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Figure 1
Marcel
Duchamp,Fresh Widow, 1920

In 1920 Marcel Duchamp duplicated choosing feminine features: those of Rose Sélavy. With this name indicates the copyright of Fresh Widow (Fig. 1), ready made resulting from the crafted assembly of a green window with French-style black leather panels. Those panels, for Duchamp’s insistence, had to be polished every day; and perhaps for this reason, for the newspaper and lewd rubbing of the skin, the French Window became, in the transformation of Duchamp, a Fresh Widow, namely a widow immodest.

Since that time the works of Rose multiply. His name is linked, again in 1920, the motor optical apparatus said Rotative plaques verre (optique de précision) (Fig. 2). The readymade of 1921 consists of a cage with cubes of marble and cuttlefish bone is christened Why not sneeze Rose Sélavy? (Fig. 3). woman sensual phrases are written in white letters spirals out of nine blacks discs in the short film Anemic Cinema (Fig. 4) shot by Man Ray and screened August 30, 1926 in a movie theater in Paris: while running, discs create buttons and sensations Sex. In September 1934 she also launches its editions with a book of perfect-as Dadaist late-expression: a box called La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (Fig. 5) containing facsimile notes and reproductions, better known as the Boîte verte. But still: in April 1939 went to Paris in 515 copies of a booklet written by Marcel Duchamp entitled Rrose Sélavy, collection of “poils et coups de pied en tous genres”.

Meanwhile the name of Rose had become Rrose. The event of 1921: a word game published on page 6 of “The Pilhaou-Thibaou” (fifteenth issue of the magazine “391”) is signed Rrose Sélavy. Picabia had taken the phrase from a letter that Duchamp had sent him from New York in January. It was the first time in the floral name was added “r” and this did nothing to duplicate the character newborn. It was just the simple addition of a consonant to delineate better the mystery of the double: a newborn creature immediately began to transform itself, to own their own “biography.”

There is also Rrose photographic documentation. In 1921 Man Ray worked the single issue of the magazine “New York Dada” by publishing a photograph he had taken to Duchamp in women’s clothes Rrose Sélavy: a hat with patterned band and an elegant fox collar supported by the hands that palpate the heat. The photograph shows a facial expression elusive: atteggiate lips into a smile mysterious, subtle indifference eyes. The attractive hat had been lent to Marcel-Rrose by Germaine Everling, the Picabia companion: the anti-romantic Duchamp had chosen as the most visible sign of its transformation a headdress that belonged to a woman whose name-Germaine-alluded to the red-hot core romantic illusion: Germanism. The indifferent smile Rrose reminiscent of the Mona Lisa (Fig. 6): in ready made l.h.o.o.q. (Fig. 7) of 1919 Duchamp had already deformed the Gioconda by drawing in pencil a few thin mustache on a reproduction of the famous painting by Leonardo. ⁽¹⁾

What Rrose represents it can be clarified thanks to the dedication that appear in the image and reveals the identity: “Lovingly, Rrose Sélavy aka Marcel Duchamp.” It was therefore another me, to be added to the existing one with nothing to hide. However Rrose aspired to a legal personality and quickly armed himself with a business card:
Precision optics Rose Sélavy New York – Paris Complete assortment of mustaches and tricks

mustache and tricks
It does not need to know that (etc.)

Figure 8
Francis Picabia,
L’Oeil cacodylate,
1921

It does not need to know that nell’emporio Marcel-Rrose you sell at will mustache to understand that the pseudonym pointed phonetically in an erotic direction: Rrose Sélavy sounds in fact like “Eros c’est la vie” ( “Eros: such is life” ). But not only that it was. In an interview with Pierre Cabanne, Duchamp expressed some illuminating remarks: “I wanted to change my identity and at first I had the idea to take a Hebrew name. I was a Catholic and this step of religion already meant a change. But I found no Hebrew name that I liked, or it hit my imagination, and suddenly I had an idea: why not change sex? From here comes the name of Rrose Sélavy. Today it sounds good enough, because even the names change over time, but in 1920 it was a silly name. The Double “R” has to do with the picture of Picabia Oeil Cacodylate (Fig. 8), exposed in the cabaret “Le Boeuf sur le Toit” -not know if it was sold-and Picabia asked all the friends to sign . I do not remember what I wrote, but the picture was photographed and therefore anyone knows. I think I wrote “Pi Qu’habilla Rrose Sélavy” ». The phrase that Duchamp wrote on Picabia framework sounds phonetically as “Picabia the arrose c’est la vie.” And it broadens the meaning to “Eros c’est la vie” to the phrase “arroser la vie,” meaning “have a drink over, make a toast to life.” ⁽²⁾

Both meanings of the name refer to the vision of life nourished by Duchamp: if a first superficial consideration the transformation of Duchamp in Rrose Sélavy seems to trigger a lively game of interpretation, more accurate observation shows that coagulates transformation instead lasting erotics : one arising from the joy to live and roam free in thought. In fact, in addition to signing some ready made, Rrose writes of bon-mots, of puns intentionally senseless, but that at times sound highly explicit.

Rrose thus possesses a “language” personality born of a precise idea of ​​language. In an interview published in “L’Express” of July 23, 1964, Duchamp said, “Language is a human error. Between two beings who love the word it does not express how much deeper they feel. The word is a pebble worn that applies to thirty-six shades of emotions. The language is easy to simplify it is a means of locomotion that I detest. ” “And yet-he says the interviewer-under the pseudonym Rrose Sélavy, she is interested in the language.” “It was for the fun. I have great respect for humor, it is a kind of protection that allows you to go through all the mirrors. ” ^{( 3)}

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Figure 9
Marcel Duchamp, Young
Man and Girl in Spring,
1911

What is accomplished reading of those Rrose? Simply the joy of reading something always new, an experience that might remind you to pick fruit in an eden. Duchamp had announced in 1911 with the painting Jeune homme et jeune fille dans le printemps (Fig. 9): a pagan joy scene when two naked young men freely capture fruit from a plant growing in a lush natural environment. The bottom line is that only women can make themselves understood without recourse to meaning, as happens in the aphorisms Rrose. In other words, only the woman is impregnable. As irony.

[2]
Duchamp pursues a primitive form of eros: this is evident from his idea of ​​marriage, she understood as a dead end, as a tomb. The Dimanches caricature of 1909 is merciless in this regard: the double couple with newborn baby, is reduced on Sundays to the boring walk where is the man to push the wheelchair, while his wife, pregnant again, walking wearily side. On your choice of bachelor, attracted to women but rejected by marriage, Duchamp once said to Pierre Cabanne: “I realized from an early age that we should not weigh you down with too much weight, with too many jobs, with a wife, with children, a country house, a car; fortunately I was convinced right away. That’s why I could live with much greater ease, as a bachelor, what I would do if I had to deal with all the usual problems of life. ” Duchamp always defended this sense of freedom, and writing once to Arturo Schwarz on the meaning of marriage said: “I’ve carefully avoided until the age of 67 years. I married a woman who, because of his age, could not have children. ” Although in fact he had already married in 1927, remaining married for the paltry three-month period. Eros is for Duchamp a serious matter; It is what replaces the irony absent. In an interview on 8 December 1961 Alain Jouffroy he asked Duchamp if he believed that humor was essential to the creation of the artwork, and he answered, “absolutely. I care particularly because seriousness is very dangerous thing. To avoid it is necessary the intervention of humor. The only serious thing I could consider is eroticism. Now that’s serious. ” ⁽⁴⁾

This idea is the basis of Rrose Sélavy philosophy, author of the aphorism that converts the pathos into a pleasure and excitement of writing in a thought. At the bottom of his procedure is eroticism, because Eros comes from the continuous news situation: the thought becomes erotic when it manifests itself as a thought in constant training, and as such is apparent from Duchamp’s works in 1911 and 1912 Dulcinée; Jeune homme dans un train sad; Nu descendant un escalier. To aspire to the erotic novelties you have to use the language into its elementary components. The language is Rrose for that chocolate that Duchamp grinding in Broyeuse de chocolat (1914) to obtain a cocoa powder which, with the addition of humorous sugar, becomes a sweet powder usable in many mixtures, something not viable with solid chocolate.

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Figure 10
Marcel Duchamp, Bottle Dryer,
1914/1964

There is also a ready made of Duchamp that can be read in antiphrastic sense: Egouttoir 1914, the circular bottle rack (Fig. 10) standing without support, very common object in the wine France. It seems to represent what should not happen in the language: the aphorisms Rrose should not dry up like bottles stuck upside down in the bottle rack. Egouttoir obviously refers to the verb égoutter, drip, which in turn very closely recalls égoûter, remove taste: if something is drained loses all taste. The erotic procedure involves the preservation of taste: Sex is the difference, not the repetition. One of the strong points of Duchamp’s biography is the reason for its abandonment of painting: questioned about, always answered similarly. In the interview she appeared October 23, 1965 on the Spanish newspaper “Siglo XX” replied that it was “because of repetition: you can do three or four exceptional things, but everything else is repetition.” In the interview to “Paris-Normandie” of April 12, 1967 said that “there is nothing more boring than repetition. All that is not unusual or uncommon falls into oblivion. ” But the erotic also implies the need to escape the latch taste created by a static tradition. In the short film A conversation with Marcel Duchamp aired on NBC January 15, 1956, Marcel said at one point that there was a danger of reaching a kind of taste: “If you repeat a number of times, it becomes taste” . ⁽⁵⁾

If there is a risk that Duchamp has systematically avoided it is to be repeated: tried constantly new ways of expression, up to the voluntary silence. Duchamp takes us by the hand and leads us to a luxurious vision of Nothing: despite this, his work triggers excitement. It happens to the body of the Jeune homme dans un train sad, and what the naked running down the stairs: both assume ever different form, such as ideas, to their liquid nature and eternally moving. Duchamp did not choose to portray firm forms, snapshots of a precise time, as well as the aphorisms Rrose are unrelated linguistic forms to common logic.

Duchamp eliminates any reference of authority: it does dissolving the meaning in a soft dough for free use. A man (the artist) makes the sign and let the other man (the user) should draw the meaning he wants. So there is the man, fleshy and round; there is the sign, geometric and creaky as the stylus that track; Finally there are the Meanings, Sea of ​​Nothingness. With the sign you can create authority: you can create utopias and theologies. Meaning to assign a sign is how to establish a relationship of authority. But you can also rid the authority sign here is the erotic action, indifference task, the nullification of the way. If you remove the sign the Meaning, it appears purity. Duchamp came to free-movement with art-the Sign of the meanings, and to leave to sign the freedom to absorb the mixture of arbitrarily Meaning that the user specifies. And freedom is the Meaning of gesture art, gesture “political” in its very essence.

[3]
In the Dictionnaire du abrégé surréalisme Eluard and Breton they inserted the definition of Duchamp on ready made “normal Subject promoted to the rank of art object for the simple choice of the artist.” But Duchamp recurs elsewhere in the dictionary, and perhaps the initials M. D. initials that the “Hasard” are his “Hasard en conserve.” The definition means “The event preserves”; It may be deformed in “Jam of the case” and there you could find already a sense, certainly not wanted by Duchamp. You might think that the fact that the case is mixed very well with the rest of the case to form the jam every single existence. Preserve the case of Duchamp has he achieved by an act of pure caprice. In his work, he entices the viewer to interpret, to comment, to add to the data (if anything, the simple fact of the readymade) other data.

However, everything is arbitrary, useless, sterile ineffective. The production of Rrose (and Duchamp) causes an arcane stupor, refractory to any rational speculation. The erotic Rrose results in sterility of Gnostic flavor: there is in fact a form of sterile celibacy in those Rrose Sélavy. Are arbitrary sentences that trigger an idea, an image, a comment of reaction, a number of interpretations, in turn, sterile, unnecessarily repeated endlessly. And this refers to the great religious intuition of Giordano Bruno: the infinite universe that contrasts with the need for finite universe on which the Thomism was holding. Bruno, however, involves the field of divinity (pantheism), Duchamp, however, shows that matter is infinite Nothing. Bruno claims a gesture of consciousness: be aware that the infinite is the image of God present in every particle of the universe; Duchamp claim instead an act of irresponsibility: “The unconscious is an orphan, atheist, unmarried.” ⁽⁶⁾ Only through recklessness it is preserved celibacy and atheism. The single figure is an infidel, as the orphan’s abandonment figure of nowhere. In the religious sphere Duchamp cultivates a pure atheism, what leavens the case put canned.

But if the arbitrariness dominates the actions of Duchamp, his choice of infertility is free. He could choose to be fertile; choose instead of being sterile, and let the multiplication of nowhere is implemented by those who are fertile, ie the “other.” He bequeaths a castle that sterile multiply interpretations of his works of art or-in the case of Rrose-of his aphorisms. Thereby establishes a two-way relationship: the barren makes sure that the fertile may perpetuate his futile fertility; fertile grants the bachelor-sterile remain so: grant him the pleasure of onanism (bachelor’s onanist by definition).

It should not be considered of secondary importance that the business card Rrose the first title is the business of “Precision Optics” is a clear invitation to take, in trade with Rrose, a precise look that omit nothing, or at least do not put into the background some observations for which you need special perspective arm themselves.

It is gnostic optics.

Gnostic idea is that man is a lump of light lit in the dark prison of the world, full of pain and hurt. The world output is only possible with a purification, also punishable by transformation into a different creature. Rrose is an erotic and at the same time pure creature with his birth, like that of Botticelli’s Primavera by the waves, Duchamp landed at an unprecedented conquest of knowledge and vision. Its transformation into a female character was not a sacrifice in the name of the Great Mediterranean Mother, but the definition of pure being Gnostic (Cathar) as a creature who lives outside of the world.

Lover of all modern forms of expression, even Breton paused several times on the figure of Duchamp. In Testimony 45, article published in March 1945 in the special issue devoted to Duchamp by the American magazine “View”, Breton poses a radical question: to what extent, after the appearance of the major work of Duchamp, The Marié mise à nu, both legitimate to continue painting as if it did not exist. The appearance of Duchamp becomes second Breton something increasingly imperative: “It tends to denounce as obsolete and useless most of the recent artistic production.” ⁽⁷⁾

Here is the purifying action of Duchamp, his evangelical Cathars: make a clean sweep of all, the need to impose the New Radically. He did it by becoming incarnate in Rrose Sélavy and making a Erotica Gnosis or, if you prefer, a Gnostic Erotica: in any case coming to the highest position to understand what in the world-and in life-worth is attempted.

Notes

1. The androgyny of the Mona Lisa with a mustache is just the most visible aspect of a phenomenon that has much more profound developments. See the long article by Lanier Graham, Duchamp & amp; Androgyny: The Concept and its Context Tout-Fait. The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal, vol. 2, n. 4, January 2002. & lt; http://www.toutfait.com/issues/volume2/issue_4/articles/graham/graham1.html

In this area could also fall sexual alteration of Étant donnés (the 1946-1966): the female genitalia observed through the holes of the door appear off-center, as if the artistic reality is different from that of nature . But back to Man Ray should be noted that he was the photographer of both the female nudity is of that priapo paperweight that exists in marble and metal versions. Photographing Rrose, Man Ray operated a blending of the feminine and priapic, up to portray a sexually ambiguous creature and infertile. If in fact the priapo fixed erection on a cold ineptitude so the eternally naked woman Man Ray does not raise physiological tension and the viewer turns into an icy inept.

2. M. Duchamp, Ingénieur du temps perdu. Entretiens avec Pierre Cabanne , Paris, Belfond, 1967, p. 118. The exact phrase written on the painting by Picabia was “en 6 qu’habilla rrose Sélavy”; you can see a good reproduction of the picture in Arturo Shwarz, Almanac Dada , Cambridge: Polity Press, 1976, p. 340. But see also Jennifer Gough-Cooper and Jacques Caumont, “Ephemerides on and about Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Sélavy 1887-1968,” in volume Marcel Duchamp , Milan, Bompiani, 1993, the date of November 1, 1921.

3. The interview of 23 July 1964 published in the aforementioned Ephemeris , to date. The production aphoristic Rrose Sélavy is collected in Marcel Duchamp, Marchand du sel. Ecrits de Marcel Duchamp , edited by M. Sanouillet, Paris, Le Terrain Vague, 1958 (Italian translation: Cava dei Tirreni, Rumma Publisher, 1969) and in Duchamp du signe. Ecrits , edited by M. Sanouillet, Paris, Flammarion, 1994. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson have dedicated to these phrases a whole chapter of their book Salt Seller . The Writings of Marcel Duchamp , New York, Oxford University Press, 1973.

4. To see the interview of Cabanne. Ingénieur du temps perdu , cit., P. 23. The idea expressed in Schwarz is reported in The machines celibate, curated by Harald Szeemann, Milan, Electa, 1989, p. 189 note 4. The interview of 8 December 1961 was published in the aforementioned Ephemeris , to date. The humor value it also reads the first lines of the interview released by Duchamp to Guy Viau of the Canadian Radio-Television July 17, 1960, now published under the title changer de nom, Simplement Tout-Fait. The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal, vol. 2, n. 4, January 2002.lt; http://www.toutfait.com/issues/volume2/issue_4/interviews/md_guy/md_guy.html

The erotic pursued by Duchamp seems to dive into the theory that Susan Sontag expresses the Against Interpretation ; the American writer there says that the vitality of interpretation is saved by the application of an “erotic” procedure, “hermeneutics.”

5. For all these statements, see the aforementioned Ephemeris , the respective dates.

6. Gilles Deleuze, in The Bachelor Machines , cit., P. 15.

7. The article is now collected in André Breton, Oeuvres completes , vol. III, Paris, Gallimard, 1999, pp. 144-145.

Figs. 1-5, 7, 9-10 © 2003 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. All rights reserved.

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• 
  Figure 1A
  Man Ray, Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, 1920
• 
  Figure 1B
  Marcel Duchamp, Cover of “The Blindman No. 1, ” April 1917
  (detail of the drawing by Alfred J. Frueh)
• 
  Figure 2A
  Man Ray, Portrait of James Joyce, 1922
• 
  Figure 2B
  Drawing by James Joyce for Finnegans Wake (1939), p. 308.

Is Marcel Duchamp the model for a character in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake?
Yes.
Is this character attractive? No.
Does this character have an equally unattractive twin brother based on Joyce? Yes.

Finnegans Wake ^[1]is unique in our history: never has a work of literature been so widely known by name yet so rarely read cover to cover. Its fame rests in part on the fact that its author was already world famous from earlier works when it was first published. And the reason for its relative neglect by readers can be explained by even a cursory glance at any one of its 626 pages: Joyce, it would seem, had practically invented a new language, roughly based on English. Offsetting the neglect of the novel by the public at large is the humming worldwide industry of Joyce scholars who are busily earning Ph.D’s trying to decipher it.

There are many parallels between Marcel Duchamp (Fig. 1A)(who earned necessary money teaching French to Americans) and James Joyce (Fig. 2A)(who earned necessary money teaching English to Europeans). If Finnegans Wake was unprecedented in literary history, Duchamp’sLarge Glass was no less so in the history of art. Like Joyce, Duchamp was already world famous from earlier work by the time the world saw the mold-shattering new work. In the case of both the artist and the writer, that earlier work was considered extremely difficult by the general public, and was embraced only by a very small number of sympathetic artists; with the Glass and the Wake, Duchamp and Joyce respectively reached a point in their odysseys where their sympathy for the ease of their audience was very close to nil. ^[2] (Fig. 1B and 2B)

Duchamp, though the younger by five years, was considerably earlier than Joyce in reaching this iconoclastic stage. For all its difficulties, Ulysses, written between 1914 and 1921, contains many passages that readers of the time could relatively easily accept as viable literature. Duchamp’s 3 Standard Stoppages, 1913–1914 (Fig. 3), and Bottle Dryer, 1914 (Fig. 4), on the other hand, were decidedly not considered viable by art lovers when they appeared on the scene.

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• 
  Figure 3
  Marcel Duchamp, Three Standard
  Stoppages, 1913-14.
• 
  Figure 4
  Marcel Duchamp, Bottle Dryer,
  1914/1964.

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Figure 5
Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped
Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, 1915-23

Duchamp made his first drawings for parts of The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (a.k.a. The Large Glass) (Fig. 5) in 1912, began the piece itself in 1915, and stopped working on it in 1923. ^[3] He made his last additions to it in New York before mid-February of that year, when he left for Europe. ^[4] Joyce started Finnegans Wake on March 10, 1923. It seems a marvelous coincidence that Duchamp ended work on his unprecedented artwork only a few weeks before Joyce started work on his unprecedented book; a person of a metaphysical bent, believing in some sort of transmigrating artistic energy, might posit a scenario out of the coincidence. The writer Calvin Tomkins pointedly connects the most ambitious and notable work of the artist with that of the writer: “The Large Glass stands in relation to painting as Finnegans Wake does to literature, isolated and inimitable; it has been called everything from a masterpiece to a hoax, and to this day there are no standards by which it can be judged.” ^[5]“Masterpiece” and “hoax,” of course, are the two labels most often attached to Finnegans Wake as well.

*

We maintain that beginning with Jarry . . . the differentiation long considered necessary between art and life has been challenged, to wind up annihilated as a principle.
—André Breton^[6]

Alfred Jarry:There is great wisdom in modeling one’s soul on that of one’s janitor. 1902

James Joyce: I have a grocer’s assistant’s mind. 1925.

Marcel Duchamp: I live the life of a waiter.1968.

A snow shovel? A bottle rack? A bicycle wheel? A focus on the ordinary was a significant feature of Duchamp’s contribution to the visual arts. With his Readymades he sought to elevate mass-produced objects into art’s realm. And he made clear that he considered the idea behind this gesture the most important of any that had come to him.

There is a parallel in Joyce’s transparent insistence that the ordinary is extraordinary. This interest was apparent to other writers: Richard Ellmann, his biographer, tells us that “to [William Butler] Yeats, Joyce was too concerned with the commonplace.” ^[7] Ellmann himself states, “The initial and determining act of judgment in [Joyce’s] work is the justification of the commonplace.” ^[8] This tendency can be seen in Joyce’s day-to-day proceedings as well as in his writing. To his friend the bookstore proprietor Sylvia Beach, for example, he said, “I never met a bore.” ^[9] (Nicely parallel is Duchamp saying that he never saw a painting from which he was unable to get something of interest.) Like Duchamp, too, Joyce was capable of de-emphasizing the inventive genius of the originating author in favor of some more generic principle of creativity: speaking of Finnegans Wake to Eugene Jolas, founder of the literary review transition, he said, “This book is being written by the people I have met or known.” ^[10] To a substantial degree this statement could apply even to Joyce’s early novel Stephen Hero and the collection of stories Dubliners, but it rings ever truer as we travel through Ulysses and then Finnegans Wake, with its “hero” H. C. Earwicker, also referred to as “Here Comes Everybody.”

In harmony with this, we find that Ulysses, notwithstanding its structural debt to the Homeric epic, lays out a single day in the life of middle-class citizens of Dublin. AndFinnegans Wake, for all its complex structure and portmanteau words, tells of a tavern keeper, his wife and his three children, yet again in Dublin, Joyce’s native town.

One of Duchamp’s many contributions to modern art, of course, was the willful use of the principle of chance, seen most vividly in the early Three Standard Stoppages, 1913-14. A few years later he ordered the title of the magazine he launched in 1917 to be Wrongwrong, but a printing mistake transformed it into Rongwrong. The error appealed to him and he accepted the title. ^[11] Joyce too, according to Ellmann, “was quite willing to accept coincidence as his collaborator.”^[12]

Once or twice he dictated a bit of Finnegans Wake to Beckett . . . in the middle of one such session there was a knock on the door which Beckett did not hear. Joyce said, “Come in,” and Beckett wrote it down. Afterwards, he read back what he had written and Joyce said, “What’s that ‘Come in’?” “Yes, you said that,” said Beckett. Joyce thought for a moment, then said, “Let it stand.”
^[13]

Authors and critics have found tonal similarities in the work of Duchamp and of Joyce. Ellmann, for example, remarks of Finnegans Wake that its “mixture of childish nonsense and ancient wisdom had been prepared for by the Dadaists and Surrealists.” ^[14] This complements Michel Sanouillet’s statement that “perhaps no one was . . . more spiritually dada than Marcel Duchamp. In [him] are joined the essential elements of the dada revolt.”^[15]

Duchamp, who said that his notes for The Large Glass were part of the piece, often repeated that all of his work was based on literature. In the 1910s he said, “I felt that as a painter it was much better to be influenced by a writer than by another painter.” ^[16] In 1922, meanwhile, the year after the publication of Ulysses and a year before he began Finnegans Wake, Joyce said that his writing owed much to painting. ^[17] He can actually be seen as striving toward an end result more typical of painting than of writing: after suggesting to a friend that he could compare much of his work in Ulysses to a page of intricate illuminations in the Irish monastic volume The Book of Kells, he continued, “I would like it to be possible to pick up any page of my book and know at once what book it was.” ^[18] And he wrote to Lucia, his daughter, “Lord knows what my prose means. In a word, it’s pleasing to the ear. And your drawings are pleasing to the eye. That is enough, it seems to me.” ^[19]

Both Duchamp and Joyce would have been at a loss without female patronage. In Duchamp’s case, Katherine Dreier was sufficiently devoted to have sometimes followed the artist in his travels—whether invited or not—and named him the executor of her will; she bought the Large Glass from Duchamp’s early supporter Walter Arensberg, and held on to it. In Joyce’s case we find Beach and Harriet Weaver, among others. Both men, however, were known to treat women unfeelingly, and Joyce at times could sound sexist: granting that some women “have attained eminence in the field of scientific research,” he could add, “But you have never heard of a woman who was the author of a complete philosophical system, and I don’t think you ever will.” Yet he admitted in a letter: “throughout my life women have been my most active helpers.” ^[20]

The Readymades and The Large Glass have been lauded or vilified as the end of art as we used to know it, and critics made similar comments on the publication of Finnegans Wake. Joyce himself remarked of his book, “I’m at the end of English.” ^[21] Yet, despite these and a slew of other connections and parallels, no essay to my knowledge has appeared discussing the possibility of a significant personal connection between these two uniquely influential geniuses. My explorations tell me that a single essay can only serve as introduction to the subject.

Joyce and Duchamp, both international figures by the 1920s, moved in the same social circles, yet no biography of either man mentions a meeting of the two. This writer, who was on friendly terms with the artist’s late widow, Teeny Duchamp, once asked her whether she was aware of any meeting or contact between Joyce and Duchamp. She answered that she was not. The only evidence I’ve found that strongly suggests they may have met is in a short biography of the American bookbinder and art patron Mary Reynolds, who “held an open house almost nightly at her home at 14 rue Halle [in Paris], with her quiet garden the favored spot after dinner for the likes of Duchamp, Brancusi, Man Ray, [André] Breton, [Djuna] Barnes, [Peggy] Guggenheim, [Paul] Eluard, Mina Loy, James Joyce, Cocteau, Samuel Beckett, and others.” ^[22] Since Duchamp was all but living with Reynolds at the time, the likelihood that he and Joyce did not meet diminishes as a possibility.

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Figure 6
Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending
a Staircase, No. 2, 1912

Figure 7
Marcel Duchamp, Photograph of Fountain
by Alfred Stieglitz, 1917

Whether they met or not, however, I believe that Duchamp was the model for a character in Finnegans Wake, and by no means a sympathetic one. But this is consistent with Joyce’s world outlook; it is probably true of most of the hundreds of characters from past and current history with whom he filled his book. Duchamp’s fictional re-creation, I believe, had to do not only with his presence and reputation in Paris but with more particular considerations having to do with his personality and his relationships. In the years we are focusing on he enjoyed as wide a celebrity in the visual arts as Joyce did in the literary world. And their respective positions dovetailed extraordinarily: both known to the cognoscenti as possessing enormous abilities, both considered bad boys by the larger public. Largely responsible for Duchamp’s bad reputation was Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1913 (Fig. 6), andFountain, 1917(Fig. 7), the notorious upended urinal exhibited as art; for Joyce it was the four-letter words in Ulysses, never before seen or permitted in legitimately published English novels. Duchamp’s “scandal” had been widely publicized in 1917 when New York’s protectors of public morals refused to exhibit the urinal on the grounds that it was “immoral” or “vulgar.” ^[23] In Joyce’s case the refusal to allow Ulysses entry into various countries on identical grounds was important news. Duchamp lived to seeFountain attain status as one of the most important artworks of the twentieth century; Joyce lived to see a similar destiny for Ulysses.

A few details about Duchamp’s relationship with American art patron Mary Reynolds and with the American collector John Quinn may help to explain why Joyce painted the character I find he based on Duchamp in such colors as he did. If this interpretation is correct, the surprise is compounded by the fact that neither Duchamp nor Reynolds is mentioned at all in Ellmann’s massive and highly detailed biography of the writer.

Duchamp and Joyce actually lived within blocks of each other at various times in Paris in the ’teens and 1920s. They were also close to many of the same people. Both Constantin Brancusi and Man Ray, for example, probably the two artists closest to Duchamp, made celebrated portraits of Joyce: Brancusi executed two true-to-life drawings of him followed by a totally abstract one that became famous and was eventually the frontispiece for Ellmann’s biography; Man Ray’s 1922 photograph of Joyce may be the most haunting portrait of a writer or artist ever made by Ray. Samuel Beckett, who met Joyce in 1928, was quite close to both the writer and the artist, as was Reynolds, although in a different way.^[24] Yet although Joyce must have seen a great deal about Duchamp in the Paris press, and no doubt heard intimate stories about him from excellent personal sources, there is only sparse documented evidence that Joyce and Duchamp even knew of each other’s existence.

click to enlarge

Figure 8
Marcel Duchamp, Cover of
transition, no. 26, 1936

One has to search to find them acknowledging each other. In 1937, when a reproduction of Duchamp’s 1916 Combreadymade was chosen as the cover of an issue of transition(no. 26) (Fig. 8)—the same issue that featured an installment of Joyce’s Work in Progress (the working title of Finnegans Wake)—Joyce intriguingly told Beach, “The comb with thick teeth shown on this cover was the one used to comb out Work in Progress.” ^[25] The comment, I would argue, suggests some kind of connection between Joyce and Duchamp that no biographer to my knowledge has yet explored. In Duchamp’s case I know of two references to the writer. Once, telling Dore Ashton in a 1966 interview how some authors were famous in the way of an expensive Swiss chocolate while others were famous more in the way of Pepsi-Cola, Duchamp remarked that Joyce was in the latter category. And in 1956, in a book introduction, he wrote of Reynolds’s “close friendship with André Breton, Raymond Queneau, Jean Cocteau, Djuna Barnes, James Joyce, Alexander Calder, Miro, Jacques Villon, and many other important figures of the epoch.” ^[26]

click to enlarge

Figure 9
Marcel Duchamp, Opposition
and Sister Squares Are Reconciled, 1932

Reynolds, one of Joyce’s inner circle, ^[27] was also a “lifelong friend” of Joyce’s perennial intimate Beckett; the two writers would sometimes meet at her house. ^[28] Joyce’s son Giorgio likewise stayed there at the same time as Beckett. ^[28A] It was in Reynolds’s house that Beckett started his relationship with Peggy Guggenheim, and they lived there for a short while after. ^[28B] Beckett and Reynolds were kindred spirits who would eventually both work bravely for the French Resistance. (Joyce, meanwhile, made a point of saying that he was not physically brave; Duchamp similarly once remarked that his response to an invasion would be to stand with folded arms.) Beckett’sEndgame, was to an extent inspired by a chess book Duchamp had co-written, Opposition and Sister Squares Are Reconciled (Fig. 9). ^[29]

This same Mary Reynolds loved Duchamp with an undying fervor. Their sexual relationship survived hell and high water, including Duchamp’s strange, short-lived marriage to a plump, not overly attractive, well-to-do woman. His liaison with Reynolds began in 1924, and “in spite of his refusal to let it impinge on his freedom, it lasted for the better part of two decades.” ^[30] Duchamp’s friend Henri-Pierre Roché who introduced them, would later write in his journal,

She suffers. Marcel is debauched. Has loved, perhaps still loves, very vulgar women. He holds her at arm’s length at the edge of his mind. He fears for his freedom. She wants to attach herself to him as he
says. (Mary’s eyes moisten with offended sweet pride.) . . . He comes to see her every day. Hides their relationship from everybody. Doesn’t want her to speak to him at the Café du Dome when they see each other each evening. Hides her. Gets out of their taxi a hundred yards before arriving at the home of friends. She loves him, believes him incapable of loving. . . . Just as a butterfly goes for certain flowers, Marcel goes straight for beauty. He could not go for Mary, but he protects against her his life, his calm, his solitude, his chess game, his amorous fantasies. ^[31]

If Joyce objected to Duchamp’s treatment of Reynolds, it was not due to middle-class prudishness: one of his closest intimates was the Irish tenor John Sullivan, whose “family life was deeply entangled between a wife and a mistress.” ^[33] Joyce himself may have remained with Nora Barnacle, the woman who loved him, until the end of his life, but a letter of 1904 to an aunt in Dublin suggests inner cravings for an independent existence; with his and Nora’s first child, Giorgio, not yet five months old, he wrote that as soon as he earned some money from his writing he intended to change his life: “I imagine the present relations between Nora and myself are about to suffer some alteration. . . . I am not a very domestic animal—after all, I suppose I am an artist—and sometimes when I think of the free and happy life which I have (or had) every talent to live I am in a fit of despair.” ^[34] He did stay with Nora, marrying her in 1931, when he was forty-nine, after twenty-seven years of cohabitation. Yet around that time he told Jolas, “When I hear the word ‘love’ I feel like puking.” ^[35] Nora for her part, after being cajoled by friends, not for the first time, into returning home to her penitent husband after she had fled his drunken behavior, said in 1936, “I wish I had never met anyone of the name James Joyce.” ^[36] Yet Joyce, when not under the influence, obviously felt a powerful attachment to Nora. In 1928–29, when she was sent into the hospital for operations twice within a four-month period, he refused to be separated from her, and “had a bed set up in her room so that he could stay there too.” ^[37]

As far as women were concerned, then, Duchamp seemed callous and acted accordingly; Joyce could speak callously and behave boorishly, but proceeded loyally. Oddly, each artist got into an inverse relationship with the same male associate, the American lawyer and collector John Quinn. In 1919, when an antiques dealer offered to sell the definitive version of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, Quinn decided that $1,000 was “much too steep.” But in July of that year he and Duchamp met and apparently hit it off. Quinn, a fellow bachelor and, like Duchamp, a “well-known connoisseur of pretty women,” ^[38]would eventually buy Brancusi sculptures through Duchamp, find a job for the artist when he needed one, and take French lessons from him for a fee. Once, “deciding that Duchamp looked tired and thin, Quinn sent him a railroad ticket and a paid hotel reservation for a few days’ vacation . . . in an . . . ocean resort on the New Jersey shore. Duchamp showed his gratitude by dashing off a pen and ink sketch of the collector and presenting it to him ‘en souvenir d’un Bontemps a Spring Lake.’” ^[39]

Joyce was a less comfortable beneficiary of Quinn’s patronage. In March 1917 Quinn sent Joyce money, but only in return for the manuscript of Exiles. He also wrote a laudatory review of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in Vanity Fair, ^[40] and later he would buy the manuscript of Ulysses. But Joyce never agreed with Quinn on the value of his manuscripts, ^[41] and he told Ezra Pound that he did not consider Quinn generous. ^[42]When Quinn tried and failed to defend Ulysses against obscenity charges in an American court, Joyce was critical of his legal strategy, clearly believing that a different approach would have brought more chance of success. ^[43] And he cannot have been pleased to learn that Quinn had told the publisher whom he had unsuccessfully represented, “Don’t publish any more obscene literature.” The only friendly thing Ellmann reports Joyce saying about Quinn came after the collector’s death, in 1924.

All the evidence shows that Joyce expected help from everyone in reach. He firmly believed in his own greatness and was not shy of trading on it. Duchamp may have had as solid a core of self-confidence, but while he took help where he could get it, he did not behave as though it were his birthright. Much more adept at navigating life’s breakers than Joyce, he seems to have been widely admired and even loved. Despite his clear refusal to make a commitment to Reynolds, for example, she remained devoted to him until her death. I met Duchamp once, engaging in a twenty-minute conversation with him the year before his death; the strong impression I was left with of his personality could best be described as “natural Zen aplomb.” Others who were very close to him agree with this evaluation with hardly a qualification. The vivid contrast with Joyce is everywhere evident. A somewhat related illustration appears in Ellmann: “Beckett was addicted to silences, and so was Joyce; they engaged in conversations which consisted often of silences directed toward each other, both suffused with sadness, Beckett mostly for the world, Joyce mostly for himself.” ^[44]

* * *

On June 8, 1927, in Paris, Duchamp married Lydie Sarazin-Levassor, the granddaughter of a successful manufacturer. (They would divorce in about half a year.) “The unavoidable conclusion seems to be,” writes Tomkins, “that Duchamp had made a cold-blooded decision to marry for money. . . . When [he] learned at the formal signing of the marriage contract, in the presence of lawyers representing both parties, that the sum Lydie’s father was prepared to settle on her came to only 2,500 francs a month (slightly more than $1,000 in today’s terms of exchange), Duchamp did not immediately back out. He turned pale, according to Lydie, but he signed the contract.” ^[45] That same summer Joyce composed a connective episode in his ‘Work in Progress’ (later titled Finnegans Wake)—an insert between two previously completed segments, “The Hen” and “Shem the Penman”—including several pages that seem to me rife with uncomplimentary allusions to Duchamp. ^[46] Since the content of these aspersions typically involves avarice, the timing of the writing supports the suspicion of a connection between this insertion and Duchamp’s newsworthy marriage. The section of Finnegans Wake that we’re about to explore was written three years after Quinn’s death and the start of Duchamp’s relationship with Reynolds, and only weeks after the marriage that some of Duchamp’s friends saw as a Dadaist joke.

I suspect that Joyce’s Professor Ciondolone is based in the main on Duchamp. My caution stems from the knowledge that few characters in the Wake are based on a single person, evidence of the universality of certain human traits as Joyce saw them. The brothers Burrus and Caseous, for example, are temporary stand-ins for the twin brothers Shem and Shaun, two of the book’s five main characters; for Ellmann the twins in Finnegans Wake were “every possible pair of brothers or opponents.” ^[47] One such opponent among Joyce’s contemporaries was the writer and artist Wyndham Lewis, whom Joyce sometimes seems to pair up with himself in Finnegans Wake—Lewis was a sometime friend who had heavily attacked Ulysses in his book Time and Western Man. But when Burrus and Caseous become stand-ins for Shem and Shaun for about five pages, I believe they are largely based on Duchamp and Joyce. If this analysis is accurate, Quinn would be their commonly shared source of milk. Consistent with the idea of twins, they seem at times to exchange personality traits, just as Shem and Shaun periodically do. In the commentary that follows, it is important to keep in mind that almost all of Joyce’s descriptions in the Wake make multiple allusions to a dizzying variety of reference points. In focusing on Duchamp, I am effectively forcing into the background the other references that I’m confident are also present. I fully expect other Sherlocks, perhaps without even arguing with my basic analysis, to have different interpretations. For all we’ll ever know, all may have some kernel of truth.

* * *

My heeders will recoil with a great leisure how at the outbreak before trespassing on the space question^[48]

where even michelangelines have fooled to dread I proved to mindself as to your sotisfiction how his abject

all through (the quickquidQuick buck.of Professor Ciondolone’s

too frequently hypothecated Mortgaged, i.e., borrowed.Bettlermensch)Bettler(German): beggar, so “beggarman.”is nothing so much more than a mere cashdime however genteel he may want ours, if we please (I am speaking to us in the second person),
The phrase suggests the idea of twins on which Joyce will elaborate below. for to this graded intellecktuals dime is cash and the cash system.

you must not be allowed to forget that this is all contained, I mean the system, in the dogmarks of origen on spurios) Darwin’Origin of Species, i.e., the survival of the fittest. think of Duchamp’s statement, “In a shipwreck it’s every man fohimself.means that I cannot now have or nothave a piece of cheeps Cheese.in your pocket at the same time and with the same manners as you can now nothalf or half the cheek apiece I’ve in mind

and Caseous

have not or not have seemaultaneously sysentangled themselves, selldear to soldthere, once in the dairy days of buy and buy. Both Duchamp and Joyce sold to Quinn, exchanging their wares—art or manuscripts—for “milk” to free them from the needs of normal labor. Burrus,let us like to imagine, is a genuine prime, the real choice Cheese. full of natural greace, Grease, grace.the mildest of milkstoffs yet unbeaten as a risicide

and, of course, obsoletely unadulterous

whereat Caseous is obversely the revise. Rival, reverse. of him and in fact not an ideal choose by any meals, though the betterman of the two is meltingly addicted to the more casual side of the arrivaliste case Arriviste—perhaps Joyce’s view of Duchamp (second definition: an unscrupulous, vulgar social climber; a bounder).and, let me say it at once, as zealous Jealous.over him as is passably he.

Probably the “art question,” as opposed to the “literature question.” The reverse, the “time” question, brings to mind Lewis’s Time and Western Man, with its attack on Ulysses.
Great artists
Feared to tread.
His object, but conceivably a reference to what I believe Joyce must have considered abject behavior on Duchamp’s part: marrying someone he thought wealthy, and in church (both Duchamp and Joyce were outspoken atheists), while deserting Reynolds, a woman of real value in the estimation of Joyce and his circle
Quick buck.
ciondolone (Italian): idler, lounger. Breton had famously accused Duchamp, the chess bum, of being an idler, wasting his great intellegence.
Bettler(German): beggar, so “beggarman.”
The phrase suggests the idea of twins on which Joyce will elaborate below.

In 1924 Duchamp had spent a month on the Riviera, “experimenting with roulette and trente-et-quarante at the Casino, trying out various systems. In a letter to [Francis] Picabia, Duchamp described in . . . detail his attempts to work out a ‘martingale,’ or system, for winning at roulette. He had been winning regularly, he said, and he thought he had found a successful pattern. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘I have ceased to be a painter, I am drawing on chance.”^[49]

Darwin’Origin of Species, i.e., the survival of the fittest. think of Duchamp’s statement, “In a shipwreck it’s every man fohimself.means that I cannot now have or nothave a piece of cheeps Cheese.

Possibly a reference to the wealthy Quinn: both Joyce and Duchamp wanted their bread buttered by the same knife, and the question was whether there would be enough butter for both of them.

Cassius, but also caseous: cheesy.
^[50]

demarcation line) with a cheese dealer’s pass.” ^[51] Did he have such a pass going back to the mid-twenties?

Both Duchamp and Joyce sold to Quinn, exchanging their wares—art or manuscripts—for “milk” to free them from the needs of normal labor.

Cheese.

Grease, grace.

Regicide—Brutus and Cassius conspired to kill Caesar. Also risus (Latin): laugh—so perhaps killer of laughter?
If Burrus is Joyce in this passage (Joyce also appears as Caseous, but Caseous and Burrus at times seem to switch personalities), he may be describing himself here as a faithful husband, and therefore obsolete—especially in the face of Duchamp’s recent behavior, interrupting a three-year-old affair with Joyce’s friend Reynolds in order to marry – to all appearances – for money (a marriage that Duchamp’s circle unanimously, and accurately, believed would be short-lived).
Rival, reverse.

Arriviste—perhaps Joyce’s view of Duchamp (second definition: an unscrupulous, vulgar social climber; a bounder).

Jealous.

Can possibly be. Perhaps Joyce is saying that each twin is jealous of the other.

We’ll leave Burrus and Caseous for awhile. My reading has Caseous and Burrus as temporary stand-ins for Shem and Shaun. They mainly represent Duchamp and Joyce. They’re the twins – butter and cheese- in competition for the milk from Quinn; and they are both close to many Reynolds, although in very different ways. I believe there is a strong likelihood that Duchamp’s abrupt discarding of Reynolds in favor of what was widely perceived as a marriage of convenience was a significant motivating factor in his rewriting the passage. It appears on pages 160 and 161 of the Viking edition. This is section I.vi, first published in transition, No.6, Sept. 1927, a few months after Duchamp’s very public marriage in Paris. The timing could not be better if this interpretation is on the mark.

The year of 1927, and particularly its first half, contains much of interest to one delving into a connection between Joyce and Duchamp. “The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly,” from a section of Finnegans Wake that Joyce revised for publication in June 1927, contains many references that seem likely connections to Duchamp. ^[52] Here are lines leading up to “The Ballad”:

Afterword
You know he’s peculiar, that eggschicker, with the smell of old woman off him, to suck nothing of his switchedupes. M.D. made his ante mortem for him.

—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake^[69]

The section of Finnegans Wake containing these two sentences was revised for publication in transition no. 11, issued in February 1928. “M.D.” may refer in part to Marcel Duchamp. (It may also refer to Jonathan Swift, a frequent presence in the Wake: “M.D.”—“My dear”—was Swift’s abbreviation in letters to Stella, a major love of his life.) “Eggschicker,” from “chicker, to chirp as a cricket” (OED), is a word consistent with my reading of various sections of the Wake in which Joyce seems to be poking fun at Duchamp’s writing efforts. The idea of stuttering recurs (a cricket repeats its chirp), being repeatedly associated with Vico and others; here it may refer to Duchamp’s magazine rongwrong, and to the numerous repetitions in his notes.

“The smell of old woman off him…”: Here I recall Duchamp’s description of Rrose Sélavy as “an old whore.” “. . . to suck nothing of his switchedupes.” Duchamp in drag as Rrose. M.D. made his ante mortem for him. “L. ante mortem: before death.”^[70] This may be an inversion, a device beloved by Jarry, Joyce, and Duchamp. The “his” here may refer to Jarry, since the section contains many allusions to Jarry, according to my reading; if so, the inversion would translate “M.D. made Jarry’s ‘after death’ for him” into “M.D. made Jarry’s ‘afterlife’ for him,” a comment on Duchamp’s repeated trips to the well of Jarry-esque imagery—as if Duchamp had made Jarry immortal.

Admittedly, this is only one of numerous interpretations that come to mind. It brings to mind Joyce’s famous comment that his Finnegans Wake would keep the scholars busy for a thousand years.

There are sections of Finnegans Wake in which Duchamp does not seem on the scene as a character, yet in which multiple isolated allusions correspond to words and imagery from his works. Jarry imagery often lurks nearby. Between page 526, line 24, and page 527, line 25, for example, we find:

526.24: it was larking in the trefoll of the furry glans with two stripping baremaids, StillaUnderwood and Moth Mac Garry. The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even is the formal title of Duchamp’s Large Glass; his Traveller’s Folding Item, 1916, is an Underwood typewriter cover. Regarding “Moth McGarry,” a famous, highly poetic section in Jarry’s book The Supermale offers a graphic symbolist version of sexual intercourse by picturing a large death’s head moth that took no notice of a lamp but “went seeking . . . its own shadow . . . , banging it again and again with all the battering rams of its hairy body: whack, whack, whack.”^[71]

527.03: Listenest, meme mearest! The French version of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even is La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même.

527.07 even under the dark flush of night. The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.

527.09: Strip Teasy up the stairs. The Bride Stripped Bare. . . . The best-known work of Duchamp’s early years as a painter is surely Nude Descending a Staircase, made in two versions of 1911 and 1912 respectively. “…upthe stairs.” could be another simple inversion.

527.18: under nue charmeen. Nue, the French for “naked,” again recalls The Bride Stripped Bare . . . / La Mariée mise à nu. . . .

527.21: Blanchemain, idler. . . . Listen, meme sweety. MD See 160.3. The name “Professor Ciondolone,” we have seen, derived from the Italian for “idler,” according to our reading refers to Duchamp. “Meme” again refers to The Large Glass.

527.24: It’s meemly us two, meme idoll. The Large Glass.

527.25: meeting me disguised, Bortolo mio. In Beaumarchais’s play The Marriage of Figaro, and in the related operas by Mozart, Paisiello, and Rossini, Dr. Bortolo is a bachelorwho wants a bride.

Duchamp said, “Eroticism is a subject very dear to me. . . . In fact, I thought the only excuse for doing anything was to introduce eroticism into life. Eroticism is close to life, closer than philosophy or anything like it; it’s an animal thing that has many facets and is pleasing to use, as you would use a tube of paint.” ^[72]

Duchamp’s notes from 1912–14 for The Large Glass center on love play and sexual intercourse between humanlike machines, and reveal just how dear eroticism was to the artist. The artist writes, for example,

The Bride is basically a motor. . . . The motor with quite feeble cylinders is a superficial organ of the Bride; it is activated by the love gasoline, a secretion of the Bride’s sexual glands and by the electric sparks of the stripping. (to show that the Bride does not refuse this stripping by the bachelors, even accepts it since she furnishes the love gasoline and goes so far as to help toward complete nudity by developing in a sparkling fashion her intense desire for the orgasm.^[73]

Published literature of the period did not talk this way, and unfettered pornography would have used an entirely different vocabulary. These notes were pioneering in more ways than one.

click to enlarge

Figure 14
Marcel Duchamp, Given: 1. The Waterfall / 2. The Illuminating Gas, 1946-66

Before its abrupt transformation into an art object, Duchamp’s upended urinal, Fountain, had been a gracefully curvy receptacle for male effusions. The title L.H.O.O.Q., we have seen, which he gave his Mona Lisa with added mustache and goatee, corresponds to the French for “She has a hot ass,” a loose translation of “There is fire down below.” The name of Duchamp’s famous female alter ego, Rrose Sélavy, who made her debut in 1921, is based on the phraseEros c’est la vie (Eros is life). Her pronouncements include, “Have you already put the hilt of the foil in the quilt of the goil” and “An incesticide must sleep with his mother before killing her.” The medium of Paysage fautif, 1946, is semen on Astralon. In theUntitled Original for Matta’s Box in a Valise, 1946, pubic hair is taped to paper. Female Fig Leaf, 1950, Wedge of Chastity, 1954, and the posthumously revealed Etant donnés . . . (Fig. 14) all feature casts supposedly made from a vagina, while Objet D’art, 1951, is decidedly phallic.

Joyce’s writing too was famously erotic, to the point where Ulysses was restricted in its distribution. Erotic and scatological passages can be found without too much effort on every page of Finnegans Wake.^[74] Molly’s erotic soliloquy, the unpunctuated tour de force with which Ulysses ends, was on its own to a large extent responsible for his early fame among the general public; and in the “Bloom in Nighttown” section (Sirens) of Ulysses, creative abandon reaches an erotic pitch reminiscent of Jarry, Rabelais, and The Thousand and One Nights.

Other parallels: Ellmann writes: ‘Joyce had been preparing himself to write Ulysses since 1907. It grew steadily more ambitious in scope and method, and represented a sudden outflinging of all he had learned as a writer up to 1914.’^[75] By way of coincidence, Alfred Jarry, who I argue was a strong unacknowledged source for Joyce, died in 1907 (at the age of 34). And in 1914, Duchamp wrote his famous ‘formula’ for Art: Arrhe est ‘a art que merdre est a merde:

An English translation might read: ‘Deposit is to art as shitte is to shit.’ Jarry’s ‘merdre’ is the only word not found in any dictionary. Given Duchamp’s extreme interest in the erotic, a likely interpretation would be, ‘My way of saying fucking corresponds to everyone else’s way of saying art as Jarry’s way of saying shit corresponds to everyone else’s way of saying shit’ – or more succinctly, ‘My fucking is to your art as Jarry’s shit is to your shit’.
We have seen in Joyce’s 1909 letters to Nora that Joyce was avidly coprophilic. Joyce scholar Clive Hart states, ‘There can be no denying that Joyce found everything associated with evacuation unusually pleasurable…’^[76] In Finnegans Wake Kate’s monologue ends with this passage: ‘And whowasit youwasit propped the pot in the yard and whatinthe nameofsen lukeareyou rubbinthe sideofthe flureofthe lobbywith. Shite! will you have a plateful? Tak.’^[77] Later in the same work we find Joyce’s verbal version of his own thumb-nosing drawing that we have reproduced at the top of this essay: ‘…kissists my exits’.^[78]

Duchamp’s urinal-as-art, Fountain, 1917, recalls Joyce’s earlier distillations of the erotic and scatological scrawls found on ‘the oozing wall of a urinal’.^[79] In Ulysses, there is this famous exchange: ‘-When I makes tea I makes tea, as old mother Grogan said. And when I makes water I makes water.’
‘-By Jove, it is tea, Haines said.’
‘Buck Mulligan went on hewing and wheedling’:
‘-So I do, Mrs. Cahill, says she. Begob, ma’am, says Mrs. Cahill, God send you don’t make them in the one pot. (Joyce’s italics.)^[80]
And lastly, in Finnegans Wake, Earwicker and Shaun complete an act of communion with the transubstantiated urine of the goddess Anna – daughter of the former, sister of the latter –:‘…when oft as the souffsouff blows her peaties up and a claypot wet for thee, my Sitys, and talkatalka tell Tibbs has eve…’^[81]

Notes

[1] James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, New York: Penguin, 1976 (1939).

[2] In this—but not solely in this—there is a common precedent in the eccentric turn-of-the-century French symbolist poet/playwright Alfred Jarry (1873–1907). Jarry’s strong effect on both James Joyce and Marcel Duchamp is the subject of six earlier essays by this writer, two for this journal: “Duchamp on the Jarry Road,” Artforum, September 1992; Jarry, Joyce, Duchamp and Cage, Catalogue for the Venice Biennale, 1993; William Anastasi with Michael Seidel, “Jarry in Joyce: A Conversation,” Joyce Studies Annual, 1995; “Jarry in Duchamp,” New Art Examiner, October 1997; “Jarry and l’Accident of Duchamp” in: Tout Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal, vol. 1, nr. 1 (December 1999); and “Jarry, Joyce, Duchamp and Cage” (rev. ed., in English, of the Italian 1993 Venice Biennale essay, with additions), in: Tout Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal, vol. 1, nr. 2 (May 2000).

[3] See Anne D’Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine, eds., Marcel Duchamp (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1973), p. 18.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors (New York: Penguin, 1965), p. 28.

[6] André Breton, quoted in Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), p. 217.

[7] Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York: Oxford UP, 1959), p. 608.

[8] Ibid., p. 3.

[9] Ibid., p. 5.

[10] Joyce, quoted in Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 5.

[11] Irene E. Hofmann. Mary Reynolds and the Spirit of Surrealism (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1996), p. 139.

[12] Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 662.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid., p. 559.

[15] Michel Sanouillet (ed.), introduction, in The Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Oxford UP, 1973), p. 6.

[16] Ibid., p. 19.

[17] Joyce, quoted in Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 559

[18] Ibid.

[19] Joyce, quoted in Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 702.

[20] Joyce, quoted in Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 648.

[21] Ibid., p. 559.

[22] Susan Glover Godlewski, “Warm Ashes: The Life and Career of Mary Reynolds,” in: Mary Reynolds and the Spirit of Surrealism (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1996), p. 108.

[23] See Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Delano Greenidge, 2002), p. 467.

[24] For Samuel Beckett, Joyce was a revered father figure while Duchamp was a friend closer to his own age, as well as a constant chess partner. Beckett “enjoyed Marcel Duchamp, who lived near him. [Mel Gussow] commented on Duchamp’s found objects, such as the urinal he exhibited as a work of art. Beckett laughed: ‘A writer could not do that.’” Mel Gussow, Conversations with and about Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1996), p. 47. In 1981 Beckett “spoke [to a new young friend, Arnold Bernold] of the days before . . . recognition had descended on him, of Joyce with undiminished reverence, of Marcel Duchamp, of his early days in Paris.” Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (New York: Da Capo, 1997), p. 573.

[25] Joyce, quoted in Ellmann, James Joyce., p. 744.

[26] Marcel Duchamp, in Surrealism and Its Affinities: The Mary Reynolds Collection, a bibliography compiled by Hugh Edwards, (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1956), p. 6.

[27] The only other female, as mentioned by Gussow as being in Joyce’s “own circle,” is Nancy Cunard; in Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist, p. 573. Only one other close female friend of Joyce’s, Nancy Cunard, is described as “close” in this collection of conversations; see p. 47.

[28] Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett (London: Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich, 1978), p. 68.

[28A] Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett (New York, Da Capo, 1977), p. 311.

[28B] Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett, p. 276.

[29] Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett, pp. 465-467.

[30] Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), p. 257.

[31] Henri-Pierre Roché, quoted in ibid., p. 258.

[32] Ibid.

[33] Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 633.

[34] Joyce, quoted in Brenda Maddox, Nora (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), p. 66.

[35] Joyce, quoted in p. 631

[36] Nora Joyce, quoted in Ellmann, James Joyce (rev. ed., 1982), p. 700.

[37] Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 619.

[38] Tomkins, Duchamp, p. 148.

[39] Ibid, p. 149.

[40] Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 427.

[41] Ibid., p. 569.

[42] Ibid., p. 494.

[43] Ibid., p. 569.

[44] Ibid., p. 661.

[45] Tomkins, Duchamp, p. 278.

[46] Joyce, Finnegans Wake, pp. 126–216.

[47] Ellmann, James Joyce, (rev. ed., 1982), p. 545.

[48] Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p. 160.

[49] Calvin Tomkins, Marcel Duchamp, p. 259.

[50] I have explored Jarry’s influence on both Joyce and Duchamp in earlier articles; see Anastasi, Jarry, Joyce, Duchamp and Cage, and Anastasi and Seidel, “Jarry in Joyce: A Conversation.” Throughout the Wake I find Jarry referred to with near reverence. Joyce was an intimate friend of Léon Paul Fargue, who in his youth had been Jarry’s closest friend and probably his lover. (Some believe him to have been Jarry’s only lover.) Joyce would likely have heard all about Jarry from Fargue. A photograph of the “Déjeuner Ulysse” banquet, given by Adrienne Monnier in June 1929, shows Fargue sitting next to Joyce near the center of twenty-six guests. See Richard Ellmann, ed.,Letters of James Joyce Letters vol. III (NY: Viking, 1966), p. 193. Jarry’s Faustroll, with its intermittently incomprehensible narrative and numerous made-up words, is an obvious forerunner of the Wake. Jarry’s biographer Keith Beaumont, writing of Faustroll and other works of Jarry’s that followed the lead of Stéphane Mallarmé, says, “The result is at times something in the nature of a verbal delirium which, at one end of the literary spectrum, recalls the delight in words of Jarry’s other great mentor, Rabelais, and, at the other, looks forward to the Joyce ofFinnegans Wake and beyond.” Beaumont, Alfred Jarry: A Critical and Biographical Study (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), p. 303. Jarry published his Caesar Antichrist in 1895. Passages in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar are likely to have informed the Burrus and Caseous sections of Finnegans Wake. Shakespeare has Cassius say of Caesar, for example, “Why man, he doth bestride the narrow world / Like a Colossus; and we petty men / Walk under his huge legs, and peep about / To find ourselves dishonourable graves.” Julius Caesar I, ii, 134. Jarry in life was very short, but since Joyce loved inversion (as did Jarry and Duchamp), he could have seen the Colossus image as a humorous inversion once he had set on the idea of Brutus (Burrus) and Cassius (Caseous) as stand-ins for himself and Duchamp. Actually, for Joyce to picture Jarry as a powerful father (a colossus), with himself and Duchamp as underlings, is consistent with images of Jarry found elsewhere in the book. Again, Shakespeare has Caesar say of Cassius, “He reads too much; / He is a great observer, and he looks / Quite through the deeds of men; he loves no plays, / As thou dost, Antony; he hears no music; Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort / As if he mock’d himself, and scorn’d his spirit, / That could be mov’d to smile at anything. / Such men as he be never at heart’s ease, / Whiles they behold a greater than themselves, / And therefore are they very dangerous.”( I, ii, 197) It was known that Duchamp – in contrast to Joyce – did not enjoy music. And just as Joyce was confident that no living writer could compare with himself, Duchamp behaved in a way that suggested a similar confidence in relation to other artists.

[51] Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (New York: Viking, 1971), p. 79.

[52] Joyce, Finnegans Wake, pp. 44–47. “By end of 1923 notebook containing rough drafts of all the episodes in Part I except i and vi (pp. 30–125, 169–216) was probably filled.” Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 801. “In 1927 Joyce was revising Part I (pp. 3–216) for publication in transition.” Ibid., p. 802.

[52A] Ellmann, 1975, The Viking Press, NY, Selected Letters of James Joyce, p.181

[52B] Ibid, p.184

[53] Roland McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake (rev. ed. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. 44.

[54] See David Hayman, ed., A First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake (Austin, TX: Texas UP, 1963), p. 66.

[55] “The crate containing The Large Glass—in storage since the closing of the Brooklyn Museum exhibition in early 1927—had been shipped from the Lincoln Warehouse to “The Haven,” [Katherine] Dreier’s country house . . . where she planned to have it permanently reinstalled. On opening the crate, however, the workmen had discovered that the two heavy glass panels . . . were shattered from top to bottom. Tomkins, Duchamp, p. 288.

[56] Roland McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake, p. 44.

[57] Breton, quoted in Tomkins, Duchamp, p. 261.

[58] Alfred Jarry, “The Virgin and the Mannekin-Pis,” in: Selected Works of Alfred Jarry (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 127.

[59] Ibid.

[60] McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake, p. 45.

[61] Ibid.

[62] Tomkins, Duchamp, p. 280.

[63] McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake, p. 46.

[64] Tomkins, Duchamp, p. 281.

[65] McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake, p. 46.

[66] Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, pp. 703–4.

[67] Breton, quoted in Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I, p. 217.

[68] McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake, p. 47.

[69] Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p. 423.

[70] McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake, p. 423.

[71] Jarry, The Supermale, trans. Ralph Gladstone and Barbara Wright (New York: New Directions, 1964), p. 39.

[72] Duchamp, in an interview with George H. Hamilton and Richard Hamilton, in “Art and Anti-Art,” BBC radio broadcast, London 1959. Quoted in Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (London: Thames & Hudson, 1969), p. 80.

[73] Michel Sanouillet (ed.), Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, p. 42.

[74] This observation is backed up by years of highly pleasurable research by the present writer and the resultant book on the subject, Up Erogenously, copyright January 2003 (unpublished).

[75] Richard Ellmann : James Joyce, new revised edition, 1982, Oxford University Press NY, Oxford, Toronto. p. 357

[76] Clive Hart, Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake, 1962, Faber and Faber, London.

[77] Finnegans Wake, p.142

[78] Finnegans Wake, p.280

[79] Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, p. 113

[80] Ulysses, p.17

[81] Finnegans Wake, p. 117

Figs. 1B, 3-14

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

SinceCourbet, it’s been believed that painting is addressed to the retina.That was everyone’s error. The retinal shudder! Before, painting had other functions: it could be religious, philosophical, moral. If I had a chance to take an antiretinal attitude, it unfortunately hasn’t changed much; our whole century [the twentieth] is completely retinal,except for the Surrealists, and still they didn’t go so far!⁽¹⁾

click to enlarge

Figure. 1
Marcel Duchamp, The Green
Box, 1934

Marcel Duchamp’s comment is very strange when one considers the number of his works that involve the distinctly retinal phenomena of optical illusions; these works, produced mainly in the 1920’s, he termed “precision optics.” Optical illusions are an important part of his work because of their unusual characteristics: they present multiple ‘interpretations’ which cannot all be ‘true’ at the same time, but which are nevertheless ‘correct’ ways to see the work. They allow him to incorporate a systematic destabilizing of vision in the system which he attempted to create in the 1910s, and which was presented inThe Green Box (Fig. 1). The systems Duchamp constructed are inconsistent. They produce contradictions which are incorporated into their meaning. In the case of “precision optics,” this inconsistency is a physical component of the work due to the action of the illusions themselves:

But let us now say exactly what is meant by consistency of a formal system… that every theorem, when interpreted becomes a true statement. And we will say that inconsistency occurs when there is at least one false statement among the interpreted theorems.⁽²⁾

Optical illusions present images which are “true” but inconsistent. The lines which form the pulsating illusion in Duchamp’s “precision optics” gain their meaning only from the relationship we choose for them; our internal decision that one orientation is more probable than another results in its apparent shift between these mutually-exclusive spatial positions, and understanding it requires the acceptance of these potentials as being a “probability set.” This is why these images are technically inconsistent–they present incompatible versions of themselves. Visual forms of this ‘class’ offer a liminal experience–one where the process of seeing becomes visible in/through that process itself. The optical illusion is a liminal experience; it allows a visualization of the process of interpretation which is normally unconscious. Vision is rendered regressive by optical illusions.

The name ‘rotoreliefs’ refers to optical illusions which appear as three-dimensional forms when displayed on a rotating surface(Fig. 2)such as a phonograph turntable. Superficially, they present an apparent contradiction to this prohibition against “retinal art.”‘ Once in motion they display a pulsating “relief” that oscillates between positive and negative space. Duchamp used these illusions in Anémic Cinéma (1926)(Fig. 3) alternating them with a series of French puns, each arranged into a spinning spiral:

Something else happens when we begin to allow the puns to have their play. The figurative meaning of “la moelle de l’épée” and “la poele de l’aimée” over powers the literal (non)sense.The reference to sexual intercourse could hardly be more evident.Furthermore, once we recognize its figurative character, our readingof the other disks begins to reveal sexual allusions. …Suddenly the abstract gyrating shapes which rise from and sink into the plane of the screen come to resemble the igloos, breasts, welts and genitalia evoked by the words. The sexuality is neither in the literal meaning
of the words, nor represented in the optical illusions, seen by themselves.⁽³⁾

 
click images to enlarge

• Figure 2
  Marcel Duchamp, Rotoreliefs, 1935
  (machine modeled after 1964 version
  created by Vittorio Marchi and
  Robert Slawinski)
• Figure3
  Marcel Duchamp, Disk Inscribed with Pun
  for Anemic Cinema, 1926.

P. Adams Sitney recognized that sexuality is the subtext to this film, but it is a subtext which requires the interpretation of the viewer looking at the juxtaposition of rotorelief and the text. The meaning produced is an overlay onto the image; this overlay does not resolve the issue of the (potential) retinal nature of these images. The sexuality which Sitney notes is a result of the punning character of the statements; these “word plays” act through a double meaning which becomes apparent when they are read aloud. The doubling of the puns parallels the doubling of the ‘rotoreliefs.’ The gyrating shapes Sitney describes are theretinal aspect of the ‘rotoreliefs.’ This effect originates in the inconsistency of human perception which optical illusions exploit. It is the interpretative shift of the “precision optics” which moves the experience of looking from the purely visual into the mental realm:

“Painting should not be exclusively visual or retinal. It must interest the gray matter; our appetite for intellectualization.”⁽⁴⁾

click to enlarge

Figure. 4
Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped
Bare by Her Bachelors, Even [ The
Large Glass], 1915-1923

“Retinal art” does not promote an intellectual response; that is only the initial effect / impression which this art produces. Duchamp’s conversion of this retinal impression in Anémic Cinéma into sexuality is connected to the system of construction he presented in The Green Box (1934). Inconsistency also enters into “precision optics” becauseThe Large Glass (Fig. 4)is an attempt at a complete formalized system of sexual congress; this is what the notes in The Green Boxdescribe.’The “mathematical” bias to the construction notes demonstrates Duchamp’s concern with formal systems. His system creates a linguistic formalism, derived from the abstract system of mathematics. It allows his introduction of a ‘formal’ component into the work provided that the viewer is aware of the system he employs:

Conditions of a language:

The search for “prime words” (“divisible” only by themselves and by unity).

Take a Larousse dict. and copy all the so-called “abstract” words. i.e., those which have no concrete reference Compose a schematic sign designating each of these words. (this sign can be composed with the standard stops) These signs must be thought of as the letters of the new alphabet.⁽⁵⁾

The invention of new “signs” for an abstract language corresponding to terms in a dictionary without concrete reference divests language of its meaning, allowing its manipulation in purely technical terms. His proposal parallels what Hilbert attempted to do for mathematics.The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even Duchamp claims is the result of the system which The Green Box documents. The meaning of “abstract” words appears only through their contextual usage. Duchamp suggests what he means by this in his text called *the. While the search for “prime words” and all that entails may be an unrealizable proposal, the new “signs” which become the letters of a “new alphabet” would logically be used to produce a new, formal and abstract language in the same sense that Hilbert’s formal system transforms the ordinary language of geometry into a new language. Kurt Gödel demonstrated in 1932 that formal systems such as Hilbert’s produce inconsistencies which are inherent to logic:

Gödel showed (i) how to construct an arithmeticalformula G that represents the meta-mathematical statement: ‘The formula G is not demonstrable.’ This formula G thus ostensibly says
of itself that it is not demonstrable. … But (ii) Gödel also showed that G is demonstrable if, and only if, its formal negation ~ G is demonstrable.⁽⁶⁾

Gödel’s proof is based on a paradox: Theorem G is demonstrable only if it is not demonstrable, but to demonstrate that it is demonstrable is to show that it isn’t. The appearance of this infinite regression of logical consequence arises because G is inconsistent; in the formal system of logic, its construction is both correct and invalid at the same moment. The statement is a true statement of logic that cannot be true. The paradox which G’del produces is one that follows the formal rules for the logical system of symbolic mathematics from which the description above is a translation; that system is thus inconsistent:

Gödel’s paper is proof of the impossibility of demonstrating certain postulates… The traditional belief that the axioms of geometry (or, for that matter, the axioms of any discipline)
can be established by their apparent self-evidence was thus radically undermined. …For it became evident that mathematics is simply the discipline par excellence that draws the conclusions logically implied by any given set of axioms or postulates.⁽⁷⁾

click to enlarge

Figure. 5
Marcel Duchamp, The Standard
Stoppages, 1913-14

In general terms, what G’del demonstrates is that the set of assumptions which provide the foundation for logical certainty have an arbitrary basis because they can be shown to produce inconsistency. In epistemological terms, formalized knowledge derived from logic is in itself an inconsistent proposition; this is Gödel’s Theorem.⁽⁸⁾Duchamp’s work, most obviously in his optical illusions, proceeds from a similar use of paradox to undermine the formal system he proposes. The parameters of that language are suggested by Duchamp’s work–the reference to The Standard Stoppages (1913-14) (Fig. 5) as the unit of measure places the “signs” inside his physical oeuvre.

Viewed by themselves and not as part of the film, the ‘rotoreliefs’ become optical illusions only when they are in motion. Until that happens, they are circular geometric signs. Understanding them as objects requires considering them as they appear when moving and stationary; in motion, their most evident feature is the illusion of space which they evoke.

To lose the possibility of recognizing (identifying) 2 similar objects — 2 colors, 2 laces, 2 hats, 2 forms whatsoever to reach the Impossibility of sufficient visual memory, to transfer from one like object to another the memoryimprint.
— Same possibility with sounds; with brain facts.⁽⁹⁾

The “loss” Duchamp describes implies a transformation of the retinal into a mental construction of the type which optical illusions typically present: they provide two similar objects contained in a single image which defies our ability to easily visualize it.⁽¹⁰⁾ The experience of optical illusions allows us to look at “seeing.” In apprehending these illusions we do transfer the memory from one image to the next; that is how we recognize the oscillation between the two positions. In a comment published in 1948, Duchamp echoed his note from The Green Box:

Senses:

One can look at seeing. Can one hear hearing, feel breathing, etc. . . . ?⁽¹¹⁾

By “look at seeing” Duchamp describes the particular interpretative effect which accompanies optical illusions. The ‘rotoreliefs” visual oscillation only results from spinning the disks. There is a double contrast here: between static image and the motion image, as well as between the two interpretations of the illusion of positive and negative volumes. It is not possible to “see” both volumes at the same time just as it is not possible to experience the illusion while the disk is stationary. The shift from one volume to the other makes the observer aware of the way biological vision gets interpreted into “seeing.”

The encounter with the “space” which these illusions create is a delayed one–the machine that displays them must first be set in motion. Once that happens, the “space” of the illusion becomes immanent. However, this “space” is unstable as Anémic Cinéma demonstrates and Sitney observes: the illusions pulsate, apparently projecting outwards only to reverse their direction and recede. The volumes which the ‘rotoreliefs’ create are internally inconsistent–they present two mutually incompatible images at the same time. In looking at these objects, it is the process of interpretation which becomes apparent through the oscillation thatAnémic Cinéma connects with sexuality.

The oscillations of these optical illusions may be the “cinematic blossoming” produced by the Bride’s desire. Duchamp makes this condition apparent in his explanation of each component of the Large Glass:

The bride basically is a motor. …The whole graphic significance is for this cinematic blossoming. This cinematic blossoming is by the electrical stripping (see the passage of the
bach. machine to the bride) … The last state of this nude bride before the orgasm which may (might) bring about her fall graphically, the need to express in a completely different way from the rest
of the painting, this blossoming.⁽¹²⁾

The appearance of the ‘rotoreliefs’ in a film called Anémic Cinéma is not coincidental; it is explicitly related to the Large Glass. This note suggests that the “blossoming” cannot be presented in the same manner as the rest of the painting. The action of the pictured machinery will not actually appear within the painting itself. It is suggestive of the ‘rotoreliefs,’ especially due to their appearance in the film. The pulsating movement of the ‘rotoreliefs’ visibly resembles “blossoming.” That the “whole graphic action” of the Large Glass cannot be expressed by the same techniques as the painting is significant. The work may be technically “unfinishable”; part of its being left “incomplete” may be the depictive problem which is solved by optical illusions such as the ‘rotoreliefs.’

As with a record, the ‘rotoreliefs’ have a hole in the center which is registered on a pin centered on the turntable. The mounting of the disk presents a sexual metaphor which is repeated throughout Duchamp’s iconography. “Precision optics” presents’ an illusion of graphic movement which makes the reliefs appear when playing the disk. This activity is a replay of the action of the chocolate grinder. The static nature of the disk is “consumed” by setting it into motion:

Given an object in chocolate.

1^st its appearance = retinal impression (and other sensory consequences)

2^nd its apparition.

The mould of a chocolate object is the negative apparition of the plane with one or several curvatures) generating 1^st (by elementary prllll-ism)the colored form of the object. 2^nd the mass of elements of light (chocolate type elements): in the passage from apparition (mould) to the appearance, the plane, composed of elements of chocolate type light determines the apparent chocolate mass by physical dyeing⁽¹³⁾

Duchamp explicitly explains the transition from retinal to mental here. The senses the concept of “apparition” suggest: (1) the opposite of its retinal effect. This “sense” would mean that “apparition” is a mental state of perception for an object. (2) That the “apparition” appears discursively through a sequence of terms he sets in context. (Continuing the mathematical parallel, these are undefined terms in a Hilbert-type formalism where meaning appears through specific contextual use rather than a direct definition). The “apparition” is a visual effect that appears mentally through the “chocolate type light.” The chocolate object is consumed by the chocolate grinder to produce the illuminating gas for the bride machine.⁽¹⁴⁾ The bride machine then begins moving to produce the “cinematic blossoming”–which is the action of the ‘rotoreliefs.’

Static imagery transforms into (both) mental and physically activity; the playing of a rotorelief on a phonograph thus recreates the action of the bachelor machine which fuels and makes active the bride. By playing the disk the audience takes the place of the bachelors. The bachelors are the force which sets Duchamp’s “mathematics” in motion. Theirs is a specific position in his system, one which repeats in his final work:

[In Etant Donnés…] Marcel Duchamp has determined forever exactly the amount of detail and precisely the fixed perspective that he wants the viewer to perceive. The illusion is complete in itself. Etant Donnés could be described as the alter ego of the Large Glass.⁽¹⁵⁾

click to enlarge

Figure. 6
Marcel Duchamp,
Given: 1. The Waterfall,
2. The Illuminating Gas,
1945-1966

Etant Donnés (1945-1966)(Fig. 6)is a large complex optical illusion. The fixed perspective / view places the audience looking through the door not only in the role of voyeur, but shifts the spectator into the role of the bachelors in the Large Glass. This action is repeated by the ‘rotoreliefs.’ It is important to remember that a phonograph of the type available in the 1920’s requires someone to crank the machine to set the disk into motion. The spectator “grinds” the “chocolate object” producing the “chocolate type light” which is the motion of the disk. Without this active participation nothing happens.

The apparition of the ‘rotoreliefs’ is after-the-fact of retinal stimulation: a “delayed” experience where the transfer from visual comprehension to intellectual comprehension is a change in mental state. That the work is an optical illusion reiterates the relationship as a “false” one. It cannot be both flat and dimensional at the same moment. The knowledge that it is flat and the perception of volume are incompatible. “Precision optics” are therefore inconsistent. Thus, perception of the finished piece is separated from its reality through the interpretation. Duchamp’s approach incorporates the inconsistency of observation that optical illusions exploit:

The figure [of Etant Donnés] is carefully designed to be seen as flattened and foreshortened by the perspective from a fixed eye-level viewpoint; the distant landscape background
and the immediate foreground of the door through which one looks are integral parts of the illusion.⁽¹⁶⁾

The optical component of these works, their “retinalism,” is an illusion: they are not physically as they appear, nor is their effect a result of their physical reality. Where theLarge Glass both excludes the audience (by incorporating them into some of the potential views), the later work replaces the bachelors with the audience. This shift appears specifically in the ‘rotoreliefs.’

Within this framework, the film Anémic Cinéma is rendered almost redundant through its literalization of the “cinematic blossoming” the ‘rotoreliefs’ demonstrate literally through cinema. The “anemia” of the title suggests an awareness of this redundancy by Duchamp and a connection between this awareness and the word “cinema” itself. The title is a near-palindrome, spelled the same forwards as backwards. It presents the problem of “2 similar objects” and allows the function of the puns and word-play of this film as derivable from the system of “prime words.” Each pun replays the action of the ‘rotoreliefs’ linguistically. It is a translation between the everyday language of “undefined terms” and the symbolic order which his formal notational system proposes. The role of “precision optics” is to present these “signs” in the form of new statements. Inconsistency plays a significant role in these works because they base their effect and thus their meaning on the encounter between the audience and the work itself.

At first sight Anémic Cinéma would seem to underline the difference between optical and verbal images. The two modes of representation are held together by the figure of the spiral. Yet we automatically apprehend them differently. The eye grasps the eccentric circles as if they were geometrical wholes. … While the view sees one set of disks as creating depth, he “reads” the other set as flat because of his reflex to the familiar orthography of the Latin alphabet. Thus,the viewer is the victim of an automatic response at odds with the ontological “sameness” of the shots.⁽¹⁷⁾

The translation of one set of terms into a statement within a formalized system is an action of rendering equivalences between one kind of notation and another. However, this action is only apparent to those who are aware of both formal systems; the sexual implication of the combination which Sitney notes, instead of simply being a juxtaposition of “neutral” content, is a logical combination within the system Duchamp calls “precision optics.” He applied that term to the Rotary Demisphere (1925) (Fig. 7a, b, c, d) and the ‘rotoreliefs’ generally. The “precision” of these works lies in the linkage between the retinal (optical illusion) and the formal logical system. This is more than just an iconographic connection; it is the literal relationship between equivalent terms in a mathematical formalism. While the retinal effect of the two kinds of presentation in Anémic Cinéma remains markedly different, it is also fundamentally the same mental sphere. Alternation in the sequence of the film demonstrates their interchangeability. While Sitney is correct that “the sexuality is neither in the literal meaning of the words, nor represented in the optical illusions, seen by themselves,” the formal system Duchamp devised is sexual: his art is representational within that system: thus sexual.

click images to enlarge

• 
  Figure. 7a
• 
  Figure. 7b

• 
  Figure. 7c
• 
  Figure. 7d

Marcel Duchamp, Rotary Demisphere, 1925

 

The appearance of the sexual content is built-in to his conception of “antiretinal.” The only group of artists which he believes also took an antiretinal attitude were the Surrealists. Given the sexual content of the mathematics at work in the ‘rotoreliefs’ and Etant Donnés…it is logical that Duchamp would feel Surrealism was also antiretinal is logical. The function of optical illusions in his later works is predicated on this translation of sexuality into visual forms. This is explicit in his final work. Inconsistency is inherent to this formulation not only because optical illusions exploit inconsistency as their form, but because the initial version of his formalized system presented in the Large Glass places the audience physically outside the system while at the same time including them in it:

The Large Glass and some of its studies are, of all Duchamp’s creations, the most accessible (to the point of being literally transparent) as well as the most abstruse. We see through them more than we see them. The viewer becomes part of the view.⁽¹⁸⁾

Anne d’Harnoncourt’s description of the Large Glass presents its inconsistency clearly through the combination of “accessible” and “abstruse.” This is a paradox. It cannot be both.That Duchamp’s art is paradoxical is self-evident: “we see through them more than we see them.” The transparency of the work is also its opacity. The inconsistency inherent to the optical illusion plays itself out intellectually and literally. “Precision optics”–Anémic Cinéma and the ‘rotoreliefs’–then, are important elements in the elaboration of Duchamp’sinconsistent system of formalized sexuality. There is a component of the rhetorical in Duchamp’s claims; for example, the system he claims produced the Three Standard Stoppages has been shown to be false.⁽¹⁹⁾ The precision of the “precision optics” lies in the way that they translate these rhetorical positions and claims into the physical form of the objects themselves. This is the intellectualization Duchamp mentions being a partial component of Surrealism, but which “stopped short” because it does not completely subsume the work into the intellectual framework in the fashion that “precision optics” does.

Notes

Figs. 1~7

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

Abstract
This paper examines the intersection of symbolic logic, immersive experience [VR] and concept visualization in the interpretation of the oeuvre of Marcel Duchamp. Influenced by the mathematicians Henri Poincaré and Élie Jouffret as well as his own intense practice of chess and logic, Duchamp sought to merge the poetic and visceral nature of the aesthetic experience with the logical and systematic character of science. This convolution of elements as disparate as chance, 3d and 4d space-time, linguistics, logic and authorship does not allow for comfortable definitive explanation but rather one, like his work itself, that engages simultaneous multi-dimensional thinking.

Duchamp questioned the purpose of ‘retinal art’, art which is merely visually beautiful, and examined the limitations of science as a singular method of interpreting and communicating experience. The body of his work stands as a systematic yet playful critique of deterministic reasoning. Using symbolic logic to characterize the most common interpretations of Duchamp’s work, the author suggests that Concept Visualization in 3d immersive experience offers a unique method for exploring and introducing the complex lattices of interpretation, intention and concept in the work of Marcel Duchamp.

Introduction

click to enlarge

Figure 1
Marcel Duchamp, Rotorelief (Optical Disks), 1935

Marcel Duchamp perhaps more than any other artist in history challenged the definition of art. Throughout his life Duchamp maintained an interest in science, mathematics, optics and art and more than any other eminent artist of the twentieth century understood and researched non-Euclidean geometry and the mathematics of higher dimensionality. Born in 1887 in Blainville (Seine-Infériuere) in Normandy to a notary’s family with a history of art, love of music literature and chess, Marcel as well as his brothers Jacques Villon, Raymond (Duchamp-Villon) and his sister Suzanne became artists. Among his scientific ventures included the development of the illusionistic Rotorelief, (Fig. 1) spinning circular geometric patterns. Although Italian optical scientist discovered and named this optical phenomenon “the stereo-kinetic effect” in 1924, it is clear that Duchamp had discovered the phenomena in early 1920. It is clear that Duchamp understood the mathematics of this method of producing the illusion of volume. He wrote, ” I only had to use two circumferences–eccentric–and make them turn on a third center”.

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Figure 2
Leonardo da Vinci, La Gioconda [Mona Lisa],
1503-05, Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Figure 3
Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q., 1919

The history of art is filled with artists whose discoveries and research were labeled or advocated as objet d’ art and whose scientific utility was not discovered until many years often centuries later. However, it is the supposition of this author, that no other artist cloaked his or her intentions in deception as a tactic to subvert conventional interpretation. Noted and controversial Duchamp scholar Rhonda Shearer has garnered attention by a stunning hypothesis about the many realms of Duchamp’s work. In 1919 Duchamp drew a supposed impromptu mustache on a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (Fig. 2) and titled it L.H.O.O.Q.(Fig. 3) When these letters are read aloud they say “Elle a chaud au cul” or “She has a hot ass” in French. Having created this work of art Duchamp stated that it revealed a truth about his noted foregoer.
Duchamp championed the “ready-made”, a manufactured object transformed into art merely by its selection and placement in an aesthetic gallery or museum context. In so doing, Duchamp altered the significance of the objet d’ art as a precious commodity created by the artist. Duchamp often maintained complex documentation of the purchase or discovery of his “found-objects”. In the case of L.H.O.O.Q., Duchamp asserts that it was purchased in a postcard shop on Paris’ rue de Rivoli. This notion that the art object is defined and given value by its context not by an empirical judgement of aesthetic value would transform the art of the twentieth century, greatly influencing Conceptual Art and Postmodern movements. Duchamp’s assertion that art is a matter of selection and context was perhaps a precursor to Baudrillard’s Second Order of Simulacra.
According to Shearer, Duchamp had another more subversive objective. She asserts that Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. was in fact a creation of Duchamp–a composite photograph of himself taken in 1912 and a reproduction of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Shearer’s research suggests that not only was L.H.O.O.Q. created by Duchamp or fabricated to his specifications but so was the snow shovel in In Advance of the Broken Arm (Fig. 4), the bird cage in Why Not Sneeze Rose Sélavy (Fig. 5), the ampoule in Ampoule Contenant 50cc d’air Paris (Ampoule containing 50cc of Paris air) (Fig. 6), and the urinal in Fountain (Fig. 7)signed R. Mutt (the famous object refused exhibition in the Society of Independent Artists show in 1917). This controversial theory is gaining greater attention in recent years, although not without significant turmoil. The notion of the “ready-made”, would remain safe according to Arthur Danto, art critic for the Nation, and Thierry di Duve, author of Kant After Duchamp, as this concept of “art object in context” has been an accepted convention of art making and interpretation for three quarters of a century. However if Shearer proves to be correct in her assertions both Danto and the Immanent Duchamp scholar and author Francis Nauman (Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction) would find this a “grand act of deception.”

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• 
  Figure 4
  Marcel Duchamp, In Advance
  of the Broken Arm, 1915/64
• 
  Figure 5
  Marcel Duchamp, Why Not
  Sneeze Rrose Sélvey?,1921

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• 
  Figure 6
  Marcel Duchamp, Paris Air, 1919/49
• 
  Figure 7
  Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917/64

Duchamp’s work, particularly that which displays his keen interest in science and mathematics is also garnering attention outside of the disciplines of art history and art criticism. New York University Physicist Jonathan Williams postulates that Duchamp’s deep play with physics or what Duchamp and the playwright Alfred Jarry referred to as “pataphysics”, was a systematic way of satirizing early 20th century deterministic systems of scientific thinking. Duchamp, according to Williams, began this direction through his investigations of non-Euclidean geometry, fourth dimensional space-time, electromagnetism, and radiation. Duchamp’s playful explorations of these areas seems to be a harbinger, of sorts, for some of the foundations of quantum mechanical theory such as Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the Erwin Schrodinger equations.

Duchamp’s systematic critiques were not limited to the scientific thinking of the day but also confronted modes of artistic production. Duchamp’s disinterest in what he referred to as “retinal art” or art which solely engaged the reproduction of visual experience was methodically deconstructed and supplanted by an art which focused on the grey matter or existed in the realm of pure intellect. “All through the nineteenth century the phrase ‘bête comme un peintre’ or ‘as stupid as a painter'”, Duchamp said. “And it was true- that kind of painter who just puts down what he sees is stupid.” For Duchamp, traditional art making merely copied itself in kind of mobius strip of mimesis and self-reflection simply cloning itself over and over again

As the myth goes, Duchamp gave up art in favor of playing chess throughout the world. “All chess players are artists but not all artists are chess players.” Duchamp used chess as a kind of model for much of his work, using it in his explorations of physics, mathematics and logic. This does not mean that he solely engaged in a form of sublime mathematically derived art. He continued his love of semantics, word games and humor throughout his life one sees this in L.H.O.O.Q. as well as his frequent use of the alter ego Rrose Sélavy (Eros is Life). Any complete and singular interpretation of Marcel Duchamp’s work is quite impossible as it is a lattice manifesting complex interweaving of intentions; mathematics, science, logic, art, consumer critique word play and alter ego.

Parsing the Oeuvre

The human propensity for binary oppositional thinking has been studied by psychologists and linguist and is evident in a great portion of western philosophy from Diogenes Laertus 200AD (lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers) to the present. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the discipline of art history, particularly as practiced in the first half of the twentieth century. Often art history has been essentially a historiography of connoisseurship, determining why one body of work by one artist is necessarily better than another body of work by another artist. This reasoning was held together by the supposition of progress, in the inevitable evolution of one mode of artistic production to another. Though not the subject of this study it is notable that when one examines art historiography (or any historiography for that matter) events, intentions and outcomes are often limited to singular reasoning. The academy, when confronted by opposing singular reasoning on any particular individual or subject matter, results in imbroglio. Critical interpretation of Duchamp’s body of work and his intentions is vested in this sort of competition between singular theories.

Duchamp consistently plays with these battles often examining them through his own prism. As Duchamp advocates the value of the “ready-made” he simultaneously describes his intent to define existence “through slightly distending the laws of physics and chemistry.” By using his own form of “absurd mathematics” he simultaneously critiques scientific thinking, logic, the definition of art, the artistic mode of production and aesthetic interpretation. Duchamp writes:

Calcul par l’absurde mathématique algébrique –
SiA=intention 10.
B=Crainte 5
C=Desir-
on a une première équation
C=a-b
et une 2 équation
C=A x B
Math ces 2 éq. Sont absurdes
C=50 / C = 5 / 2C = 55 / 2=27.5
Si A = 10 / B = 5 / c = 27.5
Si A = a = 9 / B=a/ 3 =3/ C +33/ 2=16.5

This formula demonstrates the limits of scientific reasoning by illustrating its inability to explicate immeasurable, highly personalized, data. By inserting variable equivalencies for intention, dread (crainte) and desir (desire) Duchamp demonstrates the limits of deterministic mathematics and hints at his attempts to demonstrate the breakdown of rational models of examining reality. Jonathan Williams in his article Pata or Quantum the End of Deterministic Physics, likens this propensity in Duchamp’s work to the Schrodinger equations which demonstrated that the behaviors, qualities and position of quantum particles needed to be expressed in terms of statistical probabilities thus rendering vacant the possibility of determining that a subatomic particle had any fixed quality at any given point in time. Duchamp’s continued fascination with illustrating this notion also points out his interest in expressing the difficulty that systems of logic have in making distinct calculations of human emotional variables. As one can see when examining the diversity of Duchamp’s work and intentions, traditional art historical and art critical interpreters were and in many cases remain befuddled.

Symbolic Logic and Visualizing Concept in the Work of Marcel Duchamp

The seemingly innate propensity of the human mind to binary, “this not that thinking” may be fruitfully illustrated by using symbolic logic in an interpretation of the intentions of Marcel Duchamp. With symbolic logic as a form of information or concept visualization one can demonstrate the difficulty and visual complexity of examining Duchamp’s work using a deterministic system of equivalencies.
First let us use the most oft sited interpretations of Duchamp’s oeuvre and their corresponding significances and assign to each a variable. The following is by no means an exhaustive codification of the many interpretations of Marcel Duchamp’s works it is essentially a categorization of a few of the major theories.
A. The use of the “ready-made” or “found object” asserts that by altering the context of a commonplace object it can become art.
D. The statement A allows that Duchamp in challenging the definition of the art object by exalting the primacy of the idea over the creative act he subverted the modernist convention of the artist/object and viewer relationships
B. The work was an exploration of the mathematics of uncertainty pioneered by Henri Poincaré and the study of the fourth dimensional space theorized by Élie Jouffret (Traité Élémentaire de Géometrie à Quatre Dimensions 1903).
H. The statement B allows that Duchamp called into question the discipline boundaries between art and science and destroys the notion of the artist as creator of ‘retinal art’ or the aesthetic object.
C. The work was engineered to be reassembled by the patron or viewer, who followed complex, often informed by chance, instructions. This process is evident in Duchamp’s assemblage book works such as La Bôite Verte.
P. The statement C allows that Duchamp transformed the boundaries between producer and consumer in the art market and engaged the artist/manufacturer and viewer in the process of creation.
We will next make a formula that contextualizes more precisely the relationship between the upper level referent variables A, B and C (in this case those variables that refer to the condition of Duchamp’s work rather than his intentions). Supplanting a corresponding lower case Greek letters, A becoming a(alpha), B becoming b(beta), and C becomes g(gamma) the following is the rule, universal quantifier or binding of variables governing their relationships. (Fig. 8)

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Figure 8

The above statement allows that there can only be a single interpretation of the work of Duchamp. In accordance with the current highly polarized arguments about his work the equation illustrates that, of the contemporary hypothesis, only one can be correct. The next equations maintain that there can only be a single derived intention from the overall statement of the condition of Duchamp’s work. In other words the statement: “The work is an exploration of the mathematics of uncertainty pioneered by Henri Poincaré and the study of the fourth dimensional space theorized by Élie Jouffret” may only be linked to the intention, “Duchamp calls into question the discipline boundaries between art and science and destroys the notion of the artist as creator of ‘retinal art’ or the aesthetic object”. We may express this with symbolic logic in the following: (Fig. 9)

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Figure 9

The next section of this exploration of the work of Marcel Duchamp through symbolic logic will determine the consistency of each of the condition/intention hypotheses. First we will examine the consistency of the argument A, if and only if, D:(Fig. 10)

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Figure 10

The statement A if and only if D proves logically consistent. Next we have the hypothesis B, if and only if, H: (Fig. 11)

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Figure 11

Having proved the statement B if and only if H consistent we address the theory C if and only if P:(Fig. 12)

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Figure 12

Having proved the consistency of all three hypotheses given the a priori context that only one of them is correct where are we left in this complex visual analysis of Duchamp’s intentions? His intimate knowledge of Henri Poincaré’s theories and his use of chance in the construction of many of his key works would seem to indicate that Duchamp had been quietly challenging the notion of deterministic reasoning in both the interpretation of art and physical and experiential phenomena. As Poincaré suggests in 1895;

Experiment has revealed a multitude of facts which can be summed up in the following statement: it is impossible to detect the absolute motion of matter, or rather the relative motion of ponderable matter with respect to the ether; all that one can exhibit is the motion of ponderable matter with respect to ponderable matter.

In short, Poincaré asserts that all quantifiable and qualifiable information pertaining to any phenomena can only be measured relative to other qualified and quantified data. As the first to elucidate this “principle of relativity” Poincaré discerned that all explicit information about any physical phenomena in motions is best expressed in the form of a probability. Poincaré’s critique of determinism extends to other disciplines as well as he states, “The science of history is built out of bricks; but an accumulation of historical facts is no more a science than a pile of bricks is a house.” This kind of reasoning is the bedrock of semiotics (meaning in language is ascertain through the relationship between the symbol and its meaning relative to the culture that produced it). It has also been used to critique symbolic logic. The discipline itself relies on abstract patterns, its meaning determined not from the symbols themselves but from the relationship between the marks and other patterns and more significantly cultural meanings.

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Figure 13
Marcel Duchamp, Three Standard
Stoppages, 1913-14

Duchamp’s connection to logic is most clearly noted in two of his most significant areas of concern: chance and chess. As a chess master Duchamp was, on several occasions, a member of the French championship chess team. For Duchamp chess was an organized, integrated and ordered whole, composed of rule based interactions wherein outcomes were as influenced by unquantifiable elements such as guile or desire as by systematic reasoning. This led Duchamp to assert that complexity in any system was inherently non-deterministic. We see this questioning of aggregation, perhaps more clearly, in his use of chance in aesthetic production.

Le Penseur Multi-Dimensionnelle

Duchamp’s work Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) was first displayed at the Cubist Exhibition at the Damau Gallery in Barcelona and later at the Armory Show (New York, 1913). This painting took the observational cubist penchant of displaying an object from multiple spatial vantagepoints and added a temporal element by rendering a nude figure in motion. This work explored the conceptual possibility of 2d painting, which displayed and illustrates a 3 dimensional figure traversing time. The piece arrives at a visceral form of multi-dimensional cognition. Partial inspired by his interest in chronophotography and the mathematics of Henri Poincaré Nude Descending a Staircase is perhaps his last clear attempt to use a traditional modality of retinal art to express a conceptual or gray matter art. It is also his first widely exhibited work to express his interest in the merger of science and art.

His continued interest in multiple dimensions, though I cannot prove this, is probably where we may find the solution or at least a map to a clear understanding of his work. Though we may never have a concise definition of “what his work was about” Duchamp may have left us clues as to how we may begin to “make sense” of his intentions.

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Figure 14
Front view of the postcard in
the White Box, 1967

Rhonda Shearer and Stephen J. Gould In their article Boats and Deckchairs present the most profound example of Duchamp’s trickery and play with the multi-dimensional mathematics of Henri Poincaré and Élie Jouffret. Inside Duchamp’s 1967 piece White Box Francis Nauman discovered a “commercial” postcard (1914) (Fig. 14). The postcard displays on its front three boats floating on a placid lake or river and on the reverse some writing. Nauman categorized this discovery as a “random notation” written on a “found object” citing that “on the verso of a postcard, Duchamp notes ‘a possible means by which the fourth dimension could be visually established through the optical illusion of two deck chairs’.” This note was accompanied by an illustration of parallel lines bisected by a perpendicular. The true nature of this object has never been addressed by art historians as the work could be safely categorized as one of Duchamp’s “ready-mades.”

The piece is in fact, an original painting not a commercial postcard. The curious parallel and perpendicular lines on the back are in fact obscure instructions. Duchamp’s fascination with rotation and relative vantagepoints indicates that a new dimension may be experienced through altering ones position relative to an object. When the postcard is turned 90º to the right the boats become an orthogonal rendering of deckchairs viewed from a bird’s eye vantagepoint. The mysterious “random note” on the verso is a plea to adjust your perspective when viewing the postcard but also, when correlated with the image from the front the piece becomes a profound statement about the relationship between the second, third and fourth dimensions.

Like E. A. Abbot’s famous book Flatland (1885) whose main character, a square, is shockingly introduced to the third dimension, Duchamp has demonstrated for us that one can examine from a three dimensional vantage point all sides of a two dimensional object. In turning the postcard we are taking a clearly two-dimensional image and viewing it from the third dimension wherein the objects in question become something entirely different. Inpostcard he begs the analogy: that when viewed from the fourth dimension a three-dimensional object may be seen from all sides. From years of singular interpretations of Duchamp’s oeuvre art historians have safely ignored Duchamp’s multiple interpretations: one obvious and the others subversive. When the work is proclaimed (by the artist himself) and interpreted as a “ready-made” the hidden intention with all of its possible significance is obscured.

Duchamp disavowed models of reasoning, which relied on singular definitions. This kind of one or two-dimensional interpretation is inherently flawed when attempting to ascertain his intentions. With this in mind, Duchamp’s work requires that any conceptual model of his intentions necessitates three-dimensional thinking and thusly is well suited to three-dimensional visualization.

Immersive Experience and Concept Visualization

As demonstrated, the use of symbolic logic as a means to visualizing concept in the work of Marcel Duchamp is extremely difficult. Though I have not examined the use of more advanced forms of symbolic logic (I am not a logician) it is apparent that the data, as envisaged, is not of the highest utility.

 

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Figure. 15
Screen still from the author’s Immersive
Duchamp Concept World an interactive
virtual reality computer art piece.

Figure. 16
Screen still from the author’s Immersive
Duchamp Concept World an interactive
virtual reality computer art piece.

Clearly, Duchamp had multiple intentions and the existence of seemingly inconsistent hypotheses about his work point more to the human propensity for dualistic thinking rather than to grasping a more pluralistic possibility. Engaging data that is not quantifiable and highly subjective is difficult to manage logically and exceedingly difficult to graph. However if we create a 3d cartographic form of the logic equations introduced earlier in this paper, we make the data more intuitive and thus cognitively manageable. (Figs. 15 & 16)Using interactive virtual reality software[the software we use in this example is the Glass Virtual Reality Engine, created by the author] one can have an immersive experience of the main theories about Duchamp’s work.

The virtual reality computer art piece Immersive Duchamp Concept World, presents the theories concerning the artist’s work. At the center of the virtual space is the entrance point to the world. The immersant or viewer may follow the map which branches off to various nodal points. Each of these nodal points represents a single theory. From the vantagepoint of the theory the immersant sees the other possible theories through a fog and translucent sheets, they are barely visible, as the immersant/viewer has chosen an alternate path (Fig. 15). In Immersive Duchamp Concept World the immersant is also introduced to various interactive media; readings of Duchamp’s Notes as well as to still images and animations of his work and to the writings of Henri Poincaré. If the immersant chooses to fly above the object it is from this vantagepoint the viewer sees all of the theories as a totality (Fig. 16). This totality, is essentially a relativistic rather than a fixed deterministic system as the viewer governs the experience. This model for information visualization does not stand in opposition to symbolic logic, however it does allow a form of concept visualization that merges reason quantification, qualification and the visceral.

Conclusion

The body of work produced by Marcel Duchamp was a programmatic, if playful, undermining of deterministic thinking. He demolished arbitrary discipline boundaries between artist, scientist and mathematician. His clues to altering our perspective were equally pertinent to viewing and understanding his oeuvre as they were to viewing individual works of art. His implicit and explicit call for altering our vantagepoint relative to his intentions inherently calls into question modernist singular interpretations. Yet, through the use of concept visualization, we can create more exploratory modes of information visualization; modes which allow for simultaneous multiple dimensional thinking. In an immersive environment the viewer can experience a panorama of Duchamp’s intentions, one that does not enforce strict rules of consistency, but nonetheless leads us to comprehension of a poly-dynamic yet visceral logic.

Refrences

Boxer, S. “Taking Jokes By Duchamp to Another Level of Art. “The New York Times 20 March 1999.

Clair, J. Sur Marcel Duchamp et la fin de l’art. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2000.

D’Harnoncourt, Anne & McShine, eds. Marcel Duchamp. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1973.

Duchamp, M. Notes. Paris: Champs Flammarion- Centre d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou, 1999.

Golding, J. Duchamp: The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors. New York: The Viking Press, 1973.

Gould, S. J. & Shearer, R. “Boats and Deck Chairs.” Tout Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal. 1.1 (Dec. 1000): Articles <http://www.toutfait.com/issues/issue_1/Articles/boat.html>

Hodges, W. Logic. New York: Penguin Books, 1985.

Ifrah, G. The Universal History of Numbers. New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2000.

Reichenbach, H. Elements of Symbolic Logic. New York: Free Press, 1966.

Scribner, C. “Henri Poincare and the principle of relativity.” American Journal of Physics 32 (1963): 673.

Tomkins, C. The World of Marcel Duchamp 1887-1968. Alexandria, VA: Time Life Book, 1977.

Williams, J. “Pata or Quantum: Duchamp and the end of Deterministic Physics”, Tout Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal. 2.3 (Dec. 2000): Articles <http://www.toutfait.com/issues/issue_3/Articles/williams/williams.html>

Figs. 1, 3~7, 13, 14
©2003 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. All rights reserved.

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Figure1 Ludwig Wittgenstein
(1889-1951)

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Figure. 2
Marcel Duchmap,Opposition
and Sister Squares are
Reconciled,1932

According to my Wittgenstein CD⁽¹⁾, there are 181 tokens of the word “chess” and its cognates (such as “chessboard”) in the Blackwell published works of Wittgenstein. We begin, however, with the French/American artist and chess master Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). Duchamp, co-wrote a magisterial chess book titled: Opposition and Sister Squares are Reconciled.⁽²⁾ (Fig. 2)The special subject of this specialist’s book is King and Pawn endings.
One of the simpler positions Duchamp analyzes is: (Diagram 1)

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Diagram 1
 

Black’s temptation is to swoop in (with 1 … Ke4, as in (Diagram. 2)) and attack the White Pawn. But, as Duchamp explains:

It would be wrong to begin with 1 … Ke4, [as in (Diagram. 2)] because of 2 Kc5 (Diagram. 3) and White would win the P[awn]. This manoeuvre is known as “trébuchet”. ⁽³⁾

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• 
  Diagram 2
• 
  Diagram 3

Black’s only move now is to retreat to one of the squares marked with a “K” in (Diagram. 4), allowing White to snatch the pawn(Diagram. 5)and go on to win. Black’s first, obvious, aggressive, materialistic (but unreflective) move, going straight to the undefended pawn, turns out to be a kind of suicide. (Taking one’s time would have done the trick.)

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• 
  Diagram 4
• 
  Diagram 5

Tolstoy wrote that “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Is this the same for mistakes? Is each one a mistake in its own way? 1 … Ke4 is not, I would think, the same kind of mistake that Oedipus made when he married Jocasta (although both involve regicide). What kind of mistake is 1 … Ke4? Why would anyone make this move? What might tempt or compel someone here? Chess, after all, is not baseball; it is not as if the lights were too low, or Black lost the pawn in the sun.
In a book titled How Not to Play Chess, Duchamp’s friend Grandmaster Eugene A. Znosko-Borovsky wrote:

The great privilege of our game is that there is nothing hidden; everyone can see all that is on the chessboard, and, what is more, no piece can remain unnoticed. It is necessary only to be able to see […]⁽⁴⁾

Another grandmaster friend of Duchamp, Larry Evans, continues our theme in a book titledThe 10 Most Common Chess Mistakes … and how to avoid them!:

After all, everything is open and above-board. The element of deception is at a minimum, and there are no closed hands, as in bridge.⁽⁵⁾

This might seem familiar to some of you, even to those of you who don’t read esoteric chess literature. It might remind you of remark 129 of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations:

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something–because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him.–And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.

Or of this early claim in The Blue Book:

This kind of mistake recurs again and again in philosophy; e.g. when we are puzzled about the nature of time, when time seems to us a queer thing. We are most strongly tempted to think that here are things hidden, something we can see from the outside but which we can’t look into. And yet nothing of the sort is the case. It is not new facts about time which we want to know. All the facts that concern us lie open before us. [BB: p. 6]⁽⁶⁾

Or from remark 89 of the Investigations:

We want to understand something that is already in plain view.

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Figure 3
Marcel Duchamp, Trébuchet, 1917/1964

Figure 4
Max Ernst, The Hat Makes the Man, 1920

Let us go from one kind of Duchampian trébuchet to another. Consider these two images:

Marcel Duchamp’s Trébuchet (Fig. 3) Max Ernst’s The Hat Makes the Man⁽⁷⁾(Fig. 4)

The first, Duchamp’s Trébuchet, is a photograph of a 1964 reproduction of a lost 1917 readymade. The second is Max Ernst’s mixed media work from 1920: cut-and-pasted paper, pencil, ink and watercolor on paper. The first has all the initial appearances of an ordinary, store-bought coat and hat rack, whereas the second looks alien and bizarre (in the 1930s English of the Blue and Brown Books: queer; in Freud’s German: unheimlich, uncanny.). This contrast between thefamiliar and the unfamiliar interested Wittgenstein throughout his career, and plays a central role in examining our subtitled theme of Wittgenstein on mistakes of surface and depth.
I want to ask you to indulge me and perform a Wittgensteinean experiment (which I will take advantage of later). While studying these two images, ask yourself: what do you experience when you look at them; in particular, do you have a feeling of familiarity?
In order to force the experiment, before studying these images read the following from Wittgenstein’s Brown Book:

24. Let us now go back to the idea of a feeling of familiarity, which arises when I see familiar objects. Pondering about the question whether there is such a feeling or not, we are likely to gaze at some object and say, “Don’t I have a particular feeling when I look at my old coat and hat?” (p. 180)

In this thematic neighborhood Wittgenstein’s philosophical language often employs metaphors that are aesthetic or come from the arts: looking at pictures, going to the movies, listening to music. My use of the two artists’ coat and hat racks is partly designed to make more transparent what Wittgenstein achieves philosophically with his use of these metaphors. In one of the most explicit statements of his own methodology, Wittgenstein writes that

–I wanted to put that picture before him [that is: us], and hisacceptance of the picture consists in his now being inclined to regard a given case differently: that is, to compare it withthis rather than that set of pictures. I have changed his way of looking at things. […] [PI: 144]⁽⁸⁾

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Figure 5
A duck/rabbit image
Wittgenstein’s philosophical goal is not to produce theories or theses, but to change our way of looking at things, to change our way of seeing the world. (My reading moves into the center of Wittgenstein’s methodology his discussions of Jastrow’s duck/rabbit image.(Fig. 5))⁽⁹⁾ My strategy in this paper is to make Duchamp’s and Ernst’s works of art emblems for two distinct ways of changing the way we see the world. For ease of reference, I will label Duchamp’s way the “surface” way, and Ernst’s the “depth” way. I see Duchamp and Wittgenstein in alliance here. If Ernst needs a philosophical depth companion, let’s give him Vulgar Freudianism. Duchamp’s and Wittgenstein’s way, the “nothing is hidden”⁽¹⁰⁾ way, appeals to what is before our eyes. Ernst’s work, by contrast, appeals to depth, to a structure hidden beneath the surface.(Fig. 6)

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Figure 6
Pictures on the left showing (from left to right) René Magritte, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Man Ray, attending Bill Copleys exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, line up holding a copy of the exhibition catalogue, in which announces “Tremendous Deliriums”; on the right, Ernst turns around with his head down, while Duchamp poses his fingers at, and Man Ray raises his cane as if to strike him. Photograph by Ed van der Elsken, 1966.

In order to clarify what I mean by the “depth” way, let us now look more deeply at The Hat Makes the Man. If you had a feeling of unfamiliarity, or eerie strangeness, when looking at it before, part of the reason might be the German words in the corner: none of them are capitalized. There is a remark on this phenomenon in Wittgenstein’s Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 1:

RPP I 1087. German nouns printed in lower-case letters in certain modern poets. A German noun all in lower-case letters looks alien; to recognize it, one has to read it attentively. It is supposed to strike us as new, as if we had seen it now for the first time.–⁽¹¹⁾

If that is not enough, in the Ernst work the words are a portmanteau of the made up, the nonsensical and the rare: a bit like a Teutonic Lewis Carroll poem: Jabberwocky, jawohl.⁽¹²⁾ A transcription of Ernst’s Germanic words are⁽¹³⁾:

bedecktsamiger stapel-mensch nacktsamiger wasserformer (“edelformer”) kleidsame nervatur auch umpressnerven!

Half these words are not really German. Nervatur is a specialized scientific term for a pattern of nerves or veins, and bedecktsamiger and nacktsamiger are rare scientific terms. We ⁽¹⁴⁾ might translate the phrase:

angiospermous stack- man gymnospermous waterformer (“nobleformer”) flattering nervation also !transpressnerves!

The American Heritage College Dictionary, Third edition, Houghton Mifflin, 1993, informs us of the meaning of the rare terms:

angiosperm n., A plant whose ovules are enclosed in an ovary; a flowering plant. gymnosperm n., A plant, such as a cycad or conifer, whose seeds are not enclosed within an ovary.

And, for those whose college biology is receding:

ovule n., A minute structure in seed plants, containing the embryo sac and surrounded by the nucellus, that develops into a seed after fertilization.

Both German scientific nouns are direct translations of the Greek scientific terms; if English worked the same way, then “angiosperm” and “gymnosperm” would be “coveredseed” and nakedseed”.

Combining the words and the image, we can see that the work is partly a meditation on what is hidden and what is unclothed, and that Ernst has uncovered for us a coveredseed. This is a picture of a nerve system, and Ernst is portraying an underlying skeletal or nerve structure.

Let us now add the (linguistically) unproblematic French below the German:

(c’est le chapeau qui fait l’homme)
(le style c’est le tailleur)

And the translation:

(the hat makes the man)
(style [the manner, the tone of the man] is the tailor) ⁽¹⁵⁾

The unproblematic French gives us the wonderfully complicated further point that it’s style all the way down! If we add that “chapeau” is also an old slang word for condom,⁽¹⁶⁾ then the covering of seed and the image itself become spectacularly complex. Ernst was both a student of philosophy and of psychiatry; if ever a picture called for a Freudian interpretation, even a vulgar one, it is this.
 

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Figure 7
Marcel Duchamp, Photograph of
Duchamp’s Studio, 1916-1917

Ernst has taken the familiar sight of a man and a hat and, going beneath the surface, made it unfamiliar. In contrast, Duchamp has taken a supposedly familiar, ordinary object, and defamiliarized it by a change in location and status. (The change is what Russell and Bradley would have called a change in external relations.) Duchamp’s Trébuchet is areadymade: a genre that Duchamp invented and named. The idea, or, perhaps, more accurately, the propaganda, is to take a found object – often a mass produced manufactured object; a familiar, repeated object – and turn it into a work of art, perhaps by signing it, perhaps by placing it in a museum. The legend is that in 1917, while an expatriate from the European war, Marcel Duchamp purchased a coat rack, nailed it to the floor of his New York City apartment,(Fig. 7) and then named this new work of art: “Trébuchet“. The Ernst and Duchamp works have this in common: both take the familiar and then make it unfamiliar: it is the way they make it unfamiliar that is different.
Putting the art works aside for a moment, as a way of further illustrating the differences between the ways of depth and surface, let us go back to the question of what makes us go wrong, what leads us to mistake? Familiarly, one side answers “deception” – whether psychological, social, or political: there is something hidden that needs to be uncovered; we need to leave our usual, surface haunts for the unfamiliar, where the truth lies. (Sometimes the theory is that identifying the deception accomplishes the uncovering of the truth.) As in the Ernst work all is not what it appears: in order to understand the men before our eyes, we have to go down to their underlying structure. Wittgenstein, on the contrary, says in theInvestigations “…For what is hidden, for example, is of no interest to us” [PI: 126]⁽¹⁷⁾ and:

361. In order to climb into the depths one does not need to travel very far; no, for that you do not need to abandon your immediate and accustomed environment. [RPP I]

To go down into the depths you don’t need to travel far; you can do it in your own backgarden. [CV p. 57]⁽¹⁸⁾

Or, from a draft of the forward to Philosophical Remarks:

I might say: if the place I want to reach could only be climbed up to by a ladder, I would give up trying to get there. For the place to which I really have to go is one that I must actually be at already.

Anything that can be reached with a ladder does not interest me. [CV: p. 10]

Going from one kind of scripture to another, I am reminded of G-d’s directions to Moses in Deuteronomy 30 11-14:

“Surely, this Instruction which I enjoin upon you this day is not too baffling for you, nor is it beyond reach. It is not in the heavens, that you should say, ‘Who among us can go up to the heavens and get it for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it?’ Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say: ‘Who among us can cross to the other side of the sea and get it for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it?’ No, the thing is very close to you, in your mouth, and in your heart, to observe it.”

It is perhaps now time to summon the old self-referential joke: there are two kinds of people in the world – those that divide kinds of people into two and those who do not. We should not confuse the surface/depth dichotomy with another one: those who see the world as problematic and those who do not. It is hard to imagine a philosopher (as opposed to, say, a politician) in the unproblematic camp.

Let us, then, quickly eliminate the vulgar interpretation that attention to the surface means simple common sense and that the world is uncomplicated and unproblematic. [Ross Perot’s voice and accent are in the background, saying: “It’s really all very simple.”] Both the surface skaters and the depth divers see the world as bubbingly complicated. Both believe we are inclined (at least at times), to see the world wrong. Both believe that the world as it strikes us requires a great deal of analysis – but they locate the complications in different places, give different accounts of where and how we go wrong, and engage in different kinds of analyses.⁽¹⁹⁾
Where are we now? In the context of our surface/depth dichotomy we have an overlapping and crisscrossing [PI: 67] of various themes: how to make a mistake, what is hidden, what lies open to plain view, and, lurking [hidden!?] in the background, the continual debates on Wittgenstein’s alleged quietism: the accusation that philosophy requires not investigation but renunciation.⁽²⁰⁾ The central texts of Wittgenstein’s alleged quietism are, of course,Investigations 124-6, where Wittgenstein writes that “Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language […] [i]t leaves everything as it is […] Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. […]”)⁽²¹⁾

Let us begin to unravel these threads by returning to the coat and hat rack images experiment and focusing on the question of familiarity. Do you have some particular feeling of familiarity? (To those of you familiar with Wittgenstein, this will, of course, be a familiar experiment with some familiar answers; what I hope to accomplish is to put it into a new – or, at least, less examined — context.)

Consider the following group of remarks from the Philosophical Investigations.⁽²²⁾ (Non-incidentally, these remarks are prefaced by an assertion that many – but most especially depth investigators — find one of the most annoying in Wittgenstein’s corpus: PI: 599: … “Philosophy only states what everyone admits”. Often those who find a quietism of renunciation in Wittgenstein also see him as bullying instead of arguing.)

602. Asked “Did you recognize your desk when you entered your room this morning?”–I should no doubt say “Certainly!” And yet it would be misleading to say that an act of recognition had taken place. Of course the desk was not strange to me; I was not surprised to see it, as I should have been if another one had been standing there, or some unfamiliar kind of object.
603. No one will say that every time I enter my room, my long-familiar surroundings, there is enacted a recognition of all that I see and have seen hundreds of times before.
604. It is easy to have a false picture of the processes called “recognizing”; as if recognizing always consisted in comparing two impressions with one another. It is as if I carried a picture of an object with me and used it to perform an identification of an object as the one represented by the picture. Our memory seems to us to be the agent of such a comparison, by preserving a picture of what has been seen before, or by allowing us to look into the past (as if down a spy-glass).
605. And it is not so much as if I were comparing the object with a picture set beside it, but as if the object coincided with the picture. So I see only one thing, not two.

We began this paper with a (chess) mistake. What mistake is Wittgenstein warning us against here? In this context Wittgenstein is being fairly explicit: the mistake is to assume that because S recognizes y, an act of recognition must have taken place. This seemingly simple mistake opens the door to a string of others. Since even superficial investigation (introspection will do) reveals that there is not always a conscious act of recognition (as I hope your own familiarity experiment and experiences have shown), that (alleged) act is driven underground – the depth arguer has to claim there is a hidden mechanism underlying our overt behavior. Wittgenstein’s telling of the depth story is an oft told tale: failure to appreciate differences leads one to assume essences (or is it the other way around?); since there must be an essence – a seed – and since there is obviously no gymnosperm[nakedseed], there must be an angiosperm [a coveredseed].⁽²³⁾ And then, as Hume says in the An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, “We are got into fairy land, long ere we have reached the last steps of our theory.”⁽²⁴⁾

This is a particular breed of a more general kind of Wittgensteinean warning of How Not to Do Philosophy. PI: 35 discusses the “’characteristic experiences’ of pointing”, connects it directly to our problem via the Wittgensteinean device of a parenthetical footnote [“(Recognizing, wishing, remembering, etc. .)”], then draws a more general moral:

PI: 36. And we do here what we do in a host of similar cases: because we cannot specify any one bodily action which we call pointing to the shape (as opposed, for example, to the colour), we say that a spiritual [mental, intellectual] activity corresponds to these words.
Where our language suggests a body and there is none: there, we should like to say, is a spirit.(Fig. 8)

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Figure 8
Marcel Duchamp, Tu m’, 1918

Wittgenstein then turns instead to a host of ordinary, contextually particular, surface considerations:

37. What is the relation between name and thing named?–Well, what is it? Look at language-game (2) or at another one: there you can see the sort of thing this relation consists in. This relation may also consist, among many other things, in the fact that hearing the name calls before our mind the picture of what is named; and it also consists, among other things, in the name’s being written on the thing named or being pronounced when that thing is pointed at.

Going back to recognition and familiarity, we can connect PI: 37 to PG: 166 [the original home of PI: 602ff.]:

PG: 166 So the multiplicity of familiarity, as I understand it, is that of feeling at home in what I see. It might consist in such facts as these: my glance doesn’t move restlessly (inquiringly) around the object. I don’t keep changing the way I look at it, but immediately fix on one and hold it steady.

Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 1 also makes the connection explicit:

RPP I 166: It may be asked: Does something always come into my head when I understand a word?! (The following question is similar: “When I look at a familiar object, does an act of recognition always take place?”)

The philosophical mistake, the philosopher’s mistake, is to search for something extra in the explanation of our ordinary goings on.⁽²⁵⁾ (And even worse, but almost inevitable, is to findthat something extra: this structure or that. Here, in Wittgenstein’s lights, the philosopher is like the cheap stage magician, placing the rabbit in the hat to pull it out later.)

There is a familiar (to the point of being well trodden) Wittgenstein path here: this illusory extra will then serve as the criterion (and, if met, the guarantee) of an activity that, to the contrary, only makes sense, can only be seen as the activity it is, or indeed, an activity at all, when looked on as part of a practice. This is (partly) the concern of PI: 149 and the famous rule following sections of the Investigations:

PI: 149. If one says that knowing the ABC is a state of the mind, one is thinking of a state of a mental apparatus (perhaps of the brain) by means of which we explain the manifestations of that knowledge. Such a state is called a disposition. But there are objections to speaking of a state of the mind here, inasmuch as there ought to be two different criteria for such a state: a knowledge of the construction of the apparatus, quite apart from what it does. (Nothing would be more confusing here than to use the words “conscious” and “unconscious” for the contrast between states of consciousness and dispositions. For this pair of terms covers up a grammatical difference.)

The moral so far is: if depth is taken as the a priori requirement of a hidden, underlying structure, then the pursuit of that alleged depth and structure is a task of illusion, superstition: (often under the name of science) a pseudo-scientific alchemy.

But there is another (not at all completely unrelated) sense to depth. Wittgenstein writes inZettel of the real (it has happened) danger of the real (non-illusory) loss of real (not based on a mistake) depth:

Z 456. Some philosophers (or whatever you like to call them) suffer from what may be called “loss of problems”. Then everything seems quite simple to them, no deep problems seem to exist any more, the world becomes broad and flat and loses all depth, and what they write becomes immeasurably shallow and trivial.⁽²⁶⁾

>This is the real question we have been asking all along: How does the world become deep? Or, somewhat more precisely in the light of our previous discussion: How does the surface take on a depth?

Wittgenstein sometimes profitably investigated these questions by examining the more particular question: What happens when one comes to understand something?⁽²⁷⁾

(Perhaps the warning is unnecessary, but attention to art helps remind us that understanding is not a binary on/off operation: it is not as if the internal mechanism finally works and now I understand Duchamp’s Trébuchet; it is not as if I have a feeling and then suddenly I understand Ernst’s The Hat Makes the Man. The illusion that a non-limited, non-contextual sense can be made of complete understanding goes along with the illusion that a non-limited, non-contextual sense can be made of a hidden guarantee of our practices.)

How, in coming to understand something, does it acquire a legitimate kind of depth? We can now answer this by putting all the elements together. The answer is: by putting all the elements together. (In a local way of course, and for a time.)

Wittgenstein continually argues there is nothing [no thing] extra, added on, in our coming to understand. Coming to understand, as the relation between name and thing named [PI: 37], as the multiplicity of familiarity [PG: 166], is a plurality of commonplaces: it is the manner that makes the man. In philosophy we come to understand by seeing connections:

[PI: 122] A main source of our failure to understand is that we do not perspicuously overview [ubersehen] the use of our words. –Our grammar is lacking in this sort of perspicuity [Ubersichtlichkeit]. A perspicuous presentation [ubersichtliche Darstellung] produces just that understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections’. Hence the importance of finding and inventingintermediate cases.
The concept of a perspicuous presentation is of fundamental significance for us. It earmarks the form of account we give, the way we look at things. (Is this a ‘Weltanschauung’?)⁽²⁸⁾

What changes when we come to understand are not the facts, but the attitude. The change is a change of perspective; a rearrangement of what has been in front of us all along.

Coming to understand is the both the substance and the style [never mere style] of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. It is coming to understand: process, not conclusion. Through his use of examples, his meandering methodology, his intermediate cases, his juxtaposition of situations, Wittgenstein is showing us how the surface acquires depth. The manner makes the books.

It is in this fashion, as well, that we come to understand Duchamp’s Trébuchet. Let’s look for a moment at the multiplicity and juxtaposition of meanings here:

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Figure 9
The Medieval war machine

Figure 10
The cucking stool

Figure 11
The ducking stool

Duchamp was a lover of many things, including lists, dictionaries, and self-reference. High on his list of loves was dictionaries.⁽²⁹⁾ If he had looked up “trébuchet” in an ordinary French dictionary he would have found the following three senses:

1. A medieval war machine [which the coat rack visually resembles];(Fig. 9)
2. A bird trap; and
3. A very accurate scale used in laboratories.
If he also looked up “trébuchet” in a comprehensive English dictionary, he would have seen the additional sense:
4. A cucking- or ducking-stool.⁽³⁰⁾(Figs. 10, 11)
In addition, there is:
5. A pun with the homonymic French verb “trébucher“, which means “to stumble or trip”, which is precisely what one would do with a coat rack nailed to the floor.
And, of course, there is
6. A technical chess meaning, a mutual or reciprocal zugzwang, where whoever moves loses.
The image and the multiplicity of meanings work together to change our way of looking at things: Duchamp has inclined us to see the unfamiliar in a formerly familiar and common place hat rack.

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Figure 12
Marcel Duchamp, Door: 11, rue Larrey, 1927

Two of Wittgenstein’s students wrote that:

Wittgenstein once described the situation in philosophy thus: ‘It is as if a man is standing in a room facing a wall on which are painted a number of dummy doors. Wanting to get out, he fumblingly tries to open them, vainly trying them all, one after the other, over and over again. But, of course, it is quite useless. And all the time, although he doesn’t realize it, there is a real door in the wall behind his back, and all he has to do is to turn around and open it. To help him get out of the room all we have to do is to get him to look in a different direction. But it’s hard to do this, since, wanting to get out, he resists our attempts to turn him away from where he thinks the exit must be.’⁽³¹⁾(Fig. 12)

A serious warning is necessary here. The description I just read makes it seem a little too easy to dissolve philosophical problems: it has its truth about Wittgenstein’s methodology, but it has to be counterbalanced by attention to the theme that philosophical problems cannot be dismissed, cannot be renounced, but have to be worked through. However, since I have examined this theme of working through elsewhere, and since I’ll shortly close with a similar warning, I’ll bracket it off in this essay.

We here have a constant in Wittgenstein’s career: Early, Middle, and Late Wittgenstein focused on the agent’s attitude. It is through changes in the agent’s attitude that the surface acquires depth. Wittgenstein, of course, located the ethical in that attitude. As early as 1916, Wittgenstein recorded in his Notebooks:

In order to live happily I must be in agreement with the world. And that is what “being happy” means. [NB: p. 75]
The will is an attitude of the subject to the world. [NB: p. 87]

 

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Figure 13
Original version in Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus

This kind of view survives in the Tractatus’ discussion of perspective:

5.5423 To perceive a complex means to perceive that its constituents are related to one another in such and such a way.
This no doubt also explains why there are two possible ways of seeing the figure⁽³²⁾ as a cube; and all similar phenomena. For we really see two different facts.
(If I look in the first place at the corners marked a and only glance at the b’s, then the a’s appear to be in front, and vice versa). (Fig. 13)

And in his discussion of ethics:

6.43 If the good or bad exercise of the will does alter the world, it can alter only the limits of the world, not the facts–not what can be expressed by means of language.
In short the effect must be that it becomes an altogether different world. It must, so to speak, wax and wane as a whole.
The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man.

Throughout his career Wittgenstein’s attitude toward attitude remains the same. A real change, however, is that in his later philosophy, Wittgenstein becomes much more concerned with diagnosing the reasons some are not satisfied with that answer.
The temptation, Wittgenstein comes to claim, is to confuse the illusory notion of depth with the real notion of seeing connections, of really seeing what is before our eyes. In order to see the world in depth one needs to really pay attention to the surface:

RFM: p. 102 (Here we stumble on a remarkable and characteristic phenomenon in philosophical investigation: The difficulty–I might say–isn’t one of finding the solution; it is one of recognizing something as the solution. We have already said everything. Not something that follows from this; no, just this is the solution!
This, I believe, hangs together with our wrongly expecting an explanation; whereas a description is the solution of the difficulty, if we give it the right place in our consideration. If we dwell upon it and do not try to get beyond it.)

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Figure 14
Photograph of Duchamp playing chess,
circa 1930s

What kind of mistake is 1. … Ke4, rushing in to take the pawn? What kind of mistake is failing to see the connections before us? They are not identical, but they are cousins. The chess player rushes in to take the pawn; eager to win material he is too aggressive, moving too close too soon, instead of taking his time.⁽³³⁾ By failing to notice what is there, he ends up on the wrong side of a trébuchet. The chess player does not need a secret revealed, a card turned over; what he needs is to control himself.(Fig. 14)

So, partly too, the philosopher. Wittgenstein’s chapter “Philosophy” in the so-called “Big Typescript” of 1932 includes the fragment:

PO: 162-63: Work on philosophy is – as work in architecture frequently is – actually more of a //a kind of// work on oneself. On one’s own conception. On the way one sees things. (And what one demands of them.)

And even more directly, the chapter begins with the following heading in capital letters:

DIFFICULTY OF PHILOSOPHY NOT THE INTELLECTUAL DIFFICULTY OF THE SCIENCES, BUT THE DIFFICULTY OF A CHANGE OF ATTITUDE. RESISTANCES OF THE WILL MUST BE OVERCOME. (PO: 162)

And now, as is both rhetorically and philosophically required, I will close with a warning. We should not think of the difficulty or resistance here as a psychological matter, as an individual’s quirk. Wittgenstein’s sights were broader, surveying (and diagnosing) his whole culture. As he wrote in the Foreword to Philosophical Remarks:

This book is written for such men as are in sympathy with its spirit. This spirit is different from the one which informs the vast stream of European and American civilization in which all of us stand. That spirit expresses itself in an onwards movement, in building ever larger and more complicated structures; the other in striving after clarity and perspicuity in no matter what structure.⁽³⁴⁾

In these matters the individual needs neither psychoanalysis nor shock therapy; it isphilosophy that is required: a philosophical striving after clarity and perspicuity, a philosophical straining (and training) to constantly conquer temptation anew and to see the sense visible amidst the nonsense and the nonsense clothed as sense.⁽³⁵⁾
 

Notes

35 The problem that concerns us could be summed up roughly thus: “Must one see an image of the colour blue in one’s mind whenever one reads the word ‘blue’ with understanding?” People have often asked this question and have commonly answered no; they have concluded from this answer that the characteristic process of understanding is just a different process which we’ve not yet grasped.–Suppose then by “understanding” we mean what makes the difference between reading with understanding and reading without understanding; what does happen when we understand? Well, “Understanding” is not the name of a single process accompanying reading or hearing, but of more or less interrelated processes against a background, or in a context, of facts of a particular kind, viz. the actual use of a learnt language or languages.–We say that understanding is a “psychological process”, and this label is misleading, in this as in countless other cases. It compares understanding to a particular process like translation from one language into another, and it suggests the same conception of thinking, knowing, wishing, intending, etc. That is to say, in all these cases we see that what we would perhaps naively suggest as the hallmark of such a process is not present in every case or even in the majority of cases. And our next step is to conclude that the essence of the process is something difficult to grasp that still awaits discovery. For we say: since I use the word “understand” in all these cases, there must be some one thing which happens in every case and which is the essence of understanding (expecting, wishing etc.). Otherwise, why should I call them by all the same name?

See also PI: 164:

164. In case (162) the meaning of the word “to derive” stood out clearly. But we told ourselves that this was only a quite special case of deriving; deriving in a quite special garb, which had to be stripped from it if we wanted to see the essence of deriving. So we stripped those particular coverings off; but then deriving itself disappeared.–In order to find the real artichoke, we divested it of its leaves. For certainly (162) was a special case of deriving; what is essential to deriving, however, was not hidden beneath the surface of this case, but his ‘surface’ was one case out of the family of cases of deriving.

PI: 436 & PG: p. 169: Here it is easy to get into that dead-end in philosophy, where one believes that the difficulty of the task consists in our having to describe phenomena that are hard to get hold of, the present experience that slips quickly by, or something of the kind. Where we find ordinary language too crude, and it looks as if we were having to do, not with the phenomena of every-day, but with ones that “easily elude us, and, in their coming to be and passing away, produce those others as an average effect”.

The Investigations adds Augustine’s Latin: “(Augustine: Manifestissima et usitatissima sunt, et eadem rusus nimis latent, et nova est inventio eorum.)” In Book XI of the Confessions Augustine, confronting himself with making sense of time, sees paradox after paradox, and then reminds himself of our ordinary time-talk, writing: “They are perfectly obvious and ordinary, and yet the same things are too well hidden, and their discovery comes as something new.”

Philosophical Grammar, instead, adds the same thought as Augustine, but with a decidedly different spin:

PG 169. And here one must remember that all the phenomena that now strike us as so remarkable are the very familiar phenomena that don’t surprise us in the least when they happen. They don’t strike us as remarkable until we put them in a strange light by philosophizing.

PG: pp. 72-3: A truthful answer to the question “Did you understand the sentence (that you have just read)” is sometimes “yes” and sometimes “no”. “So something different must take place when I understand it and when I don’t understand it.”

Right. So when I understand a sentence something happens like being able to follow a melody as a melody, unlike the case when it’s so long or so developed that I have to say “I can’t follow this bit”. And the same thing might happen with a picture, and here I mean an ornament. First of all I see only a maze of lines; then they group themselves for me into well-known and accustomed forms and I see a plan, a familiar system. If the ornamentation contains representations of well-known objects the recognition of these will indicate a further stage of understanding. (Think in this connection of the solution of a puzzle picture.) I then say “Yes, now I see the picture rightly”.

And:

[BB: p. 168] Now we have used a misleading expression when we said that besides the experiences of seeing and speaking in reading there was another experience, etc. This is saying that to certain experiences another experience is added.–Now take the experience of seeing a sad face, say in a drawing,–we can say that to see the drawing as a sad face is not ‘just’ to see it as some complex of strokes (think of a puzzle picture). But the word ‘just’ here seems to intimate that in seeing the drawing as a face some experience is added to the experience of seeing it as mere strokes; as though I had to say that seeing the drawing as a face consisted of two experiences, elements.

This book is written for such men as are in sympathy with its spirit. This spirit is different from the one which informs the vast stream of European and American civilization in which all of us stand. That spirit expresses itself in an onwards movement, in building ever larger and more complicated structures; the other in striving after clarity and perspicuity in no matter what structure. The first tries to grasp the world by way of its periphery–in its variety; the second at its centre–in its essence. And so the first adds one construction to another, moving on and up, as it were, from one stage to the next, while the other remains where it is and what it tries to grasp is always the same.
I would like to say ‘This book is written to the glory of God’, but nowadays that would be chicanery, that is, it would not be rightly understood. It means the book is written in good will, and in so far as it is not so written, but out of vanity, etc., the author would wish to see it condemned. He cannot free it of these impurities further than he himself is free of them.
November 1930 L. W.

Figs. 2, 3, 7-8, 12, 14
©2003 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. All rights reserved.