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

click to enlarge

Figure. 1
Marcel Duchamp, The Green
Box, 1934

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

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

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

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

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

 
click images to enlarge

• 
• 

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

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

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

click to enlarge

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

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

Conditions of a language:

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

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

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

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

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

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

click to enlarge

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

 

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

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

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

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

Senses:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Given an object in chocolate.

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

2^nd its apparition.

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

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

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

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

click to enlarge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

click images to enlarge

• 
  Figure. 7a
• 
  Figure. 7b

• 
  Figure. 7c
• 
  Figure. 7d

Marcel Duchamp, Rotary Demisphere, 1925

 

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

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

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

 

---

Notes

Figs. 1~7

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

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

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

Introduction

click to enlarge

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

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

click to enlarge

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

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

click images to enlarge

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

click images to enlarge

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

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

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

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

Parsing the Oeuvre

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

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

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

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

Symbolic Logic and Visualizing Concept in the Work of Marcel Duchamp

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

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Figure 8

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

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Figure 9

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

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Figure 10

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

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Figure 11

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

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Figure 12

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

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

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

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

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

Le Penseur Multi-Dimensionnelle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Immersive Experience and Concept Visualization

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

 

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

 

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Refrences

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Figure1 Ludwig Wittgenstein
(1889-1951)

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

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

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Diagram 1
 

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

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

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• 
  Diagram 2
• 
  Diagram 3

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

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• 
  Diagram 4
• 
  Diagram 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or of this early claim in The Blue Book:

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

Or from remark 89 of the Investigations:

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

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Figure 3
Marcel Duchamp, Trébuchet, 1917/1964

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And, for those whose college biology is receding:

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

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

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

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

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

And the translation:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Figure 8
Marcel Duchamp, Tu m’, 1918

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Figure 9
The Medieval war machine

Figure 10
The cucking stool

Figure 11
The ducking stool

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

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

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

Two of Wittgenstein’s students wrote that:

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

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

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

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

 

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Figure 13
Original version in Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus

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

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

And in his discussion of ethics:

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

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

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

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Figure 14
Photograph of Duchamp playing chess,
circa 1930s

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Notes

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

See also PI: 164:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And:

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

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

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

Painting is dead. When I first came upon this statement, I embraced it as a challenge. Challenge and risk taking are what fosters the creative evolution. Painting is far from dead, but if it is to continue to be a vital component in the arts, if it is to continue to evolve, then painting must be taken to new dimensions. I have taken this as literally as possible in my three-dimensional relief paintings, the development of which are integrally connected to two-dimensional contour and illusionistic painting devices.

Relief has been a part of image making since humans began to make images, with examples found as early as the Paleolithic era. Traditionally it has been recognized as a form of sculpture, however the concept of relief is primarily pictorial because relief, like painting or drawing, is founded on the emergence of an image from a flat surface. Contemporary painters have made use of this attribute by utilizing modes of relief in their paintings, adding bulges or layered materials for actual depth. The inclusion of the third dimension by modern artists has led to new interpretations of relief in painting, relaxing the definition of relief as a purely sculptural term.

Expanding on this idea, I have developed a way to release painting from the physical frame. I have created a unique relief painting support made of polystyrene covered in a soft cotton ground. The individually constructed and shaped forms interconnect, somewhat like a relief puzzle. The connections create an implied line consistent with the edges of the shapes in the original two-dimensional contour design. Through saturated, layered color, the illusions used to create a sense of depth in two-dimensional painting are then used on the forms. These covered and painted forms are sometimes further enhanced through the application of flock to the surface. By being removed from a physical frame, these intings, no longer contained, are allowed to visually expand into space extending across walls as well as outward toward the viewer. The pieces created in this manner can be seen below or at www.isu.edu/art. Scroll down to the Davis Gallery and click on ‘Painting in Three Dimensions by Sarah Krank.

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Figure 1
Marcel Duchamp,
Nude Descending
a Staircase,
No. 2, 1912

It seemed natural to offer this advancement to the Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (Fig. 1) by Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp’s Nude had been created to show the dynamic motion of a young lady as she descended the stairs, but the painting remained on a flat surface, the woman described in mostly hard, angular lines. I wanted to take the figure and allow her to emerge as a three-dimensional woman while keeping the intensity and power of her movements. I wanted to combine those hard, angular lines with the organic feel that Duchamp only suggests. To keep the feeling of the force of her body as she moved downward, I needed her to be big–nearly nine feet tall.

I named her Nude Redescending a Staircase (Fig.2). She begins at a physical distance, the forms in the upper left corner of the work extending only about an inch off the surface. Then, as she descends (or redescends) she gradually increases into the viewers space coming forward a full 22 inches. The oblique angles allow her to have an abstracted actual figure with illusions of light moving and playing across her form. Each individual piece is slightly rounded. Even the hardest edges have a gentleness about them thanks to the cotton ground.

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• 
• 
• 

Figure 2

Sarah C. Krank, Nude Redescending a Staircase

I wanted to honor Duchamp’s design as well as the fury it created, so I stayed as true to his color choices as possible. I created a canvas back drop for the nude so that the golden and green hues could continue to stand out against the dark background. The relief pieces are attached to a wooden form cut to resemble the stairs in the original painting.
This is hung over the canvas and the paint on the back drop continues over this support. Last, additions of small pieces of old wooden shingles were added to the surface in homage to the suggestion that the Duchamp work looked like an explosion in a shingle factory.

The tradition of incorporating the knowledge of other artists by referencing their work in your own style is invaluable. Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending is an enduring landmark, a masterpiece. To have the opportunity to stand on the shoulders of this giant of the art world has enabled me to transcend the visual plane of this painting into three dimensions and begin to incorporate Duchamp’s geometry into my organic world.

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• 
• 

Figure 3

Sarah C. Krank, Constructed Relief Painting IV – Iris

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• 
• 

Figure 4

Sarah C. Krank, Constructed Relief Painting III – Nude

Figure 5
Sarah C. Krank, Constructed Relief Painting I – Montana

 

Fig(s). 1 ©2005 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. All rights reserved.

Among the 1987 Centennial and Happy Birthday Marcel events in Philadelphia was a display of Duchamp’s works at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, many of which were ready-mades.

They were in the long gallery leading toward the Arensberg Collection. There were many interesting labels and citations to read. Near the 1916 Comb inscribed with the wonderfully cryptic message: “3 or 4 drops of height have nothing to do with savagery” was Duchamp’s proud comment about its durability: “During 48 years it has kept the characteristics of a true ready made; no beauty,
no ugliness, nothing particularly esthetic about it….”

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Figure 1
Label explaining
lost ready-made

As I continued my slow and thoughtful walk, reading as I went, I saw a little etching done in 1959 entitled Tire a quatre epingles [Pulled at 4 Corners] or “Dressed to the Nines.” The museum’s label mentioned that it was the title he’d given a chimney ventilator, a 1915 ready-made that was lost! (Fig. 1)

“Lost?” I said to myself; “I wonder if anyone is looking for it and if it can be found.” Upon arriving home, I decided to keep an eye open for it. I discussed it with a friend who thought he’d seen it in the corner of the restaurant kitchen where he was working as a pastry chef. I fumbled around in my attic and basement, thinking it just might turn up.

After checking the Yellow Pages under R, M, .D, and V, I decided that this was a long-term project and let it slip out of mind for a while, thinking that one day it would emerge on its own accord.

Several years later I stopped into Niece’s Lumberyard in Lambertville, NJ to buy some art supplies. In an almost Proustian moment of ecstatic memory, I realized that I had found the lost ready made! There it was . . . a wall ventilator, a perfect analog of a formal dress shirt, its pleats pressed and shiny white, ready to wear to a special event–pulled at four corners, dressed to the nines. (Figs. 2,
3) It even had a little lever allowing it to shift quietly like a kinetic sculpture.

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• 
• 

• Figure 2
• Figure 3

• Wall ventilator
• Wall ventilator

If I were to install it on my bedroom wall, it might qualify as a “disguised ready made.” If it were to be exhibited at a museum, perhaps it would be considered the first “forged ready made.”

Realizing that documentation is important, I enclose the receipt of its purchase as provenance– $5.44, 07/14/90. (Fig. 4)

Later I discovered that more than ten of the original ready mades had been lost, some of which were re-made in small editions by Arturo Schwarz and Ulf Linde.

However, there are some that remain a puzzle and an ongoing project for me. For example, when asked to design the installation of “First Papers of Surrealism” in 1942, (Fig. 5) Duchamp purchased 16 miles of string. He used only 1 mile of string for the show. What happened to the other 15 miles?

• 
• 

• Figure 4
• Figure 5

• Receipt of the purchase
• Marcel Duchamp, Installation
  for the exhibition of First Papers of Surrealism, 1942

Stretched out from mid-town Manhattan, it could measure a radius that would reach Paterson, NJ, Newark Airport, Coney Island, Kennedy Airport, and some point in Long Island Sound south of Norwalk, CT. If rolled into a ball, what would 15 miles of string look like?

What would its measurements be?

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Figure 6
Nura Petrov with
the strings

Some of the string can be found in my work. (Fig. 6) Skeins of it occur in Kyria Anthusa’s tangled loom, a construction of wooden branches that I made in 1995. Several yards of it, which I came upon in a ditch beside Bursonville Rd. c.1997, are hiding in a photo-copy collage from the same year. If you have any thoughts on this or other lost ready mades, drop me a line (or a standard stoppage) at my e-mail address: nurapetrov@conceptualist.com

(EDITOR’S NOTE: In regard to Duchamp’s “Pulled at Four Pins,” it is surprising that almost 50 years after the now lost original Readymade of 1915, Duchamp would have memorized its appearance as vividly as he did for the etching. For the catalogue of the1973/1974 exhibition “Marcel Duchamp: A Retrospective” (Philadelphia Museum of Art / Museum of Modern Art, NY) the American photographer Peter Hujar was assigned to take pictures of buildings in New York in which Duchamp had lived. While on Fire Island he also took several photographs of a chimney cowl similar to the one depicted in Duchamp’s etching. Such a chimney cowl was discovered and legally dismantled by ASRL intern Adam Kleinman in the summer of 2000 on a midtown-Manhattan rooftop. Together with an exhaustive collection of literature on both the variety and history of chimney cowls, the object is now part of the permanent collection at ASRL, NY. – Thomas Girst) (Figs. 7, 8)

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• Figure 7
• Figure 8

• Marcel Duchamp,Pulled at Four Pins, 1964
• Chimney Cowl,ASRL/NY, ca. 1910’s

 

Fig(s). 5, 7©2005 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. All rights reserved.

When he was in grammar school Marcel had a dream, the same dream, over and over. He told me about it many times. He dreamt of a small pond in a meadow. It always smelled like rotting weeds. A ring of golden reeds grew up around the pond, hiding it. The reeds would sprout up, curve around, and head back into the earth. They wove themselves into a network of tunnels. In summer, in the dry season, the pond became a patch of mud. Two small pipes stuck out of the mud at odd angles. Marcel became fascinated by them. He longed to retrieve them. One day he took off his shoes and pushed up his pantlegs. He stepped into the pond, sank into the mud up to his knees, and made his way to the pipes. They were covered with dark slime. He knew there must be many more in graceful curves or square configurations in a network beneath the mud. When he pulled, they came out easily. He wiped them with his sleeve and saw they were made of brass. He fashioned them into a musical instrument of his own design. The pipes took several turns around his body before they headed toward the sky. When he blew into his horn, puckering his lips, it made a sound never heard before, different from any of the instruments in the brass band in town. And it was loud. Not loud enough for our mother to hear, because she couldn’t hear anything, she was deaf. Marcel spotted our mother and was surprised. She never came down to the meadow. It was wet, and the hem of her dress could get muddy. She had been looking for Marcel. She squinted, and the sun glinted off her eyes. She couldn’t hear Marcel’s new horn. But she could see Marcel playing it, an instrument of his own invention. She could see his cheeks puffed out and his face turning red. He had already decided; he would only play his own compositions, written in a musical notation that he had devised, and that only he could read.

Reducing the degree of automaticity that is in operation as oneself requires the adopting of an anti-expressive stance. Watching our friend M. D. liberate himself to some degree from automaticity without ever actually escaping it, we realized once and then again what each of us had somehow known from early on: artists are free only within a limited set of parameters, and life, in the form it has constructed itself into in our era, will enslave even the most self-critical of artists. Managing to position objects to hold their own in relation to that which ubiquitously happens along and even to redirect it, using very-adjusted and less-adjusted ready-made insertions into symbolizing power, an inchoate emanating-out ready-made in its own right, to convey and express enough and more than enough, M. D. changed the history of expression (read symbolizing) and redefined (artistic) purpose — two remarkable achievements. But it must be acknowledged that even critically sublime insertions meant to subdue expressivity and thus renegotiate the automaticity that rules our world will before long — for even a critical artist winds up expressing something within a context of expression, within an artworld — turn sentimental — all that which has cinematically blossomed forth will be in hardly any time at all found to have about it the cloying quality of an antique endless loop of seduction. Having conceived of infra-thin, a Western version of the concept of kehai, a colonized and colonizing air that would self-perpetuate, a hope-filled venturing toward a prolongation of that which is of interest, M. D. enters history as a precursor artist to the transhuman. As for our relation to the transhuman: Only after we had, in our decades-long research project, "The Mechanism of Meaning," stared down automaticity (so as to open it up for reconfiguration) by diving right into symbolizing power (so as to note and provide on-the-spot elicitings of its component factors, leading tendencies, and modes of operation), did we come to see that, to escape human bondage (We have decided not to die!), we would have to transform ourselves into artist-architects, on-the-loose interdisciplinary creatures we sometimes refer to as coordinologists. We lie to say that M.D. asked us to build one of our transhuman houses for him, one whose design he wished to join in on. If death were really always only for others then you would find Duchamp today moving about within a tactically posed surround of his and our combined making. Arakawa Madeline Gins

Valores semánticos del vidrio.

1.1 Sobre Duchamp: La circularidad de la mirada.
1.2 El rden de la materia: A propósito de Robert Smithson.
1.3 La rtrofia del límite en Dan Graham.

Valores semánticos del vidrio

La aparición del vidrio en el panorama de la producción arquitectónica se sumó a la introducción en los procesos constructivos de una serie de materiales cuya característica fundamental fue su carácter artificial: junto al hormigón armado y al acero, se inauguró una nueva tradición constructiva.

click to enlarge

Figure 1
The projection of
a painting on the glass window

Inicialmente vinculado a las estructuras de acero en construcciones destinadas a terminales de ferrocarril, a invernaderos, como los de Paxton y Burton, o a exposiciones temporales para los pabellones de las Exposiciones Universales⁽¹⁾, como el Palacio de Cristal londinense de Joseph Paxton, las deslumbrantes posibilidades del vidrio se extendieron más allá de sus implicaciones técnicas. (Fig. 1)

La especificidad del vidrio como materia que afecta la habitación del espacio, supuso la alteración de algunos conceptos tradicionales para la arquitectura. Quizá el más significativo fuese la alteración de la idea de levedad en cuanto trasgresión de lo sólido: mientras los planteamientos arquitectónicos estuvieron asociados al muro pétreo, la ausencia de materia incitó a convocar la gravedad. Eran criterios de sustracción en el muro: horadar, abrir. Bien hacia la luz, bien hacia la visión: El óculo del Panteon, o el salón de Comares en la Alhambra.

El vidrio incorpora como actuación la de acotar, limitar. En este caso, la levedad se presenta como cualidad intrínseca de la materia, sin que en ella actúe la presencia de elementos anteriores. De algún modo se produce una densificación cualitativa del espacio.

El vidrio simbolizó de este modo una expectación antropológica⁽²⁾, que los arquitectos tomaron como estigma de la incipiente modernidad⁽³⁾. Produjo una serie de reflexiones sobre su capacidad de limitar y expandir el espacio interior. En la proyección espacial, el vidrio sólo es límite bajo ciertas circunstancias, porque puede significar al tiempo confín y umbral. Supone la materialización de la línea en tránsito hacia lo otro, y a la vez la disolución del borde.

La pérdida del marco de la ventana y por tanto del carácter objetual de la perforación destinada a relacionar el edificio con su entorno, significó en primera instancia una ampliación del límite arquitectónico, incorporando, en segunda instancia, una nueva noción de materia: La superficie vitrificada habla de continuidad visual, pero también de una contradicción interna entre el orden de la malla cristalina y la planeidad de la membrana, lo que provoca una intensa densidad conceptual. El aparente orden externo o final que expresa la delgadez transparente del vidrio no es tal, sino una expresión ideal de su capacidad entrópica ⁽⁴⁾.

Sea como fuere, la fascinación que este material ejerce sobre el hombre afecta a una cuestión de base: la naturaleza misma de la visión. La arquitectura que nos envuelve, desde el Quatroccento, ha sido una arquitectura vinculada por completo a la visión; al proceso de visualización que parte del hombre hacia el entorno. El desarrollo de planos de vidrio verticales entre los planos horizontales de la base y la cubierta, y la consiguiente reducción de la opacidad de estos paramentos a casi cero, fueron intentos de llegar a la absoluta transparencia del muro, superponiendo a la práctica constructiva una cierta voluntad ontológica⁽⁵⁾. Este proceso de asociación repercute directamente en el hecho constructivo y, lo que es más, en la definición de un modo de conocimiento específico: Ver es conocer⁽⁶⁾.

La sincronía de la percepción que permitió desarrollar el vidrio implicó la modificación de la visualización del entorno, por cuanto se amplía la multiplicación de puntos de vista o, incluso, se propicia la ausencia de objeto perspectivo. La imagen más simple es ya una estructura que se incorpora al entendimiento personal del entorno, transformada sucesivamente tras un horizonte que es el límite de nuestra capacidad personal de percepción⁽⁷⁾.. El límite de vidrio significa para el espacio arquitectónico un lugar geométrico que engloba en su unidad una multiplicidad perceptible. El lugar, de este modo, deviene una creación de la propia producción espacial.

La reversibilidad del vidrio en procesos de transparencia y reflexión apoya estos aspectos, favoreciendo el desarrollo de una verdad plural, de la que se desprende una superposición de estratos convergentes: una constante desintegración del límite y una permanente activación del concepto de lugar. Realidad y verdad dejan de ser idénticas, anunciando una totalidad potencial, múltiple. La mirada se involucra en la transformación de la consciencia del individuo.

Esta mirada detenida en el vidrio, cuando se abre a lo visible, propicia el instante. Fugitivamente, concibe lo uno inasible y lo duradero: La superposición de tiempo, el detenimiento y avance de la mirada, termina por convocar una dimensión casi ascética del vidrio. Entre las resonancias de la arquitectura, queda una cierta identificación entre la materia y la mente⁽⁸⁾.

El espacio de este modo imaginado es un espacio viviente, es el lugar de un continuo nacer, de todas las posibilidades y diferencias, matriz fecunda de signos, ritmos y formas. No es casualidad, pues, que el vidrio haya planteado diferentes cuestiones en torno a su capacidad expresiva y a su resonancia en el hombre.

 

1.1 Sobre Duchamp: La circularidad de la mirada.

click to enlarge

Figure 2
Marcel Duchamp, Nude
Descending a Staircase,
no. 2, 1912

El esfuerzo por reflejar el espacio como superposición de estratos independientes queactúan entre sí converge en la necesidad de registrar la huella transparente de todos los estratos: Cuando Marcel Duchamp comienza pintando su Hombre descendiendo por una escalera⁽⁹⁾, (Fig. 2) indica claramente que el concepto de este hombre descendiendo no es sino una frágil sumatoria de instantes ficticios. Una seriación de ritmos que finalmente constituyen un obstáculo al entendimiento de esta situación como continuidad espacial, ya que esta multiplicación estática de ritmos lo que hace es disolver las expectativas de la idea central de movimiento efímero. Se trataba de captar, no un precipitado de tiempo puro, sino el tiempo mismo.

Esta pintura, en su desarrollo espacial, incorpora el tiempo (y por tanto el movimiento) como elemento definitivo de entendimiento del objeto. Aún no es un planteamiento técnico, despojado de atributos expresivos, como ocurrirá con Broyeuse de chocolat N°2, de 1914, (Fig. 3) en donde se observa un desmedido interés por la precisión, por la exactitud. Una exactitud manipulada, en donde el objeto es una caja de resonancias enfrentado al observador. El salto entre una y otra obra resulta fundamental para comprender el origen conceptual de la obra duchampiana por excelencia: el Gran Vidrio⁽¹⁰⁾, (Fig. 4) ya que implica el paso de una visión retiniana, destinada a la expresión, a una visión intelectual destinada al entendimiento. Ya no se pretende representar la realidad, sino dotar a la realidad de presencia a través de la obra. Esta voluntad de evitar una contemplación estética delGran Vidrio impulsó a Duchamp a presentar la Boîte Verte⁽¹¹⁾ (Fig. 5) en 1934, un conjunto de escritos, cálculos y reflexiones que debían ser consultados al tiempo que se observaba elGrand Verre, de modo que cualquier tipo de asociación con la pintura tradicional quedara descartado.

La necesidad de un nuevo soporte plástico que permitiera estas lecturas, implicó al vidrio como posible soporte alternativo al lienzo, carente de posibilidades de relación más allá de las puramente visuales. Además, el vidrio como materia significa, hablando en términos pictóricos, ausencia. De esta manera, las cualidades expresivas del vidrio, fundamentalmente su transparencia⁽¹²⁾, repercuten en la instalación, tanto por sus abiertas posibilidades de significación como por su capacidad de relación con el entorno. En el desarrollo de la obra se produce una vinculación del entorno al objeto y viceversa: una superposición de elementos significantes al espacio que las sostiene. Abandonado el proceso de desarrollo espacial cubista, en que la fragmentación y desplazamiento del objeto produce un espacio que genera la obra plástica, Duchamp extrae ese espacio del lienzo y genera un objeto capaz de activar el espacio que sustenta. Se establece de este modo un diálogo entre las ideas suspendidas en esta nueva tela vitrificada y las del observador que se acerca, gira, encontrando su posición en un espacio compartido por primera vez con la obra, alimento del proceso de reconocimiento en el lugar.

En los primeros estudios para el Gran Vidrio, como Neuf Moules Mâlic (Fig.6) y Glissiére contenant un moulin á eau en métaux voisins⁽¹³⁾(Fig. 7), Duchamp descubre estas posibilidades de ambigua significación del vidrio, fotografiando en diferentes ocasiones estos pequeños esbozos sobre vidrio en distintos espacios, colocándose delante o detrás de ellos. De este modo la obra no es ese objeto de museo, sino el objeto-con-él-en el espacio. Una propuesta que desplaza todo el interés del objeto representado hasta la superficie que funda el objeto. Ya no se trata de ver sin más, sino de ver a través-de, o, en el caso de la encriptación del Gran Vidrio, no ver a través-de lo transparente. Fundamentalmente, la idea de concentrar toda la capacidad de relación al límite, a la superficie de relación entre dos caras, actualiza los intereses espaciales que paralelamente se desarrollan en el espacio arquitectónico propuesto por el Movimiento Moderno. Confirmar mediante una delgada frontera la posibilidad dual del espacio. Si bien la posición de Duchamp se antoja aún más conflictiva, por cuanto se instala en el lugar, negándolo por el carácter positivo de su presencia, mientras que, por sus cualidades de relación, lo afirma, potenciando las capacidades de un espacio al que activa después de haberse impuesto sobre él.

• 
• 
• 

• Figure 3
  Marcel Duchamp, Chocolate
  Grinder number 2, 1914
• Figure 4
  MarcelDuchamp, The
  Large Glass, 1915-23
• Figure 5
  Marcel Duchamp, The
  Bride Stripped Bare by Her
  Bachelors Eeven [a.k.a.
  The Green Box], 1934

• 
• 

• Figure 6
  Marcel Duchamp, Nine
  Malic Moulds, 1914-15
• Figure 7
  Marcel Duchamp, Glider
  Containing a Water Mill made
  of Neighboring Metals,
  1913-15

Se produce, por tanto, una superposición de posibilidades sobre la superficie, una suerte de espacio acumulado, proyectado sobre una mínima transparencia: la máxima capacidad de significación se confía al mismo límite que apetece disolver. En este punto resulta altamente significativo el concepto de inframince⁽¹⁴⁾ con el que Duchamp califica la máxima capacidad de emoción. Lo “infradelgado” supone de este modo el foco de atención, el punto de mira de las disposiciones espaciales. Un nexo definitivo con las posteriores concepciones de la arquitectura, que desplaza las bondades del espacio hasta su máxima envolvente: una piel cristalizada que resuelve al mismo tiempo el carácter del espacio interior y las maclas exteriores del edificio.

click to enlarge

Figure 8
16^th century
perspectives by Durer

La proyección de diferentes estratos significativos en un mismo nivel, implica al Gran Vidrio en la suspensión crítica de la perspectiva. Los trabajos de Duchamp en la biblioteca de Sainte Geneviéve en París le permitieron estudiar distintos tratados perspectivos, de los que extraería buen número de notas. Surgen aquí relaciones explícitas del vidrio con los sistemas perspectivos del siglo XVI, como las demostraciones de Durero (Fig. 8), que abrieron a Duchamp nuevos caminos para el desarrollo espacial del conjunto⁽¹⁵⁾. La posibilidad de alterar el concepto tradicional de representación espacial le llevó a concebir el Gran Vidrio como una proyección espacial dentro del mismo espacio, es decir, no indiferente a él como un cuadro, sino dependiente de él. Al hacer desaparecer el soporte, los objetos quedan involucrados en una suerte de idealización espacial, no obstante el marco, y su señalada línea de división, que actúan con la indescriptible fuerza del marco de una ventana extraída del muro, descontextualizado su papel de articulación, y sin embargo con la capacidad de enfatizar la idea de tránsito, de límite, de espacio significante.

click to enlarge

Figure 9
Photo of the Large Glass
taken in Katherine Dreier’s
home at West Redding,
Connecticut, summer 1936

Un espacio que ofrece al vidrio como vuelta hacia el observador: al suspender los valores retinianos y por tanto el placer estético de la contemplación, señala un doble camino de extrañamiento del objeto y afirmación del espacio, con lo que finalmente se vuelve al hombre cuestionando el acto de mirar⁽¹⁶⁾. La multiplicidad de lecturas acumuladas, así como la proyección sobre la obra de diferentes visiones del entorno, variaciones de luz, reflejos fragmentados, suponen una ampliación del proceso de conocimiento. (Fig. 9) Una activación por tanto de la mirada que ha traspasado su nacimiento como visión para alcanzar su madurez como reconocimiento. El hombre se ve mirar, y de este modo, el encuentro con el vidrio deviene consigo mismo, con su espacio y su voluntad de conocer, provocando la circularidad de la mirada.

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Notes

1. Las posibilidades de ampliar el uso del vidrio a otros tipos edificatorios fueron muy escasas, al menos en sus inicios en Inglaterra, hasta que se suprimió el impuesto sobre el consumo de este material en 1845. La Palm House de R.Turner y D.Burton (1845-1848), fue uno de los primeros edificios en beneficiarse de la disponibilidad de vidrios laminados.

Italo Calvino habla en su libro Seis Propuestas para el Próximo Milenio, del nexo entre levitación deseada y privación padecida como una constante antropológica en la que, la búsqueda constante de la levedad y sus expresiones significaron una reacción al peso de vivir. ( Italo Calvino: Seis Propuestas para el Próximo Milenio. Libros del Tiempo. Madrid: Editorial Siruela, 1989. p 39).

3. El vidrio lo hizo. El vidrio solo, sin ayuda alguna nuestra, habría destrozado la arquitectura clásica. El cristal tiene ahora una visibilidad perfecta, delgadas láminas de aire cristalizado para mantener el aire entre el interior y el exterior…El vidrio es incuestionablemente moderno.” Frank Lloyd Wright.1940. ( Frank Lloyd Wright: Modern Architecture, being the Kahn lectures. Collected writings, vol 2. New York: Rizzoli Publications, 1992. pp 38-39).

4. “…dentro de el cristal existen combinaciones constantes donde la materia vítrea es manipulada para formar nuevas estructuras. La energía que el cristal utiliza para producir delgadas láminas implica que las estructuras preexistentes se han abolido…en las disciplinas científicas, a este proceso se le llama entropía. A pesar de sus movimientos internos, el vidrio mantiene un sistema al que se encuentra subordinado..”Robert Smithson.1968 ( Robert Smithson: A sedimentation of the mind:Earth Projects. Retrospective works 1955-1973. Oslo: The National Museum Of Contemporary Art, 1999. p 85).

5. “…el vidrio consagra la visibilidad, invitando a la experiencia de una verdad objetiva.”
Dan Graham. 1976. ( Dan Graham: My Position. Villeurbanne: Nouveau Musée/Presses du Réel, 1992. p 15).

6. “El ojo como órgano de la vista es parte de la actividad total del alma; mira, pero su intención profunda, su finalidad, es “ver” lo que no se puede ver con la mirada. Mirar debe convertirse en contemplar para poder llegar a “la visión” que es conocimiento..La visión es un estado de la conciencia, un estado extremo de la atención, la cual –como en una atenta escucha- ve lo que ya sabía el cuerpo profundo.”
Pablo Palazuelo.1995.
( Pablo Palazuelo: La Visión y el Tiempo. Museo Nacional Reina Sofía. Madrid, 1995. pp 17-19).

7. “Dichosamente porque es ya una casa, imagen del firmamento y del hueco que le separa de la tierra. En ella, en la tienda o choza, primera morada fabricada por el hombre, el horizonte es confín, círculo que limita y abriga, es como un horizonte propio de su habitante…”
María Zambrano. 1977.(María Zambrano: Claros del bosque. Ed Seix Barral. Barcelona, 1993. pp 63-64).

8. “La energía inteligente se compenetra con la energía material. La capa más profunda de nuestra mente “es naturaleza”, la naturaleza que contiene la materia y lo desconocido.” Pablo Palazuelo. 1985 ( Geometría y Visión: Una conversación con Kevin Power. Diputación Provincial de Granada. Granada, 1995. p 35).

9. Nu descendant un escalier.N°2. Enero 1912 (Neully).
“Mi objetivo apuntaba a la representación estática del movimiento –una composición estática de indicaciones estáticas de las diversas posiciones adoptadas por una forma en movimiento- prescindiendodel intento de crear efectos cinemáticos mediante la pintura.”
Marcel Duchamp. 1945. ( J.Johnson Sweeney: Interview. The Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, vol. 13. New York, 1945. pp 4-5).

10. La marie mise á nu par ses célibataires, même (LE GRAND VERRE). 1915-1923 (New York). “ Óleo, barniz, hoja de plomo, hilo de plomo y polvo sobre dos placas de vidrio (quebradas), cada una montada entre dos paneles de vidrio, con cinco hilillos de vidrio, hoja de aluminio; marco de madera y acero. Especie de subtítulo: Retraso en vidrio.
Emplear retraso en lugar de cuadro o pintura; cuadro sobre vidrio se convierte en retraso en vidrio -pero retraso en vidrio no quiere decir cuadro sobre vidrio. Es simplemente una manera de llegar a dejar de considerar que la cosa en cuestión es un cuadro- hacer un retraso en todo lo general posible y no tanto en los distintos sentidos en que puede tomarse retraso, sino más bien en su reunión indecisa. Retraso –un retraso en vidrio- como diría un poema en prosa o una escupidera de plata.”
Marcel Duchamp. 1923. ( Duchamp du Signe. Ed. Flammarion. París, 1978. p.37).Al margen de las profundas explicaciones que merece la imaginería del Gran Vidrio, el tema fundamental de la obra resulta de la relación entre la pieza superior, “la novia” (símbolo de la fecundidad y la creación) y la pieza inferior, “los solteros” (símbolo de la esterilidad y el vacío), formando la dualidad de la génesis del mundo abstracto.

11. La marie mise á nu par ses célibataires, même (BOÎTE VERTE). 1934 (París). “ …Quería que este álbum acompañase al Verre, y que pudiese ser consultado para ver el Verre, porque, en mi opinión, el Verre no tenía que mirarse en el sentido estético de la palabra. Había que consultar el libro y verlo conjuntamente. La conjunción de ambas cosas le quitaba todo aquel aspecto retiniano que no me gusta nada. Era muy lógico.”
Marcel Duchamp. 1934.
( Marcel Duchamp y Pierre Cabanne: Ingénieur du temps perdu: entretiens avec Pierre Cabanne. Pierre Belfond. París,1977. p.7 ).

12. son cosas técnicas. El vidrio me interesaba mucho como soporte, a causa de su transparencia. Eso ya era una gran cosa. Por otra parte, el color, que puesto sobre el vidrio es visible desde el otro lado y si se encierra pierde toda posibilidad de oxidarse…”
Marcel Duchamp. 1934.( Marcel Duchamp y Pierre Cabanne: Ingénieur du temps perdu: entretiens avec Pierre Cabanne. Pierre Belfond. París,1977. p.64).

13. Neuf Moules Mâlic. 1914-15 (París).Oleo, hilo de plomo, hoja de plomo sobre vidrio (quebrado en 1916), montado entre dos placas de vidrio, 66 x 101,2 cm.Glissiére contenant un moulin á eau en métaux voisins. 1913-15 (París).Óleo y vidrio semicircular, plomo, hilo de plomo, 147 x 79 cm.

14. En la revisión de la obra de Duchamp para la exposición de Tokio de 1980, aparecieron nuevos manuscritos y notas inéditas, entre las que fue frecuente encontrar la palabra inframince, (Fig. 10) palabra inexistente en francés, compuesta en uno de los muchos juegos verbales del arte conceptual por Infra- (bajo) y –mince (delgado). La absoluta conexión entre lenguaje y expresión plástica arroja luz sobre este punto, encontrando, entre otras citas: “…la pintura sobre vidrio, vista desde el lado sin pintar, da un infradelgado. El intercambio entre lo que uno pone a la vista y la mirada glacial del público (que ve y se olvida inmediatamente). A menudo este intercambio tiene el valor de una separación infradelgada…”. Yoshiaki Tono, responsable de la organización de esta exposición, ilustró este término con diferentes fotografías de la superficie del agua, continua, dual, sin grosor alguno. (Fig. 11)

click to enlarge

Figure 10
Marcel Duchamp, Note
on the inframince

Figure 11
Photograph of the
surface of water

15. Las referencias a los tratados perspectivos de esta biblioteca son importantes, especialmente al Manual del pintor de Durero, de 1538, y a La Perspectiva Práctica de Du Breuil, de 1642, existiendo, además, una similitud significativa entre los dibujos con dos planos superpuestos de este último tratado y la disposición final del Gran Vidrio. Entre las notas omitidas en La Caja Verde, destacan la publicada en A l’Infinitif, en 1964: “use transparent glass and mirror for perspective…[…] paint the definitive picture “sur glace sans tain”(two-way mirror thick)…” Marcel Duchamp.1913. (Dawn Ades, Neil Cox, David Hopkins: Marcel Duchamp. Ed Thames and Hudson. Londres, 1999. pp 111-112).

16. “se olvida ante todo que el hombre, sin más, es contemplativo aunque sólo sea en la modesta medida en que mira y recibe algo de esa incompleta, más cierta, visión que su breve mirada le procura. Contemplativo en sentido preciso es solamente el dado a prolongar esa mirada…” María Zambrano. 1984. (Zambrano: De la Aurora. Ed Turner. Madrid, 1986. pp 39-40).

Fig. 2-7, 10
©2003 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. All rights reserved.

Two years ago I went to a garden design festival on the river Loire, in France.40 or so gardens had been built, all selected for innovation of ideas, material or execution. The festival is held in the grounds of a castle overlooking the river Loire. The theme of the show that year was “Erotomania”.

click images to enlarge

• 
• 
• 

Figure 2
Céline Orsingher et Laurent Bailly, Erotomania-Erotomachia, 2002

Nestling amongst the fibreglass breasts, suspended underwear and other (small) feats of the designers’ imagination was a garden enclosed by a corrugated iron wall. The only view of the garden was afforded by the occasional peep hole. Within the walls was a scene of urban decay : weeds grew high, plastic mannequins in various states of undress lay, erotically I suppose, in the overgrown vegetation. Experiencing the garden via the peephole made the experience short, private and intense. The title of the garden was Erotomanie Erotomachie. (Fig.
1) Had the idea been Given by Duchamp? (Fig.
2) I asked its architects but received no reply.

click images to enlarge

• 
• 

• Figure 2
• Figure 3

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

There are other links to be made between Duchamp and gardening…and Duchamp and landscape, I’m here today to argue the case for Duchamp the gardener and would love to hear the counter argument. I’ll make them none the less.

click to enlarge

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

Let us take a famous work: Fountain. I won’t labour this point but the simple fact is this man’s fame rests on a water feature. Duchamps horticultural aspirations can hardly be made more obvious…and the Large Glass…glass and horticulture go hand in hand, in fact the Palm House at Kew gardens is discussed by one contributor to Tout fait. Glass is a complicated, conceptual, challenging material that both allows us grow tropical plants in boreal places, as well as transmit cryptic artistic messages. Duchamp chose the latter way of using it…but could have fairly chosen the former.

What stronger argument than these? If I must go on I will. Duchamp’s liberation of Washington Square (attempted) was not, I would argue, the drunken detail in Duchamp’s life has (regrettably) been bypassed by Duchampians. It shows a clear commitment to the municipal landscape…possibly with aspirations to community gardening. Duchamp was a great fan of New York City and was it would not surprise me at all if he had been planning a post secession community (organic) wildflower meadow for the children of New York. Serious.

Not convinced? I’ll continue. Rrose Sélavy? Quoi plus dire? Duchamp was of the field in name…of the flower in pseudonym. He didn’t only think about flowers but also about watering them, and selected this as a identifying himself. A practical man as well as an aesthete…a landscaper. What better qualification for my thesis?

Duchamp was once described as being in an anti-nature phase, and defiantly turning his back on a Forsythia bush (who wouldn’t). He doesn’t fool me. The line between love and hate is a thin one.

I could go on, there is a gardener in all of us. Duchamp was no exception. The big question is why did he hide it from the world? It was nothing to be ashamed of. Answers please.

Recent Investigations on the relative permanence of chromatic memory retention by Prof. Karl Gegenfurtner of Giessen University in Germany may throw light on Duchamp’s very conservative use of color in his mature work.

In summary account, The visual memory better and longer stores images in ‘natural color’ than either in black & white or bright, primary tints. The work in Germany was placed in an evolutionary context:“If stimuli are too strange, the system simply doesn’t engage as well, or deems them unimportant” (see: Franz, V.H., Fahle, M., Bülthoff, H.H. & Gegenfurtner, K.R. “The effect of visual illusions on grasping.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, vol. 27, nr. 5 (October 2001), pp. 1124-1144).

Primary in Duchamp’s concern must have been a realization that his complex and inference rich constructions might not linger long enough in memory to permit recall at prolonged leisure and reflection. Anticipating much later research, he deliberately avoided the use of any means which could possibly hinder the visual memory’s work. Thus a characteristic natural effect was sought in his color schemes.

click to enlarge

Figure 1
Marcel Duchamp,Given:1
The Waterfall / 2. The
Illuminating Gas, 1946-1966

In the final work, Given: The Water Fall, 2. The illuminating Gas, (Fig. 1) Duchamp went out of his way to obtain colorations of light, landscape and flesh, that caused some critics to questions such an apparent reversion of a revolutionary artist to mere ‘naturalism’ as practiced by the 19^th century realists. The explanation may lie in another direction entirely. The writer believes Duchamp intuitively was aware of the phenomenon described by the German researcher and employed it cunningly in a major and little understood work.

(Timothy Phillips)

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