* This essay was originally intended to serve as the second half of an article dealing with the general topic of Duchamp and money. The first part—which deals with the subject of how Duchamp used money in both his art and life—appeared in the April 2003 issue of Art in America.

In the nearly thirty-five years that have passed since Duchamp’s death, there has been a steady increase in the attention devoted to his work, not only by art historians, but also within the world of contemporary art. Certainly the retrospective exhibitions that were held in Philadelphia and New York (1973), Paris (1977), and Venice (1993), contributed to the appreciation of his work, as did the numerous articles and books on the artist that have appeared with consistency over the years. But exactly how much this kind of attention affects the financial evaluation of his work is difficult to determine with any degree of accuracy. Historical importance and contemporary relevance are certainly factors that should be taken into consideration when one attempts to evaluate a given work of art, but, as we shall see, taste (a factor Duchamp’s work confronts by its very nature) and quantity (which he attempted to control) are even more relevant concerns in a fickle and continuously changing art market.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Arturo Schwarz, Duchamp’s dealer in Milan, continued to sell examples of the artist’s work, as did a number of galleries in other parts of Europe and the United States. Schwarz still had nearly all of the readymades that were produced in the 1964 edition. At the time they were issued, the complete set was priced at $25,000. So far as is known, there were only two takers: the National Gallery of Canada, and the Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery in New York. The Canadian purchase took place through the efforts of Brydon Smith, Curator of Contemporary Art at the museum. In 1970, Smith approached Schwarz with an interest in purchasing the entire set of readymades, but discovered that there was not enough money left in the museum’s purchase account for that particular year. The following year the museum experienced a surplus in their operating budget, and through a skillful reappropriation of these funds, they were able to make the acquisition. “It was rather in the spirit of Duchamp,” Smith later mused, for the readymades were purchased “from an account usually reserved for office supplies and other such useful materials.”⁽¹⁾

The second set of readymades ended up in an even more unlikely institution: the Art Museum of Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. In 1971, Thomas T. Solley, director of the museum, was approached by Arne Ekstrom, owner of the Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery, through which Solley had made various purchases over the years. Ekstrom wanted to know if he would be interested in acquiring the complete set of readymades (which Ekstrom had purchased from Schwarz in the mid-1960s for a Duchamp exhibition at his gallery, and which were then languishing in his storage facility). Through the museum, Solley contacted a donor who agreed to facilitate the purchase, and the readymades were shipped out to Bloomington, where, to this very day, they remain on public display in the University Art Museum. Even though the purchase price had risen to $35,000 (a considerable sum in those years), the expenditure was not challenged by members of the art faculty, but was, surprisingly, applauded.⁽²⁾In the end, it would prove to be a very wise investment, for, as we
shall see, within thirty years the entire set of Duchamp readymades would escalate in value to well over one hundred times that amount.

click images to enlarge

• Figure 1
• Figure 2

• A Collection of Dada Art, Sotheby’s London,
  December 4, 1985, catalogue (cover).
• Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel, 1916/68,
  lot no. 251 in A Collection of Dada Art.

In contrast to the success of these private sales, the first attempt to sell the readymades at public auction proved a surprising and unexpected disappointment. In 1985, Sotheby’s in London offered “A Collection of Dada Art,” which was identified in the catalogue as “property of a Swiss collection, formerly the collection of Arturo Schwarz, Milan” (Fig. 1). Schwarz had closed his gallery ten years earlier, and the 261 separate lots in this auction represented the remaining inventory from his commercial activities (he had kept the most important pieces for his own private collection). Included was work by some of the most notable of Dada artists: Hans Richter, Hanna Hoch, Max Ernst, George Grosz, Marcel Janco, Kurt Schwitters, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, and a selection of works by Duchamp. The sale concluded with the complete set of readymades issued by the Galleria Schwarz in 1964 (Fig. 2), offered, however, as separate lots. Bidding for these items was anything but brisk. In the end, six of the smaller readymades sold, but at prices that were only about half their pre-sale estimates. This would indicate that the auction house set the reserve (the lowest price at which a work can be sold) unusually low, far lower than the low of the estimate. Despite this strategy, seven of the more important readymades — Bicycle Wheel, Bottle Rack, In Advance of the Broken Arm, Fountain, among others — failed to sell. Nevertheless, within a few weeks after the sale, Sotheby’s managed to find buyers for all the readymades that still remained in their possession, but at prices that were a fraction of the pre-sale estimates.⁽³⁾

click to enlarge

Figure 3
“Art or Junk?,” The National Enquirer,
London edition, February 4, 1986.

The lack of success in selling these works did not prevent at least one newspaper— the anything-but-respected National Enquirer — from asking its readers if the readymades were “Art or Junk?” (Fig. 3). The tabloid reproduced a selection of the objects with their prices, alerting their readers to the fact that “folks are asking a fortune for this stuff.” When an expert at Sotheby’s was asked to explain the “outrageous amounts… these wacky ‘artworks’ are worth,” she wisely replied: “It requires a great deal of knowledge of twentieth-century art to understand these pieces.” Few would argue with that explanation; to understand the prices would have required a great deal of knowledge of twentieth-century art, but also a thorough knowledge of the market in twentieth-century art.

The ideas Duchamp introduced continue to represent an influential force in the world of contemporary art, a factor that — one would assume — affects the financial evaluation assigned his work. This point was dramatically demonstrated in 1997 when one of the examples of Fountain from the Schwarz edition was offer by Sotheby’s in New York as part of their autumn sale of Contemporary Art (Fig. 4). Fourteen years had passed since the Schwarz sale in London when this same work failed to sell, but times had changed. The work was considered so important that the auction house decided to reproduce it on the front cover of its catalogue, and, in a clever decision (since the two works seem to share a common theme), Robert Gober’s Drain was chosen to appear on the back cover. I was asked by the auction house to write an entry on

click to enlarge

Contemporary Art, Sotheby’s
New York, November 17, 1999,
catalogue(front cover).

Contemporary Art, Sotheby’s
New York, November 17, 1999,
catalogue (back cover: reproduced:
Robert Gober, Drain,
edition no. 2/8, cast pewter,
4 ¼ in. x 4 ¼ in. x 3 in., 1989).
Figure 4

Fountain, which turned out to be an essay of six pages that provided not only a history of the original urinal, but the making of subsequent replicas, including the Schwarz edition. The organizers of the auction decided upon a pre-auction estimate of $1,000,000 — 1,500,000, an unprecedented amount for a work like this at auction, but perfectly in keeping with their knowledge of private sales. A year earlier, it was generally known within the art world that under the directorship of David Ross, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art purchased an example of Fountain from the collection of Charles Saatchi for $1,000,000. This information may very well have contributed to the success of the Sotheby’s sale, for in the end, Fountain was purchased by Dimitri Daskalopoulos, a Greek collector, for $1,762,500, a new record for a work by Duchamp at auction. When questioned after the sale, Daskalopoulos said that he had purchased the piece because “for me, it represents the origins of contemporary art.”⁽⁴⁾

A knowledge of prior sales may have contributed to the exceptionally high price paid for this work, but there were other factors as well. In the days immediately preceding the sale, Daskalopoulos’s advisor in art purchases called me several times from Athens to inquire exactly how this particular
example of Fountain differed from one owned by Dakis Joannou, another Greek collector of modern art. Dakis’s Fountain, I explained, came from the collection of Andy Warhol, but it did not bear the important brass plaque that identified the work as part of the edition of eight signed and numbered examples.⁽⁵⁾ So far as I could determine, the work being sold by Sotheby’s was the very last example of Fountain from the Schwarz edition that was ever likely going to be made available for sale (the location of the seven other examples of this work from the complete edition of eight accompanied my essay in the catalogue).⁽⁶⁾

It should also be noted that as a collector of contemporary art, Daskalopoulos was certainly familiar with the high prices that were usually paid to secure important work. In fact, the two lots that directly preceded the sale of Fountain in the Sotheby’s auction sold for prices that either equaled or exceeded the amount paid for this particular readymade: a Jasper Johns drawing of a Flag sold for $1,762,500, and one of Andy Warhol’s paintings of wanted men (which was compared in the catalogue to Duchamp’s Wanted Poster of 1923/63) sold for $1,982,500. Even these prices were not exceptional when compared with the record-breaking $11 million dollars that was paid for a painting by Mark Rothko that followed a few lots later in the same sale. When it came to assessing the success of this sale, however, few neglected to mention the record-breaking price for a work by Duchamp.

####PAGES####

click to enlarge

Figure 5
Marcel Duchamp: Nine Works,
Sotheby’s London, December 7, 1999,catalogue (cover).

Figure 6
Marcel Duchamp, Study for
a Portrait of Chess Players,
1911, charcoal on paper, 19 ½ x 19 7/8 in.

Figure 7
Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q.,
1920/42, rectified readymade
(made by Francis Picabia),
9 ¼ x 7 inches (23.8 x 18.8 cm).
Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, New York.

Three weeks after the sale took place in New York, an auction of Impressionist and Modern Art was held at Sotheby’s in London that included nine works by Duchamp ( Fig. 5). It was generally known that all nine of these works were owned by Georges Marci, a Swiss collector who had assembled the works over the course of the prior decade. These works were featured in a separate catalogue, for which I was again asked to write the introduction. Like the readymades, most of the items offered were produced in editions: the three erotic objects made in an edition of 8 to 10 examples, a reproduction of the L.H.O.O.Q.issued in an edition of 35, and a valise, produced in an edition of 150 examples. The only unique work was Study for a Portrait of Chess Players ( Fig. 6), a magnificent large Cubist drawing that Duchamp had made in 1911, but which he had given to Louise Varèse during his early years in New York (and which remained in her possession until her death in 1988). This drawing was given an estimate of 350,000-450,000 BP, and sold for an impressive 529,500 BP. It may have been the attraction of this single work that caused most of the other works by Duchamp to sell within or in excess of their pre-sale estimates. Only the valise — which was accompanied by five original letters from Duchamp to Poupard-Lieussou (the original owner of this item)—failed to sell. The pre-auction estimate was $165,000 – $206,000, far in excess of the amount that had ever been paid for a comparable work at auction, which was, apparently, the main factor that inhibited bidding.

The exceptionally high price paid for a work by Duchamp may have impressed many, but it is not a great deal of money when compared with the amount that would have been paid, for example, for an important drawing by Picasso from the height of his Cubist period. Indeed, when the prices of Duchamp’s work are compared with those paid for anything even remotely similar by Picasso, the differences can be astronomical. In a sale of Impressionist and Modern Art held at Christie’s New York in the fall of 2000, I wrote entries for two works by Duchamp: a replica by Francis Picabia of his famous L.H.O.O.Q. ( Fig. 7)(with an estimated value of $700,000-900,000), and a deluxe edition of the valise ( Fig. 8) (estimated at $800,000-1,200,000).The auction would also include a rare Blue Period painting by PicassoFemme aux bras croisés ( Fig. 9), a woman with arms crossed that—as a friend of mine recently observed—resembled (coincidentally) the positioning of La Jocconde in Duchamp’sL.H.O.O.Q..⁽⁷⁾When I found out about the Picasso, I requested that I be allowed to write entries on Duchamp that were at least as long as the one that was being written for this painting, though I was well that the Picasso would have a higher estimate (the catalogue stated “estimate upon request,” but the experts felt that the painting was worth between 30 to 40 million dollars). To my surprise, the auction house complied. Of course, I knew that the length of my entry would not affect the outcome of the sale, but I wanted Duchamp to be accorded the same historical respect as Picasso. On the night of the auction, the Picasso sold for over 55 million dollars, and, so far as I could tell, the two works by Duchamp did not receive even a single bid.

click images to enlarge

• Figure 8
• Figure 9

• Marcel Duchamp, The Box in a Valise, 1943, deluxe edition made
  for Kay Boyle (containing original Bachelor’s Domain,
  a hand-colored pochoir reproduction on celluloid of the lower
  section of the Large Glass).
• Pablo Picasso, Femme aux
  bras croisés, 1901-02, oil
  on canvas,32 x 23 in. (81.3 x 58.4 cm).
  Private Collection.

here are several explanations that could account for this failure. First, the works by Duchamp had been recently on the market: the L.H.O.O.Q. had come from a Duchamp exhibition at a commercial gallery in New York (a show that I had organized), where the asking price for this work had been set at $1,300,000 (considerably more than the auction estimate), and the valise had been offered privately by several dealers in Europe and in the United States at prices that ranged from $650,000 to $750,000 (still lower than the auction estimate).⁽⁸⁾But even more importantly, the works by Duchamp were placed in the wrong context. The sale included paintings by some of the most renowned Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists— Monet, Renoir, Gauguin, Cézanne — as well as some of Duchamp’s most notable contemporaries: Picasso, Kandinsky, Léger, Miro, Magritte, Ernst, and Giacometti, the majority of which fared well in an evening of heavy bidding (the Giacometti sculpture, for example, sold for over 14 million dollars).

For Duchamp, context is everything. A shovel in a hardware store is, after all, only a shovel; place it into a museum, and it is magically transformed into art. This is a concept that most collectors of classic European modernism would either fail to understand or flatly reject. Most collectors of contemporary art, on the other hand, accept the philosophical and aesthetic implications of the readymade as an important if not critical precedent to the underlying conceptual strategies of modernism (which, in part, explains Sotheby’s success in sellingFountain for a record-breaking price).

The lesson of placing Duchamp’s work within the context of vanguard art is one that was well understood by the organizers of a sale on May 13, 2002, of Contemporary Art at Phillips de Pury & Luxembourg in New York. The auction featured all fourteen of the readymades that had been issued by the Galleria Schwarz in 1964, these examples from the collection of Arturo Schwarz himself. The sale also included sculpture by Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Joseph Beuys, Jeff Koons, Rachel Whiteread, and Maurizio Catelan; photographs by Cindy Sherman, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth and Thomas Ruff; paintings by Francis Bacon, Joan Mitchell, Agnes Martin, Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Damien Hirst, Neo Rauch, and Ed Ruscha, whose untitled 1963 painting of the word “NOISE” in yellow against a dark blue ground graced the cover of the lavish, oversized catalogue (Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel appeared on the back cover: Figs. 10.1 and 10.2).

click images to enlarge

• Figure 10-1
• Figure 10-2

• Contemporary Art &
  14 Duchamp Readymades,
  Phillips de Pury &
  Luxembourg,New York, May 13,
  2002, catalogue (cover).
• Contemporary Art & 14
  Duchamp Readymades,
  Phillips de Pury &
  Luxembourg, New York, May 13,
  2002, catalogue (back cover:
  reproduced: Marcel Duchamp,
  Bicycle Wheel,
  assisted readymade: bicycle
  wheel and fork mounted upside
  down on a kitchen stool painted
  white, 49 13/16 x 24 13/16
  x 10 ¾ in.(126.5 x 63 x 27.3 cm).

The sale was accompanied by as much advance publicity as the auction house could muster, including a regular run of advertisements in the New York Times reproducing the various readymades. The only newspaper to run a feature article about the sale, however, was the London Daily Telegraph. The Bicycle Wheel was reproduced, and the article was given the amusing title “Wheel of Fortune,” for as its author Colin Gleadell remarked, it was “estimated to sell for up to $3 million.” Gleadell also informed his readers that in contrast to the issuing of readymades in 1964, which were designed to be sold intact (as complete sets), these fourteen examples were being offered individually, so that collectors were at liberty to chose whichever one they wanted and could afford. He reminded readers that Fountain had sold a few years earlier for $1.7 million, and that, although this information could not be confirmed, an example of the Bicycle Wheel had “sold for more than $2 million on the private market.” Moreover, when the evaluation assigned to all fourteen readymades is tallied, “the overall pre-sale estimate for the set is $8.5 million to $12.6 million,” which, we are told, falls short of the $15 million guarantee Schwarz was given. “Clearly Phillips has taken a gamble,” Gleadell concluded, “one that Duchamp, who had a weakness for risk-taking when playing chess, might have enjoyed.”⁽⁹⁾

In fact, Duchamp took few risks when playing chess, and, as I demonstrate in the first part of this article (Art in America, April 2003), even fewer when it came to his art dealings, whether pertaining to the sale of his own work, or to the investments he had made in the work of others. In the case of the Phillips auction, however, the owners and administrators did undertake a fairly serious financial risk, for it was later revealed that they issued Schwarz a guarantee of $10 million, an amount that fell in the middle of the low and high estimates. If the readymades sold for the low estimate of $8.5 million, the auction house stood to lose $1.5 million; if they sold for their high estimate, they would have made $2.5 million. Apparently, this was a risk the auction house was willing to take, drawing a certain degree of confidence, perhaps, in their recollection of the successful sale of Fountain two years earlier in a sale of Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s.

On the evening of the sale at Phillips, it was raining steadily in New York, which, we can only imagine, must have filled the auctioneers with trepidation, for they knew that if they were to meet their guarantee, they would need as many potential bidders to compete against one another as possible. The eighty-one year old Schwarz, however, who came from his home in Milan to attend the sale, appeared confident and relaxed. Just before the bidding began, a collector asked him if he was nervous. “Why should I be nervous?” Schwarz responded. “As far as I am concerned, they have already been sold.⁽¹⁰⁾

The sale began with Duchamp’s Paris Air, one of the smallest and least known of the readymades, which was given an estimate of $200,000 – $300,000. Bidding was slow and halting. It eventually stopped at a hammer price of $150,000, short of the low estimate but still higher than the reserve, for, to everyone’s surprise (probably even the successful bidders), the auctioneer announced that the work had been sold. A similar pattern continued for the remaining thirteen readymades, where, in most cases, prices only reached approximately half the low estimates, yet were repeatedly announced as having been sold. Only the Bottle Rack (estimated at $800,000-$1.2 million) and snow shovel (estimated at $700,000-$900,000) failed to meet their reserves. Fountain, which was given a conservative estimate of $1.5 – $2 million (a range that reflected the price it had attained two years earlier at Sotheby’s), sold for a hammer price of just over $1 million, still nearly one-half million dollars short of its low estimate. When the bidding stopped, a quick tally showed that the entire set of readymades sold for $5,370,000, exactly $4,630,000 short of the amount Schwarz was guaranteed, a substantial loss for the auction house, but a huge gain for Schwarz, who, in all likelihood, with a fat check in his pocket, scurried back to Milan the next morning.

By contrast, the rest of the auction went rather well: eight artists had achieved record prices for their work, including the Ruscha cover-lot painting, which sold for over $2.5 million, and a Judd sculpture, which sold for over $1.3 million. The entire auction fetched $29,686,350, with 91% of the offerings sold by value. In a report issued by the auction house after the sale, these facts were of course emphasized, and in an effort to put a positive spin on the sale of readymades, it was even announced that Duchamp’s “iconic Bicycle Wheel tied the record for any Readymade,” which it did, since it sold for the same price as Fountain two years earlier at Sotheby’s. Of course, there was no mention of the fact that Phillips lost over $4.5 million on its guarantee to Schwarz, which was perceived by many to have been a total disaster for the Duchamp market⁽¹¹⁾

Perception is, of course, only a reflection of the person doing the perceiving. In describing the sale of the readymades in her regular column for the New York Times, Carol Vogel reported that “collectors sniffed at what some consider icons of modern art,” and Christopher Michaud, writing for the Reuters News Agency, reported that the prices of the readymades “fell far short of expectations, eclipsed by works of more current artists.” Josh Baer summarized the evening best when he wrote in his newsletter that “people will look back on [the sale] and wish they had bought.⁽¹²⁾

So far as the sale of Duchamp’s work is concerned, the failure of the readymades to attain their estimates may inhibit sales in the short term, but in the future, there will be little — if any — harm done to the general Duchamp market. To my way of seeing things, there are two reasons why Duchamp’s work continues to be assigned comparatively low evaluations: rarity, and, perhaps even more importantly, an unrelenting cerebral content.

Rarity is a factor that in most commercial markets causes an item gradually to escalate in value over time. Precisely the opposite occurs in Duchamp’s work, for its rarity creates a situation in which reliable evaluations of comparable prior sales cannot be established. The best way to demonstrate this point is by citing a hypothetical example: Say that you own a work of art by a notable artist that you are interested in selling. When an attempt is made to evaluate the work, comparables are cited, earlier examples by the same artist from the same period that have sold — either at auction or privately — within the recent past (in the art market, up to five years is usually considered a fair indicator). If you should manage to find a comparable work that sold for X-number of dollars, naturally you want the work of art that you own to be evaluated at a somewhat higher figure, an amount that reflects the time passed since the comparable work was sold. When it comes to unique works by Duchamp, however, there are preciously few comparables. During his lifetime, he saw to it that his most important work was placed into important private collections (such as with Arensberg or Dreier), which he knew would one day be donated to museums.⁽¹³⁾In the Duchamp market, then, the “snowball effect” that causes works of art to escalate in value over time is virtually nonexistent. As a result, one can ask whatever one wants for a unique work by Duchamp, but even here, the price must remain within reason, that is to say, controlled by some knowledge of prices that were paid for other works by artist in the comparatively recent past.

click to enlarge

Figure 11
Marcel Duchamp, Belle Haleine:
Eau de Voilette (Beautiful
Breath: Veil Water),
1921, assisted Readymade,
perfume bottle (6 in.) in cadrdboard
box, 6 7/16 x 4 7/16 in..

Figure 12
Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q.
, 1919,7 ¾ x 4 7/8 in.

Today, the most common way to the check prices paid for an individual artist’s work is on the Internet. A variety of sites offer postings of recent auction records, but it is virtually impossible to find any verifiable information pertaining to private sales. Of course, when a collector of means is matched with a work of art that he or she absolutely cannot live without, the question of comparable evaluations is of no relevance. In the André Breton sale that took place recently in Paris, for example, the Monte Carlo Bondsold to the Principality of Monaco for 240,000 euros (well above its pre-auction estimate of 50,000 to 60,000 euros). A similar situation occurred in the mid-1990s, when a collector and former art dealer living in Paris sold Duchamp’s Belle Haleine (Fig. 11) perfume bottle to Yves Saint-Laurent and Pierre Bergé for five million dollars. The collector originally purchased the work some twenty-five years earlier from the Forcade-Droll Gallery in New York, and, at the same time, he also purchased the original L.H.O.O.Q. (Fig. 12), which is still in his collection. Some years ago I was approached by a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, asking whether I knew if this work could be acquired. I called the collector in Paris and asked if he would consider selling it. He responded to my inquiry by asking if I knew the highest price ever paid for a work of art. Recalling Renoir’s Moulin de la Galette, I said that I thought it was around 65 million dollars (having forgotten that a van Gogh sold a few years later for some 20 million more). He said: “Bring me a collector willing to pay 66 million dollars, and we’ll talk.⁽¹⁴⁾

Even if the information pertaining to private sales were made public, I doubt that it would affect the comparatively depressed financial evaluation given to works by Duchamp. This, I believe, can be traced to a single overriding factor: the importance of vision over thought. Unlike more traditional works of art, which rely primarily upon visual comprehension for understanding their importance — and, thus, financial value — a work by Duchamp (particularly the readymades) relies upon more complicated processes of thought. We can look at a painting by Matisse, for example, and appreciate it on a purely visual level. Indeed, Matisse himself encouraged precisely this method of viewing when he stated that “an art of balance, of purity and serenity” is “something like a good armchair that provides relaxation from fatigue.”⁽¹⁵⁾By contrast, any viewer who looked at Duchamp’s readymades in this same fashion would derive little or no aesthetic pleasure; no matter how long you look at a shovel — whether hanging in a museum or in a hardware store — it remains a shovel. In this case, viewers are forced to echo a strategy employed by the artist himself when selecting these objects, for he wanted the readymades to exhibit no exceptional visual interest, or, as he said, they are objects possessed of “visual indifference… a total absence of good or bad taste… a complete anesthesia.”⁽¹⁶⁾

If we apply this reasoning to the marketplace, then an art dealer or seller is placed in a somewhat unusual position. He or she can no longer present a work of art to his or her client and allow a purely visual response to convey its content. I have come to refer to this predicament as the triangle theory, where, under normal circumstances, three specific points must be identified and understood before a sale can take place: (1) the client’s eyes; (2) the work of art; (3) the client’s pocketbook. In trying to sell a work by Duchamp, one point in this triangle must be adjusted slightly, for in considering a readymade, one cannot rely solely upon a client’s vision. Instead, the seller is obligated to move that point one or two inches back, to a position well with the client’s gray matter. Only then can he hope to come anywhere near the client’s pocketbook. If the person’s intellect is not stimulated, then, as in the case of looking at a readymade like Duchamp’s In Advance of a Broken Arm, a shovel remains a shovel, which in most hardware stores sells for about fifty dollars (not $600,000, which is the amount for which this item reportedly sold in a private sale to a European client a few days after the Phillips sale).

It is my belief that, in the future, works of art will be increasingly appreciated for their cerebral content, although for the present moment, at least, vision is still required to comprehend the existence of the object. At this point in time, we can only imagine a work of art that would stimulate our minds before reaching our eyes (of course, the same could be said for all kinds of social situations, from race relations to geographic borders, as in John Lennon’s use of the word “Imagine”). Meanwhile, as was his habit, Duchamp seems to have timed things perfectly: if there is any correlation between the aesthetic value of a work of art and the amount of money that someone is willing to pay for it, at the very moment in our history when intellect and vision strive to achieve union, there are virtually no important works by Duchamp available to test the market. He was not only successful in thwarting attempts to commercialize his work in his lifetime. In having kept his production of unique works of art to a minimum, only replicas and works in edition remain within the marketplace today, and even these items come up only rarely. Some thirty-five years after his death — in both aesthetic and monetary terms — Duchamp remains securely one step ahead of the game.

Notes

1. Quoted in a letter to the author from Diana Nemiroff, Curator of Modern Art, National Gallery of Canada, 25 September 2002.

2. Information provided in an email message to the author dated October 14, 2002, from Nan Esseck Brewer, Curator of Works on Paper at the Art Museum of the University of Indiana at Bloomington. Additional details concerning the purchase was relayed to the author in a telephone conversation with Thomas T. Solley from his home in England on October 15, 2002.

3.It should be acknowledged that I was among those who negotiated to acquire these works, eventually acquiring the Network of Stoppages (now collection of the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven),Bottle Rack, In Advance of a Broken Arm, Fountain,
and Fresh Widow (the latter four now in the collection of the Maillol Foundation, Paris).

4.Quoted in Carol Vogel, “More Records for Contemporary Art,” The New York Times, November 18, 1999.

5. See Jeffrey Deitch, ed., The Dakis Joannou Collection (Ostfildern: Cantz, 1996), p. 93.

6.At the time when this essay was written, I had mistakenly concluded that no. 4/8 of the edition was in the collection of the Toyama Museum of Art in Japan.That information proved incorrect, for no. 4 of the edition appeared on the market in 2002 at the Gagosian Gallery in New York (with a provenance that can be traced to Sarenco & Sarenco of Milan, Italy).

7.The friend, Nura Petrov, is an artist who lives in Riegelsville, Pennsylvania.

8.The Duchamp show was entitled “Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” and was held at Achim Moeller Fine Art, New York, 2 October 1999 — 15 January 2000.

9.Colin Gleadell, “Wheel of Fortune,” The Daily Telegraph [London], April 22, 2002. I am grateful to the author, who kindly provided me with a photocopy of his article.

10.The collector wishes to remain anonymous.

11.“Phillips, de Pury & Luxembourg Set 8 Artist Records in $29 Million Sale of Contemporary Art on May 13, 2002,” Click here to view the link.

12.Josh Baer, The Baer Faxt # 318, May 13, 2002; Christopher Michaud, “Rare Duchamps Collection Sold at N.Y. Auction,” Reuters Press, May 21, 2002; Carol Vogel, “An Uneven Night at Auction for Phillips,” New York Times, May 14, 2002. See also Brooks
Barnes, “Phillips Contemporary Art Auction Brings in a Healthy $30 Million,” The Wall Street Journal, May 14, 2002.

13.When he served as executor of Dreier’s estate, he arranged for several of his most important works to be placed into the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, which demonstrates that, in some measure, he wanted his work to be seen and understood
within the context of a larger, more international audience.

14.The collector wishes to remain anonymous, and even though he has refused to confirm the sale price of the Belle Haleine,its current owners requested an insurance evaluation of five million dollars when they lent the work to a show I organized for the Whitney Museum in 1996 (see the catalogue, Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1996, pp. 146 and 292).

15.Henri Matisse, “Notes of a Painter,” 1908; quoted in Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Matisse: His Art and His Public (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1951), p. 122.

16.“Apropos of ‘Readymades’,” a talk delivered by Duchamp at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 19 October 1961; published in Art and Artists,vol. I, no. 4 (July 1966), p. 47.

Figs. 6-8, 11-12 ©2003 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. All rights reserved.

Marcel Duchamp está frente al tablero de ajedrez, muy concentrado en una partida contra (o con) una joven completamente desvestida, sentada en el lado opuesto. La escena captada en esta fotografía se desarrolla en una sala del Pasadena Art Museum (California) el 18 octubre de 1963, con ocasión de la primera exposición retrospectiva que se le dedicó al artista, apenas cinco años antes de su muerte. Todos los testimonios de la época coinciden al describir a aquel Duchamp como un hombre saludable y jovial, aunque su edad, 76 años, no pareciera ya la más adecuada para jugar con chicas desnudas. La foto, en efecto, tiene obvias implicaciones eróticas, situados como están los jugadores delante de una réplica deLa mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même, que había elaborado Ulf Linde ante la imposibilidad de que el vidrio original pudiera trasladarse desde el Museo de Filadelfia hasta Pasadena.

Sabemos en realidad que la foto forma parte de una inocente performance preparada por el fotógrafo Julian Wasser con la complicidad de Walter Hopps, comisario de la exposición de Pasadena, y de una amiga de éste, Eve Babitz, que accedió a posar para ésa y para algunas otras tomas (como la que muestra a Duchamp fumando un puro junto a su Fuente con la muchacha al fondo). No consta quién ganó aquella partida o si llegó a terminarse siquiera, pero sí nos han contado que casi todos parecían estar algo nerviosos. Eve se mostró aliviada cuando supo que en la fotografía seleccionada por Wasser para la publicación, el pelo caía sobre el lado derecho de su rostro, tapándolo por completo⁽¹⁾ . Las contraposiciones de la obra eran, así, completas: un hombre mayor, vestido de negro, con la cara descubierta, juega al ajedrez con una mujer joven y desnuda, de piel muy blanca, y en cuya cabeza sólo se percibe una lisa melena negra. Distanciamiento y “belleza de indiferencia”, por utilizar la propia formulación duchampiana. El artista mira las piezas del ajedrez cuyos ecos formales evidentes se hallan en los moldes málicos y en el molino de chocolate de la maquinaria soltera, muy visibles al fondo; el cuerpo de Eve Babitz, por su parte, remite a la “vía láctea carne”, colgada en la parte más elevada del Gran vidrio, en el vértice superior de un triángulo perfecto cuyas esquinas inferiores están constituidas por los asientos de ambos jugadores. El azaroso mecanismo amoroso de la creación duchampiana se proyectaba así sobre la vida real, testimoniada por el documento fotográfico. En ese primer plano, con la esqueletizada y metafísica obra de arte al fondo, la novia ha sido desnudada ya por su(s) soltero(s), y bien podría adivinarse que el juego va muy adelantado. No está lejos el final feliz.

Pero Elena del Rivero se ha apropiado de esta fotografía y la ha digitalizado, para imprimirla en múltiples fragmentos rectangulares que ha dispuesto luego como un mural en cinco hileras horizontales. Hay unos pequeños marcos blancos de separación entre los cuadraditos, como si éstos fueran las viñetas de una gran fotonovela. Y es esta sutil contaminación de un género narrativo lo que convierte al documento de Pasadena en una historia: cada fragmento del espacio se transmuta en una unidad de tiempo, como si la nueva lectura secuencializada de la imagen obedeciera a cada uno de los movimientos sucesivos de las piezas en el juego del ajedrez. Ahora bien: delante de Eve Babitz, tapándola por completo, hay otra mujer, sentada en la misma posición, y con el rostro oculto, igualmente, por una melena negra. No es la Eva (del) original, ofrecida desnuda al juego más o menos interminable, sino una mujer mundana, notoriamente vestida, entregada a la contemplación ensimismada de unos collares de perlas, símbolos tradicionales de la vanidad. Se diría que el relato continúa así fuera, en el ámbito donde se ha situado ahora la fotógrafa. Esa modelo (la propia artista, al parecer), con camisa de malla negra y amplia falda dorada, sería una seguidora hipotética de la narración que está detrás de ella, y su “identificación” con la chica que juega al ajedrez se opera en términos ficticios, como cuando vivimos vicariamente las peripecias de un personaje novelesco. ¿O tal vez no? Su atuendo y su postura recuerdan un poco al tema tradicional de la Magadalena arrepentida (pensamos, por ejemplo, en la interpretación de Caravaggio); la ropa, desde luego, no es la de un vestido de novia, y bien podría ser la de una (falsa) princesa o la de una prostituta de lujo ataviada para una fiesta de “solteros”, même. En cualquier caso, una mujer anónima (no tiene un rostro visible), tan completa y ostentosamente vestida, sentada delante de esa foto de Duchamp, ¿nos está invitando al desnudamiento?

Y dado que la narración debe seguir, ¿quién lo ha de realizar? O más claramente, ¿quién ha de suplantar, por obvias razones de simetría, a la figura de Marcel Duchamp que continúa visible en los recuadros escaneados clavados en la pared de atrás? Parece evidente, en fin, que esta presencia femenina exige la de un ente masculino, même, situado en frente, presumiblemente desnudo, que daría una vuelta de tuerca en el interminable proceso del desnudamiento. No creo que sea disparatado hacer una lectura algo feminista de una obra como ésta, que parece hacer recíproca la proposición duchampiana: “el (recién) casado desnudado por su(s) soltera(s), mismamente”. Pero es el vacío de ese hipotético ente masculino, su hueco espacial, lo que parece obligarnos a situar a Les amoureuses (Elena & Rrrose) de Elena del Rivero (2001) en la estela de los Étant donnés. En efecto, en la instalación póstuma de Duchamp que conserva el Museo de Filadelfia, es el mirón el que completa la obra, participando en una actividad amorosa que se ofrece, como promesa, a través de los agujeros del portalón. Elena del Rivero parece invitarnos, igualmente, a plantar nuestra silla frente a su muchacha vestida: soy yo, el espectador, un ser humano concreto (o más específicamente un hombre), el protagonista que falta. La artista sugiere de esta manera que mirar es sólo una actividad preliminar, y que nada percibiremos, tal vez, si no nos desnudamos y si no estamos dispuestos a jugar.

J.A.R., enero de 2002

NOTES

1. Todos los detalles de aquella sesión, incluyendo reproducciones de las tomas fotográficas descartadas, pueden encontrarse en Dickran Tashjian, “Nothing Left to Chance: Duchamp’s First Retrospective”. En Bonnie Crearwater (editor), West Coast Duchamp. Grassfield Press, Miami Beach, Florida, 1991, pp. 61-83.

Dear John,

Thank you for the thorough reading of my pieces (yup, and Hirschhorn is certainly an intelligent enough artist not to have fallen into my little trap!). There is, of course, a very detailed article on the 8/9 bachelors in the pages of Tout-Fait: The Bachelors: Pawns in Duchamp’s Great Game

In terms of the 1964 edition, your thoughts are intriguing, yet the numbers do not quite add up. It becomes pretty tricky. The number of the entire set of Ready-mades (and semi-ready-mades, etc.) in this edition is 14. Each of them is numbered 1/8-8/8. Yet in addition to those there are three replicas reserved for artist (MD), publisher (A. Schwarz) and the Philadelphia Museum. On top of that, there are two more replicas for museum exhibitions, bringing the number up to 13 (!). Research throughout the years has led us to conclude that a much higher number was produced (some stolen from Schwarz’s warehouse, missing the small copperplate or the case and/or the signatures. All in all, it’s a pretty fuzzy affair.

Best, Thomas Girst

Tom Girst, Editor in Chief:

Have been greatly enjoying latest issue of Tout Fait, after noting not once, but twice you brought attention to Duchamp’s 1964 Readymades edition. In the Barns interview it was surrounded by the usual dismay this edition brings, fair enough. Then, in the corespondence with Hirschhorn you appeared to have taken a decidedly heavy hand in reference to this edition, using it as a form of entrapment to elicit a responce from Hirschhorn in regards to his own recent works potential “commercial” value. It was to Hirschhorn’s credit that he did not “trip” on this edition or reference it to his own works, but he clearly rebuked any notion that Duchamp ever compromised his own works, Bravo, Hirschhorn. I believe I can shed some light around the “dismay” of this Duchamp/Schwarz venture. First, in the Barnes interview he preferences his concern by stating that at least in regards to Etant donnés the work appears “to flesh out the Bride” placing it full cycle in relation to the Large Glass. The very same statement can be said of the Ready-mades edition, as usual with Duchamp the “shock” is hidden in plain sight. The answer, Dear Tom, is in the exact number of the editions “8”.

Does this number ring any bells? As Etant Donnés belongs to the realm of the Bride, so the Ready-mades belong to the realm of the Bachelors. Return to the notes in the Green Box, where Marcel lets us know that the Bachelors were conceived as a game of 8!, only changed to 9 with the addition of himself, a reluctant station master (in an non-autobiographic way as possible). As reluctant as the “lost” original Ready-made brings the number 8 to 9! In fact seen from this angle the Ready-mades appear as a collective form of “portraiture”, a sort of Bachelors composite (although non-auto, you understand). Keep up the great work.

Sincerely,

John Mcnamara
mac2u22@hotmail.com

click to enlarge

Figure 1
Marcel Duchamp,
Bicycle Wheel
(Fork), 1964

As a small point, the ‘straight fork’ (Fig. 1) might not be a functional on the road fork at all, but rather a wheel truing stand. These are still available to those of us who ride regularly, and resemble forks. When wheels go over bad bumps, over time, the spokes can loosen and the rim needs to be pulled back into shape. It is adjusted in such a bracket with added measuring tools to detect wobble and roundness. I don’t know how this enters into the thinking about the bike wheel, but I thought it might be useful to share. I am delighted to contribute to anything Stephen Jay Gould had a hand in. His work has given me so much pleasure and clarity of thought. Thank you.

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

click images to enlarge

• Figure 1
  Bicycle Wheel
  (1913) on a Stool.
  Photograph taken
  at Duchamp’s studio,
  circa 1917
• Figure 2
  Bicycle Wheel
  (1913) on a Stool.
  Photograph taken
  at Duchamp’s studio,
  circa 1917
• Figure 3
  Bicycle Wheel
  (1913) on a Stool.
  Photograph taken at
  Duchamp’s studio,
  circa 1917

In response to a discussion of the Duchamp bicycle sculpture on the massbike listserv, I have a couple of quibbles about statements on bicycle history on your pagehttp://asrlab.org/articles/why_bicycle_wheel.htm

The following statement is not entirely accurate:
”The straight fork bicycle might have looked fine, but the irregular twists, turns, throws and pitches of a Bicycle Wheel, when attached to a straight fork, were dangerous and unstable–hence, the name given to the bicycle with a straight fork design: the “Bone Shaker.”

The term “boneshaker” applies to bicycles built from approximately 1863 to 1878, with a relatively small front wheel constructed like a wooden wagon wheel–the bicycle shown inIllustration 6 on the page is of this type. Most bicycles made from approximately 1878 to 1890 had tensioned steel spokes, a larger front wheel and a smaller rear wheel. These bicycles had straight forks and were called “ordinaries”, highwheelers” or, with derogatory intent “penny farthings”–not “boneshakers.”

The rough ride of the boneshakers was due largely to the solid steel or rubber tires. Highwheelers also had solid rubber tires, but the ride was smoother–the large front wheel, nearly directly under the rider, bridged road surface irregularities better. The rear wheel was small, but it was far behind the rider, and the frame member between the rear wheel and the saddle was rather long and flexible.

The real breakthrough in ride quality came with the introduction of Dunlop’s pneumatic tires in the 1890s–along with chain drive, this invention made for a comfortable ride with the bicycle frame design still in use today.

Straight forks were used on highwheelers as well as boneshakers. A curved fork does somewhat smooth the ride, because it is springier than a straight fork–however, its effect in smoothing the ride is much less than the effect of the pneumatic tires or the highwheeler’s large front wheel.

The boneshaker in your illustration has a vertical steering axis, a straight fork and therefore zero trail. It was discovered at some time in the early development of the bicycle that a bicycle was self-steering (like a supermarket shopping cart caster) if it has trail–that is, if the tire contact patch is behind the projection of the steering axis to the road surface. Only a bicycle with trail can be ridden no-hands. This was the case with typical highwheelers; the slight tilt of the fork’s attachment to the frame created the trail.

With the rear-wheel chain-driven safety bicycle, the steering axis had to be tilted even further so the front wheel would clear the rider’s feet. Although the fork of such a bicycle is curved (“raked”) *forward* at the bottom, the tire contact patch is still *behind* the steering axis. A straight fork would bring the wheel closer to the rider’s feet and place the tire contact patch too far behind the steering axis, resulting a heavy feel to the steering, and excessive response to shifts in rider position.

What is the provenance of the fork in the Duchamp construction? It might be from a unicycle — unicycles still use straight forks to this day. Or it might be from an old highwheeler, and cut down to fit the smaller wheel used in Duchamp’s construction. Or, more likely in my opinion, the fork could be from an early safety bicycle, for example, the “bantam” bicycle shown on page 20 of the book *Bicycle Science*, 1983 edition (MIT Press), by Whitt and Wilson and also on page 158 of the wonderful 1896 book *Bicycles and Tricycles*, by Archibald Sharp (reprint edition from MIT Press, 1979). Many early safeties had a straight fork. There are other examples of such bicycles on pages 154, 280 and 288 of Sharp’s book.

And in connection with this, the following statement is not accurate:

”Manufacturers had not produced bicycles with straight forks for over 30 years Many safeties made in the 1880s and early 1890s had straight forks. So 20 years is accurate; 30 years is not. That is why I consider it most likely that the Duchamp for was salvaged from an old, disused safety bicycle.”

I am not a real expert on old bicycles. A member of the Wheelmen, who collect and restore old bicycles, might have a more definite opinion of the provenance of the fork. I am sending this message to the massbike list and Prof. Wilson, who, I’m sure, will be interested in having a look at your page.

John S. Allen
jsallen*at*bikexprt.com
http://www.bikexprt.com

 
In the conclusion of my article for the fourth issue of Tout-Fait Journal ⁽¹⁾, I identified a possible theme in the artistic events of the 1900’s. I’m referring to the gradual emergence, in art, of important ideas and conceptual themes which also belong to the grounding kernel of the complexity sciences.
As a first step, my concern was (and still is) to illuminate some unexpected links, all of them directly related to some fundamental ideas of complexity, between some leading figures in twentieth century art, namely Klee, Duchamp and Escher. This unexpected relationship is even more surprising considering the radical differences between their personalities and their artistic results, or at least the retinal (to use a duchampian term) ones. Furthermore, as far as I know, there is nothing in their writings that links these artists. Relations between Duchamp, Klee and Escher cover a huge range of ideas, and the complexity sciencesprovides us with a realm in which we can unify them.
At the yearly conference “Matematica e Cultura” in Venice ⁽²⁾, organized by Prof. Michele Emmer, I gave a talk titled “Strands of complexity in art: Klee, Duchamp and Escher”, ⁽³⁾where I presented some preliminary findings of my research. This article supplements those preliminary findings with new analogies. I’ll start by summarizing those first ideas; and then I’ll introduce other subjects, such as evolution, topology, impossible 3D objects and enlarged conceptions of perspective. Finally I’ll try to relate these themes with those of complexity.

1. A summary of preliminary findings

I divided the common traits between Klee, Duchamp and Escher into three groups, all of them mathematically relevant and strictly related to each other and to corresponding complexity themes. They are:
a. Recursion and fractals
b. Feedback loops and self organization
c. Instability and chaos
(Particularly for the a. and b. points, I took the most part of my argument about Duchamp from my article on Tout-Fait Journal cited above, where the reader can find some detailed explanations about the subjects summarized below).

a.

In Escher’s work the role of recursion, and the presence of fractal structures have been well known and accepted since the appearance of Hofstadter’s classic book ⁽⁴⁾.
As far as Duchamp is concerned, recursive structures underlie not only several individual works, but also creative processes on a larger scale, involving several works at once. I also suggested the presence (at least in embryonic form) of the idea of fractal structures, mainly linked to the typical duchampian procedure of repetition on a lower (reduced) scale.
Much of Klees work is based on recursive (iterative) procedures. Klee called themprogressions. They are mainly related to natural processes. In relation to natural processes Klee’s intuition of abstract mathematical concepts, like fractal dimensions (ie non-integer dimension), is notable, especially in relation to the botanical world.

b.

click to enlarge

Figure 1
Marcel Duchamp, The Bride
Stripped Bare by Her
Bachelors, Even, 1915-23

Here Escher’s use of tessellation comes to mind. A game of symmetries could be seen as a complex system, where very simple rules (namely the given symmetries) exert their reciprocal feedback locally; as well as interacting to have dramatic, global and complex consequences on the whole tiling system. This can be (meaningfully) related to concepts regarding morphogenesis: simple rules can create global complexity, provided that the components of the system are sufficiently connected to each other.
In most of Klee’s works we can see feedback loops in action, both negative and positive. True dynamic systems are the results of these loops. Klee relates them to morphogenetic processes. Once again, the key point is: local simplicity coupled with a huge network of connections) can determine the emergence of global organizational patterns.
Several of Duchamp’s wordplays show self-organizing properties. In a broader sense there are similar random self-organizing processes acting in the Glass. (Fig. 1)

c.

Looking at Escher’s prints, exposure to conflicting stimuli (such as black-white, concave-convex, figure-background) destabilizes the observer. This theme has been already widely discussed by scholars ⁽⁵⁾. Also, Escher is particularly interested in whirling structures that draw together self-reference, fractal structures and whirling, chaotic motions.

click to enlarge

Figure 2
Marcel Duchamp, The Bride
Stripped Bare by Her
Bachelors Even [The
Green Box], 1934

It is well known that instability plays a key role in Klee’s compositions. Moreover Klee was attracted by what nowadays is called deterministic chaos, ie. unpredictable, irregular behavior, rising from the iterations of simple deterministic procedures. A number of different figurative frameworks are borne out of iterative procedures that have been triggered to behave irregularly. The most interesting thing, however, is that from such quite chaotic tangles of lines, often perfect vital and shiny forms emerge. An interesting analogy can be drawn here with the edge-of-chaos idea of complexity.
Instability and chaos are quite typical duchampian themes. His wordplays depend on predetermined lexical conditions; the slightest differences in either a single syllable or letter or even simply intonation could cause radical shifting in the meaning of a sentence (here we have a true sensitive dependence on initial conditions). Furthermore, Duchamp saw the creative power of instability. In the loosest sense it could be seen everywhere in the Glass and in theNotes of the Green Box, (Fig. 2)but more specifically we see that in the works based on rotatory motion, where highly unsplanar sets of rotating circles can create the illusion of the sthird dimension. Here again the creative power of instability has been exploited which is also powerful edge-of-chaos idea.

2. Evolving systems
Before the twentieth century it was physics, not biology, that was the leading area of scientific endeavour. It was from physics that models and protocols for science were drawn. The 1900s saw a shift towards biology. This shift was consistent with the progressive affirmation of the new paradigm of complexity.
This interest in biology is reflected in the work of Klee, Duchamp and Escher. Firstly Klee, whose interest in Natural History (especially in botany) is well known; like a naturalist he focused (as both artist and teacher) on the central problem of organic growth. He investigated both morphology (the study of forms) and morphogenesis (the study of processes leading to form); his intuitive, biological investigations are notable.
Escher, for his part, was more attracted by abstract ideas; more mathematical than biological, but was nonetheless intrigued by the natural world. He dealt especially with the inanimate world of minerals and crystals. However biologists drew analogies of his abstract ideas with corresponding biological concepts; sometimes Escher dealt with biological processes themselves.

click to enlarge

Figure 3
Marcel Duchamp,Bride’s
Domain from the Large
Glass, 1915-23

Figure 4
Marcel Duchamp,Bachelor
Apparatus from the Large
Glass, 1915-23

Perhaps Duchamp is the artist who best expressed (both in advance and inadvertently) the inversion of the relationship between biology and physics: by distendingthe laws of physics and chemistry he bypassed the rigid determinism and the reductionism of those disciplines. By grafting the organic forms of the Bride (in the higher part of the Glass) (Fig. 3) onto the mechanical machinery of the Bachelors (in the lower part) (Fig. 4)Duchamp not only expressed the idea of a marriage between physics and chemistry (at the bottom, in a three dimensional world), and biology, (above, in a four dimensional world) but perhaps even the superiority of the latter: after all the bride is queen.
This new kind of interest in biology is related to the development in every scientific field of systemic theories. This began in the 1940’s with cybernetics and ended up with the establishment of complexity sciences: what better paradigm of a system is there than an organism? Biology teaches us that complex systems adapt and evolve, we call them complex adaptive systems (CAS) Adaptation and evolution are key in all areas of the complexity sciences. Can artists, that were aware of world-system complexity, have been unaware of these notions of adaptation and evolution, at least at some intuitive level? In my opinion no. Being sensitive to complexity implies having some awareness of evolutionary processes (not necessarily biological), driven by random probabilistic events coupled with adaptation, which make the world-system ever changing.
In Klees’ writings we find a number of references to evolutionary biology ⁽⁶⁾. He clearly had some understanding of the subject matter. However, it is what he did as a painter, more than what he thought as a naturalist, that is interesting here.
He would lovingly cultivate mistakes he made, and embed them in his paintings. He would encourage pupils to draw with their left hand, and to nurture the irregularities that ensued. He also would introduce subtle and repeated variations into his work that would form mobile, ever changing patterns. Klee clearly loved chance.

click to enlarge

Figure 5 Paul Klee, Red fugue,1921
Figure 6 Paul Klee, Sheet from the
town book, 1928

Here, two of Klees’ groups of work are of note: those of Red fugue (1921) (Fig. 5) andSheet from the town book (1928) (Fig. 6). Both groups are based on repetitive horizontal sequences, which are gradually transformed by introducing constant, apparently random variation in the repetitions of the starting shape. The representation of an evolutionary process could be seen in these paintings, where random mutations seem to be somehow selected to obtain certain properties of the resulting patterns. I discussed the subject in some detail in the article already cited ⁽⁷⁾, and I showed by means of computer simulations that evolutionary algorithms can produce quite similar patterns.
Let us consider now Escher’s use of tessellation or tiling (i.e. covering of the surface by means of repeated tiles, without empty gaps and overlapping), such as the one signed E15(1938) (Fig. 7). Each single piece of tiling contains the complete information necessary to build the whole surface; of course this holds.

click to enlarge

Figure 7
M.C. Escher, E15, 1938

Figure 8
M.C. Escher, Metamorphosis, late 1930s

Figure 9
M.C. Escher, Verbum, 1942

Meaningful analogies with the idea of complete genetic information contained within each cell of an organism. Parallels between Escher’s tessellation and mechanisms in biochemistry have been developed by Edward Whitehead ⁽⁸⁾.
Interestingly, Escher’s tiling often depicts a process which gradually transforms the structure of the tiles. This transformation is rendered infinite by the introduction of a circular narrative pattern, which leads it back to its starting point. The strips namedMetamorphosis (the process which turns the larva into insect) are examples of this (Fig. 8) which Escher created in the late 30’s. Such transformation can be seen to some extent as a metaphor for evolutionary process. This, at least, was the opinion of Nobel chemist Melvin Calvin on Escher’sVerbum (1942) (Fig. 9) ⁽⁹⁾.
Let us thirdly consider Duchamp.
The theme of the dichotomy mother – egg, and the paradoxes that lie therein are worthy of investigation. I discussed the subject in the already cited article ⁽¹⁰⁾.
Duchamp used objects and moulds to signify the idea of mother and egg. The mould represents the egg, the object the mother. He used these in a number of different contexts, including the Malic Moulds of the Glass. (Fig. 10)The object and the mould are self-perpetuating and codependent : the object is used to cast the mould and the mould to shape the object. Similar ideas are identifiable in Three Standard Stoppages (1913-14) (Fig. 11)and Tu m’ (1918) (Fig. 12). For the latter he made three wooden templates, for transferring the outline of the threads contained in the Stoppages onto the oil painting. In Tu m’ these templates appear again, depicted in the bottom-left corner; their respective threads in the right hand corner. We have the old threads; their templates, and the new threads… The two elements (thread-Mother and template-Egg) are present in both the Stoppages and Tu m’. (En passant: notice that in Tu m’ the representations of templates and threads stand at the opposite sides of the picture, as we said above; in the middle, the psychological epopee of Bride and Bachelor is abridged, maybe as the necessary step to link egg and offspring).

Figure 12
Marcel Duchamp,Tu m’, 1918

Now the key question is: is this chain deterministic? Could this cyclic process repeat itself unchanged, giving rise to ever equal objects? It couldn’t. Indeed, remember that Duchamp explicitly connects the idea of mould with the idea of infra-thin difference:

click to enlarge

Figure 13
Marcel Duchamp,
Cemetery of Uniforms and Liveries, No. 2, 1914

Infra-thin separation. 2 forms cast in the same mould (?) differ from each other by an infra thin separative amount. All “identical” as identical as they can be, (and the more identical they are) move toward this infra thin separative difference. (Note posthume).
Thus the process contains an important random event (possibly corresponding to biological mutation). A parallel could be drawn between evolutionary process and the cyclical alternation of the object and the mould(Mother-Egg). At the very least, this observation would be consistent with Shearer’s idea that the cemetery of liveries (Fig. 13)(the Malic Moulds) could be seen as the place where scientific knowledge is recorded ⁽¹¹⁾. An empty livery is a repository for a scientific idea as well as being a mould that produces new ideas on which are encoded new theories, thence new liveries and so on.

3. Topology

click to enlarge

Figure 14
M. C. Escher, Moebius band I, 1961
Figure 15
M. C. Escher, Moebius band II, 1963
click to enlarge

Animation 1
Animation of Moebius Strips

Klee, Duchamp and Escher were all three attracted by topologically interesting figures.
Several of Escher’s works deal with topological figures, such as knots (Knots, 1965) and Moebiusstrips (as in Moebius band I, 1961 (Fig. 14) andMoebius band II, 1963 (Fig. 15)).
Moebius strips (see Animation 1 which explains a possible genesis of the strip starting from a cylinder) exhibit a number of interesting properties; I’ll recall and briefly explain some of them.
First, unlike the cylinder, which has both an internal and external surface, the Moebius strip has only one surface; This can be easily verified by mentally painting its whole surface, without lifting the brush from the strip.
Second, whilst a cylinder has two edges (lower and higher) the Moebius strip has one only edge; once again you can follow this edge completely with the finger without having to lift it from the edge.
Furthermore, if one cuts the cylinder longitudinally, two distinct cylinders will be obtained, whereas by cutting the Moebius strip the same way, one only new strip is yielded.
Escher carefully showed these properties in his prints. In Moebius band I he cut the strip longitudinally and obtained three snakes eating each other’s tail, while in Moebius band IInine ants in line walk on the strip, so as to highlight the single edge and single face concepts.
Escher was interested in the circularity of his knots and strips. He drew them together in a monograph ⁽¹²⁾ under the chapter heading spatial circles and spirals. His knots, Moebius strips, as well as planar and spherical spirals, were all drawn together in this section. The knots follow circular pathways which end up at the starting point after torsions and self-intersections. The same holds for the Moebius strips.
Klee too, was interested in knots, and had been since childhood. Several of his early drawings show knotted worms hanging from a fisherman’s hook. We see the same worms, now abstract knots, in later drawings such as Ways Toward the Knot (1930) (Fig. 16). 2D knots are also drawn according to even more essential forms, like the infinity-shaped motif (and its polygonal variants) shown in his pedagogical sketch (see Sketch 1). We see a huge collection of similar patterns in pictures like Dynamically polyphonic group (1931) (Fig. 17), which is based on a feature of those 2D knots Klee was interested in (see Animation 2): a hatch follows the course of the knot with continuity, but always remaining on the same side of the line; in so doing, the hatch highlights the inside of one half of the motif, and the outside of the other half. How is it possible to pass from inside to outside, while remaining on the same side of the line? It is due to the self-intersection of the 2D knot (corresponding with the torsion in the Moebius strip), which allows passage from an inner to an outer region, without passing from one side of the line to the other. As we saw before, Moebius strip has a similar property. Let us return to Klee’s 2D knots. He amplified them, to form complex, perpetual pathways, once again formed by uninterrupted, closed, self-intersecting lines (often polygonal instead of curved) and always returning to the starting point. This is typical of Klee’s drawings of the late 20’s and the early 30’s. An example is the drawingMechanics of an Urban Area (1928) (Fig. 18).

click to enlarge

Figure 19
Paul Klee, Excited, 1934

Sketch 2
Folding recursive process

We have other evidence of the special topological meaning of Klee’s images, such as labyrinths. Labyrinthine lines and signs are indeed among the most important patterns in Klee’s late style. Several hypotheses could be made to explain the genesis of such patterns, and in my opinion they are often linked to morphogenetic processes ⁽¹³⁾. There are, however, some drawings, such as Excited (1934) (Fig. 19) and all the others, based on the same framework, which particularly show the underlying presence of the folding recursive process (seeSketch 2). Similar (but reversed) processes are sometime used for classifying labyrinths in topology ⁽¹⁴⁾ unrolling them, to obtain the simpler equivalent form. But, interestingly, similar folding processes can also give rise to fractal and/or chaotic structures ⁽¹⁵⁾ which in turn can be connected with the corresponding themes highlighted above.
With reference to the use of Duchamp’s topological figures, I have already underlined the importance of the Kleinian bottle, along with some related Moebius-strip-like structures in his writings and works ⁽¹⁶⁾, and I have already stressed a possible meaning of this circular self-penetrating and self-encompassing figure, this is recommended further reading.
Now I’ll focus on further interesting links between Klee, Escher and Duchamp with respect to the use they made of the well-known topological properties of those surfaces. The analogy between the infinity-shaped motif of Klees’ and Eschers’ Moebius strips is further reinforced by observing some other prints of Escher’s, which came 10 or 15 years before his Moebius strips; Horsemen (1946) (Fig. 20) and Predestination (1951) (Fig. 21)show the planar infinity-shaped motif.
Let us take Duchamp’s Steeplechase (Fig. 22): it is a self-made racing course, for a childish horserace game in which there is a clear connection with both Klee’s infinity-shaped motif and Escher’s prints Horseman and Predestination. This could be seen as an antecedent ofSculpture for Travelling (1918). (Fig. 23)

Jean Clair ⁽¹⁷⁾ suggested an interesting analogy between the kleinian bottle and some alchemic symbols, such as the one of the pelican devouring itself, and then he connected it with Duchamp’s Air de Paris (Fig. 24). Look now at Escher’s preparatory sketch (Sketch 3)of a Pelican; although in the definitive print he substituted the pelican with a dragon (Dragon, 1952) (Fig. 25), he maintained however the same idea of a self-penetrating and self-eating animal (after all, the snakes eating each other’s tail in Moebius band I refer to the same theme). As far as Klee is concerned, we saw similar self-eating structures, though abstract, in the meandering lines of the drawings around 1934, use the same techniques as the previously mentioned Excited: the basic motif (see Sketch 4) is formed by two curves penetrating one another, the end of the one into the belly of the other.

In his latest style Klee used a typical pattern whose genesis and meaning we can better understand by looking at a detail of the drawing The fugitive is Looking Back (1939) (Fig. 26); the body of the fugitive is based on branching curved lines, the one starting from the back of another. The head too is formed by a similar, curved line, but it is branching from its own back, in a circular, self-referential scheme. This motif is further amplified in innumerable drawings and paintings around 1939-40, where we find a lot of self-embedded, self-encompassed figures, such as in Fastening (1939) (Fig. 27).

What is the significance of this trend for using topological figures? What relationship can we establish between that and complexity?
First, with Klee, Duchamp and Escher there is a tendency to represent very complex things, where the parts are widely connected to each other, interacting with non-linear pathways, often looping and returning to some crucial points. Thus the tangled intricacy of some knots or labyrinths visually and effectively expresses the corresponding intricacy of the components of their complex systems.
Second, such intricacy of connections within a system often produces unexpected outcomes, which in turn imply new unexpected outcomes, and so on. Thus in the complex system represented in their works by our artists, it is difficult to discern clearly causes and effects, because of the network of their reciprocal feedback. The unexpected, often strange and sometimes paradoxical outcomes rising from systems subjected to circular feedback and self-referential loops have corresponded with the strange and paradoxical properties of figures such as knots, the Moebius strip or the Kleinian bottle, due to their circularity, their self-intersections or self-penetrations. The same could be said for those figures discussed above, often used by the late Klee, which are self-encompassing.
Particularly in the case of Duchamp, as I have already shown ⁽¹⁸⁾, the topological properties of the kleinian bottle were used to express the paradoxical identity Egg–Mother (or Bride–Glass). This was discussed in the previous section, and in general to express the autopoetic properties of the duo Glass–Box.
 
4. Enlarged perspective and Impossible 3D objects

Figure 28
Marcel Duchamp,
Apolinère Enameled, 1916-17

Figure 29
Paul Klee, Chess, 1931

Sketch 5
Trihedral junction
versus DihedralT-junction

Sketch 6
Trihedral
junction versus Dihedral
T-junction in Apolinère Enameled

Rhonda Shearer ⁽¹⁹⁾ thoroughly discussed the relationship between some of Eschers’ and Duchamps’ works, based on 3D impossible objects. She documented how Duchamp’s Apolinère Enameled(1916-17) (Fig. 28) predates by forty years the seminal paper of Lionel and Roger Penrose on impossible 3D figures ⁽²⁰⁾. She also stresses the bond of friendship between Duchamp and Roland Penrose, a close relative of Lionel and Roger. The cited Penrose article is the professed source of inspiration of Escher’s famous impossible figures, so that the reading of Shearer’s article cements a direct link between Escher and Duchamp via the Penroses.
But, what about Klee’s impossible 3D objects? We shall discuss some works, which are representative of corresponding frameworks, all of them developed in about 1930 and deeply linked with one another.
The first we shall consider is Chess (1931) (Fig. 29). I have elsewhere already examined this painting, its genesis and its possible meaning ⁽²¹⁾. Here I want only to recall that the bare, empty room in the background is an impossible 3D object (as a matter of fact, many other elements in the painting are spatially inconsistent, but here we shall confine ourselves to the background only).
The walls of the room are joined to each other by means of vertical edges, three of which are explicitly traced, whilst the fourth (the dotted one in Sketch 5) is only suggested by the left side of the paler rectangle in the upper right hand corner of the painting. Three of those vertical edges have mutually inconsistent junctions at the opposite extremities: one end shows a trihedraljunction, where three distinct edges converge, while at the opposite end, two of the three edges line up one another, giving rise to a dihedral T-junction. Thus, the background is an impossible, puzzling 3D object, and the checkerboard covering over the scene may suggest something like a chess problem, just to emphasize the spatial enigma posed by the background.
Look now at Apolinère Enameled: one among the ingredients for making this 3D object impossible, is just the same as for Klee’s Chess: mutually inconsistent ends of a edge, highlighted in Sketch 6.
Klee used to express the concepts and the ideas he was interested in, by means of graphic simplifications, focusing his attention on only the essential parts. He would discard irrelevant and non-essential details, that might mislead the observer and would especially avoid repetition and redundancy. If necessary they wold just suggested.
That’s the reason why we find traces of other impossible 3D objects in a very simplified form; as is the case for The Conqueror (1930) (Fig. 30). Look at his banner. Though a banner is essentially a flat object, at first sight we actually perceive something like a cube, a solid figure; but counting the peripheral sides of the overall silhouette, we find that there are five, not six, as we would generally expect (Sketch 7). Something here is wrong: as soon as we accept the hypothesis of a possible 3D vision, we immediately recognize that it is inconsistent with some details of the motif. There is something missing. To better understand what really is missing, let us examine a further simplified versions of the same motif in another of Klees’ pictures: Six species (1930) (Fig. 31). Look at the flower displayed in Sketch 8. To make it spatially plausible, we have to mentally add a missing edge to form a trihedron; the same holds of course for each other flower in the painting. Without the addition of the missing edge we perceive something oscillating between a dihedron and a trihedron, which leads us back to the analogous ambiguity we saw in Chess.

Notice now that Duchamp was interested in exactly the same ambiguity. Look indeed at the recto side of the Hershey Postcard note (circa 1915) (Fig. 32), or even at the miniature reproduction of Why Not Sneeze Rose Sélavy? in the Boite-en-Valise (1941) (Fig. 33).

Returning now to Klee’s Conqueror, it is easy to see similar treatments in its banner. Especially in this case, as we said above, the perception oscillates continually between the 2D and 3D: no sooner have we arrived at a 2D hypothesis, then we are pushed to reject it and embrace 3D one, and vice versa. The relevance of some of Duchamp’s and Escher’s ideas is here clear, for it is well-known that the conflict between surface and space is one of the most important among their themes.
Let’s now turn our attention to Klee’s Soaring, Before the Ascension (1930) (Fig. 34) which is representative of several paintings based on the same framework, worked out in the years we are considering. The framework is based on rectangles freely soaring over the whole surface of the work, connected to each other with colored bars.
At the first glance we realize that the whole is spatially inconsistent, though the local details are not. Particularly, it happens that focusing our attention on a couple of connected rectangles at once, there is no problem; but considering three or more connected rectangles at once, in the most cases it yields spatial inconsistencies, that prevent the observer from seeing which are the closest or the farthest planes (unless one admits the bars could make a hole in the rectangles and pass through them).
In Soaring Klee used several skewed perspective boxes at once, like the ones in his pedagogical sketch (Sketch 9). Here we are confronted with the desired effect of spatial ambiguity, for a face (the red one in see Sketch 10) might simultaneously belong to several boxes, each of them suggesting a different perspective; thus, that face has an ambiguous spatial collocation. We can easily see the practical effects of such a strategy in Sketch 11, which displays several of the possible simultaneous perspectives contained in a single detail ofSoaring. Interestingly, because of their shared surfaces, the perspective boxes used by Klee form a wide network of connected elements. Notice: not just a linear chain of elements, but a true net, which allows a multiplicity of possible circular courses ⁽²²⁾.
This kind of construction makes me think to something like the hypercube displayed in Sketch 12and this of course recalls the Duchamp’s pet; the fourth dimension. Thus, look at Poster for the Third Chess Championship (1925) (Fig. 35), where Rhonda Shearer ⁽²³⁾ showed several analogous spatial inconsistencies.
One of the most famous 3D impossible objects of Escher’s is Ascending and Descending (1960) (Fig. 36): on the roof of a building we see an endless staircase. Once again we have a circular course ever returning to its starting point. It is well-known, and Bruno Ernst ⁽²⁴⁾ explained it carefully, that the building, which has the impossible staircase on its roof, has a strange perspective structure, shown in Sketch 13. More than any verbal explanation, animations 3 and 4 help us understand the key reason for this. Animation 3 is a perspective sketch with one only vanishing point. It starts by showing three distinct parallel planes. They are perspectively represented with three closed polygonal lines (namely three rectangles) whose edges are of course not connected with each other. But by slightly rotating one of the edges of the optical pyramid around the vanishing point, we get a spiraling polygon, which joins in a single connected line the edges of several planes. The same holds if perspective has three vanishing points: look at Animation 4, which explains the perspective structure of Escher’s impossible building. Here is the surprise. Look at Sketch 14: the impossible room in Klee’sChess is based just on the construction presented in animation 3, thus it is deeply linked to the impossible building of Escher’s Ascending and descending. (Further explanation for this can be found in the article cited above ⁽²⁵⁾).

Thus, in these cases both Klee and Escher conceived perspective in terms of an iterative process, whose outcome is the spiraling, growing motion we saw in their buildings, as well as in a nautilus shell; thus they thought of the vanishing point as a sort of attractor of a dynamic system.
Can we see anything of this in Duchamp’s work? Not exactly the same, but in a way the answer is: yes, there are.
One of the major achievements of Duchamp on perspective is of course the lower half of the Glass (we shall consider the Completed Large Glass, 1965 (Fig. 37)). Thus, look at the Slide, a perfect perspective box which contains the rotatory element named the Water mill. Many other rotatory elements can also be found in the lower part of the Glass, such as the Chocolate grinder or the Oculist chards, but particularly the pathway described by the Sieves or the Toboggan have the feature of a spiral shell we are interested in.
The analogy between these elements and the perspective spirals we saw above is admittedly weak. But look now at Rotary demisphere (1925)(Fig. 38). Animation 5 can help visualize the surprising perspective depth effect one yields once a similar device is rotating. This is quite close to Klee’s and Escher’s idea of considering the perspective vanishing point as a sort of attractor of an iterative process which implies spiral motions.

click to enlarge

Figure 34
Paul Klee, Soaring,
Before the Ascension, 1930

click to enlarge

Sketch 12
Hypercube
Figure 35
Marcel Duchamp, Poster for the
Third French Chess Championship, 1925

click to enlarge

Figure 37
Marcel Duchamp,
Completed Large Glass, 1965

click to enlarge

Figure 39
M.C. Escher, Another
world II, 1947
Figure 40
Paul klee, Perspective
with inhabitant, 1921

What I said so far shows clearly that the theme of the impossible 3D objects and the one of an enlarged conception of the perspective are tightly linked to each other. Thus I want just to recall some of Escher’s experiments on perspective which Klee and Duchamp also did with similar outcomes.
In Escher’s Another world II (1947) (Fig. 39)the only vanishing point (roughly in the center of the print) must be considered at once on the horizon, or at the zenith or at the nadir, depending on which bird (and which wall) we are considering. The same holds for Klee’s Perspective with inhabitants (1921)(Fig. 40).
In Relativity (1953) (Fig. 41) Escher needed three distinct vanishing points to represent a world with three different gravitational fields, where people can walk on the walls as well as on the floor or the ceiling. In Klee’s Arab town (1922) (Fig. 42) we see a similar effect: the ground plane containing the floor of the higher part of the painting is the same plane containing the back walls in the lower part.
The fluid perspective in Escher’s House of stairs (1951) (Fig. 43) could be also explained by Klee’s idea of a stray viewpoint, and the final outcome could be compared with the one ofSoaring.

Finally, as far as Duchamp’s perspective experiments are concerned, Shearer showed a quantity of different perspective tricks devised by Duchamp, ranging from stray viewpoints, multiple vanishing points, fluid perspective, photographic overlapping, and so on ⁽²⁶⁾. Of course, they maintain an high degree of similarity with the ones of Escher and Klee.
Let’s now return to the impossible objects, and see them from another viewpoint.

click to enlarge

Figure 44
M.C. Escher, Waterfall, 1961

Sketch 15
The simple tribar
underling the building
of Waterfall

What do they represent? Especially in Escher’s case it is evident that they are variation on a leitmotiv: the one of perpetuum mobile. Look at Waterfall (1961) (Fig. 44) or even at Ascending and Descending, which explicitly show endless motions. But look even at the simple tribar (Sketch 15) which underlies the building of Waterfall. As we go with the eye along its bars, we perceive a sense of depth, we feel we are leaving the plane where the bars are actually drawn, to enter in the third dimension; and the pathway is really endless because, once the turn is completed, we can repeat it again and again; every time we find ourselves at the starting point.
Thus the impossible objects belong to a world which isn’t subjected to the law of thermodynamics: here entropy doesn’t increase, but reduces itself, to allow perpetual motions, such as inWaterfall.
A similar overturning is exactly what happens in complex systems with self-organization, which is one of the key concept in complexity sciences. Self-organization means that a system, provided certain conditions (one of them being the complexity of the system itself) spontaneously reduces its entropy, by introducing new levels of order among its elements. The slogan coined by Stuart Kauffman ⁽²⁷⁾, Order for free, effectively captures the essence of the stunning and seemingly paradoxical discover of a self-established order.
Now, if Klee, Duchamp and Escher guessed something about self organization as I believe and as I tried to highlight, then the impossible objects in a way could express with their paradoxical properties the surprising order-for-free nature of complex systems.
After all, something similar has been already said by Jean Clair about the Glass:
Michel Carruoges ⁽²⁸⁾ noticed that the intricate machinery of the Glass shows several analogies with other imaginary machines and engines, devised in same period by Jarry, Roussel, Kafka… Several years after, Jean Clair ⁽²⁹⁾ recalled Carrouges’ statement, and further deepened the parallelism, including in the list a quantity of pseudoscientific inventions which were popular in those years. One of the leitmotivs of those peculiar machines (Glass included) was that they produce more energy than they use, said Clair, thus they are variations on the theme of the perpetuum mobile. In fact they overturn the reality principle (the second law of thermodynamics) into the pleasure principle (the dream of an energy completely free and available).
In short, in my way of seeing things, we can group impossible objects and these machines together.

click to enlarge

Sketch 16
Necker Cube

But a further connection can also be found, particularly referred to the Necker Cube (Sketch 16), which underlies several impossible objects, such as the Impossible Bed of Apolinaire enameled. Indeed, as Rosen ⁽³⁰⁾ observed, the Necker Cube encompasses within itself, thus we can connect it to the same themes we discussed for the self-encompassing topological figures: hence feedback looping and self-reference.

5. A unifying reading perspective
In conclusion, I would like to delimit the context in which this paper should be read.
Often it happens that many people at once, unconsciously, independently and following different courses, elaborate the same new ideas and concepts, and help cement them into the Zeitgeist. In fact they contribute to the emergence of new sensibilities and new ways of observing, interpreting and understanding the world. This was the case for Klee, Duchamp and Escher: I believe they expressed (being in advance on their time) and contributed towards ideas that would grow and be affirmed. Nowadays, this new paradigm, this new way of seeing things is expressed by the so called complexity sciences.
Reiner Hedrich ⁽³¹⁾ stressed some salient traits in the development of complexity sciences. Here I’m interested in two of them. First, the gestation period of the new theories has been very long, about one hundred years. This long latency period, necessary to find a solid mathematical theory useful to describe dynamic systems behavior generously covers the lifetimes of Klee, Duchamp and Escher. Thus, in a way, they were immersed in a stream of ideas and concepts which were still under construction and organizing in theories. I’m talking about a nascient stream in the cultural subconscious, not one that was flowing on the surface of the well established scientific culture of those years; thus I don’t think that our artists could have been directly influenced by those scientific ideas; generally speaking, even admitting the possibility of such an exchange of views, in my opinion it is easier to think it happened in the opposite direction. With a few exceptions: for some aspects (I think of concepts such as instabilities and chaos) scholars acknowledge Duchamp has been influenced by the reading of Poincaré; but they are just only some aspects of his complex thought; the same holds for Klee’s possible understanding of (evolutionary) biology and natural sciences, or for the mathematical readings of Escher, which moreover in some cases he admitted to be unable to understand. The second feature in the development of complexity sciences stressed by Hedrich is that the grounding ideas of the new paradigm, the kernel of complexity, didn’t deal with a specific disciplinary field: instead, they are a sort of conceptual foundation, a shared background for any empirical discipline dealing with complex systems. This fact makes it conceivable that there was, to some extent, a widespread and unconscious emergence of such ideas, even though in purely qualitative and intuitive terms. In other words, I’m talking about quite general concepts, and not about specific subjects or details of a well-defined disciplinary field: it makes possible that the same ideas could have been grasped by someone in more intuitive forms, which is what I’m suggesting for Klee, Duchamp and Escher.
The concepts I’m talking about are closely related to each other, they form a tangle of interconnected ideas, that bringing one of them to the light, mostly implies that many (or even all of) the others could also somehow come out. Really, it is impossible to examine thoroughly one of them without revealing a cascade connection with each other. Indeed, the idea of cyclic dynamism of a system entails feedback, recursion and self-reference; in turn self-organization, fractals and chaos are entailed, and again emergence, dynamic and unsequilibria, (co)evolution; further, the visual expression of such a complexity needs new and different ways to conceive the space, where new and more complex relations may occur between its elements; thus, the represented space has strange topological properties.
It is well-known that complexity introduces several relevant changes in the way we used to know the world. This is not the place to discuss them: I’ll limit myself to summarizing some of them.
First: mainly due to both deterministic chaos and sensitive dependence on the initial conditions which characterize the dynamical systems, we have to accept two weaker versions of both the causality principle and determinism.

click to enlarge

Sketch 17
Diagram explaining
concept of complexity

Second: because of the concept of emergence, the reductionist approach is not more suito study complex systems. This is sometime expressed by opposing reductionism and holism. I like the way Chris Langton expresses the concept by means of Sketch 17 which I took from Roger Lewin ⁽³²⁾.
To effectively explain the radical change in the way of seeing the world implied by complexity, a set of dichotomies is often used, which confronts old paradigms with new:
simplicity-complexity, reductionism-holism, determinism-uncertainty, quantity-quality, necessity-contingence, predictability-unpredictability, reversibility-irreversibility, repeatability-unrepeatability, causality-randomness, law-chaos… Interestingly, if we attempt to describe Klee, Duchamp and Escher by choosing either of the poles in such dichotomies, we always have to choose the second one.
As far as Duchamp is concerned, the discussion about the crisis of determinism and reductionism has been already widely discussed, particularly in relation to the ideas of Poincaré’s.
Coming to Klee, I want just recall his essay titled Exact experiences in the field of art ⁽³³⁾, where he expressed a concept which is one of the leitmotiv of his activity as both artist and teacher: the freedom and the intuition of the artist act in the space between law and unpredictability, but always remembering the necessity of both:
Oh, don’t let the eternal spark become completely smothered by law’s measure! Take steps in time! But don’t go away from this world completely. ⁽³⁴⁾
Escher expressed a similar ambivalence with his prints, in the paradoxical coexistence of extreme formal rigor and uncertainty, mathematical exactness and instability, rigorous application of exact principles and unpredictability in the outcomes.
On the other hand, only a few words are needed to recall that Klee, Duchamp and Escher built their work as organisms, composed by a number of interacting elements, where the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts. In their works complex processes are mostly represented, whose outcomes can be emergent, unexpected properties. We can dissect them, but in so doing we always lose something. This is the true essence of their holistic art.

Notes

1. Roberto Giunti, “R. rO. S. E. Sel. A. Vy”, Tout-Fait : The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal 2.4 (January 2002) Articles <https://www.toutfait.com/duchamp.jsp?postid=1240&keyword=>.

2. < http://www.mat.uniroma1.it/venezia2005/>.

3. Roberto Giunti, “Percorsi della complessità in arte: Klee, Duchamp ed Escher”, in: M. Emmer (ed.)Matematica e Cultura 2003 (Milano, Springer Verlag – Italia, in print)

4. Douglas R. Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (New York, Basic Book, 1979)

5. Teuber M. R. “Perceptual theory and Ambiguity in the Work of M. C. Escher against the background of 20^th Century Art”, , in H. S. M. Coxeter, M. Emmer, M. L. Teuber, R. Penrose (ed.) M. C. Escher: Art and Science, (North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1986)

6. Giunti, R. “Una linea ondulata lievemente vibrante. I ritmi della natura nell’opera di Paul Klee”, Materiali di Estetica No. 2, (2000)

7. Giunti R. [6]

8. Whitehead E. P.
“Symmetry in Protein Structure and Functions”, in H. S. M. Coxeter, M. Emmer, M. L. Teuber, R. Penrose (ed.) M. C. Escher: Art and Science (North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1986).

9. Calvin M. “Chemical Evolution”, Oregon State System of Higher Education, Eugene, Oregon, 1961

10. R. Giunti [1], p. 13, <http://www.toutfait.com/duchamp.jsp?postid=1240&keyword=>.

11. Shearer, R.R.
“Marcel Duchamp’s Impossible bed and Other Not Readymade Objects: A possible route of Influence from Art to Science (Part I and II). “ Art & Academe, 10:1 & 2. (Fall 1997 and Fall 1998) <http://www.marcelduchamp.org/ImpossibleBed/PartI/> and <http://www.marcelduchamp.org/ImpossibleBed/PartII/>

12. Escher M. C. The Graphic work (Bendikt Taschen Verlag, Koeln, 1992)

13. Giunti R. “Paul Klee on Computer. Biomathematical models help us understand his work” in M. Emmer (Ed.) The Visual Mind 2, (The MIT Press, Cambridge MASS, in print)

14. Tony Phillips “The topology of Roman Mozaic Mazes” in M. Emmer (Ed.) The Visual Mind (The MIT Press, Cambridge MASS, 1993).

15. D. J. Wright, Dynamical Systems and Fractals Lecture Notes, <http://www.math.okstate.edu/mathdept/dynamics/lecnotes/lecnotes.html>.

16. R. Giunti [1], p. 11, <http://www.toutfait.com/duchamp.jsp?postid=1240&keyword=>.

17. J. Clair, Duchamp at the turn of the Centuries, ToutFait Journal, Issue 3. <http://www.toutfait.com/duchamp.jsp?postid=877&keyword=>.

18. Giunti R. [1], p. 13,<>

19. Shearer R. R. [11]

20. Penrose L.S., Penrose R. “Impossible Objects: a Special Type of Visual Illusion”, Brit. Journal of Psycology, vol. 49, 1958

21. Giunti R. “Analysing Chess. Some deepening on the concept of Chaos by Klee”

<http://www.mi.sanu.ac.yu/vismath/giunti/00Chess.htm> or <http://members.tripod.com/vismath/pap.htm>

22. Indeed, Klee gradually passed from a first conception, where things are mechanically enchained to each other in a rigid, linear successions, with a well defined cause-effect relation (look at the drawing Parade on the track, 1923) Fig. 45 to a final conception where each thing is connected with each other in a complex network, and causes and effects are not clearly distinguished: look at the pedagogical sketch (sketch 18). Its caption is says: «Building of an higher organism: the assembling of parts viewing at the overall function».

The framework of Soaring is just the first important achievement of such a creative course, which will lead in the late works to the theme of morphogenesis.

23. Shearer R.R. “Examining Evidence: Did Duchamp simply use a photograph of “tossed cubes” to create his 1925 Chess Poster?” Tout-Fait Journal, issue 4, <http://www.toutfait.com/duchamp.jsp?postid=1375&keyword=>.

24. B. Ernst, Der Zauberspiegel des M. C. Escher (Taco, Berlin, 1986)

25. Giunti R. [21]

26. Shearer R. R. “Why the hatrack is and/or is not Readymade: with interactive software, animations and videos, for readers to explore”, Tout-Fait Journal, Issue 3, <http://www.toutfait.com/duchamp.jsp?postid=1100&keyword=>

27. Kauffman S. At Home in the Universe. The Search for the Law of Self- Organization and Complexity(Oxford University Press, 1995)

28. Carrouges M. Les Machines célibataires (Arcanes, Paris, 1954)

29. Clair J. Marcel Duchamp ou le grand fictif (Galilée, Paris, 1975)

30. Rosen, S. M. “Wholeness as the Body of Paradox”. 1997 <http://focusing.org/Rosen.html>.

31. Hedrich R. “The Sciences of Complexity: A Kuhnian Revolution in Sciences?” Epistemologia XII.1 (1999) <http://www.tilgher.it/epiarthedrich.html>

32. Lewin R. Complexity. Life at the edge of chaos (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1999)

33. The essay is contained in: Klee P. Das Bildnerische Denken (Basel: Benno Schwabe & Co., 1956)

34. P. Klee, Tagebücher von Paul Klee 1898-1918 (Köln:Verlag M. Dumont Scauberg, 1957), note 636, 1905

Figs. 1-2
©2003 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. All rights reserved.

[The following is the transcript of the talk Marcel Duchamp (Fig. 1A, 1B)gave on February 17th, 1963, on the occasion of the opening ceremonies of the 50^th anniversary retrospective of the 1913 Armory Show (Munson-Williams-Procter Institute, Utica, NY, February 17th – March 31st; Armory of the 69th Regiment, NY, April 6th – 28th) Mr. Richard N. Miller was in attendance that day taping the Utica lecture. Its total length is 48:08. The following transcription by Taylor M. Stapleton of this previously unknown recording is published inTout-Fait for the first time.]

click to enlarge

• Figure 1A
  Marcel
  Duchamp in Utica at the opening of “The Armory Show-50th Anniversary
  Exhibition, 2/17/1963″
• Figure 1B
  Marcel
  Duchamp at the entrance of the 50^th anniversary exhibition
  of the Armory Show, NY, April 1963, Photo: Michel Sanouillet

Announcer: I present to you Marcel Duchamp.

(Applause)

Marcel Duchamp: (aside) It’s OK now, is it? Is it done? Can you hear me? Can you hear me now? Yes, I think so. I’ll have to put my glasses on. As you all know (feedback noise). My God. (laughter.)As you all know, the Armory Show was opened on February 17^th, 1913, fifty years ago, to the day (Fig. 2A, 2B). As a result of this event, it is rewarding to realize that, in these last fifty years, the United States has collected, in its private collections and its museums, probably the greatest examples of modern art in the world today. It would be interesting, like in all revivals, to compare the reactions of the two different audiences, fifty years apart. If only a happy few in this room actually saw the Armory Show of 1913, all of you have heard and read so much about it that we all are very familiar with the kind of reception the public of 1913 gave to it. It was a veritable bataille d’ [inaudible] with such weapons as derision, contempt, caricature, engaged in approval and defense of a new form of art expression, a battle which seems, today, hard to imagine.

click to enlarge

• Figure 2A
  Interior space of the Armory Show, New
  York (detail) 1913
• Figure 2B
  Cover of the catalogue for “The Armory
  Show-50th Anniversary Exhibition,” 1963

In Europe, this same period of 1910-1914 has been called the heroic epoch of modern art, and had its convulsions in the shows of the Independents and the Salon d’Automne of 1911 and 1912. But the reaction of the European public was only a mild cry of indignation in comparison to the negative explosion at the Armory Show. The public of 1963 will certainly not be shocked. All of the paintings and sculptures have been seen or reproduced so often during the last 50 years, and particularly after having been part of the controversy of 1913, most of them have established their worthiness. In other words (laughs), in other words, today, the public, in order to judge, will be on a more understanding and critical level, and fully aware of the concentration [inaudible] by the 50 years of survival. A feeling of reverence, with nostalgic overtones, will certainly prevail in the final verdict by our present aesthetic standards.

I hope, this afternoon, to add a little note to the Show itself, by showing you a number of works which were in the 1913 exhibition, but could not, for different reasons, be obtained for the present show. I will also show a few others, which, although in neither show, reflect the spirit of that period. The aim of the Munson-Williams-Procter Institute has been to show only the paintings and sculpture that actually were in the Armory Show. In fact, over 325 original items have been collected – a real tour de force. And now, we’ll start with the slides:

Ingres. Ingres. Dominique Ingres. Chronologically, the first artist on the list. Ingres was represented in 1913 by two drawings without any title in the catalogue. This one, a very beautiful study of a portrait he made of the Comtesse d’Haussonville (Fig. 3) was done around 1840, and may or may not have been actually in the 1913 Show. In any case, a drawing of such quality could compare favorably to any Ingres drawing, and we’ll accept it as though it had been, hmm? (laughter) It’s about the same.

Puvis de Chavannes next. Puvis de Chavannes. As a distant disciple of Ingres, Puvis de Chavannes applied a classical approach to the technique of mural painting during the middle and the end of the 19^th century. In this Prodigal Son (Fig. 4), painted in 1879, Puvis de Chavannes seems to have completely ignored the realist storm of Courbet, followed by the Impressionists’ revolution, and all the isms that raged until he died in 1898. It shows courage—or stubbornness. (laughter)

Daumier. Honoré Daumier. Third-Class Carriage (Fig. 5) by Daumier. A very well-known masterpiece, which was included in the original show. Daumier made two other wash drawings of trains and their passengers, second and first class – when trains were quite a novelty, in the world of 1860. This oil painting now belongs to the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

click to enlarge

• Figure 3
  Dominique
  Ingres, The Comtesse d’Haussonville, 1845, The Frick Collection,
  New York
• Figure 4
  Cover of the catalogue for “The Armory
  Show-50th Anniversary Exhibition,” 1963
• Figure 5
  Honoré Daumier, The
  Third-Class Carriage, 1863-65, The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
  New York

Manet. Manet. Édouard Manet, who died in 1883, painted some beautiful portraits in the last years of his life. This on, Mery Laurent (Fig. 6) —M-e-r-y, I don’t know why, hmm? Mery Laurent, the lady with the black cloak. Also called L’Automne, painted in 1882. It was included in the Armory Show, and is now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Nancy. Although Manet was on friendly terms with the Impressionists, he belongs to an earlier generation and never influenced or was influenced by any of their theories.

Degas. Edgar Degas painted this Carriage at the Races (Fig. 7), one of the many famous pictures Degas made of this scene. It was painted in 1873, when he returned from a trip to America, where he had visited his family in New Orleans, where his mother was a Creole. One still feels in this painting the mark of the Ingres and Manet influence, which disappeared in his later pastels of ballet dancers and washerwomen.

Redon. Odilon Redon. There are so many beautiful Redons …but this one is not perfect. This luminous pastel of 1910, called Roger and Angelica (Fig. 8), was among the fifty Redons shown at the original exhibition. Redon’s subjects were only simple incidents in the general arrangement of colors and forms. The figures and the faces in his pastels make no pretense at representing natural truth. They are more like the prolongation of dreams. And Redon’s pastels show the preoccupation of the non-figurative theories that we hear so much about today. (Today it’s abstraction.)

click to enlarge

• Figure 6
  Edouard
  Manet, Portrait de Méry Laurent, 1832-1883
• Figure 7
  Edgar
  Degas, A Carriage at the Races, 1872 © Burstein Collection/CORBIS
• Figure 8
  Odilon
  Redon, Roger and Angelica, c. 1910, The Museum of Modern
  Art, The Lillie P. Bliss Collection

####PAGES####

Now, we go back to the Impressionists.

Monet. Claude Monet was represented by five canvasses in the Armory Show. This first one,Boardwalk at Trouville, 1870, when Trouville was the Atlantic City of France, is an early attempt at Impressionism, since the name “Impressionism” was coined only four years later in 1874. And we have another Monet, entirely different. This one is a Water Lily Pool, on the contrary, dated 1904, much later, and is one of a series of water lily murals, which link Monet with the birth of abstraction. The two Monets that you saw were in the 1913 Show.

click to enlarge

Figure 9
Georges Seurat,
Les Poseuses (The Models),1888

Seurat. Georges Seurat, in his too-short life – he died at age 32 – achieved a very important revolution with Pointillism, which was his personal reaction to Impressionism. This beautiful version ofLes Poseuses (Fig. 9) of 1888, shows his very unique contribution to the technique of Neo-Impressionism. A large canvas of the same subject, Les Poseuses, is in the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania.

Cross. Henri-Edmond Cross was with Seurat and Paul Signac at the origins of Pointillism, the art movement that succeeded Impressionism around 1880. This painting, called Clearing(Fig. 10) of 1906-7, was in the Armory Show, and is a perfect illustration of the theories of Pointillism, based on the scientific studies of Chevreuil. Simultaneous contrast of colors which also influenced Delauney a few years later, around 1912.

Toulouse-Lautrec. (I think we have it upstairs, I think) Toulouse-Lautrec is less known for his oil paintings than for his posters. Nevertheless, with paintings such as this one, calledRed-haired Woman Seated in Garden(Fig. 11) in 1889, he belonged to the Impressionist group. This painting was in the original show, and is also included in the anniversary show. (I saw it last night, hmm.)

Gauguin. Gauguin. Paul Gauguin brought back this oil from his first trip to Tahiti. It’s calledMata Mua (Fig. 12), which in Tahitian dialect means “in open times.” It was shown at the important Gauguin exhibition at the Durand-Ruel Gallery in Paris in 1893, when Gauguin was 45, already. As you know, he died in miserable conditions during his second stay in Tahiti in 1903.

click to enlarge

• Figure 10
  Henri-Edmond
  Cross. The Clearing, c. 1906/07
• Figure 11
  Henri
  de Toulouse-Lautrec, Red-Haired Woman Sitting in Conservatory,
  1889, private collection
• Figure 12
  Paul
  Gauguin, Mata Mua, 1892

And van Gogh. Van Gogh. Of the 14 paintings that Van Gogh had in the 1913 show, five important ones are in the anniversary show, upstairs. This one, called Hills at Arles, from the Thannhauser Collection was painted in 1889 at Arles or at St. Remy, I can’t be sure. When van Gogh was very sick in the hospital at St. Remy. I show you now another landscape very much like this one. Olive Trees at St. Remy, painted in the same year, 1889. Very luminous expression and all – almost the same thing. In the following year, 1890, van Gogh went to live his last month in Auvers, a small town near Paris, where he painted several portraits of young girls like this one, Mademoiselle Ravoux (Fig. 13), June 1890, which is included in the anniversary show. Van Gogh died a month later. Incidentally, this last painting used to belong to Katherine Dreier, who lent it to the Armory Show, and it is now in the Cleveland Museum of Art.

And now we come to Cézanne. Paul Cézanne. Woman with a Rosary (Fig. 14). It was in the Show of 1913. Cézanne painted this important portrait at the end of his life in about 1903, probably in Aix [en-Provence]. In 1904-1905, the Salon d’Automne and the Independents gave him a very important one-man show. He died in 1906, before he had received a worldwide recognition.

Now we can do Ryder. Albert Ryder, a great, great painter, who came from an American Cape Cod family, and lived for many years in New York, on Washington Square and later, West 15^th Street, in a most modest and bohemian way, completely absorbed in and dedicated to his inner vision. This Moonlight Marine (Fig. 15) was in the original and is also in the present show. It’s one of Ryder’s best-known themes, a typical expression of his position as a forerunner of abstract art, as we understand it today. Very abstract, isn’t it? You hardly see the boats. There are some boats.

click to enlarge

• Figure 13
  Vincent
  Van Gogh, Mademoiselle Ravoux, June 1890
• Figure 14
  Paul Cézanne,
  An Old Woman with a Rosary, 1900-04
• Figure 15
  Albert Pinkham Ryder,
  Moonlight Marine, c. 1908, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
  York

Figure 16
James McNeill Whistler, The
Little Rose of Lyme Regis, 1895. Oil
on canvas.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, USA.

Figure 17
Mary Cassatt,
The Bath, 1910

Now, Whistler. James McNeill Whistler painted this portrait called Little Rose of Lyme Regis (Fig. 16), which is, I suppose, a small town in England. It was painted in 1895, and it is considered as one of his finest achievements in quality, as compared to most of his life-sized portraits. As we all know, Whistler lived a great part of his life abroad, and became quite a big international figure around the turn of the century.

Another American, Mary Cassatt is coming now. Mary Cassatt had two paintings in the 1913 show of her favorite subject, mother and child. She only painted that, all her life, very much like this one called The Bath(Fig. 17), 1910. That was not in the Show, I don’t think it was in the 1913 Show. In France, where she spent most of her life, she was very closely associated with the Impressionists—Degas, Pissarro, Berthe Morisot—and considered one of theirs. This painting is owned by the French government in the Petit Palais collection in Paris.

Now, we have the lights. Before we go on with the slides, I wanted to elaborate a bit on the art situation in America in the years before 1913. In New York, the private gallery of Alfred Stieglitz, Fifth Avenue, situated at 291 Fifth Avenue, although concerned with the establishment of photography as an art, was the scene of the introduction of Rodin, January 1908, and Matisse, April 1908, to America. I mean they didn’t come, only their things came, hmm (laughs). Stieglitz and Steichen, during the next years, followed up by showing Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Rousseau, Cezanne, Picasso, and the American Max Weber. In 1910, the 291 Gallery gave a group show of American artists: Marsden Hartley, Dove, John Marin, Alfred Moore, Walkowitz, and others.

####PAGES####

Quite independently from 291, and more like a gesture of revolt against the Academy, a group of American artists held an exhibition in 1908 at the Macbeth Gallery in New York called The Eight Show. Robert Henri, John Sloan, George Luks, William Glackens, Ernest Lawson, Everett Shinn, Arthur B. Davies, and Maurice Prendergast. The show of The Eight at the Macbeth Gallery was a tremendous success, and was soon followed by the creation of a Henri School of Art, headquartered in the famous Lincoln Arcade Building, where lived myself later on, on 66^th Street, where a large group of younger artists, like Bellows, Stuart Davis, Edward Hopper, Walter Pach, joined the ranks of the original Eight, under the guiding spirit of Robert Henri. The group was to be called, much later, the Ashcan School, which, to a certain extent, was a prophecy of what we know today as a proper art school, hmm?(laughter) In April 1910, a large independent show was organized by Sloan and Walt Kuhn. The great success of the show established firmly the faction of the young American artists in opposition to the Academy.

Such was the climate in which Arthur B. Davies, elected president of the newly-formed Association of American Painters and Sculptors in 1912, conceived with Walt Kuhn and Walter Pach, the project of an expanded version of the 1910 Independent with the participation of European artists. The project materialized in the Armory Show of 1913. Among the difficulties to organizing this large exhibition, the first important obstacle was the duty imposed on all import of all fine arts to America at that time. It was a remarkable decision of John Quinn, the famous New York lawyer and art patron, to go to Washington, and argue and convince the lawmakers to change the law. He succeeded, and obtained the admission duty-free of all fine original works of art to America less than a hundred years old, I believe. This action is still enforced today. Now, we will see more, more, more slides.

Yes. This is Henri. Robert Henri. Robert Henri was really a moving spirit of American modern art, in the period immediately preceding the Armory Show, though he was a finer teacher than a painter, in my opinion. This painting called Laughing Boy (Fig. 18) was not in the original show, but in the show of The Eight I spoke of, in 1908. It is a typical Henri portrait, but still too academic, I feel. The Ashcan is [inaudible]. (laughter)

Bellows. George Bellows, one of Henri’s pupils, belongs to the generation of the Ashcan School, and he is known for his pictures of boxing matches, executed in a dynamic narrative style. This view of Lower Manhattan called The Lone Tenement (Fig. 19) was painted in 1909, after Bellows had been accepted by the Academy in 1907, and before he began painting sports scenes of violent realism, which is more the Ashcan, like boxing.

Prendergast. A beutiful Prendergast. Maurice Prendergast spent his formative years in Europe. When he returned to America, he was invited to join the exhibition of the Eight in 1908 with Arthur B. Davies, Ernest Lawson, and the Henri group. He also showed at the Independents, 1910. Later on, Prendergast, Glackens, Bellows, and Charles Sheeler were among the founders of the second Society of Independent Artists – no jury – in 1917 in New York. This painting, called Ponte della Paglia (Fig. 20), was probably painted in Italy in 1899, I think. The flag is green. It’s an Italian flag in 1899. It shows, perhaps, an influence of Bonnard. It’s very true for the one in the anniversary show, upstairs, in the collection of this institute, Landscape with Figures. I remember, Prendergast was a very nice person. Very…very…almost timid.

click images to enlarge

• Figure 18
  Robert Henri, Dutch
  Joe (Jopie Van Slouten), 1910
• Figure 19
  George
  Bellows, Lone Tenement, 1909
• Figure 20
  Maurice
  Prendergast, Ponte della Paglia, 1898-99, The Phillips Collection,
  Washington

Now, Walkowitz. Walkowitz is 82 now, today—82 years old today. He was born in Siberia, and came to the United States as a child. The title of these three drawings is Duncan Dancers(Fig. 21). Walkowitz made a great number of studies and drawings in the Isadora Duncan School of Dance. His sketches of Isadora and her pupils are a very vivid evocation of the great American dancer and teacher. At the time of the Armory Show, he was with the Stieglitz group.

Katherine Dreier. Katherine Dreier sent this oil, The Blue Bowl, and we never could find it. It is certainly not lost, but we couldn’t find it. At the Armory Show, she had spent several years in Europe, and brought back a small collection of European artists, among which is van Gogh’s Mademoiselle Ravoux, that you saw on the screen a moment ago. As a pioneer of abstract art, she established a few years later the Société Anonyme and The Museum of Modern Art of 1920, long before the other Museum of Modern Art. A collection of international artworks, which is now at Yale University.

Kroll. Leon Kroll. You can hardly see it, it’s from a newspaper, but anyway. He painted this painting called Terminal Yards (Fig. 22) around 1911, and it was in the 1913 Show. Unfortunately, I have been unable to find a better slide. This one is taken from a newspaper reproduction. The painting was bought at the Armory Show by Arthur Jerome Eddy, a Chicago lawyer and art collector, a rather eccentric character – he bought two of my own paintings, (laughter) and was the first man in Chicago to have his portrait painted by Whistler and to ride a bicycle (laughter). You know, I knew him and he was very nice man.

Rousseau. Rousseau, Rousseau, Rousseau. Le Douanier has three landscapes in the present show, very much in the spirit of this one, which is called View at Malakoff (Fig. 23).Malakoff is a small town on the outskirts of Paris, dated 1898. I think it was also in the original Show, and I want to show you a bigger one, which was not in the Show. And now, in another vein, which accounts for his fully-deserved recognition, Rousseau becomes the dreamer, the poet in these large paintings like this one, called The Dream, painted in 1901.

click images to enlarge

• Figure 21
  Abraham
  Walkowitz, Isadora Duncan, date unknown
• Figure 22
  
  Leon Kroll, Terminal Yards, ca. 1911
• Figure 23
  Henri
  Julian Rousseau, Study for View at Malakoff (Vue
  de Malakoff), 1908

click to enlarge

Figure 24
Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Kneeling Woman
(Femme á genoux), 1911

click to enlarge

Figure 25
André Derain, Window on the Park
(La Fênetre sur le parc), 1912

Lehmbruck. Wilhelm Lehmbruck has been called the leading Expressionist sculptor. In this Kneeling Woman (Fig. 24) of 1910, he is simply turning away, turning his back on the pure forms of Maillol, whose influence had marked his earlier years. The plaster cast of this sculpture was in the original show in 1913 and belongs now to the Albright Gallery in Buffalo. But it is too fragile, really, to travel. You can only see it this way.

Derain. One of the original “wild beasts,” the Fauves, with Matisse and Braque. Derain turned, after 1907, to a more constructive technique. Almost a Cubist, without accepting to be a Cubist. He was very stubborn, too. And his still life, Window on the Park (Fig. 25), 1912 belongs to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, was in the original Show, and is also in the present show.

Pablo Picasso. This portrait of Madame Soler is a very early Picasso, dated 1903. It belongs to the blue period, probably painted in Barcelona, where he had returned after his first stay in Paris, 1901-1902. One of the very first Cubist sculptures by Picasso, this Head of Fernande Olivier, 1909, is treated with the same facet-like technique as were the Cubist paintings of the same year. Yes, it’s in the present show. It’s upstairs. Beautiful sculpture. Now, we have another one, which is called Woman with a Mustard Pot(Fig. 26), you see the mustard pot on the left, and was painted in 1910, at the very beginning of Cubism, and bears a certain resemblance to the sculpture you just saw on the screen. The museum of The Hague, Holland, agreed to lend this important painting to the show in New York in April. They wouldn’t let it go for more than three weeks, I don’t know why. The three Picassos you just saw were all in the original Show.

####PAGES####

Now, this is Brancusi. Constantin Brancusi. I cannot understand why this beautiful Muse(Fig. 27) and four other sculptures of Brancusi’s, created such a violent reaction in the Chicago show of 1913. As a result, Brancusi was burned in effigy, along with Matisse and Walter Pach, in Chicago (laughter). It’s true. These are the mysteries of modern art.

Braque. Georges Braque, in 1908, Georges Braque abandoned his Fauvist palette and attacked a completely different problem, which was to become Cubism. This still life, Pitcher and Violins (Fig. 28), 1910, is typical of the first years of the Cubist discipline as it was practiced by Picasso and Braque at that time. In fact, their technique was so closely similar that it was very difficult at times to distinguish the Cubist Braque from the Cubist Picasso. That I know, that was very difficult.

Léger. Fernand Léger. I remember seeing this composition by Léger in the Cubist room of the Salon d’Automne in 1911. Léger’s contribution to Cubism in 1910 and 1911 was this tubular style. Instead of using cubes, he used tubes. The art critics of the time called him a Tubist instead of a Cubist (laughter). It’s true, it was in all the papers. He was soon to develop a more colorful style.

La Fresnaye. La Fresnaye. Roger de la Fresnaye was wrongly called a Cubist. In this Village of Meulon of 1912, he simply applies a geometric technique, a formal transcription of a very effective landscape. This painting is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the Arensburg collection, and probably was in the 1913 Show. Probably. When I first came to New York in 1915, it was hanging in the Arensburgs’ dining room. They probably bought it at the Show, that’s why.

click images to enlarge

• Figure 26
  Pablo Picasso, Woman with
  Mustard Pot (La Femme au pot de moutarde),1910
• Figure 27
  Constantin Brancusi, The Muse (La Muse),
  1912, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
• Figure 28
  Georges Braque, Violin and Pitcher, 1910

click to enlarge

Figure 29
Francis Picabia, Procession in Seville, 1912

Voila. It is Picabia. I also remember being in the studio with Picabia in Paris when he was making this Cubist picture,Procession in Seville (Fig. 29) in 1912. His main preoccupation at that time was to advocate abstraction, and he must be counted with Kandinsky, Kupka, and Mondrian as one of the pioneers of non-figurative art. This painting was in the Armory Show and is also included in the anniversary show.

That’s my brother. Duchamp-Villon. Not himself, no (laughter). Duchamp-Villon, my brother, has three pieces in the present show. This one, his fourth piece, called Girl of the Woods, was made in 1910, I believe, a year before his head of Baudelaire and two years before his Cubist horse. It is a terracotta cast of the original plaster which was in the 1913 show. He died in November of 1918, from the long illness he had contracted at the front in the First World War.

click to enlarge

Figure 30
Henri Matisse, The Young Sailor, II (Jeune Marin), 1906

Now we come to Matisse, who I have been keeping for the last because I want to show you five important ones, although we haven’t got many upstairs. Matisse was represented in the Armory Show by thirteen paintings, three drawings, and a large sculpture. While Augustus John had thirty-eight, and Odilon Redon forty. But Matisse had a big share of angry hostility on the part of the public and the art critics. Even though we’re now completely familiar with the five Matisses I’ll show you, we can imagine the shock they produced in 1913 on a public totally unaware of the “Wild Beast School,” the Fauves. This painting, The Young Sailor(Fig. 30) was done in 1906, in Collioure. It is the second of two versions, this more graceful and assertive than the first one. Now, the Blue Nude of 1907 painted also in Collioure, heavily accented in the Fauve style. It is now in the Baltimore Museum. This is Luxe, the second version of 1908. It has only the word “luxe” in common with an earlier painting of 1904-5 called Luxe, Calme, et Volupté, a title taken from the famous poem of Baudelaire,L’Invitation au Voyage. It is completely painted in Pointillist technique—the other one, not this one. Girl with a Black Cat. This is one of the numerous portraits Matisse made of his daughter Marguerite. It is dated 1910, a year of many Matisse portraits. And now, the last slide, The Red Studio, one of the four large interiors painted by Matisse in 1911. Against a monochrome red, Matisse has scattered the colored miniature images of his own paintings and sculptures. This last painting belongs to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

And now, before we part, I would like to salute a few artists, veterans of the Armory Show. Archipenko, Georges Braque, Paul Burlin, Stuart Davis, Edward Hopper, Leon Kroll, Picasso, Monsieur [inaudible], Charles Sheeler, Jacques Villon, Walkowitz, Margaret and William Zorach, and myself.

(Applause)

Announcer: Lights!

(Applause)

[inaudible]

[cut]

Voice: Questions and answers – we’re never gonna get those.

[inaudible]

Marcel Duchamp: Yes. I don’t know because what you do in 1913 you don’t do in 1963, even anybody. It is very difficult to say. I might and might not. I don’t know, I couldn’t tell. And you don’t know either. I have a cigar now (laughter and applause). Thank you.

[end of recording]

click to enlarge

Figure 1
Günter Uecker,
Do it Yourself, 1969

Figure 2
Duchamp und Jean
Tinguely, Galerie
Iris Clert, Paris, Juli 1959

In wohl radikalster Konsequenz hat der deutsche ´Nagelkünstler´ Günther Uecker diesen Gedanken eines künstlerischen ´Do it Yourself´ in einer gleichnamigen Arbeit ins ästhetische Spiel gebracht. Nach dem dissenten Ende der Düsseldorfer Künstlergruppe ZERO im Jahre 1967 versuchte Uecker sich von der despektierlichen Reduzierung seines Schaffens auf ein Paar eingeschlagene Nägel zu befreien. Uecker habe zu dieser Zeit, so schrieb der ehemalige Direktor der Berliner Nationalgalerie Dieter Honisch 1993 in einem großen Retrospektivkatalog, »alles getan,um das Image des Nagels zu verbrauchen und zu überwinden,« ⁽⁹⁾ quasi die Geister, die er mit seinen Nagelbildern gerufen hatte, zu vertreiben. Sein Do it Yourself ⁽¹⁰⁾ von 1969 (Abb. 1), ein unlimitiert aufgelegtes Multiple, bestehend aus einem Holzbrett, zwei darin eingeschlagenen Nägeln und einem an diesen aufgehängten Hammer, war – bei aller materiellen Simplizität dieses Objektes – der unverhohlene Kommentar, »wer eine weitere, lediglich bereits Geleistetes wiederholende Nagelarbeit von Uecker wolle, solle sie sich doch gefälligst selbst machen.«⁽¹¹⁾ In diesem Sinne ist sein Do it Yourself wenig mehr als das lakonische Statement zur eigenen Werk- und Wirkungsgeschichte, gleichwohl aber auch nicht weniger als das emphatische Angebot an den Betrachter,es doch einmal selbst zu versuchen und dem eigenen Gestaltungswillen freien Lauf zu lassen.

Bereits zehn Jahre zuvor hatte der Schweizer Jean Tinguely als einer der ersten Künstler das Prinzip des ´Do it Yourself´ in seiner künstlerischen Praxis erprobt. Es ist sicher kein Zufall, dass gerade Tinguely die damit verbundene Aufhebung des klassischen, um das Ideal der Autonomie zirkulierenden Werkbegriffs zum Prinzip seiner Kunst erklärte, war er doch schon in frühen Jahren einer der glühendsten Bewunderer Duchamps gewesen. Nicht später als im Sommer 1959 hatte Tinguely erstmals fünf seiner berühmten Malmaschinen – die sogenannten Méta-matics – in der Pariser Galerie Iris Clert vorgestellt (Abb. 2).⁽¹²⁾ Für diese Ausstellung war mit Hand- und Klebezetteln geworben worden, auf denen Tinguely den Betrachtern künstlerische Autonomie offerierte:»do it yourself and create your own abstract painting with tinguely´s meta-matics´ (a machine producing paintings)«.⁽¹³⁾ Diese provokante Aufforderung überspitzte Tinguely noch, indem er auf den Infoblättern einen Wettbewerb ausloben ließ: »a prize of 50.000 f. is offered by the gallery to the best painting made of tinguely´s ´meta-matics´.«⁽¹⁴⁾ Laut Pontus Hulten, dem damaligen Impressario der Pariser Kunstszene und Intimus Tinguelys, seien in der Ausstellungszeit von insgesamt gut vier Wochen über 4000 Meta-Zeichnungen angefertigt worden.⁽¹⁵⁾ Dabei war der wohl prominenteste Besucher der Galerie – wir ahnen es – Marcel Duchamp, der die Méta-matic No. 8 (Meta-Moritz)⁽¹⁶⁾ mittels Einwurfs einer eigens für die Ausstellung angefertigten Münze in Betrieb genommen hatte: »Die Maschine«, so berichtet Calvin Tomkins, »[…] fuhr mit zwei Filzstiften sprunghaft über ein leeres Blatt Papier und brachte in weniger als einer Minute ein glaubhaft aussehendes abstraktes Gemälde zustande.«⁽¹⁷⁾ Jeder Ausstellungsbesucher konnte folglich ein aus seiner Kooperation mit der Maschine hervorgegangenes Bild nicht nur sein eigen nennen, ondern sich überdies im Glauben wähnen, an der Produktion eines Kunstwerkes nachhaltig partizipiert zu haben.

click to enlarge

Figure 3
Niki de Saint Phalle,
Schützenbild,
1964 © VG Bild-Kunst,
Bonn 2002

Auch die mit Tinguely liierte Francoamerikanerin Niki de Saint Phalle griff die Idee der Co-Autorschaft auf, um ihre damalige bildnerische Strategie der sogenannten Tir Tableaux, mit denen sie zu Beginn der sechziger Jahre im internationalen Kunstbetrieb reüssiert hatte, in ein ´Participation Piece´ zu transformieren (Abb. 3). Im Pressetext der Edition MAT, in der Saint Phalles Schützenbild⁽¹⁸⁾ 1964 herausgegeben wurde, hieß es lapidar: »Der Besitzer hat die Möglichkeit, durch mehr oder weniger gelungene Einschüsse sein Bild zu ´komponieren´.«⁽¹⁹⁾ Diese Kompositionsoption hatte de Saint Phalle in einem undatierten Brief an den Editeur Karl Gerstner präzisiert:

Niki des Saint Phalle / GEBRAUCHSANWEISUNG: für´s ´Schützenbild´

1.Bild an einer Auswand [sic] anlehnen

2.Starkes Brett dahinter (zum event. Schutz der Wand)

3.Gewehr (22 Long Rifle) mit Kurzmunition laden

4.So lange schiessen bis alle Beutel sich ´ergossen haben´ (oder bis IHNEN das Bild gefällt)

5.Aufpassen! Bild in der gleichen Position lassen – Bild gut trocknen lassen UND dann immer noch aufpassen: denn es kann ein Farbrückstand quer fließen.“⁽²⁰⁾

De Saint Phalles ´Do it Yourself´-Kunstwerk folgte also genau genommen der Logik eines ´Shoot it Yourself´. Der Besitzer hätte – so die Idee – die performativen Schießaktionen der Künstlerin nacherleben können: Ekstase des künstlerischen Schöpfungsaktes inklusive. De Saint Phalle:»Nach jedem Schießen fühlte ich mich vollkommen stoned. Ich war total süchtig nach diesem makabren und freudigen Ritual.«⁽²¹⁾

click to enlarge

Figure 4
Jasper Johns,
Target, 1970/71 ©
Jasper Johns and Gemini
G.E.L./VAGA, New York, NY

Figure 5
Andy Warhol, Do
It Yourself (Landscape)
, 1962

In ganz ähnlicher Weise gestaltete sich das Kooperationsangebot, das Jasper Johns in Target (Do it Yourself)⁽²²⁾ offerierte, welches 1970 in der Edition Gemini G.E.L. erschien (Abb. 4). Auch Johns wählte hierfür die Form des Multiples, wie es überhaupt bezeichnend ist, dass das Prinzip des ´Do it Yourself´ weitgehend an das Multiple und damit an die vermeintlich demokratischste aller Kunstformen gekoppelt scheint. Im Prinzip bot Johns dem Besitzer von Target die Möglichkeit, den feinen Haarpinsel zu ergreifen und die in konzentrischen Umrisslinien angedeutete Struktur einer Zielscheibe mittels dreier Aquarellplättchen farbig zu fassen, es also einem der bereits damals in der New Yorker Kunstwelt erfolgreichsten Künstler in gewisser Weise gleich zu tun. Für den Besitzer von Target hätte es folglich bedeuten können, in eine Kooperative mit dem Künstler einzutreten, die Koautorenschaft zu übernehmen und diese zudem neben des Künstlers Signatur durch die eigene zu dokumentieren.

Vor der Interpretationsfolie derartiger kooperativer Vollfertigungs- oder Vollendungsstrategien läge es nun nahe, auch Andy Warhols berühmte Serie seiner ´Do it Yourself´-Bilder⁽²³⁾ als koauktorial zu vollendende Nonfiniti zu begreifen. Indes: so unübersehbar der Einfluss Duchamps auf Werk und Wirken Warhols auch ist, bei diesen Bildern handelt es sich doch nicht um eine Paraphrase des »Creative Act«-Theorems im Sinne einer manifesten Arbeitsteiligkeit des Werkprozesses zwischen Künstler und Rezipient. Zumindest fordern Warhols ´Do it Yourself´-Paintings trotz ihrer proklamatorischen Titel keinerlei aktile Partizipation des Betrachters ein (Abb. 5). Vielmehr stellen sie, ohne dass sie den Verweis auf ihren reduziblen Charakter schuldig bleiben, die ihnen eigeneMedialität aus. Heiner Bastian, dessen schillernd glamouröse Retrospektive von 2001/02 in Berlin, London und Los Angeles Andy Warhol erneut in den Rang eines adorablen Meisterkünstlers,⁽²⁴⁾ ja eines klassisch-modernen Visionärs des 20. Jahrhunderts verklären wollte, hat mit Blick auf dessen großformatige ´Do it Yourself´-Gemälderichtig erkannt, dass diese Bilder nur ´gemalt´ seien, weil sie bereits jemand ´vorgemalt´ habe.⁽²⁵⁾ Tatsächlich sind sie – und hierin natürlich den Brillo Boxesganz ähnlich – ästhetische Statements über die Verfasstheit von Kunst;sie erscheinen in gewisser Weise als Metaphern des Warholschen Kunstbegriffs,der an die Stelle einer neodadaistischen Attitüde eine im Medium der Malerei vorgetragene Reflexion über Medialität ins Werk setzt. Warhol übersteigert damit das Prinzip avantgardistischer Malerei in seine eigene Negation – der manifesten, nämlich taktil vollzogenen Kooperation des Betrachters bedarf es hierzu freilich nicht. Letzterem kommt vielmehr die Aufgabe zu, im Sinne der Duchampschen Dechiffrierung der »inner qualifications« die metaphorische Botschaft dieser ´Ready-made´-Malerei, ihre »aboutness«, wie es Arthur C. Danto nennen würde,⁽²⁶⁾ zu entschlüsseln. Warhols ´Do-it-Yourself´-Bilder also als Epitaphe eines Endes der Malerei?

click to enlarge

Figure 6
Niki de Saint Phalle,
Schützenbild,
1964 © VG Bild-Kunst,
Bonn 2002

Figure 7
Klara Hulten, Peinture
exécutee avec la
Méta-matic N° 20,
undatiert

Zumindest sind wir mit Warhol an einem Punkt angelangt, an dem es gilt, die bisherigen Ausführungen einer Revision zu unterziehen. Betrachtet man nämlich die wenigen in den einschlägigen Katalogen abgebildeten ´Shoot it Yourself´-Bilder de Saint Phalles mit präzisem Blick, so fällt auf, dass nahezu keines Verletzungen der Bildfläche durch Einschüsse an jenen Stellen aufweist, an denen das Relief nicht erhaben ist, unter denen also a priori keine Farbeinschlüsse zu vermuten waren (Abb. 6). Wer immer ein solches Bild erworben haben mag – so ist wohl zu schließen –, wird die paradoxe Werkgenese aus Bildkreation und -destruktion kaum Zufallstreffern überlassen haben. Eher schon ist zu vermuten, dass die Farbe ganz gezielt durch Einstiche zur Eruption gebracht wurde, dass es sich folglich um einen sehr gezielten Akt der Bildschöpfung und nicht um ein performatives, der Kontingenz des Moments unterliegendes Nacherleben einer künstlerischen Attitüde gehandelt haben wird. Bei Jasper Johns wiederum ist in der gesamten Literatur zum Künstler bezeichnender Weise nicht ein einziges Beispiel einer Kooperation dokumentiert, wie sie sein ´Do it Yourself´-Target vorzuschlagen scheint. Dokumentiert sind vielmehr die unangetasteten, büttenweißen Zielscheiben, welche die ihnen zugrunde liegende Idee visuell dokumentieren. Selbst bei Tinguelys Méta-matics erscheint es mehr als fraglich, ob die Ausstellungsbesucher tatsächlich – abgesehen vom Einspannen des Papiers und der Stifte sowie dem Einwurf der Münze – eigenständig auf die Bildkreation einwirken konnten. Zu eng geschnitten erscheint der zumal nach den Vorgaben des Künstlersubjektes definierte Handlungsrahmen zu sein, als dass der Ausstellungsbesucher tatsächlich ein, wie Tomkins es beschreibt, »glaubhaft aussehendes abstraktes«⁽²⁷⁾ Bild hätte gezielt herstellen können (Abb.7). Die koauktorial zu vollendenden Kunstwerke also lediglich als Repräsentanten der ihnen zugrunde liegenden Ideen? Und die vermeintlichen Koautoren doch als nicht mehr, denn willfährige

In diesen Fragestellungen scheint immerhin die Möglichkeit auf, dass alle besprochenen multiplen ´Do it Yourself´-Objekte letztlich nichts anderes darstellen als Metaphern des von ihnen suggerierten Handlungsversprechens, ohne allerdings dessen Einlösung faktisch einzufordern; »darstellende Verkörperungen«⁽²⁸⁾ also, welche die Idee der produktiv-konstitutiven Co-Autorschaft visuell zur Anschauung bringen, ohne dieser zur Genese ihres Werkcharakters allerdings tatsächlich zu bedürfen. ´Do it Yourself´-Kunst als also janusköpfiges Spiel mit einem kumpaneienden Schulterschluss von Künstler und Betrachter auf der einen und dem offenkundigen Etikettenschwindel vorgeblicher Kompetenzübertragung auf der anderen Seite. Damit entpuppt sich die seitens der Künstler nicht ohne Augenzwinkern vorgetragene Proklamation des ´Do it Yourself´ als ein ludisches Lippenbekenntnis; eines allerdings, dass in seiner inneren Paradoxie – Deklaration von Koautorenschaft versus deren faktischer Verzichtbarkeit – Duchamp sicherlich Freude bereitet haben dürfte, liegt ihr ästhetischer Mehrwert doch in nicht weniger, als der Selbstvergewisserung des Rezipienten in der Trias von Künstler, Werk und seiner selbst.

Epilog:

Die künstlerische Strategie des ´Do it Yourself´ wurde gerade jüngst im Rahmen des Internetprojektes ´Do it´ ( http://www.e-flux.com/projects/do_it/homepage/do_it_home.html )
vom Künstlerintimus und umtriebigen Kurator Hans Ulrich Obrist aufgegriffen – hier allerdings unter Verzicht auf das pleonastische´Yourself´.´Do it´ ist ein postfluxistisches, internetbasiertes und damit nachgerade omnipräsentes Handbuch schriftsprachlicher Handlungsanweisungen von insgesamt über 60 internationalen, zeitgenössischen Künstlern. So legitimiert beispielsweise der vor einigen Jahren verstorbene Felix Gonzales-Torres den kunstversierten Netzsurfer, eine seiner berühmten Bonbonecken posthum nachzuschöpfen: „´Untitled´ Get 180 lbs. of a local wrapped candy and drop in a corner.“ Andreas Slominski, um willkürlich ein anderes Beispiel zu bemühen, fordert indes die Realisierung folgender absurden Notation ein: „Tip a bicycle seat so that the front points upwards and use the seat to squeeze lemons.“ Begleitet werden derartige Instruktionen von der Aufforderung, bei etwaigen Realisierungen diese photographisch zu dokumentieren, um derartige Bildbelege den andlungsanweisungen exemplarisch beifügen zu können. Auch hier zeigt sich allerdings, wie schon bei den Notationen der Fluxuskünstler in den sechziger Jahren, das der Aufführungscharakter weit hinter den Charakter als ´Denkstücke´zurücktritt. Zumindest sind bezeichnender Weise in ´Do it´ bislang keine Realisierung dokumentiert. Der geneigte Leser darf sich also aufgefordert fühlen, die Vorgeblichkeitsthese des Autors Lügen zu strafen: „Do it (Yourself)!“

Notes

1. Richard Bellamy in einem Gespräch mit Susan Hapgood am 21. Juli 1991 in Long Island, zit. n. Hapgood, Susan: Neo-Dada. In Ausst.-Kat. The American Federation of Arts: Neo Dada : Re-defining Art 1958-1962. 4. November 1994 – 1. Januar 1995 [hrsg. v. Susan Hapgood]. New York : The American Federation of Arts, 1994, S. 14.

2. Siehe hierzu auch Blunck, Lars: Between Gadget and Re-made : The Revolving History of the Bicycle Wheel. In: tout-fait – The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal, vol. 1, Issue 3, New York, December 2000 (http://www.toutfait.com/issues/issue_3/Notes/blunck/blunck_d.html).

3. Marcel Duchamp zit. n. Paz, Octavio : Nackte Erscheinung : Das Werk von Marcel Duchamp.Frankfurt am Main : Suhrkamp, 1991, S. 115.

4.Duchamp, Marcel: The Creative Act. In: Art News, Vol. 56, Nr. 4, New York, Sommer 1957, S. 29.

5. Ibidem, S. 28 f.

6. Immer wieder findensich derartige Aussagen in Duchamps Notizen und Interviews. Etwa: »Und das bringt mich dazu zu sagen, dass ein Werk vollständig von denjenigen gemacht wird, die es betrachten oder es lesen und die es durch ihren Beifall der sogar durch ihre Verwerfung überdauern lassen.« (Marcel Duchamp in einem Brief an Jehan Mayoux, 8.März 1956, zit. n. Daniels, Dieter: Duchamp und die anderen : der Modellfall einer künstlerischen Wirkungsgeschichte. Zugl.: Aachen, TH, Diss, 1991. Köln : Dumont, S. 2). Und an anderer Stelle: »Ich habe eine ganz bestimmte Theorie – ich nenne es Theorie, obwohl ich unrecht haben kann -, dass ein Kunstwerk erst existiert, wenn der Betrachter es angeschaut hat. Bis dann ist nur etwas, das zwar gemacht wurde, das aber verschwinden könnte, und niemand würde davon wissen. Aber der Betrachter weiht es, indem er sagt: ´Das ist gut, wir behalten es´, und in diesem Fall wird der Betrachter zur Nachwelt, und die Nachwelt behält die Museen voller Bilder, nicht wahr.« (Marcel Duchamp in einem Interview mit George Heard und Richard Hamilton für die BBC, London, 1959 , zit. n. Daniels [1992], a.a.O., S. 214).

7. Gerstner, Karl: Do it yourself Kunst : Ein Brevier für jedermann. Köln : Galerie Der Spiegel, 1970.

8. Ibidem, S. 1.

9. Honisch, Dieter: Das Werk als Handlung. In: Ausst.-Kat. Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung München: Günther Uecker, eine Retrospektive. 19. Juni – 15. August 1993 [hrsg. v. Dieter Honisch]. München : Hirmer, 1993, S. 16.

10. ünther Uecker, Do it Yourself, 1969, Hammer und Holzbrett mit zwei Nägeln, 34,0 x 16,5 x 7,5 cm, VICE-Versand Remscheid, Auflage unlimitiert.

11.Schmieder, Peter: Unlimitiert : Der VICE-Versand von Wolfgang Feelisch : Kommentiertes Editionsverzeichnis der Multiples von 1967 bis in die Gegenwart. Köln : Verlag der Buchhanldung Walther König, 1998, S. 142.

12. »Méta-matices de Tinguely«, Galerie Iris Clert, Paris, 1.-31. Juli 1959.

13. Englischsprachige Version zit. n. Hultén, Pontus: Jean Tinguely, »Méta«. Frankfurt am Main, Berlin und Wien : Ullstein, 1972, S. 91. Siehe auch Bischofberger, Christina: Jean Tinguely : Werkkatalog Skulpturen und Reliefs, 1954-1985. Zürich : Edition Bruno Bischofberger, 1982, S. 101, und Schimmel, Paul: Der Sprung ins Leere : Performance und das Objekt. In: Ausst.-Kat. Los Angeles County Museum of Art [et.al.]: Out of Actions : Zwischen Performance und Objekt 1949-1979. 8. Februar – 10. Mai 1998 [hrsg. v. Paul Schimmel]. Dt. Ausg., Ostfildern : Cantz, 1998, S. 38.

14. Hultén [1972], a.a.O., S. 16.

15. Nach Hultén, Pontus: Der Mensch und sein Werk. In: Ausst.-Kat. Museum Jean Tinguely Basel: Die Sammlung. Bern : Museum Jean Tinguely Basel und Benteli Verlags AG, 1996, S. 55.

16. Jean Tinguely, Méta-matic No. 8 (Méta-Moritz), diverse Materialien, 35 x 72 x 46 cm, 1959.

17. Tomkins, Calvin: Marcel Duchamp : Eine Biographie. München und Wien : Hanser, 1999, S. 481.

18. Niki de Saint Phalle, i >Schützenbild, 1964, Gips, Farbbeutel und Holz, 72 x 54 x 7 cm, Edition MAT, projektierte Aufl. 100.

19. Zit. n. Vatsella, Katerina: Die Edition MAT: Daniel Spoerri, Karl Gerstner und das Multiple : Die Entstehung einer Kunstform. Bremen : H.M. Hauschild GmbH, 1998, S. 238.

20.Ibidem, S. 238. Von diesen vergleichsweise miniaturartigen Tir Tableaux hätten de Saint Phalles Wünschen entsprechend wegen der geringen Haltbarkeit der Farbe zunächst nur drei Stück vorbereitet und je nach Käuferanfragen dann weitere Reliefs produziert werden sollen (de Saint Phalle in einem Brief an Karl Gerstner im Sommer 1964, nach Vatsella [1998], a.a.O., S. 280).

21. Saint Phalle, Niki de: Dies und das aus meinem Leben mit dir, Jean. In: Ausst.-Kat. Museum Jean Tinguely Basel: Die Sammlung. Bern : Museum Jean Tinguely und Benteli Verlags AG, 1996, S. 21.

22. Jasper Johns, Target (Do it Yourself), 1970/71, Lithographie, Wasserfarben, Haarpinsel und aufklappbarer Holzrahmen, 36,8 x 25,4 cm, Aufl. 40 Expl., Edition Gemini G.E.L.,Los Angeles

23. Andy Warhol, Do it Yourself (Landscape), 1962, Öl auf Leinwand, 177,8 x 137,2 cm, Museum udwig Köln.

24.»Andy Warhol Retrospektive«, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 2. Oktober 2001 – 6. Januar 2002, Tate Modern,London, 4. Februar – 31. März 2002, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles,25. Mai – 18. August 2002. Zur Kritik an Bastians Konzeption siehe v.a. Siegel, Marc: Doing it for Andy : Zur Warhol-Retrospektive in Berlin. In: Texte zur Kunst, Vol. 12, Heft 45, Berlin, März 2002, S. 171-180.

25. Siehe Bastian, Heiner: Rituale unerfüllbarer Individualität : Der Verbleib der Emotion.In:Ausst.-Kat. Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin: Andy Warhol Retrospektive.
2. Oktober 2001 – 6. Januar 2002 [hrsg. v. Heiner Bastian]. Berlin : SMPK, 2001, S. 24.

26.Zu Dantos Philosophie der Kunst und der Kategorie der »aboutness« siehe u.a. Danto, Arthur C.: Die Verklärung des Gewöhnlichen . eine Philosophie der Kunst. Frankfurt am Main : Suhrkamp, 1999 und Danto Arthur C.: Kunst nach dem Ende der Kunst. München : Fink, 1996.

27. Vgl. Fußnote 17.

28.Janecke, Christian: Service-Kunst : Nutzungsangebote in Projekten der Gegenwartskunst zwischen Bild und Vorgeblichkeit. In: Bühler, Marcel; Koch, Alexander (Hrsg.): Kunst & Interkontextualität: Materilien zum Symposium schau-vogel-schau. Köln : Salon-Verl., 2001, S. 225.

“If you are alive, you are a Dadaist,” Richard Huelsenbeck wrote in 1920. Huelsenbeck belonged to the now well-known group of poets and performers who came together in Zurich during 1916 under the name Dada. Whilst Dadaist movements appeared in other places, and took on different manifestations, the Zurich Dadaists were concerned principally with poetry and performance. And if Dada may be defined or understood in many ways, it is arguable that to those in Zurich in 1916 Dada was precisely about the ambiguity of language and its relation to the world, and this was not only demonstrated through performances and writing, but also in the attempt to resist the kind of identification that language, seemingly, cannot escape:

Spit out words: the dreary, lame, empty language of men in society. Simulate gray modesty or madness. But inwardly be in a state of tension. Reach an incomprehensible, unconquerable sphere.
Hugo Ball (Ball, 1996: 77)
Dada is elasticity itself.
Richard Huelsenbeck (Huelsenbeck, 1993: 11)

click to enlarge

Figure 1 Richard Huelsenbeck
(source unknown)
Figure 2 Hugo Ball (source unknown)

As the mediator of sense experience and as a regulator of ideas and concepts, the use of language–one may even say, of words–was extremely important to Huelsenbeck, Hugo Ball and the others (Figs. 1 and 2). And we may suggest that where Richard Huelsenbeck could claim that being itself was ambiguous (i.e., being, like Dada, was ‘elastic’), he was aware that language both connects and disconnects the individual from a world of experience; and we may read what the Zurich Dadaists proclaimed as suggesting that life was a kind of Heraclitean flux, in which all objects, experiences and perceptions were fundamentally unstable. Life, in short is ever moving forward, whilst language (which, in its attachment to categories of understanding, always works in a backward direction), by contrast, masks a kind of immanent disorder. The problem with language was not only one of, say, referentiality, but also of the way in which it gives order, or ‘makes’ the world–and in this sense the uses of language can be nefarious: “Human beings,” Huelsenbeck added, “are simply ideologues if they fall for the swindle perpetrated by their own intellects; that an idea, symbol of a momentarily perceived fact, has any absolute reality” (Huelsenbeck, 1993: 9-11).

1. Logos and Identity

click to enlarge

Figure 3
Poster for the first
evening at Cabaret Voltaire

In this essay I want to suggest that the play of identity in language and appearance that was a feature of the short-lived Cabaret Voltaire (Fig. 3), which the Dadaists established in Zurich in 1916, can be read as an attempt to destroy the idea of logos, by which I mean it was an attack on the idea that reason (through the mediating discourse of identity) reveals its own perfectibility in overcoming the shortcomings of the historical present, by reaching towards a future that would be evermore perfect. So whilst the word ‘logos’ translates as ‘word’ or ‘speech’ its associations are far richer than this, and in general terms logos refers principally to a series of developments within the philosophical tradition of the West, which taken together can be understood as an idea of perfectibility, or of the power of reason to attain such perfection. As Mark C. Taylor has written:

[t]he Logos has been interpreted in various ways: Platonic forms, the mind of the creator God, the son of God, the image of God, Reason, Spirit, Absolute Subject, creative archetypes, numbers, geometric forms, and so forth. In each of its incarnations, the logos forms the ground and provides the reason for all that exists. From a logocentric perspective, to under-stand anything, one must penetrate appearances and comprehend what stands under the surface (Taylor, 1992: 188-89).

Thus, any attempt to understand (under-stand as Taylor says), justify, or examine a ‘reality’ beyond appearance, or the relationship between language and such objectivity becomes part of this logocentric tradition, even, it is argued, when such understanding takes the form of a denial of logos (because to deny it is nevertheless to affirm a relation to it, even if it is one of unwelcome parentage, for example) (Rorty, 1991: 107-118). For our purposes the important aspect of this tradition is found in the way language and rational categories create connections between words and the world, and thus assume a principal role in the making ofidentities. It was the world as presented by such rational language around 1917 that Dada sought to question, with Hugo Ball in particular believing that only the spiritual reassertion of logos could destroy the claims of reason to reveal all–in other words, reason’s claim tologos had to be destroyed.

Although the question of identity between appearance and reality has been problematic to an understanding of the world since the dawn of philosophical speculation, the problem of bridging the apparent gap between the two becomes more marked in modern society precisely because more aspects of our experience of the world are now mediated than ever before–from the fact that one can now ‘experience’ situations, lives, or cultures beyond our own (e.g., through film, fiction, etc.), to the commonplace act of, say, purchasing a carton of milk without any knowledge of how to obtain it without the mediation of commerce (this is the inevitable mediation of material life as a consequence of the division of the field of production). Couple that with the historical emergence of contrasting ways of thinking about Western assumptions about reality (anthropology, for example, revealed a variability in beliefs about the nature of the physical world), and the problem of identity becomes so overbearing that one can see by the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century the ease with which the normally expansive curiosity of the Western mind is directed inwards. A retreat to safety, it seems, in an attempt to prevent philosophical speculation from making the gap mediated by language into an unbridgeable chasm.

In technical or formal terms this was reflected, for instance, in the development of a philosophy that advocated the abandonment of speculations about the nature of reality (the so-called Anglo-American analytic school of the first half of the twentieth century). Already, in fact, by the late 1890’s, the groundwork for this withdrawal from metaphysics was found in Gottlob Frege’s work on the sense, meaning and reference of language; although his attempt to elaborate the grounds for a firm identity between words or names and an external object that these referred to was of limited success–because he found that meaning had an unavoidable contextual determination that allowed for a degree of ambiguity (Frege, 1980: 56-79) ⁽¹⁾. In trying to make philosophy scientifically respectable, the philosophers of language who followed Frege, determined that, in language, every term must therefore be unambiguous, or rather, for talk of reality to avoid the charge of meaninglessness, words had to refer to one thing or another–word meanings must be ‘tight’ and not ‘elastic’. This meant that a conception of language taken in such terms could be understood to have a backward directed referentiality function, which is to say that language itself was for the most part assimilated to already available categories of ordering experience. The important point about this with relation to Dada is that the ‘proper’ use of language reflected a version of the logos:that is to say, the philosophically respectable notion of language in the early twentieth century cannot easily be disentangled from associated ideas of referentiality and identity, which suppose a ‘reality’ to which language use, and representations generally (be they verbal/textual or material) should match up (Wittgenstein, 1953; Goodman, 1978). The reason for this was simple–words always refer to something. Dada, as we will see, sought to say something about reality, but did not use language in this way. Of course, this was not entirely new with respect to Dada–certain uses of words (e.g., in verse or poetry) would never claim to reach for such strict conditions of use, but did this entail meaninglessness? Was the apparent gap between words and worlds not an aspect of the problem of language providing the grounds for different kinds of views of the world (e.g., scientific as against literary, etc.), that reason-as-logos had sought to overcome? As Richard Rorty has said, the basis of this problem is that the realist picture (which demands strict association, or a ‘tight’ application of words) ultimately cannot cope with the idea that there may be nothing below a surface that is ‘made’ by the connecting function of language–that actually there is no universal method for providing the means to de-contextualize words and language to get below the surface, and perhaps more importantly the metaphors that form such a large part of the representational practices of language do not have any meaning (Rorty, 1989: 19).

2. Worlds in Motion

The primacy of the logocentric tradition in Western thinking since the Enlightenment (i.e., in its association with the notion of the power of reason) ensured that any experience or phenomena that contradicted the idea of reason’s perfectibility (or that suggested gaps in reason’s applicability) was categorized in a more or less residual manner (the list could be endless–‘nonsense’, ‘coincidence’, ‘chance’, etc.), and thus an awareness of the deceptiveness of appearance, or of experiences of disorder in appearance or imagination were constituted in symbols of a sublunary world. A representation of this is found in the mythical figure of Proteus who was, according to the ancient Greek Lucian:

[n]o other than a dancer whose mimetic skills enables him to adapt himself to every character: in the activity of his movements, he is liquid as water, rapid as fire; he is the raging lion, the savage panther, the trembling bough; he is what he will (quoted in Orgel, 1967: 9-10).

In other words, the sublunary is equivalent to some conception of base existence, and Proteus, like Dada (as we have seen) is not susceptible to fixed definition, and is thus elastic in terms of ‘character’–which is to say without character. Thus, where logos is taken to be a reason that overcomes the appearance of deceptiveness, the cause of deception is itself associated with an unruly nature that is forever moving–or protean–in character. And for the Zurich Dadaists (and others) in the first decades of the twentieth century a world in motion was seen to demand new methods of interpretation, presentation, or other poetic re-enactment, as artists began to explore the centrality of disorder and deception to life as lived, and as portrayed in language and through the visual medium.

The Italian futurists, for example, were impetuous seekers of chaos and urged, simply, abandonment to the de-humanizing rush of the mechanized and rationalized industrial age. Zurich Dada, by contrast, was propelled by the need to take a long and hard look at where the consequences of modernity had taken humanity, and at the debasement of culture that was seen in the inevitability that young men would almost certainly be marching off to war with a volume of Goethe in their knapsacks ⁽²⁾. And for Hugo Ball in particular war was nothing less than the destruction of the Word (logos), the ‘magical’ nature of which was in its connection to ancient texts that contained the ‘plaintive words’ that no human mind could resist (Ball, 1996: 66). The recovery of the Word was what was required, and it was to be achieved through the destruction of words, of language as conventionally conceived, to be replaced by ‘vocables’, or combinations of word voicings in the sound-poem (Richter, 1997: 31). The poème simultané for example was the result of several voices combined in recitation of discordant elements. Ball noted that:

[t]he subject of the poème simultané is the value of the human voice […] the noises represent the inarticulate, inexorable and ultimately decisive forces which constitute the background. The poem carries the message that mankind is swallowed up in a mechanistic process. In a generalized and compressed form, it represents the battle of the human voice against a world which menaces, ensnares and finally destroys it, a world whose rhythm and din are inescapable (quoted in Richter, 1997: 31).

Dada was then also an elaboration of something that was there for all to see, but which was largely obscured by language and conventions of meaning. By indulging in a series of hide-and-seek games, Ball and the others revealed that the protean world of uncontrolled movement and unforeseeable forms was within us all, a position that was simply reinforced by the mechanized military technology of the twentieth century; which had reduced society to some kind of Hobbesian state of nature where war, as the novelist J.G. Ballard has noted, seemed to affirm that the whole world was merely a stage-set that could be swept aside at a moment’s notice ⁽³⁾. The average individual, stripped of active power in times of industrial war, was merely a puppet, set into motion by the authorial hand of the objective and sovereign state.

In such circumstances a sense of self, and no less a sense of the world, was difficult to maintain in the face of the obvious slaughter of the war. Whatever this meant for the notion of a world governed by reason and objectivity, by the pursuit of logos, it said clearly that we could not be whom we are, or who we hoped to become, without accepting that the self is to a large extend an incidental–even accidental construct–and as such was part of a ‘reality’ to which it was difficult to reconcile oneself. The suspicion that one’s being is not found in any self-determining or rationally autonomous fashion–as the words and aims of reason proclaimed–but by the apparent contingency of a being that is formed only insofar as the immanent disorder within the heart of humankind (within society) is kept under control, was demonstrated by the descent into war.

The trappings of selfhood, from the ‘construction’ of subjectivity to the foundations underlying society and morality (in all their complex causality), emerge in consequence of the affirmation of some identity; an identity which, in withdrawing, or taking something (qualities, experiences, meanings, etc.) is something to itself–is rather something than some other thing. In simple terms identity is a claim of order, or of self-composition against the contingency of all other relations. The perfect banality of such an observation is evident in the most elementary of childlike assertions of categorical learning, necessary though they are to a growing awareness of the location of oneself in the world; that, for example, ‘to be a man is to not be an animal,’ or ‘an animal is not a vegetable.’ The antinomy of characteristics or qualities that provides the language of identity is, once again, a mask. It is the order of the world thus made, defined, and so on, that directs our view away from the artificiality of the categories that support it: no identity is simply extracted, or withdrawn from the world (and no order is simply made from disorder, and then end of story) without an implicit relationship or debt to the what-is-not of identity. A thumb, for example, is not a forefinger, yet at the same time it is only a thumb in respect of its relation to the forefinger. This is true simply in abstract terms (in terms of the words and their associations alone) but also true in every instance where an actual thumb can be identified. The point is that the relationship between words and worlds is simple–words ‘make’ or reveal worlds, and so words affirm identities, or even ‘truths.’

click to enlarge

Figure 4
Sophie Tauber in masked
performance. (source unknown)
Figure 5
Sophie Tauber (and unknown other)
in masks. (source unknown)

But Dada was about the fakery of the language of reason, of a world divided and understood by such identities. It was about the essential truth of the idea that order can ever be really more than a neat arrangement of ‘things’ that could just as easily be displaced, or destroyed. This aspect of an identity that takes–extracts–itself, could be rationally autonomous in the sense that it is active; but it is alsoacting, or the metaphorical adoption of the mask that conceals a depth below the surface. Yet when the mask is actually utilized to point out, or make a reminder of how misleading appearances could be (as it was in the Cabaret Voltaire performances), the surface order of relations paradoxically vanishes under the confusion of what is presented being mediated through a symbol of deception (Figs. 4 and 5), as Hugo Ball noted:

What fascinates us all about the masks is that they represent not human character and passions, but characters and passions that are larger than life. The horror of our time, the paralyzing background of events, is made visible (Ball, 1996: 64).>

Similarly the use of words by the members of the Cabaret served equally to disconnect, or untie such relations of identity: “Silk stockings are priceless,” Walter Serner wrote reasonably enough (its reason is demonstrated by the fact that one may disagree with it), but that was not all; identity is then destroyed in the novel declaration of broken categories that are only demonstrations of unreason:

A vice queen IS an armchair.World views are word mixtures.A dog IS a hammock.
L’art est mort. Viva Dada! (Ball, Huelsenbeck and Serner, 1995: 160)

click to enlarge

Figure 6
Tristan Tzara, Zurich 1917 (source unknown)

In a similar fashion, Tristan Tzara (Fig. 6), the most volatile character amongst the Zurich Dadaists declared that he aimed to disorder sensible relations–he “smashed drawers, those of the brain and those of social organization” (quoted in Richter, 1997: 34). Confronting such declarations at the time must have been equivalent to wandering into some unknown land devoid of any human differentiation in the organization of world and experience–into, in fact, a sublunary world of natural immediacy. Equally one may now may be reminded of the psychiatric typology which tells us that a mind lacking order also–in terms of personal characteristics at least–fails to realize the autonomy so valued as a proof of the triumph of modernity (but instead, in modern terms, displays pathological tendencies): such a person becomes the ‘non-subject,’ threatened by whim, existing at the mercy of caprice. Such a ‘person’ is Proteus. A lack of order, then, is necessarily about the absence of means, or of efforts to affirm an identity (i.e., the failure to control the movement of forces beyond one’s control; the failure to differentiate oneself from the protean). What we see with Dada, and what lends credence to the claim (by Hugo Ball) that it demanded gestures that were bordering on madness is the contrast between one who is moved (disordered) and one that moves (ordered)⁽⁴⁾.

3. The Destruction of Logos

With Dada, it is sometimes difficult to know how seriously the intentions of the participants were, mainly because it is clear that there were differences all along as to the purpose of a phenomenon that had ‘no programme’ (Richter, 1997: 34). However, Richard Huelsenbeck’s statements/ writings/ contributions to Dada literature allow one to suggest that Dada was established in opposition to what we might recognize as dualistic modes of conventional thinking, of the categorization of concepts, objects, and so on, in oppositional terms (e.g., subject/object; theory/fact, etc.). These “loving polarities” as Harvie Ferguson has called them “are so many ways of rendering experience accessible by dividing it against itself” (Ferguson, 1990: 7). But Dada, if one reads Huelsenbeck’s words in this way, recognized no such conceptual ordering, and instead proposed that the reinvigoration of language would see such polarities collapse. Dada, he said (and the demonstration is in the language) “blusters because it knows how to be quiet; it agitates because it is at peace” (Huelsenbeck, 1993: 10). In other words, Dada traded on the indeterminacy of ‘is-ness,’ on the elasticity of being where one quality is identified in terms of an opposite, rather than inoppositional terms.

In the varied responses of the members of the Cabaret Voltaire between 1915 and 1919 one can plot the dissolution of Dada as anything resembling a coherent movement (Richter, 1997; Huelsenbeck, 1993). Hugo Ball, the principal founder of the Zurich Dada group, would have no truck with the issuing of manifestos, or with any other propagandist work (which seemed to emulate the activities of futurism), but this was eagerly taken up by others, such as Tristan Tzara, and then exported to a variety of other European cities ⁽⁵⁾. One thing that did bind them was the idea that language had to follow painting in re-ordering the world, in making the sensible human image that language portrays equally as fragmentary as the abstract and cubist paintings of the time. Ball, for example, wrote in 1916 that:

The image of human form is gradually disappearing from the painting of these times and all objects appear only in fragments. This is one more proof of how ugly and worn the human countenance has become, and of how all the objects of our environment have become repulsive to us. The next step is for poetry to decide to do away with language for similar reasons (Ball, 1996: 55).

click to enlarge

Figure 7
Text of Hugo Ball’s ‘Karawane’

The power behind the Dada destruction/reinvention of language was found in the belief that language and literature had already been debased–in patriotic declarations of support for the war, and in the use of literature in providing moral sustenance for soldiers at the front. The point was that language had become abstracted from life to the extent that it was rendered worthless–for example, what value did words have when they could support butchery? And what of modernity? Did not the very ‘nuts and bolts’ of reason deliver war as a “vindication of modernity, violently completing the abstraction of the world”? (Conrad, 1998: 211) So, whilst Ball sought to situate language within the evident dissonance of the times, his aim was also to create, as Malcolm Green has said, “a field of words that bypassed the author’s own associations and triggered new ones in the listener” (Fig. 7) as an aspect of regaining the world, and words, from such abstraction (quoted in Huelsenbeck, 1993: v). One important point that Dada had picked up from Italian futurism was the idea that art was created in the spatio-temporal dimension, rather than being produced merely in time, or in space. The printed word, as a possible medium for creation, was staid and fixed in both of these dimensions (although texts in Futurism and Dada experimented with font styles), and in books and newspapers, it was seen to abstract language from its real context, the context within which life takes place. What Ball and the others sought to achieve at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 was a way past this abstraction to a synthesis of the arts that would surpass the mimetic and representational limitations of mediation and traditional artistic practice (whether in writing, painting, or poetry).

This introduced the masked dances, and simultaneous recitals of poems (and so on) to combat the conventional trappings of performance in which the stage–‘staging’ suggesting a set of expectations–as the medium got in the way of substance and delivery: acting was a mask–a truth so obvious that it had become invisible. In the performances at the Cabaret Voltaire words were transformed, they became ‘vocables’; not really words at all, but concretized combinations of sounds produced by the performer voicing what can only be called a series of combined letters of the alphabet which had apparently been randomly jumbled into a new kind of vehicle for expression, and these then delivered without any regard to reference or identity ⁽⁶⁾. This corresponded in some small way to Luigi Russolo’s new idea of the human voice, the characteristics of which he listed as comprising one of six “families of noise of the Futurist orchestra,” under the heading Voices of Animals and Men(Apollonio, 1973: 86). These he listed as, “Shouts, Screams, Groans, Shrieks, Howls, Laughs, Wheezes, Sobs,” and the similarity between the two divergent movements with regard to the elevation of ‘meaningless’ sound in performance is shown if we compare the Dadaist Jean Arp’s remarks about “automatic poetry,” which he claimed “springs directly from the poet’s bowels or other organs, which have stored up reserves of usable material. The poet crows, curses, sighs, stutters, yodels, as he pleases. His poems are like Nature” (cited in Richter, 1997: 30). Of course, this ideal could only be realized in certain kinds of performance, and consequently was considered a more laudable goal in some cases than in others. It is in this respect that Hugo Ball seems to have diverged from the others. In his introduction to Ball’s diaries, translated as Flight Out of Time, John Elderfield writes that:

Ball had found that the act of recitation itself tested a poem’s quality and determined its impact. Basic to his interpretation of poetry was his conviction that it had far more aspects to it than its written words (quoted in Ball, 1996: xxvii).

click to enlarge

Figure 8
Hugo Ball in performance, 1917 (source unknown)

What the sound-poem had that was greater, according to Ball, was its connection to a realm of spiritual logos that was mediated through the performance and universal recognition of ‘ancient mystical words’ (which one takes to have been given form by the vocables). Not at all incidental to Ball’s view that performance should converge upon new possibilities was the use of masks and costumes in the Cabaret, and these, it turned out, were to become an essential component in transcending the limitations of words and language, bringing Hugo Ball, in particular, to a startling realization of the possibility of renewing the Word (i.e. logos) through the sound-poem which, in connecting to the spiritual would unmask the fakery of ideas about language and truth. The accidental nature of this discovery reveals a serious point behind the use of masks, which seems only to have been realized after Marcel Janco had prepared the costumes and the participants in the Cabaret had taken up ‘character’ under the influence of these new appearances. The masks, in fact, only highlighted the protean nature of expression–which is to say, the elusiveness, the naked strangeness of the sound and motion of performance–and Hugo Ball in particular noted that a transformation had overcome the performers (Fig. 8). The mask, he observed, “Demanded a quite definite, passionate gesture, bordering on madness” (Ball, 1996: 64). The masks also brought home to Ball the deceitful nature of the phenomenal world, the ambiguity of appearances (of words, gestures, etc.) that taken together provide a stage for meaningful life, and suggested the possibility that the only way to come to terms with this illusion was through the transforming power of a more serious kind of gesture:

Although we could not have imagined it five minutes earlier, we were walking around with the most bizarre movements, festooned and draped with impossible objects […] the motive power of these masks was irresistibly conveyed to us. All at once we realized the significance of such a mask […] they represent not human character and passions, but character and passions that are higher than life. The horror of our time, the paralyzing background of events, is made visible (Ball, 1996: 64).

The power of the mask lies in its relation to indeterminate play. In modern society play is not readily understood by the categorical mind (i.e., ‘play’ is a residual category), and certainly not as the route to truth–rather, in its frivolity and sensuousness, play is contrasted with reason and emerges as the source of error, which means it is an aspect of existence that reason-as-logos seeks always to overcome (Ferguson, 1991: 7-27). In archaic societies, on the other hand, play is taken as the return of an arbitrary cosmos to the divine lottery of Zeus–in other words, as an earlier way to divine truth, or we may say to the spiritual-as-logos (Spariousu, 1989). For Hugo Ball and the others the donning of masks and costumes upset the cozy familiarity of a modern world charmed into existence by the bending of language to suit the most grotesque ends. In the Cabaret Voltaire the liquidity, or protean quality, of the performance of bizarre movements and ecstatic recitation presented language (in the unstable form of the Dadaist vocables) ‘draped’ in the unrecognizable garb of meaninglessness. “We have now driven the plasticity of the word to the point where it can scarcely be equaled,” Ball remarked on the success of performances:

We have loaded the word with strengths and energies that helped us to rediscover the evangelical concept of the word (logos) as a magical complex image […] touching lightly on a hundred ideas at the same time without naming them. (Ball, 1996: 67-68).

Thus, the notion of logos as reason’s progress to perfection was destroyed by the impenetrable vocables and simultaneous poems, which were intended to drag the listener underneath the deceptive appearance of an industrial society that proclaimed the triumph of reason–to touch on a hundred ideas at the same time. And to return to the problem of appearance, what is crucial to our understanding is that performances like these, which employed disguise on several levels, dramatized the very problem of appearance and reality within the context of change (Napier, 1986: 2-3). This seemed to open the gap that had driven philosophy to strict terms of language association: what now was real, and what was fake, it asked. It said that change is found in unpredictable performance, but identity by contrast (as a kind of tautological redescription-of-the-same) only pertains in a state ofchangelessness. Yet, it is undeniable that things in the ‘real’ world (and not just in performance) do change–being is becoming–thus, the possibility that the world, or nature, may be ambiguous is rehearsed through the disguises of performance. Nevertheless, the potential disorder implied in such upsetting of certainties can hold a certain degree of danger, and the experience of Hugo Ball seemed to demonstrate this.

click to enlarge

Figure 9
Hugo
Ball in performance, 1917 (source unknown)

It was in June 1916, and barely a year after arriving in Zurich that Ball began to drift apart from the others involved in the Cabaret after one particularly harrowing performance. In his diaries he describes giving a reading of some of his sound-poems in a costume specially made for the event. The costume was so confining as to require many on the spot adjustments to the performance, and so it determined his movements in a particular way that he could not have foreseen, which in turn influenced the modulation and timbre of his readings. And having been carried on stage due to his immobility, Ball was left with only his arms free; the rest of his body, wrapped in a tightly fitting cylinder, was stiff (Fig. 9). Nevertheless, with arms free he found that he was able to “give the impression of winglike movement by raising and lowering [the] elbows,” which he duly did by flapping them energetically between readings, at the same time furtively trying to work out how this thing might end:

I noticed that my voice had no choice but to take on the ancient cadence of priestly lamentation […] for a moment it seemed as if there were a pale, bewildered face in my cubist mask, that half-frightened, half-curious face of a ten-year-old boy, trembling and hanging avidly on the priest’s words in the requiems and high masses in his home parish. Then the lights went out, as I had ordered, and bathed in sweat, I was carried down off the stage like a magical bishop (Ball, 1996: 70-71).

This removal of self–a destruction of the world of self–is wrought by an incalculable plunge. In letting himself be taken by events he permitted the experience to become one where the world was, for him, transformed into a magico-religious sensorium. Delving deeply into the unknown–these were performances, remember, that were described as ‘bordering on madness’–he becomes caught in the vertigo of the playful forces of denial and affirmation. He may have chosen the stage, but in the act, and through the mode of presentation he loses dominion over it. The audience witnessing this was equally unsettled; after initially being baffled, it ‘exploded’ (Richter, 1997: 42). The impact on Hugo Ball was no less emphatic–after this he “progressively disengaged himself from Dada” (Richter, 1997: 43). Tristan Tzara had begun to take a more prominent role in the presentation of Dada, nudging things in a more propagandist, pamphleteering, and confrontational direction, which seemed to be diverging sharply from the kind of activity Hugo Ball was involved in, one which aimed at the destruction of world and will, and seemed on this occasion to have been successful on at least one count, the destruction of his own will to continue: “I have examined myself carefully,” Ball said, “and I could never bid chaos welcome” (quoted in Richter, 1997: 43). The truth was that he already had, and it proved disconcerting enough to draw him back from the abyss.

click to enlarge

Figure 10
Cover of Serner’s ‘Letze Lockerung’
(Last Loosening), Hanover: Paul
Steegman, 1920.
Figure 11
Walter Serner, Zurich 1917.
By Hans Richter.

With Ball’s disengagement Dada then spread out into other European cities (and was exported to New York), and what followed the Cabaret Voltaire was a continuation, if not repetition, of an ever more provocative tomfoolery (minus Ball’s pursuit of a spiritual logos), and instead of Ball’s declared intention to create a new fusion of arts, Dada became an attack on art itself. With a barely concealed hint of nihilism, Walter Serner, a latecomer to the Cabaret Voltaire, took the radical nominalism of Dada rhetoric to an extremity of meaningless and disintegration in his Last Loosening (Figs. 10 and 11)⁽⁷⁾. This riposte to good taste, executed to hilarious effect in a slim volume of fifty pages, displayed a keen sense of the ultimate profanity of things, of the obvious cosmetic re-ordering of filth and garbage that provides a basis for identity and meaning, and that no less provides the spur for art as well. Although it is not clear whether he included his fellow Dadaists in his disparaging appraisal of the artistic objective of appropriating the world (but a good guess would suggest it is likely), it is evident that he was reaching for the chaos that Hugo Ball recoiled from: “It is generally known that a dog is not a hammock; less so that failing to accept this tender hypothesis would cause the painter’s daubing fists to slump at their sides” (Ball, Huelsenbeck and Serner, 1995: 155). Ergo, painting is hamstrung by problems of identity and representation. He goes further, suggesting that the artistic impulse derives from an embarrassment at the thought of doing nothing, from a kind of impotence compounded by an inability to constrain oneself. And all this in the face of the gratuitousness of existence:

It’s all just the same […] the desire to escape one’s embarrassment by giving it (stylistic, ogodogodo) form. Dreadful word! Which is to say: to make something that is profitable out of life, which is improbable to the tips of its toes! To clap a redeeming heaven over this filth and enigma! To perfume and order this pile of human excrement! (Ball, Huelsenbeck and Serner, 1995: 156)

In short, art was evidence of an inability to get to grips with being, to refrain from fixing things–it was a manifestation of impatience: “all in all, my dearest,” Serner wrote, “art was just a teething problem” (Ball, Huelsenbeck and Serner, 1995 : 156).

Notes

1. E.g., “the meaning of the ‘evening star’ would be the same as that of ‘morning star’, but not the sense […] the designation of a single object can also consist of several words or other signs.” Frege, 1980: 57.

2. Richard Huelsenbeck had said in 1920, “none of us had much appreciation of the kind of courage it took to get shot for the idea of a nation which is at best a cartel of pelt merchants and profiteers in leather, at worst a cultural association of psychopaths who, like the Germans, marched off to war with a volume of Goethe in their knapsacks, to skewer Frenchmen and Russians on their bayonets.” Quoted in Greil Marcus (1989) Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, MA: 194-95.

3. I paraphrase here from comments made by J.G. Ballard in an interview with Tom Sutcliffe, broadcast on BBC television in the UK as In Profile: J.G. Ballard, November 2001. Ballard was actually talking about World War Two and the experiences that went into shaping his Empire of the Sun, but the point stands equally for war in general.

4. See, for example, Michel Foucault (1999) Madness and Civilization, London. Here there are several examples of the importance of movement to autonomy. Foucault memorably begins by describing the ‘ship of fools,’ the madmen flung between ports, but detained at sea, in motion, but immobile, because of their lack of autonomous control. In other places he relates the idea that cures for madness and melancholia rested on the constraining of movement–for example, as a passenger on long sea voyages (174); and, as a passenger of an entirely different kind on the ‘rotary machine,’ a device that sought to redistribute the bodily humours of the patient. (177)

5. See Hugo Ball (1996) ibid. Entry for 24.V.1916: “we are never in complete or simultaneous agreement” (63); and Richard Huelsenbeck (1993) ibid: “Whoever turns ‘freedom’ or ‘relativity’ including the insight that the contours of everything shift, that nothing is stable, into a ‘firm creed’ is just another ideologue, like the nihilists who are almost always the most incredible, narrow-minded dogmatists. Dada is far removed from all that.” (11)

6. Tzara took this principle from performance into the printed word, and created the ‘cut-up’. According to Hans Richter (1997) ibid: “he cut newspaper articles up into tiny pieces, none of them any longer than a word, put the words in a bag, shook them well, and allowed them to flutter onto a table. The arrangement (or lack of it) in which they fell constituted a ‘poem’” (54)

7. Huelsenbeck (1993) in the Dada Almanac describes him thus: “Dr. Walter Serner…extreme adventurer, nihilist and venereologist…The epitome of the ‘gentleman burglar’ (Arp), he was later the author of numerous sleazy crime stories.” (92)
Bibliography

Apollonio, Umbro,ed.. Futurist Manifestos. Trans. by Robert Brain and Others. London: Thames and Hudson, 1973.

Arp, J. Arp on Arp: Poems, Essays, Memories. Edited by Marcel Jean. New York: Viking, 1972.

Ball, Hugo. Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1996.

Ball, Hugo, Huelsenbeck, Richard, and Serner, Walter. Blago bung, blago bung bosso fataka!: First Texts of German Dada. Translated and introduced by Malcolm Green. London: Atlas Press, 1995.

Conrad, Peter. Modern Times, Modern Places. Life and Art in the Twentieth Century. London: Thames and Hudson, 1998.

Ferguson, Harvie. The Science of Pleasure: Cosmos and Psyche in the Bourgeois World View. London and New York: Routledge, 1990.

Frege, G. Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum, 1998.

Goodman, Nelson. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978.

Huelsenbeck, Richard, ed. Dada Almanac. London: Atlas Press, 1993.

Huelsenbeck, Richard. Memoirs of a Dada Drummer. London: Atlas Press, 1991.

Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces. A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989.

Napier, A. David. Masks, Transformation, and Paradox. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California, 1986.

Orgel, Stephen. The Jonsonian Masque, New York: Columbia University Press, 1967.

Pichon, B. and Riha, K., eds. Dada Zurich: A Clown’s Game From Nothing. New York: G.K. Hall and Co., 1996.

Richter, Hans. Dada: Art and Anti-Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 1997.

Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

– – – . Essays on Heidegger and Others. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Spariosu, Mihai I. Dionysus Reborn. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1989.

Stoichita, Victor I. A Short History of the Shadow. London: Reaktion Books, 1991.

Taylor, Mark C. Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Wittgenstein, L. Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1953.