouillet argues that “Picabia wrote to ask him [Duchamp] for authorization to ‘redo’ a Mona Lisa for 391, and the authorization was naturally granted. But Picabia, who had only a vague memory of Duchamp’s work, contented himself with drawing the moustache.”⁽⁵⁾ In fact, Picabia simply redid “L.H.O.O.Q.,” the inscription that would become the title of the readymade.⁽⁶⁾ He also wrote these initials vertically and without periods on one of his own canvases, Le double monde, dated [December] 1919, which was exhibited on stage by André Breton during the First Friday of (the journal) Littérature, January 23, 1920, the first Dada manifestation in Paris.⁽⁷⁾

2

Owing to its title (Tableau dada par Marcel Duchamp), for many years the Picabia version passed for the original. Along with an enlarged replica (done in late January or early February 1930),⁽⁸⁾ the original was not displayed until March 1930 in Paris in an exhibition titled La peinture au défi and with an important preface by Louis Aragon.
For a poet, novelist and critic like Aragon, a readymade was not, from that time on, merely an industrial object removed from its context and divorced from its utilitarian function.

3

It must be pointed out that the colour reproduction which is the basis of the work was not a postcard, despite what so many people have stated verbally or in writing.⁽⁹⁾ A glance at the back of the reproduction, published by Arturo Schwarz in 1969 in the 1st edition of his catalogue, shows that it is not arranged in the usual way, with one space for the address and stamp (at right), and another for the “message” and the caption of the illustration (at left). The reproduction has been inscribed by Duchamp with a technical indication (in pencil) on how to photograph the picture on the front and, later, above this indication, with an official declaration in the presence of a notary (in ink) stating that it is indeed the original.⁽¹⁰⁾ The only trait shared by the small palimpsest— writing on writing —on the back and the picture on the front is the lead [in French: mine] pencil markings (additions of the moustache and goatee)⁽¹¹⁾ on the Mona Lisa’s face [in French: mine].
But where did Duchamp obtain this colour reproduction? The most likely explanation, as he mentioned to the Janises in 1953, is that he purchased it in a boutique near the Louvre, in the rue de Rivoli, which sold inexpensive copies of reproductions of the museum’s masterpieces, a popular practice in all large cities with major museums. It should also be recalled that in April 1911 Leonardo’s highly celebrated work, painted in the early sixteenth century, had been stolen from the Louvre (and not recovered until December 1913). Since it was believed to have disappeared or been destroyed, massive quantities of colour reproductions were distributed during these years or immediately afterwards, including photographs both intact or touched up, some in postcard format.⁽¹²⁾ As well, there was undoubtedly an awareness that 1919 was the 400th anniversary of the painter’s death. These two events (the perhaps irremediable loss and the anniversary) come into play in Duchamp’s choice.
When Duchamp sent a letter (New York, May 9, 1949) to his friend Henri-Pierre Roché asking him to purchase a vial of serum—become the vial of Air de Paris—to replace the one, currently broken, he had brought back from Paris in late December 1919 for his friends Louise and Walter Arensberg, he wrote:

Could you go into the pharmacy on the corner of rue Blomet and the rue de Vaugirard (if it’s still there, that’s where I bought the first ampoule) and buy an ampoule like this one: 125 c.c. and of the same measurements as the drawing […]

—If not rue Blomet, somewhere else—but, as far as possible, the same shape and size, thanks.⁽¹³⁾

A glance at a map of Paris shows that there is no corner of Blomet-Vaugirard, since these streets (15e) run parallel to each other! I use this example to demonstrate that a specific indication, even on the part of the author, may quite simply be inaccurate, even erroneous. And so it was for L.H.O.O.Q., postcard.
And when Duchamp, in “Apropos of Myself” (1962-1964), describes this colour reproduction as “a cheap chromo,” it must be pointed out that in French as in English, chromo is the abbreviation of chromolithographie, “image lithographique en couleur” (Petit Robert I), and chromolithograph “a color print produced by chromolithography” (The American Heritage of the English Language). In French, however, chromo, now a masculine (and no longer feminine) form, has a pejorative sense: “toute image en couleur de mauvais goût” [any colour print in bad taste]. This added meaning, which highlights the notion of taste, introduces an aesthetic, even artistic, note; such is not the case in English, where cheap, in this example, signifies “of poor quality,” but particularly “inexpensive.”⁽¹⁴⁾

4

When, during his 1966 conversations with Cabanne, Duchamp spoke of Picabia and L.H.O.O.Q., he used the opportunity, if I may say so, to add:

Another time, Picabia did a cover for 391 with the portrait of Georges Carpentier, the boxer; he and I were as much alike as two drops of water, which is why it was amusing. It was a composite portrait of Georges Carpentier and me.⁽¹⁵⁾

During the summer of 1923, Georges Carpentier went to Picabia’s home in Tremblay-sur-Mauldre, the little village where the artist had been living since 1922. Picabia did a profile of the boxer, who even signed the portrait. When Picabia, over a year later, decided to put this portrait on the first page of the last issue of 391 (issue 19, October 1924), he crossed out Carpentier’s signature incompletely (it can still be seen under the cross-out markings) and added “Rrose Sélavy / by Picabia”.⁽¹⁶⁾
Accordingly, if, by contiguity, this “composite portrait” likewise designates L.H.O.O.Q., Duchamp’s 1961 statement makes sense:

The curious thing about that moustache and goatee is that when you look at it the Mona Lisa becomes a man. It is not a woman disguised as a man; it is a real man, and that was my discovery, without realizing it at the time.

In 1919, a woman (Mona Lisa in L.H.O.O.Q.) is also a man, just as in 1920-1921, a man (Marcel Duchamp as Rose, then Rrose, Sélavy) is also a woman.

5

Without actually entering into an interpretation of the famous readymade, one notes, nonetheless, that the 400th anniversary of Leonardo’s death may have been not only a trigger (as an anniversary), but also a constraint (as a set of numbers), with the 4 indicating that only four letters could be used, and the 00 suggesting that one of them—which must be an O—be reduplicated.⁽¹⁸⁾ As can be seen afterwards as well, these four letters (as Duchamp states in “Apropos of Myself”) are in alphabetical order—H, L, O, Q—in the name of the street (cHarLes-flOQuet) where he lived at the time. But they are also in the name of the process at the basis of this reproduction, which is cHromoLithOgraphiQue.
And I note that in New York the name of the notary chosen by Duchamp, whose signature on December 22, 1944 certified that the work was the original (“This is to certify that this is the original ‘ready made’ L H O O Q Paris 1919”),⁽¹⁹⁾ was Elsie Jenriche.⁽²⁰⁾ How can we fail to see that she was there because of her name as well (which, by this fact, is a metatextual reference to one of the issues in the work), a mix of I in English or Ich in German and of else, and that the issue of “gender” (jenre, another way of spelling genre) comes into play, since else rhymes with the feminine (elle: La Joconde, La Gioconda), which in turn rhymes with the masculine (L: Leonardo, Louvre), she having become a he!
Finally, if we trace a vertical line at a right angle to the top of the work and passes it through the centre of the moustache, it becomes clear that, owing to the angle of the face, the line runs alongside the nose, at left, of the female—and now also male—figure and arrives “down below” (as Duchamp would say in 1961), exactly between “L.H.” and “O.O.Q.” This reduplication of the O is indicated once again.

Notes

1. Still unedited, the conversations with the Janis family (Sidney, the father, Harriet, the mother, and Carroll, the son) occurred on the occasion of Duchamp’s preparation of the catalogue and hanging of the exhibition Dada 1916-1923 at the Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, April 15 – May 9, 1953. In the integrated chronology of the catalogue Joseph Cornell / Marcel Duchamp… in resonance, catalogue of the exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, October 8, 1998 – January 3, 1999, and at the Menil Collection, Houston, January 22 – May 16, 1999 (Ostfildern-Ruit: Cantz Verlag, 1998), 277, Susan Davidson, without mentioning her information source, gives the month of December 1919.

2. Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, translated by Ron Padgett, introduction by Robert Motherwell, preface by Salvador Dali, appreciation by Jasper Johns (New York: Da Capo, 1971), 62.

3. It was a day after the meeting of André Breton, who had been invited there, and twelve days before Tristan Tzara arrived there to live on January 17, his stay coinciding with the start of what Michel Sanouillet called “Dada à Paris”; see his general survey, Dada à Paris (Paris: Pauvert, 1965). The seat of the “MoUvEmEnT DADA, Berlin, Genève, Madrid, New York, Zurich,” according to the letter paper with this heading, was now in Paris. Furthermore, I notice the following coincidence (which was perhaps not a coincidence in 1919, considering the state of knowledge on Leonardo’s work): when Duchamp was in Paris that year, Picabia’s two women (his wife and mistress) were pregnant with sons; when, in the spring of 1503, Francesco del Giocondo commissioned Leonardo to paint a portrait of his wife, she had already given him two sons (in May 1496 and December 1502). See Daniel Arasse, Léonard de Vinci. Le rythme du monde (1997; Paris: Hazan, 2003), 388-89. The rhyme, here, is in between Mona Lisa [Joconde] and fertile [féconde].

4. To Cabanne, Duchamp says Tableau dada de [sic] Marcel Duchamp.

5. Michel Sanouillet, Francis Picabia et «391» (Paris: Losfeld, 1966), II: 113. Volume I is a facsimile edition of 391 [1917-1924] expanded with various unedited documents (Paris: Losfeld, 1960). Since Duchamp had been in New York since January 6 and no 12 of 391 did not appear (Sanouillet specifies) until the end of March, one might assume that Duchamp, interviewed by Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Abrams, 2nd edition, 1970), 476, only dimly recalled the circumstance: “My original did not arrive in time, and to delay the printing of 391 no further, Picabia himself drew the moustache on the Mona Lisa but forgot the goatee.”

6. I say “the inscription that would become the title of the readymade” since, in the poster-catalogue of the exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery, Duchamp wrote:”La Joconde, postcard with pencil.” In Marcel Duchamp (London: Trianon Press, and New York: Grove Press, 1959), Robert Lebel first uses the inscription as the title. In The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Abrams, 1st edition, 1969), Arturo Schwarz first indicates the exact dimensions of the readymade: 19.7 x 12.4 cm. (7 ¾ x 4 7/8 in.).

7. The two O’s in “L H O O Q,” themselves in the centre of two other O’s shaped like strings forming 8’s, or propeller blades, but without an axis, soft and bent by the wind, are equally—and doubly—the O’s of “dOuble” and “wOrld” [mOnde]. The small gap at the top left in one of these other O’s is matched only by the small gap in the À of “À DOMICILE” [at home], another inscription, and by the small addition—the tail—of the Q in “L H O O Q.” One way of creating an ironic coincidence between mathematical speculations (topOLOGY) and commercial speculations (delivery “à domicile“, that is, at home [AU LOGIS]).

8. “I made, just before leaving Paris, a Mona Lisa, for Aragon […] / Man Ray has the 1st Mona Lisa”, letter from Duchamp to Jean Crotti, Villefranche-sur-mer, February 6, 1930, in Affectionately, Marcel : The Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp, edition by Francis Naumann and Hector Obalk, translation by Jill Taylor (Ghent and Amsterdam : Ludion Press, 2000), 171.

9. Three examples: Duchamp himself in 1953 (see note 6); Ecke Bonk, Marcel Duchamp: The Box in a Valise. Inventory of an Edition (New York: Rizzoli, 1989), 241; Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996), 221.

10. I note that Duchamp never used a postcard in subsequent replicas.

11. In the original French version of this article I use the plural, as did Duchamp in April 1942, when he indicated in ink at the bottom of the model of one of Picabia’s two versions (that reproduced in 391): Moustaches par Picabia / barbiche par Marcel Duchamp.” In French, the singular and plural are used indifferently for certain words, for example: ciseau and ciseaux (two blades), pantalon and pantalons(two legs), moustache and moustaches (two cheeks or, simply, two sides of the face). Furthermore, I note that the indication, inscribed by Picabia on two lines pencilled vertically to the right of the reproduction, begins with two liaisons—the one starting the 1 of “1 cliché” on the first line, and the other starting the s of “sans” on the second line—which are matched only by the tips of the moustache! For a reproduction with commentary, see Francis Naumann, The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, catalogue of the exhibition at Achim Moeller Fine Art, New York, October 2, 1999 – January 15, 2000. If, in fact, Arp came into possession of these two versions during his trip to Paris in April 1942, his meeting with Duchamp (they had known each other since 1926) could only have taken place in the non-occupied zone of southern France (in Grasse where Arp lived or in Sanary where Duchamp was living before his departure for the United States on May 14th).

12. See the two postcards dated 1914, reproduced in Roy McMullen, Mona Lisa: The Picture & the Myth (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1975).

13. Affectionately, Marcel, 272.

14. This is, moreover, Michel Sanouillet’s translation of this passage: “un chromo […] bon marché“, in “À propos de moi-même,” Duchamp du signe (Paris : Flammarion, 1975), 227. Naumann follows exactly the same train of thought: “an inexpensive chromo-lithographic color reproduction”, The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 10.

15. Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, 63.

16. See Michel Sanouillet, Francis Picabia et “391,” 166. One can see (391, 127) Carpentier’s signature and Picabia’s addition under some of the typewritten lines printed at the bottom of the page.

17. Herbert Crehan, “Dada,” Evidence (Toronto), no. 3 (autumn 1961).

18. These two O’s also evoke, by means of the rhyme “O.” / water [eau], the mountain lake and the plains lake in the Mona Lisa, respectively at the top right and a little farther down left of the landscape dominated by the loggia where Lisa, the model, is. And what about the winding road that leaves the plains lake, and which is echoed in the tail of the “Q” (calligraphied by Duchamp)?

19. A presentative sentence in another, the referent of “This” (This, as in “This is my Body” or in “This is a work of art”) being cataphoric (that is, it follows the pronoun): in the first case, it is “the original ‘ready made’;” in the second, it is the entire proposition that shapes the first case.

20. In a short article titled “Desperately Seeking Elsie: Authenticating the Authenticity of L.H.O.O.Q.‘s Back” (Tout-Fait, New York, vol. I, no. 1, December 1999), Thomas Girst informs us that this lady was a public stenographer at the Hotel St. Regis, New York, from 1943 to 1945.

I don’t remember quite when I stumbled upon the chord sequence that constitutes the structure of this song, but it was long before I found an appropriate theme to write the lyrics around.

There is an O. Henry “Gift of the Magi” quality to Teeny Duchamp’s donation of her beautiful tresses to the construction of her husband’s creation. I think this sentimental association works well with the melody to the benefit of a song I am very happy to have written.

Swirling around in the lyrics are references to Apollinaire, Gertrude Stein, and fuck it, I’ll just go through the whole god damned thing verse by verse. This really is a rare opportunity to do this sort of thing. No kidding, really…

It begins…

 

Teeny’s hair
Falls down gently to her shoulders
She doesn’t look any older
Than she did when she was young”

click to enlarge

Figure 1
Marcel Duchamp,
Given: 1. The
Waterfall, 2. The
Illuminating Gas, 1946-66

Okay, here’s the scoop: “Teeny” is “Teeny” but “she” is not “Teeny”. “She” is the mannequin in Philly. Etant Donnes. (Fig. 1)

 

There is a room
Filled with the stolen Mona Lisas
Di Milo’s broken pieces
That’s where the pictures are hung”

M.D.’s early champion, Guillaume Apollinaire, was a suspect in the disappearance of the Mona Lisa before the war. The best way I can describe this “room” is to say that it is the imagination. A space seen by the mind’s eye. “The pictures” are, of course, the works that are not only imagined, but brought to realization.

 

“When he arrives
All of the men with badges trust him
Take a Spanish door through customs
It’s no crime, it is no crime”

This is my idea of what it could have been like traveling to New York from Cadaques with the “Spanish door” M.D. acquired for the outside of Etant Donnes.

 

“Ascending the stairs
Where you accept the Legion of Honor
And the mark of Cain is upon her
For all time, yes for all time”

Obviously Marcel did not ever receive the award mentioned, but, he did become famous–“mark of Cain”–and pigeonholed as a Cubist because of the scandal in New York over his “Nude Descending a Staircase“. And to make things rhyme, which by doing so pisses off all of the racist Bob Mould fans who criticize me for paying attention to the way words sound, and not coming off like a self-hating, sexist Ezra Pound wannabe, I have referred to M.D. as “her”. I know he was a he. Most of the time I mean.

 

“Take my knights away
Sweep all my horses off of the table
Show me strategies if you’re able
Show me how the game can be played”

This verse is about chess. It sounds kinda sexy though, doesn’t it? The line “Show me strategies if you’re able” could be about artistic strategies also; if you replace the word “horses” with “expectations” it means much.

 

“We go to the place
Where all the re-named roses gather
And the bearded ladies lather
To be shaved, oh to be shaved…”

A Rose by any other other name would smell as sweet. And of course, Rose is a Rose is a Rose is a Rose…What if rose is eros? Rrose? (Fig. 2) Marcel “re-named” himself Rrose. “Bearded ladies” are in reference to “L.H.O.O.Q.” and “L.H.O.O.Q.RASEE (SHAVED)“.(Fig. 3) Also what else in the story is shaved? Hairless? I’ll let you folks come up with that answer. If you ever run into me somewhere, say the answer to me and I’ll buy you a Seven-Up.

Thank you.

click images to enlarge

• Figure 2
  Man Ray, Rrose Sélavy, 1921
• Figure 3
  Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved, 1965

Figs. 1-3
©2003 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. All rights reserved.

Abstract

Paris in the 1930s

 Samuel Beckett first encountered Marcel Duchamp in Paris during the 1930s. Something of the familiarity of their relationship may be deduced from this casual remark in a letter to George Reavey, written in 1938:

I am halfway through a modified version in French of Love and Lethe. I don’t know if it is better than the English version or merely as bad. I have 10 Poems in French also, mostly short, When I have a few more I shall send them to Éluard. Or get Duchamp to do it. (ed. Fehsenfeld and Overbeck, 2009, 645).

The 1930s marked a period of tranquillity, contentment, and artistic achievement for [Mary] Reynolds. Her relationship with Duchamp had settled into a comfortable intimacy. Her creativity and binding production were at their highest levels. She held an open house almost nightly at her home at 14, rue Hallé, with her quiet garden the favored spot after dinner for the likes of Duchamp, Brancusi, Man Ray, Breton, Barnes, Guggenheim, Éluard, Mina Loy, James Joyce, Jean Cocteau, Samuel Beckett, and others. (Godlewski, 2001, 12).

Murphy

Endon was a schizophrenic of the most amiable variety, at least for the purposes of such a humble and envious outsider as Murphy. The langour in which he passed his days while deepening now and then to the extent of some charming suspension of gesture, was never so profound as to inhibit all movement. His inner voice did not harangue him, it was unobtrusive and melodious, a gentle continuo in the whole consort of his hallucinations. The bizarrerie of his attitudes never exceeded a stress laid on their grace.

Beckett also made a link between indifference and freedom in Murphy:

Arcachon, 1940

Portrait of Chess Players

• 
  Figure 1: Le Trébuchet (The Trap)
  If Black is to play, he wins the opposing pawn by:

1. … f4-e3

2. b5-c5 e3-e4.

It would be wrong to play

1. … f4-e4

because of

2. b5-c5!

and White wins the pawn.

Opposition and Sister Squares are reconciled

            L’opposition et les cases conjuguées sont reconciliées was published in Paris and Brussels (Editions de l’Echiquier, 1932) in a limited edition. Few copies were sold, and Francis M. Naumann records that, late into his life, Duchamp “kept most of the edition in a closet, giving copies away to friends whenever he thought the gift appropriate” (Naumann and Bailey 2009, 22). The book’s design and its use of chess terminologies are both somewhat unusual for a chess textbook, and clearly resonate with themes in Duchamp’s artwork. So, for example, the illustrations frequently divide the chessboard across the middle using a dotted line as a ‘hinge’, self-consciously echoing the division of the Large Glass into two panels. To compound the allusion, eight of these ‘hinged pictures’, as Duchamp called the Large Glass (Sanouillet and Peterson, 1975, 27), are printed on transparent paper so that they may be folded to make the two principal domains correspond exactly. Here we see one variation of the instruction that was eventually to be included in the Green Box of 1934: ‘develop the principle of the hinge’.

The chess argument depends on two well-known properties that become highly important in the endgame, but Duchamp’s choice of terminologies may have had a wider significance than just their chess usage. His preference for the term ‘sister’ squares (in English) over the more commonly used ‘corresponding’ squares may be a nod towards Suzanne.The term ‘opposition’, while it does not figure much as a word in Duchamp’s notes, nevertheless occurs throughout his work as a theme, as is best exemplified by the relationship between Bride and Bachelors, in the two panels of the Glass, which are then ‘reconciled’ by the operations of that imaginary technology. The word ‘domain’ occurs particularly in the Green Box with reference to the two panels of the Glass. The ‘passage’ of the White King from secondary to principal domain echoes the passage of the Virgin to the Bride (as depicted in the canvas of that title of 1912). The principle of the opposition in chess is as follows:

• 
  Figure 2: The Opposition

• 
  Figure 3: Virtual Opposition

• 
  Figure 4: Lasker-Reichelm, 1901

• 
  Figure 5: Routes

• 
  Figure 6: Sister Squares

            1st Variation, after 1. …a8-a7

            b2-b3 (White retains the heterodox opposition and the threat of reaching A in one move)

            2. …a7-b7 (forced to remain one square from A)

            3. b3-c3 (still has heterodox opposition and threat on A)

            3. …b7-c7 (forced. If he plays b7-a7, White will have the two file advantage to O)

            4. c3-d3 (still has heterodox opposition and threat on A)

            4. … any (Black is now forced to abandon his control of A, as any move to the left will
            give White a two file advantage to O. White now occupies A and wins).

            2nd Variation

            Becomes 1st Variation, e.g.

            1. …a8-b7

            2. b2-c3 etc.

            3rd Variation, after 1. …a8-b8

            2. b2-c2 (takes the heterodox opposition)

            2. …b8-c8 (to keep White King as far as possible from A)

            3. c2-d2 (retains the heterodox opposition)

            3. …c8-d8 (Black cannot turn back because White will gain the two file advance. The first             variation showed that …c8-c7 would be a win for White)

            4. d2-c3 (White breaks the opposition, threatening to reach A in one move)

            4 …d8-c7 (forced to protect A)

            5. c3-d3 (reverting to the first variation, and White wins).

• 
  Figure 7: White’s Secondary Domain

Eleuthéria

            VICTOR: I look out for my welfare, when I can.

GLAZIER: Your welfare! What welfare?

VICTOR: My freedom.

GLAZIER: Your freedom! It is beautiful, your freedom. Freedom to do what?

VICTOR: To do nothing.

Endgame

            The Clock in profile

            and the Inspector of Space

            Note: When a clock is seen from the side it no longer tells the time.

            HAMM: (anguished). What’s happening, what’s happening?

            CLOV: Something is taking its course.

            Clov, of course, cannot afford to reveal his knowledge to Hamm, even if such a thing were possible.

A further curious exchange acquires significance in the light of Duchamp:

            HAMM: Why don’t you kill me?

            CLOV: I don’t know the combination to the larder.

            HAMM: Do you know what’s happened?

            CLOV: When? Where?

            HAMM: (violently) When! what’s happened? Use your head, can’t you? What has happened?

            CLOV: What for Christ’s sake does it matter?

            HAMM: Before you go…(Clov halts near door)… say something.

            CLOV: There is nothing to say.

            HAMM: A few words…to ponder…in my heart.

            CLOV: Your heart!

 Coda

On the 10th January 1958, Marcel Duchamp and his wife Teeny attended the theatre in New York. In a letter to Henry McBride, he noted: ‘We saw, and loved, Endgame of Beckett.’ (Caumont and Gough-Cooper, 1993, 10-12 January).

References

Adorno, Theodor W. (1982) “Trying to Understand Endgame,” New German Critique, 25, pp. 119-150

Bair, Deirdre (1980), Samuel Beckett: A Biography, London: Picador.

Beckett, Samuel [1934] (1994), More Pricks Than Kicks, New York: Grove Press.

Becket, Samuel [1938] (1994), Murphy, New York: Grove Press.

Beckett, Samuel (1946), ‘Poèmes 38-39’, Les temps Modernes, 2.14, pp. 288-293.

Beckett, Samuel [1947] (1995), Eleuthéria, New York: Foxrock.

Beckett, Samuel [1957] (1976), Endgame, London,  Faber.

Caumont, Jacques and Gough-Cooper, Jennifer (1993), Marcel Duchamp, London: Thames and Hudson.

Cabanne, Pierre (1971), Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, London: Thames and Hudson.

Cohn, Ruby (1974), Back to Beckett, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Cros, Caroline (2006), Marcel Duchamp, London: Reaktion.

Éluard, Paul (1932) [Selected Poems], (Tr. Samuel Beckett), This Quarter 5.1, pp. 89-98.

d’Harnoncourt, Anne and McShine, Kynaston (1973), Marcel Duchamp, Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Fehsenfeld, Martha Dow and Overbeck, Lois More (eds.) (2009) The Letters of Samuel Beckett Volume I: 1929-1940, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gontarski, S. E. (ed.) (2010) A Companion to Samuel Beckett. London: Wiley/Blackwell.

Haynes, John and Knowlson, James, (2003) Images of Beckett, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Henderson, Linda Dalrymple (1998), Duchamp in Context, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Judovitz, Dalia (2010), Drawing on Art: Duchamp and Company, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Knowlson, James (1996), Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, London: Bloomsbury.

Lane, Richard (ed.) (2002) Beckett and Philosophy, Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Naumann, Frances M. and Bailey, Bradley (eds.) (2009), Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess, New York: Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, LLC.

Reavey, George (ed.) (1936), Thorns of Thunder: Selected Poems of Paul Éluard, (Tr. Samuel Beckett, Denis Devlin, David Gascoyne, et al.), London: Europa Press and Stanley Nott.

Restivo, Giuseppina (1997), ‘The Iconic Core of Beckett’s Endgame: Eliot, Dürer, Duchamp’, in Engelberts, Matthijs (ed.) Samuel Beckett: Crossroads and Borderlines. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 111-124.

Roché, Henri-Pierre (1959), ‘Souvenirs de Marcel Duchamp’, in Lebel, Robert (ed.) Sur Marcel Duchamp, New York: Grove Press, pp. 79-87.

Sanouillet Michel and Peterson, Elmer (eds.) (1975), Marchand Du Sel: The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp, London: Thames and Hudson.

Schwarz, Arturo [1969] (2001) ,The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp. New York: Delano Greenidge.

Shattuck, Roger and Watson Taylor, Simon (eds.), (1965) Selected Works of Alred Jarry, London: Methuen, 1965.

Shenk, David (2006), The Immortal Game: A History of Chess, London: Doubleday.

Tomkins, Calvin (1998) Duchamp: A Biography. London: Random House.

Wood, Beatrice (1976), Oral history interview with Beatrice Wood, available at http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-beatrice-wood-12423 (accessed 15 January 2012).

Notes

Wayne Andersen, Marcel Duchamp: The Failed Messiah (Geneva: Éditions Fabriart, 2010)

This book is an insult to the intelligence of anyone who believes that Marcel Duchamp was an important and influential figure in the history of modern art in the early years of the 20th century. It’s subtitle-The Failed Messiah-tells you pretty much everything. While not technically an oxymoron, within this context, the words “failed” and “messiah” contradict one another, for by definition, a messiah is one who succeeds in his quest, and even Duchamp’s most ardent detractors would find it difficult to argue that he didn’t. Even the author of this book, Wayne Anderson-an 82-year-old retired professor of history and architecture at MIT (and also a doubtlessly disgruntled academic)-tells us that what Duchamp did to the history of art is comparable to the impact of the meteor that killed the dinosaurs. His use of the word “failed,” therefore, must apply specifically to his own personal point of view, for Andersen believes that the adulation accorded Duchamp by the art establishment is unjustified, blown far out of proportion to what he perceives are the artist’s actual accomplishments. Since Anderson’s myopic view is shared by preciously few, in writing this book he must have envisioned his own role as that of a messiah, someone who has valiantly stood up against all opposition to provide us with the correct path to aesthetic salvation, one that would have gone smoothly had Duchamp and his readymades not intervened.

Andersen’s greatest objection-and the reason he claims that motivated the writing of this book-is that Duchamp is increasingly identified as among the most important artists of the 20th century, and his urinal (titled Fountain) is repeatedly named the single most influential work of art made by any artist of the modern era (as confirmed by a survey of art professionals in England in 2004). He is most aggrieved by those who admire the urinal with the reverence accorded other great works of art. In a prologue to the book, Andersen declares Fountain and all copies of it a sham, in words that tellingly reflect his messianic theme: “Pilgrims by the daily hundreds come to one or the other of these shrines of modern art to contemplate with puzzlement and some in reverence this recumbent piece of plumbing as if it had closed down the Old and given rise to the New Testament of Art History.” The allusions to religion are not coincidental, for although I have no idea what faith Andersen practices (if any), his real objections to Duchamp are derived from a sense of moral superiority, especially when it comes to the subjects of eroticism and sex (themes that run, admittedly, through Duchamp’s work from start to end). In the introduction to his book, Andersen openly confesses his prudish beliefs. “With sexual freedom comes degradation, since morals of any kind are generated by the immoralities of sex, like valor by cowardness [sic] or honesty by cheating. Yet, the whole biological purpose of each species’ existence is to breed for the next generation. The moral brain cannot always hold up pants and panties when desires press downward to where bodies generate dirt and from there upward to pictures drawn and enacted by dirty minds.” That he was thinking of Duchamp comes a few pages later. “Duchamp was a vulgar man with a dirty mind,” he writes, “sexual, not sensuous.”

The issue of bodies generating dirt and excrement is something that comes up repeatedly in Andersen’s critique of the urinal, and it is abhorrent to him that some might equate these thoughts within the realm of aesthetics. He is especially revolted by the fact that when a urinal is used, it requires the exposure of a man’s penis, something he repeats on no fewer than on four separate occasions in his text. Here is one: “The beauty constant and concomitant sexual urges are universal. Is it merely coincidental that every man, on stepping up to a urinal, opens his fly and takes out his member?” In an effort to place the urinal in an art-historical context, he places it at the end of a lineage marked by fifty-year intervals that begins with Manet’s Olympia (1863), continues with Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), and concludes with the urinal. (Although Duchamp’s Fountain was conceived of in 1917, it was not recognized for its importance within the art establishment until the 1960s, allowing him to place it some fifty years after Picasso’s Demoiselles.) This observation causes him to pose the following question:

How is it that modern art, from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century starts and finishes its first fifty-year phase with representations of women not for adoring and seducing or even raping but for just plain fucking? And ends its second fifty-year phase with a urinal pretending to be a fountain while asking to be pissed in. It is of course biological for a man to approach a urinal as if it were a woman. Each time he steps up to one, he open his fly and takes out his member.

There he goes again with the penis reference. But in making his point, it is worthwhile to ask why Andersen used the word “fucking,” when he could just as easily have used any other more socially acceptable euphemism for sexual intercourse? He finds Duchamp’s sexual puns vulgar and distasteful, so on the title page of the book (yes, on the title page), he issues the following warning to his readers: “This book was written for mature readers at an adult age. It contains words and expressions that are suppressed as obscene wherever English or French is spoken. And it includes quotations of texts by others that are pornography in both the original language and English translation.” Presumably, Andersen’s own words were not translated from anywhere, so what could be his excuse for resorting to such foul language?

In the end, what Andersen finds most objectionable is that the art establishment has accepted Duchamp as having made a legitimate contribution to its history, when he feels that the artist is an outright charlatan. At one point, he even stoops so low as to try making his own sexual pun by calling Duchamp a con artiste [cunt artist], having found the Etant donnés to be “one of the greatest domination assaults on a woman that art history has recorded.” Throughout the text, Andersen foolishly and quite naively states that the readymades are not art, and he takes us through what he must believe is a logical line of reasoning to dismiss them as such, constantly reminding readers that when a readymade is returned to the setting for which it was originally designed, it reverts back to the object that it was. No kidding! Of course it does, but that is precisely the point of these objects. Context is everything. Indeed, in the case of the readymades, when placed into a museum, it is their very raison d’être. What Andersen seems incapable of understanding is that the readymades are both things simultaneously: objects designed for a specific purpose and, when placed on display in a museum or art gallery, works of art. In a sense, they are conceptually akin an optical illusion, like the schematic drawing of a staircase, for example, that is comprised of steps that go up and down simultaneously. The problem is that our minds are limited in their capacity to see them going in both directions at the same time, but we are intelligent enough as human beings to know that they do. Apparently this simple concept is way over Andersen’s head. Either that or, if he understands it at all, he ignores the logic within it, for it does not facilitate his insistence that the readymades be dismissed as works of art.

In the introduction to his book, Andersen takes a swipe at university presses, many of which, we can be fairly safe in assuming, have rejected his manuscripts for publication. “Like mega-corporations in economics, academic presses control the trade,” he tells us, “five to ten university art editors with the power to determine what gets published.” The opinions of these highly qualified and informed individuals did little to deter Andersen, for he responded to their rejections by forming his own private printing press, a firm that goes by the name Editions Fabriart, which, on the copyright page of the Duchamp book is identified as an imprint of the consulting firm of Vesti Design. Only from the website for the publishing house (www.atlasbooks.com/marktplc/10215.htm) do we learn that Vesti Design is founded and owned by Wayne Andersen, and that Editions Fabriart publishes only the writings of one author: Wayne Andersen. Ostensibly, nothing is wrong with publishing your own writings (indeed, I plan to do so one day myself), but if not handled properly, the result can be an academic disaster, which is unquestionably the case with Andersen’s book on Duchamp. To begin with, academic presses employ a peer-review process, something that would have caught the countless regrettable errors contained in this book and, anyone familiar with the literature on Duchamp and Dada, would have cut out at least half of the 388 pages of insufferable text by pointing out the simple fact that most of it has been published elsewhere and, in most cases, in writings based on primary source material.1 Andersen is certainly driven in his quest to defame Duchamp, but, apparently, he is not sufficiently motivated to seek out and read the appropriate literature on the artist, and least not enough to make a significant contribution of his own. Even when he does consult the appropriate sources, they are usually only skimmed, causing him to miss important details that could-in some instances-even have bolstered his argument. Anderson tells us, for example, that it will be his purpose in this book to strip Duchamp bare, to “peel away at his mythical overlays until he becomes shiveringly naked… under his wrappings of adulation.” With this in mind, he delves into the Duchamp biography, using Calvin Tomkins’s excellent book on the artist as his primary guide. In his summary, Andersen tells us that Duchamp “produced no children” (p. 157), but Tomkins is among the first to publish the fact that, in 1911, Jeanne Serre, a model who appeared in several paintings by the artist from this period (one of which, The Bush, Andersen reproduces), gave birth to his only biological daughter, Yvonne. She was never formally recognized as his offspring, but in the late 1960s, he met and established a close relationship with her during the last years of his life. In my review of the Duchamp retrospective that took place at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice in 1993, I connect the birth of this illegitimate child to the theme of the unobtainable, which I postulate figures into the making of not only the Large Glass, but also the Etant donnés. This review was not published in an obscure periodical, but rather appeared seventeen years ago as a full-length article in the pages of Art in America. Somehow, Andersen managed to miss it.⁽²⁾

I realize that within the context of a book review, it is considered bad form to chastise an author for having failed to consult the reviewer’s publications, but I have devoted a good part of my scholarly career to writing not only about Duchamp, but also New York Dada. Whereas Andersen has read some of my writings on these subjects and even refers to them admiringly, they are mostly from anthologies, and he has missed the more important books, most notably my monograph on New York Dada (published in 1994) and the catalogue Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York (published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name that I organized for the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1996).3 Had he known these publications, he might have spared us his excruciatingly painful indictment of Duchamp’s friends and associates-Beatrice Wood, Mina Loy, Arthur Cravan, Man Ray, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven-all of whom are given separate chapters in my book. Even here, Andersen displays a remarkable ignorance of the most current literature on his subject: he gives a biographical sketch of Mina Loy, without knowing that the definitive book on this remarkable woman was written by Carolyn Burke and published in 1996, nor when he discusses the Stettheimer sisters does he seem to know anything about the biography of Florine Stettheimer written by Barbara Bloemink and published in 1995.⁽⁴⁾ He devotes an entire chapter to presenting what he believes is an original interpretation of Duchamp’s Large Glass by comparing it to a Rube Goldberg cartoon, which, he claims, is information repressed by Duchamp scholars. “I find no discussion or even mention of this cartoon in any academic essay devoted to a descriptive analysis of the New York Dada [magazine] texts or images,” he writes. In my own writings, I have discussed the Goldberg cartoon that appeared in New York Dada on at least two occasions: once when comparing it to the complex machinations of the Large Glass, and again when pointing out that the twisted pipes it contains mimes the circuitous route of New York Dada through various European capitals.⁽⁵⁾ Andersen has clearly not done his homework; these are the sort of literary lacunae for which any conscientious professor of art history would fail his students.

It is known that Andersen published this book without requesting permission from the Duchamp Estate (or the agency that represents them: The Artists Rights Society, or ARS) to reproduce the works by Duchamp that it contains. Rather, it appears that he scanned the images from various published sources, without bothering to request permission from the authors or the publishers whose labors he so freely appropriates. If Andersen can adopt such a moral high ground in criticizing Duchamp, how is it that he can so blatantly violate issues of copyright? Maybe this is just one of many duplicitous positions taken by a man who, in his twilight years, wishes to seek revenge from the same sort of institutions that rejected him (if true, I would recommend he heed the advice of Confucius: “Before you embark on a journey of revenge,” he warned, “dig two graves”). It was the art establishment, after all, that also understood and embraced the contradictions that lie at the core of Duchamp’s work, a philosophical conundrum that is implicit to its meaning. I find myself in an equally complex dilemma in writing this review, for allowing its publication can only serve to draw more attention to a book that presents no legitimate justification for its existence. To ignore it, however, would seem the greater injustice. Andersen’s objections with Duchamp are shared by comparatively few, yet a number are more influential critics, writers who, like himself, believe that Duchamp has no rightful place in the history of 20th century art. These writings can only serve to inhibit a greater understanding of Duchamp and his work, preventing honest and otherwise diligent students from engaging the serious issues that are necessary to fully comprehend its importance and meaning. Refuting such a biased and highly restrictive point of view is-despite the consequences-a worthwhile endeavor.

Notes

1. The book is also filled with a plethora of typos and clerical errors. At one point, Andersen says that only he has read the text, which is regrettable, for even a casual reader would have caught mistakes in the sequence of footnotes that occur in several places (most notably in chapter 5, where the footnotes start to renumber themselves, a detail ignored where the footnotes themselves appear at the back of the book). This creates a real headache for serious scholars, but as I hope to demonstrate, it is indicative of the way in which the author so casually treats the literature he consults.

2. See Francis M. Naumann, “The Bachelor’s Quest,” Art in America 81/9 (September 1993), pp. 72-81, 67, 69

3.New York Dada 1915-23 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994) and Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York (Whitney Museum of American Art, November 21, 1996 – February 23, 1997; catalogue distributed by Harry N. Abrams).

4. Carolyn Burke, Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), and Barbara J. Bloemink, The Life and Art of Florine Stettheimer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).

5. New York Dada, p. 203, and Making Mischief, p. 20.

Duchamp’s “underground” career — decades ostensibly away from the art world in pursuit of chess — is a touchstone for youthful artist Mark Bloch, who has taken the gameboard out of the underground and bck into the museum gallery in his recent series, Storage Museums. There’s an element of travel chess here too, not to mention the Museum in a Suitcase.

Early in 1911, at the age of 24, Marcel Duchamp painted a relatively small painting (25 7/8 by 19 3/4 inches, oil on canvas) he called Young Man and Girl in Spring. ¹ This painting is also identified as Spring, which is how the painting is referred to throughout this paper. A larger version (58 5/8 x 19 3/4 inches, oil on canvas) followed. This second version was exhibited at the 1911 Salon d’Automne in Paris.² Although no photograph of the entire second painting is known to exist, part of it is visible—now repositioned horizontally—as the background of Duchamp’s Network of Stoppages of 1914.

What follows is an analysis of the first version of Spring and its role in Duchamp’s larger creative output. Some of my ideas, as well as my interpretations and conclusions, draw on the large and ever-growing body of scholarly literature on Duchamp. However, my observations and ideas are shaped by my perspective as a practicing artist. Quite intentionally, I have tried to follow the logic of Duchamp’s creative process and his artistic decision-making strategies from the standpoint of his being a visual artist. I offer what follows in that spirit.

In this paper, I explore the possibility that Spring contains pre-figurative elements of Duchamp’s final magnum opus, Étant donnés (Given: 1º The Waterfall, 2º The Illuminating Gas), created between 1946 and 1966. That a small, sketchy painting made thirty-five years earlier could be seen as a study for the confounding, elaborate installation that is Étant donnés may strike readers as somewhat improbable. Nevertheless, through careful scrutiny of Duchamp’s artwork and the many notes he made, it is my opinion that very early on—Duchamp planned and prepared for the major works he would eventually produce. I acknowledge that this process is highly unusual, that most artists develop their styles over a period of time, with any one piece or style representing a point on a trajectory of development and maturation. It is well known Marcel Duchamp used ideas he had formulated years before their actual implementation. As Michael Taylor observes: “The pseudoscientific title of Etant donnes has its source in a note first published in 1934 known as the Green Box: “Etant donnes 1° la chute d’eau / 2° legaz d’eclairage.”³

Part I
Although it is uncharacteristically rough in execution, Spring is a fully realized composition(Fig. 1).

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  Figure 1
  Spring (Young Man and Girl in Spring), 1911. Oil on canvas, 25 7/8 x 19 3/4 in. (65.7 x 50.2 cm.). Israel Museum of Art, Jerusalem

The artist apparently deemed this painting important enough to offer it as a wedding present to his favorite sister, Suzanne, who married a Rouen pharmacist, Charles Desmares, on August 24, 1911. On the back of the canvas Duchamp wrote, “A toi ma chere Suzanne —Marcel” (“To my dear Suzanne —Marcel”).⁴
Perhaps due to the painting’s uncharacteristically loose, expressionistic execution, some scholars assert that Spring is merely a loose study. However, the existence of an India ink and charcoal study for the female figure of Spring,also dated 1911 and titled Standing Nude (Fig. 2), adds weight to the argument that Spring is an autonomous work, not a preliminary sketch. ⁵

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  Figure 2
  Standing Nude, 1911. India ink and charcoal on paper 24 5/8 x 18 7/8 in. (62.5 x 47.8 cm.). Collection of Silvia Schwarz Linder and Dennis Linder, Milan

The two versions of Spring can be seen as the final symbolic allegorical group of works that Duchamp began painting in April 1910 with Portrait of Dr. Dumouchel. The others in this group include The Bush (1910), Paradise (December 1910–January 1911), The Baptism (1911), and Draft on the Japanese Apple Tree (1911).

Spring is an allegorical painting set in a landscape of tree forms. Most prominent in the composition are the two elongated, up-reaching figures, which occupy the frontal plane and extend from the lower to upper margins of the painting on both sides.

Both figures are delineated by black contour lines. On the left is a female nude; on the right is a male whose genitals are obscured by a thong-like covering. The back of the female’s head is visible as a cap of dark hair; except for her chin, her face is blocked by the closer arm, which, like her other arm, is thrust upward toward a canopy of leaves. Both of the female’s arms are rendered twice (Fig. 3), visually suggesting waving limbs. This depiction of sequential positions in space essentially constitutes Duchamp’s original attempts to paint a figure in motion a year before his two versions of Nude Descending a Staircase, of 1912.

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  Figure 3
  Detail of fig. 1, Spring: arms of female figure, marked to indicate “waving” motion

The male figure extends his right arm into the tree leaves. His other arm is bent above his faceless head, the hand in a fist. The feet are roughed in. Just below his feet is a patch of ochre that is deeper in tone than the field of ochre dominating the lower right quadrant. It is in this area Duchamp signed the work in block letters followed by an 11, signifying the year of its production, 1911.

The top of the painting is filled with a canopy of tree leaves defined at its lower edge by angled black lines.⁶ The central area of the canopy is yellow, with an uneven upper band of white pigment suggesting sunlight streaming from above. Surrounding these leaves and the slender black tree trunk is a section of lightened blue. The black line of the tree trunk doubles as the center indentation of an unmistakable heart shape, which occupies most of the composition. Leading Duchamp scholar Francis Naumann, in his essay on Spring, was the first to notice this large geometrically simplified shape for a human heart.⁷ The bottom V shape of the heart passes behind the lower torsos of the two figures. The left outline of the swelling V doubles as the thin, curving trunk of a tree or sapling. Its leaves or blossoms extend from the left behind the female’s lower back. The shape and hue of these leaves, along with the bent trunk, recall the tree form in another painting by Duchamp in 1911, Draft on the Japanese Apple Tree (Figs. 4 and 5). This can be seen as an early example of Duchamp’s recycling of pictorial content from one piece to another, a practice examined in the pages that follow.

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• Figure 4
• Figure 5

• Draft on the Japanese Apple Tree, Marcel Duchamp, 1911, oil on canvas, 24 X 19 11/16″, collection of Dina Vierny, Paris.
• Detail from fig. 1 – Bent tree form outlined.

In the area at upper – far left, behind the pink-budded tree, is another tree with a simple, straight black trunk. Over a dark green area are about a dozen daubs of white, red, and green that help define the tree’s form. On the right side, surrounding the upper torso of the male figure, are circular shapes outlined in black which I believe were meant to represent trees. These are less realized than those on the left side and are not painted in.

The center of the entire composition and consequently at the center of the heart shape, is a circle whose circumference is energetically and repeatedly drawn with black crayon or oil pastel. Within this circle is rendered a small, pinkish figure, whose back is positioned to roughly align with the black tree trunk of the central tree. Head tilted to the left, its face, like the two nude figures, is featureless. One leg is straight down, while the leg on the right is raised and bent downward at the knee. One arm is extended, and the other arm is not visible.

This overdrawn circle also loops down in ovoid strokes that cut across the profile head of a fourth human figure, also with a featureless face. The legs of this figure appear to be folded in a kneeling position and are partially cropped by the arced line of the heart outlined on the right. A coat with tails can be interpreted, draped over the kneeling figure’s shoulders.⁸

Located toward the top left of the kneeling figure is a series of round shapes, modeled in pink/red and white. Small jots of black seem to indicate tree trunks, possibly an allusion to a small grove of trees, executed almost like a child’s simplistic rendering of “lollipop trees” complete with short, vertical black jots for trunks. Interspersed with the pink/red colors are similar shapes in grey. Their uniform size, combined with a stacked symmetry of placement, is not convincingly organic in nature. The staggered symmetry of these uniform-sized boulder shapes is akin to the appearance of brick wall construction. Even the hue is reminiscent of the color of bricks. This aspect creates some ambiguity in their appearance. Other shapes, more loosely formed, are found to the right of the kneeling figure’s profile.

The V point of the prominent heart shape outline in combination with the two figures’ straight legs approximates the letter M. (Fig. 6) This is the first example of Duchamp’s embedding one of his initials into his works, a practice he would continue throughout his career.

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  Figure 6
  Detail of fig. 1, Spring: outline of M shape.

Part II
Spring is noteworthy in several ways. Its two leaping figures are overtly exuberant and make this Duchamp’s most expressionistically emotional painting. Positioned on either side of the composition, streamlined and elongated to extend over most of the vertical dimension of the work, they create a framing device for the encircled central figure. That their faces are without features supports their function as a formal device, although without diminishing their symbolic intent.

The forceful circles drawn repeatedly around the central figure in the outlined heart shape visually emphasize the importance of this element, especially the circle’s placement in the middle of the composition. On close examination, the rough quality of line points to the use of oil pastel or crayon applied over thick, dried oil paint, not to the blending-in that is usual in oil painting. In other words, these circles were drawn over the composition after it was painted (Fig. 7). Perhaps Duchamp came to realize that he could achieve a visceral effect by “roughly” circling this centrally placed element. In any case, it is clear that his intention was to emphasize this part of the painting.

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  Figure 7
  Detail of fig. 1, Spring: crayon lines circling the central figure

Considering the relatively long time oils take to dry, it is conceivable that the painting was completed before the attributed date of early 1911. If this is the case, it would not be the first time Duchamp mistakenly dated one of his works.⁹

That being said, I would like to comment on Arturo Schwarz’s interpretation regarding the possible intent behind the figure enclosed within a circle as representing Mercurius in a bottle The figure of Mercurius (Mercury) was a commonly used alchemical image symbolizing the universal agent of transformation.¹⁰ Schwarz illustrates an eighteenth-century woodcut for visual comparison (Fig. 8).

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  Figure 8
  Anonymous, Mercurius in a Bottle. Woodcut engraving for J. C. Barchusen’sElementa chemiae, Leiden, 1718.

Duchamp addressed his interest in alchemy on a variety of occasions
He responded to biographer Robert Lebel’s question about his connection to the subject with the following statement: “If I have practiced alchemy it was in the only way it can be done now, that is without knowing it.”¹¹

While some art historians agree on this interpretation, like most matters concerning Duchamp’s creations, other viewpoints abound. Both Naumann and Duchamp biographer Calvin Tomkins reject Schwarz’s alchemy theory in favor of the notion that Spring can be read as an affirmative statement about marriage.¹² Naumann suggests that the figure in the globe is possibly prophetic of the married couple’s newborn-to-be.¹³

A different perspective is expressed by another Duchamp biographer, Alice Goldfarb Marquis, and art historian Jerrold Seigel, both of whom believe there is not one figure but “several dancing figures” in the circle.¹⁴ Pierre Cabanne, another expert and a personal friend of Duchamp’s, says of the central circle in Spring that it contains “ill defined forms.”¹⁵

An unusual, if not perplexing, interpretation of this circle comes from philosopher and art historian Thierry de Duve. In his book Pictorial Nominalism, de Duve acknowledges other interpretations of the orb, including Schwarz’s alchemy comparisons and Maurizio Calvesi’s reference to vessels in Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (ca. 1500). De Duve’s opinion is that it could well be inspired by the small circular convex mirror in Jan van Eyck’s Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and His Wife Giovanna Cenamani, or The Arnolfini Wedding Portrait (1434).¹⁶ However unique a theory, especially because of the wedding connection, it seems an unlikely source considering that the famous convex mirror in van Eyck’s painting reflects the images of three figures, the bride and groom as well as the painter himself, none remotely resembling the singular figure in the orb.

At this point, an examination of the specific emblem Schwarz identified is warranted. In 1718, Leiden chemistry professor Johann Conrad Barchusen had a series of seventy-eight emblems engraved, titled Elementa chemiae, which are meant to allegorically represent the specific process of alchemical transmutation known as “the wet way,” as opposed to the shorter process called “the dry way.”

The Mercurius emblem that Schwarz chose as comparable to the central figure in Spring is close to the end of Barchusen’s sequence, at number seventy-five. The caption for this emblem has been translated as follows: “After much suffering and torment I was resurrected large and pure and immaculate.”¹⁷
The sentiments associated with Barchusen’s Mercurius do not mesh in an illustrative sense on any level, alchemical or otherwise, in terms of celebrating newlyweds.

I would like to offer another observation on this small figure, however unconventional, along with a different general point of view about Spring. The positioning of the legs—one straight, one bent and the only visible arm outstretched and extended within a small patch of bright paint directly above a small black line where the hand would appear—are uncannily familiar.

These forms, including a head-like shape tilted to the left, very closely approximates the reclining nude holding a lantern in Étant donnés With this visual correspondence in mind, the circle can be understood as an allusion to a peephole placed in the center of the figurative framing devise through which a scene is viewed, a vantage point consistent with his final creation. In addition but possibly just coincidental, the yellow linear device in Spring, which extends vertically below the outstretched arm on the right, might be seen as a visual symbol of a waterfall.(Fig. 9)

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  Figure 9
  Detail of fig. 1, Spring: outline of central figure in relation to the nude and other elements in Étant donnés

The repetitive, roughly drawn lines that drop down to include the kneeling figure form a shape that is roughly comparable to the opening in the brick wall of Étant donnés.(Fig. 10)

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  Figure 10
  Étant donnés (Given: 1.The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas), 1946–66, view through the door of the installation. Mixed media. Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The representation of a kneeling figure had lasting importance for Duchamp. In 1967 he produced eighteen drypoint etchings which are included in the second volume of Arturo Schwarz’s Complete Works, The Large Glass and Related Works. Half of these were devoted to The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, while the other half formed a suite called The Lovers.

Of the latter, one print depicts a female figure kneeling as if in prayer; significantly, it is titled The Bride Stripped Bare. Besides the obvious connection with the full title for the The Large Glass, (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even), the drawing creates a full-circle connection with the first work of Duchamp’s to bear this title, a drawing produced in 1912 while he was in Munich. These 1967 prints were some of Duchamp’s last artworks, created before the public was made privy to the Étant donnés installation, which, as he had specified, happened only after his death. Whatever his intentions, it is noteworthy that Duchamp in his final days would return to the theme of kneeling/prayer imagery first addressed in depth in his early allegorical paintings, many of which depicted figures in this position.

Let us return to the meaning of the two leaping figures in Spring. In the first comprehensive catalog of Duchamp’s work Robert Lebel speculates that the painting is a response to the loss of the youthful closeness of his siblings: “Both his brothers were married and his sister wedded a pharmacist from Rouen in 1911: these were just so many assaults upon the ties of childhood for one who was to remain so long the “ bachelor.”¹⁸

I believe the most original supposition as to what inspired Spring is offered by Alice Goldfarb Marquis in her biography of Duchamp, Marcel Duchamp: Eros, C’est la vie. Prior to painting Spring in early 1911, Duchamp had a relationship with a model, Jeanne Serre, who is believed to be one of the figures represented in the 1910 painting The Bush. This relationship produced Duchamp’s only child, born February 6, 1911. Marquis believes it is possible that the birth of this child, named Yo, and the end of the affair might be the actual inspiration for Spring.¹⁹

Schwarz and Cabanne share the opinion that the two reaching figures represent Suzanne and Marcel, Schwarz insisting that Marcel was opposed to the wedding. And while these bordering figures may or may not be Duchamp’s primary focus for Spring, they are clearly presented as symbolic of something—seen in the pair’s action of reaching upward.

The specific, emotive body language is another thing that separates this painting from Duchamp’s other allegorical works of 1910–1911. Those paintings are obscure in their symbolism. The glowing hand in the Portrait of Dr. Dumouchel is inexplicable beyond, perhaps, referring to this doctor’s “miraculous curative powers”; the relationships between the couples in Paradise, The Bush, and Baptism are all seemingly symbolic in intent, and yet they are stubbornly ambiguous. The odd, Buddha-like figure in Draft on the Japanese Apple Tree is bafflingly arcane.

The essay Schwarz wrote for The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp describes the Spring figures’ arms “lifted to the sky in a Y-shaped figure.”²⁰ Actually, the arms of the two figures do not form the shape of any letter, much less Y, as they reach up into the leaves of the tree. However there is a Y shape drawn in the space between the figures’ arms.(Fig. 11)

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  Figure 11
  Detail of fig. 1, Spring: outline of Y shape.

This constitutes the top connection of the two orbs of the linear heart shape while doubling as the image of the centrally placed tree trunk. Returning to the small encircled figure, we see that not only is it placed in the painting’s center, but it is also at the center of the heart shaped symbol. Surely the symbolic metaphor of something being “central to one’s heart” would not escape Duchamp’s attention in this time frame.

In writings about Spring, one often encounters interpretations of the purpose for the upward stretch of the two figures. Are they reaching for fruit from the Tree of Life, or perhaps the apple in the Garden of Eden? No, there is no discernable fruit of any kind in this painting. (The absence of fruit makes sense in view of the title Spring, whenfruit is not mature and ripe for picking.)

The top center of the canvas is a discernibly lighter yellow/white than the green abstracted “leaves” on either side. In other words, strong sunlight is clearly suggested as it filters through the tree leaves. I propose that the two figures are enacting, allegorically, the act of “reaching for the sun.”

Duchamp addressed the subject of the sun at least two other times. In 1911, the same year Spring was conceived, Duchamp illustrated several poems by Jules Laforge, one of which is Once More to This Star, also translated as Another for the Sun. Jerrold Seigel offers this synopsis of the poem: ”The sun exchanges insults with the earthlings it threatens to warm no longer . . . once the old waning star has died.”²¹ Another example is a simple drawing from 1914 entitled To Have an Apprentice in the Sun. On a sheet of music staff paper, it depicts a figure struggling uphill on a bicycle. Duchamp believed it noteworthy enough to include it in his first compilation of reproductions of significant works, known as the Box of 1914.

Part III
After painting the two versions of Spring Duchamp switched gears stylistically and executed notes, works, and studies that culminated in The Large Glass, as well as his final painting in 1918, Tu m’.Duchamp began developing his ideas through extensive note-taking for future projects. The late Walter Hopps, who was responsible for organizing Duchamp’s first retrospective in the United States, provided a succinct analysis for the overall import of these notes: “Although they were not published until 1934, some of the notes in The Green Box date back to before 1915 [the year] when Duchamp started fabricating The Large Glass. These notes are the complete scheme for and the literary form of The Large Glass, which is itself like a circuit diagram or even cybernetic abstraction. In Étant donnés, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even becomes a strange and magical three-dimensional tableau, and Duchamp’s magnum opus is now complete: a work that exists in conceptual, diagrammatic, and figurative form.”²²

It is conceivable that after he realized the Large Glass and Tu m’—in effect crossing them off his “to do” list—Duchamp gave himself the rest of his life to actualize his third and final pre-planned major project. In doing so he freed himself to pursue other interests that would occupy him over the years: the “production” of a variety of readymades,his close involvement with the presentation of ground-breaking art exhibitions which radically challenged accepted practices, and of course the pursuit of his lifelong fascination with the game of chess. The notion that he planned out his entire artistic output before its execution can be compared to the method of a superior chess player, who has the capacity to figure out his moves and strategies well beforehand. Most significantly, this mode of operation would grant him the one thing he claimed to value over all else: personal freedom.

Another look at Network of Stoppages—Duchamp’s 1914 painting produced over the second version of Spring— is warranted in order to understand his creative process.(Fig. 12)

click images to enlarge

• 
  Figure 12
  Network of Stoppages, 1914. Oil and pencil on canvas, 58 5/8 x 77 7/8 in. (148.9 x 197.7 cm.). Philadelphia Museum of Art.

It is revealing how several different projects dovetailed in one another. Put another way, in quick succession, different projects were manifest in a single work. With his pre-existing notes for The Large Glass (its dimensions, the “capillary tubes” element, and the premise for 3 Standard Stoppages, in particular) this was not a matter of having one epiphany after another. This was the application of pre-formulated thought born of copious note-making.

In 1913 Duchamp had developed his first schematic plans for The Large Glass. A year later, the experiment in his notes on The Idea of Fabrication would culminate in the production of three ruler/templates called 3 Standard Stoppages. This information and these devices would be applied to Network of Stoppages. Black bands of paint were applied to both sides of the second Spring, producing a space that is exactly half-scale of The Large Glass’s dimensions. The three constructed Stoppages templates were used to create the Network of Stoppages in a configuration that would later serve two functions for The Large Glass: the small circles were inserted throughout the array of curved lines that indicated an aerial view of the placement of the nine “bachelors” (also known as Malic Moulds). The linear design is also the first rendition of the Large Glass’s “capillary tube” element, the series of lines incised into Large Glass which traverse the forms that constitute the bachelors/Malic Moulds.

Here we have a total of six interlocking projects that evolve into one another with a common goal in mind: the second version of Spring; 3 Standard Stoppages templates; Network of Stoppages painting, which includes The Large Glass in half-scale dimensions, the positioning of the bachelors, and the first version of the capillary tubes.

In relation to his later work, Spring can be chronologically positioned. If it is not the first-draft study for Étant donnés, it is at least a premonition of some of the most important visual elements central to this last work: a reclining figure, one arm raised and holding aloft what I perceive to be a lit lantern near a waterfall, as glimpsed through a peephole that must be viewed through an opening in a constructed brick wall. The cloaked kneeling figure in Spring represents the voyeur, a well-known subject of interest to the artist. In fact, the classic pose of a voyeur is a person crouching or kneeling in order to spy through a keyhole. Because Étant donnés must be viewed through two peepholes, the viewer is essentially transformed into a voyeur—one who takes in a scene privately.²³

Another general visual interpretation of Spring symbolically situates it in a time/space continuum, an allusion to the eventual realization of Étant donnés. The two border figures are situated on the green and yellow circular shapes formed by the negative space on either side of the large outlined heart symbol, in other words, “hills.” Viewed thus, the circle/peephole with the small figure can be perspectively construed as being far off in the distance. We know that at the time he painted Spring, Duchamp was interested in allegory and symbolism and was sufficiently intrigued by Symbolist poetry to do a series of illustrations based on poems by Symbolist poet Jules Laforgue. Perhaps symbolically this circle/peephole device illustrates something taking place in the future—“over the hills and far away”—at a time when Duchamp planned to actually construct the Étant donnés installation.

Based on the belief that Spring is in fact the first study for Étant donnés and that it was executed even before studies for The Large Glass had commenced, perhaps its intention as merely a wedding gift is an oversimplification of Duchamp’s more serious concern. Knowing its long-range significance, he could have given it to his favorite sister for safekeeping. I believe Duchamp intentionally inscribed only his sister’s name to emphasize her sole ownership if the marriage did not work out. (If this were the case, it proved to be a wise move and is an example of Duchamp’s astute forward thinking; the marriage ended in divorce seven years later.) Through the course of Duchamp’s life and extensive travels, many works of his were lost, yet Suzanne still had this painting in her possession at the time of her death in 1963.

Spring was never included in any version of Boîte-en-valise,the purpose of which was the presentation (at small scale) of all of the works he believed of import in his career. One other major work, Étant donnés, was left out, for the reason that only after he died, as per his instructions, was it to made be known. Thus, it seems appropriate that because his last, secret masterpiece would have to be absent from his portable museum, the first painting, Spring, that led to it was excluded as well.

With these observations in mind, it is my assertion that Marcel Duchamp’s intent was to conclude his artistic career by coming full circle back to his original study, Spring. His artistic interests and aspirations remained true to his early allegorical works, which had, in fact, eclipsed his earlier forays into landscape and portraiture. The allegorical works were his first truly original expressions. Spring is representative of his study for his ultimate allegory—Étant donnés.

I believe that his major works, beginning with Spring in 1911, along with 3 Standard Stoppages and the readymade concept, were planned out in the mind and in his notes in a concentrated period of time before their execution by several years and even decades later.

Granted, it is almost incomprehensible that an artist so early in his career could possibly have schemed, organized, and internalized such an intense cavalcade of interrelated artworks or made plans to unfurl future creations over the course of his lifetime. On the other hand, the incomparable and ever-elusive Marcel Duchamp was possibly the only artist who could attempt and pull off such a timed-release, sustained process of creation.

© copyright 2008 Kurt Godwin. All rights reserved.

§ My thanks to Francis M. Naumann for his support and encouragement and to my editor, Julia Moore, for helping me craft this article.

Notes

¹ Spring was painted in Neuilly, France. Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, second rev. ed. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1970): 426

² Francis M. Naumann, The Mary Sisler Collection. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1984: 172. In 1914 Duchamp applied black paint over the original left and right margins of the painting and rotated it counterclockwise 90°. The most recognizable image is that of a female nude, seen on her back because of the rotation. The rest of what remains of the painting is blurred, as if by a wash of thinned paint. The details, which must have been quite clear originally, are now mostly unrecognizable. The “recumbent” female figure is the exception. She appears to be more fully realized in detail than the woman in the first Spring.

³Michael Taylor, Marcel Duchamp – Etant donnes,(Philadelphia Museum of Art Publishing Department, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: 2009), 23

⁴ After Suzanne died 1963, Spring came into the possession of the New York City art gallery Cordier & Ekstrom and then was bought for the Mary Sisler Collection. Duchamp scholar Arturo Schwarz collection acquired it from Sisler and in time donated it to the Israel Museum of Art, where it is today. Schwarz notes that the painting was relined in the 1960s, covering over the inscription. Arturo Schwarz, Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp Rev. and expanded paperback edition (New York: Delano Greenidge Editions, 2000): 546.

⁵ This drawing study is almost the exact same size as Spring, measuring 25 5/8 x 18 3/4 inches. The simple contour of the nude is so closely copied at the same scale that it is not inconceivable that it was used as a direct transfer for the painting. The figure is allegedly a model named Reina who appears in a similar pose in an engraving by Duchamp’s oldest brother, Jacques Villon (Schwarz, 2000: 546.)

⁶ Although it is often asserted that there is fruit of some sort in this tree depiction, none in fact is represented. The title of the work specifies spring.

⁷ Naumann, Sisler Collection: 139.

⁸ That Duchamp would depict a kneeling figure is significant. With the exception of the Portrait of Dr. Dumouchel, the first painting in his allegorical style, there are kneeling figures in all of Duchamp’s allegorical works. Further, in 1910, the same year of the Dumouchel portrait, he produced four pen-and-ink drawings, all titled Study for Kneeling Nude.

⁹ Speaking with Pierre Cabanne about the illustration he made for Jules Laforgue’s Once More to This Star, Duchamp stated, “I had put a stupid date below, 1912, when it had been done in November 1911, and I dedicated it to [F. C.] Torrey in 1913. When you compare the dates, you say, ‘that’s impossible.’ An amusing mess.” Pierre Cabanne, Conversations with Marcel Duchamp (New York: Da Capo Press, 1971): 46.

¹⁰ Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, second rev. ed. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1970): 238.

¹¹ John F. Moffitt, Alchemist of the Avant-Garde: The Case of Marcel Duchamp (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003): 9.

¹² Rudolf Kuenzli and Francis M. Naumann, eds., Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1989): 25, and Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996): 53.

¹³ Francis M. Naumann, The Mary and William Sisler Collection (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1984): 138.

¹⁴ Alice Goldfarb Marquis, Marcel Duchamp: The Bachelor Stripped Bare (Boston: MFA Publications, 2002: 59, and Jerrold Seigel, The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp: Desire, Liberation, and the Self in Modern Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1995): 34.

¹⁵ Pierre Cabanne, Duchamp & Co., trans. Peter Snowdon (New York: Rizzoli Publications, 1997): 34.

¹⁶ Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991): 53.

¹⁷. Alexander Roob, The Hermetic Museum: Alchemy & Mysticism (Cologne, Germany: Taschen, 1997): 145.

¹⁸ Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, 1st American ed. (New York: Paragraphic Books, 1959): 6.

¹⁹ Calvin Tompkins, Duchamp: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996): 45.

²⁰ Schwarz, 1970: 90.

²¹ Seigel: 34.

²² Walter Hopps, Susan Davidson, Ann Temkin. Cornell/Duchamp. . . In Resonance (Stuttgart, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 1998, and New York: D.A.P. Distributed Art Publishers, 1999): 75.

²³ In his book Ingres: Erotic Drawings, art historian and critic Stephane Guegan includes a section devoted to Ingres and voyeurism. The chapter concludes, in part, with the following statement: “The theme of the vulnerable, reclining woman, viewed from the front or back, left other traces, often of a passably licentious aura, among the drawings Ingres bequeathed to his birthplace. On one is written: ‘One who looks in at the door.’ This confirms Ingres’ calculated voyeurism, more subtle than is sometimes thought.” Stephane Guegan, Ingres: Erotic Drawings (Paris, Flammarion, 2006): 59.
The subject of Ingres’ interest is noteworthy in relation to Duchamp’s. Included in Duchamp’s final series of etchings, The Lovers, he paid homage to a few artists he apparently held in high esteem. One print is based on a work by Rodin, another on a Courbet. But he must have had particular admiration for Ingres, for he based two compositions on paintings by the older master.

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Belle Haleine: Eau de Voilette
[Beautiful Breath: Veil Water], 1921
Assisted readymade: Rigaud perfume bottle
with label created by Duchamp and Man Ray,
bottle 6” (15.2 cm) high, in an oval,
violet-colored cardboard box,
6 7/8 x 4 7/8 inches (16.3 x 11.2 cm);
inscribed on gold label attached
to the back of the box:
Rrose / Sélavy / 1921

Belle Haleine: Eau de Voilette [Beautiful Breath: Veil Water] is the amusing title Marcel Duchamp gave to a work of art that he made—with the assistance of Man Ray—in the spring of 1921. At first glance, it appears to be little more than an ordinary perfume bottle, although readers of French might confuse it with a mouth wash, which, if consumed, would give them, as the label indicates, belle haleine [beautiful breath]. We now know that in order to produce this work, Duchamp appropriated an actual bottle of perfume issued by the Rigaud Company of Paris in 1915 for “Un air embaumé,” the name given to the most popular and best-selling fragrance the perfumery had produced in its sixty-five year history. Advertisements for this product feature a scantily clad female model holding a bottle of the perfume below her nostrils,

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Figure 1
Advertisement for Un Air
Embaumé, Rigaud Perfume,
La Rire no. 88 (9 October 1920)

the essence of the liquid rendered visible as an undulating, ribbon-like shape floating through the air. The model is shown taking a deep breath, her eyes closed and head tilted slightly back, as if to suggest that the scent possess the qualities of an aphrodisiac, rendering powerless all who inhale its intoxicating vapors. It may have been precisely these qualities that attracted Duchamp to this particular brand of perfume, for he wished to draw attention to the woman whose features are depicted on the bottle, his newly introduced female alter-ego: Rose Sélavy.

Rose Sélavy was born by self-procreation in 1920. Duchamp—who was then living in New York and who, for years, had harbored a personal and professional disdain for entrenched, academic systems within the world of art—sought to establish an entirely new artistic identity. Just as he had invented the pseudonym of R. Mutt three years earlier (when, in 1917, he boldly submitted a white porcelain urinal to an art exhibition with infamous results), this time he wanted something more permanent, an alternative persona through which he could hide his true identity while continuing to function as an artist. “The first idea that came to me was to take a Jewish name,” he later explained. “I was Catholic, and it was a change to go from one religion to another!  I didn’t find a Jewish name that I especially liked, or that tempted me, and suddenly I had an idea: why not change sex? It was much simpler. So the name Rrose Sélavy came from that.”¹ The name Rose Sélavy not only succeeds in changing gender, but, to a somewhat lesser extent, the Jewish identity he originally desired. Sélavy is a close phonetic equivalent of Halévy, a common Jewish name in France. Moreover, in America the name Sélavy could be pronounced “Say Levy,” but of course the most obvious pun is with the French phrase “c’est la vie” [that’s life].² Almost immediately, Rose was credited with the production of works of art, such as Duchamp’s Fresh Widow—a miniature French window with its panes covered by black leather (Museum of Modern Art, New York)—which, on its support, is inscribed in bold uppercase letters: “COPYRIGHT ROSE SELAVY 1920.”

Although Rose Sélavy was already functioning as an artist, it was not until the winter of 1920-21 that Duchamp decided that she should become visibly manifest, so he enlisted the services of his friend and colleague Man Ray to help take pictures of himself in drag.

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Figure 2
Man Ray, Portrait of Rose Sé
lavy, 1921, New York, negative Estate
of Man Ray, Musée National d’Art
Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou,
Paris copy print from Jean-Hubert Martin,
Man Ray Photographs [London:
Thames & Hudson, 1981]))

He printed one of the pictures he had taken of Rose Sélavy and closely cropped the head into an ovoid format, which he placed atop a symmetrical design in black ink meant to fit within the wing-like, decorative shapes that emanate from the base of the Rigaud perfume bottle. He then carefully wrote the word BELLE in ascending letters on the left side of the label, followed by the word HALEINE descending on the right. Below that, he wrote Eau de Voilette in an expressive italic font, underneath which appear the letters “RS,” the initials of Rose Sélavy (the “R” rendered backwards, its lower branch responding to the flourish given to the seraph atop of the letter “S”). At the base of the label appears the locations where, presumably, the perfume would be sold—New York and Paris—two city centers that Duchamp traversed frequently during these years (indeed, he probably purchased the bottle during a trip to Paris in 1919). A photograph of the layout was reduced in size to fit the small format of the perfume bottle, whereupon the resultant print was then carefully glued to its surface. The finished product made its first public appearance on the cover of New York Dada, a single-issue magazine edited by Duchamp and Man Ray that was released in April 1921.

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Figure 3
Man Ray, Label for the Belle
Haleine, 1921, gelatin silver
print, 8 13/16 x 7 inches (The J. Paul
Getty Museum, Los Angeles).

The bottle was placed in the center of the cover and surrounded by a seemingly endless repetition of the type-written words “new york dada april 1921” printed in lower-case letters and positioned upside-down in an exceptionally small font that ran to the edges of the cover, the whole cast, appropriately, in a reddish, rose-colored hue.

Exactly whose idea it was to reproduce this bottle on the cover of New York Dada is unknown, but we do know that, at the time, both Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp had hoped that the Dada movement—which had originated in Europe and spread quickly throughout various European capitals—would continue to broaden its scope internationally. In a metaphorical sense, then, the artists may have equated the ability of a fragrance to permeate its surroundings with the convention-defying capabilities of Dada to influence all the arts. Unfortunately, however, at the time the Dada movement was in the process of breathing its last breath, for within a matter of years, it would be replaced by Surrealism in Paris, while the artists in New York either left for Europe or retreated to more conventional forms of artistic expression. The seed of Dada would eventually germinate, but only about a half century later, when a group of young artists in London, New York and Paris became aware of Duchamp’s work—particularly the readymades—and immediately recognized its radical aesthetic implications. Ironically, this scenario reinforces a possible alternate reading to the words “un air embaumé,” which translates literally as “perfumed air,” but which, in English, could also be read as “embalmed air.” Indeed, it has recently been observed that the box in which the perfume was packaged—which was preserved and is intended to be part of the final work of art—is curiously shaped like a coffin.³ Like a mummy enwrapped in cloth and preserved for eternity, it would seem that today—with the artist’s uncontested influence on the development of contemporary art—Duchamp’s bottle of perfume has finally been opened, allowing for the diffusion of an alluring spirit that virtually everyone can now readily detect.

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Figure 4
New York Dada,
April 1921, cover.  Private
Collection, New York

Rigaud was the perfect fragrance for Duchamp to have selected.  Not only was it a known and popular French brand of perfume, but its exotic qualities—which the firm emphasized in all of its advertisements—was an ideal fragrance for the somewhat vulgar and lascivious Rrose to endorse. In an advertisement that appeared in Harper’s Monthly, it is implied that Un Air Embaumé was a scent that originated in an unspecified Arab country located somewhere in the Middle East; it depicts a harem girl gesturing toward a peacock with one hand, while she uses the other hand to hold back a curtain revealing the interior of a darkened boudoir.

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Figure 5
Advertisement for Un Air Embaumé,
Rigaud Perfume Company,
Harpers Monthly, December
1919.  Collection Francis M.
Naumann, New York

There, a couple inclines on a bed, while a gold bottle of Rigaud floats mysteriously above their heads, glowing in the darkness like an apparition.  Another advertisement that appeared in several American fashion magazines shows a woman seated in her dressing room, visible to viewers through an open curtain door.

“A peep into the boudoir of any much sought-after woman,” the caption reads, “will usually reveal some RIGAUD odeur as the real secret of her power to fascinate men.” In small print at the bottom of the page, the advertisement informs prospective buyers that, if purchased for yourself or as a gift, the fragrance is assured to have an enduring effect. “Un air embaumé is one of the most loved of Rigaud odeurs. It is the type of rare fragrance that a woman clings to devotedly for many, many years.”

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Figure 6
Advertisement for Rigaud
Perfume, New York fashion
magazine, ca. 1920-21. Collection
Douglas Vogel, New York

In June of 1921—a few months after the appearance of New York Dada—Duchamp returned to Paris, where, later in the year, he signed a large painting by Picabia entitled L’Oeil cacodylate (Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris) with the name Rrose Sélavy, spelling the name Rrose for the first time with a double-r. Later he said that this was required, for, as he explained, “the word ‘arrose’ demands two R’s.”⁴ Clearly Duchamp intended to evoke a pun on the word “eros,” for Rrose Sélavy is a homonym for the phrase “eros c’est la vie” [eros, that’s life]. Although less often acknowledged, the double-r might also have been derived from the French verb arroser, which means to wet or moisten, an appropriate word considering the obviously erotic connotations of perfume, which the manufacturer wanted users to think offered one of the first elements of attraction in any successful amorous encounter. Duchamp later signed the box of his perfume bottle with the name Rrose Sélavy (using the double-r), and gave it to Yvonne Chastel-Crotti, the ex-wife of his former studio-mate in New York, Jean Crotti (a Swiss-born painter who had married Duchamp’s sister Suzanne), a woman with whom Duchamp had had his own brief amorous encounter in 1918.⁵

The bottle remained in Yvonne Crotti’s possession throughout her life, and although it had been included in a group show of collage in Paris in 1930, it was shown for the first time within the context of Duchamp’s work in an exhibition organized by the Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery in New York in 1965.⁶ It was there that the object was first identified as an “assisted readymade,” indicating that—as with all other readymades—the object itself already existed, but required some alteration, that is to say, assistance on Duchamp’s part in order to bring it into being as a work of art. That assistance resulted in having created one of the most provocative works of art ever made, a simple bottle of perfume whose liquid long ago evaporated, but whose essence, to be sure, will continue to influence artists long into the future.

This text was first published as the entry on Duchamp’s Belle Haleine: Eau de violette in the sales catalogue Collection Yves Saint Laurent et Pierre Bergé, Christie’s Paris, 23 February 2009, lot no. 37.

Notes:
¹ Pierre Cabanne, Interview with Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. by Ron Padgett (New York: Viking Press, 1971), p. 64.

² The similarity to Halévy was pointed out by Ellen Landau, and is reported in Bradley Bailey, Duchamp’s Chess Identity, doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University, 2004, n28, p. 107; see also Bradley Bailey, ” Rrose of Washington Square: Marcel Duchamp, Fanny Brice, and the Jewish Origins of Rrose Sélavy ,” Source XXVII, no. 1 (Fall 2007), p. 41.

³ As suggested by Rhonda Roland Shearer in Bonnie Jean Garner, “Duchamp Bottles Belle Greene: Just Desserts for his Canning,” Tout-Fait, issue 2 (2000): www.toutfait.com. For the double reading of the title, see also Steven Jay Gould’s contribution to this article: “From the Bitter Negro Pun to the Beautiful Breath Bottle.”

⁴ Cabanne, Dialogues with Duchamp, p. 65.

⁵ Arturo Schwarz claims that this work was “signed after 1945,” although he provides no explanation for why the signature was applied at this time (see Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp , 3rd revised and expanded edition [New York: Delano Greenidge, 1997], vol. II, cat. no. 388, p. 688).

⁶ NOT SEEN and/or LESS SEEN of/by MARCEL DUCHAMP/RROSE SELAVY 1904-64, Cordier & Ekstrom, Inc., New York, 14 January – 13 February 1965, cat. no. 71. At the time of this show, Yvonne Crotti was living in London (her last name changed by married to Lyon), and it was probably through Duchamp’s assistance that the work was sold (at the time, Arne Ekstrom, proprietor of the gallery, was actively acquiring works by Duchamp for the Mary Sisler Collection). The 1930 show that included his Belle Haleine / Eau de Violette was Exposition de Collages, organized by Louis Aragon for the Galerie Goemans, Paris, March 1930; Duchamp was also represented by  Pharmacy, an example of The Monte Carlo Bond, and two versions of the L.H.O.O.Q.(see Jennifer Gough-Cooper and Jacques Caumont, “Ephemerides on and about Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Sélavy 1887-1968,” in Pontus Hulten, ed., Marcel Duchamp, exh. cat., Palazzo Grassi, Venice, 1993, entry for 02/06/1930).