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Figure 1
Antonio
Sant’Elia, La Città Nuova, Italy, 1914
Figure 2
Shiro Kuramata,
Glass Chair, 1976

Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) was a French painter turned conceptual artist, film maker, erotic guru, and chess player. He was, however, never an architect, nor specifically interested in architecture, and yet, he has exerted a tremendous influence over a generation of architects practicing after 1975, as well as over current architectural historians and theorists. Contemporary literature in architectural theory has gone so far as to argue that architectural works created before many of the works of Duchamp, such as La Città Nuova (Fig.1), be understood within the context of Duchamp’s works.Architects have, in roughly the past twenty-five years, picked up on concepts in which Duchamp was interested and integrated them into their works. This has been possible largely because of dramatic shifts in the way that art is defined in this new postmodern era.Sundry Duchampian concepts or fascinations, such as projection, chance, and metaphor, seen throughout the wide range of his post 1912 works, have been interpreted and used by numerous architects and designers. This phenomenon has occurred both in a sort of direct homage to one or more of Duchamp’s works as well as in a more subtle, intellectual sort of homage, incorporating a Duchampian concept, such as chance, not only into a single architectural work, but into the way that an architect creates any architectural work.Some work, such as that of furniture designer Shiro Kuramata (Fig. 2), has been preoccupied with the former. Some architects claiming to be Duchamp’s standard-bearers, such as California team Morphosis, acknowledge Duchamp’s influence in both ways.Even famous and influential contemporary architects Frank Gehry and Robert Venturi also occasionally directly base a work on a work by Duchamp. However, the works of Gehry and Venturi are particularly useful in illustrating the latter, intellectual type of acknowledgment of Duchamp, as permeating all of their works are evidence of Duchampian thinking about concepts such as chance and metaphor.A final architectural firm, Diller + Scofidio, has incorporated so many Duchampian concepts, not only projection, chance, and eroticism as metaphor, but also ideas such as the infra-thin, ambivalence, ambiguity, and ephemerality, that their work can be seen as truly Duchampian architecture. This discussion seeks to establish why and how Marcel Duchamp has been so influential in contemporary architecture by thoroughly exploring the Duchampian concepts of projection, chance, and metaphor both within Duchamp’s work and that of contemporary architects whom he has influenced, and then further exploring these and other Duchampian ideas through the work of two postmodern architects upon whom Duchamp has been extraordinarily influential, Elizabeth Diller and Ric Scofidio.

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Figure 3
Marcel Duchamp, Given:
1. The Waterfall / 2.The
Illuminating Gas,
1946-1966, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Figure 4
Image of Antonio
Sant’Elia, 1914

At first it may seem somewhat strange, that Marcel Duchamp should be so influential on the theory and practice of architecture and design of the period after 1975, considering that Duchamp was not an architect. The only works that could be termed ‘architectural’ for which he was responsible, the door and room of Étant Donnés (Fig. 3) and the door that is neither open nor closed, would hardly elevate Duchamp to the status of a guru in contemporary architecture on their own. Duchamp did receive training in technical drawing, which including drawing mechanical and architectural objects, such as doors⁽¹⁾ but this, too, fails to qualify Duchamp as an architect. This problem is complicated even more by the fact that there were practicing architects in his milieu with interests similar to those of Duchamp. One such architect was Antonio Sant’Elia (Fig. 4), the Italian Futurist architect best remembered for his drawings for La Città Nuova. Sant’Elia, like Duchamp and many others living in the 1910s, was interested in non-Euclidean geometry, and the Futurists, like Duchamp, were affected by the new technological innovations of their day, such as the discovery of x-rays and the appearance of the incandescent lamp, the hydraulic generator, the skyscraper, cinema, and the automobile.⁽²⁾Duchamp was very familiar with the ideas of the futurists⁽³⁾, and both men were similarly a product of their cultural milieu. Furthermore, unlike Duchamp, Sant’Elia actually created detailed urban plans and architectural drawings for a city of the future, La Città Nuova, integrating into an urban spatial form the new ideas about a space-time continuum.⁽⁴⁾

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Figure 5
Marcel
Duchamp, The Bride Stripped
Bare by Her Bachelors, Even
[a.k.a. The Large Glass], 1915-23

Figure 6
Marcel Duchmp,Cover of
The Bride Stripped Bare
by Her Bachelors Even [a.k.a.
The Green Box], 1934 (regular edition)

If Sant’Elia was infinitely more involved in architecture than Duchamp, and sharing many of the ideas Duchamp held in the 1910s, it is perhaps astonishing, then, that a current scholar of La Città Nuova, Sanford Kwinter, believes that La Città Nuova should be viewed within a Duchampian context.Kwinter argued in 1986 that, “La Città Nuova may be understood in this light less as a literal, realizable program than as a set of instructions [as Duchamp’s procedural Green Box], governing not only the assembly of isolated modules of (bachelor) machinery…”⁽⁵⁾ Antonio Sant’Elia was killed in 1916 and the bulk of his work on La Città Nuova is from 1914,⁽⁶⁾while Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (Fig. 5), hereafter referred to as the Large Glass, referenced by the phrase ‘bachelor machinery,’ dates from 1915-1923. The Green Box (Fig. 6), an explanation of the Large Glass, dates to 1934.⁽⁷⁾ In claiming that La Città Nuova be viewed within the context of works by another artist, not even an architect, which were created after La Città Nuova, Kwinter, besides pulling Sant’Elia’s work totally out of context, demonstrates the passionate love affair of contemporary architectural historians and theorists with Marcel Duchamp. The question remains, though, why is Duchamp so influential within contemporary architectural theory, while other seemingly valid figures, such as Sant’Elia, while still important, are much less cited than Duchamp?The simple answer is that the nature of Duchamp’s influence has nothing to do with architecture directly, and everything to do with his ideas. Duchamp did not specifically write, or at least did not intend to write, architectural theory, yet, it is in the realm of theory that he has been most influential, chiefly because he was the first truly idea-oriented artist, the antecedent of the conceptual artist.

Throughout his life, Duchamp was fascinated by chance. The Three Standard Stoppages (Fig. 7) are chance forms of measurement. The appearance of the Three Standard Stoppages, their lengths and shapes, were determined entirely by chance. His Monte Carlo Bond (Fig. 8) was created so that others might invest in a gambling trip that he wished to take. Would others take a chance and invest so that Duchamp could play a game of chance?There was also a strong element of chance in the creation of the readymades. The objects chosen as readymades were chosen at random, mass-produced, and were aesthetically indifferent, that is one would not usually go up to the object and feel anything about its aesthetic qualities one way or the other because it had none in its normal context. Fountain (Fig. 9), a urinal not markedly different from any other urinal, bought by Duchamp in an everyday New York plumbing shop, has been elevated to cult artistic status and was branded by some as an abomination and hailed by others as a beautiful form. Any other urinal would have served the artistic function just as well as the one that became Fountain, just as any other mass-produced urinal would serve a man who needed to relieve himself just as well. Each readymade involved an element of chance in this way.

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Figure 10
Frank O. Gehry, Guggenheim
Museum in Bilbao (in two views),
Spain,1997

Figure 11
Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye,
1928-30

Figure 12
Morphosis, Diamond Ranch
High School, Pomona,
California, 2000

Figure 13
Marcel Duchamp,
bôite-en-valise, 1935-41

In an explanation of how the design for his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (Fig. 10), Spain, came about, Frank Gehry noted that it just happened, was a lot like a chance fluke.⁽⁸⁾ This is in stark contrast to the Modernists of the early-middle twentieth century, who were obsessed by perfect proportions and the golden mean. Le Corbusier, for example, used a precise geometric formula in his early high International Style work of the 1920s (Fig. 11). He had rules controlling how line and form could be used and tried to adhere to a difficult system of proportion called the golden section. This required room proportion ratios to be 1:1.618.⁽⁹⁾

Gehry observed this in a statement concerning the freedom that chance gives an architect,

“I used to be a symmetrical freak and a grid freak. I used to follow grids and then Istarted to think and I realized that those were chains that Frank Lloyd Wright was chained to the 30-60 grid, and there was no freedom in it for him, and that grids are an obsession, a crutch. You don’t need that if you can create spaces and forms and shapes. That’s what artists do, and they don’t have grids or crutches, they just do it.”⁽¹⁰⁾

While International Style and earlier architects rigorously adhered to meticulous formulas, an architect today chooses the forms of a building, of a space, in the same way that Marcel Duchamp walked into a store and chose a readymade. They just do it. Much contemporary architecture, then, from the works of Frank Gehry to Robert Venturi to Peter Eisenman can be read as Architectural readymades.

Besides living legends such as Venturi and Gehry, younger, up and coming architects, are also interested in Duchampian ideas, specifically in the Architectural readymade. Thom Mayne, a younger California architect with an interest in the work of Frank Gehry and who practices under the name Morphosis, claims Duchamp as his idol. Morphosis tries to make every building an Architectural readymade. He claims that he, “treats materials, sanitary fittings, and bits of plan with innocent astonishment, that is, as objets trouvés.”⁽¹¹⁾ It can be said, then, that Morphosis selects its urinals along with the rest of the building components as Duchamp did. A recent Morphosis project, though, the Diamond Ranch High School in Diamond Bar, California, (Fig. 12), shows that Morphosis has made use of chance, of the Architectural readymade, in much the same way as Gehry.⁽¹²⁾ For the school, Mayne created jutting, or projecting, forms, brought together at random, or at least to give that effect.

Eroticism as a metaphor was a constant motif throughout Duchamp’s career. Sometimes this was simply playful, such as issuing his bôite-en-valise (Fig. 13), portable museums, in an edition of the sexually significant number 69. Most often, these works were not specifically about eroticism, they just used eroticism as a metaphor for something else, namely art. Duchamp’s masterpieces, the Large Glass and Étant Donnés, first and foremost raise issues about the nature of artistic practice in light of technological, societal, and artistic change. The Large Glass was about the act of painting in an age in which abstraction challenged the mimetic nature of the craft, the fallacy of one-point perspective in relation to actual sight was well known, and photography and cinema could produce mimetic works more quickly, accurately, and cheaply than painting. This is shrouded in an elaborate game in which nine bachelors try to satisfy their desire and impregnate the ‘bride.’ Étant Donnés, on the previous page, was created in a time in which there was a crisis, a near-death incident, in the life of representational art. His hyper-realistic painted landscape in the background of the work and the complete illusionary nature of the work as a whole challenged the assumption of the middle of the twentieth century that painting, or art in general, should be abstract. This was in the guise of a nude woman with her sex exposed in the foreground. Duchamp not only used eroticism as metaphor, but used his own works as metaphors of each other. The Large Glass and Étant Donnés are both metaphors of each other not only because they are reverse projections of each other, but also because they allude to each other through having the same theme, the bride, the waterfall, and the illuminating gas.Architects have been, since the 1970s and ‘80s, using metaphor in a downright Duchampian manner, to explore what it means to be an architect in the face of the information technology revolution, computers replacing the t-square and drafting table, the ‘cult of the box’ of architecture of the middle twentieth century, the impact of the automobile and the highway on architecture and urbanism, and the increasing prevalence of mass architecture, such as strip malls. The issues raised by much current architecture because of and in response to these technological and societal shifts, is the same raised by Duchamp in works such as the Large Glass and Étant Donnés.

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Figure 14
Golden Goose. Downtown
Las Vegas (Fremont Street) by night

Figure 15
Mies van der Rohe,
Chapel, Illinois
Institute of Technology,
Chicago, 1953

Robert Venturi’s Learning from Las Vegas (1977) , a seminal work in postmodern architectural theory, uses metaphor, though definitely not of an erotic nature, to explain the state of architecture in America in the 1970s. Las Vegas is used as a metaphor for the need for increased decoration and less of the International style high seriousness of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe (Figs. 14 and 15). Like Duchamp, who also rejected the high seriousness prevalent in artistic circles in his own time, Venturi used humor throughout the work. After the metaphor of Las Vegas itself, the book’s most overriding metaphor is that of the duck and the decorated shed. The duck, a building shaped like a duck, is a metaphor for buildings which are symbols. This is based on a real duck-shaped building, a restaurant specializing in roast duck, from God’s Own Junkyard.⁽¹³⁾ A decorated shed, on the other hand, refers to any of the various average looking buildings by the highway which are heavily decorated with signs and logos, and more globally to any building covered with ornament. Within this framework, Chartres Cathedral is a duck (though it is a decorated shed as well), while Renaissance buildings are all decorated sheds.⁽¹⁴⁾ (Figs. 16 and 17) Sentences from Learning from Las Vegas, such as “Minimegastructures are mostly ducks,”⁽¹⁵⁾ show just how heavily Venturi relied upon metaphor. Really, Venturi’s duck and decorated shed are Duchamp’s bride in this respect.

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Figure 18
Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q., 1919

In Learning from Las Vegas, Venturi also suggested placing a replica of the shape and text of a marquee from Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas advertising popular comedian Flip Wilson to perform in the ‘Circus Maximus’ over a print by Piranesi of the Pantheon.⁽¹⁶⁾ This gesture is the equivalent of Duchamp’s iconoclastic gesture in his painting L.H.O.O.Q.(Elle a chaud au cul.), or ‘she has a hot ass’, on a print of the Mona Lisa (Fig. 18). This work by Venturi, advertising Flip Wilson on the front of the Pantheon, is both a direct homage to a single work of Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q., as well as a more intellectual homage to Duchamp through the use of metaphor.With Duchamp, the metaphor is again eroticism, with Venturi, it is Las Vegas. This work is also important in that it is so clearly directly indebted to Duchamp, one may surmise that Learning from Las Vegas, arguably one of the most important works in architectural theory of the late twentieth century, perhaps an important work in the whole history of architectural theory, would not have been written, or at least not have been written in nearly the same way, were it not for Marcel Duchamp.Marcel Duchamp’s ideas have been so important in contemporary architectural theory and practice that many architects and designers have created works which are inspired by literal or stylistic elements of Duchamp’s works. This is directly in contrast with Duchamp’s views on avoiding repetition and on the irrelevance of style or the visual, and is certainly not that most reverential way to pay tribute to the father of conceptual art. Works such as the readymades went against the ‘mimetic’ or ‘retinal’ nature of art, yet as Tilman Kuchler argued in a discussion of the ‘end of modernity and the beginning of play’, theysolicit processes or artistic representation and reproduction in the postmodern era.⁽¹⁷⁾This goes beyond reproducing Duchamp’s work, such as the inaccurate assertion hand-crafted reproductions of Fountain made to sell in Arturo Schwarz’s gallery. This type of homage involves miming the visual aspects of one of Duchamp’s works.Shiro Kuramata, a prominent Japanese furniture designer of the 1980s, frequently used this sort playful retinal homage to Duchamp in his work. Kuramata, like many postmodern artists, architects, and designers, called Duchamp his idol.⁽¹⁸⁾ Works such as his Miss Blanche armchair of 1988 ( Fig. 19), left, playfully allude to Duchamp’s works, while ignoring much of the intellectual content of Duchamp. The chair’s title is actually a reference to Blanche Dubois of Tennessee William’s A Streetcar Named Desire, but Kuramata admitted that the embedding of paper roses within the acrylic body of the chair is a homage to Duchamp’s female alter ego, Rrose Sélavy.⁽¹⁹⁾ A detail of Miss Blanche also elicits a visual, or retinal, comparison with a detail of the Large Glass. The visual effects achieved by the roses and by the nine malic molds are quite similar, though the thinking behind them could not be more different. Kuramata also created a set of acrylic perfume bottles, inspired by Rrose Sélavy’s perfume bottle, Belle Haleine, eau de voilette (Figs. 20 and 21). These works by Kuramata take their inspiration from Duchamp in a very literal way, and are therefore not Duchampian at all. This honorific literalization of Duchamp’s works has not, however, been the sole way in which Duchamp has appeared as an influence in current visual production. Rather, some have tried to copy or acknowledge Duchamp’s ‘style’ or ‘look,’ if such a quality even exists, because the larger and more important theoretical implications of Duchamp have made him such a popular figure, a veritable guru, in the contemporary era.

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Figure 22
Morphosis,Kate Mantilini
Restaurant, Beverly Hill,
California, 1986

Figure 23
Marcel Duchamp, Chocolate
Grinder No. 1, 1913

In the past, Morphosis, too, sometimes dabbled in a more literal and, therefore, less successful use of Duchamp. For Kate’s, a Hollywood restaurant completed by Morphosis in 1987 (Fig. 22), the architects made the centerpiece of the interior space a large mural of boxers and a chocolate grinder.⁽¹⁾(At this time, Michael Rotondi, another young California architect, was also a principal of Morphosis. Rotondi and Mayne were partners until 1991.) This is meant to recall Duchamp’s amusing painting of a Chocolate Grinder (1911) (Fig. 23), amusing because it takes its inspiration from the French saying “Bachelor grinds his own chocolate [masturbates].” In the same article about Morphosis, “Duchamp Goes West”, Rowan Moore goes on to note that instances such as this are part of the reason that subtlety and originality are all too often lacking in current architectural practice.⁽²¹⁾ Duchamp, Moore argues, mentioned too frequently or lightly, will become as meaningful as a Campbell’s Soup can, a Leon Krier pediment, or a Gehry fish.”⁽²²⁾

Even Frank Gehry has, on occasion, been mildly guilty of this mimetic crime. The look of Gehry’s Telluride Residence in Telluride, Colorado, which has been in the planning stages since 1995, is based, in Gehry’s words, on Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. (Figs. 24 and 25)⁽²³⁾ The house will step down the hill for which it is intended, just as Duchamp’s Nude steps down the stairs. Unlike Kuramata, however, who used roses to recall Rrose Sélavy, Gehry’s house does not go so far as to have an abstracted, monochromatic nude figure painted on it. Instead, the Telluride Residence is the mechanomorphic nude. The house serves as a metaphor for Nude Descending a Staircase, as well as a simple visual recollection of the painting, and thus escapes the mimesis of Kuramata.

Many contemporary architects, not only Gehry, have been visually inspired by Nude Descending a Staircase. For example, the fire station designed by Zaha Hadid for the Vitra complex in Germany (1990-1993) (Fig. 26), was also inspired in part by Duchamp’s Nude,⁽²⁴⁾ and the aerial computer plan of Morphosis’ Diamond Ranch High School can also visually be likened to Nude Descending a Staircase. There is even debate over whether Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao looks more like Nude Descending a Staircase or like Futurist artist Umberto Boccioni’s sculpture, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. (Fig. 27)⁽²⁵⁾ Again, these comparisons and debates lead away from the true nature of Duchamp and the reasons for which he is so much discussed and quoted. It is perhaps partly coincidental that contemporary deconstructivist architecture looks so much like Nude Descending a Staircase, partly that the deconstructivists are visually stimulated by works of Boccioni and of early Duchamp, and partly due to the fact that, as mentioned previously, Duchamp’s cult status encourages many writers as well as architects to invoke Duchamp and identify with him. When one realizes that works such as Antonio Sant’Elia’s preliminary drawings for La Città Nuova also have much visually in common with structures such as Diamond Ranch High School, the explanation of Duchamp’s stylistic influence through cult association becomes the most convincing.

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Figure 28
Liz Diller and Ric Scofidio,
Blur Building by day
and night, Yverdorn-les-Bains,
Expo 2002, Switzerland

Figure 29
Marcel Duchamp,Manual
of Instructions
for the Assembly of “Etant
donnés”: “Approximation démontable,
exécutée entre 1946 et
1966 à New York”, 1966,
Collection of Philadelphia
Museum of Art

For the architectural firm of Diller + Scofidio, sex and eroticism, as well as other Duchampian fascinations, are important themes in their work. Architects Liz Diller and Ric Scofidio achieved much fame in 2001 for their pavilion for the Swiss Exposition of 2002), the Blur building, a ‘building’ made almost entirely of water vapor, with a little steel used (Fig. 28).⁽²⁶⁾ In 2002, Diller + Scofidio published their notes (four years worth) for the project in a book called Blur: The Making of Nothing. The book contains reproductions of the notes in all their forms, on cocktail napkins, on lined yellow notebook paper, and with photographs of the rings of binders and colors of folders, much in the same way that Duchamp’s manual for the Étant Donnés were published by the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Fig. 29). Numerous other parallels with Duchamp can be seen in the work of Diller + Scofidio. This architectural work shares the ephemeral quality of the readymades. Just as many of the original readymades were thrown away when their exhibition was over, this building literally faded away, evaporated when the exposition was over.This pavilion can be read as the ultimate expression of another Duchampian concept, the infra-thin. Dawn Ades described the infra-thin as follows,

“An example of ‘visible infra-thin’ is iridescent cloth, or shot silk, which has a different character or colour according to the -light…Infra-thin then points to a condition of liminality, that is, something on the threshold (between inside and outside, for example); the interface between two types of thing (smoke and mouth); a gap or shift that is virtually imperceptible but absolute…Infra-thin encompasses time and space as well…”⁽²⁷⁾

Like iridescent cloth, a pavilion made of water vapor can be seen through, its appearance changing with light and weather conditions.Indeed, in the making of the pavilion, many photographs were taken with time, relative humidity, and temperature noted.⁽²⁸⁾ Such a building would hover within the threshold between inside and outside, its bounds being imperceptible and ever-changing, its duration ephemeral. The walls of such a building would be walls and not walls (again, the door is neither open nor closed), ever shifting, and either barely visible or oppressively opaque depending on the amount and type of light filtering through the vapor. Ben Rubin, a project manager for Diller + Scofidio, called the cloud building “pure visual noise.”⁽²⁹⁾ This is undoubtedly what Duchamp meant by the infra-thin, noise which could be seen but not heard, a building made of water vapor, a building that was there and not there. Just as an advertisement for Flip Wilson could never have been placed on a print of the Pantheon had it not been for Marcel Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q., neither could a structure made of water vapor have been ‘erected’ without the antecedent of Duchamp’s infra-thin.

This infra-thin building straddled the line between the material and the immaterial, between reality and fantasy, and between conceptual art and architecture. Marcel Duchamp explored new media in his own work, such as the use of mass-produced, purchased objects as his readymades. Similarly, Diller + Scofidio explored a new architectural medium, water vapor, in this highly innovative structure. As with Duchamp, the work was meant to be experienced. Just as one can not fully appreciate Étant Donnés without going to the Philadelphia Museum of Art where it is installed and looking through the peepholes, the experience of the water vapor pavilion lay in the experience. By only reading about it or looking at photographs of it, one loses the experience of getting wet and of losing one’s way in a cloud. Another part of the experience of the water vapor pavilion was the ambiguity and anonymity into which visitors were submerged as they moved through the space. Each visitor was given an identical raincoat, a costume which reinforced the participatory nature of the spectacle (as well as being very useful for remaining somewhat dry). Looking forward to the work, Liz Diller commented on the blur effect,

“We use vision to assess identity; a quick glimpse of another person allows us to identify his/her gender, age, race, and social class. Normally, this visual framework precedes any social interaction. Within the cloud, however, such rapid visual identification is not possible. The foggy atmosphere, combined with visitors in identical raincoats, produces a condition of anonymity. It will be difficult to distinguish a 25-year old Japanese fashion model from a 13-year old Indian boy from a 70-year old Russian grandmother.”⁽³⁰⁾
Diller + Scofidio seek to put architecture at the service of the mind just as Duchamp sought to put art at the service of the mind. The pavilion was not designed to be aesthetically pleasing through its lines or forms. It had no lines and its forms were ever shifting. Rather, the work was designed to make people think about the meaning of architecture and the interface of technology, humans, and the natural environment. Whether a person was even willing to consider the pavilion ‘architecture’ or not was not at issue. Diller + Scofidio gave the viewer, the participant the same experience that Duchamp gave viewers of Fountain when it was exhibited in 1917. The experience, the fun in viewing these works was the chance to think about them afterward and decide whether or not they really were art or architecture.

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Figure 30
Marcel
Duchamp, Comb, 1916/1964

Figure 31
Marcel Duchamp,
Rendez-vous du Dimanche
6 Février 1916, 1916

In the works of both Duchamp and Diller + Scofidio, performance art plays an important element.⁽³¹⁾Duchamp created one of the readymades, the dog comb (Fig. 30), in front of his patron’s Walter and Louise Arensberg. He had created a textual message on four postcards sent two weeks prior to the event, inviting the Arensbergs to this rendez-vous (Fig. 31). This event can be seen as the precursor of the happening of the 1960s, just as attendance at the Diller + Scofidio pavilion can be seen as the latest generation of the happening. In their book, Diller + Scofidio included numerous pictures of themselves working with their crew to create the ‘Estructur.’ They drew crowds and media attention, and this was an integral part of the conception of the work.⁽³²⁾Finally, eroticism was a very important part of both the pavilion, the Blur building, and the entire Swiss Expo.02. There were four sites for Expo.02, Neuchatel, Murten, Biel, and Yverdon.⁽³³⁾ Yverdon, the site of the pavilion, was themed “Sexuality and Sensuality,”⁽³⁴⁾ and Diller + Scofidio and their team, “to avoid contentions of individual authorship, the group members would merge identities to become ‘Extasia’, or ecstasy, in anticipation of winning the preferred site of Yverdon [Diller + Scofidio favored the theme of sexuality and sensuality above the other themes].”⁽³⁵⁾ (Though Diller + Scofidio did produce Blur at the Yverdon site, Extasia was eventually disbanded.)⁽³⁶⁾As the building was to be created on the Yverdon site, themed sexuality and sensuality, the building was expected to take on the Yverdon characteristics.

The organizers of the exposition created detailed explanations of what each of the four themes was all about by comparing each of the four’s responses and attitudes, much like a personality quiz in a popular magazine.
For Yverdon, some of these were:

“Code words: sensuality, sexualityAntonym of code words: asceticismKey questions: Can sensuality and transcendence, eroticism and
sexual drive coexist?Architecture: round, amoeba-like, soft, bubbly, knobby, smallForms: round, organic, soft, amorphous, flowing, carnal, curved,
bumpyDuration: moments, phasesSymbols and cult figures: Romeo & Juliet, Cupid, Aphrodite,
CasanovaActivity: kissing, letting goSeason: summerA phrase: you kiss wellPhilosophical model: hedonism, passion, self-surrenderWhat’s going on, baby?: gender debate, imposedIndividuality: intimacyDrug: aphrodisiacs, alcoholForms of communication: whispering, pillow talk, shoutingTones/noises: lip-smacking, Bossanova, heartbeat, panting, jukeboxObjects: electric plug, dam, a lonely lost ski, vibratorDeath: heart failure, death at orgasmDrink: Bloody Mary, water”⁽³⁷⁾

So, the initial task faced by Diller + Scofidio was to create an innovative temporary exposition pavilion recalling the many qualities listed above. Diller + Scofidio chose the site because of their interest in eroticism, and are showing a Duchampian influence in this way as well. These architectural constraints owe, however, to the phenomenon of postmodernism. In 1910 or 1950, for example, no government organization would have asked an architect for a building which recalled lip-smacking and a lonely lost ski. Though the actual pavilion itself was probably not the least bit erotic, it achieved a certain eroticism by using verbal means, the list on the previous page, to make people think about sex when they think about the Blur building. This is much the same tactic which Duchamp used in the Large Glass. His notes for the Large Glass explain the complicated process of desire and visualize undressing of the bride which is inherent in the work, though not visually detectable without the notes to instruct the viewer. A large mass of water vapor in Switzerland may be very erotic, just as Duchamp’s completely non-representational rendering of a bride may be; it is all dependent upon the framework of ideas within which the viewer approaches the work, and has nothing to do with the visual. The eroticism of Diller + Scofidio can be traced both to an interest in Marcel Duchamp and to the rule breaking of the culture of today. In a final analysis, though, the mere idea of a building, which is not a building, made of water vapor, and devoted to thinking about sex (as opposed to sex itself) detached from any visual or retinal mode of artistic expression, is decidedly Duchampian.

Marcel Duchamp has been quoted and acknowledged time and time again by contemporary architects and theorists because of particularly Duchampian ideas, such as eroticism as metaphor, his uses of new media, and his desire to move away from the retinal qualities of art towards an art which was at the service of the mind. Some writers and architects, including Sanford Kwinter, Shiro Kuramata, and Morphosis have at times misused Duchamp because his name is so en vogue. This has occurred by either invoking Duchamp’s name when no connection really exists or by paying a literal, retinal homage to one or more of Duchamp’s works. Many others, though, have incorporated Duchampian ideas into their own works in a more intellectually based homage. The Deconstructivists are indebted to his ideas about projection and chance, and Robert Venturi (Fig. 32) could not have made his playful jabs at the high seriousness of International Style architecture without Duchamp. Finally, the firm of Diller + Scofidio created a building which can be read as a truly Duchampian building, an embodiment of the infra-thin, playful performance and experiential art, and of a highly intellectualized eroticism. Though Duchamp was never an architect, his thinking has made possible deformed forms, has allowed Flip Wilson’s act to enter into the once sanctified realm of high art, and has allowed architects to literally erect buildings of clouds.

Notes

1. Pierre Cabanne, Duchamp & Co (Paris: Terrail, 1997) 32.

2. K. Michael Hays, ed., Architecture Theory since 1968 (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1998) 586.

3. Ibid

4. Sanford Kwinter, “La Città Nuova: Modernity and Continuity,” Architecture Theory since 1968, ed. K. Michael.Hays (Cambridge, Mass: The
MIT Press, 1998) 608.

5. Amy Dempsey, Art in the Modern Era ( New York:Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2002) 91.

6. Cabanne, op. cit.132.

7. Gehry Partners, Gehry Talks: Architecture + Process (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002) 140.

8. John Pile, A History of Interior Design ( New York: John
Wiley & Sons, Inc:, 2000) 278.

9. Gehry Partners, op. cit. 140.

10. Rowan Moore, “Duchamp Goes West,” Blueprint 36 (May 1987):20.

11. Alice Kimm, “Morphosis Diamond in the Rough,” Architecture Week4 (June 2000): 11.

12. Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Learning from Las Vegas
(Cambridge, Mass.:The MIT Press, 1977) 88.

13. Ibid.89.

14. Ibid.105-6.

15. Ibid.160.

16. Ibid.61.

17. Tilman Kuchler,Postmodern Gaming: Heidegger, Duchamp, Derrida(New York: Peter Lang, 1994)121.

18. David Hanks and Anne Hoy, Design for Living: Furniture and Lighting,1950-2000 (Paris: Flammarion, 2000)186.

19. Ibid

20. Moore, op. cit. 20.

21. Ibid

22. Ibid

23. Gehry Partners, op. cit. 183.

24. Puglisi, op. cit. 28.

25. Puglisi, op. cit. 27-8.

26. Diller + Scofidio Firm, Blur: The Making of Nothing (New
York: HenryN. Abrams, Inc., 2002) 1.

27. Cox Ades, and Hopkins, op .cit. 183.

28. Diller + Scofidio Firm, op. cit. 70-1.

29. Ibid. 192.

30. Ibid. 209.

31. Cox Ades, and Hopkins, op. cit. 208.

32. Diller + Scofidio Firm, op. cit .285.

33. Ibid. 10.

34. Ibid. 16.

35. Ibid.

36. Ibid. 109.

37. Ibid. 10.

Bibliography

Adcock, Craig. “Duchamp’s Eroticism:
A Mathematical Analysis.” Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century.
Ed. Rudolph E. Kuenzli and Francis M. Naumann. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1996.___.“Marcel Duchamp’s Approach to New York: ‘Find an Inscription for the Woolworth Building as a Ready-made’.”

Dada/Surrealism. Vol. 14 (1985): 52-65.
Ades, Dawn, Neil Cox, and David Hopkins.

Marcel Duchamp. London: Thames & Hudson, 1999.
Baird, George. “La Dimension Amoureuse

in Architecture.” Architecture Theory since 1968. Ed. K.
Michael Hays. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1998.

Banham, Reyner. Theory and Design
in the First Machine Age. New York: Praeger, 1960.

Cabanne, Pierre. Duchamp & Co.
Paris: Terrail, 1997.

Colomina, Beatriz. “L’Esprit Nouveau
between Avant-Garde and Modernity: The Status of Artwork and the
Everyday Object.” Architecture Theorysince 1968. Ed. K. Michael
Hays. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1998.

Dempsey, Amy. Art in the Modern
Era. New York:Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2002.

de Solà-Morales, Ignasi. Differences:
Topographies of Contemporary Architecture. Cambridge, Mass:
The MIT Press, 1997.

de Vries, Hilary. “What’s Doing in
Los Angeles.” New York Times 28 Sep. 2003, section 5: 14.

Diller + Scofidio Firm. Blur: The
Making of Nothing.New York: Henry N.Abrams, Inc., 2002.

Duchamp, Marcel, Iconoclast.“A Complete
Reversal of Art Opinions.” (reprinted from Arts & Decoration,
Sept. 1915)In Studio International (Jan./Feb. 1975): 29.
Gehry Partners. Gehry Talks: Architecture
+ Process. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002.

Giedion, Sigfried. Space, Time and
Architecture. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1949.

Girst, Thomas. “(Ab)Using
Marcel Duchamp: The Concept of the readymade in Post-War and Contemporary
American Art.” Tout-Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online
Journal 2. 5 (April 2003): Articles.

Hanks, David and Anne Hoy. Design
for Living: Furniture and Lighting, 1950-2000. Paris: Flammarion,
2000.

Hays, K. Michael., ed. Architecture
Theory since 1968. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1998.

Henderson, Linda Dalrymple. The
Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art. Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983.

_ _ _.”X-Ray and the Quest for
Invisible Reality in the Art ofKupka, Duchamp and the Cubists.”
Art Journal (Winter 1988): 323-40.

Kuchler, Tilman. Postmodern Gaming:
Heidegger, Duchamp, Derrida. New York: Peter Lang, 1994.
Kuenzli, Rudolph E. and Francis M.

Naumann, eds. Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century. Cambridge,
Mass: The MIT Press, 1996.

Kwinter, Sanford. Architectures
of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture. Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 2001.

Kwinter, Sanford. “La Città Nuova:
Modernity and Continuity.” Architecture Theory since 1968.
Ed. Hays, K. Michael. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1998.

Maxwell, Robert. Sweet Disorder
and the Carefully Careless. New York: Princeton Architectural
Press, 1993.

Moore, Rowan. “Duchamp Goes West.”
Blueprint 36 (May 1987): 18-20.
Pasadena Art Museum. Marcel Duchamp.
Exhibition catalog, 1963.

Pile, John. A History of Interior
Design. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc:, 2000.

Powers, Edward D. “Fasten
your Seatbelts as we Prepare for our Nude Descending.” Tout-Fait:
The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal2.5 (April 2003): Articles.

Puglisi, Luigi Prestinenza. Hyper
Architecture: Spaces in the Electronic Age. Basel, Switzerland:
Birkhauser, 1999.

Reichenbach, Hans. The Philosophy
of Space and Time. New York: Dover, 1958.

Venturi, Robert and Scott Brown, Denise.Learning from Las Vegas. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press,1977.

Wood, Beatrice. “Marcel.” Marcel
Duchamp: Artist of the Century. Eds. Kuenzli, Rudolph E. and
Francis M. Naumann. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1996.

Figs. 3, 5-9, 13, 18, 21, 23, 25, 29-31© 2005 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. All rights
reserved.

See I have placed
before you an open door that no one can shut.
-Revelation 3:8
The successful criminal brain is always superior…
-Dr. No

I.
In The Trial of Gilles de Rais, Georges Bataille writes, “Crime is a fact of the human species, a fact of that species alone, but it is above all the secret aspect, impenetrable and hidden. Crime hides, and by far the most terrifying things are those that elude us.”⁽¹⁾
Marcel Duchamp, in both his work and practice, is the elusive artist par excellence. He is the ultimate fugitive of art historical investigation, leaving a trail of tricks, twists, contradictory meanings, and duplicitous identities that lead to epistemological dead-ends. Upon close inspection, Duchamp’s tactics to elude definitive conclusions and vex the viewer reveal themselves as criminal, not unlike those of the con man, fugitive, and even the killer.

click to enlarge

Figure 1
Marcel Duchamp, Given: 1. The Waterfall
2.The Illuminating Gas
(interior),
1946-1966, Gift of the
Cassandra Foundation,
Philadelphia Museum of Art

This paper suggests that Marcel Duchamp consciously toyed with criminal methodologies to elude interpretation and heighten the inconclusive nature of his work. I propose that criminal tactics were one means for Duchamp to enact his rebellion against traditional morality and aesthetics that followed his introduction to the philosopher Max Stirner in 1912. This program emphasizes a continual play on presence/absence, both in the artist’s modes of production and identities. After a brief overview of the apparent criminality of his work, I focus on his final project, Étant donnés (Fig. 1), and suggest that the installation partly derived from a notorious unsolved murder in 1947 known as the “Black Dahlia.”⁽²⁾ This macabre event reveals remarkable consistencies with Étant donnés, particularly in the identity and character of the victim, Elizabeth Short. Short’s lifestyle embodies uncanny similarities to Duchamp’s decade-long obsessive erotic narrative of the “Bride and her Bachelors,” thus revealing his appropriation of certain details as an enactment of a “copycat” crime in art. Finally, I relate Étant donnés to Duchamp’s earlier works to suggest a reversal of his criminal modus operandi from elusion to hypervisibility. This shift is evident in Étant donnés, which trades conceptual for physical modes of production and complicates the presence/absence of the artist. By furthering the inconclusive nature of Duchamp’s work (through the use of what Jean-Francois Lyotard terms the “hinge”) and being itself most enigmatic, Étant donnés is stamped with the same status as the Black Dahlia murder: open and unsolved.

click to enlarge

Figure 2
Marcel Duchamp,
Nude Descending the Staircase No. 2, 1912

Figure 3
Marcel Duchamp,
Three Standard Stoppages, 1913-14

Figure 4
Marcel Duchamp,In
Advance of the Broken Arm, 1915/1964, 132 cm, Musée national
d’art moderne, Paris

In 1912, Duchamp first read Max Stirner’s The Ego and His Own, an anarchic text that promoted individualism based on a self-exploration of the ego outside predetermined moral and societal values.(3) The abrupt shift in Duchamp’s aesthetic philosophy that followed his introduction to Stirner, from chronophotographic works such as his famous Nude Descending the Staircase, (Fig. 2) toward works of a more conceptual nature that challenged or defied metaphysics and the values of art and society, such as Three Standard Stoppages (Fig. 3) from 1913-14, is considered a consequence of his introduction to Stirner.⁽⁴⁾Moreover, Amelia Jones has argued the locus of this system was the incorporation of eroticism in both subject and object, which served as the agent to aggressively challenge bourgeois cultural values.⁽⁵⁾ The following discussion demonstrates that the nexus between Stirnerite philosophy and eroticism forms an artistic program that produces works that break the “laws” of art, imply criminal play and behavior, and exploit and celebrate the erotic in ways that imply violence to the body.
Duchamp “broke” many artistic rules after his shift toward self-determination. The readymades, such as In Advance of the Broken Arm from 1915 (Fig. 4), are now classic examples of his defiance of the imposed aesthetics of bourgeois society.⁽⁶⁾ They not only break the “laws” of art, but also illustrate a form of elusion through their absence of traditional notions of artistic production. As Walter Hopps points out, Duchamp’s career is marked by efforts to suppress the artist’s hand, to remove or disassociate himself from the object through an absence of visual signs that suggest the physical mark of the artist.⁽⁷⁾ Duchamp, defying the tradition of physical craft, creates a work that bears only conceptual evidence of its production, having been designated a work of art.⁽⁸⁾ The hand and its mark is dangerous to Duchamp. “It’s fun to do things by hand,” he stated, but “I’m suspicious because there’s the danger of the ‘hand’ which comes back…”⁽⁹⁾ Direct appropriation of these objects hides the handprint of the artist, as in the lack of fingerprints at a crime scene (is not appropriation, unlike imitation, a kind of stealing?).⁽¹⁰⁾ It is here that Duchamp’s elusion seems to elicit a specifically criminal tone. Moreover, any investigative attempt to trace the sources of these works through the available evidence leads us to hardware stores or factories, not the studio, where any number of these objects were purchased or produced.⁽¹¹⁾ Ironically, in a recent attempt to do just this, Rhonda Shearer found that the origins of the readymades are often untraceable to any context due to slight alterations by Duchamp, no doubt meant to further complicate attempts to “solve” these works and hinder their investigation.

Nowhere did Duchamp defy conventional aesthetic authority more than in the submission of his famous Fountain (Fig. 5) to the first annual exhibition of the American Society of Artists in 1917.⁽¹²⁾ An object so defiant of the “laws” of art, made by simply re-naming and shifting the base of a common urinal, Fountain led a supposedly unjuried exhibition to censorship through its blasphemous suggestions. In addition, Duchamp mocked the committee by signing the work with the alias “R. Mutt” rather than his own name. In this clever tactic, the artist hid his association with the scandalous submission and thus insured his innocence. As a member of the exhibition committee, Duchamp debated the fate of “Mr. Mutt’s” entry much like a criminal who watches their crime scene from a physical distance or under disguise. This, no doubt, amused Duchamp, who continued to emphasize this play on criminal behavior in works such as L.H.O.O.Q., (Fig. 6) defacing the Mona Lisa with a graffiti-style moustache and goatee. Graffiti, itself an illegal form of art, involves the elusive presence/absence of an artistic “criminal” for its production and reception. In other capers, such as his fraudulent checks such as Tzanck Check (Fig. 7) from 1919, Duchamp focused on the act of counterfeiting. And in Wanted (Fig. 8), from 1923, the artist fashioned a literal image of himself as a fugitive with multiple aliases (again emphasizing absence), complete with profile photographs like those of an ex-convict with a prior record.⁽¹³⁾

click to enlarge

Figure 9
Marcel Duchamp,
Note in the Green Box (1934)

Figure 10
Marcel Duchamp, Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even [a.k.a.
The Large Glass], 1915-23

All of these acts might be described as “petty crimes” when compared to his last work, the installation in the Philadelphia Museum of Art entitled, Étant donnés: 1 la chute d’eau, 2 le gaz d’éclairage – translated as Given: 1. The Waterfall 2. The Illuminating Gas. The title of this piece, taken from the opening lines of an introductory note to Duchamp’s Green Box (Fig. 9), signals its association with his earlier work The Large Glass, (Fig. 10) and suggests its representation as a three-dimensional version of the narrative of the Bride and her Bachelors.
Étant donnés has baffled scholars since its discovery after the artist’s death in 1968, when following Duchamp’s instructions, it was reinstalled in the Philadelphia Museum of Art by Anne d’Harnoncourt and Paul Matisse in 1969. With the exception of a select group of individuals that included the artist’s wife Alexina Matisse and her son Paul, the work was created by Duchamp in secrecy in New York City, first in his studio at 210 West 14th Street and later moved to another small room on 80 East Eleventh Street around 1965.⁽¹⁴⁾ The majority of scholarship that discusses the body in Étant donnés focuses on readings that emphasize violation, murder, rape, or other acts that associate criminal violence, eroticism, and the body.⁽¹⁵⁾ It has been described as a “mutilated woman” and a “seemingly dead female body,” suggesting that some form of criminal activity either already transpired or is about to occur.⁽¹⁶⁾ The erotic nature of these violent interpretations is based largely on the positioning of the body and Duchamp’s choice to explicitly display the female groin region, which is overtly shown to the viewer who peers through the small eyeholes in the door that houses the installation. The body, in its placement before us with legs spread apart, shocks the viewer because of what numerous scholars refer to as its “hypervisibility.”⁽¹⁷⁾

II.

click to enlarge

Figure 11
Photograph of Elizabeth Short
for civilian employee ID

Figure 12
LAPD Detectives Harry Hansen
and Finis Brown with Elizabeth Short’s
body, January 15^th, 1947,
Museum of Death

On the morning of January 15th, 1947, the mutilated body of Elizabeth Short, an aspiring starlet known as the “Black Dahlia” for her stunning beauty and jet black hair, was found purposefully placed on the edge of an open lot on Norton Avenue in Los Angeles, California (Fig. 11).⁽¹⁸⁾ For the next few months at first, then years as the case went on, her name littered the headlines of West and East coast newspapers that described in detail both her flamboyant lifestyle and macabre death. To this day, the Black Dahlia murder case remains California’s most notorious unsolved crime. The following discussion suggests that the media presentation and crime photographs of the Black Dahlia murder, contemporaneous to Duchamp’s conception of Étant donnés, may have affected its design and progress.
The parallels between the Black Dahlia and Étant donnés are numerous. By far the most striking similarity involves the two bodies. In a photograph of Elizabeth Short’s body at the crime scene, she lies in thick, tall grass not unlike the twigs that surround the body in Étant donnés; her legs spread wide displaying her sex (Fig. 12). And, in the most grisly detail of this heinous crime, her body is no longer whole; it has been severed at the waist. In a surrealist fantasy become reality, the Black Dahlia represents a real-life example of what was envisioned in the contemporaneous paintings, photographs, and installations of artists such as Hans Bellmer, Rene Magritte, Man Ray, and even Marcel Duchamp. Often times, for example, these surrealist artists would manipulate mannequins in their works for both their uncanny mixture of life-like and lifeless qualities, as well as their constructive and deconstructive potential through detachable anatomical parts. As the photograph illustrates, Short’s mid-section was not only severed in a manner similar to these detachable dummies, but, coincidentally, her body was actually mistaken for a mannequin by a passer-by who, observing the severed torso and skin that was “white as a lily,” believed it came from a department store.⁽¹⁹⁾

click to enlarge

Figure 13
Marcel Duchamp, Lazy
Hardware, window display for André
Bretons Arcane 17, 19.-26.
April 1945, Gotham Bookmart, E. 57^th
St. New York,
Photography Maya Deren,
Philadelphia Museum of Art,
Marcel Duchamp
Archive.

Duchamp found both inspiration and direct use for mannequins throughout his career. He explained to Man Ray in the early 1920’s that the origin of the Bride theme came from the “brides in booths” at French Country Fairs, where dummies dressed as a bride and groom were used as targets for people to throw balls in an attempt to decapitate them.⁽²⁰⁾ Closer in time to the Black Dahlia and Étant Donnés is his display window at the Gotham Book Mart in New York City from 1945 to promote Andre Breton’s surrealist publication Arcane 17 (Fig. 13); where Duchamp installed a headless female mannequin that immediately caused a scandal with the League of Women.⁽²¹⁾
The two most forceful formal similarities between the Black Dahlia and the body in Étant donnés are located in the groin region of each figure. First, both Elizabeth Short’s body and the body in Étant donnés have no pubic hair. The lack of hair in Étant donnés has been discussed in relation to Duchamp’s interest in gender indeterminacy, as well as a tale of the Baroness Else von Freytag-Loringhoven, who had her pubic area shaved by a barber in a film that both Duchamp and Man Ray collaborated on.⁽²²⁾ Furthermore, in the memoirs of Lydie Sarazin-Levassor, Duchamp’s wife for eight months in 1927-28, she claims that Duchamp requested she remove her body hair, owing to his “almost morbid horror of hair.”⁽²³⁾ In light of these past incidents, the absence of pubic hair from Short’s body, in itself, could have proved alluring to Duchamp.
But Short’s body also offers an explanation for the strange, incorrect anatomy that suggests a female vagina in Étant donnés. Amelia Jones has negated the conclusions of earlier scholars who discussed the genitalia of Duchamp’s figure in terms of the anatomy of the female sex, proving that there is in fact no labia majora or labia minora. What exists instead is what she calls an “aggressively visible and grotesque gash that goes nowhere.”⁽²⁴⁾ In the photograph of the Black Dahlia murder one can see a literal gash that was incised above the vagina into the lower abdomen of the body of Elizabeth Short (Fig. 14). It is now known through the disclosure of the autopsy reports that Elizabeth Short’s pubic area was underdeveloped. Detectives and crime experts suspect that the gash was a means for the sexually ravenous killer to insert himself into Short, whose genitals were underdeveloped and therefore unable to engage in vaginal intercourse.⁽²⁵⁾
Thus, the Dahlia could not offer her bachelors a natural way to fulfil their lustful desires, much like the failure of the love operation in Duchamp’s narrative of the Large Glass where the “bachelors grind their chocolate.”⁽²⁶⁾ The “gash” in Étant donnés first appeared in a vellum study for the figure in 1948-49 (Fig. 15), and the transition from a drawing dated controversially either 1945 or 1947 (Fig. 16), which features a female body without head and arms (severed?) with natural pubic hair, to the hairless body with a single “gash” in the vellum study has never been explained.⁽²⁷⁾ If Duchamp was exposed to the Dahlia murder, either in 1947 or 1949 (this will be discussed in more detail shortly), then perhaps this event was the impetus for these design alterations. Chronologically, the murder (and his exposure to it) fits neatly between the otherwise inexplicable transition from the drawing to the vellum study.

click to enlarge

Figure 17
New York
Daily News Headline, January 18^th, 1947

Figure 18
Marcel Duchamp, Fresh Widow, 1920

The story of Elizabeth Short presented in the newspapers during the investigation also parallels aspects of Duchamp’s own erotic narrative. Short’s failure to fulfil the “love operation,” while not directly stated through a medical explanation, was implied through accounts in the papers that spoke of her teasing nature and relationships that ended “before the love was consummated,” echoing Duchamp’s non-consummation and frustration in the theme of the Large Glass.⁽²⁸⁾ Moreover, the newspapers on both coasts played-up a controversial aspect of her past, in which she claimed to have married an air force pilot who in fact died before the ceremony could take place.⁽²⁹⁾ Thus, Elizabeth Short appeared to be paradoxically married and unmarried. The newspapers furthered the confusion when they obtained information from her address book, which contained “an album of pictures ranging in rank from sergeant to lieutenant general.”⁽³⁰⁾

Several newspapers ran stories that published a long list of “Bachelors,” as in the New York Daily News headline from January 18^th 1947 that reads, “Many Loves in Slain Girl’s Life”(Fig. 17).⁽³¹⁾ As Jean-Francois Lyotard and others point out, Duchamp complicates attempts to locate fixed meanings in his works through what has been called a “hinge” effect.⁽³²⁾ The hinge, represented in language by the juxtaposition of “and/or,” as in the double alias of Marcel Duchamp and/or Rrose Sélavy, is both single and multiple, definitive and simultaneously inconclusive. To extend the “hinge” interpretation, the Dahlia was a Duchampian fantasy come to life―single and/or married, Elizabeth Short and/or the Black Dahlia, whole and/or severed, life and/or art. Like the Bride in Duchamp’s tale, who has “no singular, definitive groom,” the Dahlia represents eroticism and violence staged in these photographs as a literal “Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even(ly) cut” as a symbol of the artist’s concept of infra-mince, a physical cut that in this context plays itself out in a long list of Duchampian metaphors.⁽³³⁾She is a “Fresh Widow,” like the French women Duchamp referred to after the First World War in his 1920 work of the same name (Fig. 18); a work whose title also, coincidentally (?), references the guillotine―“the Widow, in popular French jargon.”⁽³⁴⁾ Lastly, in several of the crime scene photographs and those of the newspapers, the detectives, policemen, and reporters seem to echo Duchamp’s description of his Occulist Witnesses and bachelors, who “stand, sadly, in ‘uniforms and liveries’” and observe the spectacle before them.⁽³⁵⁾ (Figs. 19 & 20)

click to enlarge

• 
  Figure 19
  Marcel Duchamp,
  Occulist Witnesses,
  from Green Box
  (1934), 1920
• 
  Figure 20
  Marcel Duchamp,
  Cemetery of Uniforms
  and Liveries, No. 2,
  1914

III.

In mid-January 1947 Duchamp returned from a stay in Europe, arriving in New York at the moment the Dahlia case began to unfold. The particulars of the murder and its surrounding controversies were appearing daily in newspapers. The New York Daily News ran headlines and follow-up stories about the Dahlia murder for several weeks.⁽³⁶⁾ More importantly, at the time of the killing Los Angeles was the home of the artist’s close friend Man Ray. The relationship between these two artists is well documented, and Man Ray’s influence on Duchamp’s conception of Étant donnés has already been suggested.⁽³⁷⁾ In addition to being engulfed in a sea of newspaper headlines and Hollywood gossip about the killing, Man Ray, like Elizabeth Short, frequented the popular bars and clubs in Hollywood and knew many people in the jet set of the movie community.⁽³⁸⁾ With his lifelong fascination with sado-masochism, Man Ray would certainly have taken an interest in the particulars of this crime.⁽³⁹⁾ As a photographer of such repute, Man Ray might have been able to obtain one of the many hundreds of crime scene photographs taken by reporters that circulated through the Hollywood community.⁽⁴⁰⁾ These photographs were reproduced and passed from hand-to-hand, and were not censored like the newspaper photographs that displayed the body in situcovered with a sheet, nor were they the “cleaned-up” autopsy photographs that appeared in detective and crime magazines.

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Figure 21
Marcel Duchamp and
Man Ray in Los Angeles,
California, 1949

On his way back from Paris in 1947, the year of the murder, Man Ray spent a week in New York City.⁽⁴¹⁾ This could have served as an occasion for him to share this information with Duchamp, either simply for its grisly, surrealist nature or for its many similarities with his own and Duchamp’s beliefs and work. If this was not the case, Duchamp may have heard or seen something about the Black Dahlia during his visit to the Arensberg’s home in Los Angeles two years later in April 1949 after his participation in a Round Table discussion in San Francisco.⁽⁴²⁾ The Black Dahlia case was again making news with new suspects, and moreover Duchamp spent each afternoon secretly meeting with Man Ray by taking “afternoon walks.”⁽⁴³⁾ In this photograph (Fig. 21), the two artists, in a witty false “alibi,” sit on a stage set in Hollywood designed as a Parisian street corner. Why wouldn’t someone with a penchant for criminal tactics, who characterized his interest in eroticism as “Enormous. Visible or not underlying in every case…” be fascinated by this crime?⁽⁴⁴⁾ In an interview with Walter Hopps during his stay in Los Angeles, Duchamp declared he was going through his “sex maniac” phase, a phrase which coincidentally appeared in newspaper articles such as the first Los Angeles Times piece on the Dahlia Murder, which opened with the lines, “Butchered by a sex maniac…”⁽⁴⁵⁾ It is not surprising then, that upon his return to New York, Duchamp sent the clay model for the body in Étant donnés out for casting in plaster and, as Calvin Tomkins describes in his biography on Duchamp, “by summer he was working on it with great intensity―up to eight hours a day…”⁽⁴⁶⁾

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Figure 22
Marcel Duchamp,
Female Fig Leaf,
1950

Figure 23
Marcel Duchamp,
Wedge of Chastity,
1954

These events and shared interests between Duchamp and Man Ray in the context of the Black Dahlia suggest new meanings for two of Duchamp’s later erotic objects, Female Fig Leaf and Wedge of Chastity (Figs. 22 & 23). If Man Ray was partly responsible for introducing Duchamp to the Black Dahlia in 1947 or 1949, this may explain the nature of Duchamp’s gift, Female Fig Leaf, to the photographer. On his return to Paris with his new wife Juliet in 1951, Man Ray was surprised by Duchamp, who was waiting onboard in the couple’s cabin in port in New York City.⁽⁴⁷⁾ Duchamp presented Man Ray with an object described as a “wax impression of what looked like a woman’s vulva.”⁽⁴⁸⁾ Could this be a hint, or subliminal reference to the body in Étant donnés (or the Dahlia)?⁽⁴⁹⁾

Did this object imply something more than a simple shared interest in eroticism in the form of a farewell gift? With Duchamp’s love of puns and double meanings, one wonders if a linkage to Étant donnés and/or the Black Dahlia continued with the verbal/visual play in another erotic object,Wedge of Chastity. A wedding gift to his wife Alexina (Teeny) Sattler, Duchamp inscribed the object with the phrase, “Pour Teeny 16. Jan. 1954.” The spoken phrase, “Pour Teeny,” in English carries an additional meaning; “poor teeny,” as in the poor starlet who could not fulfil the “love operation” because of her “Wedge of Chastity.” Is it surprising that this “wedge” seems to fit snugly into a kind of “gash?” Or that January 16^thwas also the day after the murder of Elizabeth Short, the first day the headlines appeared in New York City papers?

IV.

click to enlarge

Figure 24
Marcel Duchamp,
The Bride Stripped Bare
by Her Bachelors Even [a.k.a.
The Green Box], 1934

Similar to Étant donnés, the Black Dahlia case perplexed investigators, and “facts” were constantly being undermined by the introduction of contradictory evidence. These inconclusive theories were played out, among other places, in newspaper headlines that emphasized the “gender indeterminacy” of the suspect. Authorities, first suspecting a man, reversed their hypothesis. The press ran headlines such as “Woman Now Sought In Black Dahlia Killing.”⁽⁵⁰⁾ Ironically, the case’s most plausible suspect is now a female impersonator―how Duchampian.⁽⁵¹⁾Quotes from detectives appeared in the papers as well, such as a statement from Detective Harry Hansen who regrettably admitted, “No lead had any conclusion, once we’d find something, it seemed to disappear in front of our eyes. Following any of those leads was like going down one-way streets with dead-ends.”⁽⁵²⁾ When a suitcase of the victim’s belongings turned up, it was filled with all kinds of objects―beauty supplies, photographs of men she had known, letters, etc. In a stunningly similar manner to Duchamp’s Box in a Valise, or better yet Green box, the suitcase’s contents guided detectives in their investigation much as the Green Box serves as a “guide” to the Large Glass. (Fig. 24)
In this sense, the Black Dahlia/ Étant donnés comparison can be viewed as the complicated performance of what criminologists term a “copycat” crime, played out within the sphere of art. Elizabeth Short’s life represents Duchamp’s pre-existing tale within the context of a specific time and place. Yet Étant donnés, continuing Duchamp’s penchant for criminal play, becomes a kind of “copycat” crime by re-using a specifically criminal mode of appropriation, and possibly specific details from this crime, as a “readymade” for certain features of his installation. The cyclical indeterminacy of “who copied who” once more suggests the “hinge,” represented this time by the Dahlia murder, which negotiates between the narrative of the Large Glass and Étant donnés (it is amusing as well that the linguistic symbol for Lyotard’s hinge has at its center a slash that “severs” the “and/or” indeterminate). Thus, Duchamp’s narrative and/or the life of Elizabeth Short―the Dahlia murder and/or Étant donnés.
Unlike the Large Glass, however, which presented cryptic visual versions of erotic narratives, Duchamp in Étant donnés, shocked his art audience by performing a spectral flip of his criminal modus operandi. What was, up to this point in his career hidden, was suddenly blatantly revealed.⁽⁵³⁾ As detective Jess Haskins said of the Dahlia murder, “It was not unusual―the ‘display idea’ as part of a sex crime…Hiding it had been the least of the perpetrator’s concerns.”⁽⁵⁴⁾ Duchamp, it is well known, claimed that eroticism was “a way to bring out in the daylight the things that are constantly hidden….because of social rules.”⁽⁵⁵⁾Thus, the earlier use of criminal and erotic subjects and actions emphasized the elusive absence of the living artist and cryptic narratives. Conversely, Étant donnés presents a hypervisible, blatant operation through another kind of artistic absence, first by, as he said, “going underground” during the secret and elusive production of Étant donnés, then through his literal absence in death.⁽⁵⁶⁾ In this role reversal, Duchamp exposes the crime and hides himself, like a serial killer, whose “psychosexual nexus is terra incognita.”⁽⁵⁷⁾
As in many famous unsolved murders, Elizabeth Short’s body was not simply dumped in a lot; it was deliberately arranged.⁽⁵⁸⁾ Her two halves were placed to repeat the natural position of the body several hours after the actual crime occurred. This gave the crime scene what detectives characterized as a “sacred setting,” implying that messages or meanings could be yielded by its purposeful display.⁽⁵⁹⁾ Duchamp also stresses his intentional positioning and display of the body in Étant donnés, controlling among other things our line of vision. As his title implies, we are presented with certain “evidence” from which to attempt to solve this artwork and/or crime.⁽⁶⁰⁾ The title, presented in the format of a mathematical equation, ironically suggests that this piece can be “solved” through a logistical program. “Given” it implies, “the waterfall, the illuminated gas, and whatever else you can see.” Here the spectral flip appears to hide the conceptual and offer an overtly constructed physical art environment.⁽⁶¹⁾ Moreover, Duchamp’s strategic placement of Étant donnés at the far rear of the Arensberg room in the Philadelphia Museum of Art creates two further paradoxes. One, it is literally “hidden” in a dark retreat at the back of the “display,” yet shockingly reveals itself within the darkness when the viewer looks through the peepholes. Second, the entire Arensberg room creates an exhibition narrative based on a body of work, that ends with a literal body. The post-Stirnerite works in the brightly lit outside gallery hide the physical mark and presence of their creator and engage us through the conceptual and extra-dimensional. The dark hidden room of Étant donnés offers us the physical, both as literal body and as an attempt in understanding based on the empirical act of seeing.

click to enlarge

Figure 25
Marcel Duchamp, epitaph
inscribed on Duchamp’s
grave stone, 1968

In death, Duchamp left a corpus and a corpse. His permanent absence was certainly his ultimate act of elusion. As in the Black Dahlia murder, the death of the “suspect” stamps Étant donnés permanently “open and unsolved.” We can never “break the case” of Marcel Duchamp (although we can break his works of art). In denying us solutions, Duchamp also denies us from closing the book on his work; its inconclusive nature leaves it inevitably open and alive. Thus, by defying solution, perhaps he and his work even defy death. “Besides,” his self-written epitaph reads, “it’s only the others that die.”⁽⁶²⁾ (Fig. 25) This, it seems, is Duchamp’s only truth.

Notes

1. G. Bataille,The Trial of Gilles de Rais, trans. Richard Robinson (Los Angeles,1991) 13. I was inspired to begin this essay with these words by Stuart Swezey, who included Bataille’s statement in his preface to John Gilmore’s book, Severed:The True Story of the Black Dahlia Murder, Los Angeles, 1994.

2. For a full account of this tragedy, see J. Gilmore, Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia Murder (Los Angeles, 1994).

3. F. M. Naumann,“Marcel Duchamp: A Reconciliation of Opposites”, Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century, ed. R. Kuenzli and F. M. Naumann (Cambridge,Massachusetts, 1989) 29.

4. M. Stirner, The Ego and Its Own (New York, 1907) 361. Duchamp himself stated that his reading of Stirner “marked his complete liberation.” A. Antliff, “Anarchy, Politics, and Dada”, In Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York (Whitney Museum, 1996) 212.

5. A. Jones, “Eros, That’s Life or the Baroness’ Penis”, In Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York (Whitney Museum, 1996) 239.

6. Antliff makes the connection between Duchamp’s adoption of Stirner’s philosophy and a revolt against what he calls “the rules ‘art’ imposed on the individual.” Antliff, op. cit., p. 213.

7. W. Hopps and A. d’Harnoncourt, Etant Donnés: 1 la chute d’eau 2 le gaz d’éclairage: Reflections on a New Work by Marcel Duchamp, Philadelphia Museum of Art Bulletin (second reprint) Volume LXIV, Numbers 299 and 300, (April-September 1969, Philadelphia, 1987) 37.

8. In this sense, I disagree with Antliff’s characterization of the American readymades.He states, “Here Duchamp undermined the metaphysical aesthetics and socially imposed conventions that defined ‘art,’ replacing painting and sculpture with mass-produced objects devoid of aesthetic deliberation and any trace of the creative process.” In my opinion, the readymades are neither devoid of aesthetic deliberation nor lacking any trace of the creative process. What the readymades lack are physical traces (visually recognizable) of creation. Instead, the evidence of a creative process is solely conceptual. Antliff, op. cit., p. 213.

9. P. Cabanne,Entretiens avec Marcel Duchamp (Paris, 1967) 165, trans. D. Judovitz, “Rendezvous with Marcel Duchamp: Given”, Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century, ed. R.E. Kuenzli and F. M. Naumann (Cambridge, Mass, 1989) 197.

10. As Steven Levine pointed out during the discussion of this paper at the Symposium for the History of Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, imitation could certainly be considered “criminal” as well. As early as Antiquity, the deceitful nature of artistic imitation led Plato to exclude it from his ideal Republic.

11. As Rhonda Shearer points out, it is possible that these objects were not appropriated exactly as they were “found” by Duchamp. Manufacturer catalogs contemporary to the readymades do not contain illustrations that directly match some of Duchamp’s objects. Thus, she suggests the artist may have altered them slightly to further confuse their “origin.” In L. Cambi, “Did Duchamp Deceive Us?”, Art News, v 98 (February 1999) 98-102. Moreover, we know from photographs and remarks by Man Ray that Duchamp’s studio was, for the most part, bare. This also suggests that the artist wished to confuse any attempts to “trace” the source material or influences of his work.

12. It could be argued that Duchamp’s “outlaw” status began even earlier, when he submitted his Nude Descending the Staircase to the 1913 Armory exhibition.

13. Judovitz first suggested that Duchamp possessed criminal qualities in her discussions of Tzank Check and Wanted in Chapter 4 of Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit. Her interpretation and discussion of criminality, however, rests solely on the idea of counterfeiting and fake transactions. D. Judovitz, Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit (Berkeley, 1995) 167-78. This paper suggests that these are but two of many examples within Duchamp’s artistic career in which he looked to criminality as a means of reconciling his philosophical and aesthetic/non-aesthetic programs. Moreover, Duchamp’s Wanted is included here to emphasize, through his multiple aliases and criminal image, the connection between criminality and elusion (absence).

14. J. A. Ramirez, Duchamp: Love and Death, Even (London, 1998) 199.

15. The most complete investigation of the nude body in Etant donnés, its influences, and location within a history of nudes in the landscape is Antonio Juan Ramirez’s discussion in his book Duchamp: Love and Death, Even. In an attempt to separate fact from hearsay, Ramirez asks an important question: “What kind of things might Duchamp have seen or read; with which intellectual wave and artistic movement was he associated at any given moment?” ibid., p. 12. Ramirez’s discussion focuses, for the most part, on art historical sources beginning as early as the end of the 15^th century and ending with the surrealist work of Hans Bellmer and others. While he does briefly mention that popular photographs of pornographic subjects were more important than art historical images of the nude, his discussion of this material is brief, and indirect. Rather than answering his own question in relation to this material, Ramirez offers visually similar images but fails to contextualize them and discuss the direct avenues through which Duchamp may have seen or obtained them. Therefore, re-asking Ramirez’s question, I offer the Black Dahlia as a more convincing non-art historical influence.

16. A “seemingly dead female body” in A. Jones. Postmodernism and the Engendering of Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge, 1994) 192 and a “mutilated woman” in Ramirez, op.cit., p. 234.

17. This is discussed, among others, by J. A. Ramirez, D. Judovitz, and A. Jones.

18. As Gilmore explains, soldiers began to call Elizabeth Short by this name as a re-worked version of a recent film entitled “The Blue Dahlia.” The “Black Dahlia” quickly became a nickname that soldiers would use in their queries as to whether she had been spotted somewhere on the streets each day. Gilmore, op. cit., p.56.

19. Elizabeth Short’s body had been drained of blood prior to being dumped in the lot, explainingwhy it appeared “white as a lily.” ibid., p. 5.

20. A. Schwartz,Man Ray: The Rigour of the Imagination (New York, 1977) 188.

21. Hoppsand d’Harnoncourt, op. cit., p. 32.

22. D. Hopkins,“Men Before the Mirror: Duchamp, Man Ray and Masculinity”, Art History,v 21 (September 1998)s 317.

23. Le Recit de Lydie, Rrosopopees 19-20 March 1989: 489.

24. Jones, Postmodernism and.., op. cit., p. 201.

25. Gilmore,op. cit., p. 124.

26. L.D. Steefel, Jr., The Position of Duchamp’s Glass in the Development of His Art (New York, 1977) 167.

27. This suggests a more convincing date for the first drawing as 1947 rather than 1945. If Duchamp had seen the photographs of the Black Dahlia, then perhaps they might explain an origin for the pose of the figure, usually referred to as Marie Martins. In addition, the last number of the date inscribed on this drawing, in my opinion, looks much more like a “7” than a “5.” Calvin Tomkins also identifies the date of this drawing as 1947. C. Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (New York, 1996) 357.

28. Detective Brown, speaking about the letters found in her suitcase. Gilmore, op. cit., p.

29. “Mother of Hero Doubts Marriage to Short Girl”, Los Angeles Times 19 Jan. 1947: 3.

30.Daily News, New York, 18 Jan. 1947: 1,3.

31. ibid.

32. See J.F. Lyotard, Duchamp’s TRANS/formers, Venice, CA, 1990, pp. 58-61, and D. Judovitz. Unpacking Duchamp, op. cit., p. 215.

33. For a detailed discussion of infra-mince, see M. Nesbit “Last Words: (Rilke, Wittgenstein) (Duchamp)”, Art History 21 (December 1998): 547. There are other striking similarities between the images of the Black Dahlia crime scene and Duchamp’s studies for Etant donnés, especially a drawing from 1959 in which the Large Glass is juxtaposed with a landscape that includes telephone poles. These appear in the same area as some of the telephone poles in several crime scene photographs. Moreover, the Occulist Witnesses in Duchamp’s drawing occupy the same position as the policemen and detectives in the crime scene photographs.

34. O. Paz, Marcel Duchamp, New York, 1978, p. 122.

35. A. Jones, “Eros..”, op. cit., p. 240.

36. From January 18^th, 1947 through early February the New York Daily News ran three front-page stories, and fourteen other articles that appeared somewhere on the first five pages of the newspaper (most on them on page three).

37. See for example Ramirez, who claims that these “aspects (photographs), along with the adventures shared by the two friends suggests (as we shall see) Man Ray’s considerable influence on Duchamp.” Ramirez, op. cit., p. 221.

38. Elizabeth Short is known to have frequented the following locales: Four Star Grill, Florentine Gardens, The Rhapsody, the Dugout, the Loyal Café, and the Streets of Paris. Moreover, in an email correspondence, John Gilmore informed me that there was a strong possibility that Man Ray may have known the Black Dahlia, or at least met her.

39. For a summary see A. Schwartz, Man Ray, p.187-190. The articles in the

Los Angeles Times and the Examiner, for example, discuss the sado-masochistic aspects of the crime.

40. In John Gilmore’s book, Detective Brown is quoted in the autopsy room as saying, “There are already a thousand photographs… You can see most of what’s been done…..” Gilmore, op. cit., p. 126.

41. M. Ray, Self Portrait: Man Ray, Boston, 1988, p. 291.

42. For a summary of Duchamp’s participation in this event, as well as a chronology of his California experiences, see B. Clearwater, West Coast Duchamp (Miami, 1991).

43. Tomkins, op. cit., p.370.

44. Cabanne, op. cit., p.165.

45. “Girl Victim of Sex Fiend Found Slain”, Los Angeles Times, Thursday, 16 Jan. 1947: 2. The interview with Hopps is quoted from Tomkins, op. cit., p.423.

46. Tomkins, op. cit., p. 366.

47. M. Ray, op. cit., p. 295

48. Tomkins, op. cit., p. 370.

49. To my knowledge, no one has ever made a cast of the female groin region of the body in Etant donnés. It could be possible that Female Fig Leaf is directly linked to Etant donnés in this way. 50. “Woman Now Sought in Black Dahlia Killing”, New York Daily News 21 Jan. 1949:5.

51. See Gilmore, Chapter 17.

52. ibid., p. 173.

53. Some scholars were disappointed because this seemed to point to a return to representation that negated Duchamp’s “progress” toward conceptual art.

54. Gilmore, op. cit., p.8.

55. N. Baldwin, Man Ray: American Artist (New York, 1988) 276.

56. Duchamp told Cage that having as second studio “was a way of going underground”, J. Masheck, Marcel Duchamp in Perspective (Englewood Cliffs, N.J, 1975) 155.

57. S. Swezey, Preface, in Gilmore, op. cit., p. iii.

58. ibid., p.12.

59. ibid., p.9.

60. Interestingly, a 1945 work sometimes thought to be the earliest model for the nude body was sent to forensics and FBI specialists to test and confirm the material as human semen. Ramirez, op. cit., p. 233. How interesting to think that Duchamp, in an erotic act, used the chance design of his ejaculated semen on a piece of paper as a possible “origin” for a body in Etant donnés.

61. The physical construction of Etant donnés is emphasized by its context in the museum, and also by the fact that it was posthumously re-constructed by others, “put together” again, so to speak.

62. This is Duchamp’s self-written epitaph.

Figs. 1-10, 13, 15-16, 18-25 © 2005 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. All rights reserved.

A dada creation of Teste, not the least chimeric, was to want to preserve art – Ars – purely by eradicating illusions about the artist and the creator”
Paul Valéry
(For a portrait of Monsieur Teste)

A Provisional Portrait

He was courteous, articulate, cultivated. At least, one would imagine so. He practiced understatement, liked humor as well as irony. He kept himself at a distance, always in the wings, and would not provide his opinion. On the edge of the circus of the vanities, here was the opposite of a man of letters, of a student of the mind.

The hell raisers of modern art made him the father of the revolution which redefined taste in the 20th century, without really knowing how he was influenced by Alphonse Allais and how similar he was to Ravachol or Kropotkine.

The fact is that this discreet, elegant man, practicing the subtle art of conversation instigated change. He was invited, celebrated in the most elegant circles, and people didn’t pay much attention to the crowd of roustabouts who, following him, invited themselves to the party.

After the patrons, came the institutions. In February 1977, for its opening, the Centre Georges Pompidou chose to celebrate him. This was a watershed event⁽¹⁾.It posed the question of the century: What is art? – And it chose to answer by brushing aside the heroes that one expected to find, Matisse or Picasso⁽²⁾. With Duchamp, the Minister of Culture had to have faith, with twenty-five

With Duchamp, the Minister of Culture had to have faith, with twenty-five years still to go before the end of the millennium, to favor an art that he believed was liberal, anarchic, democratic, an art for all and made by all, and which answered therefore to the aims of an enlightened State which had known only to suffer an existing elite. Every man is an artist. Every gesture is a work of art. Every work of art can be anything at all.
The fact is that legions of slackers, hearing of artists out there without an oeuvre, without talent or profession, identified themselves with Duchamp, more or less. However, in their actions, their writings, their manifestations, the simplicity turned into misery; the subtlety, a heaviness; intelligence became stupidity; irony, slowness; allusion, crudeness, and finally the meticulous and mercurial method of “le marchand du sel” [Duchamp pseudonym] gave way to a plethora of productions by artists by the grosse, without spirit and without style.
Duchamp remained a silent witness to this phenomenon. He, who had carried on so little, written so little, and who had never taken credit for the result, with an amused smile, allowed the dream world of an avant-garde to become the palladium of fin de siècle societies.
There had been, without a doubt, a mistake about someone.
An Aristocratic Failure^*
What was it exactly about the nihilism of Marcel Duchamp? What was the sense in his renouncing painting? By way of what did this transformation of values, this Nietzschian enterprise to which he attached himself, have some of the characteristics of the tabula rasa of the avant-garde at the beginning of the century?
By way of nothing, perhaps. The last of the decadents became, against his will, the first of the moderns.

* * *

Hannah Arendt saw and described that which in the first decade of the century bound modernity with totalitarianism. Contemporary artists during the First World War for the most part shared in “the desire, she said ‘to lose oneself’ and a violent disgust for all existing criterion, for all established powers. […] Hitler and those who were failures in life weren’t the only ones to thank God on their knees when the mobilization swept Europe in 1914.⁽³⁾” The elite also dreamed of coming to terms with a world it considered corrupt. The war would be a purification for all, the tabula rasa of values which enabled belief in a whole new humanity. An entry into nihilism, for sure, was this rejection of a society saturated with ideology and bourgeois morality: “Well before a Nazi intellectual announced, ‘When I hear the world culture, I draw my gun,’ the poets had proclaimed their disgust for this ‘cultural filth’ and poetically invited ‘Barbarians, Scythes, Negroes, Indians, Oh! All of you, to the stampede.’⁽⁴⁾

” This rage to destroy what civilization had produced as more refined, more subtle, more intelligent, “The Golden Age of Security” according to Stefan Zweig, but also to destroy this world which celebrated, in 1900, the triumph of scientific progress and humanitarian socialism, was shared by artists and intellectuals as well as terrorists from all sides, from the Nazis to the Bolsheviks. In the cafés of Zurich, Huelsenbeck and Tristan Tzara were mixing with, at neighboring tables, Lenin and the future trigger-happy political commissioners.

* * *

Still more recently, Enzensberger recalled some facts that France, sole remaining nation managing the arts in Europe, continues to ignore. “From Paris to Saint Petersburg, the fin de siècle intelligentsia flirted with terror. The premier expressionists called [it] the war of their wishes, just like the futurists […]. In large countries, the cult of violence and the ‘nostalgia for mud’ in favor of industrializing the culture of the masses, became an integral part of heritage. Because the notion of the avant-garde took an unfortunate turn, its first supporters would never have imagined...⁽⁵⁾”

Let’s remember above all from Hannah Arendt the term “failures.” From Hitler, the regrettable candidate at the Academy of Beaux-arts in Vienna, to all those mediocre artists, poets and philosophers cultivating their resentment, failures hastened the twilight of culture.

Duchamp also, in a sense, was a “failure.” The feeling of failure – the idea of being a loser, a pariah, an outcast, a Sonderling or whatever leads a person to finding out at the age of fifteen or sixteen that they’re not in the “in” crowd – was most vivid. There was the social failure of being a notary’s son, an offspring of small-town bourgeoisie in a province that was already looked down upon on the eve of the First World War. There was the professional failure of his entrance examinations to the Ècole des Beaux-arts in 1905, which drove back the spirits of the young artist. There was the failure of the Salon des Indépendants in 1912, when his work was refused. So many wounds to narcissism.
But the most vivid failure remained family-related, when we see his ambition of becoming an artist thwarted by his own brothers, more talented than he. Jacques Villon was a good, sensitive painter and, more than that, an extraordinary engraver. Duchamp-Villon was a wonderful sculptor who, if he hadn’t been killed in the war, would have become one of the greatest artists of the century. Marcel, the youngest, was a menial, underpaid artist. How could he make a name for himself when his name was already taken?
Duchamp would be able in fact to serve as a perfect example to illustrate the argument, all the rage in the United States actually, that the youngest child is born to rebel. Put forth by Frank J. Sulloway, this argument tends to demonstrate on the basis of behaviors that the fate of great creators and reformers of society is dictated within the family dynamic by their birth order. While first borns identify in general with power and authority and have conservative personalities devoted to keeping their prerogative and resisting radical innovations, children born last weave a plan for turning the status quo upside down and often develop revolutionary personalities. “From this rank emerge the great explorers, the iconoclasts, and the heretics...⁽⁶⁾”

In open rivalry with his older brothers, Duchamp would have been the prototype of the last born who, in order to dig his ecological niche, had the only alternative of radically upsetting the values advocated by his environment.

* * *

Even so, nothing about him was known to be resentful. Nothing more remote than the idea, common to intellectuals of the time, that individuals had to blend in with the masses to fulfill their destiny. Nothing about him would have been more disagreeable to consider than this comradeship in action of the masses which proposed to fell with violence the society it repulsed.
It was therefore by the love of irony and the daily practice of failing that he responded with his creative powerlessness. The homo ludens against the homo faber.
An accident of life, this feeling of being a failure – and that which was the result of it, his lofty distance from the inner circle – was leading him on the other hand to take note, at the start of the century, of a phenomenon which was elevating the universal. Few onlookers were yet alarmed by the situation, one without precedent in the venerable system of the beaux-arts. And Duchamp was one of the rare to acutely grasp that which others were refusing to admit: art – art such as we knew it, the art of painting, with its rules, techniques, and enslavement to style and schools, art with its status, social recognition, academies, salons, glory – had no reason to exist any longer. Art, an invention of the XVth century, had had its day…
What then had it meant “to succeed”? The previous generation had been able to believe in brilliant careers on the perimeter of respectable society. The studio of the painter who had “arrived” was part of the fashionable scene. But the fin de siècle artist was hardly more well-off than the colorful figure of the previous decades, uneducated, filthy, “stupid like a painter…”
Duchamp’s refusal never to let himself be seduced by the security of normal life and his scorn for the respectability and honors which accompanied this life were therefore sincere and very similar to the anarchic despair experienced by political explorers, by outcasts like Hitler. Without a doubt he didn’t escape, no more than any other, from an infantile proclivity for provocation. From the Indépendants to the Armory Show, he had not a few of these acts which recalled the violence of the time. His actual approach — so profound and so stubborn that it would define itself in the Large Glass, in the ready-mades, and later in Étant donnéswas of a wholly different nature. It was a matter less of shocking the bourgeoisie and destroying their culture than engaging himself in an intellectual adventure without precedent.
Anarchists, Dadaists, Surrealists and other dynamos of society: Duchamp was decidedly not of this group. Rather, his camp was that of the deserters. His departure for New York, at the beginning of the war, resembles Descartes’ departure for Amsterdam. To a cauldron of reflection, of daydreaming, far from the masses. Polite but reserved: he wasn’t there for anyone.
Max Stirner⁽⁷⁾ , therefore, rather than Nietzsche or Sorel. The idea of the unique

pupil in advance of the obsession. Nothing owed to anybody and nothing repeating itself. There wasn’t any need of “getting lost” because, in the world which he had entered, there was already nothing else to lose. He was the first to understand that he belonged to a world “without art,” in the same way one speaks of a world “without history.” When he began his work, the death of art had taken place. In this respect, Duchamp is a survivor, not a precursor. He wasn’t preparing for the flood, he was exposing the conditions for survival.

From Decadence to Dandyism

The elegance of a dandy instead of the feigned untidiness of an anarchist. The lack of distinguishing adornments. To pass unnoticed was the distinction. This avoided the worst blows as well as applause. It was an attraction to the strict, the rigorous, the stripped down – “austere” was the key word for Duchamp’s aesthetic, just the right tone in English flannel and tweed, enveloped in the wreath of a good cigar.
The distance he put between himself and his press was always very British. Every one of his talks, interviews, and writings was subject to: “Never explain, never complain.” There was no theory to justify himself, no excuse to excuse himself. Such reserve was immediately sufficient to disconcert a questioner, to discourage the curious, to confuse the scholarly.
The style of this period was also, among the enlightened ones in London, Vienna, and Brussels, about American functionality. Duchamp’s admiration for the quality of plumbing in New York was right up the alley of Adolf Loos; everything, like not tolerating the rancid smells of turpentine trailing about in the studios, was in accord with the architect of theMichaelsplatz, with his disgust for the pastry shops in Ringstraße. (The taste for industrial modernity, for every last technical comfort in improving a home, was already, right away, a trait of the decadent such as des Esseintes.) Nothing “dadaist” in any case, rather an exquisite education, confronting the trivialities of the time.

* * *

No, his admiration had gone instead, one could say, to Mallarmé, Laforgue, Jarry, Alphonse Allais. From his direct elders. From “countries” of Norman descent also, in that this concerned the last two. A nihilism well tempered. The line of the symbolist comet. It would be convenient to add, come to mention it, Huysmans – and Remy of Gourmont, another Norman – whom we think about very little.

From des Esseintes to the “Breather”

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10. Heinrich Hoffmann,
Marcel Duchamp, 1912
Is it possible that Hitler and Duchamp crossed paths in Munich, in the smoky cabarets of Schwabing or in the Festsaal of the Hofbrauhaus? It’s slightly possible. When Apollinaire wanted a portrait of Duchamp to illustrate Les Peintres cubistes, Duchamp chose Heinrich Hoffmann, the #1 photographer of Munich who had come to immortalize the work of von Stuck and of Hildebrandt, ill.10. This is
the same Hoffman who, eleven years later, would become Hitler’s personal photographer⁽⁴⁹⁾.
The photographs that he made of Duchamp, in the pose of a speaker with his mouth shut, were, it’s been said, influenced by Erik Jan Hanussen, the famous European sage, seer, and astrologer, who would have taught Duchamp the art of body language⁽⁵⁰⁾.

* * *

This reference takes us back to the ambiguous capital in which avant-garde artists and political adventurers plunged indiscriminately. In 1912, Munich had in effect become the Haupstadt, the European capital of occultism⁽⁵¹⁾. The Gesellschaft für Psychologie, established by the official Baron
von Prell and the doctor von Schrenck-Notzing, was then in full swing and multiplying its exchanges with the spiritual underworlds in England, Italy and France. Nor did the heart of the modernist scene in Munich pass unnoticed by Stefan George’s circle. Moreover, in the plastic domain, along with vson Stuck and Marées, who carried the symbolist generation, one of the most celebrated painters in Munich was Gabriel von Max who painted portraits of sleepwalkers and spirits. His brother, photographer Henrich von Max, took photos of mediums in trance that Gabriel then used in his tableaus. Here, we notice a coincidence with the use of auras and halos which Duchamp tried his hand in with, for example, Portrait de Dumouchel. In 1907, the annual meeting of the Theosophical Society met in Munich and, between 1909 and 1913, the Mysteries of Rudolf Steiner were regularly played there. The great anthropology master⁽⁵²⁾, who in 1913 broke away to distinguish himself from the theosophy of Blavatsky, also promoted, during these years, conferences which were assiduously
attended by Klee, Kandinsky, Jawlensky, Gabriele Münter and Marianna van Werefkin. Did Duchamp listen in? If this disciple was reading so attentively, to the point where he made particular notes in Du spirituel dans l’art, wouldn’t he have been tempted to listen to the master? Did he go to see the Alchemy museum, in the future Deutsches Museum, with its cornues threaded one into the other like the sieves of the Large Glass? Without a doubt, and much more. It was in Munich in any case that he discovered the theme of his Grand Oeuvre and it was in a frenzy that he multiplied his approaches which would one day turn into the Large Glass : Virgin (No. 1), Virgin (No. 2), Mécanique de la Pudeur, Pudeur mécanique, Passage of the Virgin to the Bride, Bride.
* * *
In search of a non-retinal art, capable of taking into account the invisible and its manifestations, Duchamp very naturally gravitated towards these “seekers” and found photography to be the new
medium which would permit him to materialize these new phenomena. In 1922, on Christmas Day, in the Brevoort hotel in New York, he wrote to his brother Jacques Villon: “I know a photographer here who takes photos of the ectoplasm around a male medium – I had promised to help him in one of
the seances and then got lazy but it would have amused me a lot.”⁽⁵³⁾”
“Metarealism” had never really stopped fascinating the man who, in the “Pistons de courant d’Air,” had always meant to photograph ectoplasm.
It was this direction that I undertook to define in Duchamp et la photographie⁽⁵⁴⁾.
But the work, which appeared in 1977, had come too early. Enthusiasm for photography had not yet been born. Above all, in the Parisian climate, one wasn’t disposed to admit that occultism, theosophy and spirituality had fed the imaginations of modern painters more than Lenin’s work or the treatises of Rood or Chevreul. It would have to wait twenty-eight years and through a series of exhibitions that would begin in Los Angeles with The Spiritual in Art⁽⁵⁵⁾and culminate in Frankfurt with Okkultismus und Avant Garde⁽⁵⁶⁾in order to see this approach not only validated, but triumphing over others.
Much since then has appeared which reveals the immense influence of the irrational at the turn of the century on the birth of the avant-garde⁽⁵⁷⁾.

Two unpublished sources

A little more than twenty years ago, in 1977, I attempted to present the fertile ground of this vein without taking much risk and committing myself to it. To establish the approach of the avant-garde from its curiosity with the occult instead of its solidarity with the proletariat, this would have been too much of a shock for the doxaof modernism.

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11. The cover of the book by
Louis Farigoule, La Vision
extra-rétinienne et le sens
paroptique, 1921