click to enlarge
Figure 1
Figure 2
Marcel Duchamp, Fresh
Widow, 1920 (back)
Marcel Duchamp, Fresh
Widow, 1920 (front)
To Rhonda Roland Shearer –
Contrary to your comment on “Fresh Widow,” French windows *do* open in — that way the shutters can open out!
Jim Hausman
resident of Chavenay, France
Dear Tout-Fait,
Duchamp, in a communication to Katherine Dreier in Paris, once sent a subtly altered photograph of a seemingly typical bar scene. On examination, spatial relationships were “out of whack” when referred to any rational floor plan. This may anticipate the work of the mathematician Donald Spencer (1912-2001) on systematic distortions of complex assemblages. Duchamp fooled the untutored eye by rearranging the spatial context in such a way that a non-visual logic replaced the logic of perspective (but in a superficially undetectable way). Such an alteration is, of course, reversible. This answers the requirement of reversibility in any complex distortion, which, in effect, is an operation for which an equation can be written. I wonder if any relationship could be traced between Duchamp’s anticipatory work and the later, formal work of Spencer and other geometers.
With best wishes to all,
Timothy Phillips
In his response to Jean Clair’s article, Arthur Danto makes a reference to Hegel by way of introduction; “It is true that in Hegel’s view, art is a superceded moment of Absolute Spirit, and it is in this sense that Hegel famously pronounces the end of art. Its mission, in Hegel’s system, is to be taken over by metaphysics.” It is not entirely obvious how this fits into the context of twentieth century art after Duchamp.
In another paragraph (which I have mercilessly truncated) Danto says: “Closing the gap between art and life .. Pop refused to countenance a distinction between fine and commercial, or between high and low art. …nothing an artist made could carry meanings more profound than those evoked by everyday garments, fast food, car parts, street signs. Each of these efforts aimed at bringing art down to earth, and transfiguring, through artistic consciousness, what everyone already knows.”
click to enlarge
Figure 1
Andy Warhol,
Marylin Monroe, 1967
Warhol’s approach was to appropriate something (a graphic design) that was already art (though categorized as “commercial art”) and offer it as high, avant-garde, fine, or “business” art (take your pick of terms). Thus the only thing the context changed was the price…and the “autograph.” Instead of appreciating the value of the label as art (sending us out to grocery store shelves to “collect” it for a few dollars) the result only reaffirmed the power of the art-world to assign arbitrary value and make it believable.
If “nothing an artist made could carry meanings more profound ‘than events or objects from everyday life'” (a suggestion Duchamp once made on viewing a propeller) and if these are things “everyone already knows” what is this “artistic consciousness” that we seem to need to “transfigure” …. why does it need transfiguring anyway? Do we need artists to tell us what we already know?
Is it possible that by closing the gap between art and life it is art that becomes irrelevant? If art cannot provide an insight into life, a fresh view of the quotidian or a clarification of its value and meaning….if it just shows it to us and asks us to celebrate its dull uniformity, glossy chic or garish banality as it is -and as the best life can offer-why would we need art at all? Danto says; “I saw it as the task of aesthetics to show how to distinguish art works from real things when there was no visible or palpable difference between them.” But haven’t we already arrived at the position that now there is no difference? “Art” is indistinguishable from any other commercial product or media sensation except as a speculative or investment vehicle for the very rich.
There have been many moments in the art of both East and West when artists called attention to everyday life and common objects. In every case either our attention was directed to something important about them, something uncommonly noticed, or their use as material transformed by the artist into a newly insightful event. In no case was the value seen to inhere in their triviality. It is a bit ironic that the distinctly non-trivial work of Duchamp has been used as pretext by generations of artists intent on making triviality a career path. The trivial has not been transfigured but everything else, even rage and disgust, has been trivialized. But then, as Danto has pointed out before, art has ended. It has not, however, become metaphysics.
Kirk Hughey
kirkparis1@aol.com
Dear Tout-Fait,
click to enlarge
Figure 1
Marcel Duchamp,signed
version of Draft Pistons, 1914
Figure 2
Marcel Duchamp,
unsigned version of
Draft Pistons, 1914
With regard to the two extant Draft Piston photographs which are supposed to determine the shapes of the three openings in the Milky Way, it seems to me that Duchamp’s signature and dating of one of these photographs has authorized a certain orientation which has been accepted too uncritically.
For a long time there was, I thought, something a bit peculiar about these two photographic prints (the way they were always reproduced). They didn’t read correctly. More visible in some reproductions than in others can be seen two spindly hooks attached to the gauze or netting. But – as reproduced – these hooks are at the base of the photographs.
Also, the lighting in the photographs didn’t seem to be right. If, as Duchamp later recalled, these photographs were made at an open window (perhaps in May 1915 on the top floor of 23, Rue St. Hippolyte?), then the shadows and the way the natural light falls are all wrong – but not if you turn the photographs upside-down. I believe Duchamp signed and dated one of these photographs upside-down with intent, perhaps inferring that the signature doesn’t necessarily orientate the work – or rather, can perhaps authorize (as in authorizations of the Bride) a certain dis-orientation (Discuss!).
Incidentally, as 23 Rue St. Hippolyte was still under construction when Duchamp moved there in 1913, I don’t think it would be too far-fetched to presume that the enclosure directing the currents of air – within which the netting or gauze appears to be hung – is a section of ventilation or central-heating duct [see also: Linda Dalrymple Henderson,Duchamp in Context, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998)].
Yours in an-artism,
Glenn Harvey
15 The Green
Mistley
Manningtree
Essex CO11 1EU
UK
Figs. 1, 2
©2002 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. All rights reserved.
Duchamp’s ‘R’s
The prevalence of excessive “R”s in Duchamp’s œuvre may seem to hold a clue for those who care, or “ose”—-dare, to look. After all a Frenchman struggling with the English language might pronounce those “Rs” as “arse” a term which refers in colloquial English speech to a measure of daring. Duchamp so loved to use colloquial speech and puns. And to all accounts he loved, as the Americans say, to “get some arse,” his pursuit of the ladies being legendary.
The influence of Raymond Roussel on Duchamp is often cited but not sufficiently documented. The double R’s of Raymond Roussel’s initials figure into Duchamp’s female pseudonym: Rrose Sélavy.(1) This name could be a conscious tribute to Roussel, Duchamp here giving him life. Rrose Sélavy / Roussel, la vie–Roussel, life. This could be a measure of his respect for Roussel.
click to enlarge
Figure 1
Marcel Duchamp,
Tonsure, 1919
Figure 2
Marcel
Duchamp, 50 cc
of Paris Air, 1919
One of Roussel’s later plays was called L’Etoile au Front—the Star on the Forehead. Duchamp’s famous haircut in which he had a star cut into the hair on the back of his head may be a joke in which he has reversed the forehead, in French “le front,” or in English pronunciation, the “front” of his head, for the back.
The significance of Duchamp claiming to be a “breather” is also connected to Roussel and the excessive “R.” The word “hair” when pronounced with a heavy French accent “air” is a homophony to the French pronunciation of the letter “R”–Roussel’s initials, RR. Every time Duchamp evokes an “R” he is evoking not only Roussel, his own haircut, but also the “Air” which he so relished.(2)
Duchamp’s gift to Walter Arensberg of a glass phial of Air de Paris continues the trail. The French pronunciation of the letter “R” is also a homophony of the word “err” to wander, stray or to err in the English sense of making an error. The “Air de Paris ” Air of Paris that Duchamp gave Arensberg in the United States does in fact err, or wander, from Paris–“Air / err de Paris.” Duchamp, as an expatriate, had also wandered from Paris–“il err de Paris”–he wanders/strays from Paris. There is also a lexical link between Air de Paris and Duchamp’s later Monte Carlo gambling spree. This lexical link continues as “Paris” is not only the name of a city but the plural of the noun “pari” which means in English–“bet” or “wager.” Duchamp’s “Air/Err de Paris,” the “error of bets” prefigures his recognition of his Monte Carlo betting spree as an error of judgement.
Returning to Duchamp’s gift to Arensberg, “Air de Paris,” we have established that the words “Air” and the French pronunciation of the letter “R” are homophones. “Air/R de Paris.” If we substitute the English pronunciation of the letter “R” for the French pronunciation of the same letter “R,” which is pronounced the same as the English word “Air,” we can see a further correlation. The letter “R” when pronounced in English is also the equivalent of the French pronunciation of the word “art,” the “t” being silent. Hence in substituting the French pronunciation of the letter “R” = English “Air” with the English pronunciation of the letter “R” = French “Art,” we have, instead of “Air de Paris,” “Art de Paris.” This is in fact what Duchamp gave Arensberg. “Art” from Paris, which was Air. Equivalences.
Looking once again at Duchamp’s use of the double “R” of Roussel’s initials we can, in applying a similar cross linguistic procedure to the interpretation of this usage, extrapolate from the “Rr” of Rrose Selavy–in English/French pronunciation “Art err”(3)–Art errs. Or Art (with a capital A–high art) errs or wanders–Art/R errs/r–ose Selavy–ose, c’est la vie–dare, that’s life. Art has entered into life. Similarly one can extrapolate Art/air–ose c’est la vie. Art/air–dare that’s life. Art and the air of life are equivalent. Dare to breathe.
Duchamp may have made a further comment on the status of art through his use of the double “R.” In a reference to Jarry he says “Arrhe is to art what merdre is to merde.”(4)Arrhe–from the (feminine) word for a (monetary) deposit–arrhes, and art, similarly tomerdre and merde, are homophones in French. Duchamp’s cynical interpretation of the relation between art, money and shit/shitte is here presented succinctly. Jarry’s “merdre” is similar to money in the bank, a deposit or “arrhe” and “art” is placed similarly to shit. “Arrhe” and “art” are in French homophones with the English pronunciation of the letter “R.” There is a further stress on the letter “R” with the redundant “R” in Jarry’s neologism “merdre.”(5) This redundant “R” recalls the redundant “R” of Rrose. It seems Duchamp’s stress on the redundant “R/art” may be a cynical statement about the status of art. If the redundant “R/art” (from “merdre”) is placed similarly to “arrhe” or cash in the bank what would we deduce from this? That this type of monetarily motivated art is shit?
Enough about “R”s “arse” and their extrapolations. Maybe we have wandered too far or maybe we just err and its time to find some fresh air.
Notes
1. Other commentators– including Thierry de Duve in his Kant and Duchamp (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996); and André Gervais in La Raie Alitée d’Effets have noted the similarity between Rrose Sélavy and Roussel.
2. George Bauer playfully expounds some of these correlations in his article entitled “Roussel– Duchamp” inLa Quinzaine Litteraire, no. 407 (1983): 14–15. He does not however make the front/back connection.
3. French conjugation of the verb to err or wander.
4. Marcel Duchamp, Duchamp du signe (Paris: Flammarion, 1994). “Arrhe est à art ce que merdre est
à merde.”
5. The second “r” is redundant. The word is pronounced similarly to the French word for shit.
Figs. 1, 2
©2002 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. All rights reserved.
click to enlarge
Photograph of Reunion
performance by
Shigeko Kubota, 1968
Figure 1
George Maciunas, Fluxus
(Its historical development
and relationship to
avant-garde movements)
Diagram No. 1-2, 1966
Figure 2
Cunningham
Dance Foundation,
Walkaround Time, 1968
More And moRe.
rules are esCaping our noticE. they were Secretly put in the museum. (1)
Born in Niigata, Japan, in 1937, Shigeko Kubota grew up in a monastic environment during WWII and the subsequent postwar period. She later studied sculpture in Tokyo in the late 1950s and early 1960s, during which Japan strived to reestablish its financial, political and psychological welfare from the devastation of the war. This period also offered a chance for Japanese artists to move away from fairly confined notions of presentation and cultural isolation from the global art community. Although such avant-garde group, as Gutai, began to evoke innovative ideas in the 1950s. For instance, painting by foot, crashing through papers, throwing paint, or displaying water in Osaka and Tokyo, a gender-biased phenomenon was still a fixed hierarchy of the society. After the failure of local art community to put up any critical response to her work, Kubota took off on a Boeing 707, leaving her native country for New York in 1964. She was drawn to the glittering landscape of the New York art scene, where Pop art, Happening, Minimal and Conceptual work were the dominant manners of the time. Through Yoko Ono, she was soon acquainted with George Maciunas, the founder of Fluxus, and became a core member of Fluxus participating in various street events and performances.
Fluxus’ rebellious ideas (Fig. 1) and its multicultural constitution embraced Kubota and provided her with a nurturing environment to explore an innovative outlet for her creative impulse. Kubota had learned of Duchamp and the underlying concepts and intellectual approach of his work when she was still in Japan and became even more inspired by him when she visited the Duchamp exhibition by Pontus Hulten at the Stockholm Museum in 1967. The next year she met Duchamp in person when she was flying to the opening of Merce Cunningham’s Walk Around Time (Fig. 2) , a performance based on Duchamp’s Large Glass(1915-23) with a setting designed by Jasper Johns. In a lovely story vividly remembered by Kubota:
| “I met Duchamp on an American Airline flight to Buffalo for the opening of ‘Walkaround Time’ by Merce Cunningham. It was a cold winter in 1968. The airplane couldn’t land at the airport in Buffalo because there was a blizzard from Niagara Falls. We landed at the airport in Rochester, then took a bus to Buffalo. In Toronto later in 1968, I photographed Marcel and John Cage playing chess at the ‘Reunion’ concert.”(2) |
Despite the newly raised confusion with regard to the sequence of the precise dates for these two events from which an anecdote on the beginning of their friendship is woven,(3) Duchamp had a profound impact on Shigeko Kubota. Not only was he the inspiring father icon for the Fluxus group and for Kubota’s creative impulses, he also offered an unforgettable friendship during the final year of his life. Kubota took part in and photographed Reunion, a chess game organized by John Cage which turned out to be the last public reunion between these two masters of the contemporary creative mind,(4) and it was here that Kubota began to utilize video technology, a novel means through which dream and reality meet. Three works based on this chess event set forth her artist career as a pioneering video artist.
Marcel Duchamp and John Cage (1970; 1971) & Video Sculpture (1968-75)
click to enlarge
Figure 3
The wire-up chessboard
for Reunion,
Toronto, 1968
Performed at Ryerson Theatre of Ryerson Polytechnic, Toronto, on March 5, 1968, Reunion was organized by John Cage and included the musicians David Tudor, Gordon Mumma, and David Behrman and a wired-up chessboard designed by Lowell Cross (Fig. 3). When Teeny and Marcel Duchamp took turns playing chess with Cage on the stage, the pre-modulated photoreceptors served as a gating mechanism to receive messages of movements and to transmit sound and light. Depending on the moves of the chess pieces, the sound was cut off or rerouted to generate a kind of random music by means of the pre-configured chance operation of two “intellectual minds.” With the photographs she took and material acquired later, Kubota slowly developed three works based on this memorable event: a book, a videotape and a video sculpture in a period of time ranging from 1968 to 1975.
Published in 1970 in a limited edition of 500 numbered copies with a blue cover and inserted in a blue cardboard box, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage (Fig. 4) consists of photographs taken during the Reunion performance and a 33 1/3 rpm blue flexidisc (phonograph) of the Reunionsound recording, accompanied by text written by John Cage under the title of “36 Acrostics re. and not re Duchamp.”
click to enlarge
Click to listen
download QuickTime Player
Figure 4
Shigeko Kubota, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, 1970
The videotape of 1972, carring the same title as the book, includes segments of John Cage–telling stories, mediating, playing a piano, sitting bandaged while Nam June Paik measures his brain waves (Figs. 5 & 6)–with still images of Teeny, Duchamp and Cage playing chess inReunion alternating throughout as though they are the interlude in music composition. In addition, footage from Kubota’s visit to the graveyard of the Duchamp family in Rouen in 1972 (Fig. 7)(5), captures the fleeting movement of wind dancing with the patchy light that pierces through the shadowy grove. A sense of euphoria generates. On and off for three times, the exotic and shaman-like voice of Kubota chanting “Marcel Duchamp, 1887 to 1968,” is the only literal sound intervening with the seemingly timeless silence. The life-death confrontation in an infinite circle is further reinforced through the repetitive expression. This footage was later edited and colored for Kubota’s astounding installation, Marcel Duchamp’s Grave (Fig. 8), at The Kitchen, New York in 1975.
click images to enlarge
Shigeko Kubota, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, 1972 [details]
Figure 8
Shigeko Kubota, installation view of Marcel Duchamp’s Grave, 1972-75
click to enlarge
Figure 9
Shigeko Kubota,
Video Chess, 1968-75
The concluding work, the Video Chess (1968-75) (Fig. 9), a sculptural TV, is constructed and posited on the floor with its monitor facing up. A transparent chessboard with transparent chess pieces sits above the TV monitor. Kubota reworked the 1968 Toronto photographs by having them transferred, keyed, matted, and colorized at the Experimental TV Center in Binghampton, NY with the assistance of Ken Dominik, and later at WNET-TV Lab in New York. The monitor plays the transferred and colorized images of Duchamp and Cage playing chess with the original soundtrack emitting. Every crosspoint of the chess matrix has a hole and light cell which are modulated by the proceeding of a chess game. As viewers/players look down/play chess on this transparent chessboard, in Kubota’s words, they are “accompanied by the videotape of the two great masters playing from the otherside of this world.” (6)
Don’t
yoU ever want to win?
(impatienCe.)
How do you
mAnage to live with
just one sense of huMor?
she must have Persuaded him to smile.(7)
The porta-pack video camera is an integral part of Shigeko Kubota’s work, given that the video camera is to open up a dialogue with the self that is encountered everyday as well as with unknown natures which are uncovered. Margot Lovejoy pinpoints the benefit for the presence of the first portable video camera to the art world:
|
“Some saw video as an agit-prop tool. Installed in closed-circuit elaborated gallery settings, the video camera with a delayed feedback loop could confront and interact with the viewer in a new dialogue which placed the spectator within the production process as part of the conceptual intentions of the artists. Combined with sound/music or spoken dialogue and text, the medium opened up new aesthetic ground for exploring time/motion/sound/image relationships in a broad range of contexts.”
|
click to enlarge
Figure 10
Shigeko Kubota
During the 1960s, the Fluxus’ adoption of video into their happening and performance in Europe and the United States created a different climate of aesthetic discourse which attracted a young generation and resulted in their reflecting on video as an effective medium for new art. The possibility to commit personal testaments to tape in any environment, however intimate, and in complete privacy, has made video an exciting feature. Despite its exhausting weight to carry, video recording equipment has always been relatively simple to operate and it is possible to work alone without the intrusive presence of the crews demanded by 16mm filmmaking. It is also easy and relatively cheap to record long monologues on tape. Kubota bought her SONY porta-pack camera in 1970. The flexibility and easy operation of a video camera allows Kubota to document her daily encounters with herself and others during her travels (Fig. 10). Later, she works on the footage acquired, transforming personal narratives into a confronting public display. It is noteworthy that Kubota is used to handling video work herself throughout the process. Herewith, she gains a total control over what she choses to preserve or erase.
To Kubota, the unique qualities of video with “no past history, no objecthood, and no agree-upon-value”(9)have set up a new category for equal competition among artists. In a long interview conducted by Katsue Tomiyama in 1991, Kubota praises video because “male and female artists began the competition at an equal point.” (10) Her attraction to the video, furthermore, is educed by its “oriental” and “organic” nature–“like brown rice, brown curb, like seaweed, made in Japan.” (11)–the single-channel TV is capable of bridging two extreme worlds–“TV is always somewhere between dream and reality.” (12) She later contemplates, “video acts as an extension of the brain’s memory cells. Therefore, life with video is like living with two brains, one plastic brain and one organic brain. One’s life is inevitably altered. Change will effect even our relationship with death, as video is a living altar. Yes, videotaped death negates death as a simple terminal.”(13)
the wind-break becaMe
A
woRk of art
(it began Casually
likE
the firepLace).(14)
Closely examining these three works, one can tell the apparent contrast between the independence of individual segments seen in the blue book (1968-72) as well as in the videotape (1972), and the integration of Video Chess (1968-75) as the sculptural entity. The 1972 videotape of Marcel Duchamp and John Cage in which fragments of images alternate with one another, barely has the trace of editing revealed. In the 1991 interview, Kubota admitted her reluctance to alter the video-recorded images, which is coherent with what we see in the 1972 videotape, an open-ended quality register with a sense of naivety. On the contrary,Video Chess is eloquently constructed and presented under an authoritative art form. This time, Kubota ruminates on the overall presentation as a whole as oppose to co-existing fragments presented in the prior video of Marcel Duchamp and John Cage. The conceptual connection is reinforced by the absence of both intellectual minds. In other words, the absence of both Cage and Duchamp has turned into an abstract physicality. The spectator can only be aware of their presence by the arbitrary appropriation offered by Shigeko Kubota. It is as if she is the invisible and all-powerful shaman who channels and embodies the men-objects with our living world in a simulated territory where life and death negate each other, forming an endless cycle.
click to enlarge
Figure 11
Num June Paik,
T.V. Cello with
Charlotte Moorman, 1971
Figure 12
Peter Campus, Head
of a Man with Death
on His Mind, 1978
Figure 13
Bill Viola, The
Veiling, 1995
During visit to Duchamp’s grave, the ritual act of presenting an offering (her blue book) on Duchamp’s grave and chanting was “as in the oriental family custom of putting rice cookies on the dead ancestor’s altar.”(15) Usually performed by an official in ancient eastern culture, chanting during the funeral rite is regarded as the emotional mourning toward the loss of loved ones and a communication with them on the other side of the world.
Aesthetically, the poetic and exquisite elaboration of Video Chess is quite appealing and from this Kubota would further mature as an original and independent video artist and become a significant figure among her peers, such as Nam June Paik (Fig. 11), Peter Campus (Fig. 12), Bill Viola (Fig. 13), Gary Hill, and Dan Graham, who together mark the first phase of Video Art. However, not so much to deduce the conceptual connection between Kubota’s Japanese and Duchampian “roots,” (16) her ability to integrate personal memories and history into an exquisite sensibility substantiates Kubota’s identity as a female artist who tackles motifs rooted in art and life and elevates them to the hegemonic discourse of art history. To Kubota, art making is always something deeply associated with nature and culture alike. In the case of these three works derived from the chessReunion, the materialization of Duchamp and Cage is appropriated and manipulated by Kubota. The search for truthful perceptions of history, perhaps, is best summed up by Kubota’s self-description for her video sculpture Adam and Eve of 1991. An environmental work drawn on Kubota’s friendship with Al Robbins and the influence by which Duchamp played Adam with Brogna Perlmutter as Eve in Picabia’s Relâche (1926), a ballet work inspired by Lucas Cranach’s painting, Adam and Eve is “an appropriation of an appropriation of an appropriation of an appropriation.”(17)From this perspective, the duality between subject and object has been erased because it no longer represents authenticity but a repetition of the past.
Notes
1. John Cage, “36 Acrostics re. and not re Dcuhamp,” in Shigeko Kubota, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage(Takeyoshi Miyazawa, 1968) no. 19.
2.Shigeko Kubota: Video as a Form of Spiritual Collision with the World, exhibition catalogue, Fondazione Mudima, Italy (19 May 1994) 38.
3. During my research on this memorable event held in Toronto, 1968, I came across the confusion of dates as to the first performance of the Walkaround Time by Merce Cunningham and that of the Reunion performance by John Cage and Duchamp. According to the chronological table available on the web site of the Merce Cunningham Organization <http://www.merce.org/repertory_chronology.html>, Walkaround Time was first performed on 10 March 1968, while Reunion was scheduled on 5 March 1968, which is five days prior to the Cunningham performance in Buffalo. Judging by the performing dates for these two events, Ms. Kubota couldn’t possibly have known Teeny and Duchamp when she was attending the Reunion and photographed the chess game. Unable to reach Ms. Kubota for the clarification of the confusion, thus, it seems more logical that the trip to Buffalo could well have been a planned reunion with the Duchamps and participation in the event, other than an accidental encounter on a plane to Buffalo for the opening of Walkaround Time.
4. Duchamp died a few months later in October 2, 1968.
5. According to Kubota, “It was a very windy day. I took a train from Paris to Rouen, then took a cab to his cemetery. There were two entrances. I didn’t know which one to take. At the flower shop nearby the cemetery, I asked a woman, ‘where is Marcel Duchamp’s grave?’ She looked at me and said, ‘Who is he?’Then she opened the telephone book. I was very shocked. Alone, after a long search in the vast cemetery, the weight of my porta-pack crushing on my shoulder, I finally found Duchamp’s grave next to that of Jacques Villon, his brother. …” See Shigeko Kubota: Video as a Form of Spiritual Collision with the World 41.
6. Shigeko Kubota, 1981.
7. Cage, in Kubota, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, no. 6.
8.Margot Lovejoy, Postmodern Currents, Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media (Ann Harbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1989) 195.
9. Ibid.
10. Shigeko Kubota: Video as a Form of Spiritual Collision with the World, exhibition catalogue, Fondazione Mudima, Italy (19 May 1994) 9.
11. Cited from Moira Roth, p. 106; first published in Jeanine Mellinger and D. L. Bean, “Shigeko Kubota,” interview in Profile 3.6 (November 1983): 3.
12.Shigeko Kubota, 1981.
13. Artist’s statement in the exhibition catalogue, Shigeko Kubota, Video Sculpture,ed. Zdenek Felix (Berlin: Daadgalerie; Essen: Museum Folkewang; Zürich: Kunsthaus Zürich, 1982) 13.
14.Cage, in Kubota, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, no. 7.
15. Mary Jane Jacob, ed., Shigeko Kubota: Video Sculpture (New York: American Museum of the Moving Image, 1991) 24.
16. Because of the monastic association of her father’s family, Kubota had frequently witnessed funerals as a child. She recalled, “I often did homework inside a temple room where fresh bones were stored. How I plyed with ghosts…all these childhood memories flashed back to my head.” Mary Jane Jacob, ed., Shigeko Kubota, Video Sculpture80.
17. Ibid, 68.
Fig. 2 © Merce Cunningham Dance Foundation, Inc., NY, 2002
Fig. 13 Collection of the artist, courtesy Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London
(The following example of Marcel Duchamp’s encounter with the mind of Leonardo da Vinci is excerpted from a longer essay. Duchamp discovered Leonardo’s anatomical writings and drawings, through photogravure reproductions, in the Bibliotheque Sainte Genevieve in Paris, first as a curious visitor in 1910, then as a professional librarian with a great deal of spare time, in 1913-14. Outside the library, the publication of a new French translation of Leonardo’s Treatise on Painting in 1910 aroused great interest among all three Duchamp brothers and their Cubist friends at Puteaux.)
In his Treatise on Painting Leonardo da Vinci advised:
| “When you wish to remember well something you have studied, do this: when you have drawn the same object so many times that you have it in your memory, try to execute it without the model. Now trace the model on a thin smooth glass, and place it upon the drawing you have made without the model, and note well where the tracing does not coincide with your drawing. Where you find that you have made errors, resolve not to repeat your mistakes. Return to the model and draw the wrong part again so many times that you will have committed its image to the mind.” (1) |
Leonardo urged young painters to study nature, observe acutely, and remember everything, in order to develop the ability to produce complex compositions with many figures in motion on a broad expanse of landscape. Marcel Duchamp, in a note in the Green Box, (Fig. 1) contradicted this passage from the Treatise on Painting. He seemed to acknowledge its significance by undoing it. He ran Leonardo’s advice in reverse;
| “To lose the possibility of recognizing 2 similar objects– 2 colors, 2 laces, 2 hats, 2 forms whatsoever. To arrive at the Impossibility of sufficient visual memory to transfer from one like object to another the memory imprint. –Same possibility with sounds; with brain facts” (2) |
click to enlarge
Figure 1
Marcel Duchamp, Note from
the Green Box, 1934
Duchamp evoked a psychic state in which, from one instant to the next, the mind would sustain no overlapping visual imprint (or tracing on glass, as Leonardo might say). He called for a total collapse of short–term memory. This would be a terrifying experience. But looked at in another way, it would be intensely interesting. Everything would be new all the time. An artist who could attain this frame of mind, even to a minute degree, would produce some unforeseen works. Such an artist, Duchamp hoped, might even become liberated from the bounds of practice and tradition, and “make works which are not works of ‘art’.”
A painter could make a sculpture. That would be nothing new. But in an extreme state of self–induced forgetfulness, a painter might lose track of which of the five senses governs his art form. He might slip away from the use of the retina, the organ of sight, and start hearing, for example, rather than seeing. He could become a composer of music without even noticing it.
click to enlarge
Marcel Duchamp, Note #183,
in Paul Matisse
(ed. & trans.),
Marcel Duchamp,
Notes, 1983
A previously unknown collection of notes by Duchamp was published in 1980, a dozen years after his death. The sheet which came to be designated as #183 reads: (Fig. 2)
“…like…luminous electric lights which light up successively, a line of identical sounds could turn around the listener in arabesques (on the right/ left/ over/ under)…
Develop: one could, after training the listener’s ear, succeed in drawing a resembling and recognizable profile. With more training make large sculptures in which the listener would be a center. For example, an immense Venus de Milo made of sounds around the listener. This probably presupposes an aural training from childhood and for several generations.”(3)
A proposal for another musical occurrence, a construction made of a single sound drawn out over time, sprang out of the mind of Marcel Duchamp during his study of Leonardo’sWindsor Anatomy, Folio B. It is as if Duchamp, in the course of pondering the most succinct and beautiful anatomical drawings ever made, was overcome by a wave of the esthetic amnesia he had only dared to imagine. Had he succeeded in making one of those “works which are not works of ‘art'”?
click to enlarge
Figure 4
French translation
of da Vinci’s manuscript
click to enlarge
Figure 3
Leonardo da Vinci,
Transcription of
the manuscript page
Duchamp jotted down instructions for “The Tuner,” a performance for a solo piano tuner on an empty stage. It was based on another jotting– the number 3, written backwards eight times, by Leonardo da Vinci. The numerals run like leaking water down the right–hand margin of Leonardo’s manuscript page, disconnected from the block of text. (Fig. 3) A transcription of the original Italian, and a translation into French, follow the photogravure facsimile of Leonardo’s original, and here the eight 3’s are lined up in a neat horizontal row that stands out as a peculiar typographical feature, an unexpected visual rhythm. (Fig. 4) Any reader, with no knowledge of Italian or French, can decipher this line: “3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3.”
Duchamp and Leonardo shared an infatuation with the number “3.” A triad was used by both artists to hold back the tide of infinity, or infinite complexity, at a very early point in the enumerating or measuring process. “Three is infinity,” Duchamp said. “One is unity, two is double, duality, and three is the rest.”(4) There was no need to go any further. “When you’ve come to the word three, you have three million–it’s the same as three.”(5)
click to enlarge
Figure 5
Marcel Duchamp,
The Bride Stripped Bare
by Her Bachelors,
Even [a k.a. The
Large Glass], 1915-23
The list of components of the Large Glass executed in triplicate covers the work from top to bottom: 3 draft pistons, 3 isolating plates, 3 standard stoppages,3 rollers on the chocolate grinder, 3 oculist witnesses, 3 X 3 cannon shots, 3 X 3 malic molds, 3 X 3 capillary tubes. A catalog of the unexecuted tripled parts, called for in the Green Box and the posthumous notes but ever appearing in the Large Glass, includes the following: 3 splash/rashes, 3 falls, 3 feet for the Juggler of Gravity, 3 summits for the combat arbles, 3 desire centers,”(6)3 “positive rods of the desire dynamo,”(7)and the “hot chamber of the triple decision.”(8)
So Duchamp used the number three to tie together, as with bits of wire, the members of his ungainly automaton called The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.(Fig. 5)
Leonardo used tripling for the reverse project, the project of aking apart a once–living human body. He needed an ordering mechanism for material that might otherwise slip out of his control. As he removed the outerlayers of the body and probed into the tissues of a human corpse he repeatedly,at each step of the way, for each limb and each organ, called for three separatedissections: one carried out from the top, one from the side,and one from the ottom. Each dissection, in turn, would require, if he could get it, a fresh pecimen.
Anatomists in Leonardo’s time had no preservatives, and corpses egan to decompose even as the investigators worked. If a forearm, for example, ere placed on the table with its palm facing downward, tissue could be removed with a scalpel and, very gingerly, with fingers, to reveal the blood vessels. The next step, in theory, would be to turn the arm over. The anatomist could then trace, on the underside of the arm and hand, the sources and destinations of the vessels already laid bare. But this was impossible because of disintegration. The specimen would already be undermined by rot, and “on account,” said Leonardo,
“of the very great confusion which results from the mix–up of membranes with veins, arteries, nerves, tendons, muscles, bones, and especially blood, which itself dyes every part the same color….Therefore it is necessary to perform more dissections. You need three to acquire full knowledge of the veins and arteries, destroying with the utmost diligence all the rest, and another three to obtain knowledge of the membranes, and three for the tendons, muscles, and ligaments, three
for the bones and cartilages and three for the anatomy of the bones.”(9)
Clearly this was goullish work, and Leonardo issued a warning to prospective artist–anatomists; “Though you may have a love for such things you will perhaps be deterred by a weak stomach, or, if this does not restrain you, then
perhaps by the fear of living through the night hours in the company of these corpses, quartered and flayed and horrible to behold.”(10)
Leonardo needed the number three to organize and objectify, and perhaps to keep some of the horror at bay. Proposals for a great series of dissections, to be accompanied by drawings and diagrams, appear as unrealized fragments in several of his manuscripts. In the Windsor Anatomy, Folio Bhe writes:
| “We shall make three diagrams…with the bones sawn asunder so as to show their thickness and hollowness. Three other diagrams we shall make for the bones entire, and for the nerves which spring from the nape of the neck and showing into what limbs they ramify. And three others for the bones and veins and where they ramify, then three for the muscles and three for the skin and the measurements,and three for the woman to show the womb and the menstrual veins which go to the breasts.”(11) |
At this moment, while writing this passage, Leonardo was seized by a fit of graphic exuberance. At least this is what the evidence on the manuscript page appears to record. His hand would not stop drawing a mark that looks like the letter E, eight times, down the side of the page. This marginal calligraphy reveals a childlike excitement. It also demonstrates a simple truth about human anatomy. The musculature of the right hand is structured so that, when manipulating a writing implement or tool, a clockwise circular motion feels natural and pleasurable. (This fact has come to determine the design of cork–screws, can–openers, and the configurations of our written alphabet.) Leonardo was a born draftsman, perhaps the greatest to ever live, and a born lefty. At an early age he developed full command of his most important tool, the drawing hand. But the left hand wants to follow a counter–clockwise path, and he refused to impede its natural movement in any way. It is for this reason that Leonardo taught himself to produce ‘mirror–writing,’ running across the page backwards, from right to left. But now his hand would not stop spinning like a tiny funnel cloud, delineating the numeral 3 in reverse. It escaped from his text and spilled in a free–fall down the side of the page.
click to enlarge
Figure 6
Marcel Duchamp,
Bride, 1912
Marcel Duchamp arrived on this scene, on the back of Sheet #20 in the Windsor Anatomy, Folio B, over four–hundred years later, in 1910. For the next two years he struggled as a painter, secretly, with Leonardo’s anatomical images. He was in awe of their mechanical complexity, and their chilling sense of precision. Yet they were terribly alive, sometimes almost eliciting an olfactory experience of life and death. At the end of this struggle, during the summer of 1912, Duchamp produced the painting the Bride. (Fig. 6) He was approaching artistic maturity by following the solitary path he had set for himself, a path that would call for spells of lengthy contemplation intertwined with impulsive, illogical actions.
click to enlarge
Figure 7
Marcel Duchamp,Note
#183,in Paul Matisse
(ed. & trans.),
Marcel Duchamp, Notes, 1983
Duchamp was deliberately constructing within himself a pathway to delirium, a controlled and self-imposed delirium. He wanted to have this state of mind available as an artist’s tool, to provide the possibility of bringing together
two ideas that had never been joined before, or to jumble up the senses, switching, for example, seeing and hearing. At some moment during these two years Duchamp must have, following his own prescription, lost “the possibility of recognizing 2 similar objects…2 forms whatsoever…” His mind stumbled upon the aberrant trail of reversed 3’s in Leonardo’s anatomical manuscript. In an instant, it seems, his mind was cleared of his growing preoccupation with the number 3. He had ‘lost the possibility’ of recognizing the number, but saw it instead as an E, not the written letter, but the musical note. His hand took off like Leonardo’s and started to spin out backward 3’s, or E’s. The initial effort was botched (Fig. 7); Duchamp was right-handed, so the counter-clockwise motion of his pen went awry. But in his next attempt he produced eight exuberant E’s in an upwardly tilted procession,followed, for good measure, by another row of four. Duchamp had emerged with a piece of music, a miniature “happening,” composed solely of the note E from the musical octave. He took a “readymade” activity, the maintenance of a musical instrument, and transformed it into the performance itself. He was fifty years ahead of his time:
“THE TUNER–
Have a piano tuned on stage–
EEEEEEEE
EEEE
or
make a movie of the tuner tuning, and synchronize the tunings on a piano.
Or rather, synchronize the tuning of a hidden piano.
or
have a piano tuned on the stage in the dark.
Do it technically and avoid
all musicianship–“(12)
Duchamp left this note unpublished, among the group to be discovered after his death.It shows that readymade music was a step on the path to readymade objects,and that this path led him through Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, past the number 3.
NOTES
1. A. Phillip McMahon, trans., Treatise on Painting by Leonardo da Vinci (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1956) 47; Josephin Peladan, trans. and ed., Leonard de Vinci, Traite de la Peinture (Paris: Librairie Delagrave, 1910) 101.
2. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson, eds., The Writings of Marcel Duchamp
(New York: Da Capo Press, 1973) 31.
3. Paul Matisse, ed. and trans., Marcel Duchamp, Notes (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983) note #183.
4. Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (New York: Viking Press, 1971) 47.
5. Cabanne, Dialogues 47.
6. Matisse, Notes, notes #63 and #251.
7. Ibid., note #162 recto.
8. Ibid., note #131.
9. Edward MacCurdy, ed., The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (New York: George Braziller, 1954) 160;and Serge Bramly, Leonardo (New York: Penguin Books, 1991) 374.
10. MacCurdy, Notebooks 166.
11.Ibid. 131-132.
12. Matisse,Notes, note #199.
Figs. 1, 2, 5-7
©2002 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. All rights reserved.
The apparatus composing the piece is comprised of three parts: a funnel, several open top cars, and a set of numbered balls. … The placing of notes (numbers) in the score was determined by the way in which the balls came through the funnel and were taken out of the cars. … The composition itself was determined by Duchamp in his description of the system and his examples of musical scoring(1)
click images to enlarge
Marcel Duchamp,
The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors,
Even: Musical Erratum (1913), from the Green Box (1934)
In discussing how he arrived at his implementation of Marcel Duchamp’s musical “score,”La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires même: Erratum Musical, (Figs. 1 and 2) for his 1987 performance of Duchamp’s music, Peter Kotik first explained the technical instructions which produced the score itself, noting that “I intentionally avoided implementing my own musical ideas. Indeed, it was a realization rather than a composition.”(2) The reason for his description of the score he used as a “realization” is simply that the score was determined by a particular kind of “chance operation” laid out in a set of instructions from 1912-1913. The kind of “chance” used by Duchamp is one where the precise sequence of a set of carefully described elements are assembled into one instance of a very large, complex permutation itself deflected from being purely mechanical through the intervention of an interpreting consciousness. What creates this situation are the lacunae left in the instructions, thus leaving aspects of the implementation uncertain, open to the interpretation of the one who sets up the apparatus and employs it. As a result, even though these works are technically deterministic–limited set of elements, limited set of possible outcomes (all the possible arrangements of notes in the score could be worked out mathematically)–the actual implementation has the character of being “random” because there is no overriding intelligence actually setting the pieces into a particular order, even though their arrangement is (paradoxically) dependent on an overriding intelligence. It is only possible to perceive the order from the vantage point of process, where each individual “score” or “implementation” is a particular instance of the rules being followed in a specific way. This is the meaning of what Duchamp terms his “chance operations.” La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires même. Erratum Musical (as used by Kotik) is simply one instance of those operations.
The omissions left in the instructions for these works are significant. Because there are areas which remain unknown in the how of implementation, each time these instructions are implemented, the one following the instruction is forced to “fill in” the missing details,(3)thus introducing a very significant variable into an otherwise mechanical process. It is not possible to simply sit down and perform the necessary permutations of elements (using a computer program for example) and produce the totality of all possible scores; such a construction would only result in all possible scores producible using those assumptions about how to fill in the details. Logically, different assumptions produce a different score. This is an important factor since it sets the emphasis in neither the results nor the mechanical process, but in how that mechanical process is imagined by the implementer.
click to enlarge
Figure 3
Marcel Duchamp,
Note from the
Green Box, 1934
Figure 4
Marcel Duchamp,
The Bride Stripped Bare
by Her Bachelors, Even
[a k.a. The Large
Glass], 1915-23
Figure 5
Marcel Duchamp,
Note from the
Green Box, 1934
On a note in the Green Box, (Fig. 3) Duchamp makes the following comment, suggestive given both the title of La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires même. Erratum Musical and the problem of its score:
Use ‘delay’ instead of picture or painting: ‘picture on glass’ thus becomes ‘delay in glass’–but ‘delay in glass’ does not mean ‘picture on glass’
[translator’s note: The expression “retard en verre” is a homophone of several others, notably, “retard d’envers” (delayed reversal), “retard envers” (delay in relation to/delay towards), etc.](4)
The piece is a musical notation to La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (The Large Glass)(Fig. 4) that comes very early in the planning stages for this major work. The idea of delays, particularly “delays towards,” is useful since the apparatus produces a delay in the creation of the score, a process which is itself delayed by the points before and after the functioning of the apparatus which require interpretation to continue. It produces music whose performance is delayed by the method of its composition, putting the performer in the position of one of the “bachelors” confronted by a “bachelor machine”–a device which does not produce an artwork so much as the instructions for producing an artwork (a musical score is a set of instructions for making music, but is not itself music). At the same time, the performer who would normally “realize” the score as music is forced into the position of the composer, since the composer must provide an essential element for the realization of the instructions (hence, the creation of the music). This is the event being displayed through the bottom plane of La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même, which makes the role of “retard” (delay) a literal one: as Kotik notes, not only are the instructions for the apparatus incomplete (Duchamp’s title for the system is: An apparatus automatically recording fragmented musical periods), its functioning as a score is also left uncertain, forcing the performer to find ways of implementing it.(5) The kinds of problems associated with this score are paralleled by the instructions for the readymades, also recorded on a note in the Green Box: (Fig. 5)
| Specifications for ‘Readymades’
By planning for a moment to come (on such a day, such a date, such a minute), ‘toinscribe a readymade‘–the readymade can later be looked for–(with all kinds of delays). The important thing is just this matter of timing, this snapshot effect, like a speech delivered on no matter what occasion but at such and such an hour. It is a kind of rendez-vous.(6) |
click to enlarge
Figure 6
Marcel Duchamp,
In Advance of the
Broken Arm, 1915
(Studio Photograph)
What is notable about this description is the way that it does not mention any of the typically significant characteristics of readymades: their arbitrariness, their lack of aesthetic response, etc.(7) Instead it suggests that the decision to make a readymade comes first linguistically, for which an object is later simply picked up. For example, Snow Shovel (In Advance of the Broken Arm)(Fig. 6) may have begun as the statement, with the shovel later purchased, adjusted, and then presented as a “readymade.” This note suggests that these objects are first and foremost language–inscribed–rather than related to conventional aesthetics in either positive or negative terms. The selection is based on how well it fits the words which will be attached to it; the words come first, the readymade simply their illustration. The object is then an imaginary (subjective) connection between those words and some physical construction in the world, whereby this connection repeats the emphasis on the mind of the interpreter as decisive in the “chance” operation of discovering the score–the necessary “missing” element in Duchamp’s instructions for La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires même. Erratum Musical.
“Chance operations” are left “open to chance” only in the sense that the missing details of the instructions are open to interpretation in their implementation. The character of a “speech delivered on no matter what occasion but at such and such an hour” would be a statement of whatever happened to be the most recent subject of personal thought, a representation of the “desire” of that particular instant. By making this the analogy for the process–a snapshot–Duchamp implies the readymade is a presentation of his subjective moment, which is then connected to some physical support (the actual “readymade” we know) whose realisation depends on how he implements his instructions at some later moment which could include reconsideration, revision and reinterpretation (the “delays”). The initial statement limits the possible implementations, but only just. This is the same situation in La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires même: Erratum Musical, the apparatus with its funnel and row of boxes. As the balls fall into the boxes, they present one order which is then altered further by their being removed and ordered into the score based on another set of instructions. Further complicating this is the fact that there are six voices, but they are not specified.(8) While there are a finite number of possible arrangements in each interpretation of the instructions, it is also not directly discernable which arrangement will appear at any given moment, nor, considering the role interpretation plays in implementing the apparatus, are the results necessarily always going to be the same even if the sequence of balls is the same. Depending on how the framework for making the selection is decided based on the written instructions, different results will follow. The initial conditions of the search determine the outcome.
It is this dependence on initial conditions that renders the outcome of this process indeterminate. It is the change between one interpretative framework and another which is the significant point in this “physics,” and which is relevant to understanding the role of the interpretation of the implementer in the “measurement”:
|
Luggage Physics Determine the difference between the volumes of air displaced by a clean shirt (ironed and folded) and the same shirt when dirty.(9) |
click to enlarge
Figure 7
Marcel Duchamp,
Three Standard
Stoppages, 1913-14
While the different volumes of clean and dirty laundry may seem an absurdity, if treated seriously, one is forced to make a decision about the physical state of the dirty shirt–ironed and folded, or crumpled into a ball, or in some other state, etc.–before even being able to contemplate the possibility of measurement. Each situation will obviously result in a different value. Some of the dirty shirts would have more volume than the clean ones, while others may have the same volume, or possibly less volume; it depends on what the conditions are at the moment of measurement. This repeats the Three Standard Stoppages: (Fig. 7) we are left with an approximation of the unit of measure, rather than a singular “standard”(10)–in this case the question of what kind of shirt, state of that shirt when dirty, physical dimension of both clean and dirty shirts, etc., determines what volume results. “Chance” within this framework is the particular choices made by the implementer following the instructions, with concomitant effects on the measurements through the implementation. How the instructions apply to the situation renders an otherwise apparently mechanical, deterministic situation indeterminate. The key factor in this situation is “desire”: the desire to know the result, compounded by the (subjective) desire which directs the implementer in a particular direction. In the case of Kotik’s implementation of La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires même. Erratum Musical, it is his “desire” to allow the SEM Ensemble to perform this score which structures his interpretation of it.(11)
There is a dialectic opposition in this situation between defined (instructions) and undefined (interpretation / desire of interpreter). The instructions appear to produce a framework of specific limitations, a system which is then undermined at its foundation by the role an interpreter must play in order to actually follow the instructions as written. However, once that point of indeterminacy passes, the apparatus functions mechanically until another point of interpretation intervenes in its functioning, producing a “delay” in the apparatus: a stoppage. We stop, awaiting further interpretation before proceeding. This is what is meant by “chance operations”–rather than those aspects which are not left to human will and understanding, it is the human element which is the locus of “chance” itself:
| Your chance is not the same as my chance, just as your throw of the dice will rarely be the same as mine.(12) |
The process of each person doing something–which Duchamp relates directly to “chance”–is unique to that person. This is the basis of the first of the musical scores he produced: three people draw notes out of a hat. However, this kind of chance is a very simple one, where it is possible to describe all possible results through a permutation of the possibilities; the apparatus used for La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires même: Erratum Musical is a development and refinement of this earlier process where the permutation becomes problematic.
Duchamp has emphasized the importance of the “chance operation” being something other than the manipulation of a sequence of permutations. Simply because some of his early chance procedures (1912-1913) are reducible in these terms does not necessarily mean that this was important to his later procedures which develop from them. It is a configuration of personal possibilities. In describing the “possible,” he emphasizes the relation of the elements as other than a set of probable outcomes:
Possible
The figuration of a possible.(not as the opposite of impossible
nor as related to probable nor as subordinated to likely) possible is only a physical “caustic”[vitriol type] burning up all aesthetics or callistics(13)
The implication within this construct of “possible” is based on the physical implementation in a negative sense–the literal application reducing all outcomes to a particular one, a situation where aesthetics no longer applies because of the deterministic result. Taken in relation to “chance operations” this would be the functioning of the apparatus independent of human control. This discussion of “possible” can be understood as related to “chance operations”: the permutation of elements described in the first musical piece (also titledErratum Musical) could be produced by purely mechanical means (a process of substitution) since the elements are not so much altered through the understanding of the instructions as they are selected, then presented in a particular order–that of their selection from inside the hat. This “chance operation” is qualitatively different from that which Kotik encountered: necessary details must be supplied by the implementer. It is only through the “chance” (personal) invention of the missing details that subsequent “random” action happens. Even though when operated, the apparatus produces a sequence of elements within set parameters, the meaning of that sequence is not actually determined within Duchamp’s instructions. There are six “voices,” but the parameters and relationship of those voices is unknown. On both sides of the apparatus’ functioning there are points of unknown significance, making us aware of the gap between looking at his instructions and trying to follow them.
In spite of the emphasis on the spaces between instruction and implementation in his version of “chance operations,” Duchamp has claimed a distrust of language. However, this failure to communicate is literally necessary for the kind of “chance” his work employs. Without the problem posed by the abstraction where “you’re lost,” the human intervention is unnecessary.
|
As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted. Language is just no damn good–I use it because I have to, but I don’t put any trust in it. Once I became interested in that group of philosophers in England, the ones who argue that all language tends to become tautological and therefore meaningless. I even tried to read that book of theirs on The Meaning of Meaning. I couldn’t read it, of course, couldn’t understand a word. But I agree with their idea that only a sentence like ‘the coffee is black’ has any meaning–only the fact directly perceived by the senses. The minute you go beyond that, into abstractions, you’re lost.(14) |
click to enlarge
Figure 8
Marcel Duchamp,
Fountain, 1917
(Photograph by
Alfred Stieglitz, 1917)
Figure 9
Marcel Duchamp, Given: 1.
The Waterfall / 2.
The Illuminating Gas,
1946-66
This statement sounds odd given the very abstract nature of his work and the high degree of misinformation Duchamp has provided over the years about it. Simply considering the many variations of the Fountain (Fig. 8) incident,(15) and the degree to which he was unwilling to provide any information about Etant Donnés (Fig. 9) during his lifetime(16) suggests that he may be providing yet more misinformation about his work and working process. Yet, these comments are suggestive considering the kinds of problems his instructions present in their implementation. They are an illustration of the difficulty which abstractions present to communication: to return to the luggage physics problem, how do we approach measuring the “dirty shirt”? While a clean and a dirty shirt do present different, individually understandable aspects, the problem is not one of clean or dirty shirts, but of deciding how to proceed with measuring them. Any measurement would either be provisional or, more likely, incomplete and contingent–an approximation based on several different measurements, as the Three Standard Stoppages refer to the meter and present approximations of the meter, but not the actual meter itself.
Underlying this whole discussion of what Duchamp says is his working process is the problem of “Can he be believed?”–presented by the intentional fallacy.(17) Whether he actually worked in the fashion he has claimed, or did something very different in actuality, is distinct from the problem posed by “chance operations.” The version of “chance” which Duchamp suggests has been (in)directly influential through its influence on John Cage.(18) This makes an examination of Duchamp’s “chance” not only appropriate, but necessary and important to evaluating his “chance operations.”
In interpreting this “chance” process we are confronted by the same problems Peter Kotik encountered in attempting to implement La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires même. Erratum Musical and produce his score. We are forced to look elsewhere for more details to help answer the unknown aspects of the equation. That these are things which Duchamp said does have some bearing on other things he said, and while the reconstruction here does omit certain details and emphasize others in order to create the impression of clarity, there may actually be no clarity at all. Statements made at different times in his life and edited over long periods may not be as consistent as those statements made all at once, as with a speech delivered on no matter what occasion but at such and such an hour. The idea that these “chance operations” are limited within specific frameworks gives us the possibility of a rendez-vous with his ideas of chance, but we are left uncertain as to whether we will simply find ourselves waiting at the station for a train which may never arrive.
NOTES
1. Peter Kotik, Music by Marcel Duchamp, CD liner notes and recording, Edition Block EB-202, Berlin,1991, np.
2. Kotik, op. cit., np.
3. Kotik, op. cit., np.
4. Pierre Cabanne, Duchamp & Co (Paris: Finest Sa/Editions Pierre Terrail, 1997) 76.
5. Kotik, op. cit., np.
6. Marcel Duchamp, The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, eds. Michael Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (New York: Da Capo Press, 1989) 32.
7.In contrast to the Green Box note, these are the characteristics which Duchamp emphasized in his later discussions of the readymades. “Apropos of ‘Readymades'” in The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, pp.
141-142, is typical.
8. Kotik, op. cit., np.
9. Duchamp, op. cit., 192.
10. Rhonda Roland Shearer and Stephen Jay Gould,”Hidden in Plain Sight: Duchamp’s 3 Standard Stoppages, More Truly a “Stoppage” (An Invisible Mending) Than We Ever Realized,” in Tout-Fait 1, no. 1 (December 1999). In examining the instructions Duchamp provided for the Standard Stoppages, Shearer and Gould discovered that the set of instructions provided were not the actual system which Duchamp had used; the “meter long thread” was not dropped–instead it was sewn to its canvas support, thus producing the work in question. The actual procedure,which has always failed to produce results resembling Duchamp’s “drop” is incapable of producing the work inquestion. The relevance of the Standard Stoppages to his consideration lies in the generally held belief that they were products of that procedure, even if such a belief is an easily falsifiable intentional fallacy.
11. Kotik, op. cit., np.
12. Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors (New York: Penguin, 1968) 33.
13. Duchamp, op. cit., 73.
14. Tomkins, op. cit., 31-32.
15. William Camfield, Fountain (Houston: Houston Fine Art Press, 1989).
16. Bonnie Clearwater, ed., West Coast Duchamp (Miami Beach: Grassfield Press, 1991) 70.
17. Monroe Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (New York: Harcourt
Brace, 1958).
18. Richard Kostelanetz, ed., John Cage, (New York: Praeger, 1970) 171.
Figs. 1-9
©2002 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. All rights reserved.
Am ersten Dezember 2000 wurde mit Thomas Hirschhorn der Prix
Marcel Duchamp bekanntgegeben, der in diesem Jahr erstmalig verliehen wurde. Für zeitgenössische, in Frankreich lebende Künstler bestimmt, ist die Auszeichnung mit einem Preisgeld von FF 200.000 (etwa DM 60.000) verbunden sowie der Möglichkeit einer zweimonatigen Ausstellung im Centre Pompidou, Paris. Hirschhorns “Pole Self” wurde dort zwischen dem 28. Februar und dem 30. April 2001 gezeigt.
Hirschhorn ist natürlich der Kunstwelt nicht fremd. 1957 in Bern geboren, hatte der Künstler bereits europaweit seine Werke gezeigt, als ihn Catherine David 1994 im Jeu de Paume präsentierte. Und mit fünf Einzelausstellungen allein in 2001, von Zürich bis Barcelona, sowie seiner Teilnahme an internationalen Kunstschauen, etwa der Biennale von Venedig, ist auch die Nachfrage an seinen Werken stetig gewachsen.
click images to enlarge
Various installation views of Thomas Hirschhorn’s “Pole Self,”
Paris, Centre Pompidou, February 28 – April 30, 2001
SSein Oeuvre indes ist nicht leicht zu erfassen und fast unmöglich zu vergessen. Hirschhorn verwendet alltägliche Materialien wie Silberfolie, Pappe und Klebestreifen für seine meist mehrere Räume umspannenden Installationen. Wo immer sie gezeigt wird, scheint seine Kunst zu wachsen und sich auszubreiten. Einigen Betrachtern mögen seine Environments schlichtweg hässlich, seine Werkstoffe zu billig und der Versuch, den Besucher intellektuell zu involvieren als allzu didaktischer Eifer erscheinen. Natürlich, hier findet man nicht die unnahbar glattpolierten Oberflächen eines Jeff Koons. Der Gebrauch des Materials gründet sich auf einer demokratisch-egalitären Vorstellung, die dem Betrachter die Nachvollziebarkeit der Kunstproduktion möglich macht. Und Kunst ist nicht nur zum ästhetischen Wohlbefinden gedacht sondern erfordert eine Auseinanderzeitung, die Zeit bedarf, den Betrachter einbezieht und Ideen wie Vorstellungen generiert. Oft baut Hirschhorn “Altäre” oder “Kioske” im öffentlichen Raum, die er Schriftstellern und Künstlern wie Raymond Carver oder Robert Walser, Ingeborg Bachmann und Meret Oppenheim widmet. Er setzt sich mit dem Holocaust auseinander und verballhornt die Obsession seines Heimatlandes mit der Produktion von Luxusgütern. Für “Pole Self” hat Thomas Hirschhorn mehrere Räume im Centre Pompidou in eine Bibliothek umgewandelt, in der Bücher an Metallketten von der Decke baumeln. Andere Installationen beherbergen Sandsäcke zum Reinschlagen und einen “antikapitalistischen Müllcontainer” mit Büchern über Luxus und Wohlstand.
*All documentation (figures 1-6) from Gilles Fuchs (ed.), Le Prix Marcel Duchamp 2000, Paris: ADIAF, 2001
Als Gilles Fuchs, Präsident der Association pour la Diffusion de l’Art Français, den Prix Marcel Duchamp übergab, soll Hirschhorn diesen nach der Laudatio lediglich mit einem “Merci” auf den Lippen entgegengenommen haben. Tout-Fait wollte es bezüglich Hirschhorns Wertschätzung Duchamps etwas genauer wissen. Was folgt sind dessen Antworten auf sieben Fragen, die wir neugierig an ihn gerichtet haben.
Tout-Fait: Herzlichen Glückwunsch zum Erhalt des ersten Marcel Duchamp Preises. Wie erklären Sie sich, dass dieser im Jahre 2001 erstmalig vergeben wurde?
Thomas Hirschhorn: Es ist ein Zufall, dass dieser Preis den Namen “Marcel Duchamp” trägt. Es ist ein Zufall, dass mir der Preis zugesprochen wurde
Tout-Fait: Gibt es ganz spezifische Projekte, für die Sie Ihr Preisgeld verwenden?
Thomas Hirschhorn:Ich habe das Preisgeld für die Produktion der Arbeit “Pole Self” verwendet.
click to enlarge
Figure 7
Marcel Duchamp, Design
for “The Temptation
of St. Anthony,”
1946 (on the cover,
the catalogue shows
Max Ernst’s winning entry
for the Hollywood movie
The Private Affairs of Bel Ami)
Tout-Fait: D Duchamp hat sich stets kritisch Preisen und Jurys gegenüber geäussert, obschon er Auszeichnungen, nicht wie Breton, durchaus entgegennahm. 1946 wählte Duchamp gemeinsam mit Alfred H. Barr und Sidney Janis Max Ernsts “The Temptation of St. Anthony”(Fig.7) als Gewinner eines Wettbewerbs unter einer Anzahl von Gemälden aus, die sich alle mit dem gleichen Thema auseinandersetzten. Duchamp bemerkte zu seiner Erfahrung als Juror: “Juroren neigen dazu, falsch zu liegen…selbst die Überzeugung gerecht zu sein vermindert nicht die Zweifel am Recht, überhaupt etwas zu beurteilen.”
Thomas Hirschhorn: Einen Preis zu erhalten engagiert nicht den Preisträger sondern den, der den Preis vergibt. Ich hingegen bin gegenüber meiner Arbeit engagiert und nur ihr gegenüber.
Tout-Fait: Die Beiträge Duchamps zur Ausstellung “Internationale du Surréalisme” (Fig.8)
in Paris und die “First Papers of Surrealism”(Fig.9)in New York haben mich begeistert. Was mich beeindruckt ist sein Künstlersein-Verständnis. Marcel Duchamp war frei mit dem Eigenen.
click to enlarge
Figure 8
Marcel Duchamp, Twelve
Hundred Coal Bags Suspended
from the Ceiling
over a Stove, 1938
(part of his installation for
the Exposition Internationale
du Surréalisme, Paris)
Figure 9
Marcel Duchamp, Sixteen
Miles of String, 1942
(part of his installation
for the First Papers of
Surrealism exhibition, NY)
Tout-Fait: Erinnern Sie sich an das erste Mal, als Sie mit Duchamps Werk konfrontiert wurden?
Thomas Hirschhorn: Das war in der Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich (heute Schule für Gestaltung) im Kunstgeschichteunterricht. Wir diskutierten das Bild “The Passage from Virgin to Bride” (Fig.10), die Arbeiten, die er danach machte wie die “Broyeuse de Chocolat” (Fig.11) oder das grossartige Werk “The Large Glass”(Fig.12) und die “Ready-Made”. Dann las ich das für mich sehr wichtige Buch von Thierry de Duve “Nominalisme Pictural”. Später sah ich im Philadelphia Museum of Art die wunderschöne Louise und Walter Arensberg Collection.
click images to enlarge
Tout-Fait: Sie haben einmal gesagt “Was mich interessiert, ist das Zu-viel-Tun, das Leisten einer Über-Arbeit, wie beim Licht”. Ist diese Bemerkung mit Duchamps Notizen zu “Infra-mince” vergleichbar (erstmals posthum publiziert in “Marcel Duchamp, Notes”, Paul Matisse, Hrsg., 1980, Nr.1-46). Darin bekundet er unter anderem sein Interesse an der Wärme von Stühlen, nachdem man auf ihnen gesessen hat, die Extra-Energie, die man auf das Herabdrücken eines Lichtschalters, etc., verwendet.
Thomas Hirschhorn: Das kann man nicht vergleichen. Mich interessiert das “zuviel”, zuviel-tun, zuviel-geben, sich ausgeben, Kraft verschwenden. Verschwendung als Werkzeug oder Waffe.
Tout-Fait: In Ihren Arbeiten meine ich ständig den inhärenten Unwillen zu erkennen, überhaupt etwas im gegebenen Kunstweltkontext auszustellen. Ihre Installation im Guggenheim Shop vor einigen Jahren war so eine Totalverweigerung ohne dabei Nein zu sagen. Duchamp stellte seine Readymades zu Beginn nicht aus und weigerte sich oft, an Ausstellungen teilzunehmen. Sind Ihre neuen Arbeiten (die ich erstmalig auf der Armory Show 2001 sah) im klassischen Öl-auf-Leinwand Grossformat (mit Rahmen, zum an die Wand hängen) ein erster Kompromiss hinsichtlich der Vorführbarkeit Ihrer Werke (in Wohnungen von Sammlern z.B.), ähnlich wie Duchamps spätere Editionen der Ready-mades?
click to enlarge
Figure 13(left)..Figure 14(right)
Thomas Hirschhorn’s
handwritten response (in German),
faxed on September 20, 2001
Thomas Hirschhorn: Duchamp hat keine Kompromisse gemacht. Er war der intelligenteste Künstler seines Jahrhunderts.
Das Das Interview wurde von Thomas Girst via e-mail und Fax geführt. Thomas Hirschhorns Antwortschreiben ging ASRL am 20. September 2001 in Form zweier handgeschriebener Seiten, exkl. Deckblatt, zu. Frau Petra Gördüren,Arndt&Partner, Berlin, sei für die Herstellung des Kontakts und Frau Sophie Pulicani, Atelier Thomas Hirschhorn, Paris, für die Zusendung der Abbildungen gedankt.
Figs. 7-12
©2002 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris.
All rights reserved.
JEAN NEYENS:Marcel Duchamp, puis-je vous demander de quelle réflexion peut-être sur l’art d’alors ou sur le monde d’alors procédaient vos premières œuvres?
MARCEL DUCHAMP: C’est trés compliqué et complexe parce que, à cinquante ans ou quarante ans de distance, on a un mal de chien à se rappeler comment, dans quelles conditions toutes ces choses-là se sont faites, et surtout que, au moment où elles ont été élaborées, ces choses sont venues pêle-mêle, sans ordre. Il n’y avait pas une sorte de schéma qui dirigeait toute l’organisation et, je vous dis, c’est une chose aprés l’autre qui arrivait sans savoir elle-même qu’elle s’apparentait à une chose précédente ou à une chose future. Et pour nous, quarante ans après, ça fait un tout assez homogène, mais c’est difficile d’expliquer comment c’est venu.
J.N.: Mais si même vous ne nous livrez que la signification que vous attribuez aujourd’hui à votre démarche d’alors, ça n’en est pas plus faux.
MARCEL DUCHAMP: Oui, évidemment, il y a une différence énorme, n’est-ce pas… c’est que… Ia différence énorme est d’ordre… je ne sais pas, pécuniaire, si vous voulez… Quand nous avons fait tout ça dans le groupe des Dada il n’y avait surtout aucune recherche d’en profiter.
Alors ça fait vraiment une différence énorme, parce qu’il n’y avait pas de marchand. Nous n’avons jamais montré nos choses à ce moment-là. Nous ne Ies gardions même pas. Personne ne les connaissait. Personne que nous-mêmes, et même entre nous on en parlait sans y attacher d’importance puisque c’était vraiment en réaction antisociété, n’est-ce pas. Alors, il n’y avait aucune raison que ça prenne une forme quelconque. Et nous ne pensions pas que ça la prendrait jamais.
J.N.: Est-ce que cette réaction contre la société en 1910 était déjà tellement vive? Qu’est-ce qui la motivait?
MARCEL DUCHAMP: Oui, en 1910, c’était moins… déjà… Non… en 1910, c’était déjà l’art abstrait avec Kandinsky, Kupka, Picabia et… Mondrian, qui, eux, ne faisaient que continuer une tradition commencée par Courbet, si vous voulez. Mais ie réalisme de Courbet ensuite s’est transformé en impressionnisme, énsuite en fauvisme, ensuite en cubisme et enfin la dernière formule était l’abstraction, surtout chez Kandinsky et Kupka et Mondrian.
Alors il a fallu attendre la guerre pour arriver à Dada, n’est-ce pas, au dadaïsme, qui était justement plus qu’une réaction d’ordre pictural ou d’ordre artistique, même: c’était une réaction antisociété comme je vous le disais… même pas politique dans le sens politique, ce n’était pas du tout un communisme ou une chose comme ça, c’était une réaction intellectuelle, une réaction cérébrale, presque.
J.N.: Vos ready-made datent-ils d’aprés-guerre, ou d’avant-guerre?
click to enlarge
Figure 1
Marcel Duchamp,
Bottle Dryer, 1914
Figure 2
Marcel Duchamp,
Pharmacy, 1914
MARCEL DUCHAMP:C’est-à-dire que j’en ai fait un… j’en avais fait un en 1913, par conséquent c’était avant la guerre. Je ne l’appelai pas ready-made à ce moment-là parce que je ne savais pas que c’était un ready-made. Je n’avais fait… j’avais fait simplement une roue qui tourne, une roue de bicyclette qui tourne sur un tabouret, pour le plaisir de la voir tourner. Sans autre idée que de la voir tourner dans mon atelier comme j’aurais eu ce feu-là qui brûle, n’est-ce pas. C’est une chose qui—par le mouvement— m’était… distrayante comprenez-vous, un accompagnement de la vie, mais pas du tout une œuvre d’art dans le sens… ou même une œuvre d’antiart d’aucune sorte. Ensuite j’ai fait le Bottlerack.(Fig.
1)
J.N.: Le Séchoir à bouteilles.
MARCEL DUCHAMP: Le séchoir à bouteilles, qui, lui, n’était pas… qui ne bougeait pas. Donc il y avait du mouvement et du pas-mouvement. Et cependant il y a eu une relation entre les deux choses. Il y a eu aussi d’autres choses encore plus intéressantes à mon avis, c’était de prendre une chose toute faite d’un modèle, c’est-à-dire pour la Pharmacie, (Fig. 2) n’est-ce pas,n’est-ce pas, c’etait un petit paysage de neige fait par je ne sais qui, que j’avais acheté chez un marchand, auquel j’avais ajouté simplement deux points—un rouge et un vert—qui indiquaient les bocaux de pharmacie qu’on voit. Tout ça faisait un paysage de vue dans la neige, n’est-ce pas, en ajoutant ces deux choses qui pourraient et… auraient pu être des lumières de chaumière, étaient en réalité… avaient été transformées en pharmacie, n est-ce pas…
Ensuite à New York en 1915 j’avais fait une pelle à neige qui ne m’intéressait pas du tout spécialement et alors l’intéressant, dans tout ça, ce n’était pas tellement la réaction en soi, mais il y avait aussi l’idée de trouver quelque chose dans ces objets, qui ne soit pas attrayant au point de vue esthétique. La délectation esthétique était exclue. Ça n’était pas comparable à ce qu’on appelle I’«objet trouvé», par exemple. L’objet trouvé est une chose, c’est une forme, soit un bois à trouver sur la gréve ou des choses comme ça, qui ne m’intéressent pas, parce que c’était du domaine encore esthétique, c’est-à-dire… une belle forme, etc. Ça avait été déjà supprimé complètement de mes recherches.
J.N.: Vous ne cherchiez pas à faire rêver en affichant ces formes nouvelles, non ?
MARCEL DUCHAMP: Au contraire, la chose intéressante pour moi était de l’extraire de son domaine pratique ou utilitaire et l’amener dans un domaine complètement… vide, si vous voulez, vide, de tout, vide de tout à un point tel que j’ai parlé d’anesthésie complète pour le faire, comprenez-vous, c’est-à-dire qu’il fallait… ce n’était pas si facile à choisir, quelque chose qui ne vous plaise pas et qui, vous, ne vous plaise pas, comprenez-vous ce que je veux dire par là… non seulement qui ne doit pas vous plaire esthétiquement, mais qui ne devait pas non plus vous déplaire esthétiquement, c’est-à-dire le contraire: le mauvais goût au lieu du bon, ce qui est la même chose, n’est-ce pas. Il n’y a aucune différence entre le bon et le mauvais goût… deux choses aussi peu intéressantes pour moi que—I’un que l’autre, I’une que l’autre.
J.N.: Donc votre entreprise était purement négative à l’époque. Il n’y avait pas du tout, par exemple… I’ambition… d’apprendre à l’œil à admirer ou à…
MARCEL DUCHAMP:
… I’œil…
J.N.: … ou à s’adapter, disons, à des formes nouvelles dans un esprit un peu fonctionnaliste.
MARCEL DUCHAMP:Non, aucunement, aucunement, aucunement. Et c’est pour ça que tous ces ready-made, en somme, sont assez différents l’un de l’autre…tellement différents qu’il n’y a pas, si vous voulez… un air de famille entre eux… Il n’y a aucun air de famille entre cette Pharmacie dont je vous parle et le Séchoir à bouteilles ou la Roue de bicyclette qui tourne! Évidemment on a dit «objets manufacturés». Mais ce n’est pas toujours des objets manufacturés. J’ai même fait une fois pour m’amuser une… Dans un restaurant, je dînais avec des amis à New York, il y avait un grand tableau d’une décoration, qui décorait ce restaurant et qui était complètement ridicule, comme peinture et à tous les points de vue, et je me suis levé, puis j’ai été le signer, comprenez-vous. C’est donc… il y a là encore là… ce ready-made n’était pas manufacturé, il était fait à la main quand même par un autre peintre!… Et même, dans un de mes tableaux, j’avais mis une main qui indique, vous savez, la direction, qu’on emploie dans les établissements publics. J’avais mis cette main, mais que je n’avais pas peinte moi-même. Je l’avais fait peindre par un peintre d’enseignes.
J.N.:
Pourtant, dans le fait d’appeler… une pissotière en faïence…
MARCEL DUCHAMP: … oui oui oui…
J.N.: une fontaine…
MARCEL DUCHAMP: … oui oui…
J.N.: … c’était quand même…
click to enlarge
Figure 3
Marcel Duchamp,
Fountain, 1917
(Photograph by
Alfred Stieglitz)
Figure 4
Marcel Duchamp,
In Advance of
a Broken Arm, 1915
(Studio photograph)
MARCEL DUCHAMP: … un urinoir, que j’ai appelé Fontaine (Fig. 3) pour le dégager de sa destination utilitaire! L’idée de fontaine…
J.N.: … oui…
MARCEL DUCHAMP: … était complètement ironique, puisqu’il n’y avait même pas de fontaine, mais enfin ce support, et puis alors le titre n’était pas absolument nécessaire, quoique j’ajoutais souvent une phrase… par exemple dans le Séchoir à bouteilles j’avais acheté… ajouté une phrase que je ne me rappelle pas parce que le Séchoir à bouteilles est perdu, a été perdu en 1916, quelque chose comme ça—dans un déménagement—et j’avais écrit une phrase dessus et je ne me la rappelle absolument pas et rien, même aucun mot que je puisse me rappeler.
Mais dans la Pelle à neige j’avais écrit: «En avance du bras cassé», (Fig. 4) tâchant de trouver aussi une phrase qui ne veuille rien dire. Parce que même si ça peut vouloir dire quelque chose… l’avance du bras, «En avance du bras cassé» a un sens vraiment inutile, comprenez-vous, et sans grand intérêt!
J.N.:
Il n’y avait pas du tout d’intention de farce?
MARCEL DUCHAMP: Non plus, non plus! Non, la farce était une gra… pour moi, c’était moi qui… d’autant plus il n’y avait pas de farce puisque personne ne s’en occupait! Il n’y avait pas de public, il n’y avait pas… ce n’était pas présenté au public. Il n’y avait pas du tout de participation du public ou acceptation du public ou même prendre le public à témoin et lui demander ce qu’il en pensait, comprenez-vous… c’est différent dehors tout de même, je vous dis, l’ensemble de toutes ces choses-là était dans un climat où le public n’était pas convié! Il n’y avait pas de public—le public n’était pas convié, n’était pas nécessaire… du tout!
J.N.: Vous n’êtes pas du tout peintre professionnel?
MARCEL DUCHAMP: C’est ce que j’ai voulu éviter toujours, d’être professionnel dans le sens d’être obligé de vivre de sa peinture, ce qui la rend un petit peu quand même… sujette à caution puisque c’est fait… et surtout vous savez ce que c’est que les marchands de tableaux quand ils vous disent «Ah! si vous me faisiez dix paysages dans ce style-là, j’en vendrais autant que vous voudrez». Alors—comme ce n’était pas du tout mon intérêt ou mon amusement, je ne le faisais pas. Je ne faisais rien. Alors c’est pour ça, je suis allé à une conférence. Une table ronde qu’on avait faite à Philadelphie, on m’avait demandé «Où allons-nous?». Moi j’ai simplement dit: «Le grand bonhomme de demain se cachera. Ira sous terre.» En anglais c’est mieux qu’en français—«Will go underground». Il faudra qu’il meure avant d’être connu. Moi, c’est mon avis, s’il y a un bonhomme important d’ici un siècle ou deux—eh bien! il se sera caché toute sa vie pour échapper à l’emprise du marché… complètement mercantile (rire) si j’ose dire.
Figs. 1-4
©2002 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. All
rights reserved.