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Afterthought: Ruminations on Duchamp and Walter Benjamin

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Denise Bellon, Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, 1938.
Estate of Denise Bellon, Paris.

Walter Benjamin in the Bibliothèque
Nationale, in Paris, Spring 1937(around the time he met Marcel Duchamp).Photograph by Gisèle Freud, reproduced in Momme Bodersen, “Walter Benjamin: A Biography” (Verso, 1996), p. 234.

The elaborate subtitle of my book on Marcel Duchamp — The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction — was a fairly obvious reference to the celebrated essay by Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” published in 1936. Not only had I intended this reference, but by having written “The Art of Making Art,” I wanted the repetition of words to emphasize the theme of reproduction, one that I felt was at the core of Duchamp’s work, while, at the same time, central to the subject of Benjamin’s essay. Logical though this approach may have seemed to me at the time, in retrospect, I now realize that it was somewhat misleading. To some, the title may have suggested that my book was heavily dependent on theory, which, in actual fact, could not be further from the truth. I consider myself a contextualist, that is to say, an art historian whose sole goal is to place the work of art in its proper context, within the artist’s oeuvre and that of his contemporaries, as well as — and perhaps even more importantly — within the larger framework of the social, economic and cultural climate from which it emerged (the latter factor being the main reason why I brought up the subject of Benjamin in the first place).⁽¹⁾

Benjamin’s essay is — without doubt — the most penetrating analysis ever attempted to evaluate the effects of photography, film and the newest innovations within the print media — which he indicates are the most recent advancements in the art of mechanical reproduction — on the way in which society will come to envision the concept of originality in a work of art. He feels that these new forms of reproduction have created a sudden and undesirable break from the traditions of the past, a time-honored and respected hands-on approach to the making of art that had characterized its production from the very beginning. In emphasizing this particular point, a comparison with Duchamp’s approach to mechanical reproduction might appear — at face value — perfectly legitimate. The techniques he employed, particularly in preparing reproductions for his valise, were, for the most part, methods already developed for well over a century.⁽²⁾ Duchamp had a special fascination for the technique of pochoir, for example, a stenciling process whereby every image reproduced was — for all intents and purposes — an original.

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Figure 1.
From or by Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy (The Box in a Valise), 1941

Having said this, it is equally important to clarify the fact that the pochoir process is a means by which to eliminate the individuality of the artist, for if it was to be employed in any significant numbers (as was the case for the more than 300 copies of the valise; see Figure 1, then it was usually carried out by a battery of professionals who specialized in the application of this technique, craftsmen who carefully and systematically applied the colors in the fashion of an elaborate assembly line. For all intents and purposes, the process denies any possibility of expressiveness on the part of its maker, eliminating the “patte,” as Duchamp called it, or artist’s personal touch. From the years of his earliest mature works (ca. 1913-14), Duchamp maintained that he was devoted to “discredit[ing] the idea of the hand-made.”

In essence, he wanted to operate in the fashion of a machine, for he wished “to wipe out the idea of the original, which,” he later explained, “exists neither in music, nor in poetry: plenty of manuscripts are sold, but they are unimportant. Even in sculpture, the artist only contributes the final millimeter; the casts and the rest of the work are done by his assistants. In painting, we still have the cult of the original.”⁽³⁾ In effect, then, Duchamp strove to eliminate the aura intrinsic to an original work of art, a position that certainly would have placed him in opposition to Benjamin, who — as a result of its mechanical replication — considered this particular aspect of art its most endangered feature.

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Figure 2.
Handcolored photograph of the ‘Large Glass’ incorporated in the limited edition of ‘Sur Marcel Duchamp’ by Robert Lebel, 1958. (inscribed lower right in white ink: MARCEL COLORIAVIT)

It is my contention that Duchamp used the pochoir process because he wanted his paintings to be reproduced in color and — at that point in time — color photography was simply not sufficiently developed to accurately record the subtle nuances of color and tonal gradations in a painting. During the summer of 1935, when Duchamp was gathering photographs for his valise, Walter Arensberg wrote to explain that “the truest color notation can be obtained from a black and white photograph hand colored by some specialist who does work for floral catalogues.”⁽⁴⁾ Indeed, the hand-coloring process was one Duchamp would employ throughout his career, inscribing these works in Latin: “Marcel coloriavit,” (see Figure 2)to indicate that he had himself applied the color. Once the technique of color printing achieved the results he sought, however, he did not object to its usage; in the early 1960s, for example, he added twelve new printed color reproductions to his valise, images that he must have felt adequately reflected the paintings and sculptures they represented.

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Figure 3.
Nude Descending a Staircase, December 1937, pochoir-colored reproduction with attached postage stamp

The ultimate problem with my pairing of these two great thinkers (Duchamp and Benjamin) is that the profound implications of Benjamin’s writings are unintentionally obfuscated when we attempt to integrate them with Duchamp’s equally-profound concept of the readymade, of which, we can be reasonably safe in assuming, Benjamin had no knowledge. Although we now know that Duchamp and Benjamin met on at least one occasion (in a café in Paris a year after Benjamin’s essay had been published), it is doubtful that the readymade would have been one of the issues they discussed. The subject of reproduction may very well have come up, however, since Duchamp showed him a pochoir of his Nude Descending a Staircase (see Figure 3), which Benjamin noted, was “breathtakingly beautiful, maybe mention…”⁽⁵⁾ It is tempting to speculate that Benjamin might have found this particular reproduction possessed with a quality (an aura) that he had only previously associated with original works of art. Could it have been — as I speculated in the introduction to my book — that in having written “maybe mention,” Benjamin might have intended to take this fact into consideration in a possible future revision of his essay on mechanical reproduction? This, of course, is a question that cannot be answered, for the essay was never revised, and Benjamin died three years later (fearing possible deportation, he committed suicide at the beginning of the war).

The issues Benjamin addresses in his essay are, admittedly, somewhat difficult to grasp, due in part to a circuitous method of reasoning that, in a relentless attempt to explicate every point he brings up, inevitably loses sight of its subject. The intellectual gymnastics are, nevertheless, a feat to behold, and well worth the process of engagement, although I am still convinced that the ultimate conclusion he draws — that the aura of a original work of art “withers” as a result of its reproduction — is inherently flawed. In a long footnote to my text, I refer readers to the opinions of Benjamin’s contemporaries and a number of subsequent writers who were critical of his theory. Unknown to me at the time, however, was an excellent analysis of Benjamin’s essay by Jacquelynn Baas, who not only challenges the wholesale acceptance of Benjamin’s theories by present-day critics, but in a careful reading of the text, she finds serious flaws with the theory itself. “The aura or perceived potency of presence of the art object is seemingly enhanced,” she concludes, “not diminished, in ‘the age of mechanical reproduction.'”⁽⁶⁾

This is precisely the conclusion I came to. Moreover, in spite of the theoretical shortcomings I have acknowledged, I remain convinced that if one reads Benjamin’s essay with Duchamp’s concept of the readymade in mind, the issues he addresses are contradicted throughout the text. But, again, we could argue that this is not what Benjamin had in mind. Yet there is no question that, in emphasizing various techniques of mechanical reproduction, Benjamin believed he had identified the source of a phenomenon that was then in the process of transforming the very nature of art. Indeed, his essay begins with a long quote from the writings of Paul Valéry (1871-1945), a French poet and essayist whose writings Benjamin greatly admired. “We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts,” wrote Valéry, “thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.” What contributed more to altering “our very notion of art” in this century, we might well ask, than the readymade, a concept that has revolutionized the very way in which we think about art and the art making process?

Notes

* Francis M. Naumann, Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Ghent: Ludion Press, 1999); distributed in the United States by Harry N. Abrams (French edition by Hazan, Paris; Dutch edition by Fonds Mercator, Antwerp)

1.The inspiration for this critique came from a review by Mark Daniel Cohen of two exhibitions that I organized to coincide with the release of my book: “Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Achim Moeller Fine Arts, October 2, 1999 – January 15, 2000, and “Apropos of Marcel: The Art of Making Art After Duchamp in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Curt Marcus Gallery, October 8 – 30, 1999 (Review, October 15, 1999, pp. 38-40). It should be noted that Cohen’s criticism was aimed at my exhibitions and not the book (which, at the time of his writing, he had not yet seen).

2.To give credit where credit is due, this point was first brought to my attention in 1991 by Jan Ceuleers, a Belgian writer with whom I discussed the approach I had planned for my book on Duchamp. It is with regret that I did not discuss this particular aspect of Duchamp’s work at greater length in my text, for it would have strengthened a rapport with Benjamin’s theories, thereby better justifying the subtitle I had chosen.

3. Otto Hahn, “Passport No. G255300,” Art and Artists (London), vol. I, no. 1 (July 1966), p. 10.

4.Walter Arensberg to Marcel Duchamp, September 1, 1935 (Duchamp Archives, Philadelphia Museum of Art); quoted in Naumann, Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art, p. 127.

5. Duchamp’s meeting with Benjamin was noted in the latter’s diary and is cited in Ecke Bonk, “Delay Included,” in Joseph Cornell / Marcel Duchamp In Resonance, exh. cat., The Menil Collection and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (New York: D.A.P., 1998), p. 102. Although Duchamp and Benjamin met in the spring of 1937, the finished pochoir of the Nude Descending a Staircase is dated “December 1937.” The time discrepancy is probably a result of the fact that all of the pochoirs in the series had not yet been completed, and it is likely that Duchamp awaited their return before signing and dating the entire series.

6. Jacquelynn Baas, “Reconsidering Walter Benjamin: ‘The Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in Retrospect,” in Gabriel P. Weisberg and Laurinda S. Dixon, eds., The Documented Image: Visions in Art History (Syracuse University Press, 1987), p. 346; I am grateful to Linda Henderson for having drawn this essay to my attention. For the footnote in my text, see p. 24, note 6.

Fig.1~3 © 1999 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP,
Paris.

Boats and Deckchairs

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The inception of the third millennium can boast an extended pedigree as a symbol for new beginnings. In a work written in 1884, the hero of science fiction’s most celebrated tale about expanding horizons contemplates his limited world at this crucial moment:

It was the last day of the 1999th year of our era… and I was … musing on the events of the past and the prospects of the coming year, the coming century, the coming Millennium… There I sat by my wife’s side, endeavoring to form a retrospect of the year 1999 and of the possibilities of the year 2000.

And as A Square took stock of his life in the two-dimensional universe of E.A. Abbott’s Flatland, a sphere from an incomprehensible world of higher dimensionality passed right through the plane of his entire existence, appearing first as a point, and then as a circle of initially expanding and subsequently diminishing radius — while A Square looked on in stunned awe and utter mystification. The sphere spoke to A Square: “I am indeed, in a certain sense a Circle, and a more perfect Circle than any in Flatland; but to speak more accurately, I am many Circles in one.” A Square then looked at his timepiece, and noted the maximally auspicious moment of the sphere’s passage: “The last sands had fallen. The third Millennium had begun.”

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Figure 1.
duck-rabbit ⁽¹⁾

As a technique for the most concrete form of mind-stretching, the study of optical illusions surely matches the contemplation of dimensions beyond our sensory experience (or even our mental conceivability). Many classical illusions present alternatives in two dimensions — as in the duck-rabbit (Figure 1) or urn-faces of gestalt switching between figure and ground. T.S. Kuhn invoked this famous illusion as a primary metaphor to illustrate his central concept of paradigm shifting in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962): “It is as elementary prototypes for these transformations of the scientist’s world that the familiar demonstrations of a switch in visual gestalt prove so suggestive. What were ducks in the scientist’s world before the revolution are rabbits afterwards.” Other illusions present alternatives in three dimensions — as in the famous Necker Cube, so effectively used by Richard Dawkins (in The Extended Phenotype, 1982) to argue for the compatibility of gene-centered and organism-centered views of natural selection. Dawkins writes:

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Figure 2.
Necker Cube ⁽²⁾

There is a well-known visual illusion called the Necker Cube (Figure 2). It consists of a line drawing which the brain interprets as a three-dimensional cube. But there are two possible orientations of the perceived cube, and both are equally compatible with the two-dimensional image on the paper. We usually begin by seeing one of the two orientations … After a few seconds the mental image flips back and it continues to alternate as long as we look at the picture. The point is that neither of the two perceptions of the cube is the correct or ‘true’ one. They are equally correct.

If these familiar illusions in our palpable worlds of two and three dimensions have furnished such useful images for contemplating the nature of major innovations in scientific thinking, consider what we might gain if we could join the two methodologies and create a representation for alternative states in a four dimensional world that we cannot draw and scarcely know how to conceive.

In fact, a stunning example of such a double whammy in mental extension (an optical illusion based on alternative states in four dimensional perspective) was constructed more than eighty years ago by one of the greatest artists of our century: Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). He published the illusion in 1967 — as a puzzle on a piece of stiffened paper, resembling a postcard in size and shape, and containing an original painting on one side and a verbal explanation on the other. Nevertheless, his evident intention and brilliant realization have never been deciphered.

Many reasons for past failure may be cited. Some can be laid firmly at Duchamp’s door as the desired consequence of his own cryptic intentions. As the enfant terrible of Dada (in the usual interpretation of art historians) — the man who “embellished” a reproduction of the Mona Lisa with a beard and moustache and called the result “art”; the man who signed an ordinary urinal and placed the object on display as his own sculpture, entitled “Fountain,” at a famous art show — Duchamp never deigned to explain his artistic theories or intentions.

But equal or greater weight must be placed upon our own failure to ask the right questions, largely because we have operated under a false taxonomy of intellectual disciplines — one that drives a powerful but illusory wedge of maximal separation between art (viewed as an ineffably “creative” activity, based on personal idiosyncrasy and subject only to hermeneutical interpretation), and science (viewed as a universal and rational enterprise, based on factual affirmation and analytical coherence).

Duchamp ranks as an artist in this false dichotomy — and as a maddeningly cryptic member of his calling to boot. Thus, we have never asked the right questions because we have not recognized the serious and well informed treatment of scientific issues, ranging from optics to the mathematics of probability and dimensionality, pervading so much of Duchamp’s art — and illustrating, in a manner unmatched since Leonardo himself, the fundamental compatibility between these two great domains of human creativity. Many scholars have recognized and documented the numerous scientific allusions throughout Duchamp’s oeuvre, but have then assumed that Duchamp could never be regarded as an innovator of scientific concepts, if only because artists, in our stereotypical view, cannot develop sufficient expertise to understand such technical subjects. Duchamp’s playful or sarcastic allusions to science must therefore represent a grand sardonic joke, an extended reflection by a creative spirit upon the sterility of technological precision.

But several of the great iconoclasts who founded various movements in modern art at the beginning of the 20th century showed serious concern for contemporary science, particularly for concepts of non-Euclidean geometry and the fourth dimension — although they did not employ these ideas in more than a metaphorical, albeit enlightening, way. Duchamp, however, through a combination of general brilliance and rigorous education in the best traditions of French Cartesian schooling, developed a far deeper understanding of mathematics, verging on professional competence (at least for conceptual grasp, if not for manipulation of formulas). As my wife, Rhonda Roland Shearer, has demonstrated, Duchamp took particular interest in the work of the great mathematician Henri Poincaré, and much of his art represents a novel and systematic application of Poincaré’s views on the nature of time, space, causality, probability and even human creativity itself.

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Figure 3.
verso of “postcard”⁽³⁾

In 1967, Duchamp published, in an edition of 150 copies, a box containing facsimile reproductions of 79 notes, mostly compiled in the years just before World War I, and largely devoted to scientific subjects relevant to his plans for his greatest artistic work, The Large Glass. Scholars have not appreciated the scientific depth of these notes, but the forthcoming work of Shearer with New York University physicist Richard Brandt has revealed the genuine and explicit mathematical innovation within Duchamp’s rigorous analysis of four dimensional representation.

In a note that has attracted some scholarly attention (Figure 3), Duchamp penned an apparently cryptic metaphor about the fourth dimension. The “official” English translation, done by artist Cleve Gray under Duchamp’s personal supervision, states:
Two ‘similar’ objects, i.e. of different dimensions but one being the replica of the other (like 2 deckchairs [chaises ‘transatlantiques’ in the more expressive original French], one large and one doll size) could be used to establish a 4-dimensional perspective — not by placing them in relative positions with respect to each other in space3 [three dimensional space] but simply by considering the optical illusions produced by the difference in their dimensions.

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Figure 4.
recto of “postcard” ⁽⁴⁾

The reverse side of this note shows a fairly crude painting of three boats, depicted at varying distances from an observer based on clues provided by the enveloping landscape of trees, mountains and ponds (Figure 4). Since this naive little picture bears no evident relationship to Duchamp’s jottings on the reverse side, scholars have invariably assumed that Duchamp, following his usual procedure in writing important notes on the back of gas bills, beer coasters, etc., just used a scrap of paper immediately at hand when his muse struck.

For example, Duchamp scholar Francis Naumann states that many items in the White Box (the name of the 1967 publication) record “random notations… on a variety of topics, quickly jotted down on whatever writing surface happened to be available at the time. Several notes, for example, appear on gas bills dating from 1914, while others are written on the verso of postcards, photographs, advertisements, restaurant stationery, and other scraps of paper.” Naumann then explicitly placed the “deckchair” note in this category by claiming: “On the verso of a postcard, Duchamp also noted a possible means by which the fourth dimension could be visually established through a consideration of the optical illusion created by two deckchairs” — although neither Naumann, nor any other scholar, has ever tried to explain the actual nature of the illusion, presumably because they could not possibly decipher Duchamp’s note under the unquestioned assumption that the boats, as part of an irrelevant picture postcard, could be safely ignored as accidental and extraneous.

Duchamp’s object is not, in fact, a commercially produced postcard, but an original painting, almost surely by Duchamp himself, on a piece of paper presented, in his customary trickster’s way, in a humble guise that would keep its true nature invisible in plain sight. The reverse side (containing Duchamp’s note) also features a vertical line in the middle and four horizontal lines to the right, mimicking the address guides of a normal postcard. But these lines have been inked in by hand on this one-of-a-kind objet d’art. Why, then, did Duchamp draw lines at right angles to suggest the paraphernalia of a postcard? And why, more importantly, did he paint three boats on the picture side — and then write an apparently unrelated statement about deckchairs on the reverse?

The boats should have inspired at least a modicum of suspicion from the start. We assume, from conventional cues of perspective, that we see three boats of roughly the same length, but painted in different sizes to imply greater or lesser distance from an observer. The boats, on closer inspection, are a bit “funny” — but not sufficiently so to inspire much attention. Duchamp paints the visible part above the water in near bilateral symmetry with a supposed reflection in the water below. A yellowish (presumably metal) tip at the bow of each boat appears in such mirrored reflection, as does a human figure sitting upright in the middle of each boat. But what are we supposed to make of the rumpled gray material at the stern of each boat? A furled sail (but where, then, is the mast, and why does a little rowboat carry such a sail)? Or perhaps some blankets stored behind the human figure (but why as such a large and topheavy cargo)?

Serious attention to two common themes in Duchamp’s output neatly solves all these problems. First, as already stated, Duchamp delighted in concealing important statements (often on scientific themes) by depicting his original works as everyday commercial objects available in thousands of copies at ordinary stores. (In a subject for another time, Shearer has also discovered that none of Duchamp’s famous “readymades” really represent, as he claimed, factory-made objects signed by the artist, but otherwise unaltered, and thus reconfigured as art.)

Second, as scholars have documented in detail, and as the artist himself frequently noted with relish, Duchamp constantly played with the theme of 90 degree rotations in his art (see the accompanying 1965 photograph of Duchamp’s face seen simultaneously in profile and full view). Several motives underlie this preoccupation, ranging from an immediate and visceral delight in showing that visual “certainties” can often be discombobulated and reoriented by such a simple change, to the more abstract and technical reason that we represent an added mathematical dimension by an axis drawn at right angles (90 degrees) to all other axes — and that a right angle rotation therefore denotes (at least metaphorically) a view in a new dimension.

Shearer and I suspect, but cannot prove, that Duchamp had two motivations, one “sneaky” and the other quite overt (if we chose to see), for drawing those horizontal and vertical lines on the back of his boat painting: first, to fool us into regarding the work as a postcard; and second, to tell us, at the same time, that we must rotate the picture by 90 degrees to see both orientations of the optical illusion described in the note written over these orthogonal lines: one picture (the boats) in horizontal orientation — and another, representing the key to the whole work, by a 90 degree rotation into a vertical position.

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Figure 5.
recto of “postcard” turned 90 degrees ⁽⁵⁾

Rhonda Shearer discovered this vertical key one evening as we indulged in our favorite pastime of playing mental chess with Duchampian puzzles. She turned the boats by the prescribed Duchampian 90 degrees (Figure 5) and we could only laugh at the gorgeous simplicity thus revealed, but so artfully, so craftfully (and craftily) hidden in plain sight. The three boats, seen entirely from the side as objects of similar size, but painted large or small to indicate relative distance from an observer in the inferred third dimension, become deckchairs, seen from above (in a bird’s eye view looking down), and necessarily interpreted as large or small (“large” and “doll size” in Duchamp’s words) because the picture, in vertical orientation, becomes entirely flat and two-dimensional when we lose the perspective cues (of pond and trees) needed to infer a third dimension of depth from a flat painting.

Now we can finally understand why the boats look a bit “funny” in the horizontal view: Duchamp included the odd features to make a plausible deckchair in 90 degree rotation! The metal tip at the boat’s bow becomes the wooden rod of the chair, projecting above the cloth seat and backing. The man in the boat becomes the arm of the chair, while the furled sails (or whatever we take the paraphernalia on the stern of the boat to represent) become the blanket to cover our legs on the windy deck of the Queen Mary.

In short, by a simple rotation of 90 degrees, a group of boats, seen entirely from the side and represented as near and far in three dimensions, becomes a group of deckchairs, seen entirely from the top and represented as big and little in two dimensions.

Cute, even clever — but what’s the point beyond some visceral amusement produced by imposing one man’s artistic dexterity upon everybody’s perceptual foibles? How, in particular, does this bit of colored frippery illuminate Duchamp’s statement that he had invented a new form of representation “to establish a four dimensional perspective” — a view into a higher world imbued with spatial freedom that we cannot “see” in our surrounding three dimensional universe of height, width and depth? Should we actually take Duchamp seriously and literally, or is he just screwing around again, using some highfalutin’ scientific language to inflate a jest, and to poke further fun at mathematical claims about grand and universal abstraction?

Let us give the artist some benefit of doubt, some credit for his acknowledged brilliance, by taking him seriously and assuming that we really do need to enter a 4-D space if we wish to perceive Duchamp’s weird 3-D “hybrid” object all at once — his amalgam of boats-near-and-far-seen-entirely-from-the-side and deckchairs-big-and-little-seen-entirely-from-the-top. We cannot see an object from two completely orthogonal (right-angled) vantage points at the same time in our everyday perceptual world of three dimensions. For such simultaneous viewing, we would need to observe two adjacent faces of a single cube at the same time — while looking at each of them absolutely face on! (We can see both faces of a cube at the same time if we observe them at an angle, say by looking straight at the edge between the faces and then viewing each face at a slope of 45 degrees from our line of sight. But, in our world of three dimensions, we cannot see an object entirely from the side and entirely from above at the same time.)

So how can we regard Duchamp’s hybrid boat-deckchair as a single coherent image in 4-D space? Duchamp’s own answer turns out to be formally correct: we can only see a three-dimensional object entirely from the side and entirely from above at the same time if we make our observations from the fourth dimension. Moreover, in unscrambling this paradox for us, Duchamp has provided a remarkable insight into this perennially fascinating and frustrating topic of higher dimensional worlds that we can conceptualize reasonably well, and characterize rigorously in mathematical terms — but that we cannot possibly “see” directly because we live in a universe where immediate perception only extends into three dimensions.

Hardly any subject exceeds the fourth dimension both in public fascination and in difficulty of conceptualization — hence our long pedagogic struggle to develop devices that can work as explanatory aids. No technique has ever bettered the classical route of making analogies from the transition between two and three dimensions, which we can grasp easily from direct experience, to the passage between three and four dimensions, where we have no direct experience at all. Flatland, written by the English cleric E.A. Abbott in 1884, remains the most effective and beloved classic in this genre. Let us therefore return to this standard source as we try to explicate Duchamp’s four-dimensional illusion.

When the Sphere visits Flatland right at the auspicious moment of transition into the third millennium at the inception of year 2000, he first tries to teach A Square about the third dimension by verbal argument. But A Square cannot comprehend such an expanded universe of higher dimensionality, so the Sphere tears him from the plane of Flatland and treats him to a view of his entire universe from “above” (a dimension previously inconceivable to A Square). Of course, A Square has learned the shapes of buildings and compatriots in his two-dimensional world, but he could only resolve these forms by laboriously working his way around their perimeters and measuring the sides and angles. However, from his new vantage point above his old world, A Square can see the entire form of each Flatland object all at once — a wondrously new vision that he can only conceive and express as seeing the “invisible inside” of things in one grand, full and instantaneous view.

But when A Square returns to Flatland, he discovers that he cannot convey his newfound knowledge to his countrymen, who persistently fail to conceive this expanded modality of sight. A Square tries various pedagogic devices, including metaphors about unobstructed views of totalities all at once (whereas his compatriots “know” perfectly well that one can only see part of an object’s periphery from any single vantage point in Flatland), and a motto — “Upward, not Northward” — that he intones to remind himself of a miraculous insight that may fade from concept and memory in his renewed confinement to Flatland.

Abbott hoped that we might understand the invisible fourth dimension by making a strict analogy to A Square’s abrupt “promotion” from two into three dimensions. Flatland remains one of the great classics of science fiction and mathematical pedagogy, but I think that Abbott made a tactical error in his explicit choice of analogies. Abbott stresses A Square’s struggle to verbalize his new and instantaneous view of each Flatland object, a miraculous novelty that A Square can only manage to describe as an ability to see into the “interior” of objects from a mysterious new vantage point called “above” (“upward, not northward”). By strict analogy, we should then try to conceptualize the fourth dimension as a place outside our ordinary space, from which we might peer into the interior of our bodies.

When I first read Flatland as a teenager, I became enthralled with this prospect, and I spent years trying to work through the analogy in an overly literal way — to no avail. But A Square’s best verbalization only represents a limit imposed by his customary perception, not an optimal way to express the promotion from three to four dimensions. I believe that Abbott’s pedagogical aims would have been better served if he had focused upon a different aspect of A Square’s enlarged vision from above the plane of Flatland — an aspect that translates into a better (and technically more accurate) analogy for moving from three to four dimensions. A Square not only sees the “inside” of Flatland objects from his new dimension. He also, and with just as much novelty, sees the entirety of Flatland objects all at once — whereas, in the conventional and limited plane of Flatland, he can only grasp this totally in time, by moving laboriously around the periphery of each object. And this ability to see an entirety all at once, rather than bit-by-bit in extended time — far more than A Square’s limited and idiosyncratic expression of his discovery as a new vision into the “inside” of objects — provides the key that can unlock the nature of a transition from our familiar three dimensional world into a rich but imperceptible domain of four dimensions, a world as foreign to our experience as the undescribable “above” to the citizens of Flatland.

Thus, to make the most fruitful analogy, we should say that, just as A Square could see the totality of two dimensional objects all at once from a third dimension above, so might we, from a fourth dimension outside the confines of our familiar three dimensional space, be able to see the entire surface of a three-dimensional object all at once. And this vision of “totality all at once” captures the aspect of four dimensional perspective that Duchamp so brilliantly tried to convey in his illusion of boats and deckchairs. We cannot see an entire cube from any single point of sight in three directions. Rather, we must move our eye around the cube in time, and then mentally integrate the full object by piecing together a set of partial visions. But, if we could look down upon a cube from a fourth dimension at right angles to each of the cube’s three dimensions, we would be able to see all six faces, all at once.

To emphasize this crucial point in at least a semitechnical way: We represent traditional three-dimensional space on three “mutually orthogonal” axes — that is, on three lines intersecting at a point, with each line perpendicular to each of the other two. If we place our eye along any of these axes, we will see a full view of the other two axes face on — and these two axes will define a plane in the next lower two-dimensional space. For example, when we look directly down one axis of a cube from above, we obtain a full view of the face of the cube defined by the other two axes crossing at right angles to form the plane of this face. Similarly and by extension (following the “Flatland” method of arguing by analogy), if we could (as we can’t in the world we know) draw an additional axis at right angles to each of the three axes of a conventional cube in 3-D space, and if we could then look down upon the cube from a vantage point right along this fourth axis, we would see the entire surface of the 3-D cube all at once (just as we see an entire 2-D face of the cube along a third axis perpendicular to these two). In other words, in a 4-D world, we wouldn’t need to spend time moving our eye all around the cube in order to see all parts of its surface (as we must do in our 3-D world). Rather, we would see the full surface of the cube all at once from the fourth dimension — not through the dark glass of a lower order of observation, but truly face to face.

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Figure 6.
Marcel Duchamp ⁽⁶⁾

We can now “cash out” Duchamp’s brilliant insight about 4-D representation (while, at the same time, understanding his fascination with both the reality and the metaphorical meaning of rotations by 90 degrees — (Figure 6). Duchamp wants us to regard the boats and deckchairs as two alternative views of a single image (like the duck-rabbit in 2-D). But we cannot do so in our 3-D world because we cannot see both views at once. That is, the picture will not flip from one state to the other from any single point of sight because we can only access the two views sequentially in time, by rotating the object 90 degrees and then seeing deckchairs in the previous boats.

But, in a 4-D world, we could see both versions of the single “hybrid” 3-D object at the same time (as boats-entirely-from-the-side and deckchairs-entirely-from-the-top). To grasp the paradox, consider the boat view and the deckchair view as residing on two adjacent faces of a cube. When we look at either face straight on (that is, entirely from the side or entirely from above), we cannot see the other face at all in our 3-D world. But we can see both faces simultaneously, and each straight on, along the added axis of a 4-D representation.

Click to enlarge

Figure 7.
note ⁽⁷⁾

Duchamp then devises a wonderful analogy between this almost inconceivable prospect of seeing an entire 3-D object all at once, and something we can easily achieve with our analogous sensation of touch. Suppose we hold a small penknife firmly in one hand. We can touch the knife’s outer surface at all points simultaneously, and we can reconstruct the form of the object from these sensations — even though we cannot see all parts of the knife’s surface simultaneously from any single vantage point in a 3-D world. Now, Duchamp suggests, suppose we regard our simultaneous touch in 3-D as analogous to the possibility of simultaneous sight in 4-D. Then we will understand how we might “see” the entire surface of a 3-D object all at once. In another of his White Box notes, Duchamp writes: “The 3 dimensional vision of a plane P. corresponds in the continuum to a 4 dimensional grasp of which one can get an idea by holding a penknife clasped in one’s fist, for example.”(Figure 7)

Click to enlarge

Figure 8.
note ⁽⁸⁾

Duchamp clarifies the meaning of this note with two sketches. If one tries to see an entire object within a space of the same dimensionality as the object itself, one cannot do so all at once, but must move around the object, taking and integrating different views in sequence. Duchamp follows the Flatland procedure of 2-D analogy by writing in another White Box note:

“When I represent a 3-D space by means of a 3-D sphere (or a 3-D cube) I am comparable to a flat individual A who sees the section of a drawn plane P. The individual A can move to A1. He measures, while moving, the 4 sides if the quadrangle but at each stop he sees a projection of the quadrangle on an imaginary axis perpendicular to his visual ray.” (Figure 8) But if, as the second sketch shows, the 2-D observer can move into a third dimension above, then he can see the plane P all at once. Similarly, one can see the entire surface of a 3-D cube all at once from the 4th dimension, just as one can feel the entire surface of a penknife simultaneously.

Several other White Box notes reinforce this interpretation of the boat-deckchair hybrid as a representation in four dimensions, with the alternative states as different 3-D views that cannot be seen simultaneously in our 3-D world. Duchamp begins by posing the classic conundrum: “What is the meaning of this word 4th dimension since it does not have either tactile or sensorial correspondence as do the 1st, the 2nd, the 3rd dimension.”

Duchamp then gives a wonderfully concise and generalized description of the boat-deckchair: “From the 2-dimensional perspective giving the appearance of the 3-dimensional continuum, construct a 3-dimensional (or perhaps a 2-dimensional perspective) of this 4-dimensional continuum.” This note sounds cryptic, but concrete translation into the boat-deckchair example resolves both meaning and intent: consider the boat and deckchair views as 2-D paintings that, at least for the boats (given the included cues for perspective), depict a world in 3-D. But both views really represent two aspects of a “hybrid” 3-D object seen simultaneously in 4-D space. We can now finally grasp what Duchamp meant when he wrote, on the back of the boat “pseudopostcard” (as quoted earlier in this essay): ” . . . to establish a 4-dimensional perspective — not by placing them in relative positions with respect to each other in space³ but simply by considering the optical illusions produced by the difference in their dimensions.”

We also know that Duchamp invoked the example of a 3-D cube to express the simultaneous view of an entire 3-D object in 4-D space — thus representing the boat-deckchair duality as two views on two adjacent faces of a cube, both visible at the same time in 4-D. Duchamp describes this simultaneous sight of the entire cube, again making an analogy to simultaneous touch of the penknife in 3-D (I love his phrase “circum-hyperhypo-embraced” — that is, “grasped all around at once, both above and below”): 3-D perspective starts in an initial frontal plane without deformation. 4-D perspective will have a cube or 3-D medium as a starting point which will not cause deformation, i.e. in which the 3-D object is seen circum-hyperhypo-embraced (as if grasped with the hand and not seen with the eyes).

Finally, Duchamp explicitly notes that, in 4-D space, two intersecting planes (the boats and the deckchairs on two adjacent faces of a cube) can be seen at once along an axis in the higher dimension: “2 intersecting planes do not determine a space — they merge along a plane perpendicular to their common intersecting line.”

Popular books on the 4th dimension often try to depict this additional factor as time, while treating the three dimensions of our everyday world as space. This common formulation expresses Duchamp’s observation that, in ordinary 3-D space, one can only “see” the entirety of an object through time — because one must move one’s eye sequentially around a 3-D object to grasp the full form that can’t be perceived all at once. But we can express both the paradox and the reality of the 4th dimension in a more interesting (and also mathematically accurate) manner when we represent the added dimension spatially — as a fourth axis (albeit undrawable in our surrounding 3-D world) at right angles to each of our three everyday spatial axes, and therefore imbued with the wondrous property of offering a simultaneous view of entire 3-D objects — if only we could leave our 3-D world and, like A Square above the plane of Flatland, gaze upon our known universe from outside.

Such a prospect must stand as the most exciting symbol, and the most thrilling potential realization (if we could ever find the exit from our 3-D prison), for the grandest goal, the summum bonum, of our mental lives and dreams — transcendence to a higher and genuine (not a fuzzily metaphorical) view of reality. Duchamp’s 4-D boat-deckchair therefore embodies both our fondest dreams and our deepest intellectual struggles in a perfectly lovely and humble item of four dimensional concrete.

But the eurekas of millennial transitions to higher dimensions of insight pose as many present dangers as potential rewards. A Square, Abbott’s hero of the year 2000, ends up in prison, condemned as a dangerous radical who, like Socrates, might corrupt the youth if allowed to roam free and preach “the gospel of three dimension.” As Duchamp reminds us more gently, and with sophisticated and cryptic humor, we also live within a maze of conceptual prisons that might hold us even more tightly because we do not perceive the walls. But if we could find the entrance to an expanded world where boats and deckchairs fuse into one point of sight, then these walls might also enter our field of vision — and we might greet this insight with a bellow of joy exceeding the vocal power of Joshua’s entire army, as they shouted and trumpeted so many years ago at Jericho, when the walls came a-tumbling down!(9)

This essay has been published simultaneously in the December 1999 issue of Natural History Magazine 10, vol. 10 (December 1999 / January 2000), pp.32-44.

Notes

1.from: J.R. Block and Harold E. Yucker, Can You Believe Your Eyes?, New York: Gardner, 1989, p. 16, fig. 2.2

2.from: J.R. Block and Harold E. Yucker, Can You Believe Your Eyes?, New
York: Gardner, 1989, p. 16, fig. 2.2

3.from: Marcel Duchamp, A l’Infinitif (The White Box), New York: Cordier
& Ekstrom, 1967 [plexiglass box of 79 facsimile notes (translated by Cleve Gray) concerning The Large Glass; signed and numbered edition of 150]

4. from: Marcel Duchamp, A l’Infinitif (The White Box), New York: Cordier & Ekstrom, 1967 [plexiglass box of 79 facsimile notes (translated by Cleve Gray) concerning The Large Glass; signed and numbered edition of 150]

5. from: Marcel Duchamp, A l’Infinitif (The White Box), New York: Cordier & Ekstrom, 1967 [plexiglass box of 79 facsimile notes (translated by Cleve Gray) concerning The Large Glass; signed and numbered edition of 150]

6. cover of Robert Lebel’s Marcel Duchamp, Paris: Trianon, 1959 (first monograph and catalogue raisonné of the artist); photograph by Victor Obsatz

7. from: Marcel Duchamp, A l’Infinitif (The White Box), New York: Cordier & Ekstrom, 1967 [plexiglass box of 79 facsimile notes (translated by Cleve Gray) concerning The Large Glass; signed and numbered edition of 150]

8. from: Marcel Duchamp, A l’Infinitif (The White Box), New York: Cordier & Ekstrom, 1967 [plexiglass box of 79 facsimile notes (translated by Cleve Gray) concerning The Large Glass; signed and numbered edition of 150]

9.My wife and I wrote this essay for the millennial issue (December 1999-January 2000) of Natural History. In treating this grandest temporal passage in all our lives, I wanted to follow the essayist’s fundamental principle of using a particular example to illustrate a broad generality — in this case the nature and overarching value of expanded mental horizons — that no one but an arrogant fool would attack head on. (An explicit essay about “the nature of truth” merits only our instant and a priori ridicule). Duchamp’s brilliant and entirely misunderstood four-dimensional perspective illusion of boats and deckchairs works well as such a concrete illustration, especially since I could amalgamate his story with the best fictional invocation, written more than a century ago in 1884, of the forecoming (and now passing) 1999-2000 millennial transition as a symbol for the possibility (and both the difficulty and danger, for the hero of this tale ends up scorned and in prison) of discovering fundamentally new dimensions in human and scientific understanding. Incidentally, I have stated that I will end this series of essays at the Millennium (right on number 300, with never a month missed since 1974, and following the admirable DiMaggio-Jordan principle of quitting while ahead). Please don’t regard the forthcoming and final year of these essays as a retreat from this pledge, analogous to the almost comical image of a diva’s multiple “farewell” tours. As I discussed at length in my book Questioning the Millennium, perfectly good defenses can be advanced for either a 2000 or a 2001 beginning for the 3rd millennium. I happen to maintain a slight preference for 2000 (as did the good Reverend E.A. Abbot in 1884), while acknowledging that both positions enjoy undeniable merit as consequences of arbitrary human decisions that cannot be validated, or disconfirmed, by scientific knowledge. Nonetheless, as a practical point, I will write until January 2001 (as I always had intended) — because it would be such a shame to make a big fuss about quitting at the millennium, only to face the possibility that partisans of 2001 will triumph in the public debate — and that posterity will judge me as falling short, just before the finish line. I have always followed my grandfather’s rules for a successful life: Hedge your bets and never draw to an inside straight. You will have me to kick around only for one more year.

The Green Box Stripped Bare: Marcel Duchamp’s 1934 “Facsimiles” Yield Surprises

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Green Box with 94 Items
© 1999 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS,
N.Y./ADAGP, Paris.
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Museum of Modern Art Lab.
In 1934, Marcel Duchamp announced the publication of his Green Box (edition of 320 copies) in a subscription bulletin — an enormous undertaking since each box contains 94 individual items mostly supposed “facsimiles” (Duchamp’s word) of notes first written between 1911 and 1915, each printed and torn upon templates to match the borders of the scribbled originals for a total of 30,080 scraps and pages.⁽¹⁾

(See illustrations 1A & 1B for The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even in deluxe and regular editions; illustration 1C for the Subscription Bulletin advertising the Green Box in 1934; and illustration 1D for Duchamp’s master work a.k.a. The Large Glass (1915-23) of the same title as the Green Box.) Spectators, according to Duchamp, needed to study this “Sears Roebuck-like catalogue” of notes in order to understand his major life’s work, The Large Glass (also known by the same title as the Green Box: The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even).

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Illustration1A
© 1999 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS,
N.Y./ADAGP, Paris
Illustration 1B
© 1999 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS,
N.Y./ADAGP, Paris
Illustration 1C
© 1999 Succession Marcel Duchamp,
ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris
Illustration 1D
© 1999 Succession Marcel Duchamp,
ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris

Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp’s biographer, in 1996 writes:

Duchamp had always maintained that his Glass was not just something to be looked at but “an accumulation of ideas,” in which verbal elements were at least as important as visual ones, perhaps even more so. […] As Duchamp would say in a 1959 interview, he had “tried in that big Glass to find a completely personal and new means of expression; the final product was to be a wedding of mental and visual reactions; in other words, the ideas in the Glass were more important than the actual visual realization.” Since the ideas were contained (more or less) in
the notes, their long-delayed publication would become a new chapter in the continuing saga of his unfinished, shattered, but far from defunct masterpiece.⁽²⁾

Duchamp famously boasted — and the claim has been repeated, mantra-like, in nearly all commentary and scholarship upon Duchamp — that he had exerted enormous, almost maniacal, effort to reproduce the notes exactly, down to details of paper and ink.⁽³⁾He told Michel Sanouillet in 1954, for example:

I wanted to reproduce them as accurately as possible. So I had all of these thoughts lithographed in the same ink which had been used for the originals. To find paper that was exactly the same, I had to ransack the most unlikely nooks and crannies of Paris.Then we cut out three hundred copies of each lithograph with the help of zinc patterns that I had cut out on the outlines of the original papers.⁽⁴⁾

Scholars have accepted Duchamp’s claims at face value, uncritically adopting Duchamp’s given words as a premise in their own “analysis.” For example, Calvin Tomkins refers to Duchamp’s “absolute fidelity to the physical appearance” of his Green Box Notes as “puzzling” since they were based upon abstract ideas.⁽⁵⁾ Elizabeth Cowling writes in 1997; “Duchamp adopted the most time consuming and meticulous methods,scouring the specialist suppliers in Paris for papers that were exactly like those on which he had originally made his notes, and for lithographic inks of exactly the same color as the inks,etc. he had used.”⁽⁶⁾ And David Joselit writes in 1998: “Duchamp took extraordinary pains to mass-produce what is generally assumed to be unique or original — the artist’s cognitive process. It was not enough to publish transcripts of his texts. Rather he sought to reproduce as precisely as possible each torn piece of paper, each different ink, so that every one of the proposed three hundred editions of the Green Box would appear to share the spontaneity, the immediacy of the original process — as though he had undertaken to mass-produce his own subjectivity discovered readymade.”⁽⁷⁾

Let us leave aside for now (and for later and more extensive commentary) the deliciously ironic issue of why conventional scholarship on a man so celebrated for tweaking and mocking conventionality should be so willing to accept the subject’s own statements about his intentions and procedures as a kind of holy writ — and not suspect that Duchamp might also have played games by preying upon their gullibility and hagiographical tendencies as well. In any case, we merely wish to point out here that Duchamp, manifestly and purposefully, did not proceed as advertised in compiling the Green Box — and that scholars have not thought to check his claims, even though the material for so doing (comparison of the original and reproduced notes) has always been available.

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Illustration 2A
© 1999 Succession Marcel
Duchamp, ARS,N.Y./ADAGP, Paris

Illustration 2B
© 1999 Succession Marcel
Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris

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Illustration 3A
© 1999 Succession Marcel
Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris .

Illustration 3B
© 1999 Succession Marcel
Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris.
Most of the original notes remained with Duchamp and were not accessible to scholars during his life. But they then passed to his estate, and thence to the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), where they are now freely available for scholarly study. Moreover, and more importantly,a substantial group of these notes have always been potentially available to researchers — and comparisons between the originals and the Green Box so-called facsimiles could always have been made, although none ever were. Duchamp produced a special edition of 20 deluxe boxes (out of the total edition of 320), each containing one original note, along with 93 reproductions.

Several owners of the 20 Deluxe Green Boxes sold the original notes (contained within them) separately, and Shearer was able to procure one of the original notes.⁽⁸⁾Shearer’s note discusses a long, complex and important statement about the malic molds and sieves in the bachelor half of The Large Glass. (See illustrations 2A & 2B, Shearer’s original note and the Green Box reproduction.) She noticed immediately that neither the ink nor the paper of the original note matched the reproductions in two copies of the Green Box. The original is written in black ink, but the Green Box versions use blue ink in the lithographic reproduction. (see illustrations 3A & 3B which compare the original note’s textured paper and the reproduction’s paper) The original paper is thin, textured and warm in tone. The Green Box reproduction’s paper is much thicker, bluish in tone and smooth.If Duchamp “wanted to reproduce [the notes] as exactly as possible,” why would he replicate other Green Box notes with paper similar in texture to Shearer’s original note, but then not use this same paper in reproducing Shearer’s note? (See illustration 3C showing example of Green Box note with texture.)

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Illustration 3C
© 1999 Succession Marcel
Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris.
Shearer and Gould then consulted Margaret Holben Ellis at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts, and Christopher McGlinchey and Erika Mosier at the Museum of Modern Art Conservation to learn if the difference in ink color could have resulted from a natural change through time from Duchamp’s original. Christopher McGlinchey, from his chemical analysis, identified the ink in the original note as lamp black and in the reproduction as Prussian blue. McGilnchey assures us that the lampblack ink in the original note was not ever blue (as used in the reproduction), and that the inks are truly different.⁽⁹⁾ See illustrations 3A & 3B showing detail of Prussian blue ink in the Green Box copy and lamp black ink in the original note.) Moreover, the wove paper used by Duchamp in the Green Box could not represent the closest likeness available after scouring all the stores of Paris, because machine-laid paper much more similar (if not identical) to Duchamp’s original can still be easily obtained and was surely available when Duchamp made the Green Box.⁽¹⁰⁾(After all, he used machine-laid paper in other Green Box note reproductions.)Clearly, Duchamp intentionally altered both ink and paper to depart from the originals in his “facsimile” copies despite his claims, beginning in 1934, for faithful reproduction.

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Illustration 5A
© 1999 Succession Marcel Duchamp,
ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris

Illustration 5B
© 1999 Succession Marcel
Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris.

We then checked further to discover whether these alterations are systematic throughout the Green Box, or merely incidental in a few notes. Shearer and Gould examined 22 original notes at the Pompidou Center and we now wish to present this preliminary report.We feel confident in stating, at this early stage of our investigation,that the differences are pervasive and systematic. Every one of the 22 notes we examined shows substantial difference between the original and the Green Box “copies.” On every note, Duchamp uses complex combinations of different papers and different inks in making the Green Boxversions.⁽¹¹⁾Moreover, lest one think that Duchamp may simply have done the best he could with materials available, and that the differences represent “sins of omission” rather than “sins of commission” we can report conclusively that at least some of the changes were done with clear intent – for Duchamp’s own instructions remain in the original notes to prove the point. On the back of several one-sided notes, he wrote an instruction for the printer: tel recto seul – that is, “same size, right side only.” But two notes of the 22 we examined bear the “smoking gun” inscription: Ag 1/4 recto seul — that is, “enlarge by 1.25, right side only.” (See illustrations 5A & 5B, two of the notes which Duchamp selected to enlarge in reproductions.) The Green Box versions of these two notes are, indeed, 1.25 times larger than the originals.

Among further typical alterations in the 22 notes we find: the original note “laws, principles, phenomena” is written in blue ink but the Green Box version is printed in black ink, a reverse combination when compared to Duchamp’s alterations of Shearer’s original note — in black ink but “duplicated” in blue ink. In another case, he reproduced the “1912” note on graph paper with a square pattern whereas the original was on graph paper with a rectangular pattern. However, in the “chute d’éau” note, the original is not on graph paper, yet the Green Box version is printed on square patterned graph paper.⁽¹²⁾

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Illustration 6A
© 1999 Succession
Marcel Duchamp, ARS,
N.Y./ADAGP, Pari

Illustration 6B
© 1999 Succession
Marcel Duchamp, ARS,
N.Y./ADAGP, Paris

We strongly suspect that the differences between originals and Green Box versions are systematic rather than capricious — they are surely pervasive in any case — and we shall be studying all the available notes in an attempt to understand the system. But, for now and in closing, we wish to report one other remarkable fact.⁽¹³⁾

Duchamp’s wry and false claims that he worked so hard in scouring Paris for the right inks and papers covers up an enormously greater (and genuine) expenditure of time that he completely failed to stress!We first learned about this remarkable feature of Duchamp’s production when Margaret Ellis noted a pin prick through a period in both Green Box versions that we used for this study– but no pinprick in the original.(See illustrations 6A & 6B, showing original note without pin prick and reproduction with pin prick.) This led us to suspect that the pinprick probably anchored a stencil that Duchamp had used to produce part of the Green Box version.

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Illustration 6C
© 1999 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS,
N.Y./ADAGP, Paris.

Indeed, our study of several notes reveals that, although Duchamp always reproduced the background text by lithography when he added the words and phrases in red or blue highlight (often as they appear on the originals) he used pochoir stencils (a method he openly discussed and employed for promoting both his Boîte en Valise1934-41)and his< Eau et Gaz Box (1958)even featuring his inclusion of the actual pochoir stencils in his grand deluxe versions). (See illustration 6C for Duchamp’s Boîte; see illustration 7A for Duchamp posing with Lebel holding “pochoir stencils” sold with the grand deluxe Eau et Gaz and illustration 7B for pochoir stencil included in the grand deluxe version of Eau et Gaz.) Moreover, and more remarkably, he used two or more stencils for one color on some of the notes (to secure overlayerings as occurs in handwriting), even though the entire text of one color could have been reproduced with a single stencil. (See llustrations 8A & 8B comparing his use of two stencils for red showing overlap — similar to the results of handwriting — versus his use of one stencil for red.See also illustrations 8C & 8D which show the irregular texture of collotype lithography in one of Duchamp’s Green Box notes versus the smooth surface from a stencil that often shows varied pooling along edges upon close inspection.) ⁽¹⁴⁾

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Illustration 7A
© 1999 Succession
Marcel Duchamp, ARS,
N.Y./ADAGP, Paris
Illustration 8A
© 1999 Succession
Marcel Duchamp, ARS,
N.Y./ADAGP, Paris.
Illustration 8B
© 1999 Succession
Marcel Duchamp, ARS,
N.Y./ADAGP, Paris.

Illustration 7B
© 1999 Succession
Marcel Duchamp, ARS,
N.Y./ADAGP, Paris
Illustration 8C
© 1999 Succession
Marcel Duchamp, ARS,
N.Y./ADAGP, Paris
Illustration 8D
© 1999 Succession
Marcel Duchamp, ARS,
N.Y./ADAGP, Paris.

Just consider the immense amount of work required to reproduce 320 copies of most of the 94 items in varied combinations of inks and papers that depart from the originals, often one at a time using multiple stencils. For example, Ellis and Mosier have assured us that Duchamp, as a printer with two years of professional training, would have known that he could have achieved far greater exactness in reproduction, and saved a great deal of money and even more time in what can only be regarded as meticulous and uninspiring work, by reproducing the red and blue highlights lithographically. Did he use this laborious method of stenciling to introduce inevitable and slight differences among the 320 boxes — differences that a careful observer could use to spot his methods, and to discover the inconsistencies between his actions and his explanations? Or does the hand stenciling create enough small, perceivable differences between each copy (and its original document) to force us to ask whether we encounter here a new category and strategy of reproduction — not a true “facsimile” (“to make similar”) but now a “facvarious” (“to make different”). This man never ceases to surprise us — and to instruct us about our foibles and assumptions.

P.S.

The “original plates […] used in printing the manuscript notes for
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Illustration 9
© 1999 Succession
Marcel Duchamp, ARS,
N.Y./ADAGP, Paris.the Green Box” (as depicted in entry no. 436 in The Arturo Schwarz Duchamp Catalogue Raisonné [1998])are not printing plates according to Ellis and Mosier. We checked to see if these plates could have been the templates used by Duchamp to tear the edges of each reproduction in order to mimic the tears of the originals. Of the 23 plates only a few have the complete shape of the original note — the others would not work as successful templates for tearing the reproductions because they are, at best, only partial fragments of the entire original note’s total edge boundary. (See illustration 9 of the alleged “original printing plates” for the Green Box.)

Notes

1. The following text is from the 1934 Subscription Bulletin: 300 exemplaries numérotés et signés d’un recueil de feuillets manuscrits,dessins et peintures (années 1911 à 1915) ayant servi à la composition du LA MARIÉE MISE A NU PAR SES CÉLIBATAIRES, MÊME par Marcel Duchamp Les notes manuscrites, en fac-simile rehaussé de crayon rouge et bleu, les dessins et peintures reproduits en phototypie (une planche en couleurs)sont imprimés sur papiers divers et réunis dans un emboîtage de 33 cm x 28cm. prix de l’exemplaire franco de port: France 120 francs / Étranger 150 francs Edition Rrose Sélavy 18 rue de la Paix Paris Il a été tiré 20 exemplaires (dont 10 hors commerce), signés et numérotés, sur papiers de luxe; chacune des boîtes contient, outre la reproduction en couleurs, des photographies originales et une page de manuscrit. prix de l’exemplaire franco de port: 750 francs. – Bulletin de Souscription Veuillez m’adresser ………………….. exemplaires de la boîte contenant les fac-simile et reproductions en couleurs de notes manuscrites, dessins, peintures ayant servi à la composition de LA MARIÉE MISE A NU PAR SES CÉLIBATAIRES, MÊME par Marcel Duchamp

2.Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), 296.

3.In Marcel Duchamp’s 1st Catalogue Raisonné designed by Duchamp himself in 1959 — Henri Pierre Roché, Duchamp’s close friend and sometime partner and collaborator writes about the Green Box notes: “These are exact replicas of each document with the original colors of the inks and pencils that he used. The textures and shapes of paper are identical with the originals even in the case of scraps and torn pieces where metal masks were used.” Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp (New York: Grove Press, 1959). 81.

4. Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp, 296.

5.Ibid.

6.Elizabeth Cowling in the exhibition catalogue Surrealism and After:The Gabrielle Keiller Collection (Edinburg, 1997), 161.

7. David Joselit, Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910-1941 (Cambridge:MIT Press, 1998), 85.

8. This particular note is recognized by experts as an authentic Green Box note original.

9.This particular note is recognized by experts as an authentic Green Box note original.

10.Ellis, Mosier, and McGilnchey identified the papers as wove and machine-laid.

11.For an English translation of the Green Box Notes, see Hamilton and Hamilton, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelor, Even (New York: Percy Lund, Humphries and Co. Ltd,1960).

12.This particular note is recognized by experts as an authentic Green Box note original.

13.See Hamilton for Green Box Notes.

14.Duchamp was known for his formal interest in chance systems. For example,Duchamp and his two sisters created a musical score (also included in the Green Box) with a system of randomly selected notes.

“From the Splash to the Flash, with the best wishes of Le Soigneur de Gravité,”
The Large Glass: A Guided Tour

Jean Suquet, born in Cahors (Lot, in the South of France) on 22 June

Introductory Remarks

Jean Suquet, born in Cahors (Lot, in the South of France) on 22 June 1928, has been close to the Surrealist group since 1948.

One day during the spring of 1949, André Breton invited Suquet to show him some of his writings. Suspecting a relationship between Suquet’s work and Duchamp’s The Large Glass, Breton, who had been commissioned to write a book on Duchamp, suggested that Suquet do the book instead. Breton introduced him to Mary Reynolds and Jacques Villon.

In his first letter to Duchamp (Paris, 15 July 1949), Suquet wrote: Si je dois écrire sur vous et votre oeuvre ce ne sera pas en critique mais en poète. [If I have to write about you and your work, I will do so as a poet, rather than as a critic.] Duchamp answered (New York, 9 August): Suis tout à fait d’accord pour votre projet. Et comme vous le dites, ‘en poète’ est la seule façon de dire quelque chose. [Am in complete agreement with your idea. And like you say, ‘as a poet’ is the only way to say anything.]

In conjunction with a letter dated 12 December, Suquet sent him some forty or so pages of writing. Duchamp responded immediately (25 December).His answer ended with nothing less than the following: Après tout, je vous dois la fière chandelle d’avoir mis à nu ma mise à nu. [After all, I really owe it to you to have stripped bare my stripping bare.]

However, Suquet’s first Duchampian works (1949-1956) wouldn’t be published at that time, except for “Le Signe du Cancer” [“The Sign of Cancer”] by La Nef, Paris, in the special issue of March-April 1950 (Almanach Surréaliste du demi-siècle).

The two men – 63 and 22 years old – met in Paris on 26 October 1950 at the home of Mary Reynolds who had just died.

From the first exchanged letters, one can tell, the tone was set. A conviviality was there and it remained for fifty years.

Suquet has published seven books, long and short ones, on Duchamp’s work.

*Miroir de la Mariée.
[The Bride’s Mirror]. Paris: Flammarion, coll. “Textes,” 1974.(267 p.)

*Le guéridon et la virgule
[The pedestal table and the comma]. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1976.(128 p.)
*Le Grand Verre rêvé
[The Large Glass of dreams]. Paris: Aubier, 1991. (169 p.)

*Le Grand Verre: Visite guidée
[The Large Glass: A Guided Tour]. Caen and Paris: l=Échoppe,1992. (25 p.)

*Regarder l’heure. Sur le ciel de Marcel Duchamp
[To look at the hour. Against the sky of Marcel Duchamp]. Caen and Paris:l’Échoppe, 1992. (24 p.)

*In vivo, in vitro.
Paris: l’Échoppe, 1994. (119 p.)

*Marcel Duchamp ou L’éblouissement de l’éclaboussure.
[Marcel Duchamp or the dazzling of the splash]. Paris: Éd. l’Harmattan,coll. “L’art en bref,” 1998. (124 p.)

Far beyond Breton’s and Duchamp’s deaths (in 1966 and 1968 respectively),
Jean Suquet “delays as a poet.” He is currently 71 years old.

Even though Duchamp wrote to Suquet on 25 December 1949: Vous savez sans doute que vous êtes le seul au monde à avoir reconstitué la gestation du verre dans ses détails, avec même les nombreuses
intentions jamais exécutées [You know without a doubt that you’re the only one in the world to have reconstituted the gestation of the glass in its details, including even the numerous intentions which were never materialized], it would be some decades and many essays before the understanding would become clear, in the path of this succinct “guided tour,” that all the elements of the glass – The Large Glass – are in place.

André Gervais

16 November 1999

THE LARGE GLASS: A Guided Tour

by Jean Suquet

translated by Julia Koteliansky with Sarah S. Kilborne

Marcel Duchamp’s Scheme for The Large Glass

1 – Chocolate grinder.
2 – Slide.
2A -Driving hook and chain of revolution
2B -Underground pedal.
2C -Water mill.
3 – Large scissors.
4 – Bachelors.
5 – Capillary tubes.
6 – Horizon — Bride’s clothing.
7 – Bride, head or eyes.
7A -Suspension ring of the “Hanged” female.
7B -Wasp.
7C -Weather vane.
8 – Milky way flesh color.
8A -Meteorological extension.
8B -Roundtrip of the top inscription letters.
9 – Sieves.
10 -Planes of flow.
10A-Mobile of splash.
10B-Crashes — splashes.
11 -Cannon (?)
11A and
11B-Rams of the boxing match.
12 -Oculist charts.
13 -Shots.
14A-“Tripod” of the juggler-handler-tender of gravity.
14B-Spring of the juggler-handler-tender of gravity.
14C-Platform and black ball of the tender of gravity.

Being the one who punctuated the Mona Lisa with a mustache, who exhibited a urinal in a salon, Marcel Duchamp dashed off salubrious mockeries from time to time, to amuse the “gallery” of artviewers, as if to put them on a false scent. Meanwhile, every day, almost entirely in secret, he was working on his “grand oeuvre,” which is today at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Large Glass, as much a window opening up a perspective as far as the eye can see, is formed by two vertical glass plates, one on top of the other, in a frame that is 1.76m wide x 2.72m high. On these glass plates, without offending the main part of their transparency, Marcel Duchamp outlined, using lead wire, austere echanical figures that are meanly stopped or, one could say, imprisoned in ice. He sketched them, erfected them, arranged them in schemes; he suggested their possible movements in notes, by pen, by encil; he scribbled them on pieces of paper in Paris between 1912 and 1915. He patiently and obsessively crystallized them in New York from 1915 until 1923, before he abandoned the piece in a definitively unfinished state. (The italics are Marcel Duchamp’s.) In 1933 he was told that the “oeuvre” on which he had spent thousands of hours of work had been accidentally broken into a thousand pieces. As if words themselves would escape from the lips of those breaks, he immediately undertook to publish his first and formative rough drafts of The Large Glass before even considering mending the disaster, which he would finally address in 1936. With the fervor of a water diviner and the carefulness of a monk copying a sacred text, he made a facsimile of each manuscript (he used the same paper, he tore outlines in the same way) and then gathered the jumbled up notes which made up ninety-three loose sheets in a luxurious box of green velvet, producing three hundred copies of this box in the autumn of 1934. A flight of leaps from the very first moment. On the cover of this marvelous Green Box is a constellation of dots in capital letters for us to decode into a sentence locked to its own equivocation: LA MARIÉE MISE À NU PAR SES CÉLIBATAIRES MÊME [The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors Even]. No need for the author’s name. Its sonority sparkles in the title:
MARiée, CÉLibataires. It’s similar to looking for or in oreille.⁽¹⁾ Marcel Duchamp delivered his notes in the sumptuous disorder of a puzzle, as if he had wanted everyone to start the game over and to braid his own path through the nerve tissue of the breaks. He wished pure reign for the legend – provided that one would read it through the grid of The Large Glass – without giving away in silence any of its given data. In order to begin, the reader should better add a swig of fun to the mechanical scheme described in these pages. With the same playfulness, he will have to make thousands of words sing which echo; he will have to find the sources of this “oeuvre” in the most vivacious, the most breathtaking,the most insatiable desire which haunts every mortal; and in every articulation of this meager trace he will have to follow the thread of this or that imaginary escape – for example, of the elusive fourth dimension – time – which a painter can only make sense of by revealing the imprints of its passing. That is why none of the rouages [cogs], none of the roueries [cunning] should be left in the shadows. The gears speak if they can be matched with precision, according to the number of their teeth. And their forbidding machinery, their jubilant machinations, start up as soon as mots [words] provide them with a moteur [motor].

In the bottomhalf, in the very middle, the chocolate grinder (1) is turning;turning as it has been and as it will continue to do, in a circle, inorder to come back under the mere whip of repetition of the adageof spontaneity: the bachelor grinds his chocolate himself. We won’tdwell on its dubious color or its essence of childhood. This triplemillstone propelled by a proverb, in spite of its size, in spite ofits central positioning, is useless except for the fact that it putsone on guard against the razzle-dazzle of the appearances. Next to it,a slide (2) goes back and forth over repeating litanies.

It jerks and rattles and opens and closes, oh, barely half way throughthe large scissors (3) which do not cut but whose large X, ontop of the bachelor’s world, sharpens the poignant question of an unknown.A bit further back from the infernal train of these grating scraps ofmockery, nine red fellows stand frozen at attention. They are the bachelors(4). They do not move, but the name that they wear slips and slides.This masquerade of uniforms, as hollow as if strictly dressed up, wasbaptized by Duchamp in the beginning as eros matrix and then,at the end, cemetery. Matrix and cemetery in one and the sameplace! A great gap must be overcome to be able to link at once the entranceand the exit. A subtle mobility, a quasi-spiritual fluidity must fillthese moulds of males reduced to their clothes. As a matter of fact,the bachelors are full of spirit – inflated with illuminating gas.”Gas” comes from the Germanic “geist” meaning “spirit.”Moreover, in 1912, gas wasn’t yet reduced to its culinary usage. Itblew life into lamps, but before it met its match, “l’hydrogène clarteux” [glimmering hydrogen] remained invisible. The painter can onlyshow the demijohns which contain it, the pipes and tubes (5)which canalize it, or he can perceive out of its flow only the plumbingnailed to the walls. Meanwhile inside, spirit flows, time flies, gasleaks…

Let us, then, flow along together. This brother in wandering, let’s accompany him on his voyage – in spite of the fact that he does not spare guiding traces. He does not say anything about the direction of the route [path], he hardly indicates the movement of the roue [wheel]. Thus, relying a lot on chance, dressed in personal rags, heavy with our own past, motivated by the very improbable prospect of enjoying the end of an instantaneous rest, let’s enter the impersonal duration of The Large Glass. But before stepping over the threshold, let’s pause while standing in front of it. At eye level (at least in the original frame) the fracture between the bottom and the top follows naturally the horizon line (6). Below, on the ground, the bachelors. On top, the Bride (7). What?! This skeletal puppet balancing at the zenith of the cemetery is actually the promised female? Could it be the spectre of Jocasta, the hanging mother of blinded Oedipus? Could death and love have crossed their blades for the sake of the large scissors of the unknown? What does this formless form mean? Is it a fossil? Is it a trace of an inspiration, like the impression of a bird’s talons on snow or sand? Can we imagine it from here below? Duchamp has only half-opened the keyhole of the vanishing point: he has designated the horizon as the Bride’s clothing. An admirably just allegory! We know the duplicity of this imaginary line which is, after all, only an infirmity of the eye. Where sight is lost, there we see it being drawn. When we go towards it,it moves away accordingly. And the bachelors, who are rushing pleins gaz [flat out] to strip the Bride bare, keep before them in their own regard [gaze] the veil which they are rousing and agitating and which they are dying to unfasten. However, before they can actually unfasten the folds of perspective which blind them…

The Bride has undone her clothing which falls down onto the horizon and covers the world around. She is nue [nude], nuages [clouds], nébuleuse [nebula]. Milky way flesh color (8) writes Duchamp with one stroke of the pen, one flap of the wing.

C’est la vie! The Bride has a life–center. Her heart beats. The throbbing jerk of her pulse, palpitating like the convulsive abdomen of a wasp (a winged hymen), generates an air draft, a blow, a wind which sends out, to fray at the four points of the quadrant, an oriflamme [banner] of entrails and brains. On fire with infinity, the Bride escapes from her intimacies, she evaporates from appearance into transparency, she breaks out of the limits of her skin, escapes all outline, challenges all representation. Nubile, the maiden pours her heart out like a nebula. Nue [nude], she wants to be une [one] with the universe. She lets herself be captivated by the meteorological extension (8A), ripped out by the tempests, embellished by fair weathers (time takes the colors of weather), which merge her smoothly into the weave of the sky as une flamme consistante [a solid flame]. A langue de feu [tongue of fire], sublimated into what is fatal about it: le langage [language]. The current of air going up through the Bride’s porous flesh is charged with lettres [letters]. The blowing, rising her up, is her vivid voice. The flesh is made word. Even though, in her first outburst, the blossoming of the Bride was going to turn the top of The

Large Glass into a vitrail [stained-glass window] of entrails sparkling with fine copper, platinum and golden dust, the rise of pleasure transmuted gold into words, the dew of the lips into volatile ink. Blossoming: to make an Inscription of it (8B). The writing, which drags its ink, crackles. It blazes, it self-erases, it rises again, it flows back, it ploughs the Milky way flesh color from one end to the other. Breathtaking, always on the alert, letters deliver the commandments, orders, authorizations of the Bride to the bachelors. Times have really changed. Instead of a hefty fellow spitting out thunder, a woman reigns in the sky. She dictates law.

On the bottom, the gas is still far from the end of its hardships. From pipes into funnels, from sieves (9) into churns, from obscurity into narrowness, being compressed, stretched out, cut, re-cut, frozen, and finally liquefied as a floorcloth, spirit goes through all the states of matter. La pesanteur [gravity] humiliates it, and la pesante heure [weighty time] overwhelms it with even worse hitches. But that’s in vain. Gas never gives up its determination to rise. Its most twisted avatar, the least conclusive of its laborious progress, fails to even slightly alter the dream which is going to emancipate it from gravity. And when on the bottom of the planes of flow (10) the blood-bursting gas drips its miserable puddle on the ground, it is always capable of exploding desire. Three or four of its drops regale the breech of the cannon (11) pointed towards the vanishing point. The artist/artillery man spits out a bille de combat [combat marble]. The bachelors, with Gallic pride, support the sky above their heads with the help of two béliers [battering rams](11A, 11B) standing straight, risen to the surface of the horizon and flirting with its alluring underclothing. The bille [marble] releases the béliers [battering rams]. The sky falls. At least it intends to fall. For, with each shot, at the same time as the gas breaks up the supporters, whose parts are iron but whose joints are fragile, it infuses them with its dearest childhood memories: a resurgence of ascensional magnetization. The fallen rams raise their heads. And all starts over. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted, concluded Duchamp. Thus, after five years of obstinate,ysterious work, distillations, incantations, decantations, backwardsreturns, fresh advances – of knights, bishops, queens and kings – thereverse of The Large Glass is silvered. In this mirror,using a scalpel on line after line to the point of scratching out theeyes, no second chances possible, he engraves three ready-made oculistcharts (12) which had been borrowed from an optician’s shop windowand placed in perspective. By the end of its apprenticeships, the gasunderstands what destiny its name implies. Being illuminating, it mustilluminate – starting with making itself clear. Under the shock of onelast fall, of a shattering weight (10A) thrown into the puddle by theintervention of the scissors, it leaps out in éclaboussures [splashes](10B) – whose sublimation maintains only éclat [brilliance].The gas sets its own body on fire. It declares its flame. On the springboardof the oculist mirrors, which peel off its last dregs and correct thearrow of its ultimate rise, it spouts into the sky in a burst of rays.The soaring is described by Duchamp in a flight of alliterations: éblouissementde l’éclaboussure [dazzling of the splash]. The late illuminatinggas fades into the core of its own light. It discovers there the originof its own interior lighting. And it metamorphoses for the lasttime. Even though they are ablaze, these are not the drops themselves>which pass over the horizon and find their opening towards the infinite in the constellation of the nine shots (13); but their image does. Which is the exact physiological definition of the gaze. When a ray of grains of light riddles the retina, the light doesn’t go beyond and find its way through the gray matter thickness; but its image at the nerve level does, as a bunch of electrical impulses, of chemistries and chimeras.

So, the energies at work in The Large Glass tend to unite. On the top, a flood of words. On the bottom, a flux of light. At the end of the voyage, the gas is transmuted into a dazzling gaze, the Bride, into effervescent writing. And the stripping bare, according to Duchamp’s wish, can therefore be read as a poem. Which rhymes the épanouissement [blossoming] of the Bride with the éblouissement [dazzling] of the bachelors. We’ll turn this already rich rhyme into gold by extracting from it this last word: OUI [yes].

click to enlarge

“You don’t say!” burst out laughing the supporters of NON [no]. Between the horizon and the Milky way there’s a transparent immensity, in which Duchamp had not drawn any signs, neither a cloud nor the cast shadow of a dash. There are only solitudes. It’s having never looked at the sky on a beautiful night. The Milky way marries the roundness of the vault of night and bows until it touches the horizon. No need for a giant to give shape to this pure effect of perspective. It’s enough to have a being whose forms have no longer in relation to their destination a mensurability, for example the letters of the alphabet, upper and lower cases, which forward and deliver the same message. In fact, a troubadour enters into the scene and will reveal himself as the Bride’s letter-weight, the lady’s spokesman: the juggler of the center of gravity (14). He DANCES on the horizon line. He flexes, he straightens himself up, from one foot to the other, at the mercy of the cannon shots, according to the wish of the splashes. His body, sharpened into a spring, twists like an endless screw between the bottom and the top. At his head, he erects a round platform in which a black ball rolls. That’s the clot of darkness he juggles with. He dances, he translates the jerks of the machine through twirling the ball which concentrates the waves of unbalance of the bachelors’ commotion. The ball vacillates,zigzags, dangerously brushes against the edges, but it does not fall. For the Bride sends it orders of new balance by licking it with a flame tongue, by flicking it with touching letters which contrecarrent [thwart] its écarts [swerves]. Five times, in drawings and model, Duchamp represented this deus ex machina in the shape of a guéridon [pedestal table], of a table tournante [swivel table]. A streamer on its three legs (sometimes four, or two), it is the Oracle of the married-divinity. One knock, two knocks, three knocks – like all gods, it doesn’t exist. The Large Glass cleared it away into transparency. The fundamental dodge making diabolic the empty space, the miraculous blank around which the puzzle has been reconstituted. So that,
for all the onlookers who had not read, or misread, the directions for use, it does not work, it cannot work. These infidels don’t hear the screeching of the grain of salt crunched by the gears, > they forget to deduce the god from these signs, from these marks. In the title, for example, he curves a comma’s tail, sliding it in between the plural célibataires [bachelors] and the singular même [even], virgule [comma], there is no dead language except Latin which admits its real name: virga. Oh yes! He’s the one in the salons today whom everybody calls Mister Phallus.
The one who shines in his own absence, who acts all the better since he is not there. To the sounds of the stripping bare, this dancer changes his name as if it were a mask. With one last stroke of the pen,Duchamp instituted the appellation: Tender of gravity. The doctor of the law de la chute des graves [of the collapse of the graves] who unites the One in the sky with us on the ground. The volatile physician who heals the grave horizontal cut, who turns into a song the cry, indicated by Duchamp in the first draft of his preface: Given that, if I suppose I’m suffering a lot. And what kind of remedy, what drug or alcohol is carried by the guéridon that is the Bride’s bed-side table? It’s enough to address it sharply and to enjoy one of the puns Duchamp had been so fond of: guéris donc! [so heal!]. And si tu es gai, ris donc! [if you’re cheerful, then laugh!]. To heal gravity is to laugh. With the dot on the “i” shaped like a black ball. By spelling the letters of the Bride, the trismegistus juggler-handler-tender of gravity undresses this well-balanced virtue labeled by Duchamp: irony of affirmation. He personalizes OUI from top to toe. A OUI, whose letters anybody can make dance to their liking:

How the Tender of Gravity translates
‘Oui’ into ‘Yes’

Notes

1. Tr. “or” is French for “gold”; “oreille” is “ear”

Hidden in Plain Sight: Duchamp’s 3 Standard Stoppages,More Truly a “Stoppage” (An Invisible Mending) Than We Ever Realized

click to enlarge

Marcel Duchamp, 3 Standard
Stoppages, 1913-14
© 1999 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris

Marcel Duchamp’s first box, the Box of 1914, included the seminal note that led to one of the artist’s most important works — the 3 Stoppages Étalon(or 3 Standard Stoppages): ⁽¹⁾

The Idea of the Fabrication
horizontal
–If a threadone meter longfalls
straight
from a height of one meter on to a horizontal plane
twisting as it pleases and creates
a new image of the unit of
length —
— 3 examples obtained more or less
similar conditions
:considered in their relation to one another
they are an approximate reconstitution of
the unit of length
The 3 standard stoppages are
the meter diminished

(See illustrations 1A & 1B, showing the 1914 Box and the 3 Standard Stoppages note.) The Green Box of 1934 includes the first paragraph of this statement and also the additional key note: “3 Standard Stops=canned chance.” (See illustrations 2A & 2B,showing The Green Box and its reproduction of the earlier note for 3 Standard Stoppages).⁽²⁾

click images to enlarge

Illustration 1A
© 1999 Succession Marcel Duchamp,
ARS, N.Y./ADAGP,Paris
Illustration 1B
© 1999 Succession Marcel Duchamp,
ARS, N.Y./ADAGP,Paris
Illustration 2A
© 1999 Succession Marcel Duchamp,
ARS, N.Y./ADAGP,Paris
Illustration 2B
© 1999 Succession Marcel Duchamp,
ARS, N.Y./ADAGP,Paris

Duchamp then made the object, listing the date as “1913-14” and insisting that he had followed the protocol of his note. He claimed that he had dropped three pieces of string, each exactly one meter long, each from a height of exactly one meter, and each only once, onto a canvas. He then glued each string to the canvas in the exact position of its chance fall. Photographs of the three canvas strips appear in the Box of 1914.
When working on his painting Tu m’ in 1918,Duchamp made wooden templates in the shape of each string’s pathway. (See illustrations 3A, 3B & 3C for Tu m’ and details of the Stoppages.)

Illustration 3A
© 1999 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS,
N.Y./ADAGP, Paris

Illustration 3B
© 1999 Succession Marcel Duchamp,
ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris

Illustration 3C
© 1999 Succession Marcel Duchamp,
ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris

click to enlarge

Illustration 4
© 1999 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS,
N.Y./ADAGP, Paris
In the summer of 1936, as he was working on the restoration of The Large Glass, Duchamp cut each of the canvases down to its current width and glued each to a glass plate. A comparison of the 1914 photos with the current strips on glass — which are now at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York — reveals no differences in the length or form of any of the strings. We may therefore assume that MOMA’s object represents Duchamp’s original construction.(See illustration 4 for the 3 Standard Stoppages in situ at the Museum of Modern Art.)
Calvin Tomkins describes the central importance of the 3 Standard Stoppages in Duchamp’s work and career:

Duchamp would come to look upon the stoppages as one of the key works in his development as an artist. “In itself it was not an important work of art,” he [Duchamp] said, “but for me it opened the way — the way to escape from those traditional methods of expression long associated with art. I didn’t realize at the time what I had stumbled on. When you tap something, you don’t always recognize the sound. That’s apt to come later. For me the Three Standard Stoppages was a first gesture liberating me from the past.”

(However one chooses to interpret this work and its meaning, one can only appreciate the deep and delicious irony,the provocation of thought, and the tweaking of the most literal of all conventions — for the meter was defined by the French revolutionary government in 1791 as a new and liberating device, based on the size of the earth itself [defined as 1/10,000,000 of the quadrant of the earth’s circumference measured from the North Pole through Paris to the Equator], and therefore constant, unvarying, and capable of serving all people as an absolute standard. [In fact, The International Bureau of Weights and Measures long kept, at rigidly constant temperatures to prevent change by expansion and contraction, an actual standard meter,defined as the distance between two lines etched into a bar of 90 percent platinum and 10 percent iridium]. [See illustration 5, showing the standard meter.] How lovely, in an early 20th century age that was introducing concepts of chance and higher dimensionality into the previous exactness of Newtonian physics, to tweak this rigidity by defining a new meter based on three separate infusions of chance imposed upon an object one meter long!)

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Illustration 5

Standard scholarship on the Standard Stoppages simply repeats Duchamp’s descriptions of his modus operandi — arguing about meanings and intentions at great length and with great erudition,but never questioning the actual mode of manufacture, or carefully examining the original object to verify Duchamp’s claims. Nonetheless, a current of doubt has crept into the literature, and into the talk of Duchamp scholars and aficionados, for a definite and interesting reason: each of Duchamp’s three strings (see figures) follows a smooth and gentle curve, with broad and limited undulations and no large “wiggles,” crossover loops or other sharp irregularities. The three pathways are, in fact, quite regular and appealing in their gradual and limited meandering.

Many people — perhaps, for the fun of it, or to feel some affinity with Duchamp, rather than from any suspicion about the master’s standard protocol — have tried dropping strings of the same apparent composition following Duchamp’s method: regular tailor’s thread, one meter long, dropped from a height of one meter. And, to put the matter succinctly, no one (at least anecdotally) has presented evidence that they have been able to replicate any of Duchamp’s gentle patterns,even once. Light string just will not fall into such a regular pattern when dropped from such a height. Try as many times as one may, the actual results always produce a pathway far more jerky and wiggly than anything obtained by Duchamp in any of his three stated attempts.

For example, a well known and oft repeated story states that Duchamp’s friends, composer John Cage, and artist William Anastasi each tried to drop string numerous times following Duchamp’s protocol, and never could match any of his patterns closely because the actual drops always exceeded the pathways of the stoppages in degrees of irregular wiggling. We do know that when Walter Hopps and Arturo Schwarz both asked Duchamp how they should make the pathways of the strings for their reproductions of the stoppages (they were having trouble replicating the pathways even by trying to lay out the string in the “right” patterns by hand because the string always jumped and wriggled in other parts as they tried to lay out one part in Duchamp’s gentle arrangement) — Duchamp advised them simply to lay out the string along and against the path of the wooden templates (residing in MOMA).⁽³⁾

Yet Duchamp continued to insist, vehemently and even when questioned closely (and perhaps in the light of such suspicions),that he had followed the stated protocol of dropping each string — “exactly” one meter in length — just once, and gluing it where it had landed “à son gré” (by its own will). For example,in an interview with the young Carroll Janis (who has told us that he pressed the point because he had developed similar doubts and puzzlement): ⁽⁴⁾

Marcel: It could be done only once. Also I like that it could only be done once and no more. That’s like an experiment or something. I liked it very much …

Carroll: I wanted to ask you about the lines.Were they dropped according to the laws of chance, and the first position they fell, they were? In other words, it was strictly that one drop and it wasn’t any drop until you felt you had achieved this sort of effect?

Marcel: No, there were three drops.

Carroll: Yes, I know there were three separate drops, but each was one drop?

Marcel: Absolutely. Also, that’s the point…

Carroll: Marcel, did you drop each one just once, or did you keep on dropping them?

Marcel: Just once, just once. Don’t recall there was any mishap.

We have also tried to replicate Duchamp’s smooth and gentle patterns by hundreds of frustrating drops, using all kinds of threads, including some (of much greater weight or thickness, or covered with various stiff surfaces) that one might consider more apt than Duchamp’s threads to fall in such regular patterns — different materials of cotton, silk and wool; different weights, different waxed and unwaxed surfaces; including forms of “regular tailor’s thread” (Duchamp’s words and claim) that would have been available in France, during 1913. We also never came close to replicating the smooth patterns of the stoppages. Our drops were often dramatically affected by the variety of slight differences in initial conditions. Sudden whipping air currents or the uneven timing of the opening our two thumbs (holding the thread at each end in-between the two forefingers before releasing each thread) created even more extreme wiggle patterns. The elastic construction of the thread itself (in actuality, a bundle of smaller gauge threads) creates differences in overall length (due to increases or decreases of pulling and releasing tension, which results from stretching each thread into its horizontal position in preparation for each one meter drop).⁽⁵⁾
Trying to establish stability and precision in the act of holding and dropping threads was maddening (and therefore hilarious) and impossible.⁽⁶⁾

We then asked conservators at MOMA, Erika Mosier,Pat Houlihan, and Christopher McGlinchey, to examine the original object,and they solved the old problem, with almost embarrassing simplicity, in a simple and direct way that any even casually suspicious scholar could have discovered at any time. Duchamp, in fact, followed a procedure quite contrary (both in actual action and implied significance with respect to the role of chance) to his stated protocol to make the original object now on display. If one turns over each of the canvases and studies the back through the glass mounts, the solution emerges clearly — and one can only laugh and say something like: “oh, so that’s what he did to get such smooth patterns.” Each of the strings begins on this obverse side, extends through a needle hole to the recto side of the display,meanders for a meter along the recto (making the path of the stoppage itself), and then goes through another needle hole back to the obverse,where it extends further for a few additional centimeters (making a much longer total thread length than Duchamp’s claim of an “exact” one meter!).(See video and illustrations 6A, 6B, 6C & 6D for recto and verso views. Also see, illustration 6E for visualization of a needle’s path through the canvas.>

click images to enlarge

Illustration 6A
© 1999 Succession Marcel Duchamp,
ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris
Illustration 6B
© 1999 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS,
N.Y./ADAGP, Paris
Illustration 6C
© 1999 Succession Marcel Duchamp,
ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris
Illustration 6D
© 1999 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS,
N.Y./ADAGP, Paris

Needles path for the Stoppages
Illustration 6E

Obviously Duchamp made the pathways purposefully by sewing– that is, he sewed through the obverse, left a meter of string on the recto side, and then sewed back through to the obverse. He could then put tension on the string by holding both of the obverse ends and (along with the potential counter weight of needles)produce any pattern of his own choice on the recto side.

In his characteristic, instructive and playfully challenging way, Duchamp did not make his actual protocol (so contrary to his stated procedure) obvious, but he didn’t hide his workings very strictly either — as if he intended to challenge us by saying: “I have hidden this in plain sight. I have given you deliberate hints. Why don’t you be critical and look carefully, and not just believe what creative people or authoritative scholars (and docents giving public tours at MOMA) tell you.” To wit:

1. He could have mounted the canvases on an opaque surface, — wood, cardboard — thus making the holes for sewing through, and the extensions of string on the verso sides, invisible.But he glued the canvases on glass, so that one could see his procedures through a glass, and rather clearly.

2. Once one has the right hypothesis,the whole “experiment” becomes even funnier, and emerges more as a test of the chance occurrence of critical powers and human discovery than a test of the blank rules of chance within objective nature. Once one realizes what Duchamp actually did, several features of the work, previously unnoticed,point to the true procedure. For example, one can now actually see (in the visible relief impression — pressing up from the back into the rectoside) that the pathways of the extensions of the strings on the versoside (see again illustrations 6A, 6B, 6C, 6D) have been right there, and fully visible, all along, not only in the work on display at MOMA but also in Duchamp’s 300 copies of the Boîte en Valise where a miniature version of the 3 threads, their six ends (on the recto side, see illustration 7) and their faint but visible extensions (pushing up from the verso side) lie at the bottom of the box ready to be seen.⁽⁷⁾

click to enlarge

Illustration 7
© 1999 Succession Marcel Duchamp,
ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris
Also, importantly, Duchamp’s threads are decidedly more than a meter in length, a fact that he also leaves right before us — to be seen in both recto and verso. Moreover, one can finally understand why the string “ends” do not fray at all on the rectoside (as ordinary string always does at a cut end). These are not string ends at all, but places where a continuing string passes through a hole to the other side (see again illustrations 6A, 6B, 6C, 6D).

Finally, another delicious irony in closing:perhaps we can now understand the real reason behind Duchamp’s naming this piece a “stoppage,” literally an “invisible mending.” Scholars like Camfield have assumed that he meant to designate his “amending” of the meter. But what then is invisible about the effort — given the object
itself and Duchamp’s published protocol? The object, we now understand,truly, and absolutely literally, represents a genuine “invisible mending”– a pathway done by sewing, but hidden in plain sight.

Notes

1.From the Box of 1914 at The Art Institute of Chicago; in Arturo Schwarz’ Duchamp Catalogue Raissoné (Revised edition, New York: Delano Greenidge Editions, 1997) this note is listed as Note 96.

2.Richard Hamilton, The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even(New York: Percy Lund, Humphries and Co. Ltd, 1960).

3.We are grateful to Pat Houlihan, Associate Conservator of Sculpture at MOMA,for pointing out the visit to MOMA by Hopps and others re: their construction of 3 Standard Stoppages reproductions.

4.From a private conversation with Carroll Janis and Rhonda Roland Shearer,1998.

5.We used thread from varying size spools (large and small) including waxed thread loosely wrapped around 12″ flat cardboard.

6.Box Notes (1934) but specifically ddressed the technical aspect of “early chaos theory” first developed by Henri Poincaré (who died in 1912). Poincaré stated that chance systems sensitive to small, initial conditions, like the weather or roulette, are affected by 1) air currents 2) muscle control (as in no two spins of a roulette wheel can ever be exactly controlled to be alike) and 3) gravity.(Henri Poincaré, The Foundations of Science, New York: The Science Press, 1921. See chapter,”Chance.” In the Green Box Notes, Duchamp refers to the same three initial conditions that Poincaré mentions as his examples. For his three
experiments in chance Duchamp writes:

Wind — for the draft pistons

Skill — for the holes

Weight — for the standard-stops

to be developed —

In a second note, Duchamp correlates the “weather” with his Bride in The Large Glass as sensitive to initial “differences” — just as Poincaré correlates the “weather” as “sensitive to small differences.” (See Poincaré,The Foundations of Science). Duchamp would have likely learned about Poincaré’s insight into chance systems from Poincaré’s popular writings.The artist Cleve Gray, translator of Duchamp’s White Box Notes, was told “many times” by Duchamp that “Poincaré was at the bottom of everything he [Duchamp] was doing” (Private conversation 1997 Rhonda Roland Shearer and Cleve Gray.)

(For above two notes, see Richard Hamilton, The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelor, Even, New York: Edition Hansjörg Mayer, 1976.)

7.An important topic for Duchamp, he, in fact, titled an exhibition,NOT SEEN and/or LESS SEEN of/by MARCEL DUCHAMP/RROSE SÉLAVY 1904-1964,Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery, 1965.

“Two Minds on a Single Wavelength:” Timothy Phillips on Salvador Dali and Marcel Duchamp

click to enlarge

Salvador Dalí with Timothy
Phillips (left),
early 1960’s

We first learned of Timothy Phillips (b. 1929) when he wrote a letter to the editor of Canada’s National Post in response to Sarah Boxer’s article “A Self-Made Man. The Art World is Upset by Evidence that Marcel Duchamp Manufactured the Readymades he Claimed to have Found” (15 March 1999, reprinted in the Post with permission of The New York Times). The letter was forwarded to us by one of the paper’s editors. From this initial writing, a correspondence with Phillips began and it soon became apparent that he was highly interested in one of Duchamp’s fascinations: mathematics. We also became aware that he had worked as an assistant for Salvador Dalí, executing “minor details of lesser pictures.” The assistantship came about in 1949 when Phillips’ mother had her portrait painted by Dalí (Illustration 1) and Phillips went along, bringing his copy of 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship for an autograph.

Perhaps intrigued by the young man’s looks and interest in mathematics, Dalí invited Phillips to his house in Port Lligat, Cadaqués, and Phillips started to spend his summers working with Dalí (who wrote later that an angel had sent Phillips across his path). In the art world of Cadaqués at that time, the young Canadian met, among others, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp.

An active painter, Phillips maintains the Toronto-based Tappa Gallery as well as the Timothy Phillips Art Foundation. Now deeply religious, he attends services twice a week. In the correspondence that ensued after his letter to the editor, he happily shared memories of his very different lifestyle of the 1950s and 60s:

Emboldened by the example of the renowned master [Dalí], I proceeded to act in ever stranger ways. In the beginning Dalí said (in “Dalínese”): “You is not enough crazy.” When I parted company from him, he declared: “You is too much crazy!” In the interval, my apparent insanity had progressed more than his command of English. Eventually, my wealthy step-father purchased for me and my newly married – and disastrously so – wife, a mountaintop former monastery. There I took mescalin and vast quantities of alcohol (not to mention sex!), confirming to the letter Dalí’s shrewd estimate of my then mental state.

We had to meet him!

click to enlarge

Timothy Phillips, Toronto, June 1999

Thomas Girst: You seem to have had a pretty wild time while living in Cadaqués during the 1950s and 60s.

Timothy Phillips: That’s unfortunately true.

T.G. But you lived in a monastery.

T.P. First of all, I started in a fisherman’s hut which I rented and then I fell in love with a local girl. She was the daughter of an English expatriate. Staying in the monastery meant very primitive living but we stayed there for a couple of summers. Then she ran off with Jonathan Guinness who secretly turned out to have a second wife that he kept in the countryside. Well, she went where the money was and I fell in one of my down periods. That’s when I became religious. I was working for Dalí before I was married, doing mathematical calculations. I also did very minor parts of lesser pictures and he complimented my sense of tone. It is very difficult to explain to anybody who doesn’t paint what tone is. Generally, tone is what you see in a painting when you take a black and white photograph. If it’s all pale and you can’t distinguish things, if it all depends on color it is not in tone. If it is in tone, it’ll be 50% mid-tone, 25% light tone and 25% dark. And it will have a pattern of masses of tone. Apparently, tone is becoming lost. It used to be taught in schools. So Dalí said to me that I had the total sense of a Velazquez, a big exaggeration, but I’ve tried to live up to it and in a lot of pictures I haven’t./p>

T.G. Did you know Puignau, the contractor and mayor? He was important to Duchamp.

T.P. Puignau! Yes, I certainly know him. He is a great guy!

T.G.He arranged the wooden door for Duchamp’s Given to be shipped to New York. He also got the bricks for Duchamp’s last major work and helped him find a summer home, later installing a big chimney designed by Duchamp.

click to enlarge

Illustration 2.© 1999 Succession
Marcel Duchamp, ARS, NY/ADAGP,
Paris Marcel Duchamp, The
Mayor of Cadaqués, 1968

T.G. Duchamp even did a portrait of him in the 60s.
A little drawing (figure 2)
.

T.P. Oh, I have to see it.

T.G. Was he friends with Dalí as well?

T.P. Oh yeah, was he ever! He was a very intelligent man. No one could be friends with Dalí without having either talent or intelligence or both.

T.G. It is said that when Dalí was with Duchamp, Dalí wasn’t the exhibitionist he used to be.

T.P.Dalí was never an exhibitionist, that was for the public. Dalí was the humblest man I’ve ever known in my life. Only interested in what he could learn, what he could absorb. A remarkable man! Duchamp was a very humble man too and so sharp and intelligent. He was a chess player, he didn’t advertise his moves. I don’t think that Dalí appreciated Duchamp until he began to deeply study mathematics and metaphysics. First of all, Dalí had this concept of Freudian analysis but then he outgrew it and became aware of not only geometrical format in painting, but the dynamic of mathematics and geometry which underpinned everything. So a little talk with Duchamp would show Dalí just where the real truth of things laid and he could then abandon these Freudian concepts and go to something far deeper, which he did. His paintings became progressively more mathematical and dynamic.

T.G. He also showed a big interest in DNA.

T.P. Yes, he was a “scientist manqué” fascinated with contemporary science and all its branches, particularly biology and physics.

T.G. As a young man, Duchamp read up on mathematical treatises, especially at the time he was working at the library Saint-Genevieve in Paris.

T.P. He did, he saturated himself in that, and I also noticed that he knew Apollinaire who was unbelievably intelligent.

T.G. He even tried to outdo de Sade by writing a more pornographic book than the old prisoner could have had imagined.

T.P.I do not know one major creative mind that did not have a pornographic streak, not one!

T.G. Can you elaborate upon when you first met Duchamp? He and Man Ray had come up to your monastery?

T.P.My wife invited them. She had a remarkable ability to meet people and socialize and she was incredibly pretty. So it was no difficulty for her to have this famous pair invited. I knew that Duchamp had a fantastic grasp of perspective and a razor sharp intellect, but I thought he was the supreme joker of modern art.

T.G. When did that change for you?

click to enlarge

Illustration 3 Timothy Phillips,
Nude after Velazquez (Untitled),
late 1950’s

T.P. Well, I spoke to him while I was working on a study of a nude and he complimented me on the foreshortening (Illustration 3).He said how difficult foreshortenings were and I knew this was a very serious person. Just his general conversation showed a very high intelligence and I became aware that he was no joker. He said to me: “My idea is to destroy easel painting” and I thought “But this is what I am doing, why do you want to destroy it?” I believe what he wanted was to destroy the banality and the mechanicalness of what passes for painting and to introduce the beauty of “grey matter,” add a bit of intelligence into painting.

T.G. I thought the term “grey matter” did not come up with Duchamp until later in his life. Did he mention “grey matter” to you in Cadaqués?

T.P. No, he never did because he wouldn’t go into it very much. I didn’t even know he was a master chess player at that time. I did not know nearly enough about him or Man Ray. I just knew that these were famous men. I approved of Duchamp making fun of the whole modern movement because I did not like it.

click to enlarge

Salvador Dalí (center)
with Gala and Timothy
Phillips (left), early 1960’s

T.G. Do you have any memory of how Man Ray and Duchamp were together?

T.P. Well yeah, they were terrific. Man Ray, I think it was a joke, said to me, “I intend to paint a picture of such a nature that everyone of the spectators will drop dead,” and I said to him: “Mr. Ray, have you paid up your insurance premiums?”

T.G. You must have also met Teeny, Duchamp’s wife?

T.P. Yes, she was lovely!

T.G. Teeny and Gala [Dalí’s wife] didn’t get along…

click to enlarge

Timothy Phillips,
Toronto, June 1999

T.P. No, I am afraid not, they wouldn’t. Gala had a commercial streak. I am sure that came as a result of her childhood in Russia and her life as an ex-patriot in Paris. She became, well, not only an entrepreneur but a total opportunist. Regretfully, it spoiled the character of an otherwise wonderfully civilized woman, that’s too bad. And also of course, she was a nymphomaniac and Dalí alone couldn’t satisfy her sexually, so that boatmen or young actors or anything else would do. Eventually, Dalí got fed up and he slugged her in the Hotel Meurice. They broke up and that was the end for Dalí because she did all the business.

T.G. How did they spend their summers together?

T.P. Well, he would paint from early morning until nightfall, then after supper he’d turn on the lights and painted by artificial light. Occasionally, he’d go out on a little excursion in a yellow fishing boat with Gala and I would often come along. We’d go to those islands off Cap Creus.

T.G. Where you can see those rock formations sometimes found in Dalí’s paintings?

T.P. Yes, wonderful rock formations!

T.G. And Gala would read to him while he was painting?

T.P. Yes, she would read to him the most pornographic works that she could find: Marquis de Sade and also Rabelais.

T.G. Do you know that someone once did the L.H.O.O.Q. with Gala for a surrealist
exhibition in the 60s — the “L.H.O.O.Q., Comme D’Habitude” (Illustration 4)?

click to enlarge

Illustration 4.L.H.O.O.Q.,
Comme d’Habitude, 1961

T.P.This is a supreme piece of irony to put the moustache on Gala. Incidentally, there was a lot of tension between Gala and Dalí. He knew that she was a nympho and that she betrayed him sexually every time she could. Dalí and Gala were a very unhappy union at the time, projecting to the public something they weren’t. But she had an amazing eye!

T.G. For his art or for young men?

T.P.Both! (laughs) Regarding Duchamp and Dalí, she didn’t like Dalí giving too much credit to anyone. Her idea was that Dalí should be some kind of a demigod, a Renaissance man who simply absorbed everything osmotically and gave it back in his own way. The fact that he would then commune with Duchamp I think disturbed her a little bit. The idea that anyone could influence Dalí was alien to her.

T.G. So when you met him was he still practicing his paranoic-critical method?

T.P. Paranoic-critical method was with him from the time he discovered it until his death. It was his basic method of creation. And it was really his way to liberate the right hemisphere of the brain because what hinders the sane person is the critique of the left hemisphere. It is critical and linear, but if you can liberate the right side of the brain you can have these wonderful insights, which are free of limiting logic. They have their own logics. There are so many different logics — irrational or non-rational and hyper-rational logics. They’re all in mathematics, so that is Dalí’s method of contacting the super-rational.

T.G. And delving into the subconscious at the same time.

T.P. But I think Duchamp showed him there was a mathematical basis for all this. It clearly fascinated Dalí to see that Duchamp could handle these things. He understood the whole field of advanced mathematics.

click to enlarge

Salvador Dalí (lower center) and
Marcel Duchamp (upper left)
attending a bullfight held in
Dalí’s honor, August 1961

T.G. Hence their mutual respect.

T.P. Yes, mutual respect. A lot of mutual admiration between two geniuses. They were two minds on a single wavelength.

T.G. And in one of Dalí’s paintings, Dalí hands the crown to Duchamp, turning him into a king.

Yes, it is Salvador Dalí in the Act of Painting Gala in the Apotheosis of the Dollar, in which One may also Perceive to the Left Marcel Duchamp Disguised as Louis XIV, behind a Curtain in the Style of Vermeer, which is but the Invisible Monument Face of the Hermes of Praxiteles(figure 5) which he did three years after I broke off contact in 1962. There are so many references in the title alone. To begin with, you have the helix and its reflection.

T.G. In the background you also find allusions to Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase
of 1912.

Figure 5

Salvador Dalí, Salvador Dalí
in the Act of Painting Gala
in the Apotheosis of the
Dollar, in which One may also
Perceive to the Left Marcel Duchamp
Disguised as Louis XIV, behind a
Curtain in the Style of Vermeer,
which is but the Invisible Monument
Face of the Hermes of Praxiteles, 1965.

Timothy Phillips and Thomas Girst
outside the Tappa Gallery
Toronto, 1999

T.P. An incredibly complex painting with the Velazquez door and the Vermeer curtain. I believe that Dalí acknowledged Duchamp as the major mind force in modern art. For me, everything else is an effervescence of superior talent, but without real significance. Besides Klee, Dalí and Duchamp, I can’t really think of many of the others as anything except being exceptional talents. Klee was a man who I think understood the insane, children and the symbolism of these minds which might in certain ways be far superior to normal minds. There might in fact be no such thing as insanity, because you can’t define sanity; and Klee’s exploration of the insane I think went deeper than Dalí’s. At the time, I thought the value of Dalí was in his superb technique. Now I think that his technique was cumbersome although he achieved miracles.

T.G. But Dalí as a person must have been much more insane than Klee!

T.P. Klee was Swiss! What do you expect of a Swiss?

T.G. Not too much of what Dalí was, with his staring eyes…

T.P. That was something he just put on. Dalí wasn’t insane at all, one of the sanest men I’ve ever met in my life. My god was he sane (laughs)!

The interview was conducted at Timothy Phillips’ Tappa Gallery in downtown Toronto,June 20, 1999. It is preserved in full on a digital videotape (filmed by Friederike N. Gauss), © ASRL, 1999.

click images to enlarge

Timothy Phillips – Picture Gallery

LE GRAND VERRE: Visite Guidée

Un Chapeau

Jean Suquet, né à Cahors (Lot, dans le midi de la France) le 22 juin 1928, fréquente à Paris le groupe surréaliste depuis 1948.

Un jour du printemps 1949, il est invité par André Breton à lui faire lire quelques pages de ses écrits. Soupçonnant une parenté entre ceux-ci et Le Grand Verre de Duchamp, Breton, à qui on a demandé un livre sure Duchamp, lui suggère d’écrire ce livre à sa place. Il lui fait rencontrer Mary Reynolds et Jacques Villon.

Dans sa première lettre à Duchamp (Paris, 15 juillet 1949), Suquet écrit: “Si je dois écrire sur vous et votre oeuvre ce ne sera pas en critique mais en poète.” Duchamp lui répond (New York, 9 août): “Suis tout à fait d’accord pour votre projet. / Et comme vous le dites, ‘en poète’ est la seule façon de dire quelque chose.”

Parallèlement à une lettre du 12 décembre, Suquet lui envoie quelque quarante pages. Duchamp répond tout de suite (25 décembre). Cela se termine sur rien de moins que: “Après tout, je vous dois la fière chandelle d’avoir mis à nu ma mise à nu.”

Les premiers travaux duchampiens de Suquet (1949-1956) ne seront cependant pas publiés à l’époque, sauf “Le Signe du Cancer,” dans La Nef, Paris, no. spécial (Almanach Surréaliste du demi-siècle), mars 1950.

Les deux hommes – 63 ans et 22 ans – se rencontrent à Paris, chez Mary Reynolds qui vient de mourir, le 26 octobre 1950.

Dès les premières lettres échangées, on le voit, le ton est donné. Et la connivance est là – est toujours là, cinquante ans plus tard. Bien au delà de la mort de Breton (en 1966) et de Duchamp (en 1968), Jean Suquet “retarde en poète.” Il a 71 ans.

Il a publié sept livres, longs et brefs, sur l’oeuvre duchampienne:

*Miroir de la Mariée. Paris: Flammarion, coll. “Textes,” 1974. (267 p.)

*Le guéridon et la virgule. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1976. (128 p.)

*Le Grand Verre rêvé. Paris: Aubier, 1991. (169 p.)

*Le Grand Verre: Visite guidée. Caen and Paris: l’Échoppe, 1992. (25 p.)

*Regarder L’heure. Sur le ciel de Marcel Duchamp. Caen and Paris: l’Échoppe, 1992. (24 p.)

*In vivo, in vitro. Paris: l’Échoppe, 1994. (119 p.)

*Marcel Duchamp ou L’éblouissement de l’éclaboussure. Paris: Éd. L’Harmattan, coll. “L’art en bref,” 1998. (124 p.)

Bien que Duchamp lui ait écrit (25 décembre 1949): “Vous savez sans doute que vous êtes le suel au monde à avoir reconstitué la gestation du verre dans ses détails, avec même les nombreuses intentions jamais exécutées,” il faudra attendre quelques dizaines d’années et plusieurs essais pour qu’il soit clair, dans le trajet de cette “visite guidée” succincte, que tous les éléments du verre – Le Grand Verre – sont bien en place.

André Gervais

16 novembre 1999

LE GRAND VERRE: Visite Guidée

Par Jean Suquet

Schéma du Grand Verre de Marcel Duchamp

1 – Broyeuse de chocolat.
2 – Glissière.
2A -Agrafe motrice et chaîne de révolution.
2B -Pédale en sous-sol.
2C -Moulin à eau.
3 – Grands ciseaux.
4 – Célibataires.
5 – Tubes capillaires.
6 – Horizon — vêtements de la Mariée.
7 – Mariée, tête ou yeux.
7A -Anneau de suspension du Pendu femelle.
7B -Guêpe.
7C -Girouelle.
8 – Voie lactée chair.
8A -Allongement météorologique.
8B -Aller-retour des lettres de l’Inscription.
9 – Tamis.
10 -Pentes d’écoulement.
10A-Mobile de l’éclaboussure.
10B-Fracas — éclaboussures.
11 -Canon (?)
11A et
11B-Béliers du combat de boxe.
12 -Tableaux d’oculiste.
13 -Tirés.
14A-“Trépied” du jongleur-manieur-soigneur de gravité.
14B-Ressort du jongleur-manieur-soigneur de gravité.
14C-Plateau et boule noire du soigneur de gravité.

Celui qui a virgulé des moustaches à la Joconde, qui a exposé une pissotière dans un salon, Marcel Duchamp, s’est acquitté à la va-vite de ces salubres moqueries, de loin en loin, pour amuser la galerie, et comme pour donner le change. Car dans le même temps, chaque jour, presqu’en secret, il travaillait à un “grand oeuvre,” aujourd’hui au musée de Philadelphie. Le Grand Verre, telle une fenêtre ouvrant une perspective à perte de vue, est constitué par deux plaques de verre verticales dressées l’une au dessus de l’autre dans un cadre de 1,76 m de large sur 2,72 m de haut. Sur ces vitres, sans offusquer l’essentiel de leur transparence, Marcel Duchamp a dessiné, au moyen de fil de plomb, de sèches figures mécaniques méchamment arrêtées, on dirait prises dans les glaces. Il les a esquissées, précisées, mises en place sur des plans, il en a suggéré les possibles mouvements par des notes, à la plume, au crayon, sur des bouts de papier griffonnés à Paris de 1912 à 1915. Il les a cristallisées patiemment, obsessionnellement, à New York entre 1915 et 1923, date à laquelle il a abandonné son chantier définitivement inachevé. (Le caractère italique souligne les citations de Marcel Duchamp.) En 1933 on lui apprit que l’oeuvre à laquelle il avait consacré des milliers d’heures de travail était brisée en mille morceaux. Aussitôt, avant même de songer à cicatriser le désastre, ce qu’il fit en 1936, comme si les mots s’échappaient d’entre les lèvres des cassures, il entreprit de publier ses brouillons fondateurs. Avec la ferveur d’un sourcier de soi-même et la minutie d’un moine recopiant un texte sacré il reproduisit chaque manuscrit en fac-similé, il le fit imprimer sur un pareil papier, il en déchira le contour à l’identique et il recueillit en vrac dans un luxueux coffret de velours vert édité à trois cents exemplaires à l’automne 1934 un jeu de quatre vingt treize feuilles volantes. Envolées de leur jaillissement au tout premier moment. Le couvercle de cette merveilleuse Boîte Verte est constellé par un pointillé de lettres majuscules qui donnent à déchiffrer une phrase articulée sur sa propre dérobade: LA MARIÉE MISE À NU PAR SES CÉLIBATAIRES MÊME. Nul besoin du nom de l’auteur. Sa sonorité scintille dans le titre: MARiée, CÉLibataires. Ainsi qu’une invite à chercher l’or dans l’oreille. Marcel Duchamp a livré ses notes dans un somptueux désordre de puzzle comme s’il avait voulu que chacun reprenne le jeu à son compte et brode à travers le tissu nerveux des brisures son propre chemin. Il a souhaité libre cours à la légende, pourvu qu’on la lise grâce à la grille du Grand Verre; et sans passer sous silence aucune des données. Pour commencer le lecteur fera bien d’ajouter une lampée d’huile de rigolade au schéma mécanique que ces pages détaillent. Il devra avec le même enjouement faire chanter les mille échos du vocabulaire; retrouver les sources de l’oeuvre dans le plus vif, le plus haletant, le plus irrassasiable désir qui hante le commun des mortels; et à chaque articulation de ce trop maigre tracé prendre le fil de telle ou telle échappée imaginaire, celle par exemple de l’insaisissable quatrième dimension, le temps, que le peintre ne peut mettre à la raison qu’en relevant les empreintes de son passage. C’est pourquoi aucun des rouages, aucune des roueries ne doivent être laissés dans l’ombre. Les engrenages parlent pour peu qu’on les apparie avec exactitude selon le nombre de leurs dents. Et leur machinerie rébarbative, leurs machinations jubilatoires, marchent dès l’instant que les mots leur prêtent moteur.

En bas, au beau milieu, la broyeuse de chocolat (1) tourne; tourne comme elle a tourné et tournera en rond pour revenir au même sous le seul fouet de la répétition de l’adage de spontanéité: le célibataire broie son chocolat lui-même. Ne nous attardons pas à sa couleur douteuse, à son parfum d’enfance. Cette triple meule mue par un proverbe, en dépit de son volume, de sa place centrale, ne sert à rien. Sinon à mettre en garde contre le tape-à-l’oeil des apparences. A son côté une glissière (2) va et vient en ressassant des litanies. Ses saccades et ses hoquets ouvrent et ferment, oh à peine à moitié, de grands ciseaux (3) qui ne coupent pas mais dont le grand X affûte au dessus du monde célibataire la poignante question d’une inconnue. Un peu en retrait du train d’enfer de ces ferrailles grinçantes de railleries, neuf bonhommes rouges se tiennent figés au garde-à-vous. Ce sont les célibataires (4). Ils ne bougent pas mais le nom qu’ils portent ripe et dérape. Cette mascarade d’uniformes aussi creux que strictement ficelés, Duchamp pour commencer l’a baptisée matrice d’éros et pour finir cimetière. Matrice et cimetière confondus en un même lieu! Il faut en faire un grand écart pour joindre ainsi d’un trait l’entrée à la sortie. Une mobilité subtile, une fluidité quasi spirituelle habiter ces moules de mâles réduits à leurs habits. En effet, les célibataires sont pleins d’esprit. Gonflés au gaz d’éclairage. Gaz dérive du “geist” germanique qui signifie esprit. Et de fait en 1912 le gaz n’est pas rabougri aux utilités culinaires. Il insuffle aux lampes leur sang. Mais tant qu’il ne rencontre pas une allumette “l’hydrogène clarteux” demeure invisible. Le peintre ne peut montrer de lui que les bonbonnes qui le contiennent, les tuyaux et les tubes (5) qui le canalisent, ou ne perçoit de sa coulée que la plomberie clouée aux murs. Or dedans l’esprit court, le temps passe, le gaz fuit…

Fuyons de concert. Ce frère en errance, accompagnons le dans son voyage. Bien qu’il soit avare de traces indicatrices. Il ne dit rien du sens de la route, tout juste amorce-t-il le mouvement de la roue. Alors, en laissant la part belle au hasard, vêtus de nos loques personnelles, lourds de notre propre passé, motivés par la très improbable perspective de jouir de la fin d’un repos instantané, entrons dans la durée impersonnelle du Grand Verre. Mais avant d’en franchir le seuil, marquons un suspens debout face à lui. À hauteur d’oeil (du moins dans le cadre d’origine) la fracture entre le bas et le haut suit naturellement le trait de la ligne d’horizon (6). En bas, à terre, les célibataires. En haut, la Mariée (7). Quoi! Ce pantin squelettique se balançant au zénith du cimetière, c’est donc ça la femelle promise? Serait-ce le spectre de Jocaste, la mère pendue d’Œdipe aux yeux crevés? La mort et l’amour croiseraient-ils leurs lames au service des grands ciseaux de l’inconnue? Que signifie cette forme sans forme? Est-ce un fossile? L’empreinte d’un envol, telle la griffe d’un oiseau sur la neige ou le sable? Pouvons nous d’ici-bas l’imaginer? Car Duchamp vers elle n’a entrouvert que le trou de serrure du point de fuite: il a désigné l’horizon comme vêtement de la Mariée. Admirable justesse de l’allégorie! On connaît la duplicité de cette ligne imaginaire qui n’est après tout qu’une infirmité du regard. Où la vue touche à sa perte, là la voit-on tracée. Quand vers elle on avance, elle recule d’une égale dérobade. Et les célibataires qui s’élancent pleins gaz pour mettre à nu la Mariée portent dans leur propre regard, fomentent et agitent au devant d’eux le voile qu’ils brûlent de dégrafer. Tant qu’ils ne se seront pas eux-mêmes déshabillés du pli perspectif qui les aveugle…

La Mariée a donc dénoué son vêtement qui est tombé sur l’horizon et s’arrondit autour du monde. Elle est nue, nuages, nébuleuse. Voie lactée chair (8) écrit Duchamp d’un même trait de plume, d’un seul coup d’aile.

C’est la vie! La Mariée est dotée d’un centre-vie. Son coeur bat. Son pouls à la saccade lancinante, palpitant comme l’abdomen convulsif d’une guêpe (hymen ailé), engendre un courant d’air, un souffle, un vent qui envoie s’effilocher aux quatre points cardinaux une oriflamme de viscères et de méninges. Enfièvrée d’infini, la Mariée s’évade de ses intimités, elle s’évapore d’apparence en transparence, elle rompt les limites de sa peau, échappe à tout contour, récuse toute représentation. Nubile, la jeune fille s’est épanchée en nébuleuse. Nue, elle ne veut faire qu’une avec l’univers. Elle se laisse emporter dans un allongement météorologique (8A), déchiré de tempêtes, embelli de beaux-temps, (le temps qui passe prend les couleurs du temps qu’il fait), qui l’entre-lisse à l’étoffe du ciel telle une flamme consistante. Langue de feu qui se sublime en ce qu’elle a de fatal: le langage. Le courant d’air qui monte à travers la chair poreuse de la Mariée se charge de lettres. Le souffle qui la soulève c’est sa vive voix. La chair se fait verbe. Alors que dans son premier élan l’épanouissement de la Mariée devait transformer le haut du Grand Verre en un vitrail d’entrailles étincelant de cuivre fin, de platine et de poussière d’or, la montée du plaisir a transmuté l’or en paroles, la rosée des lèvres en encre volatile. Épanouissement: en faire une Inscription (8B). Crépite une écriture qui chasse sur son encre. Elle flamboie, elle s’efface, elle ressourd, elle reflue, elle laboure aller-retour de bout en bout la Voie lactée chair. Ses lettres haletantes, toujours sur le qui-vive, portent aux célibataires les commandements, ordres, autorisations de la Mariée. Les temps ont bien changé. Au lieu d’un malabar qui crache la foudre, au ciel règne une femme. Elle dicte la loi.

En bas, le gaz est encore loin du bout de ses peines. De tuyaux en entonnoirs, de tamis (9) en baratte, d’obscurité en étroitesses, compressé, étiré, coupé, recoupé, congelé, et pour finir liquéfié comme une serpillière, l’esprit passe par tous les états de la matière. La pesanteur l’humilie, la pesante heure l’accable des pires contre-temps. En vain. Il ne renonce jamais à son idée fixe ascensionnelle. Le plus tordu de ses avatars, le moins probant de ses ahannants progrès, n’altèrent en rien le rêve qu’il va s’emanciper de la pésanteur. Et quand au bas des pentes d’écoulement (10) le gaz suant sang et eau jute sur la terre sa flaque misérable, il est toujours capable d’exploser de désir. Trois ou quatre de ses gouttes viennent régaler la culasse d’un canon (11) pointé en direction du point de fuite. L’artiste-artilleur crache aussi sec une bille de combat. Les célibataires en fiers gaulois soutiennent le ciel au dessus de leurs têtes grâce à deux béliers (11A, 11B) dressés tout droits qui affleurent l’horizon et flirtent avec ses affriolants dessous. La bille déquille les béliers. Le ciel tombe. Du moins fait-il semblant de tomber. Car à chaque coup tiré le gaz en même temps qu’il effondre les souteneurs aux membres de fer mais aux genoux fragiles les charge du plus cher de ses souvenirs de jeunesse: une résurgence d’aimantation ascensionnelle. Les béliers chus relèvent la tête. Et tout recommence. Ce n’était pas tout à fait ce que je voulais, conclut Duchamp. Alors, après cinq années d’un travail obstiné, mystérieux, distillations, incantations, décantations, retours en arrière, nouvelles avancées des cavaliers, des fous, des reines et des rois, il fait argenter le revers du Grand Verre. Dans ce mirroir, il grace au scalpel, sans retouche possible, trait après trait, au point de s’y arracher les yeux, trois tableaux d’oculiste (12) empruntés ready-mades à la vitrine d’un opticien et mis en perspective. Au terme de ses apprentissages le gaz a compris à quoi son nom le destine. Dit d’éclairage, il doit éclairer. À commencer par sa propre lanterne. Sous le choc d’une dernière chute, celle d’un poids fracassant (10A) précipité dans la flaque par l’entremise des ciseaux, il rejaillit en éclaboussures (10B). Dont la sublimation ne garde que l’éclat. Le gaz fait feu de son propre corps. Il déclare sa flamme. Sur le tremplin des miroirs oculistes qui l’écorchent de ses dernières scories, qui corrigent la flèche de son ultime élan, il gicle vers le ciel en une gerbe de rayons. Essor que Duchamp qualifie dans une envolée d’allitérations: l’éblouissement de l’éclaboussure. Feu le gaz d’éclairage sombre au coeur de sa propre lumière. Il y découvre l’origine de son éclairage intérieur. Et il se métamorphose une dernière fois. Toutes embrasées soient-elles ce ne sont pas les gouttes mêmes qui passent l’horizon et trouvent leur trou vers l’infini dans la constellation des neuf tirés (13) mais leur image. Ce qui est l’exacte définition physiologique du regard. Quand un faisceau de grains de lumière crible la rétine, ce qui passe au delà et se fraie un chemin à travers les épaisseurs de la matière grise, ce n’est plus la lumière, c’est son image à fleur de nerf, un bouquet d’influx électriques, de chimies et de chimères.

Ainsi courent à confluence les énergies à l’oeuvre dans le Grand Verre. En haut, un flot de paroles. En bas, un flux de lumière. À la fin du voyage, le gaz se transmue en un regard ébloui. La Mariée en écriture effervescente. Et la mise à nu, selon le vœu de Duchamp, peut alors être lue comme un poëme. Qui fait rimer l’épanouissement de la Mariée avec l’éblouissement des célibataires. On fera d’or cette rime déjà riche en tirant d’elle le dernier mot: OUI.

Tu parles! vont s’esclaffer les partisans du NON. Entre l’horizon et la Voie lactée s’étend une immensité transparente où Duchamp n’a tracé aucun signe, pas un nuage, pas l’ombre portée d’un trait d’union. Il n’y a que solitudes. C’est n’avoir jamais regardé le ciel par une belle nuit.

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La Voie lactée épouse la rondeur de la voûte nocturne et s’incline jusqu’à toucher l’horizon. Nul besoin d’un géant pour donner corps à ce pur effet de perspective. Y suffit un être dont les formes n’ont plus par rapport à leur destination une mensuration, par exemple les lettres de l’alphabet qui majuscules et minuscules acheminent et délivrent le même message. Justement entre en scène un troubadour qui va se révéler le pèse-lettre de la Mariée, le porte-parole de la Dame; le jongleur de centre de gravité (14). Sur le fil de l’horizon, il DANSE. Il fléchit, il se redresse, d’un pied sur l’autre, au gré des coups de canon, selon le bon plaisir des éclaboussures. Son corps taillé dans un ressort se vrille comme une vis sans fin entre le bas et le haut. A sa tête, il arbore un plateau rond où roule une boule noire. C’est avec ce caillot de ténèbres qu’il jongle. Il danse, il traduit les secousses de la machine en virevoltes de la boule qui concentre les ondes de déséquilibre du branle-bas célibataire. La boule vacille, zigzague, frôle dangeureusement les bords, mais elle ne tombe pas. Car la Mariée lui envoie des ordres de nouvel équilibre en la léchant d’une langue de flamme, en la chiquenaudant de lettres touchantes qui contrecarrent ses écarts. A cinq reprises, en dessins comme un maquette, Duchamp a représenté ce deus ex machina sous la forme d’un guéridon, d’une table tournante. Serpentin sur ses trois pieds (parfois quatre, sinon deux) il est l’oracle de la divinité-mariée. Un coup, deux coups, trois coups, comme tous les dieux il n’existe pas. Le Grand Verre l’a dissipé en transparence. Esquive fondamentale qui endiable la case vide, la lacune miraculeuse autour de laquelle le puzzle s’est reconstitué. Si bien que pour tous les regardeurs qui n’ont pas lu, ou mal lu, le mode d’emploi, ça ne marche pas, ça ne peut pas marcher. Ces mécréants n’entendent pas crisser le grain de sel que croquent les engrenages, ils oublient de déduire le dieu de ses indices, de ses brisées. Dans le titre, par exemple, il arque la queue de la virgule qui s’est glissée entre les célibataires pluriels et le singulier même, virgule, il n’y pas de langue morte qui n’avoue son vrai nom qu’en latin: virga. Eh oui! c’est lui que dans les salons tout le monde aujourd’hui appelle Monsieur le Phallus. Celui qui brille par son absence, qui agit d’autant mieux qu’il n’est pas là. Aux soins de la mise à nu, ce danseur change de nom comme de masque. D’un dernier trait de plume Duchamp l’a institué: Soigneur de gravité. Le docteur de la loi de la chute des graves qui conjoint l’Une au ciel et nous à terre. Le médecin volatil qui cicatrise la grave coupure de l’horizon. Le guérisseur qui met en chanson le cri que Duchamp a laissé deviner dans le premier jet de sa préface: Étant donné, si je suppose que je sois souffrant beaucoup. Et quel remède, quelle drogue, quel alcool porte le guéridon qui sert de table de chevet à la Mariée? Il suffit de l’apostropher à haute voix et de savourer un de ces calembours que Duchamp aimait tant: guéris donc! Et si tu es gai, ris donc! Guérir la gravité, c’est rire. Avec le point sur le i en guise de boule noire. En épelant les lettres de la Mariée, le trismégiste jongleur-manieur-soigneur de gravité déshabille cette vertu bien balancée que Duchamp a qualifiée: ironisme d’affirmation. Il personnalise de pied en cap le OUI. Un OUI dont chacun peut à loisir faire danser les lettres:

For a Portrait of Marcel Duchamp:
“The Dedications Speak”

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It is currently impossible to gather in its entirety, indeed to reconstitute in its integrity, Marcel Duchamp’s book collection. And maybe this will forever be the case, given that the man lived in small apartments or hotels for long periods of time, and that he moved a lot between two continents. Certainly, this precariousness did not favor the preservation of any given collection, apart from maybe one during the 20’s in his chess-playing period (after he left The Large Glass unfinished, in 1923) – but that collection is of the artwork of Picabia and Brancusi and is a different question.

Meanwhile, the thought is not forbidden that one could attempt a complete collection, or at least the most thorough list, of all printed matter that could have been, at one time or another, connected with Duchamp: he preserved things, his family, friends and female companions preserved things (there is evidence of this), and Duchamp mentions these things in his writings, interviews, etc. It is immense work, just beginning, and must be taken slowly.

Within this ensemble, it is already possible to denote a sub-ensemble: those of the exemplars which were autographed to Duchamp.⁽¹⁾ The “constellation” formed by these books which have been marked with a handwritten addition (and even, in certain cases, a pictorial addition) is precious in that it allows us to make up a portrait of the dedicatee through the various “titles” he is given.⁽²⁾

Not in the slightest bit exhaustive, I will only rapidly tackle a few dedications chosen from among those I know. Only one, the last, has in fact been published.⁽³⁾

***

I will egin very simply with a non-dated dedication (but seemingly from 1948, ate of this book’s publication) from an old accomplice, André reton (1896-1966).

À Marcel DuchampCe petit papillon exotiqueQu’on invite à ne pas tropInsister à sa fenêtre à l’Ami numéro 1		To Marcel Duchampthis little exotic butterfly that we invite not to insist too much at his window to the number 1 Friend
– Martinique charmeuse de serpents. Paris: Ed. du Sagittaire, 1948 [printing completed on 25 August 1948].

On the occasion of his stay in North America (1941-1946), Breton, who did not speak English and lived within a circle of exiled French intellectuals (including Marcel Duchamp from 1942 on) did not hesitate to visit French-speaking areas this side of the Atlantic: Martinique (April-May 1941), the Province of Quebec (August-November 1944) and Haïti (December 1945-February 1946).⁽⁴⁾ It was during one of these trips that Martinique charmeuse de serpents, a collection of prose and poems by André Breton and André Masson, was initiated. It was then published after Breton’s return to Paris whilst Duchamp, “number 1 Friend,” was back in the United States.

In the autumn of 1960, Duchamp said of his longtime friendship with Breton (they had known each other since the summer of 1921): Une grande sympathie avec Breton. Il y avait une sympathie comme avec Picabia. Une sympathie d’homme à homme, plutôt que de théorie à théorie [A great sympathy with Breton. There was a sympathy as with Picabia. A sympathy from man to man, rather than
from theory to theory.]⁽⁵⁾ As for the window motif, it is worth remembering hat it allows us to bring these two men together. In 1924, Breton wrote he first Surrealist Manifesto in which he reflected on the automatically ritten sentence: quelque chose comme: ‘Il y a un homme coupé en deux par la fenêtre’ [something like: ‘there is a man cut in two by the window’]. Then in 1936, Breton wrote a poem, Au lavoir noir, which was illustrated by Duchamp with the reproduction of a window, La bagarre d’Austerlitz [Brawl at Austerlitz], a readymade (1921).

***

When, in 1954, Robert Lebel (1901-1986) asked André Breton to write a preface for his new book, Chantage de la beauté, Lebel had already started working on the biography and catalog that would be Sur Marcel Duchamp, his next book.⁽⁶⁾

Breton wrote the preface in November 1954 and the Editions de Beaune published the book in Paris in April 1955.⁽⁷⁾ Lebel sent it to Duchamp with this dedication: Pour Marcel Duchamp / real esthète / New York City / Robert Lebel. [For Marcel Duchamp / real aesthete / New York City / Robert Lebel.] Duchamp would later respond via letter (4 August 1955):

Cher Lebel

Bien reçu Chantage que j’ai lu comme je lis Platon càd à grande allure – Nevertheless il m’en reste beaucoup collé à matière grise.

Dear Lebel

Received Chantage and have read it as I read Plato which is to say at great speed – Nevertheless there is a lot of it left stuck in my gray matter.

In early July, after two days of shooting at the Philadelphia Museum of Art with James Johnson Sweeney, Duchamp took a few weeks rest in East Hampton, NY, at the house of one of his wife’s friends.⁽⁸⁾

The relationship between the artist and the spectator, analyzed with elegance and earnestness in this little book, is also a question debated by Duchamp himself, as exemplified in the following:

– in a letter to his brother-in-law Jean Crotti, 17 August 1952, published in the Jean Crotti exhibition catalogue (Galleria Museum, Paris, December 1959-January 1960):

Les artistes de tout temps sont comme des joueurs de Monte-Carlo et la loterie aveugle fait sortir les uns et ruine les autres. […]Je ne crois pas à la peinture en soi. Tout tableau est fait non pas par le peintre mais par ceux qui le regardent et lui accordent leurs faveurs […].

Artists of all time are like gamblers in Monte-Carlo and a blind lottery draws certain ones and ruins the others. […]I do not believe in painting in itself. A painting is not made by the painter but by those who look at it and grant it their favor […]

– in an interview with Jean Schuster, January 1955, published in Le Surréalisme, même (Paris, no. 2, Spring 1957):

Ce sont les REGARDEURS qui font les tableaux.

It is the ONLOOKERS who make the paintings.

– in a letter to Jehan Mayoux, 8 March 1956, published in his book La Liberté une et divisible: Textes critiques et politiques (Ussel, Éd. Peralta, 1979).

[…] une oeuvre est faite entièrement par ceux qui la regardent ou la lisent et la font survivre par leurs acclamations ou même leur condamnation.

[…] a work is made entirely by those who look at it or read it and who make it survive by their accolades or even their condemnation.

– in The Creative Act, a brief paper written in English in January 1957, given in Houston in April 1957, and published in Art News (New York, no. 4, Summer 1957):

All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.

As we can see, none of these writings or sayings were known of at the time that Lebel published his book and Lebel, on this question, was opposed and would continue to be opposed to Duchamp=s radical position. For example, on p. 11-12:

Tantôt, on est amené à le [l’artiste] concevoir comme pure végétation: c’est “l’amandier qui fait sa fleur.” Tantôt, dans l’hypothèse la plus favorable à la portée de son intervention, son oeuvre est un essai, une sorte d’intentionnalité timide, une requête, un projet encore amorphe, indéterminé dont il ne connaît pas lui-même la teneur et qu’il soumet, comme humblement, à l’approbation des autres. […]
Le rôle du spectateur est ainsi démesurément enflé. Quant à l’artiste, il est purement et simplement confondu avec l’objet qu’il présente.

Sometimes, we are brought to conceive of him [the artist] as of pure vegetation: he is the “almond tree which blossoms.” Sometimes, the hypothesis most favorable to his intervention is that his work is a trial, a kind of timid intentionality, a request, a still amorphous project, indeterminate and of which he does not himself know the content and which he submits, as if humbly, to others for approbation. […]
The role of the spectator is thus inordinately inflated. As for the artist, he is purely and simply mistaken for the object he presents.

And, for another example, in Note pour un post-Duchamp, an article written in 1974 and published in Marcel Duchamp (Paris, Belfond, coll. “Les Dossiers,” 1985):

Le débat est ouvert entre les * regardeurs +, auxquels il a imprudemment délégué tous pouvoirs et qui sont aujourd’hui maîtres du terrain.

The debate is open among the “onlookers,” to which he unwisely delegated full power and who are today in control of the ground.

The spectator (who looks) and the master (who possesses) can, of course, be one and the same. The “crucial moment when all worth constitutes itself [is the moment when], well away from already cleared paths and established reputations, the work enters into contact with a spectator for the first time” and must necessarily be distinguished from the moment when the master, who speaks the “aesthete’s idiom,” “does ot hesitate to separate himself from his horses, his works of art or his women, without ever losing the notion of their market value”: when the value becomes a market value.⁽⁹⁾

As for the artist himself, he “is a man who plastically realizes the attitude that he cannot in fact achieve. […] Most religious painters delivered themselves from the temptation of sanctity through their painting. Conversely, as brilliantly demonstrated by Marcel Duchamp, it is in acceding to an autonomous behavior that an artist can emancipate himself from art.”⁽¹⁰⁾]

But Duchamp, who is a “real aesthete” per Lebel’s dedication, is also the opposite of Van Gogh for whom “conduct itself supplants its representation. What he paints is Van Gogh grappling with the world not the conduct of Van Gogh which this artist admits he is incapable of achieving and, by extension, offering.”⁽¹¹⁾] If Van Gogh, the “suicide of society” as Artaud puts it, “refuses to aesthetically fill the gap that normally separates work behavior [what he puts forth] from real behavior [what he takes on],” Duchamp, soon to declare himself “anartist,” is already removed from the process and all that there is at stake.⁽¹²⁾]

Duchamp juxtaposes English and French so that “Nevertheless” is to “il m’en reste beaucoup collé à ma matière grise” in his response what “real” is to “esthète” in the dedication, with this exception (which could also be a distinction): there lies within a transformation. And yet, it=s because of duchampian angrais ⁽¹³⁾] that Areal esthète@ must above all not sound like real estate [biens fonciers] or real estate agent [agent immobilier], Duchamp being “immobile” (motionless) enough “at great speed” to be amused by an “agent immobilier,” ⁽¹⁴⁾] and enough of a “marchand du sel” (salt seller) to be amused by the “bien foncée” (really dark) color of a “chantage” (blackmail).⁽¹⁵⁾]

If Duchamp=s relationship with philosophy (Plato) or aesthetics (Lebel) seems hasty, at what speed did he read scientific or technical books (mathematics, photography, etc.) or literature (poetry, novels, etc.)? Maybe this question, which implies a long practice, can never be satisfyingly answered in detail, given that too many books from his collection in its actualized state are now missing, and that references to the books he might have consulted at the Saint-Genevieve library when he worked there as an intern from 1913 to 1915 have disappeared as well.

In any case, “real esthète” can be literally crushed or squeezed into the single word “reste” (which in French means both “left,” as in the verb, and “remains,” as in the noun) and “Platon” can be interpreted as the shadow or offhanded rhyme of “East Hampton.”

***

I will continue with two dedications from completely different horizons but which meet in the exact formulation of the Atitle@ granted Duchamp.

The first is by Alain Bosquet (1919- ):

Pour Marcel Duchamp,premier anarchiste de notre temps-		For Marcel Duchamp first anarchiste of our time-
-Premier testament. Paris: Gallimard, 1957 [printing completed on 12 February 1957].

The “Premier testament” [First Testament] for the “first anarchist,” of course. Alain Bosquet, poet and novelist, is also the author of an anthology: Anthologie de la poésie américaine des origines à nos jours (Paris, Stock, 1956). Since Duchamp went back to Paris in 1958, it was in New York that Alain Bosquet sent this exemplary.

The second is by Simon Watson Taylor:

Cette première exemplaire du livre de la Science sortie de l’imprimeriehuit semaines avant la date de
publication est reservée pour Marcel Duchamp, premier pataphysicien de notre temps (etde tous les autres, selon les “valeurs equivalents” promulgés par l’inventeur de la Science).

-Homages pataffectueuses de Simon Watson Taylor (vulg.) janv. 1965 ap. J.C.

This first exemplary of this book of Science, taken from the press eight weeks before the date of
publication is reserved for Marcel Duchamp, first pataphysicist of our time (and of all others, according to the “equivalent worth” promulgated by the inventor of Science).

-Pataffectionate homage from Simon Waston Taylor (vulg.) Jan. 1965 AC.

– Roger Shattuck [1923-] and Simon Watson Taylor [?-], eds., Selected Works of Alfred Jarry. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1965.

According to all accounts, Taylor and Duchamp had known each other since 1959. Then, translating Histoire de la peinture surréaliste by Marcel Jean (and Arpad Mezei) in 1961, Taylor introduced Shattuck to Duchamp in 1961.

The “first exemplary” for the “first pataphysicist,” of course. Thus, over-determination came into play on Bosquet’s part from paratext (title of the book) to paratext (dedicating of the exemplary), and on Taylor’s part from circumstance (speed of printing) to paratext.⁽¹⁶⁾] But is it deliberate, we ask ourselves, that the word “exemplaire,” a masculine word in the French, becomes feminine, that “valeur,” a feminine word becomes masculine, and that “homage,” which is not a French word but an English word, is masculine when spelled in the french (hommage) but here modified with a feminine adjective?⁽¹⁷⁾]Is the inversion of gender related to ‘pataphysics,’ – “science of the particular, in spite of the fact that it is claimed there exists only the science of the general?”⁽¹⁸⁾]
And isn=t pataffectionate (pata as a prefix) a way of Aresponding,@ in all lateness, to this letter from Duchamp (17 June 1960) that ended by cordiapata (pata as a suffix)?

***

I will end, very simply, with a non-dated dedication (but seemingly from 1937,
date of this small book’s publication) from an unknown person, Jehan Mayoux (1904-1975):⁽¹⁹⁾

À Marcel Duchamp puisqu=il n’est pas un mythe comme je l’ai longtemps cru mais un homme – ce qui est tellement mieux	To Marcel Duchamp since he is not a myth as I believed for a long time buta man – which is so much better.
-Maïs, Paris, not on sale to the general public, 1937 [printing completed on 3 February 1937], reprinted in Oeuvres, tome 1, Ussel (Corrèze), Peralta Ed., 1976.

Duchamp wrote to Jehan Mayoux (8 March 1956) and previously to Katherine Dreier (5 November 1928), to Magda and Walter Pach (17 October 1934), to Jean Crotti (17 August 1952), to Walter Arensberg (23 January 1954) and to André Breton (4 October 1954) particularly lucid and clear-cut letters about art and language, the market and the preservation and interpretation of art.

Even though Duchamp practically never used the word man, except in a statement like AThere is no solution because there is no problem. Problem is the invention of man – it is nonsensical@ (to Harriet and Sidney Janis, 1945) where it is a question of man, not of a man, it remains, to give only one example in the guise of a paradox, that this man who practiced silence finally accepted that, from interviews to dialogues, from conversations to papers, an abundant spoken oeuvre would form itself.⁽²⁰⁾]

Wouldn’t this near naïve – touching, even – dedication written more than thirty years before Duchamp died still resonate today, more than thirty years after his death? What is a myth,⁽²¹⁾] indeed, if not, in one sense and I quote, very simply, from the Nouveau Petit Robert dictionary of 1993), a “simplified image, often illusory, which people elaborate upon or accept about an individual […] and which plays a determining part in their behavior and appreciation?”⁽²²⁾] But mustn’t we obtain, at the point we have reached, at this end of a century, with a being as complex as Marcel Duchamp, French and American artist and anartist, the utmost precision possible as far as what he has said and done?

Notes

1. The dedication of an exemplary, in the form of an autograph (thus private), is to be distinguished from the dedication of a work in print (thus public): one says autograph an exemplary, but dedicate a work. And, as specified by Gerard Genette, “given that the exemplary represents the work, it is validated both through and as the work.” This book is a study of the paratexts, which will be “around the text, within the very space of the volume” (that’s the peritext) or “at a more respectful (or more cautious) distance […] outside of the book” (that’s the epitext), with peritext and epitext sharing “exhaustively and without residue the spatial field of the paratexts.” The dedication of a work as much as the dedication (autograph) of an exemplary are part of the peritext. Inversely, one will have to collect, at least in a list, the most complete ensemble of printed matter that Duchamp had, at one time or another, dedicated, such as: Rrose Sélavy (1939); the miniature books published by PAB (1958-1960); Robert Lebel’s book Marcel Duchamp (1959); and The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1960), the “green book” produced from the contents of the Green Box, etc.

2. It would be helpful to compare these terms to the ones which can be found, for example, in different statements published on the occasion of the 1973 exhibition by the Museum of Modern Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art and in a review published on the occasion of the Beaubourg exhibition (1977); see both “A Collective Portrait of Marcel Duchamp,” pp. 179-229, and “Faut-il vraiment vénérer Duchamp?” (a file by Philippe Sers), Connaissance des Arts, Paris, no. 299 (January 1977), pp 46-55.

3. It is in the Mary Reynolds collection and, as such, was published in Hugh Edward’s Surrealism and it’s Affinities: The Mary Reynolds Collection, The Art Institute of Chicago, 1956. The others come from the archives of Marcel Duchamp’s succession, Villiers-sous-Grez, (Seine-et-Marne,France).

4. During his stay in Quebec, Breton wrote his last long, original work: Arcane 17 (December 1944) which brings closure to the cycle of narrative begun with Nadja (1928) and then continued with Les vases communicants (1932) and L’amour fou (1937). Other books published after 1944 and before Breton’s death were collections of either his articles or poems.

5. Georges Charbonnier, Entretiens avec Marcel Duchamp, Marseille: André Dimanche Editeur, 1994, p. 72.

6. The writing of Sur Marcel Duchamp was begun in 1953 and finished, in a manner of speaking, in 1957. However, in light of the fact that French and English editions were going to be published simultaneously, George Heard Hamilton redid in 1958 the English translation (which had been previously done by another and was not good). The simultaneous publication took place in Paris and in London by the Trianon Press, as well as in New York by the Grove Press, in 1959.

7. Breton’s “Petit colloque initial” is on pp. 5-6; Lebel’s text is on pp. 7-27.

8. Duchamp stayed in East Hampton for approximately six weeks. He returned to New York on Monday, 22 August and most likely went out to Long Island on Monday, 11 July. “A Conversation with Marcel Duchamp,” Robert D. Graff, producer, NBC, New York, in the “Elder Wise Men” series, first aired on 15 January 1956.

9. “crucial moment…the first time” = “Le moment crucial où toute valeur se constitue, lorsqu’à l’écart des chemins déjà frayés et des réputations établies, l’oeuvre entre pour la première fois en contact avec le premier spectateur” (p. 14) and “does not hesitate…market value” = “n’hésite pas à [se] séparer [de ses chevaux, ses oeuvres d’art ou ses femmes], sans jamais perdre la notion de leur valeur vénale” (p. 10).

10. “is a man…himself from art” = “est un homme qui réalise plastiquement l’attitude qu’en fait il ne peut pas atteindre. […] La plupart des peintres religieux se sont délivrés par leurs oeuvres de la tentation de la sainteté. Inversement, comme le montre avec éclat Marcel Duchamp, c’est en accédant à un comportement autonome qu’un artiste peut s’affranchir de l’art” (p. 23).

11. “real conduct…of offering” = “la conduite réelle prend le pas sur sa représentation. Ce qu’il peint, c’est Van Gogh aux prises avec le monde, non la conduite de Van Gogh que l’artiste s’avoue incapable d’atteindre et, par suite, de proposer” (p. 24)

12. “refuses to…[personally adopts]” = “refuse de combler esthétiquement l’écart qui sépare normalement l’oeuvre-conduite [qu’il propose] de la conduite de fait [qu’il adopte personnellement]” (p. 24) Also, it is to be noted that Antonin Artaud wrote Van Gogh, le suicidé de la société, Paris, K. éditeur, 1947, which was reprinted in Oeuvres complètes, tome X, Paris, Gallimard, 1974. And to Richard Hamilton , September 1959, Duchamp said, “I don’t mind being an anartist.”

13. A mixture of English and French, “l’angrais” (a term proposed by me in 1977) is to Duchamp what “engrais” is to “du champ.” [Translator’s note: “engrais” in French means “manure” and “du champ” means “of the field.”] What I call “angrais” is Duchamp’s peculiar cross-fertilization of languages.

14. Two references must be mentioned in connection with this way of being motionless “à grande allure” [“at great speed”]: Paul Valéry’s important poem, Le cimetière marin [The graveyard by the sea], stanza XXI, in Charmes, 1922, and the famous paradox proposed by Zeno of Elea (5th century BC, 500 years before Plato), “Achille immobile à grands pas” [“Achilles motionless in great strides”].

15. I do not forget here, of course, that Robert Lebel, essayist, was also an expert to the French Customs and that Duchamp, artist, and his friend Roché, diarist, bought and sold many works of art.

16. The circumstance can be further pinned down: this exemplary was handed to Duchamp by Taylor in the name of the College of Pataphysics on 13 January 1965 during the dinner following the opening of the exhibition Not Seen and/or Less Seen of/by Marcel Duchamp/Rrose Sélavy 1904-1964, Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery, New York. (Exhibition dates: 14 January-13 February 1965.)

17. Translator’s ote: French words are denoted as either masculine or feminine and are modified accordingly. When “l’exemplaire,” a masculine word, “becomes feminine,” that is to say that for some reason it has been modified with an adjective with a feminine, not masculine, ending. The correct expression would be “premier exemplaire” but the dedication gives us “première exemplaire.” Similarly, “equivalent” is an adjective in the masculine but it is modifying a feminine word “valeur.” And “hommages” should be modified with an adjective in the masculine but it is given “pataffectueuses.” The proper word here would be “pataffectueux.”

18. “science du particulier, quoi qu’on dise qu’il n’y a de science que du général?”

19. Stilllittle known, Jehan Mayoux, who was successively a “primary school teacher,secondary school teacher and inspector of primary education” (in theNorth at the time of this dedication, then in Corrèze), would be imprisonedduring WWII for refusing to mobilize, then suspended during the Algerian ar for being one of those who signedthe “Manifeste des 121” (September1960) which called for the right not to fight. I quote here the briefnote that Jean-Louis Bédouin credits him with in the anthology Lapoésie surréaliste (1964), revised and enlarged edition, Paris,Seghers, 1970, p. 227.

20. From Marcel Raval (“[…] a severe oeuvre, befriended with silence: that of Marcel Duchamp,” Les Feuilles libres, Paris, 36, March-June 1924) to Joseph Beuys (“Das Schweigen von Marcel Duchamp wird überbewertet” [“The silence of Marcel Duchamp is overrated.”], Dusseldorf, 11 December 1964, passing by Andrew Forge (“The Silence of Marcel Duchamp ,” The Listener, London, 5 November 1959) and Georges Charbonnier (“Yet , it is the silence of a painter that we wish to evoke during this series of broadcasts: Marcel Duchamp’s silence […] Was Marcel Duchamp indicating an absolute disagreement when he stopped painting? With what? These questions will always be present in our minds behind the others we ask…”) – from all this, it is very clear.

21. See Luc Brisson’s important book, Plato, the Myth Maker, translated by Gerard Naddaf, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1998. And here Plato pops up again!

22. “simplified image…appreciation” = “image simplifiée, souvent illusoire, que des groupes humains élaborent ou acceptent au sujet d’un individu…et qui joue un rôle déterminant dans leur comportement ou leur appréciation?”

Pour un portrait de Marcel Duchamp: “disent les dédicaces”

Il est impossible actuellement de rassembler dans son intégralité, voire de reconstituer dans son intégrité, la bibliothèque de Marcel Duchamp. Et peut-être en sera-t-il à jamais ainsi, l’homme ayant habité longtemps dans de petits appartements ou à l’hôtel, et s’étant aussi beaucoup déplacé sur deux continents. Cette précarité n’a certainement pas favorisé le développement et la conservation de quelque collection que ce soit, sauf peut-être celle, durant les années 1920, en pleine période échiquéenne – après qu’en 1923 il ait laissé inachevé le Grand Verre -, d’une collection d’oeuvres d’art: Picabia et Brancusi. Mais ceci est déjà une autre question.

Cependant, il n’est pas interdit de penser qu’il faudra tenter de rassembler, au moins dans une liste, l’ensemble le plus complet de titres d’imprimés qui ont pu, à une époque ou à une autre, le “rejoindre “: il les a conservés, sa famille, ses amis ou ses compagnes les ont conservés (et peuvent en témoigner d’une façon ou d’une autre), il les mentionne dans ses écrits ou ses parlés, etc. Immense travail qui ne fait que commencer et qui ne peut être mené à bien que lentement.

Dans cet ensemble, il est d’ores et déjà possible de délimiter un sous-ensemble: celui des exemplaires qui lui ont été dédicacés.⁽¹⁾ La “constellation ” que forment ces livres marqués d’un ajout manuscrit (et même, dans certains cas, pictural) est précieuse en ce qu’elle permet de constituer, par le “titre ” dont ils affublent le dédicataire, un portrait de celui-ci.⁽²⁾

Sans, donc, la moindre exhaustivité, je n’aborderai rapidement que quelques dédicaces choisies parmi celles que je connais. Une seule, la dernière, n’est pas inédite.⁽³⁾

***

Je commencerai, tout simplement, par une dédicace non datée (mais vraisemblablement de 1948, date de la publication du livre) d’un vieux complice, André Breton (1896-1966):

À Marcel Duchamp
ce petit papillon exotique
qu’on invite à ne pas trop
insister à sa fenêtre,
à l’Ami numéro 1

– Martinique charmeuse de serpents. Paris: Ed. du Sagittaire, 1948. [Printing was completed on 25 August 1948].

Lors de son séjour en Amérique du Nord (1941-1946), Breton, qui ne parle pas anglais et vit à New York dans le milieu des intellectuels français exilés (dont Marcel Duchamp, à partir de 1942), n’hésitera pas à faire quelques voyages en territoire francophone: Martinique (avril-mai 1941), Province de Québec (août-novembre 1944) et Haïti (décembre 1945-février 1946).⁽⁴⁾ C’est donc lors d’un de ces voyages qu’est amorcé ce recueil, mixte de proses et de poèmes d’André Breton et d’André Masson, qui ne sera publié qu’après son retour à Paris alors que Duchamp, “l’Ami numéro 1”, sera déjà de retour aux États-Unis.

À l’automne 1960, Duchamp dira ceci de cette longue amitié (ils se connaissent depuis l’été 1921): “Une grande sympathie avec Breton. Il y avait une sympathie comme avec Picabia. Une sympathie d’homme à homme, plutôt que de théorie à théorie.” ⁽⁵⁾ Quant au motif de la fenêtre, il n’est pas inutile de rappeler qu’il permet d’unir les deux hommes: Breton par sa réflexion sur telle phrase automatiquement écrite (“quelque chose comme: ‘Il y a un homme coupé en deux par la fenêtre’ “, Manifeste du surréalisme, 1924), Breton et Duchamp par Au lavoir noir (1936), poème du premier illustré par une fenêtre (La bagarre d’Austerlitz, readymade, 1921) du second.

***

Quand, en 1954, Robert Lebel (1901-1986) demande à André Breton une préface pour son prochain livre, Chantage de la beauté, il a déjà commencé à travailler à la biographie et au catalogue que sera Sur Marcel Duchamp, le livre suivant.⁽⁶⁾

Breton écrira cette préface en novembre 1954 et le livre paraîtra à Paris aux Éd. de Beaune en avril 1955.⁽⁷⁾Lebel l’enverra à Duchamp avec cette dédicace: “Pour Marcel Duchamp / real esthète / New York City / Robert Lebel,” qui répondra par lettre (4 août 1955) ceci:

Cher Lebel

Bien reçu Chantage que j’ai lu comme je lis Platon càd à grande allure – Nevertheless il m’en reste beaucoup collé à matière grise.

Duchamp, qui a fait, début juillet, deux jours de tournage au Philadelphia Museum of Art avec James Johnson Sweeney⁽⁸⁾, se repose alors pendant quelques semaines à East Hampton (Long Island), dans la petite maison d’une amie de son épouse.⁽⁹⁾

Le rapport entre l’artiste et le spectateur, analysé avec élégance et verdeur dans ce petit livre, est aussi une question débattue par Duchamp lui-même:

– dans une lettre à son beau-frère Jean Crotti, 17 août 1952, publiée dans le catalogue de l’exposition Jean Crotti (Musée Galleria, Paris, 11 décembre 1959-11 janvier 1960:

Les artistes de tout temps sont comme des joueurs de Monte-Carlo et la loterie aveugle fait sortir les uns et ruine les autres. […]
Je ne crois pas à la peinture en soi. Tout tableau est fait non pas par le peintre mais par ceux qui le regardent et lui accordent leurs faveurs […].

– dans une entrevue avec Jean Schuster, faite en janvier 1955 et publiée dans Le surréalisme, même (Paris, n° 2, printemps 1957):

Ce sont les REGARDEURS qui font les tableaux.

– dans une lettre à Jehan Mayoux, 8 mars 1956, publiée dans son livre La liberté une et divisible. Textes critiques et politiques (Ussel, Éd. Peralta, 1979):

[…] une oeuvre est faite entièrement par ceux qui la regardent ou la lisent et la font survivre par leurs acclamations ou même leur condamnation.

– dans Le processus créatif, brève communication rédigée en anglais en janvier 1957, donnée à Houston en avril 1957 et publiée dans Art News (New York, n° 4, été 1957):

Somme toute, l’artiste n’est pas seul à accomplir l’acte de création car le spectateur établit le contact de l’oeuvre avec le monde extérieur en déchiffrant et en interprétant ses qualifications profondes et par là ajoute sa propre contribution au processus créatif.

All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work into contact with the external world through deciphering and interpreting the painting=s profundity and, in this way, makes a contribution to the creative act.

Comme on le constate, aucun de ces écrits ou parlés n’était connu lors de la publication du livre de Lebel qui, sur cette question, s’oppose et s’opposera à la position radicale de Duchamp:

– ici même (p. 11-12):

Le débat est ouvert entre les “regardeurs,” auxquels il a imprudemment délégué tous pouvoirs et qui sont aujourd’hui maîtres du terrain

Le spectateur (qui regarde) et le maître (qui possède) peuvent, bien sûr, ne faire qu’un. Le “moment crucial où toute valeur se constitue, lorsqu’à l’écart des chemins déjà frayés et des réputations établies, l’oeuvre entre pour la première fois en contact avec le premier spectateur” (p. 14), doit nécessairement être distingué du moment où le maître, qui parle “l’idiome de l’esthète,” “n’hésite pas à [se] séparer [de ses chevaux, ses oeuvres d’art ou ses femmes], sans jamais perdre la notion de leur valeur vénale” (p. 10): lorsque la valeur devient une valeur vénale.

De son côté, l’artiste “est un homme qui réalise plastiquement l’attitude qu’en fait il ne peut pas atteindre. […] La plupart des peintres religieux se sont délivrés par leurs oeuvres de la tentation de la sainteté. Inversement, comme le montre avec éclat Marcel Duchamp, c’est en accédant à un comportement autonome qu’un artiste peut s’affranchir de l’art”(p. 23). Mais Duchamp, “real esthète” dit la dédicace, est aussi l’inverse de Van Gogh dont “la conduite réelle prend le pas sur sa représentation. Ce qu’il peint, c’est Van Gogh aux prises avec le monde, non la conduite de Van Gogh que l’artiste s’avoue incapable d’atteindre et, par suite, de proposer”(p. 24). Si Van Gogh, “suicidé de la société”a dit Artaud ⁽¹⁰⁾], “refuse de combler esthétiquement l’écart qui sépare normalement l’oeuvre-conduite [qu’il propose] de la conduite de fait [qu’il adopte personnellement]”(p. 24), Duchamp, “anartist” dira-t-il bientôt, n’est déjà plus dans cet enjeu.⁽¹¹⁾]

Dans sa réponse “Nevertheless”(en anglais) est à “il m’en reste beaucoup collé à ma matière grise”(en français) ce que dans la dédicace “real” est à “esthète,” par cette distinction -dans les deux acceptions de ce mot B qu’il y a dans le passage. C’est aussi par l’angrais duchampien⁽¹²⁾] que “real esthète” ne doit surtout pas s’entendre real estate, “bien fonciers,” ou real estate agent, “agent immobilier”, Duchamp étant assez immobile “à grande allure” pour s’amuser d’un “agent immobilier”⁽¹³⁾] et assez “marchand du sel” pour s’amuser de la couleur “bien foncée” d’un “chantage” (blackmail)⁽¹⁴⁾].

Si les rapports de Duchamp avec la philosophie (Platon) ou l’esthétique (Lebel) semblent expéditifs, à quelle vitesse a-t-il lu les livres scientifiques ou techniques (mathématiques, photographie, etc.) et la littérature (poésie, roman, etc.)? Peut-être qu’à cette question, qui désigne une longue pratique, il ne pourra jamais être donné une réponse vraiment satisfaisante et vraiment détaillée, trop de livres manquant dans sa bibliothèque en son état actuel, et trop d’indications manquant sur ce qu’il a pu consulter à la Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève quand il y travaillait comme stagiaire de 1913 à 1915, par exemple.

Ici, en tout cas, “real esthète” est ramassé en “reste,” et Platon est à l’ombre, cavalièrement, d’East Hampton.

***

Je continuerai avec deux dédicaces venues d=horizons tout à fait différents, mais qui se rejoignent dans la formulation exacte du “titre” dont elles gratifient Duchamp:
– la première est d’Alain Bosquet (1919-):

Pour Marcel Duchamp,
premier anarchiste
de notre temps –

– Premier testament. Paris: Gallimard, 1957 [Printing completed on 12 February 1957].

De Premier testament à “premier anarchiste,” bien sûr. Alain Bosquet, poète et romancier, est aussi l’auteur d’une Anthologie de la poésie américaine des origines à nos jours (Paris, Stock, 1956). Duchamp ne revenant à Paris qu=en 1958, c=est à New York qu=il envoie cet exemplaire.

– la deuxième est de Simon Watson Taylor:

Cette première exemplaire du
livre de la Science sortie de l’imprimerie
huit semaines avant la date de
publication est reservée pour
Marcel Duchamp, premier
pataphysicien de notre temps (et
de tous les autres, selon les
“valeurs equivalents” promulgés
par l’inventeur de la Science).
-Homages pataffectueuses de Simon Watson Taylor (vulg.) janv. 1965 ap. J.C.

Roger Shattuck [1923-] and Simon Watson Taylor [?-] (ed. by), Selected Works of Alfred Jarry, New York, Grove Press, Inc., 1965.

Taylor et Duchamp se connaissent depuis 1959, selon toute vraisemblance. Taylor, qui traduit alors l’Histoire de la peinture surréaliste de Marcel Jean et Arpad Mezei, présentera Shattuck à Duchamp en 1961.
De “première exemplaire” à “premier pataphysicien,” bien sûr. La surdétermination aura donc joué, côté Bosquet, du paratexte (le titre du livre) au paratexte (la dédicace d’exemplaire), côté Taylor, de la circonstance (la rapidité de l’impression) au paratexte.(15)] Mais est-ce délibéré si exemplaire, mot masculin, est devenu féminin, si valeur, mot féminin, est devenu masculin, si homage, mot masculin quand il est en français (hommage), est devenu féminin bien qu=il soit en anglais? Cette inversion du genre a-t-elle ici quelque rapport avec la ‘pataphysique’ – “science du particulier, quoi qu’on dise qu=il n’y a de science que du général?” Et pataffectueuses (pata comme préfixe) n’est-il pas un moyen de “répondre,” avec tout retard, à cette lettre de Duchamp (17 juin 1960) qui se terminait par cordiapata (pata comme suffixe)?

***

Je terminerai, tout simplement, par une dédicace non datée (mais vraisemblablement de 1937, date de la publication de ce tout petit livre) d=un inconnu, Jehan Mayoux (1904-1975):(16)]

À Marcel Duchamp
puisqu’il n’est pas un mythe
comme je l=ai longtemps cru mais
un homme – ce qui est tellement mieux
– Maïs, Paris, not on sale to the general public, 1937 [printing completed on 3 February 1937], reprinted in Oeuvres, tome 1, Ussel (Corrèze), Peralta Ed., 1976.
C’est à Jehan Mayoux (8 mars 1956), mais précédemment à Katherine Dreier (5 novembre 1928), à Magda et Walter Pach (17 octobre 1934), à Jean Crotti (17 août 1952), à Walter Arensberg (23 janvier 1954) et à André Breton (4 octobre 1954), que Duchamp aura écrit telles lettres particulièrement lucides et tranchées à propos de l’art et du langage, du marché de l’art, de la conservation de l’art et de l’interprétation de l’art.

Bien que Duchamp n’utilise pour ainsi dire jamais le mot homme, sauf dans un énoncé comme “There is no solution because there is no problem. Problem is the invention of man – it is nonsensical” (à Harriett et Sidney Janis, 1945) où il s’agit de l’homme et non d’un homme, il reste, pour ne donner qu’un exemple en forme de paradoxe, que cet homme qui pratiquait le silence (17)] aura finalement accepté que, d’entrevues en entretiens et de conversations en communications, se constitue une abondante oeuvre parlée.

Cette dédicace presque naïve, touchante même, faite plus de trente ans avant la mort de Duchamp, ne serait-elle pas toujours d’actualité, plus de trente ans après sa mort? Qu’est-ce qu’un mythe, en effet (18)], sinon, dans l’une de ses acceptions (et je cite, tout simplement, Le nouveau Petit Robert, 1993), une “image simplifiée, souvent illusoire, que des groupes humains élaborent ou acceptent au sujet d’un individu […] et qui joue un rôle déterminant dans leur comportement ou leur appréciation?” Mais ne faut-il pas obtenir, au point où nous en sommes, en cette fin de siècle, avec un être aussi complexe que Marcel Duchamp, artiste et anartiste français et américain, la plus grande précision possible quant à ce qu’il a fait et dit?

Notes

1. La dédicace d’exemplaire, autographe (et privée), à distinguer de la dédicace d’oeuvre, imprimée (et publique): on dit dédicacer un exemplaire, mais dédier une oeuvre. Et « du fait qu’il la représente, l’exemplaire vaut à la fois par et pour l’oeuvre », précise Gérard Genette, Seuils, Paris, Seuil, coll. « Poétique », 1987, p. 133. Ce livre est une étude du paratexte, que celui-ci soit « autour du texte, dans l’espace du même volume » (c’est le péritexte) ou « à distance plus respectueuse (ou plus prudente), […] à l’extérieur du livre » (c’est l’épitexte), péritexte et épitexte se partageant « exhaustivement et sans reste le champ spatial du paratexte » (p. 10 et 11). Autant la dédicace d’oeuvre que la dédicace d’exemplaire font partie du péritexte. Inversement, il faudra donc tenter de rassembler, au moins dans une liste, l’ensemble le plus complet de titres d’imprimés que Duchamp a pu, à une époque ou à une autre, dédicacer: Rrose Sélavy (1939); les petits livres publiés par PAB (1958-1960) et l’impliquant; Sur Marcel Duchamp (1959), le livre de Robert Lebel; The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1960), le « green book » fait à partir de la Boîte Verte; etc.

2.Il ne serait pas inutile de comparer ces énoncés à ceux qu’on peut trouver, par exemple, dans divers témoignages publiés tant dans le catalogue de l’exposition du Museum of Modern Art et du Philadelphia Museum of Art (1973) que dans telle revue à l’occasion de l’exposition de Beaubourg (1977): voir d’une part « A Collective Portrait of Marcel Duchamp », p. 179-229, d’autre part « Faut-il vraiment vénérer Duchamp? » (dossier constitué par Philippe Sers), Connaissance des Arts, Paris, n° 299, janvier 1977, p. 46-55.

3.Elle est dans la collection Mary Reynolds et, à ce titre, a été publiée dans Hugh Edwards, Surrealism and its Affinities: The Mary Reynolds Collection, The Art Institute of Chicago, 1956. Les autres viennent des archives de la succession Marcel Duchamp, Villiers-sous-Grez.

4.C’est lors de ce séjour qu’il écrira sa dernière oeuvre «longue» (tous les autres livres qu’il publiera jusqu’à sa mort étant des recueils d’articles ou de poèmes): Arcane 17 ([décembre] 1944), qui clot le cycle des récits, commencé avec Nadja (1928) et continué avec Les vases communicants (1932) et L’amour fou (1937).

5.Georges Charbonnier, Entretiens avec Marcel Duchamp, Marseille, André Dimanche Éditeur, 1994, p. 72.

6.Commencé en 1953 et pour ainsi dire terminé en 1957, la traduction en anglais en vue d’une publication simultanée en deux langues en sera refaite par George Heard Hamilton en 1958, et cette publication aura effectivement lieu à Paris et à Londres (Trianon Press) ainsi qu’à New York (Grove Press) en 1959.

7.Le « Petit colloque initial » de Breton est aux p. 5-6, le texte de Lebel aux p. 7-27.

8.« A Conversation with Marcel Duchamp », Robert D. Graff réalisateur, NBC, New York, série « Elder Wise Men »; première diffusion: 15 janvier 1956.

9.Pendant six semaines, en fait: Duchamp revenant à New York le lundi 22 août, ce séjour a probablement commencé le lundi 11 juillet.

10.Antonin Artaud, Van Gogh, le suicidé de la société, Paris, K éditeur, 1947; repris dans Oeuvres complètes, tome X, Paris, Gallimard, 1974.

11.« I don’t mind being an anartist [Je veux bien être un anartiste] » (à Richard Hamilton, septembre 1959).

12.Mixte d’anglais et de français, l’angrais (terme proposé par moi en 1977) est à Duchamp ce que l’engrais est à du champ.

13.Cette façon d’être immobile « à grande allure » n’est pas sans convoquer, via tel important poème de Paul Valéry (« Le cimetière marin », strophe XXI, dans Charmes, 1922), tel fameux paradoxe sur le mouvement proposé par Zénon d’Élée (Ve siècle avant J.C., un demi-siècle avant Platon): « Achille immobile à grands pas ».

14.Je n’oublie pas ici, bien sûr, que Robert Lebel, essayiste, est aussi expert près les douanes françaises, et que Duchamp, artiste, comme son ami Roché, diariste, a aussi acheté et vendu bien des oeuvres d’art.

15. La circonstance peut être davantage précisée: cet exemplaire a été remis à Duchamp par Taylor, au nom du Collège de ‘Pataphysique, le 13 janvier exactement, lors du dîner suivant le vernissage (preview dinner) de l’exposition Not Seen and/or Less Seen of/by Marcel Duchamp/Rrose Sélavy 1904-1964, galerie Cordier & Ekstrom, New York, 14 janvier-13 février 1965.

16.Encore peu connu, Mayoux, qui sera successivement « instituteur, professeur et inspecteur de l’enseignement de premier degré » (dans le Nord, à l’époque de cette dédicace, puis en Corrèze), aura été emprisonné durant la Deuxième Guerre pour avoir refusé d’être mobilisé, puis sera suspendu durant la guerre d’Algérie pour avoir été l’un des signataires du « Manifeste des 121 » (septembre 1960) appelant au droit à l’insoumission. Je cite ici la brève notice que lui consacre Jean-Louis Bédouin dans La poésie surréaliste [1964], anthologie, édition revue et augmentée, Paris, Seghers, 1970, p. 227.

17.De Marcel Raval (« […] une oeuvre sévère, amie du silence: celle de Marcel Duchamp », Les Feuilles libres, Paris, n° 36, mars-juin 1924) à Joseph Beuys (« Das Schweigen von Marcel Duchamp wird überbewertet [Le silence de Marcel Duchamp est surestimé] », Düsseldorf, 11 décembre 1964), en passant par Andrew Forge (« The Silence of Marcel Duchamp », The Listener, Londres, 5 novembre 1959) et Georges Charbonnier (« Or, c’est le silence d’un peintre que nous voulons évoquer au cours de cette série d’émissions: le silence de Marcel Duchamp. […] Marcel Duchamp, en cessant de peindre, marquait-il un désaccord absolu? Avec quoi? Ces deux questions sont toujours présentes derrière toutes celles que nous avons posées […] »), cela aura été dit.

18. Sur cette question, voir l’important livre de Luc Brisson, Platon, les mots et les mythes, Paris, Maspero, coll. « Textes à l’appui », 1982. Et revoilà Platon!

Why Tout-Fait?

Welcome to the inaugural issue of Tout-Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal. About six months ago, we sent word to Duchamp scholars, scientists and art historians around the world introducing the idea of the first online journal devoted to Marcel Duchamp and his circle. We are very pleased to announce the arrival of Issue #1, including articles and notes by Craig Adcock, André Gervais and Francis M. Naumann. Tout-Fait’s News section features the collaboration of Rhonda Roland Shearer, Stephen Jay Gould and noted conservators on important findings on Duchamp’s Standard Stoppages (1913/14) and his Green Box of 1934. Artists William Anastasi and Donald Shambroom tackle questions of glass and cracks throughout Duchamp’s oeuvre. And we are honored to present Jean Suquet’s The Large Glass. A Guided Tour (1992) in both French and English. Like André Gervais, Suquet is a poet as well as art historian and greatly adds another dimension to Duchamp scholarship.

You may wonder, why “Tout-Fait”? The term “tout fait” was not only the standard French translation for ready made but also a phrase often used by the French mathematician Henri Poincaré who was a crucial influence on Duchamp. Rhonda Roland Shearer first commented upon the term in The Sciences and it was recently picked up by Thomas Zaunschirm in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and Barry Cipra in Science. After heavily debating about twenty other suggestions (among them The Oculist Witness, Mirrorical Messenger and The Sunny Apprentice) as well as Duchamp’s idea for Space Art News (expressed in a letter to Marcel Jean, 4 August 1955), we finally agreed on “Tout-Fait,” highlighting the intersection of art and science.

As every Duchamp afficionado might have noticed right away, the colorful squares of Tout-Fait’s design are loosely based on the sequence of rectangular shapes (reminiscent of a book of color filters for light experiments or photography) in Duchamp’s last painting, Tu m’ of 1918. Tout-Fait’s next issue will feature more squares, making room for literature, streaming video, our tri-annual centerfold and a ‘Letters to the Editor’ section. For letters intended for publication, criticism and suggestions or any technical problems, please contact us directly at info@toutfait.com.(Note: e-mails which were sent to info@toutfait.com and editor@toutfait.com were never received. Those are invalid accounts and we are sorry for any confusion this may have caused.) To start or participate in a dialogue regarding Tout-Fait and related matters, we suggest using the
Critical Notes Bulletin Board of the Marcel Duchamp World Community as a forum to generate any kind of discussion. Feel free to post your thoughts!

A strictly not-for-profit journal, Tout-Fait is made possible by a team effort of writers, editors and web designers and relies on the commitment of our readers and the kind support of individuals to keep it up and running. In particular, we wish to thank Jacqueline Matisse-Monnier for her interest and substantial support of this project. Many thanks also to Tim Kummerow on the West Coast for his unfailing collaboration and computer wizardry.

Enjoy browsing, stay a while and spread the word.

Thomas Girst
Editor-in-Chief

For more Duchamp related websites, click here for links.

Tout-Fait is published by the CyberArtSciencePress,
the publishing branch of the not-for-profit
Art Science Research Laboratory, Inc.,
62 Greene Street, Third Floor, New York, New York 10012

Tout-Fait welcomes any type
of critical thinking. Multiple authorship is encouraged. All articles are first publications. All accepted foreign submissions will be published in both English and their original language. Tout-Fait (ISSN 1530-0323) is published by CyberArtSciencePress , the publishing house of the not-for-profit
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